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Once recovered, Trevor senior claimed, rather unconvincingly, that “J.A.” was an old flame. Yet afterward he was so uneasy that Holmes resolved to leave. However, the day before his departure, an uninvited guest arrived—an “acid-faced” old sailor named Hudson. Trevor senior clearly knew the sinister-looking man, and poured himself a large brandy. “Why, it’s thirty year and more since I saw you last,” said Hudson. “Here you are in your house, and me still picking my salt meat out of the harness cask.” When he mentioned a mutual acquaintance called Beddoes, Trevor senior, clearly in shock, drank himself into a stupor.

A fatal message

Seven weeks later, back in London, Holmes received a telegram from Trevor junior imploring him to return to Norfolk, where his father had suffered a massive stroke. ❯❯

118 THE GREAT DETECTIVE

Beddoes warns Trevor senior

by way of a cryptic code. The full coded message is shown here, but Holmes deduces that taking every third word (in bold) reveals its true meaning. The use of coded messages for secret communications was common in Victorian Britain.

The supply of game for London is going steadily up. Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, has been now told to receive all orders for fly-paper and for preservation of your hen pheasant ’s life.

But by the time Holmes reached Trevor’s hamlet, the old man was dead. It transpired that, since Holmes’s last visit, Hudson had exerted a strange hold over Trevor senior and for weeks had terrorized the household. Things came to a head when an argument broke out between Hudson and Trevor junior. Young Victor had then refused to apologize, at which Hudson left for Beddoes’ Hampshire estate. And it was a brief, cryptic message (see above) from there, received the day before Holmes’s return to the house, that had brought on the stroke.

The budding detective took some time to decipher the strange message. He read it backward, then tried alternate words, before realizing the key lay in every third word, starting with the first: “The game is up. Hudson has told all. Fly for your life.” No wonder Trevor senior was so affected. But why the bizarre “Head-keeper” and “hen pheasants,” and what secret was Hudson harboring? The odd choice of filler words seemed to validate the message’s authenticity, confirming that Beddoes, an avid hunter, wrote it. But Hudson’s role remained unexplained.

A deathbed confession

As Trevor senior gasped his last breath, he told his doctor where to find a letter he had written for his son in the event of his death. The letter revealed that his real name was James Armitage—“J.A.”—and explained how, as a young man working in a London bank, he had stolen money in order to pay a debt, intending to return it before anyone noticed. However, he had been caught, tried, and sentenced to transportation aboard the Gloria Scott, bound for Australia.

Here the plot thickened. It was October 1855, and transportation ships had been enlisted for military uses because of the Crimean War (1853–1856). The ship carrying Armitage was, in fact, a repurposed tea clipper, a lightweight vessel overloaded with almost a hundred crew, prisoners, and soldiers.

At sea, an inmate named Jack Prendergast let Armitage in on an elaborate escape plot. It was already well prepared and financed, and Prendergast’s partner was busy masquerading as the ship’s own chaplain, and secretly bribing the

The murder of the ship’s captain, illustrated here by Paget in The Strand Magazine, is part of the violent and bloodthirsty mutiny that led Armitage and Evans to flee the ship.

THE GLORIA SCOTT 119

Those are the facts of the case, Doctor, and if they are of any use to your collection, I am sure that they are very heartily at your service.

Sherlock Holmes

crew and bringing weaponry into the 38 inmates’ cells. They seemed so certain to overwhelm the 18 soldiers and a mere few others that Armitage decided to join in.

A violent mutiny

The violence of the mutiny that took place is described in full, gory detail. Conan Doyle, who twice served as a ship’s surgeon—in the Arctic on the whaler Hope in 1880, and off the West African coast on the steamer Mayumba in 1881— has Prendergast ruthlessly cut the throat of the bound and gagged convict ship’s surgeon. Interestingly, however, there is a curious difference between the original British and American descriptions of the murdered ship’s captain. In the British edition, he “lay with his head on the chart of the Atlantic,” whereas the American edition described “his brains smeared over the chart of the Atlantic.” The jury is still out as to which of these was Conan Doyle’s original.

Uneasy with all the wanton bloodletting, several men, including Armitage and another friend named Evans, wanted no more part in it.

They escaped in a lifeboat, but as they rowed away the Gloria Scott exploded and they turned back to search for survivors. There was only one amid the wreckage: Hudson. It transpired that a bullet had ignited the ship’s gunpowder.

