It was the end of September, and the wind had beaten at the windows all day.
By evening the rain had grown heavier. In the Baker Street rooms Holmes was cross-indexing his records of crime and Watson was deep in a sea-story.
On such a night the bell rings. Nothing small brings a man out at this hour and in this weather, Holmes says.
The man who comes in is twenty-two at the outside. Water runs off his umbrella and his face is pale.
What Three Generations Inherited
His name is John Openshaw. What he wants to tell, he says, is not his own affair but his family’s.
His grandfather had two sons. The elder, Elias, went out to America as a young man and planted in Florida, fought for the South in the Civil War, and rose to be a colonel.
A few years after the war he came back to Europe with a considerable fortune and took a small estate near Horsham.
The original does not hide his reason for coming back. He was bitterly opposed to giving Black men the vote in the South, and he carried that bitterness out of America with him.
He was fierce and quick-tempered and saw nobody. There were weeks on end when he never left his room. The nephew was the exception, and by sixteen John held every key in the house.
One room in the attic stayed locked.
Five That Fell Out of the Envelope
On a March morning in 1883 a letter with a foreign postmark lies by the colonel’s plate. It has come from Pondicherry in India.
He opens it and five dried orange pips patter down onto the plate.
The boy nearly laughs, and then he sees his uncle’s face and the laugh dies. The lip has fallen, the eyes are protruding, the skin has gone the colour of putty.
Inside the flap, just above the gum, the letter K is scrawled three times in red ink. The uncle cries the letters out, says one word, death, and goes up to his room.
That day he brings the brass box down from the attic and burns everything in it. Then he sends for his lawyer and makes a will leaving the estate to his brother.
He is handing over the good of it and the bad of it together, he says, and if it cannot be borne, leave it to your deadliest enemy.
Seven weeks later he is found face down in a shallow green pool at the foot of the garden. The water is two feet deep and there is no mark of violence on him, and the jury rules suicide.
Two More Envelopes
On the morning of 4 January 1885 it is the father who opens the envelope. The same five dried pips, the same three letters.
One thing is new. A line has been written above them telling him to put the papers on the sundial.
The postmark is Dundee.
The father laughs it off. This is a civilised country, he says, and refuses to have such nonsense taken seriously. He forbids his son to go to the police.
Three days later, coming home in the twilight from a visit to a friend, he falls into one of the deep chalk-pits of that country and dies. It was dark, the road was strange to him, and the pit was unfenced. The jury rules accidental death.
And yesterday the third envelope came, addressed to John Openshaw. The contents are the same and only the postmark differs. East London.
He has already been to the police, he says. The inspector listened with a smile and took it for a practical joke.
They did allow him a constable. The man’s orders are to stay in the house, so he has not come tonight.
What Holmes Tells Him to Do
There is one more piece of evidence. On the day his uncle burned the papers he picked a half-burned sheet out of the ashes.
It is bluish paper with a ragged edge where it was torn from a book. It is headed March, 1869, and short entries run down it.
The fourth, Hudson came. The seventh, the pips sent to three men. The ninth and the tenth, two of them cleared. The twelfth, the third man visited, all well.
Holmes folds the sheet, hands it back, and tells him not to lose another instant.
Put that sheet in the brass box, he says, and a note with it saying the rest were burned by his uncle and this is all that remains. Then put the box out on the sundial as instructed.
Revenge can wait. The first thing is to take away the danger standing in front of him, and the other side has its web already woven while this side is still weaving.
It is not yet nine, he adds, and the streets will be crowded. The young man answers that he is armed, and leaves for Waterloo.
Holmes will not go down to Horsham. The secret, he says, is in London.
Three Postmarks
For a while after the young man goes, Holmes says nothing. Then he lights his pipe and asks Watson a question.
What were the three postmarks.
Pondicherry, Dundee, East London. Watson answers, and hears what his own answer means.
They are all seaports. The writer was aboard a ship.
Seven Weeks and Three Days
Here Holmes takes one step further.
From Pondicherry, seven weeks stood between the warning and the death. From Dundee it was three or four days.
Distance does not explain it, because the letter came the same distance. Watson stops there.
