The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [242]
“There is a difficulty,” replied Holmes. “Rachel Howells has, by using us as her instruments, effectively lodged her claim. She knows however from Watson’s account that there are legal obstacles. She cannot have expected to surmount them unaided. She has certainly enlisted confidants as her agents. It is to these that the crown jewels of the Tudors and Stuarts must be released. Rachel Howells undoubtedly expects to reclaim them; what arrangements she has made to that end I have as yet no way of knowing. I think it unlikely however that these surrogates yet know that they have laid, let alone established, good claim to the Crown Jewels of England; nor, I suspect, are they aware that they have a murderess in their midst.”
“But where are these confederates?” cried Musgrave.
“In North America, the origin of this extraordinary letter.”
“In Canada? In British Columbia?”
“It is not unlikely.”
“But who are they? The Scowrers? The Mafia? The Red Circle?”
“That is what I must still discover. Now, Musgrave,” said Holmes, laughing, “you are overwhelming me with your questions. Besides, you are leading me into Watson’s deplorable habit of explaining matters backwards. Would it not be better if we repaired to your quarters, where I shall be happy to clarify the matter? Agreed? Come then, lead on!”
It was a remarkable gathering as we sat in comfortable arm chairs in Musgrave’s rooms. On a table before us lay the newly discovered great orb and sceptre of the kings of England, steeped in centuries of history. Beside them Nathaniel Musgrave had placed the refurbished Hurlstone crown – golden, jewel-encrusted and magnificent. Beside these objects lay the two linen bags in which they had been found. Holmes explained:
“Before I could form a hypothesis capable of explaining the extraordinary message which directed us to these treasures, it was first necessary to assemble my data. My starting point was these two linen bags. They are, as you rightly told us, Musgrave, identical. The first, which has been kept with the crown since its recovery years ago from the mere, shows some signs of deterioration; the other little if any. On my last visit, when the existence of only one bag was known, I paid little attention to it, ascribing its damaged condition to its sojourn in the crypt of your cellar while ten generations of your ancestors lived out their lives above. But of course I was mistaken. I should have realized that centuries of corrosion by worms and fungi, sufficient to have eaten through the walls of the wooden strongbox, would have utterly destroyed a simple linen bag. The deterioration of the bag had of course been caused only by its comparatively short immersion in your lake. But these bags are otherwise identical and in similar condition. It must follow that the crown jewels were placed in them not at the time of Charles’s trial and execution but comparatively recently.”
“At the time the first bag was tossed into the mere?” I suggested.
“Precisely,” said Holmes. “And who was the last person we know to have handled the crown and its bag?”
“Brunton!”
“Yes, the butler Brunton and his accomplice, the person to whom he passed up the treasure – handed it up from the crypt that was to be his coffin. But wait, we have not yet exhausted the resources of applied deduction! If the bags were not in the crypt when Brunton discovered the strongbox – and we have now established that they were not – they can only have been taken there by Brunton himself. We can be sure that it was Brunton who lowered himself into the crypt, while Rachel Howells waited above. Brunton, with the treasure at last within his grasp, was of course intent on examining it; he neither needed nor wanted a witness. It is unlikely that Howells, even if invited to descend, would have been prepared to enter the crypt herself, knowing that only a simple prop, a billet of wood, prevented the stone slab from crashing down, with none above to hear her cries. With an accomplice she trusted, her avarice might have overcome her fear; with a man who had