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THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL 123

After examining the Musgrave Ritual, Holmes deduces what Brunton had already discovered, that the Ritual contained directions to a hidden treasure, entrusted to the Musgraves centuries ago. At a certain time of year, the directions can be followed using the shadows cast by the trees in the grounds of Hurlstone, Musgrave’s estate.

Indicates the month of June, when the sun is in the correct position to guide the seeker.

Shows the number of steps to take, the direction, and, crucially, the need to seek “under” the final location.

Whose was it?

His who is gone.

Who shall have it?

He who will come.

What was the month?

The sixth from the first.

Where was the sun?

Over the oak.

Where was the shadow?

Under the elm.

How was it stepped?

North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.

What shall we give for it?

All that is ours.

Why should we give it?

For the sake of the trust.

The first questions refer to the treasure’s owner (Charles I) and the person for whom it is intended (his son).

The two trees enable Holmes to calculate the starting point from which to find the treasure’s location.

Refers to the pact made between the Musgraves and the Royal Family to protect the crown.

become clear to him “that there were not three separate mysteries here, but one only”: the Ritual, as well as the disappearance of Brunton and Howells, all share a common denominator. To Holmes, it is clear that the Ritual (see above) is in fact a cipher, giving measurements that plot a course to a particular spot. If Holmes can find that, then he will almost certainly discover the secret that will enable him to solve the entire mystery.

The detective works through the document, applying his usual logic. The oak tree is easy to identify—it is situated directly in front of the house and extremely ancient, so it would have certainly been there when the Ritual was drawn up. He asks Musgrave if there is an elm, and learns that one was cut down after being struck by lightning 10 years before, but a mark on the lawn shows where the tree once stood (midway between the oak and the house). When questioned on the height of the tree, Musgrave conveniently recalls from his trigonometry lessons that it was exactly 64 feet tall. Holmes enquires if the butler ever asked him the same question and Musgrave, astonished, recalls that he had indeed, only a few months ago.

Stepping it out

Holmes intuits from the wording of the Ritual that the starting spot must be the point that the elm’s shadow would have reached at the exact moment when the sun is just higher than the oak. He puts a rod into the ground where the elm had been, and follows its shadow to a point calculated on the basis of the elm’s 64-foot height. This takes him to a spot by the house that is marked by a “conical depression”— more evidence of Brunton having also followed the same path. From this starting point, Holmes begins to step north, east, south, and west, following the words of the Ritual. They lead him through a heavy old door in the house’s oldest part and into a stone passageway behind it where the “sun shone full upon the passage floor.” Holmes is convinced he has found the correct location. ❯❯

124 THE GREAT DETECTIVE

Beneath the flagstones

However, when he looks down, hoping to see evidence of a hiding place beneath the paving—as the Ritual implies—to his dismay he sees that the paving stones were cemented together many years ago and Brunton cannot possibly have moved them. But Musgrave tells him that there is a cellar hidden beneath, and leads him down. Now it is clear they have found the correct spot—and they are not the only ones to have visited recently.

Here, in the dark cellar, they find Brunton’s “shepherd’s-check muffler” tied around an iron ring that is attached to a large, heavy flagstone in the floor. Although it might strike the reader as odd that this room was never investigated in the supposedly “cellar to garret” search, the intensifying excitement leaves no time to wonder about such intricacies. Anticipating what they might find, Holmes asks Musgrave to summon the county police. Then, with a police constable, Holmes lifts up the flagstone and peers into the hole beneath. There he sees a square chamber, a little deeper than the height of a man: on one side is a “brass-bound wooden box,” with an old key in its lock. On the other, a gruesome, black-clad corpse: the over-inquisitive butler.