“I think that those seven weeks represented the difference between the mail-boat which brought the letter and the sailing vessel which brought the writer.” (The Five Orange Pips)
The letter rides an engine and arrives first. The man rides the wind and arrives after. From somewhere as far off as Pondicherry that difference opens to seven weeks, and from Dundee it closes to a few days.
Which is what makes this envelope terrible. A London postmark means the letter and the man are in the same place, and there is no gap left to use.
Three Letters
Holmes asks for the letter K of the encyclopaedia from the shelf.
What stands there is the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society formed by ex-Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, with branches in Tennessee, Louisiana, the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida.
Its power went into terrorising Black voters and killing or driving out those who opposed it. A warning came before the act, oak leaves in some districts, melon seeds or orange pips in others.
The man who received it could give up his ways or leave the country. If he braved it out he died, and usually in some strange and unforeseen manner.
And the society collapsed suddenly in 1869.
That is the same year Elias Openshaw left America with the register. Holmes thinks the two may stand as cause and effect.
One man could not stage two deaths well enough to satisfy a coroner’s jury. So there are several of them, men of resource and determination.
The three letters are not one man’s initials. They are the badge of a society.
The Morning Paper
The storm blows itself out in the night and the sun comes up dim over the city.
Holmes is at breakfast when Watson comes down. He has a busy day ahead on the Openshaw business, he says, and he will begin with the City rather than Horsham.
Watson picks up the unopened paper from the table. His eye stops on one heading.
Tragedy Near Waterloo Bridge, it says, and the account runs beneath it. Between nine and ten last night a constable heard a cry for help and a splash. The night was so dark and stormy that no rescue was possible, and the body was recovered later by the water-police.
The envelope in the pocket carried the name John Openshaw.
The paper takes it that he was hurrying for the last train, missed his path in the darkness and walked over the edge of a landing-stage. There were no traces of violence on the body, so it was an unfortunate accident.
The two of them sit in silence. Watson writes that he had never seen Holmes so shaken.
“That he should come to me for help, and that I should send him away to his death—!” (The Five Orange Pips)
He springs out of his chair and paces the room. Then he says that the Embankment is not on the direct line to the station.
Which means the young man did not go that way on his own. The bridge would have been too crowded even on such a night for what they wanted.
The Chase That Came Too Late
Holmes spends the whole day over Lloyd’s registers and files of old papers.
Thirty-six ships of fair tonnage called at Pondicherry in January and February of 1883. One of them is the Lone Star, reported as having cleared from London although her name belongs to one of the American states.
He searches the Dundee records and finds her lying there in January 1885.
Last week the Lone Star came into the Albert Dock in London, and on the early tide this morning she went down the river, homeward bound for Savannah. The captain and the two mates are the only native-born Americans aboard, and all three were away from the ship last night.
Holmes takes an orange from the cupboard and squeezes the pips out of it. He puts five into an envelope and writes two sets of initials inside the flap.
He addresses it to Captain Calhoun. The letter will be waiting when the ship makes Savannah, and the cable will have reached the police there before her.
But the envelope never arrives.
The equinoctial gales were very long and very severe that year. Somewhere far out in the Atlantic a shattered stern-post was seen swinging in the trough of a wave with two letters carved on it, L and S, and that is all anyone will ever know of the Lone Star.
Today, Being Right and Keeping Someone Alive
Not one step Holmes takes in this chapter is wrong.
He reads a ship out of three postmarks, a kind of vessel out of two intervals, a society out of three letters. By the end he has the ship’s name and the captain’s name in his hand.
And the client is dead.
Every chapter of this series asks about the place where Holmes jumps from what he sees to what he concludes. Until now the question has been about the size of the jump. This chapter asks something else.
If the jump was exact and the man was lost anyway, what did the jump do?
The young man left the room before nine. Holmes knew the streets would be full at that hour, and he also knew the danger was immediate.
Knowing both, he let him go alone.
We stand in that place often enough. We spend our time working out what the problem is, and the moving on it waits. In the meantime the thing happens.
Have I ever put off the first move because I was busy getting the answer right?