Sherlockian Ruminations from a Stormy Petrel Read online

  Title Page

  SHERLOCKIAN RUMINATIONS FROM A STORMY PETREL

  Brenda Rossini

  Publisher Information

  First edition published in 2014 by

  MX Publishing

  335 Princess Park Manor

  Royal Drive,

  London, N11 3GX

  www.mxpublishing.com

  Digital edition converted and distributed in 2014 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  © Copyright 2014 Brenda Rossini

  The right of Brenda Rossini to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not of MX Publishing.

  Cover design by www.staunch.com

  Part 1

  Christian Sacraments and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”

  Christianisacramentumrubor - There are a welter of sacramental alternatives to this puzzle and the devil is in the details: “Each is suggestive, and together they are almost conclusive.” Arthur Conan Doyle, educated in a Jesuit school, was attracted to the mystical, spiritual, and sacramental. He dabbled perversely and symbolically with these not-so-subtle motifs in The Devil’s Foot: “Neither of us is prepared to admit diabolical intrusions into the affairs of men...” Yet so it is, and the other-worldly excursion brings murder to a peaceful, card-playing community.

  Baptism begins Christian life, cleansing the new life of its original sin, and becomes the gateway towards receipts of the rest of the sacraments. Devil’s advocate Dr. Sterndale, who lived “beyond the law” and Christianity in Africa, returned to civilization with a devil’s ritual, the Radix pedisdiaboli, which uncorked the whole diabolical intrigue. But he brought it along only as a curiosity. He was but a pilgrim. It was the perfidious Mortimer Tregennis who found a use for it in Cornwall.

  A baptism by fire takes place at the Tregennis house, nearby a stone cross which does not save the acolytes. The Tregennis’ are consumed by an airborne devil’s root, burning like incense, from which effects one is dead and the others driven mad. The baptism accoutrements include fire, guttered candles, ashes, and a lamp, presumably containing oil, but not from the vicarage’s holy font where Holmes acquired his portion.

  There are no water immersions with Radix pedisdiaboli but water symbolism abounds:

  - Mounts Bay, to which waters, like Lourdes, Holmes has gone for his health; it will be a life-affirming respite, and one where guilt and crime will be identified and confronted.

  - Holmes’ clumsy stumbling over water pots - “So absorbed was he in his thoughts, I remember, that he stumbled over the watering-pot, upset its contents, and deluged both our feet and the garden path”. Alas, foot washing is not a sacrament but a Christian ritual amongst disciples. The wetting of the feet is a creative deviation from Christian dogma. In baptism, water is poured on the head. Here, Holmes’ “baptism” occurs when the contents of the water pots are spilled and poured upon his feet.

  - When Dr. Sterndale stood outside the Tregennis house, a morose figure looking in at Brenda, the rain may appear as baptismal, though the reader must assume that Sterndale had been baptized.

  Holy Orders: The word “priest” is the Latin derivation of the Greek “presbyteros” meaning an “elder.” Priests through the ages were authoritarian hierarchies over a credulous public, whether the Druids of neolithic man, Chaldeans, a colonial explorer, or African medicine men who used devil’s root to seal ordinations.

  Vicar Roundhay was elderly and “intrusive,” enlisting unworthies as his priests to solve the devil’s crimes. To invest with Holy Orders, there is a laying of the hands. When Roundhay was with Tregennis in Holmes’ room, Watson observed a “twitching of his thin hands.” Tregennis and Roundhay shared a “common emotion.” Tregennis dressed formally for the occasion, entrusted to solve a crime which he committed. But he had his own agenda; he was a rogue priest with the devil’s root as his “special Providence.”

  Another priest in the thicket was Sterndale. He lived an ascetic, monk-like existence “amid his books and maps...(in) an absolutely lonely life...almost like an anchorite.” The vicar was in his confidence; they knew and respected one another. When Sterndale went off to Africa, the vicar wired him because he required his services.