The men were picked up off Cape Verde by a brig heading for Australia, and managed to convince their rescuers they were from a foundered passenger ship. Once in Australia, Armitage and Evans created new identities, renaming themselves Trevor and Beddoes, respectively, and both made their fortunes. Returning later to England, with their pasts safely buried, it was clear why the return of Hudson, with his knowledge of their part in the mutiny, was so disconcerting.

In concluding his reminiscence, Holmes tells how Victor junior— heartbroken about his father’s disreputable past—became a tea planter in India. And it turned out that Beddoes’ warning that Hudson had “told all” had been wrong. Both Beddoes and Hudson vanished, but although the police thought Hudson had killed Beddoes, Holmes himself suspected the opposite, and that Beddoes had fled the country.

A likely inspiration

Apart from this surmise, Holmes does little more in this case than decode the cryptic message and read a confessional letter: indeed, the whole case is largely a frame for a pirate story (Conan Doyle was enthusiastic about the genre, and in 1922 wrote a collection called Tales of Pirates and Blue Water).

“The Gloria Scott” may have been inspired by a real-life case of mutiny, aboard the convict ship Cyprus in 1829, in which some convicts refused to take part. Two rowed away—and the captain who picked them up was named Hudson. ■

Transportation

The transportation of British criminals to the far reaches of the Empire was a staple of 19th-century justice, and had been since Elizabethan times. Convicts were usually forced to do hard labor—a practice that was seen to kill two birds with one stone, since it not only removed the convict from British society but also provided the colonies with a supply of workers. In the early days, felons were sent to work for the Virginia Company in America, but after American independence, Australia became the focus, the first 700 convicts landing in Botany Bay, near Sydney, in 1788. Although the practice ended in New South Wales by 1851 and in Tasmania by 1853, it continued in Western Australia until 1868, by which time over 160,000 convicts had been delivered to the country. Had Trevor senior’s crime been committed 33 years earlier, his story would have been very different. As his confessional letter from the 1880s states, “The case might have been dealt with leniently, but the laws were more harshly administered thirty years ago.”

IN MY INMOST

HEART I BELIEVED

THAT I COULD

SUCCEED WHERE

OTHERS FAILED

THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL (1893)

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: May 1893 US: May 1893

COLLECTION

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894

CHARACTERS Reginald Musgrave Old acquaintance of Holmes and owner of Hurlstone estate.

Richard Brunton Former butler at Hurlstone; a widower and womanizer.

Rachel Howells Second maid at Hurlstone and Brunton’s former fiancée.

I

t is no surprise that “The Musgrave Ritual” was one of Conan Doyle’s favorite stories. Brimming with intrigue, it features buried treasure, a baffling coded message, and even a link to the English Civil War that adds a piquant element of historical drama.

Although the story begins with Watson addressing the reader in the usual way, it is actually Holmes who narrates most of the action, since it occurred long before the doctor moved into 221B Baker Street. In fact, it is the second-earliest case in the Holmes canon, following on from “The Gloria Scott” (pp.116–19).

An untidy flatmate

On a winter’s evening in 1888, at 221B, soon after the publication of A Study in Scarlet (pp.36–45)

THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL 121

The 1943 movie Sherlock Holmes Faces Death takes the name and ritual from “The Musgrave Ritual,” but bears little resemblance to the original story.

and around the time of the events in The Valley of Fear (pp.212–21), Watson is berating Holmes for his untidiness and famous domestic peccadilloes: his habit of keeping cigars in the coal scuttle, stashing tobacco in a Persian slipper, and pinning letters to the mantelpiece with a jackknife. It is hard to disagree with Watson’s complaint that pistol practice is best saved for outdoors. Yet Holmes’s decoration of the wall with bullet holes that spell out “VR” (Victoria Regina) is not only evidence of his patriotism, it is also a deft piece of contextual data from Conan Doyle, as June 1887 had marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

It is Holmes’s lackadaisical housekeeping that prompts him to tell Watson about the “Musgrave Ritual.” Ruefully accepting Watson’s suggestion to tidy up, Holmes starts with a box containing a record of his earlier cases and chances on one that “really is something a little recherché,” withdrawing a set of perplexing items: an old, crumpled piece of paper, a weathered key, a wooden peg attached to some string, and some rusty metal discs— the residual traces of the case.

