“Did I?” Holmes went immediately to the mantel—cluttered as always with newspapers, books, and unanswered correspondence—and after a brief search shook his head. “I shall find it, never fear,” he said, his brow furrowing. “And return it, if you would be so kind as to give me your direction once more.”
Colby hesitated, then snatched the nearest piece of paper from the table—a bill from Holmes’s tailor, I believe it was—and scribbled an address upon it. “I’m off to Watchgate this afternoon,” he said. “This will find me.”
“Thank you,” said Holmes, and I noticed that he neither touched the paper, nor came within arm’s reach of the man who stood before him. “I shall have it in the post before nightfall. I can’t think what can have become of it. It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Colby. My felicitations on the happy outcome of your suit.”
When Colby was gone Holmes stood for a time beside the table, looking after him a little blankly, his hands knotted into fists where they rested among the scrapbooks. He whispered, “Damn him,” as if he had forgotten my presence in the room. “My God, I had not believed it . . .”
Then, turning sharply, he went to the mantelpiece and immediately withdrew from behind the clock the note which Carstairs Delapore had sent to Colby. This he tucked into an envelope and sealed. As he copied the direction he asked in a stiff, expressionless tone, “What did you make of our guest, Watson?”
“That success has made him bumptious,” I replied, for I had liked Colby less in his elevated and energized mood than I had when he was merely unthinking about his own and other people’s money. “Holmes, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“Did you happen to notice which hand he wrote out his direction with?”
I thought for a moment, picturing the man scribbling, then said, “His left.”
“Yet when he wrote the address of the Hotel Excelsior the day before yesterday,” said Holmes, “he did so with his right hand.”
“So he did.” I came to his side and picked up the tailor’s bill, and compared the writing on it with that of the Excelsior address, which lay on the table among the scrapbooks and clippings. “That would account for the hand being so very different.”
Holmes said, “Indeed.” But he spoke looking out the window onto Baker Street, and the harsh glare of the morning sunlight gave his eyes a steely cast, faraway and cold, as if he saw from a distance some terrible event taking place. “I am going to Shropshire, Watson,” he said after a moment. “I’m leaving tonight, on the last train; I should be back—”
“Then you find Viscount Delapore’s sudden capitulation as sinister as I do,” I said.
He looked at me with blank surprise, as if that construction of young Colby’s information had been the farthest thing from his mind. Then he laughed, a single sharp mirthless breath, and said, “Yes. Yes, I find it . . . sinister.”
“Do you think young Colby is walking into some peril, returning to Depewatch Priory?”
“I think my client is in peril, yes,” said Holmes quietly. “And if I cannot save him, then the least that I can do is avenge.”
Holmes at first refused to hear of me accompanying him to the borders of Wales, sending instead a note to Carnaki with instructions to be ready to depart by the eight o’clock train. But when Billy the messenger boy returned with the information that Carnaki was from home and would not return until the following day, he assented, sending a second communication to the young antiquarian requesting that he meet us in the village of High Clum, a few miles from Watchgate, the following day.
It puzzled me that Holmes should have chosen the late train, if he feared for Colby’s life should the young man return to fetch his fiancée from the hands of the two monomaniacs at Depewatch Priory. Still more did it puzzle me that, upon our arrival at midnight in the market town of High Clum, Holmes took rooms for us at the Cross of Gold, as if he were deliberately putting distance between us and the man he spoke of—when he could be induced to speak at all—as if he were already dead.
In the morning, instead of attempting to communicate with Colby, Holmes hired a pony trap and a boy to drive us to the wooded ridge that divided High Clum from the vale in which the village of Watchgate stood. “Queer folk there,” the lad said as the sturdy cob leaned into its collars on the slope. “It’s only a matter of four mile, but it’s like as if they lived in another land. You never do hear of one of their lads come courtin’ in Clum, and the folk there’s so odd now none of ours’n will go there. They come for the market, oncet a week. Sometimes you’ll see Mr. Carstairs drive to town, all bent and withered up like a tree hit by lightnin’, starin’ about him with those pale eyes: yellow hazel, like all the Delapore; rotten apples my mum calls ’em. And old Gaius with him sometimes, treatin’ him like as if he was a dog, the way he treats everyone.”
The boy drew his horse to a halt and pointed out across the valley with his whip: “That’ll be the priory, sir.”
After all that had been spoken of monstrous survivals and ancient cults, I had half expected to see some blackened Gothic pile thrusting flamboyant spires above the level of the trees. But in fact, as Carnaki had read in William Punt’s book, Depewatch Priory appeared, from across the valley, to be simply a “goodly manor of gray stone,” its walls rather overgrown with ivy and several windows broken and boarded shut. I frowned, remembering the casual way in which Colby had thrown his sack of guineas onto Holmes’s table: feed a cur and he’ll shut up barking . . .
Yet old Gaius had originally turned down Colby’s offer to help him bring the priory back into proper repair.
Behind the low roofline of the original house I could see what had to be the Roman tower Carnaki had spoken of—beyond doubt the original “watch” of both priory and village names. It had clearly been kept in intermittent repair up until the early part of this century, an astonishing survival. Beneath it, I recalled, Carnaki had said the subcrypt lay: the center of that decadent cult that dated to pre-Roman times. I found myself wondering if old Gaius descended the stairs to sleep on the ancient altar, as the notorious Lord Rupert Grimsley had been said to do, and if so, what dreams had come to him there.
After London’s stuffy heat the thick-wooded foothills were deliciously cool. The breezes brought the scent of water from the heights, and the sharp nip of rain. Perhaps this contrast was what brought upon me what happened later that day, and that horrible night—I know not. For surely, after I returned to the Cross of Gold, I must have come down ill and lain delirious. There is no other explanation—I pray there is no other explanation—for the ghastly dreams, worse than any delirium I experienced while sick with fever in India, that dragged me through abysses of horror while I slept and have for years shadowed not only my sleep, but upon occasion my waking as well.
I remember that Holmes took the trap to the station to meet Carnaki. I remember, too, sitting by the window of our pleasant sitting room, cleaning my pistol, for I feared that, if Holmes had in fact found some proof that the evil viscount had kidnapped beggar children for some ancient and unspeakable rite, there might be trouble when we confronted the old autocrat with it. I certainly felt no preliminary shiver, no premonitory dizziness of fever, when I rose to answer the knock at the parlor door.
The man who stood framed there could be no one but Carstairs Delapore. “Withered all up like a tree hit by lightnin’,” the stable lad had said: had his back been straight, he still would not have been as tall as I, and he looked up at me sideways, twisting his head upon a skinny neck like a bird’s.
His eyes were a light hazel, almost golden, as the boy had said.
They are my last memory of the waking world that afternoon.