“A wealthy one,” I said, still stung by that careless remark about those who remained in town. “One not used to hearing the word no. But earnest and good of heart, I would say. Certainly he takes a balanced view of these ‘decadent’ studies—to which the Delapores can scarcely object, if they share them.”
“True enough.” Holmes set letter and note upon the table, and went to the bookcase to draw out his copy of the Court Gazette, which was so interleaved with snipped-out society columns, newspaper clippings, and notes in Holmes’s neat, strong handwriting as to bulge to almost double its original size. “But what are the nature of these folkloric ‘practices’ which are ‘fairly ugly by modern standards’? Ugliness by the standards of a world which has invented the Maxim gun can scarcely be termed bogies in the dark.
“Carstairs Delapore,” he read, opening the book upon his long arm. “Questioned concerning his whereabouts on the night of the twenty-seventh August, 1890, when the owner of a public house in Whitechapel reported her ten-year-old son Thomas missing; a man of Delapore’s description—he is evidently of fairly unforgettable appearance—seen speaking with the boy that evening. Thomas never found. I thought I recognized the name. Delapore was also questioned in 1873 by the Manchester police—he was in that city, for no discernible reason, when two little mill girls went missing . . . I must say I’m astonished that anyone reported their disappearance. Mudlarks and street urchins vanish every day from the streets of London and no one inquires after them any more than one inquires the whereabouts of butterflies once they flitter over the garden fence. A man need not even be very clever to kidnap children in London.” He shut the book, his eyes narrowing as he turned his gaze to the endless wasteland of brick that lay beyond the window. “Merely careful to pick the dirtiest and hungriest, and those without parents or homes.”
“That’s a serious conclusion to jump to,” I said, startled and repelled.
“It is,” Holmes replied. “Which is why I jump to nothing. But Gaius, Viscount Delapore, was mentioned three times in the early reports of the Metropolitan police—between 1833 and 1850—in connection with precisely such investigations, at the same time that he was publishing a series of monographs on ‘Demonic Ritual Survivals Along the Welsh Borders’ for the discredited Eye of Dawn Society. And in 1863, an American reporter disappeared while investigating rumors of a pagan cult in western Shropshire, not five miles from Watchgate village, which lies below the hill upon which Depewatch Priory stands.”
“But even so,” I said, “even if the Delapores are involved in some kind of theosophistic studies—or white slaving, for that matter—would they not seek rather to get an outsider like Delapore’s niece out of the house, rather than keeping her there as a potential source of trouble? And how would the old man use a pack of occult rubbish to dominate his granddaughter and his son against their will?”
“How indeed?” Holmes went to the bookcase again, and took down the envelope in which he had bestowed Burnwell Colby’s card. “I, too, found our American visitor—despite his patent desire to disown association with his hidebound and boring family—an ingenuous and harmless young man. Which makes this all the more curious.”
He held out the envelope to me, and I took it out and examined it as he had. The stock, as he had said, was expensive and the typeface rigidly correct, although the card itself bore slight traces of having been carried about loose in Mr. Colby’s pockets with pens, notes, and photographs of his beloved Judith. Only when I brought it close to examine the small dents and scratches on its surface was I conscious of the smell that seemed to imbue the thick, soft paper, a nauseating mix of frankincense, charred hair, and . . .
I looked up at Holmes, my eyes wide. I had been a soldier in India, and a physician for most of my life. I knew the smell.
“Blood,” I said.
The note Holmes sent that afternoon received an answer within hours, and after we had finished our supper he invited me to accompany him to the home of a friend on the Embankment near the Temple: “A curious customer who may fill in for you some hitherto unsuspected colors in the palette of London life,” he said. Mr. Carnaki was a thin young man of medium height and attenuated build, whose large gray eyes regarded one from behind thick spectacle lenses with an expression it is hard to define: as if he were always watching for something that others do not see. His tall, narrow house was filled with books, even lining the walls of the hallways on both sides, so that a broad-built man would have been obliged to sidle through crabwise, and through the darkened doorways I glimpsed the flicker of gaslight across what appeared to be complex chemical and electrical apparatus. He listened to Holmes’s account of Burnwell Colby’s visit without comment, his chin resting on one long, spidery hand, then rose from his chair and climbed a pair of steps to an upper shelf of one of the many bookcases that walled the small study at the back of the house to which he’d led us.
“ ‘Depewatch Priory,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘stands on a cliff above the village of Watchgate in the wild hill country on the borders of Wales, where in 1215 King John confirmed the appointment of an Augustinian prior over an existing “hooly howse” of religion said to date back to foundation by Joseph of Arimathea. It appears from its inception to have been the center of a cycle of legends and whispers: indeed, the king’s original intent was apparently to have the place pulled down and salt strewn on its foundations. One Philip of Mundberg petitioned Edward IV, describing the monks there engaged in “comerce wyth daemons yt did issue forth from Hell, and make knowne theyr wants by means of certain dremes,” but he apparently never reached the king himself and the investigation was dropped. There were repeated accusations of heresy involving the transmigration of the souls of certain priors, rumors which apparently transferred themselves to the Grimsley family, to whom Henry VIII presented the priory in 1540, and surfaced in the 1780s in connection with the Delapores, who succeeded them through marriage.’
“William Punt”—he tapped the black leather covers of the volume as he set it on the table beside Holmes—“in his Catalogue of Secret Abominations described the place in 1793 as being a ‘goodly manor of gray stone’ built upon the foundations of the Plantagenet cloister, but says that the original core of the establishment is the ruin of a tower, probably Roman in origin. Punt speaks of stairs leading down to a subcrypt, where the priors used to sleep upon a crude altar after appalling rites. When Lord Rupert Grimsley was murdered by his wife and daughters in 1687, they apparently boiled his body and buried his bones in the subcrypt, reserving his skull, which they placed in a niche at the foot of the main stair in the manor house itself, ‘that evil dare not pass.’ ”
I could not repress a chuckle. “As protective totems go, it didn’t do Lord Rupert much good, did it?”
“I daresay not,” returned Holmes with a smile. “Yet my reading of the 1840 Amsterdam edition of Punt’s Catalogue leads me to infer that the local population didn’t regard Rupert Grimsley’s murder as particularly evil; the villagers impeded the Metropolitan police in the pursuit of their duties to such effect that the three murderesses got completely away.”
“Good heavens, yes.” Carnaki turned, and drew out another volume, more innocuous than the sinister-looking tome of abominations: this one was simply a history of West Country families, as heavily interleaved with clippings and notes as was Holmes’s Gazette. “Rupert Grimsley was feared as a sorcerer from Shrewsbury to the Estuary; he is widely reputed to have worked the roads as a highwayman, carrying off not valuables but travelers, who were never seen again. Demons were said to come and go at his command, and at least two lunatics from that section of the Welsh border—one in the early part of the eighteenth century and one as recently as 1842—swore that old Lord Rupert dwelled in the bodies of all the successive Lords of Depewatch.”