Sherlock had reached into his pocket while Mycroft was speaking, and produced a small object the size of a snuffbox. His expression, as he held it out to Mycroft, was a study in grimness and frustration. Mycroft took it from him, and inspected it carefully.
It was a figurine carved in stone: an imaginary figure, part human—if only approximately—and part fish. It was not a mermaid such as a lonely sailor might whittle from tropic wood or walrus ivory, however; although the head was vaguely humanoid, the torso was most certainly not, and the piscine body bore embellishments that seemed more akin to tentacles than fins. There was something of the lamprey about it—even about the mouth, which might have been mistaken for human—and something of the uncanny. Mycroft felt no revelatory thrill as he handled it, but he knew that the mere sight of it was enough to feed an atavistic dream. Opium was not the best medicine for the kind of headaches that Chevaucheux must have suffered of late, but neither he nor Watson was in a position to know that.
“Let me have your lens, Sherlock,” Mycroft said.
Sherlock passed him the magnifying glass, without bothering to point out that the lamplight in the Strangers’ Room was poor, or that the workmanship of the sculpture was so delicate that a fine-pointed needle and the services of a light microscope would be required to investigate the record of its narrow grooves. Mycroft knew that Sherlock would take some meager delight in amplifying whatever conclusions he could reach with the aid of the woefully inadequate means to hand.
Two minutes’ silence elapsed while Mycroft completed his superficial examination. “Purbeck stone,” he said. “Much more friable than Portland stone—easy enough to work with simple tools, but liable to crumble if force is misapplied. Easily eroded, too, but if this piece is as old as it seems, it’s been protected from everyday wear. It could have been locked away in some cabinet of curiosities, but it’s more likely to have been buried. You’ve doubtless examined the scars left by the knives that carved it and the dirt accumulated in the finer grooves. Iron or bronze? Sand, silt, or soil?” He set the object down on a side table as he framed these questions, but positioned it carefully, to signify that he was not done with it yet.
“A bronze knife,” Sherlock told him, without undue procrastination, “but a clever alloy, no earlier than the sixteenth century. The soil is from a fallow field, from which hay had been cut with considerable regularity—but there was salt, too. The burial place was near enough to the sea to catch spray in stormy weather.”
“And the representation?” Mycroft took a certain shameful delight in the expression of irritation that flitted across Sherlock’s finely chiseled features: the frustration of ignorance.
“I took it to the museum in the end,” the great detective admitted. “Pearsall suggested that it might be an image of Oannes, the Babylonian god of wisdom. Fotherington disagreed.”
“Fotherington is undoubtedly correct,” Mycroft declared. “He sent you to me, of course—without offering any hypothesis of his own.”
“He did,” Sherlock admitted. “And he told me, rather impolitely, to leave Watson out of it.”
“He was right to do so,” Mycroft said. And to notify the secretary in advance, he added, although he did not say the words aloud.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the sailor, “but I’m rather out of my depth here. Perhaps you might explain what that thing is, if you know, and why it was sent to Captain Pye . . . and whether it will finish me the way it finished him. I have to admit, sir, that Rockaby seemed to have near as much hatred of me as he had of the captain toward the end, even though we were friends once and always near neighbors. I don’t mind admitting, sir, that I’m frightened.” That was obvious, although John Chevaucheux was plainly a man who did not easily give in to fear, especially of the superstitious kind.
“Alas, I cannot give you any guarantee of future safety, Mr. Chevaucheux,” Mycroft said, already fearing that the only guarantees to be found were of the opposite kind, “but you will lose nothing by surrendering this object to me, and it might be of some small service to the Diogenes Club if you were to tell me your story, as you’ve doubtless already told it to Dr. Watson and my brother.”
Sherlock shifted uneasily. Mycroft knew that his brother had hoped for more even if he had not expected it—but Sherlock and he were two of a kind, and knew what duty they owed to the accumulation of knowledge.
The seaman nodded. “Telling it has done me good, sir,” he said, “so I don’t mind telling it again. It’s much clearer in my head than it was—and I’m less hesitant now that I know there are men in the world prepared to take it seriously. I’ll understand if you can’t help me, but I’m grateful to Mr. Sherlock for having tried.”
Anticipating a long story, Mycroft settled back into his chair—but he could not make himself comfortable.
“You’ll doubtless have judged from my name that I’m of French descent,” said Chevaucheux, “although my family have been in England for a century and a half. We’ve always been seafarers. My father sailed with Dan Pye in the old clippers, and my grandfather was a middy in Nelson’s navy. Captain Pye used to tell me that he and I were kin, by virtue of the fact that the Normans who came to England with William the Conqueror were so called because they were descended from Norsemen, like the vikings who colonized the north of England hundreds of years earlier. I tell you this because Sam Rockaby was a man of a very different stripe from either of us, although his family live no more than a day’s ride from mine, and mine no more than an hour on the railway from Dan Pye’s.
“Captain Pye’s wife and children are lodged in Poole, my own on Durlston Head in Swanage, near the Tilly Whim caves. Rockaby’s folk hail from a hamlet south of Worth Matravers, near the western cliffs of St. Aldhelm’s Head. To folk like his, everyone’s a foreigner whose people weren’t clinging to that shore before the Romans came, and no one’s a true seaman whose people didn’t learn to navigate the Channel in coracles or hollowed-out canoes. Dr. Watson tells me that every man has something of the sea in his blood, because that’s where all land-based life came from, but I don’t know about that. All I know is that the likes of Rockaby laugh into their cupped hands when they hear men like Dan Pye and Jack Chevaucheux say that the sea is in our blood.
“Mr. Sherlock tells me that you don’t get about much, sir, so I’ll guess you’ve never been to Swanage, let alone to Worth Matravers or the sea cliffs on the Saint’s Head. You’re dead right—and then some—about the way the local people work the stone. They used Portland stone to make the frontage of the museum Mr. Sherlock took me to yesterday, but no one has much use for Purbeck stone because it crumbles too easily. These days, even the houses on the isle are mostly made of brick—but in the old days stone was what they had in plenty, and it was easily quarried, especially where the coastal cliffs are battered by the sea, so stone was what they used. They carved it, too, though never as small and neat as that thing, and you’ll not see an old stone house within ten miles of Worth Matravers that hasn’t got some ugly face or deformed figure worked into its walls. Nowadays it’s just tradition, but Sam Rockaby’s folk have their own lore regarding such things. When Sam and I were boys he used to tell me that the only real faces were those that kept watch on the sea.