The Manor House Ghost

by S. Subramanian

“I am glad to meet you, sir,” said [Mycroft Holmes], putting out a broad, fat hand like the flipper of a seal. “I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler. By the way, Sherlock, I expected to see you round last week to consult me over that Manor House case. I thought you might be a little out of your depth.”

“No, I solved it,” said my friend, smiling.

“It was Adams, of course.”

“Yes, it was Adams.”

– “The Greek Interpreter”, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Readers who have followed my accounts of the cases of Sherlock Holmes may recall that the conversation reported above was the first occasion I ever had of meeting my remarkable friend’s even more remarkable brother, Mycroft Holmes, the younger man’s senior by some seven years. The meeting took place at the Diogenes Club, located not far from the Carlton in Pall Mall, a club created for the exclusive membership of London’s most eccentric misanthropes, among whose numbers Mycroft Holmes counted himself. The elder Holmes was an official at Whitehall from where he orchestrated the government’s most delicate operations of diplomacy and international political relations, conducted, for the most part, in the secret world, and under cover of the murky shadows of intrigue and espionage. In the younger brother’s candid estimation, the older was the most astute exponent of the art of scientific deduction and inferential logic he had ever known, but one whose sedentary occupation, coupled with his natural predisposition to laziness and the private comforts of a life without physical exertion or social intercourse, often left him with little scope for the exercise of his remarkable mental faculties, save only when he could enthuse himself sufficiently to engage in the undemanding pursuit of armchair reasoning.

My first acquaintance with the Diogenes Club and Mycroft Holmes, described by Sherlock Holmes as “two curiosities”, of which the first was “the queerest club in London” and the second was “one of the queerest men”, happened on a lovely summer evening of the year ‘88, and was the starting point of that singular train of events which I have described elsewhere under the heading of “The Greek Interpreter”. The case, readers may recall, was a demanding one which tested my friend’s powers of deduction to the hilt. Somehow, in the course of the exertions called forth by the investigation, I succeeded in forgetting the teasing allusion to “the Manor House case” that had cropped up in the exchange between my friend and his brother. It did come back to me later, and I often taxed Holmes with the demand for a detailed account of the matter. Because of his commitment to his various clients and of mine to my various patients, we somehow did not get around to discussing the matter again at any length for some months, until, in early November of that year, Holmes brought it up again.

“Pshaw!” he said one morning, tossing aside the newspaper he had been reading. “The nonsense which the press is pleased to serve up as ‘news’ to a hungry and accepting public is nothing short of scandalous. Have you seen the newspaper accounts of the murder recently committed near Hammersmith that has been variously referred to as ‘The Case of the Fulham Fiend’, ‘The Devil’s Hand in Denham’s Death’, and ‘The Vampire Horror’? Is there no end to the idiocies of the written word - at both its dispensing and its receiving ends?”

“It is the culture of commerce, Holmes,” I replied. “Sensation and scandal are what sell, not reason and moderation.”

‘No doubt, Watson. This puts me in mind of ‘the Manor House case’, alluded to by brother Mycroft when we met at the Diogenes Club some months ago, and in which you have been kind enough to display an interest from time to time. The case is intellectually unremarkable (hence Mycroft’s sly suggestion that it might have carried me out of my depth), but presents a good example of the grip which fantasy and un-reason can have upon the minds of a gullible public. See here, Watson: Here is a manuscript which had been passed on to me by Mycroft a week before our meeting that summer’s day at the Diogenes. The author of the manuscript is a young man by the name of Montague James - a writer, antiquarian, and don at the Royal College in Bridgeford University. Mycroft, in turn, had received the document from a common friend of his and James’. My brother is often the recipient of accounts of events which display some departure from the norm, or reflect signs of the bizarre and the outré.”

“And what is their source?”

