"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 off-handedly, 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 hidebound 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?"
"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' 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 27th 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 discernable 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 anymore 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 crab-wise, and through the darkened doorways I glimpsed the flicker of gas-light across what appeared to be complex chemical and electrical apparatus. He listened to Holmes' 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 strewed 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.