The Book of the Dead Read online

  ‘The Cabinet will be made aware of what you have done at the first opportunity,’ Sir David promised. ‘It is regrettable that there can never be any public acknowledgement.’

  ‘I leave such honours to politicians,’ Holmes replied. ‘Mine is a more self-effacing business.’

  THE FIREWITCH LEGEND

  Towards the end of the following March I called at Baker Street to find Holmes completing a late breakfast. Virtually all his post had been tossed to the floor, indicating it was from the sort of time-wasting eccentrics who frequently discommoded him, but one letter was engaging his attention.

  ‘Good-morning, Watson. Do you recall our meeting with Cedric Braithwaite at Bushells last year?’

  ‘Very clearly. Do I infer you have heard from him?’

  ‘Yes, and a very curious letter it is. See for yourself.’

  As I took the note, Holmes went to the bookcase and, while I read, consulted a number of volumes. The address ‘Meldred Hall, Attwater, Near Kendal’ was printed at the top of the letter which was dated the previous day.

  ‘Dear Mr Holmes,’ I read. ‘This is being dispatched before I catch this morning’s train for London where I shall stay the night at Bushells. I pray you will be available to see me tomorrow morning so that I may place before you a matter of the utmost seriousness. It seems that my life may be in the gravest danger and I now fear also for my sister. The most incredible aspect is that there appears to be a connection with the family legend of the Attwater Firewitch. I regret approaching you with such scant courtesy on the basis of our brief meeting with Sir David Digby, but beg you to believe that I am desperate to know where to turn. Cedric W Braithwaite.’

  I finished reading and looked up at Holmes. ‘What do you make of it?’ I asked.

  Holmes did not reply as he continued examining one of his books. He turned the page and read on, then closed the volume sharply and replaced it on the shelf.

  ‘We know the measure of this man, Watson,’ he said. ‘He is clearly capable of handling most matters for himself. He would not consult me upon a trifle and his evident agitation amplifies the seriousness of the matter. I am also intrigued by this family legend.’

  ‘I have always believed you regarded legends as merely the products of fanciful minds,’ I remarked.

  ‘They are,’ he replied. ‘But there is invariably some grain of truth behind the web of tales spun around it . However, none of my books refers to such a legend and I am puzzled by the term Firewitch.’

  ‘Surely it indicates the manner of her death?’ I suggested.

  ‘I think not. While witchcraft was regarded as a heresy in Scotland and on the Continent, bringing death by burning, in England it was a felony and those found guilty of it were hanged.’

  ‘Perhaps she dealt in fire in some manner?’

  ‘Possibly, but the front doorbell indicates that our anxious visitor has arrived and will be able to furnish us with the answers himself.’

  Moments later Braithwaite entered. There was little resemblance to the man I remembered. He was highly nervous and confused, but the most shocking thing was several deep scratches, partly healed, down both sides of his face.

  ‘Mr Holmes, thank God you are here!’ he cried, then staggered forwards as Holmes leapt to his side to prevent him from falling.

  ‘This way.’ He led our visitor to a chair. ‘Watson, the brandy.’

  I poured the drink which Braithwaite accepted with trembling hands. As he gulped it down, I was appalled that the confident and capable man I had last seen should have been reduced to such a pitiful condition. Holmes took a seat opposite him and waited until he had recovered some manner of composure.

  ‘I had anticipated this was a serious business,’ he finally said quietly. ‘But I clearly have underestimated its gravity. Please tell me everything that has occurred when you are able.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Braithwaite and finished the brandy at a swallow. ‘I hardly know where to start. Since leaving Meldred Hall, I have been haunted by the fear there will be some further outrage in my absence.’

