I stood there with my red flannel underclothes in one hand, staring at them as if I had forgotten their purpose entirely. Holmes had gone down the hall to the taproom to negotiate something with the innkeeper, and I was alone in the small ground-floor room he had given us with only the trunk and my memories for company. I was still standing there, fully dressed, when Holmes returned in his shirtsleeves, his jacket draped over one shoulder. He tossed the jacket onto the bed, and was in the act of unfastening his collar when he finally noticed my immobility.
"Watson?" he asked, gently.
I shook my head.
"What is it?" Holmes said, stealing up softly behind me.
"I can't sleep," I finally said. "I can't even undress. I can't do anything until we find out what happened. I know that it is the middle of a moonless night and it is a long walk over strange country to Roylott's pile, but Holmes, we're here, and I cannot--simply--"
"Of course not, Watson," he said, quickly. "Give me a moment to get into my burglar's black, and we will make our way thither under the cover of darkness. If you would be so good as to unpack the windowcutting and safebreaking tools, which I secreted between the trunk walls and the lining...and there should be a disassembled dark lantern between the false bottom and the real bottom."
By the time we had assembled the lantern and Holmes had collected his tools, I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of this expedition. "Perhaps we should wait until daylight, after all...it will be difficult to make a complete examination in the dark, will it not?"
"One thing I have learned over the years," Holmes replied, adjusting the collar of his black overcoat, "is never to disobey an urge of that kind. If you are consumed with a desire to get into that ancient pile this very instant, then you must have a good reason for that. And so we will go, impractical as it may seem. No, not that way, I don't want the landlord to know our movements. This way, out the window."
I was not sure, as I followed his shadowy form across those dark unlit downs, that my hunch was as trustworthy as Holmes's usually had been. But then it had surprised me to hear him come so close to admitting the part that intuition had played in his success. Intuition certainly came to his rescue now; at least, I cannot explain any other way the fact that we did at last reach the grounds, and find ourselves looking up at that black brooding hulk of an ancestral hall.
Holmes led us around to the servant's entrance. The door yielded to him quickly, and we passed down the long corridor, unveiling the dark lantern. Dust was thick everywhere, undisturbed by human feet although the tracks of mice and other animals were visible. The hall had clearly been shut up for some time, although it was impossible to say for how long. Had the furniture been covered and the windows shuttered the instant Miss Helen had removed her things and herself from this unlucky place? Or had that distant cousin who inherited it come down, tried to make the place live again, and then finally abandoned it in despair?
"We will begin with the bedroom," Holmes whispered, and got to work on the door.
When it opened we crept into the room, somehow feeling a need for silence even though our light would surely be visible to anyone in that house. But there was nobody there. The room was empty--the hangings and bedding had been removed, and most of the furniture was gone. Probably the heir had taken or sold most of what had any value. All that was left was the bolted bed--which must have seemed too much trouble to remove--and the bell-pull. And, of course, the ventilator.
I stood looking up at the curving tendrils of the wrought-iron grille that separated this room from the study next door to it. It had been worked in a floral design, with the air coming in through the spaces between the stems and leaves and little flowers. But to my eyes the vines looked like so many serpents, twisting on each other, laying snares in that innocent flowerbed for the imprudent and unwary.
Holmes shook his head.
"It yields up nothing more now than it could have then," he said. "Let us venture into Roylott's chamber."
Roylott's room had been almost totally denuded. The only thing that had been left in it, almost, was the large cast-iron safe. It was still locked. No doubt, once Roylott had died, nobody knew the combination; and even if they had, they could not have been keen on the idea of opening a safe containing a deadly serpent. And as it was, after all, too heavy to move, they had left it where it was.
Holmes crouched down by the safe and began to work his magic upon it. While he was dealing with the combination lock my eyes went back to the ventilator. Something seemed to be stirring in the back of my mind, but I could not tell yet what it was.
"Holmes," I finally said.
"In a moment, Watson," Holmes answered. "This is a delicate operation."
I did wait. But I could not wait as long as it was taking him to open the safe.
"Holmes, I have been thinking about what Christison said, about the disease being miasmatic in origin."
Realizing he would not have peace until he let me finish, and no doubt inclined to indulge me after my outburst in the railway carriage and its aftermath, he put down his tools and turned to face me.
"Yes, Watson?" he said, encouragingly.
"Suppose Roylott wanted to poison his daughter," I said. "Miss Helen said that they used to see to all of the housework because they had no regular servants. They must have done the cooking. It would have been risky for Roylott to introduce something into their foor or drink, since they oversaw all the preparations and would certainly have remarked upon his presence in the kitchen. Since they bolted their doors and windows at night he could not have administered it to them while they slept, in the form of an injection or other such thing. But if he could create a poisonous vapour, which he could introduce into the next room through that ventilator..."
