“Guardians,” corrected our visitor. “Her uncle is the Honorable Carstairs Delapore, and her grandfather, Gaius, Viscount Delapore, of Depewatch Priory in Shropshire. It’s a crumbling, moldering, Gothic old pile, sinking into decay. My family’s money could easily rescue it—as I’ve said to Mr. Delapore, any number of times, and he agrees with me.”
“A curious thing to do, for a man rejecting your suit.”
Colby’s breath gusted again in exasperated laughter. “Isn’t it? It isn’t as if I were a stranger off the street, Mr. Holmes. I’ve been Mr. Delapore’s pupil for a year, have lived in his household on weekends, eaten at his table. When I first came to study with him I could have sworn he approved of my love for Judith.”
“And what, precisely, would you say is the nature of Mr. Delapore’s teaching?” Holmes leaned back in the basket chair, fingertips pressed lightly together, closely watching the young American’s face.
“I guess you’d say he’s . . . an antiquarian.” Colby’s voice was hesitant, as if picking his words. “One of the most remarkable students of ancient folklore and legend in the world. Indeed, it was in the hopes of studying with him that I came to Oxford. I am—I guess you might call me the intellectual black sheep of the Colby family.” He chuckled again. “My father left the firm to my brothers and myself, but on the whole I’ve been content to let them run it as they wished. The making of money . . . the constant clamor of stocks and rail shares and directors . . . From the time I was a small boy I sensed there were deeper matters than that in the world, forgotten shadows lurking behind the gaslights’ artificial glare.”
Holmes said nothing to this, but his eyelids lowered, as if he were listening for something behind the words. Colby, hands clasped, seemed almost to have forgotten his presence, or mine, or the reality of the stuffy summer heat. He went on, “I had corresponded with Carstairs Delapore on . . . on the subject of some of the more obscure Lammastide customs of the Welsh borderlands. As I’d hoped, he agreed to guide my studies, both at Oxford and, later, among the books of his private collection—marvelous volumes that clarified ancient folkloric rites and put them into contexts of philosophy, history, the very fabric of time itself! Depewatch Priory . . .”
He seemed to come to himself with a start, glanced at Holmes, then at me, and went on in a more constrained voice, “It was at Depewatch Priory that I first met Mr. Delapore’s niece, Judith. She is eighteen, the daughter of Mr. Delapore’s brother Fynch, a spirit of light and innocence in that . . . in that dreary old pile. She had just returned from finishing school in Switzerland, though plans for her come-out into London society had run aground on the family’s poverty. Any other girl I know would have been pouting and in tears at being robbed of her season on the town. Not she! She bore it bravely and sweetly, though it was clear that she faced a lifetime of stagnation in a tiny mountain town, looking after a decrepit house and a . . . a difficult old man.”
From his jacket pocket Colby withdrew an embossed cardboard photograph case, opening it to show the image of a most beautiful young lady. Thin and rather fragile looking, she wore her soft curls in a chignon. Her eyes seemed light, blue or hazel so far as I could tell from the monotone photograph, her hair a medium shade—perhaps red, but more likely light brown—and her complexion pale to ghostliness. Her expression was one of grave innocence, trusting and unselfconscious.
“Old Viscount Delapore is a grim old autocrat who rules his son, his niece, and every soul in the village of Watchgate as if it were 1394 instead of 1894. He owns all of the land thereabouts—the family has, I gather, from time immemorial—and so violent is his temper that the villagers dare not cross him. From the first moment Judith declared her love for me, I offered to take her away from the place—to take her clean out of the country, if need be, though I hardly think he would come after her, as she seems to fear.”
“Does she fear her grandfather?” Holmes turned the photograph thoughtfully over in his hands, examining the back as well as the front most minutely.
Colby nodded, his face clouding with anger. “She claims she’s free to come and go, that there’s no influence being brought to bear upon her. But there is, Mr. Holmes, there is! When she speaks of Viscount Delapore she glances over her shoulder, as if she imagines he could hear her wherever she is. And the look in her lovely eyes . . . ! She fears him, Mr. Holmes. He has some evil and unwholesome hold upon the girl. He’s not her legal guardian—that’s Mr. Carstairs Delapore. But the old man’s influence extends to his son as well. When I received this”—he drew from the same pocket as the photograph a single sheet of folded paper, which he passed across to Holmes—“I begged him to countermand his father’s order, to at least let me present my case. But this card”—he handed a large, stiff note to Holmes—“was all I got back.”
The letter was dated August 16, four days ago.
My best beloved,
My heart is torn from my breast by this most terrible news. My grandfather has forbidden me to see you again, forbidden even that your name be mentioned in this house. He will give no reason for this beyond that it is his will that I remain here with him, as his servant—I fear, as his slave! I have written to my father, but fear he will do nothing. I am in despair! Do nothing, but wait and be ready.
Thine only,
Judith
The delicate pink paper, scented with patchouli and with the faint smoke of the oil lamp by which it must have been written, was blotted with tears.
Her father’s card said merely:
Remove her from your thoughts. There is nothing which can be done.
Burnwell Colby smote the palm of one hand with the fist of the other, and his strong jaw jutted forward. “My grandfather didn’t let the mandarins of Hong Kong chase him away, and my father refused to be stopped by Sioux Indians or winter snows in the Rockies,” he declared. “Nor shall this stop me. Will you find out for me, Mr. Holmes, what vile hold Lord Gaius has upon his granddaughter and his son, that I may free the gentlest girl that ever lived from the clutches of an evil old man who seeks to make a drudge of her forever?”
“And is this all,” asked Holmes, raising his eyelids to meet the American’s earnest gaze, “that you have to tell me about Carstairs Delapore and his father? Or about these ‘lurking shadows’ that are Delapore’s study?”
The young man frowned, as if the question took him momentarily aback. “Oh, the squeamish may speak of decadence,” he said after a moment, not offhandedly, but as if carefully considering his words. “And some of the practices which Delapore has uncovered are fairly ugly by modern standards. Certainly they’d make my old pater blink, and my poor hidebround brothers.” He chuckled, as if at the recollection of a schoolboy prank. “But at bottom it’s all only legends, you know, and bogies in the dark.”
“Indeed,” said Holmes, rising, and held out his hand to the young suitor. “I shall learn of this what I can, Mr. Colby. Where might I reach you?”
“The Excelsior Hotel in Brighton.” The young man fished from his vest pocket a card to write the address upon—he seemed to carry everything loose in his pockets, jumbled together like cabbages in a barrow. “I always stay there,” he explained as he scribbled. “It was how Miss Delapore knew where to reach me. How you can abide to remain in town in weather like this beats me!” And he departed, apparently unaware that not everyone’s grandfather rammed opium down Chinese throats in order to pay the Excelsior’s summer-holiday prices.
“So what do you think of our American Romeo?” inquired Holmes as the rattle of Colby’s cab departed down Baker Street. “What sort of man does he appear to be?”