  ‘Pray compose yourself,’ Holmes told him. ‘As recent events have evidently caused you great distress, might I suggest you begin with this legend to which you refer? That is clearly in the past and you may find it easier to talk about first.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Our visitor appeared to make an effort to regain his natural demeanour. ‘The legend of the Attwater Firewitch is little known outside our neighbourhood of Westmorland. It began in the time of my ancestor Thomas Braithwaite, who built the original Meldred Hall in the sixteenth century. There was a woman in the district named Margaret Seymour who had the reputation of being a witch. In our rational and scientific age, it appears preposterous that people could believe in such things, but then they had great potency. You may be familiar with Mr Harrison Ainsworth’s excellent account of the Lancashire witches, events that took place just across the county border not far from my home around the same period.’

  ‘I have heard of the book, but its nature is not such as to engage my interest,’ Holmes commented. ‘Please continue.’

  ‘In the autumn of 1548, Margaret Seymour called at Meldred Hall begging for food,’ Braithwaite went on. ‘She was turned away somewhat curtly and was later seen gathering herbs from a hedgerow near the house. Shortly afterwards, Thomas’s daughter fell ill of an ague and the Seymour woman began to boast that she had placed a spell on her. I should add that she had a familiar in the shape of a strange bird, a matter of which you will shortly see the significance.

  ‘As a Justice of the Peace, Thomas had her brought before him. She at first denied her claims but, when faced with witnesses who had heard her words, defiantly admitted them. She was sent for trial at Lancaster Assizes accused of witchcraft. The contemporary reports indicate that her incarceration had unhinged her mind and she rambled like a madwoman in the dock. She was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

  ‘In the meantime, all efforts to alleviate the daughter’s condition had failed and, the night before Seymour’s execution, Thomas visited her cell to beg her lift the supposed spell. He was accompanied by a priest who wrote an account of the occasion.’

  Braithwaite produced a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘This has been copied from the original, although some of the more antique phraseology has been modernised.’

  Holmes glanced through it then passed it to me, asking Braithwaite to wait until I had read it for myself.

  ‘At the request of Thomas Braithwaite, Gent,’ I read, ‘I did accompany him to the Lancaster prison, to see the witchwoman Margaret Seymour, under sentence of execution, that he might persuade her to lift the Devilish enchantment placed upon his daughter, Jane, at that time lying unto extremity of death.

  ‘The woman lay on a heap of straw in one corner and we could clearly see Satan’s mark upon her, a gross protuberance upon her chin with several hairs springing therefrom. She was silent as Thomas Braithwaite beseeched her, for pity’s sake, to spare his innocent child and I enjoined her to reject the Devil and all his works at peril of her immortal soul but to no avail. Then did Thomas Braithwaite fall into a great rage, crying that he would pursue her through all of Hell in his vengeance. I called down for the Mercy of God at such blasphemy and pulled him away and as I did so she spat at him. But it was not spittle that landed on his cheek, it was the woman’s blood.

  ‘As I dragged him from the room, the woman spoke, making strange passes with her hands, which struck fear into my heart. She said:

  “The bird will fly, the bird will land,

  The fire will come at its command,

  The flames will burn with scorching breath,

  The fire will ever bring you death.”

  ‘Then did Thomas Braithwaite’s rage increase greatly. He broke away from me and cried at the woman that he would bring fire upon her and it was with the greatest trouble that I did lead him from the cell.’

  I handed the curious narrative back to Braithwaite.
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  ‘The story thereafter is briefly told,’ he continued. ‘The morning after the visit, Margaret Seymour was taken out to be hanged, but as she was being led to the scaffold Thomas and a party of his servants rode up and abducted her. They took her back to his estate and locked her in a barn which they then set ablaze. As her cries faded, a great bird was seen to rise out of the conflagration. That night it reappeared on the roof of Meldred Hall and the daughter began to scream that she was burning. She died within minutes and the bird flew away. The curse of the Attwater Firewitch had come to pass.’

  As our visitor completed his strange narrative, Holmes leaned forward in his chair and looked at him piercingly.

  ‘A melodramatic tale,’ he remarked. ‘But one which a man of your abundant intelligence would treat as nothing more than a historical curiosity exaggerated by added romantic imaginations. It is more than this which has brought you to me.’