I broke off. Something new had just occurred to me. Holmes was watching with a combination of interest and impatience.
"But Watson, you did say that theory about fever being bad air had been exploded..."
"Holmes, when you saw that saucer of milk on the safe--you are sure it was milk?"
Holmes looked crestfallen.
"It looked like milk," he finally said, defensively.
"Did you smell it or taste it?"
He dropped his eyes and muttered, "No."
"What if it wasn't milk?" I said. "Or what if the milk was simply being used as a medium? Suppose the poison was dissolved in that milky liquid, and he was killed in the act of vapourising it?"
Holmes threw a hand out impatiently. "Watson, to do that he would have needed some sort of heat source, and we never found..."
Now he had trailed off, and it was my turn to prompt him.
"Holmes?"
He had returned suddenly to the safe, and was applying himself to the lock with savage and desperate vengeance. The door at last swung open. Holmes drew back from the smell of decay that assailed our nostrils.
His eager hands were soon plunged into the safe, sorting through its contents. He brought one hand out, holding gingerly by a finger and thumb a long, bony, brittle object wrapped in what looked to me like dirty oilskin.
"Item one on our inventory, Watson," Holmes said, flinging it into a corner. "One snake, speckled, extremely dead."
So the safe had not been opened since that horrible day. Holmes reached further back, and drew out a ring of metal that surrounded a short, shallow canister whose interior was caked with a black, gummy substance.
"Well, Watson," he said. "Surely you recognize this from your days in the army?"
"It is the burner from a camp stove," I said, feeling a chill settle in my stomach.
Holmes sat back on his haunches, staring at the twisted and slightly blackened object before him.
Since he appeared for the moment to be lost in contemplation, I turned my attention to the inside of hte safe. It contained only two more objects. One was a piece of paper, slightly charred at the edges. The other was a string bag, through which a small hole had been burnt. Bringing the lantern close, I could see that the bag was stuffed full of dried leaves, which had begun to crumble, and leak out of the hole onto the floor of the safe.
"What is it, Watson?" Holmes said, looking finally in my direction.
I had drawn out a handful of the loose, crumbled leaf fragments and was peering at it in the dark. It was impossible to guess the shape of the leaves, but what I could tell was that they had been dried, carefully, by someone who understood the knack of preserving herbs.
I brought the lantern close to the paper. It was charred at the edges, and the ink was very faint.
"It is not in cipher," I said, finally, "but it is in a doctor's handwriting, I think, and that is much worse."
"Worse yet," Holmes said, looking over my shoulder, "it is in Latin."
"It is easy enough to parse, however," I said. "They are all common medical terms. 'Bis in diem,' for instance..."
For a moment I could not go on. Sitting in that dark, empty house with the ghosts of the past gathering around me, I found the words all the more monstrous because they were so familiar.
"Twice a day," I finally said, huskily. "And this means, 'crushed and dissolved in milk.' And..." I shook my head, and swallowed the lump in my throat. "Holmes, this is a prescription. These are Roylott's notes to himself about how to use whatever this herb is. The instructions about dosage..." I cleared my throat, but it did not help. "The instructions about dosage have been amended..."
I could not continue. Holmes was not looking at the paper. He was looking at me, and that was enough for him.
"The original instructions specified the dosage necessary to cause the patient--or let us say, victim--to miscarry," he said, gently. "The amended instructions specify the dose necessary to cause death."
I nodded.
"Ah, Watson," he said, sadly.
"It says here," I finally answered when I could speak, "that the effect appears to be cumulative."
I think Holmes had learned it all already. But I continued to explain, hoping it would steady me.
"Administered twice a day for two days, sufficient to induce abortion. Administered twice a day over seven days, sufficient to cause death," I said. "That is what the instructions say."
I looked up at him. He stared right back at me.
"You began," he said, solemnly. "You finish."
I did not know exactly what he meant, but I went on.
"He knew that his daughter was pregnant," I said. "It would not have been difficult for him to suspect, and their trip to London must have confirmed it for him. If she were pregnant by that half-pay marine, it meant that either they had been secretly married, or they shortly would have to be married, or she would be giving birth to an unfathered bastard child. None of these possibilities were acceptable to Roylott. His first thought was to induce the miscarriage," I said, with a dark sigh. "Then, perhaps, it occurred to him that a miscarriage was simply a temporary solution. Either the marine would return, and they would marry, or Julia would find another husband, but sooner or later he must lose her income. And so after he had induced the abortion...he continued administering the poison. Conscientiously noting, as any good doctor would, the effects that each dosage produced on the patient."