“They are referred to him by one or other of his numerous eccentric friends and acquaintances, partly because the latter would like to have their curiosity satisfied by ‘what Mycroft makes of it all’, and partly because it pleases Mycroft to bend his brain to a consideration of these intellectual puzzles, whereby he is enabled to exercise his mind without having to go to the least trouble of exercising his body, not even to the extent of having to stir his substantial frame from the depths of comfort provided by his amply padded chair. From time to time, he sends these cases over to me for my opinion, and in order to compare notes. Our brief conversation on the Manor House affair, to which you were an auditor at the Diogenes, has reference to the contents of the document you now hold in your hand.”

I looked at the manuscript with some curiosity. It was a brief type-written document, and I riffled through its contents quickly.

“Why,” said I, “this purports to be a true ghost story!”

“Precisely,” said Holmes. “What is remarkable about the account is the deliberately muted style in which it has been written. It has none of the gore and crude brutality of the average tale of the supernatural such as you might expect to find in ‘shockers’ and penny-dreadfuls. To the contrary, its contents are related in a tone of uniform moderation and deliberation, not to say reflective scholarship and un-coercive persuasion. The effect of such a tract upon a credulous mind is, in my view, more insidious and lasting than would be the effect of a crass and sensation-mongering account. But let me leave it to you to decide what you make of it. Friend Lestrade has sent around a note threatening to make one of his periodic visitations upon us. You know how he likes to exchange notes and trade official gossip with me every once in a while. He will be here at six in the evening tomorrow. Perhaps we can chat about the ‘Manor House case’ when he is here.”

That night, I took to bed with me to read the document I had been given by Holmes. It is a short account, simply titled “A School Story”. Since then, it has been read, I am sure, by countless other people, in virtually unchanged form, but after a considerable hiatus in time from when it was first written. Indeed, it was many years from the time I speak of now that the story was eventually published, in 1911, in a collection of pieces titled More Ghost Stories from an Antiquary, by the now famous mediaevalist scholar and writer, M. R. James. To those that have read the story, it will come as no surprise that I found it to be a tale that occasioned me much disquiet and disturbance. I slept badly that night.

Promptly at six o’clock the following evening, Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard was at our chambers in Baker Street. Holmes made him welcome in his customary friendly manner.

“A pleasure, as always, Lestrade, to see you,” said he, “and to have the benefit of your - ah - scintillating ideas on crime and its detection. But first, pray divest yourself of your hat and coat and muffler, and sit down here by the fireside. Surely a whisky and soda would not be out of place on a cold evening such as this?”

“Don’t mind if I do, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson,” said Lestrade, “I’m off duty now.”

“Splendid! If you will be so kind as to do the honours, Watson?”

Holmes observed Lestrade keenly as I poured out the drinks.

“It has been some time since last we met, Lestrade, so I know little of how life has been treating you in the last few weeks, save what I am able to deduce from my superficial observations of your person. It is clear that you have gained some weight - I should say a pound-and-a-quarter - that Mrs. Lestrade has been on vacation for some time now, that you have acquired a new razor, that your watch has been giving you a good deal of trouble lately, that your work has been taking you to the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, that the poor state of the plumbing at home has added to your worries, that the new postman has been delivering your mail at the wrong address, and that you have been having a rough passage at work with a superior whose ignorance of police procedure is matched only by his shortness of temper.”

Lestrade started up in his chair before quickly subsiding again out of a proper regard for his own professional pride. “Correct in every detail, Mr. Holmes,” he conceded grudgingly.

“And aren’t you going to ask me how I came by my deductions?” enquired Holmes with amusement.

“Oh, I have worked it all out for myself, Mr. Holmes. To the Scotland Yard professional, the exercise is simplicity itself, the product of a most elementary sequence of deductions from known causes to logical effects.”

