Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon Page 6

  “Where, precisely, did you find the twigs, Miss Allerthorpe?” Holmes asked.

  “Just there, if memory serves.” She pointed to a section of the ledge immediately to the right of the open casement.

  “And your presumption is that somebody went out onto the lake, walked round to this corner of the castle, scaled the wall, deposited the twigs, then retraced his steps?”

  “It is possible, is it not?”

  “Is the lake ice thick enough to support the weight of a person?”

  Eve Allerthorpe turned to her brother. “So far this winter I have not gone skating on it. Have you, Raz?”

  “No. If the cold spell persists then perhaps I shall, but I do not believe the lake is so consistently frozen as yet that there is no risk of falling through thin ice. For a grown man, at any rate. A child, on the other hand…”

  “The Thurrick could manage it, of course,” Miss Allerthorpe added. “After all, when I saw him…” She faltered, casting a look at her brother.

  He frowned. “What’s that, sis? You actually saw the Black Thurrick? This is news to me.”

  “I did,” Eve Allerthorpe allowed, somewhat shamefaced. “That is the real reason why I left for London in such haste.” Briefly she outlined to Erasmus her nocturnal encounter with the Black Thurrick – how she had watched it cross the lake, and how the sinister creature had turned and looked up at her with glowing eyes before resuming its journey.

  “Why did you not see fit to mention it at the time?”

  “I was confused and upset, Raz. I was not thinking clearly. You know what everyone here thinks about me. ‘That Eve, always going around with her head in the clouds. So erratic. So imaginative.’ At best, I would have been disbelieved. At worst, it would have confirmed people’s darkest opinions.”

  “You could perhaps have confided in me.” Erasmus Allerthorpe sounded hurt.

  “And should perhaps have.” She laid a hand on his arm. “I am sorry. Absenting myself from home for a while seemed the simplest solution. Would you be so good as not to share what you have just learned with the rest of the family? Can you do that for me?”

  “I suppose so. For your sake.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Holmes. “No human would dare venture out upon the ice, but a supernatural entity might safely walk upon it?”

  “And also scale the wall below this room to put the birch twigs on the ledge,” said Miss Allerthorpe with a nod.

  “A twenty-foot climb. It is quite some athlete, this Black Thurrick of yours.”

  “If it can clamber onto a roof and wriggle down a chimney and back up again, Mr Holmes,” said Erasmus, “why should a wall present much difficulty?”

  “A good point, well made,” said Holmes, with just a suggestion of sarcasm. “May we now take a look at the window ledge of your bedroom, Mr Allerthorpe?”

  “Certainly. This way.”

  We followed Erasmus Allerthorpe to a first-floor bedchamber of sizeable proportions, furnished with a four-poster, a large mahogany wardrobe and a comfortable-looking armchair. Like his sister’s study it had outward-facing windows, with a commanding view across the lake to the shore. Here the drop to the lake’s surface was a good thirty-five feet or more, and just as sheer.

  “Where exactly on the ledge was the bundle of twigs?” Holmes asked. “Show me.”

  “Here, I think.” Erasmus indicated a spot just outside one of the casements.

  “You think or you are sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Holmes opened the left-hand casement and, as before, leaned out. His face was inscrutable. He looked down, up and to either side, then scraped the snow off the ledge and inspected the surface of the stonework closely. Finally he pronounced himself satisfied.

  “It would take a man with the wall-adhering capabilities of a fly to pick his way over masonry such as I see here,” he said. “The gaps between the runs of blocks are exceedingly narrow, affording little in the way of handhold and toehold. There are no scratches or other marks on the ledge to suggest that a grappling hook or similar contrivance has been employed.”

  “That does not rule out the possibility that the culprit is a child,” Erasmus said. “A very agile child might conceivably be able to make the ascent.”

  “Or the Black Thurrick,” Eve Allerthorpe added.

  “No, we must not forget the Black Thurrick,” said Holmes. “The last location for the twigs is the gateway at the end of the causeway, is it not? Let us examine that, while there remains sufficient daylight.”