A familiar new client

After his success as a student in the case of “The Gloria Scott,” Holmes earned a reputation as an investigator at university, spurring several fellow students to offer him investigative work. Reginald Musgrave—a shy and aristocratic man—was one of them. Having been out of touch for four years, Musgrave visits Holmes at his Montague Street lodgings, near the British Museum (and close to where Conan Doyle once lived). Musgrave tells Holmes that his father died two years ago, and that he is now in possession of Hurlstone, the family home. In response to an enquiry about his career, Holmes remarks, “I have taken to living by my wits,” making him a paradigm of the self-made man. Musgrave is pleased to hear it, since there is a mystery to be solved and the police are unable to shed any light on the matter.

A butler and a battle-ax

Musgrave explains that the mystery concerns the disappearance of his butler, Richard Brunton, an educated man who has served the family for over 20 years. He is a notorious womanizer and recently broke off his engagement to a maid, Rachel Howells, in favor of another servant, causing great uproar.

In the small hours of the previous Thursday night, Musgrave had been unable to sleep, and had gone to ❯❯

122 THE GREAT DETECTIVE

retrieve a book from the billiards room. He was alarmed to see a light coming from under the door of the library and, suspecting burglars, he picked up an old battle-ax from a wall display and peeped in through a crack in the door. He was amazed to see his butler examining “a slip of paper which looked like a map.” Musgrave then watched as Brunton headed to the bureau, removed a second document, and began to study it carefully and meticulously. Furious, Musgrave confronted Brunton, who turned “livid with fear” and thrust the maplike paper into his pocket. Musgrave fired him on the spot, but Brunton managed to barter for a week’s notice.

Musgrave explains to Holmes that the document taken from the bureau was a strange old family “observance” called the Musgrave Ritual. This document is no secret, and consists of a series of arcane-sounding questions and answers that, for generations, each Musgrave has read out upon reaching maturity. Musgrave is certain the Ritual is of no relevance to the case, saying it is of “no practical use whatever.” Holmes clearly has other ideas, but allows his client to continue.

If we could find that spot we should be in a fair way towards finding what the secret was...

Sherlock Holmes

The disappearances

It was three days later that Brunton mysteriously vanished. His bed had not been slept in, and no one knows how he could have left the house— the doors and windows were locked. Also, his effects (except for a black suit and slippers) were all left behind. A thorough search of labyrinthine Hurlstone, parts of which date back to 1607, proved fruitless—no trace of the butler could be found.

In the meantime, another curious incident had occurred. When Rachel Howells, the second maid and Brunton’s snubbed fiancée, told Musgrave that the butler was missing, she suffered

Richard Brunton

Originally a schoolmaster, Richard Brunton was first employed by Musgrave’s father. The description we are given is initially rather humorous—one can picture this flamboyant intellectual in “a quiet country district,” dazzling the local ladies with his “splendid forehead” and flair for music and languages. Musgrave compares him to Don Juan, the mythic European libertine. This legendary lothario was a stock figure in celebrated works by Byron, Mozart, Pushkin, and others. It is interesting that

a hysterical attack and had to be confined to bed. Three days later, she too disappeared. Footprints ran from her window, across the lawn, and stopped at the edge of a lake. Musgrave and the staff suspected the worst of the “poor demented girl,” but dredging the lake had revealed only an old linen bag filled with “a mass of old rusted and discoloured metal and several dull-coloured pieces of pebble or glass.”

Holmes’s curiosity is aroused, and he says he must see the Ritual. Although Musgrave cannot see its relevance, he duly brings the document with him to Montague Street to show Holmes, pointing out that there is no date inscribed on it, but that the spelling is of the mid17th century—almost the same age as the house itself. Holmes instantly grasps the document as being “immensely practical,” declaring the butler an extremely clever man with “a clearer insight than ten generations of his masters.”

Over the oak, under the elm

That afternoon, Holmes travels down to Hurlstone with Musgrave. As he describes his journey, he intones to Watson that it had already

Brunton, with his “insatiable curiosity,” recalls Holmes himself. However, unlike the detective, he is scuppered by his inability to control himself: a fatal flaw reminiscent of pride or hubris in classical drama.

Although Conan Doyle has been criticized for thin characterization, Brunton comes across vividly, even if Holmes encounters him only as a barely recognizable corpse. So vividly, in fact, that the reader might forget he is described in three layers of narration: Musgrave’s, Holmes’s, and Watson’s.