The reality of the Ritual

Although the Ritual wording is beguiling, Holmesian experts agree that, in reality, there is no way the L-shaped house, the oak tree, and the elm could have been arranged in such a way that the Ritual makes sense; in addition, there are various other issues that have plagued the

This illustration by Sidney Paget first appeared in The Strand Magazine. It shows Holmes, right, examining the ancient oak tree that was the first step mentioned in the Musgrave Ritual.

story since its publication. For instance, in the original version of the story, the reference to the time of year (June) was absent from the Ritual; Conan Doyle added it later, presumably after realizing that it would have a vital effect on the shadows’ trajectories. Yet even with this addition, the Ritual still doesn’t specify the time of day, which would put the elm’s shadow in an opposite direction depending on whether it was morning or evening. The story also does not account for new trees growing during the three centuries since the Ritual was penned; and the final two steps that lead into the corridor are made moving west, even though “the setting sun shone full upon the passage floor.” However, such discrepancies play no part in the thrilling climax of this story.

The mystery accomplice

The discovery of Brunton’s body is tantalizingly inconclusive: Holmes has only solved part of the mystery. He reaches the full solution by using his trademark technique of putting

No man could have recognized that distorted liver-coloured countenance.

Sherlock Holmes

THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL 125

Here was the secret of her blanched face, her shaken nerves, her peals of hysterical laughter on the next morning.

Sherlock Holmes

“myself in the man’s place.” It is an apposite remark, since he has literally been tracing Brunton’s steps to the letter, following the felon’s every move in a manner more pronounced than anywhere else in the canon.

There is a moment of cheeky braggadocio from Holmes when he tells Watson that “the matter was simplified by Brunton’s intelligence being quite first-rate,” meaning (given Holmes’s own intellect) he didn’t need to take “the personal equation” into account. This was originally an astronomers’ term, coined when they realized that scientific measurements could be affected by subtle personal bias. Holmes’s use of the word preempts its employment in the 20th century by psychologists like Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung, who highlighted the effect of individual subjectivity in psychological judgments.

Holmes establishes that Brunton would have needed an accomplice to lift the flagstone, and correctly surmises that he had sought the help of his old flame, Rachel Howells. But Brunton had not counted on his former lover vindictively kicking away the wooden wedge keeping the stone raised, leaving him to suffocate in the airless chamber.

A regal discovery

It is clear that the “treasure” Brunton was after was the bag of objects found in the lake, where Rachel must have thrown them before she fled. Having earlier painted her as hysterical, Conan Doyle now relies on another stereotype: her impulsive vengeance is written off as a sign of her “excitable Welsh temperament.”

The dirty coins beside Brunton’s corpse are from the time of Charles I, so Musgrave’s general dating of the Ritual was correct. He then says

A nation in conflict

The English Civil War (1642–1651) began as a result of irreconcilable differences between King Charles I and his parliament. In one of the most dramatic episodes in English history, the Civil War divided the country between those supporting the King (the Cavaliers) and those supporting the Parliamentarians (the Roundheads) under Oliver Cromwell. It culminated in the execution of King Charles I in 1649, the exile of his son (later Charles II), and the monarchy’s replacement with a republic. The

that his ancestor Ralph Musgrave had been a prominent Cavalier and “right-hand man to Charles II in his wanderings.” With a quick polish, Holmes achieves a dazzling shine on one of the old gems, and realizes the “double ring” of rusted metal is in fact the lost crown of the Stuarts, and the dull stones are its gems. All had been safely stored at Hurlstone in anticipation of the restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War.

In reality, the Stuart crown was melted down, but Conan Doyle exploits an alluring—and even historically plausible—possibility. Nevertheless, the “unfortunate oversight” of whichever Musgrave descendant failed to communicate the significance of the Ritual as successfully as the Ritual itself, meaning Charles II never reclaimed his crown, is a little perfunctory.

Holmes’s comment that “nothing was ever heard” of Rachel is a loose end as uncharacteristic of the detective as of Conan Doyle— chiefly given that she is surely guilty of the worst transgression. However, it is also worth noting there is one more crime that goes unpunished: Holmes never did get around to tidying up his room. ■

“wanderings” of Charles II that Musgrave refers to is the period when he had fled from England.

Within a decade, Cromwell’s government was falling apart, and his death in 1658 threw the country into disarray. The Royalist general George Monck, who had in fact been a good friend of Cromwell, arranged for Charles II’s return from exile. On May 1, 1660, Charles II was restored to the throne and England’s brief years as a republic came to an end.