  The Allerthorpe siblings fetched their overcoats, and outside we went, tramping across the courtyard, through the entrance and along the slender land bridge. Eve showed Holmes exactly where she had discovered the first bundle of twigs, and he subjected the gatepost and the surrounding area to careful scrutiny.

  “No,” he concluded, “I doubted there would be any clues here, and I was right. Too much time has passed, and too much snow has fallen. I included this spot in my survey purely for the sake of completeness.”

  As we were preparing to head back to the castle, Thaddeus and Shadrach Allerthorpe reappeared from the woods, their boots crunching through the snow. Each brother had a couple of dead game birds dangling from his belt. I remembered that I had heard a smattering of distant gunshots while we were indoors.

  “Ah, the mighty hunters return,” said Erasmus. “And not empty-handed, either.”

  “None of your cheek, Raz,” snapped his father.

  “I thought I was being complimentary.”

  “There is ever a note of sardonic insinuation in your voice, my boy. Your headmasters, both at the Priory School and at Harrow, remarked upon insolence as being your most noteworthy characteristic.”

  “I was merely—”

  Thaddeus cut him off. “You were merely flapping your lips uselessly, as usual. Never a word comes out of your mouth that does not remind me how feckless an heir I sired. And your sister, with her faddlesome ways, is scarcely any better.”

  Erasmus scowled but, if he had some retort ready, he did not give vent to it. Eve, for her part, chewed disconcertedly on a fingernail.

  “And you, Mr Holmes,” Thaddeus Allerthorpe said, rounding on my companion. “You are conducting detective work? Or dare I to hope that you are at the gate because you are leaving us sooner than predicted?” He uttered a mirthless chuckle, which his younger brother echoed.

  “You are not rid of me so easily,” Holmes replied with an affable smile.

  “Can’t blame a fellow for wishing. Come along, Shad. Let’s get these birds to Mrs Trebend, so that she can pluck, gut and hang them. They should be good to eat by New Year. I rather fancy one of her succulent game pies. In fact, I shall demand she cook one for us.”

  The two older Allerthorpes swept past us and traversed the causeway back to the castle. With the light swiftly ebbing from the sky, we four followed suit.

  As we went, I noticed Erasmus glaring at his father’s back. His eyes were filled with resentment, and at that moment I felt a surge of sympathy for the lad. I had misjudged him. It could not have been easy, growing up the son of so brusque and callous a man. If Erasmus affected an insouciant, devil-may-care attitude, and liked a drink, I could well understand why. These things were armour to him, inuring him against his father’s jibes.

  Just as we re-entered the courtyard, a manservant came out to close the pair of great bolt-studded doors that hung in the archway. They thudded shut, and a heavy iron bar was lowered to secure them. Fellscar Keep was now well and truly closed off from the outside world, to all intents and purposes impregnable; but I could not help feeling, rather than secure, confined.

  Chapter Six

  DINNERTIME PURDAH

  At dinner that evening, my already dim view of the Allerthorpe family as a whole was in no way improved. For that was when Holmes and I met the remaining resident members of the clan.

  We sat at a table roughly the size of a cricket pitch, in a room not much smalle
r than the dining hall at a Camford college. Aside from the four Allerthorpes whose acquaintance I had by then made, there were three others. These were Shadrach Allerthorpe’s wife Olivia, a prim, pinched-looking female whose eyes were rather too large and chin rather too small; their daughter Kitty, who had her mother’s looks and appeared to take scarcely any more pleasure in life than she did; and Kitty’s husband Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd, who was quite the rakish devil, with his mane of wavy, dark hair, array of bright teeth and firm, jutting jaw.

  With regard to the food, I could have no complaints. A rich oxtail soup was followed by a nicely suety steak and kidney pudding, with blackberry and apple crumble for afters. All of it was fine, tasty fare. The wines were excellent, too, and were poured by a butler whose name, I quickly gathered, was Trebend. This man, solemn-faced and slight of stature, was the husband of the Mrs Trebend whom Thaddeus had mentioned earlier in the day, the cook.