“Bravo, Lestrade!” cried Holmes, laughing heartily. “I should ask you, though, to explain that ‘elementary sequence’ for poor Watson’s benefit, but never mind, never mind, some other time, perhaps. Today, I thought, we might spend a pleasant hour or two discussing a curious document which fell into my hands some months ago. Watson, who has read the document, has, for your benefit, Lestrade, kindly agreed to relate its contents, which we might call an account of the Manor House case. It would be interesting to know what both of you make of it. I should warn you at the outset, Lestrade, that what Watson is about to relate is a purportedly true ghost story written by a Bridgeford don, Montague James. I have it from reliable sources that Mr. James regards scepticism as an unexceptionable response to his story, but he has also issued this warning: As an antiquarian with a profound scholarly knowledge of mediaeval artifacts, he believes that any prolonged mocking of the vintage and provenance of the charm on a watch-chain which figures in the story could literally lead to a freezing of the satirist’s blood. While on the subject, it is a cold evening, is it not? Watson, before you start on your account, will you be so good as to stretch out a long hand in the cause of closing that window against the draft and latching it tight?”

I walked over to the window and secured the latch of the window.

‘We are now ready to hear from Watson his version of James’s ‘School Story’,” said Holmes. “No doubt he will present us with a quick and efficient summary, eschewing irrelevancies while not neglecting details of import. Watson, if you will, please?”

“By way of a prologue,” I said, ‘let me reproduce a conversation between Holmes and his brother Mycroft which took place some months ago at the Diogenes Club in Pall Mall, and which brought to my attention the case under review.” I quickly recalled, for Lestrade’s benefit, the exchange between the Holmes brothers which I have reproduced at the beginning of the present account.

“As for James’s ‘A School Story’,” I continued, “it is largely an account of a conversation between a gentleman simply referred to as A and a friend of his, which takes place in a smoking-room, and is overheard by at least one other auditor, whom I shall call X. The story commences with a discussion between A and his friend of the staple fare and hackneyed themes that are a standard feature of stories involving schools and ghosts, and are often claimed by mendacious schoolboys as records of events which they themselves have experienced. On the invitation of his friend, A proceeds to relate an account of a ghostly occurrence which he recalls from his own schooldays, an occurrence that is located nearly twenty years ago, in 1870. The school, we are told, was situated near London, and we are provided by James with a vivid description of its physical features and ambient atmosphere. If I may quote from James: ‘It was established in a large and fairly old house - a great white building with very fine grounds about it; there were large cedars in the garden, as there are in so many of the older gardens in the Thames valley, and ancient elms in the three or four fields which we used for our games. I think probably it was quite an attractive place, but boys seldom allow that their schools possess any tolerable features-’”

“Can you spare us the lyrical descriptions and stick to the cardinal features of the account, Watson?” asked Holmes with acerbity.

“Very well,” I replied, with some stiffness. “The cardinal features of the account can be summed up in three specific instances, and a sequel, which A recounts. All three instances involve a schoolmaster called G. W. Sampson who taught Latin, and a fellow-student of A’s called McCleod. Sampson was apparently a recent arrival at the school, a person who was generally well-liked, and who wore a watch-chain with a charm on it that attracted attention. The charm, we are told, was a Byzantine coin, with the imprint of some emperor on one side of it and an engraving of the owner’s initials - G. W. S. - and a date, 24 July, 1865, on the other side. Sampson had apparently obtained the coin, perhaps a little smaller in size than a florin, in Constantinople. As for the boy McCleod, A’s recollection of him was that of a simple and unremarkable boy with whom A struck up a friendship.

“Now for the three episodes. The first occurred when Sampson set up a Latin exercise for the boys in his class, a simple one requiring them to employ the verb memini in a sentence. Most of the boys got away with simple constructions of the type of ‘I remember my father’, but McCleod, apparently in the grip of some mysterious force outside his control, turned in a sentence vastly beyond his own actual limits of knowledge and ability, which read: Memento putei inter quatuor taxos, meaning ‘remember the well among the four yews’ - a sentence that seems to have caused Sampson considerable consternation and anxiety.

“The second episode occurred on a day when Sampson again set a task in Latin composition for the boys. On this occasion, he wanted them to write a Latin sentence involving a conditional construction. After committing their respective constructions to paper and turning in their papers for examination, the boys noticed that Sampson reacted with great disquiet to a particular paper and rushed out of the classroom after reading it. A then took the liberty of reading the paper in Sampson’s absence. On it was written in red ink the following sentence: Si tu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad te, meaning, ‘If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you’. A noticed the remarkable fact that this message was written on a paper placed on top of all the other submissions from the boys in the class, and that, along with this paper, the total number of papers added up to seventeen, when there were only sixteen boys in the class.