  Braithwaite looked at him desperately. ‘Much, much more Mr Holmes. I have known that legend since childhood and it has never caused me concern. But now…’

  He shuddered and his eyes went wild again. Holmes glanced an instruction at me and I went to pour another brandy. As I did so, Mrs Hudson entered and said that a porter from Bushells was at the door with an urgent message for our visitor. Holmes told her to bring him in. He was obviously a retired military man, well suited to the club’s blue and grey uniform for its servants.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he said. ‘But Mr Simpson, the club secretary, took receipt of this telegram and felt that it should be delivered to Mr Braithwaite without delay. He had mentioned he was coming here, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, my man.’ Holmes took the telegram and gave the messenger sixpence. As he saluted and walked out, Holmes handed it to Braithwaite who tore it open then leapt to his feet with a cry.

  ‘My God! Eleanor!’

  Before either of us could move, he had dashed from the room and we heard his footsteps pounding down the stairs and the crash of the front door. We leapt to the window and saw him frantically hailing a cab and jumping into it.

  ‘We must follow him at once!’ I cried.

  ‘There is no urgency,’ said Holmes calmly. ‘There are no trains back to Westmorland until this afternoon.’

  ‘Is he returning there then?’

  ‘Of course. A telegram of such importance could only have come from his home and its contents have clearly destroyed what capacity for logical thought he currently retains.’

  He turned from the window then crossed the room and picked something up from the floor.

  ‘His telegram,’ he remarked. ‘His dropping it underlines the agitated condition of his mind.’ He read the message and his face darkened. ‘This is no fanciful legend, Watson,’ he said grimly.

  I took the telegram from his outstretched hand. It said: ‘YOUR SISTER ATTACKED BY GREAT BIRD. RETURN AT ONCE.’

  A JOURNEY TO THE LAKE DISTRICT

  We were greeted at Bushells, where we had expected to find Braithwaite, with the news that he had already left to catch an earlier train to Manchester from where, we could only conclude, he would complete his journey on horseback.

  ‘And a few hours’ patience would have resulted in his being there at least as quickly,’ Holmes remarked. ‘When a rational man loses all touch with plain common sense, Watson, he is being driven hard. We will follow him this afternoon, using the train he has so impetuously abandoned. Are you at liberty to accompany me?’

  ‘I have only to inform my wife and pack,’ I replied. ‘I have recently engaged a junior partner and the experience of dealing with the practice on his own will be a salutary one.’

  ‘At Euston station then.’ As I turned to go, Holmes called back to me. ‘Include your revolver in your luggage.’

  We purchased hampers of cold ham and chicken from the London and North Western Railway for our seven hour journey north and secured a compartment to ourselves. Holmes was disinclined to discuss the business towards which we were heading; theorising without data he left to dreamers. I tried to engage him in conversation about various reports in the late afternoon edition of the Star, but his interest was only aroused with an account of a double murder in Hammersmith. He listened attentively as I read the details concerning the discovery of the bodies of a man and a woman, both of whom had the letter ‘X’ carved into their foreheads.

  ‘The man was a minor clerk with a shipping agency and the woman the agent of a Mediterranean state with whom he had become entangled,’ he told me. ‘The arrival of a merchant ship from Naples a week ago sealed their fates and nothing could prevent it.’

  The conversation reminded me of something I had meant to raise with him previously.

  ‘I have often wondered why you were not involved in the infamous Whitechapel murders back in eighty-eight,’ I remarked. ‘They remain unsolved and I would have thought that the authorities would have called upon your services.’

  He gave me a curious look. ‘Of course they did, Watson, although by that time I had investigated the killings of my own volition.’

  For a few moments he remained silent, gazing through the window at the landscape as I waited for him to continue.

  ‘I spent several nights in the area in a disguise so impenetrable my own brother Mycroft would not have recognised me,’ he said finally and there was a very sombre tone in his voice. Reflected in the glass of the carriage window, his face had become grave. ‘At the end I had proved that the conclusions I had reached following the murder of Martha Turner in George Yard Buildings were correct in every detail.’

  He turned to face me, and I was startled by his countenance. He looked like one recollecting the most terrible evil.