  With regard to the company at table, however, that was another thing altogether. The Allerthorpes did very little to make Holmes and me feel at home. For most of the meal their conversation revolved around the many relatives who were due to turn up at Fellscar the following day, as well as other family matters, subjects to which my friend and I could offer no useful contribution. I do not know whether we were being deliberately excluded, but it certainly seemed so. Only Eve, and to a lesser extent Erasmus, made any effort to engage with those poor souls not blessed with Allerthorpe blood or married into the clan. By the rest we were consigned to dinnertime purdah.

  While I was disgruntled at this treatment, Holmes appeared to find it entertaining, if his wry expression was any indicator. He observed the family much as though their antics were a play staged for his amusement.

  What struck me as notable was the undue amount of attention Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd paid to Eve. Seated next to her, he monopolised her for the first two courses. Whenever her interest strayed elsewhere – to speak to me, for example, about a novel she had recently read, Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, with a view to garnering my thoughts on Gothic fiction – Danningbury Boyd would tap her arm and practically demand that she occupy herself with him instead. He leaned towards her in a manner one might almost call impertinent, from time to time resting an elbow upon the back of her chair, and his eyes were alive with fascination. It was clear to me that Eve did not reciprocate this fascination but was too timid to rebuff him as perhaps she ought.

  The effect Danningbury Boyd’s behaviour had upon his wife was all too obvious. The looks she shot him across the table were venomous, and on more than one occasion she addressed him peremptorily, in an effort to divert his focus away from Eve and towards a more appropriate recipient, namely herself. Each time, her husband responded with a complacent smile and an uxorious compliment or two, which just about mollified her.

  Only when the ladies withdrew did the talk around the table broaden in scope and encompass Holmes and myself. Over port and cigars, Thaddeus Allerthorpe challenged Holmes to reveal what insights he had gained into “this twigs foolishness”, if any, during the day.

  “On the face of it,” my friend said, “one must at least give some credence to the idea that the culprit is none other than the Black Thurrick.”

  “Oh, bosh!”

  “Please, Mr Allerthorpe, hear me out.” Holmes began counting off on his fingers. “Point one. It is Christmas time, when the Thurrick traditionally makes its rounds. Point two. Twice has a bundle of birch twigs manifested in a place to which nobody could obtain easy access by climbing – no ordinary human, that is. Point three. What does anyone who is not the Black Thurrick have to gain by leaving the twigs around the castle?”

  “Why can it not be a hoax?”

  “I did not say that it was not. I was simply enumerating all the reasons why this Christmas demon might be regarded as a likely suspect.”

  “Then there’s the fact that Eve saw the Thurrick with her own eyes,” said Erasmus.

  I fixed the young fellow with a hard stare. Had he not, just a couple of hours earlier, assured his sister that he would tell no one about her sighting of the creature upon the lake? Yet here he was, blurting it out to his father and uncle. Erasmus had been drinking heavily throughout dinner, and eating little of the food in front of him which might have mitigated the effects of the alcohol, with the result that his inhibitions were lowered. Still, that was no justification for betraying Eve’s confidence.

  He remained oblivious to my baleful look as, in a tone somewhere between jest and deadly earnest, he regaled Thaddeus and Shadrach Allerthorpe and Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd with a potted version of everything Eve had told him.

  His father was quick with a repudiation. “Pshaw! The girl is either making it up or confusing fancy with fact. Knowing Eve, the one is as probable as the other. Desperate for attention, she is. All the more so since her mother passed away. She’s not been in her right mind for months. Hit her hard, Perdita’s death did. Hit us all hard.”

  For the briefest of moments Thaddeus’s face darkened, and I caught a glimpse, or so I thought, of something beneath the man’s irascible exterior, something wounded and tragic. It did not linger long. Swiftly enough the bluff and bluster reasserted themselves.

  “Doubtless she wishes to have seen the Black Thurrick,” he continued, “because it affords a link to her late mama. It was Perdita, after all, who would tell those stories about the Thurrick and all the rest. With this fabrication Eve, in a roundabout way, is trying to demonstrate that she has not forgotten her mother and still mourns her.”

  “That,” said Holmes, “is an astute piece of psychological insight, if I may say so, Mr Allerthorpe.”

  “You are too kind, sir,” came the droll reply.

