Brunton, redoubling his efforts following his dismissal on a week's notice by your cousin, discovers the site of the cache within two days. His problem is to retrieve the treasure he believes to lie below. He confers with the angry, and astute, Rachel Howells, who strikes a bargain: she is to share equally in the treasure as the price for her help – and her silence.
She it is who provides the two linen sacks, one for each half share of the trove. Brunton takes them down into the crypt, fills one with half the treasure and hands it up to Howells.
"The sceptre and the orb for you; the crown for me, Rachel! Fair enough, my dear?" I can almost hear the words.
"What does Howells do then?" he continued. "Aware of the need for haste, she hastily stashes her bag in the nearby hiding place she has selected earlier: the sarcophagus from which we have retrieved it today. While doing so, she quickly examines the bag's contents. Despite Brunton's assurances she may well conclude that the discoloured old pieces of metal are worthless. I seem to hear her screaming imprecations down at Brunton, crouched below. Brunton, reaching up to raise himself from the dungeon, places his bag on the stone shelf beside the wooden billet. And then – murder!"
"You always suspected it!"
"Yes, Watson. Murder. No other hypothesis fits. Consider. Her means, and her opportunity, are all too close to hand. Of motives she has no lack! Revenge – for Brunton has recently wronged her – as I suggested before, perhaps much more than we know: passionate Celtic women do not take kindly to being thrown over for gamekeepers' daughters; anger – for Brunton has undoubtedly promised her that a great treasure awaits them at the bottom of the pit as a price for her help in raising the flagstone; and avarice, for Brunton's protestations that the trinkets are of immense value may – just may – be true.
"So she, the second bag lying at her feet, murders him: murders him by dashing away the wooden billet. The heavy slab crashes down. Her faithless lover is imprisoned in the tomb. In pace requiescat avidus!"
Musgrave and I had listened in fascination as Holmes's words vividly brought this ghastly tragedy to life. I took a deep breath to escape the spell he had cast.
"But this can only be a hypothesis!" I heard myself cry in protest.
"It is more than that," said Holmes. "Consider the significance of the second bag. A British jury might possibly have acquitted Howells for lack of evidence had she been brought to trial at
the time of Brunton's death: the butler had been found dead in the crypt; the Stuart crown in the mere. There was no evidence connecting Howells directly to either. She had in any event
disappeared. But now the second bag has been found and Howells's neck is in jeopardy for she, and only she, can have received it from Brunton's hand. Brunton never left that crypt alive. It was Howells, a jury will reason, who threw the one sack into the mere – her footsteps, leading to the edge of the lake, proclaim as much – after first secreting the other in its hiding place, a few steps from where she stood. This is no hypothesis, Watson. It is proof. This second linen bag places a hempen rope around the neck of Rachel Howells."
"I am sure you are right," said Nathaniel Musgrave, his eyes still fixed on Sherlock Holmes. "The facts are indisputable.
They admit of no other explanation. Murder was done in our Hurlstone cellar that day: our butler the victim; our housemaid his executioner."
Holmes continued. "Aghast at what she has done, she snatches up Brunton's bag and flees to her room, her ears ringing with the sounds of muffled screams and the drumming of frenzied
hands from the cellar. In the haven of her room she makes her plans for flight. What can she do with the bags, the evidence of her dreadful crime?Their discovery in her possession means the
gallows. She decides to leave hers in its feudal hiding place. She spends the next two days in secreting her few belongings near the gate leading from the Hurlstone estate to the world beyond.
On her final night she retires to bed as usual then, quietly, to avoid waking the night nurse, she leaves the house and walks to the lake – carefully leaving tracks to the water's edge to establish the possibility of her death by drowning as an explanation for
her disappearance – flings Brunton's treasure into the mere and takes the gravel path leading from the grounds."
"How do you know she took the path?" I asked.
"Because her footsteps took her to the edge of the mere next to the gravel path. It was at their junction that her trail ended. The mere was dragged the next day so thoroughly that the linen bag was detected and brought to the surface. But they found no body! No Rachel Howells! She had not entered the lake, therefore she had taken the path. It was always my opinion," he went on, "that she had carried herself and the memory of her crime to some land beyond the sea, an opinion I now find justified. She left your grounds, Musgrave, walked to the village, thence, taking every care to remain inconspicuous, by coach to Portsmouth."
"But would a second housemaid be capable of devising such an undertaking?" Musgrave inquired.
"It was a formidable plan, but the Welsh have many characteristics besides passion and fire," replied Holmes. "Among them are courage, cunning, and intelligence. Your cousin had a high opinion of Rachel Howells. He told me so. Remember, too, she was engaged to Richard Brunton, a man of first rate education and intelligence. It is most unlikely that he would have allied himself to a simpleton.
"It now appears that the land she chose," he continued, "was North America. Her transatlantic vessel's first port of call was probably Halifax in Nova Scotia, or perhaps Boston in New England. From there she has made her way west, settling in the wilderness gold-mining town of Barkerville – an appropriate haven for an avaricious murderess with crown jewels on her mind. No doubt she changed her name and has supported herself there under her new identity."
"You think it is Rachel Howells who has sent you this letter from Canada, then?"
"It can be no other."
"The woman must be arrested, Holmes. She is a murderess! We know her abode. Why should we hesitate?"
"No, Watson, we cannot arrest her until we have identified her with certainty as the sender of this enigmatic letter which has, thanks to our dutiful playing of the role she has written for us, both revealed the treasure and laid claim to it. Consider: the murderess hid the second bag in the coffin. The sender of this letter, and she alone, knows that the bag was hidden there and has directed us to it. To bring home guilt to Rachel Howells we must identify her not only as Hurlstone's second housemaid, and Brunton's accomplice, but also as the sender of the letter."
"But how dared she send the message and risk detection?" asked Musgrave.
"Let us put ourselves once again in her place. She has learned long ago from Watson's published account of the affair of the Musgrave Ritual that Brunton had told her no less than the truth: that the contents of the bags are indeed of immense value. Watson's narrative has told her also that her share of the treasure remained undetected when Brunton's bag was recovered from the mere. She ponders how she can lay her hands on her fortune, as she no doubt considers it. How does she reason? How can she secure the treasure but avoid the scaffold? Watson's account has told her of the legal difficulties and expense encountered by the Hurlstone estate in retaining the crown. Revelation of her own treasure will kindle a similar investigation. To reveal her knowledge of its existence is to put a noose around her neck. At the cost of her life she must not be identified as the treasure's finder. She needs an untermediary, an agent capable of dealing with the authorities and of meeting the expense necessary to retrieve the trove. She therefore finds a surrogate – or surrogates. In their name she lays claim to the treasure, relying on them to provide her with both a share of the proceeds and continuing anonymity.