  Holy Eucharist: At mass, Christians partake of a wafer and wine from a chalice - the verisimilitude of body and blood from a crucifixion in the Middle East; they receive spiritual power in the transfer and life is revealed. The devil’s root, half-human and half-goat, brought by Sterndale “under extraordinary circumstances in the Ubangi country,” was ingested as a powder in an ordeal ceremony - madness or death was the fate. The root would kill on contact.

  Holmes tested his hypothesis of the crime. He bought a lamp like Tregennis’. He lit it and filled it with oil. He says the oil is from the vicarage - it’s holy. Watson serves as godparent. Once lit, the poisonous devil’s root ash is expelled into the air and they are both overcome.

  Another Eucharistic example was the family Tregennis’ final meal, but in their case, the dining occasion was a precursor to the ending of life and not an affirmation of life. The three siblings were eating with the killer in their midst and not their savior. It has evocations of the Last Supper.

  Confirmation: The believer and a sponsor reflect on their eucharistic decision and commitment. For this “ceremony,” Holmes conducted a life-threatening experiment with the devil’s root....until there is “no longer doubt.” The depth of Watson’s commitment is evident:

  “I dashed from my chair, threw my arms round Holmes, and together we lurched through the door and in instant afterwards had thrown ourselves down upon the grass plot and were lying side by side, conscious only of the glorious sunshine which was bursting its way through the hellish cloud of terror which had girt us in. Slowly it rose from our souls like the mists from a landscape, until peace and reason had returned, and we were sitting upon the grass, wiping our clammy foreheads, and looking with apprehension at each other to mark the last traces of that terrific experience which we had undergone.”

  Mortimer Tregennis perverts the affirmation of a spiritual life when, in order to secure for himself the family financial legacy, he hellishly dooms the physical lives of his siblings.

  Matrimony - Dr. Sterndale and his wife could not divorce even though she’d left him. Thus, the sacrament of eternal union brought pain to Sterndale and Brenda Tregennis, the woman he loved; the devil’s root brought death.

  Penance/Confession - to be saved from eternal consequences, the sinner receives spiritual counsel and leaves consoled after confession. Sterndale is summoned by Holmes and confesses. Absolution is administered simultaneously as per Christian doctrine. Instead of referring him to the authorities, Holmes sends Sterndale off to “bury” himself in Central Africa as penance and a form of future last rites.

  Mort
imer Tregennis was confronted by Sterndale about the devil’s foot and about a similar fate then awaiting him. Sterndale described Tregennis as a “wretch” and “paralyzed.” Was it for fear and was he repentant in his last five minutes on earth?

  Extreme Unction - Last rites were administered by Sterndale for Mortimer Tregennis, the criminal in the first tragedy but a victim in the second. Sterndale walked to Tregennis’, carrying with him gravel in preparation for the ritual dirt to be thrown on a grave...dust to dust, ashes to ashes. He threw it up at the window where Tregennis was to die. He forced Mortimer to sit beside the lamp into which he poured devil’s foot powder and watched from outside the window with a pistol. Sterndale was not seeking to heal with the sacrament but to enact his revenge.

  Mortimer Tregennis disposed of his family at a last supper; how perverse was his role as their judge and executioner.

  Was Conan Doyle sacrilegious? Or devil-may-care with ancient dogmas and certainties? Perhaps. More likely, he was a keen weaver of tall tales: Sterndale’s gravel? Devil’s Foot was published in 1910. Two years prior, Charles Dawson reported that a skull fragment was found in a Piltdown gravel pit. Doyle commemorated for posterity that elemental gravel. Likewise his unholy adventure with the sacraments was a fitting accompaniment to his greater enterprise - spiritualism.

  Part 2

  Death Comes to Pemberley’s Debt to Boscombe Valley

  Cooee! Death Comes to Pemberley involves a murder imposed within the woods of Pemberley by mystery author P.D. James, both eminent and grise (age 92).

  James’ plot flits between Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility, but what is not acknowledged is that the pastoral murder most foul is drawn in toto from Conan Doyle’s Boscombe Valley Mystery...the details of a woodland hit that was first deduced by Sherlock Holmes.