  ‘You and I are in agreement, Watson, that certain stories like the Runnymede Cobra or the Casket of the Medicis must never be told. Better they were shouted from all the rooftops of London than that the identity of the Ripper and the full explanation behind his atrocities should ever be revealed.’

  I find it impossible to convey how much his reply shook me. The cases to which he referred involved persons and matters of the greatest consequence; exposure of the details of either would be calamitous. I found it incredible that a series of sordid murders of common women of the streets could be connected with matters of greater magnitude. But I can recall few occasions when my friend spoke with more gravitas.

  Because of the severity of the gradients, the main line bypassed Kendal and we left the train at the small halt of Oxenholme some distance from the town. It was too late to go straight to Meldred Hall and we secured the services of a dogcart which took us to a travellers’ hotel. Holmes asked the youth who showed us to our rooms if he knew the Braithwaite family.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he replied. ‘I help with the harvest on the estate each year. But ‘tis terrible what has happened to Miss Eleanor.’

  ‘You have heard of that then?’

  ‘All Kendal has. She was attacked by the bird of the Firewitch. Some say she is dead, but I think that be just rumour. I pray it is anyway.’

  Holmes thanked the youth and instructed him we would require an early breakfast the following day before dismissing him.

  ‘This Firewitch still has her believers locally,’ he commented. ‘Any strange incident connected with Meldred Hall over the past three hundred years will doubtless have been attributed to her. An attack by a great bird, as the telegram says, would be natural fodder for folklore. Let us hope that the boy’s prayers for Miss Braithwaite are answered.’

  The next morning we hired horses and took the direction indicated to us. Within little more than half an hour, we reached Meldred Hall, an imposing black Lakeland stone house behind a high wall on the road from Kendal to Sedbergh, hard by the village of Attwater. The house stood on the edge of a wide valley with the mountains rising about two miles to the west. The Hall had been built (I later discovered) some thirty years earlier in the Gothic revival style with mullioned arched windows and steep, gabled roof. Holmes presented his c
ard to the butler and we were taken to the morning-room where Cedric Braithwaite joined us.

  ‘Mr Holmes! Dr Watson! What miracle has brought you here?’ His face even more drawn and haggard than the previous day.

  ‘Nothing more miraculous than the steam engine.’ Holmes produced the telegram. ‘You left this in your haste. How is your sister?’

  ‘Sleeping, thank God, but her experience has been terrible. I should never have left her. There is devilry in this place!’

  ‘Then I am confident it will prove to be Man’s rather than Satan’s,’ Holmes commented. ‘You left us yesterday with your story incomplete. Will you now tell us of more recent events?’

  Braithwaite paused in his pacing by the fireplace and gazed at the flames leaping from the logs.

  ‘The first real occurrence was on the sixteenth of January,’ he began. ‘I was walking through the woods about a mile from the Hall in the evening when a woman appeared about fifty yards ahead of me. She was bent and old and dressed in rags. She raised her stick and waved it at me in a gesture of threat. Then she hobbled away. I ran to the spot but there was no sign of her, despite the fact that she was too aged to have made away with any speed.

  ‘I dismissed the matter from my mind, but about a month later I was again on the outskirts of the same woods in the evening with Prince my dog when he suddenly ran ahead of me. He stopped some distance off and began to paw at the ground and then…’ Braithwaite turned from the fire and there was terror in his face. ‘And then, Mr Holmes, a huge bird, the like of no creature I had ever seen before, swept out of the trees. I heard Prince yelp in agony as it settled on him. I raced to the spot and began to strike at the creature with my stick. But it would not be driven off and one of its great wings knocked me to the ground.

  ‘As I lay there, the creature plunged at Prince again then rose with something in its claws and flew back towards the trees. I scrambled to my feet and went to Prince. The poor animal had been torn to pieces. As I bent over his body, I heard a hideous laugh and looked up to see the same old woman at the edge of the woods holding a lighted brand above her head. I ran towards her, but once again she vanished.’