  “Interesting thing about the Thurrick…” Shadrach Allerthorpe began.

  “Here we go,” said Thaddeus, rolling his eyes. “Shad is about to share with us the benefits of his book-learning. My brother, Mr Holmes, in case you didn’t know, is the brainy one. Did far better at school than I, and now styles himself an amateur historian.”

  “There is a little more to it than that,” Shadrach interjected.

  “If you insist. Out of the pair of us, you see, Mr Holmes, Shad got the intellect. Whereas all I got was the property, the title deeds, the money…” Thaddeus chortled at his joke.

  Shadrach Allerthorpe sighed. “All I was going to say was that the Black Thurrick is a Yorkshire variant on other, similar Christmas-related figures which may be found all over Europe. There is Zwarte Piet, or Black Peter, in the Low Countries – a fire-singed devil who was enslaved by Saint Nicholas and is now forced to accompany him on his rounds. If children misbehave or disobey their parents, Zwarte Piet is permitted to thrash them soundly. Then there is the Germans’ Knecht Ruprecht, likewise an indentured helper of Father Christmas. He carries a staff and a bag of ashes, and invites children to pray. If they pray well, he rewards them with sweetmeats. If they do not, he belabours them about the head with the sack of ashes. There is the shaggy, horned Krampus, who is found in the Christmas iconography of not only the Germanic countries but their eastern neighbours. He uses birch branches to swat wayward children. In Francophone nations you will find Père Fouettard. He is usually depicted with a bundle of sticks on his back, with which he, too, is wont to beat children. His name, after all, translates as ‘Father Flogger’. Sometimes he carries a wicker basket as well, into which the bad children are thrown so that he can bear them away.”

  “Much like the Thurrick and his sack,” said Erasmus.

  “There are countless other similar folkloric beings,” said Shadrach. “The same characteristics recur: twigs or branches and a violent disposition at odds with Father Christmas’s benevolence, as if you cannot have the one without the other. A necessary counterweight, perhaps. No light without shadow. It isn’t too much of a stretch to suppose that, in the dim and distant past, travellers from abroad visited the north of England and shared anecdotes about their own Christma
s demons, and so was born a regional equivalent, the Black Thurrick.”

  “Alternatively,” opined Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd, “the Black Thurrick might be the original, the progenitor of his European counterparts.”

  “Alternatively still,” said Erasmus, “the Black Thurrick is real.” There was a glint in his glassy, crapulous eye, and I discerned that his purpose now was mischief-making. “If Eve saw it, it must be.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Raz!” Thaddeus barked. “I’ve had about as much as I can take of this. Bad enough that you live under my roof, on the allowance I give you, and have not yet shown any inclination to learn about running the estate. Must I put up with listening to your inane jabber as well?”

  Erasmus Allerthorpe flinched, as did I to a lesser extent. His father’s outburst was even more vitriolic than it had been this afternoon and, in my view, just as unwarranted. I anticipated a ferocious rejoinder from the young man, and might even have applauded it; but, as before, Erasmus simply bit his lip. Then, abruptly, he thrust back his chair and stalked out of the room, snatching a decanter of whisky off the sideboard as he went and slamming the door behind him.

  “Don’t think me too harsh on the lad,” Thaddeus said to Holmes and me, as if in answer to our unvoiced question. “I am simply losing patience with him. He is coming to the age when he should at least be giving thought to his duties as a prospective heir. I won’t be around forever, and keeping things going at Fellscar is a full-time job. So is managing the family’s finances. We have sold off our businesses but somebody has to keep an eye on the money; it can’t be left entirely in the hands of stockbrokers. I try to get the lad interested in these things, but he would rather fritter his life away, either here or with his ne’er-do-well friends down in London. I drive him hard because much is expected of him and he is signally failing to live up to his responsibilities. One day I hope the pressure I put on him will yield results.”

  I refrained from saying what I wanted to – that the results might not be ones that Thaddeus Allerthorpe would like. My own brother, as the firstborn son, had had onerous expectations imposed upon him by our father, and the consequences had been a life of anxiety and dissolution and a premature death.