  The characters are there for the finding, culled from Jane Austen’s stories. The mystery arcade, however, is from Boscombe. Holmes set out the murder scene for Watson, point by point - easy enough to follow for an author’s blood-stained right hand in search of a plot.

  SUSPECTS:

  The suspect in Pemberley? Pride and Prejudice villain - Wickham the casanova di prepubescent females. He was also a close friend of the victim Col. Denny, he comes forth from the wooded site, blood-stained and drunk.

  In Boscombe? the prodigal son, James, age 18 is accused of murdering his father Charles McCarthy. James came running up to the lodge almost immediately after Patience Moran had heard him quarreling with his father. He was in a shocked state, and his right hand and sleeve were stained with fresh blood.

  THE SCENE

  an isolated, wooded copse

  WITNESSES (there were none at either murder scene):

  In Boscombe, William Crowder, a gameskeeper, saw Charles going towards the woods, and soon after, he saw James going down that same path, carrying his gun. Patience, the 14- year-old, was picking flowers. She said there appeared to be a violent quarrel between father and son McCarthy. She said she saw James raise his hand as if to strike his father.

  In Pemberley, George Pratt, the coachman, said that after Wickham, Lydia, and Capt. Denny were through carousing at a pub, Pratt drove them in the chaise towards Pemberley. Then, there was a heated quarrel between these two friends:

  “halfway into the woodland Captain Denny knocked to stop the chaise,” got out and said: ‘I’m finished with it and with you.’ He then ran off into the woodland Wickham went running after him.”

  About 15 minutes passed and then Lydia and Pratt heard the shots. No one was in the copse but Wickham and Denny. Denny was shot and killed.

  Mr. Darcy unfolds the Pemberley mystery as mannered, gentleman detective. He retraces the steps of the chaise and its passengers and walks through the “remote” and “tree-guarded wood. It was nighttime, and they could see little but what their lanterns shone upon.”

  ACTUAL ASSAILANT IN THE WOODPILE

  In both Pemberley and Boscombe, two ailing, seemingly incapacitated individuals holding grudges.

  THE BODY

  McCarthy was “stretched out upon the grass”...”the head had been beaten in by repeated blows of some heavy and blunt weapon.” It was initially surmised that the injuries looked to be the kind inflicted by the butt end of James’ gun.

  CONFESSIONS

  In Pemberley, Wickham weeps over Capt. Denny’s body, which is on its back, his right eye caked with blood, his left, glazed, fixed unseeing on the distant moon. Wickham was keeling over him, his hands bloody, his own face a spattered mask and confessed responsibility for his best friend’s death.

  THE ACTUAL WEAPON

  a slab of stone hidden in the moss

  BOTH STORIES COMMENT ON THE VICTORIAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

  Conan Doyle consistently spoke with disfavor about the criminal justice system.

  An inquest was held in Boscombe on the next day, Tues. and James was bound over for “wilfull murder.” The murder occurred on Monday.

  What made Boscombe Valley an object of desire? Was it the obscurity of the story? Here then was a fresh turn of an old plot, but let’s acknowledge the gift(s) of Holmes.

  Part 3

  Jack the Ripper as shanda

  With Charles Nicholls’ re-shuffling of Jack the Ripper suspects in Traces Remain, one becomes perplexed by the Ripper graffiti in 1888 which announced “The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing” - the translation of which might be, you cannot just continue to blame us (the Jews)! Or, in the alternative, if Jews must be blamed for something, here is something that will really cause a Ripple.

  The evidentiary details of the Ripper crimes were that five prostitutes, alcoholic and destitute, were murdered and their corpses mutilated with a bladed instrument. These unsolved murders occurred in the early hours, between Aug. 31 to Nov. 9, 1888, in the untypical quiet of London’s overcrowded immigrant district of Whitechapel where Jews and Irish swelled the squalid ranks (no fog-lapped windowpanes). These women died while working, on the street, except for the last one who died in her lodgings.