The wind was up now, whistling in the corners of the house. The light of the dark lantern danced over Holmes's pallid features and reflected in the irises of his saddened eyes.
"Miss Helen simply never received the required dosage," I said, bitterly. "She recognized her symptoms, and came to London to consult Goulding, then Christison, then us. Her exposure to this vile stuff was enough to destroy her health forever. But it was not enough to kill her. We came up here, and we kept watch in her room...and we interrupted him just as he had begun to administer one of the day's two doses."
"And then?" Holmes prompted.
"He heard you shouting and striking at the bell-pull. He knew he had been discovered. He put out the flame and flung the burner into the safe. He was in the act of shutting the door when the snake killed him."
I shook my head. "I am wrong on many points, I am sure. And I cannot explain how the snake came to have killed him."
Holmes's voice, when he spoke, was unexpectedly husky.
"No, Watson," he said. "You are not wrong. There are only three questions that your theory does not answer, and I ask them not because I do not believe your solution is the true one, but because I desire to make it more complete."
I waited, in some astonishment, for him to put them to me.
"One: why was Roylott himself not affected by this noxious vapour, as he must surely have been much more directly exposed to it than his poor victim? Two: where did that snake come from, how did it get to him, and why? Three: Is Mary's death simply the result of a different assailant using the same methods, or are they somehow related?"
"I do not have answers for any of them," I said.
"I cannot answer the first," said Holmes simply. "I believe I can answer the second."
He rubbed his eyes wearily with his long white fingers, then began the explanation.
"That tied dog-leash was Roylott's. He used it to handle an extremely poisonous serpent which he kept as a pet, because keeping deadly animals as pets is the kind of thing that depraved and brilliant criminals do. Miss Helen knew of the snake's existence, and she knew how her sister had died; she considered the recent installation of the ventilator and the bolted bed and reached the not unreasonable conclusion that it was the snake that had killed her sister. Her only error--a moral rather than a tactical one, I suppose--was in deciding that the available evidence might not support her hypothesis, and therefore fabricating a new clue in order to put me upon what she believed was the right scent."
"The bell-pull," I said.
"Exactly. She provided me with the link between the ventilator and the bed. That was enough to guide me in that direction." He sighed. "That night I heard a hiss. I assumed, because I had already formed my theory, that it was the hiss of a snake. You, however, compared it in your account of the incident to the sound of steam. You had hit upon the solution then, Watson; you simply did not realize it."
"Good Lord," I said.
"I rushed to the bell-pull, from which I expected the danger to come, and began slashing at it," Holmes said, dejectedly. "I remember asking you if you saw it. You did not--because you were not expecting to see it."
He paused for a long morose moment, and shook his head.
"There was no snake there, Watson. There was a snake in my mind, but around that ventilator there was only the deadly miasma. But Roylott did not know that I had made that mistake. He thought we had caught him; and after hurriedly but ineffectively hiding the evidence, he grabbed the snake, with the intention of using it against us as a weapon. In his haste he mishandled it--with what results, we well know."
We sat silent, looking at each other in the uncertain light of the lantern.
"Holmes," I said, "you have hit upon the answer, I am sure of it."
"No, Watson," he answered. "You have hit upon the answer. You are the one who solved this mystery."
I did not know how to answer that. I did not even know for sure what I felt.
"Watson," he said, "I have known you for a long time, in many strange situations. You are handsome when you are courageous; you are charming when you are loyal; and you are endearing even when you are dense. But when you are brilliant, Watson, you are absolutely breathtaking."
In my entire life I had never heard anyone apply the word "brilliant" to me. Nor, certainly, the word "breathtaking."
"I see that you are skeptical of that last assertion," Holmes said, with a self-deprecating smile. "If I were entirely sure that you had recovered from the emotional shock of today's events, I would tell you to gather up the evidence from that safe, climb back onto the grounds with me, go into the woods until we are far away both from this evil and from the eyes of the local populace, and prove it to you by means of an empirical demonstration. But if you are not in the mood, I cannot blame you."
I was exhausted, drained, soaked with grief and horror. And yet, as I looked at him, I began to wonder if Holmes had not perhaps hit upon the only prescription for the sickness that had gripped me.
"Let us get out of this place," I said, "and we will see what that does for my mood."
Holmes scooped up the bag, stuffing it into the sack that held his tools. The paper he slipped inside his jacket. We climbed out of the window and into the darkness of the wilderness that the Roylott estate had become.