THE RESULTS

SHOW THAT

THE TRAP WAS

SKILLFULLY

BAITED

THE REIGATE SQUIRE (1893)

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: June 1893 US: June 1893 (as “The Reigate Puzzle”)

COLLECTION

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894

CHARACTERS Colonel Hayter Old Military friend of Watson’s.

Inspector Forrester

Local police detective.

Old Mr. Cunningham

Elderly local squire and justice of the peace.

Alec Cunningham

Mr. Cunningham’s son.

Mr. Acton Neighbor in a land dispute with the Cunninghams.

William Kirwan Victim.

W

hen it was originally published in The Strand Magazine in June 1893, Conan Doyle’s story about a landowning father and son was called “The Reigate Squire,” referring to the father, Old Mr. Cunningham, only. When it was included in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, however, it was retitled “The Reigate Squires,” to include the son as well. To complicate matters further, when published in the US in Harper’s Weekly (at the same time as the UK Strand publication) it was called simply “The Reigate Puzzle.” Interestingly, this was also the title used by Strand illustrator Sidney Paget in his account book in March

THE REIGATE SQUIRE 127

1893, so it may be that “The Reigate Puzzle” was in fact Conan Doyle’s original, working title.

Whatever title Conan Doyle preferred, the idea for the story came from “Health and Handwriting,” an article published in the Edinburgh Medical Journal in January 1890 and sent to him by its author, Alexander Cargill. He wrote to Cargill in 1893, saying, “I would like now to give Holmes a torn

Graphology

slip of a document, and see how far he could reconstruct both it and the writers of it. I think, thanks to you, I could make it effective.”

In 1927, Conan Doyle had to choose between this story, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” “The Crooked Man,” “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” “The Gloria Scott,” “The Greek Interpreter,” and “The Resident Patient” for the final spot in his list

There was huge interest in the “scientific” study of personality in late Victorian times. Many people believed personality was revealed by physical traits, such as the pattern of bumps on the head— a now discredited idea called phrenology (see p.188). Others believed in handwriting analysis, with some experts claiming that subtle differences in handwriting could reveal life stories. The theory originated with French priest Jean-Hippolyte Michon (1806– 1881) and his followers, who, from 1830, established the “science” that came to be called graphology.

To prove that the earth is spheroid, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, the model for Conan Doyle’s villain, did experiments in Lapland in 1736.

of his 12 favorite Holmes stories (see box, p.18). “I might as well draw the name out of a bag…” he wrote, “…they are all as good as I could make them.” But in the end he chose “The Reigate Squire,” on the basis that it was the story in which Holmes had shown the most ingenuity.

The exhausted hero

The setup for the story is unusually dramatic, and lays the ground for the parochial crime that follows. Holmes has just broken a major international conspiracy. The villain of the piece was “the most accomplished swindler in Europe,” one Baron Maupertuis— named, with delicious irony on Conan Doyle’s part, after one of the greatest French scientists and adventurers. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) was the leading champion of Newtonian science in 18th-century France, and led an extraordinary expedition to the Arctic to prove Newton’s ideas ❯❯

In the same year that Conan Doyle wrote “The Reigate Squire,” French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911, pictured) published a key text on the subject, which he considered to be “the science of the future.” Just a year later, graphology received a major blow when handwriting “experts” in France were exposed for their role in the conviction of Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of treason. Graphology never proved itself, and today it is considered a pseudoscience, like phrenology.

128 THE GREAT DETECTIVE

The deceptive letter that lured Kirwan to his death offers many clues to Holmes. Whoever wrote it was involved in the crime, and the time it occurred is clear. As Holmes observes, “Why was someone so anxious to get possession of it? Because it incriminated him.”

If you will only come round to the east gate you will will very much surprise you and The varied be of the greatest service to you

handwriting

and also to Annie Morrison. But say

shows that it was written nothing to anyone upon the matter. by “two persons doing alternative words.”

The corner of the letter was “found between the

finger and thumb of the dead man.”

Holmes finds the other part of the letter in the