  South African historian Charles van Onselen identified one “Joe” the Ripper, aka Joe Fox/ Joe Silver as the sexually-motivated perpetrator. Fox lived in South Africa, having traveled to that British protectorate from New York and London in the late 1890s. He may have made a brief stop in Whitechapel in the 1890s but there was no recorded connection or transit in the relevant time period of the murders...1888.

  According to Hartley Nathanin Who Was Jack the Ripper, “The authorities and upper classes assumed that the perpetrator must be a foreigner or a low-class savage.” Numerous Ripperologists also profiled a suspect from the upper classes - one who wandered through this immigrant community unrecognized. Nicholl observed correctly that identification of the Ripper as Jewish may have been anti-Semitic scapegoating, but that it was more likely a possibility than not.

  A Jack the Ripper suspect was reported to have worn astrakhan. Symbolically, in literature and in journalistic reporting, “swarthy” men wore astrakhan, and so we find this garb in Arthur Conan Doyle, T.S. Eliot, and in Evelyn Waugh, the latter two being particularly disposed towards ethnic disparagement. The Ripper was reported to have worn a hat, and in one sighting, it was purportedly described as a “deerstalker.” Jewish men always wore hats; a traditional habit. British workmen were not so obliged.

  Van Onselen’s Joe Fox was a pornography entrepreneur (new on the Victorian horizon), brothel-keeper and criminal habitué...an immigrant trying to make a large living and unable to do so legitimately. Most of the Jewish suspects were excluded by dates, alibis, and other negations, but one persisted, and it was not Joe Fox. It was Aaron Kosminski. He featured in the early police investigations upon witness identifications. Robert House persuasively placed him as the killer in Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotla
nd Yard’s Prime Suspect.

  Aaron emigrated with his family from Russo-Poland about 1882, at age 17. In those little towns, Jews were familiar with blood libel accusations - knife-slaughter and mutilation of gentile children for Jewish rituals. Aaron would also have observed the common ritual slaughter of chickens for the weekly shabbos table. Living alone in Whitechapel, behind his family in a back-room shelter, Aaron was variously reported as an infrequent hairdresser, tailor, and as a laborer in Butcher’s Row.

  All was not without serendipity in Whitechapel. In 1880, author Charles Fox published a celebrated version of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sweeney Todd was dedicated to slitting the throats of the upper class, and, inspired by utilitarian theories, converted the victims to tasty meat pies for the poor. He didn’t really exist but in Aaron Kosminski’s time, Sweeney and his bloody habits was performed to enthusiastic audiences again and again. In 1888, the year of the Ripper murders, Benjamin Farjeon, himself an immigrant resident of Whitechapel, published his version, Devlin the Barber. The legend played on in musical ditties, penny dreadfuls and in serializations as shilling “shockers.”

  The murders:

  Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, discovered 3:40 a.m. Fri. Aug. 31.

  Annie Chapman, last heard at 5:30 a.m., Sat. morning Sept. 8.

  two on one day: Liz Stride 12:45 a.m. and, about 1:45 a.m., Catherine Eddowes, early morning Sun. Sept. 30.

  Mary Jane Kelly, last seen or heard in her lodgings, 2:30 a.m., Fri. Nov. 9.

  Two of the murders fell proximate to the Jewish High Holy Days which in 1888 were: Thurs. Sept. 6 - Rosh Hashanah 1;

  Fri. Sept. 7 - Rosh Hashanah 2; Sat. Sept. 15, Yom Kippur.

  Three died before or after the weekend shabbos (Fri. sundown through Sat. sundown).

  None of the prostitutes was Jewish though there were Jewish prostitutes. Sadie was not always a lady. According to van Onselen, as well as Conan Doyle’s colleague and fellow spiritualist William T. Stead in his anti-white slavery campaigning, Jewish pimps controlled East End brothels and transported their women to American haunts. Joe Fox may have found his career in this manner.