“The third and final episode occurred on that night, when A, who shared a dormitory with him, was woken during the night from his sleep by a seriously disturbed McCleod. From the dormitory window, the boys had a view of Sampson’s room, and McCleod claimed, with the greatest conviction, that he had seen a thin man, wet all over and looking barely alive, sitting or kneeling on Sampson’s window sill and seeming to beckon to the latter. While A did not see what McCleod insisted he had witnessed, A was also strangely disinclined to doubt McCleod’s word, for the Highland boy gave every indication of speaking the truth and of being moved to profound agitation and fear by his experience. Apparently, the master Sampson disappeared from the school the following day, and was never more heard of or from.

“So much for A’s account of the ‘School Story.’ This brings us to the sequel of the story. Its narrator informs us that an unseen auditor X of A’s account, which I have just summarized, found himself some months later in Ireland, staying with a friend in a country house. One evening, while turning out some odds and ends from a drawer in the smoking room, X’s host came upon a watch chain with a charm on it - a coin with the words ‘G. W. S., 24 July, 1865’ etched on one side of it. The chain had apparently been found a year or two ago on the rags clothing a body which had been discovered, in the embrace of another body, in the course of cleaning out a well located amongst some yew trees on the grounds of the country house. The bodies, it seems, must have been in the well for about twenty years.”

“So!” said Holmes. “What do you gentlemen make of it?”

“Well,” said I, “I suppose the inference we are invited to make is that before he took up his teaching assignment at A’s school, Sampson had been responsible for the death of a man whose body he dumped in a well, that this man’s ghost or spirit pursued Sampson to the school, and that the ghost warned Sampson of retribution and death, and eventually succeeded in exacting a dreadful revenge by luring Sampson to a watery end by drowning in the very same well where the avenger had been done in or had his body disposed of. It is an uncanny story, rendered the more so by its plausibility. It is against all my rational instincts to allow ghoulish phenomena to inhabit the world I do, but the events described by A in his rendering of the affair are hard to account for in any other terms. I must admit that there is an element of convincing suggestiveness about the story which makes it hard to dispel that shiver in the spine which the story succeeds so damnably well in inducing. At the least, I must confess to feeling disturbed and confused.”

“And you, Lestrade?” asked Holmes.

“Oh, it’s stuff and nonsense, Mr. Holmes,” declared Lestrade. “I don’t know how to explain the yarn, but as a policeman who has to deal with real crimes and real criminals, I must say I’m damned if I’m going to allow spirits and demons to make up the evidence I would be required, as an agent of the Force, to present before a judge in a court of law.”

“Spoken forcefully, Lestrade,” said Holmes, “forcefully and well, though I am a little hard put to it to endorse a conviction which so casually dispenses with the need of offering a reasoned explanation for it.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Holmes,” said Lestrade. “So now why don’t you tell us what you make of the whole thing?”

“But before you do so, Holmes,” I interposed, “it would be of signal assistance to have clarity on two matters pertaining to the case. First, who is the ‘Adams’ that Mycroft and you referred to in your conversation at the Diogenes? And second, why have you recurrently alluded to the story as ‘the Manor House case’?”

“My apologies to both of you for the opacity surrounding these two questions,” replied Holmes. “I trust the matter will become transparent once I have explained. Let me begin by saying that ‘Manor House’ is the name of the school that A refers to in his story. I should be very well acquainted with it, because I was myself a student there for a short time. Apart from anything else, the school is easily recognizable from A’s vivid description of what Watson referred to as ‘the physical features and ambient atmosphere’ of the place-”

“Oh, and I thought,” I remonstrated, “that all of that was just unwarranted lyricism that strayed from the cardinal features of the case?”

“Touché, Watson!” cried Holmes. “And again my apologies, my dear fellow! There is that vein of pawky humour in you which I must learn to guard against. But to resume: The identification of the school in the story with the Manor House is put beyond doubt by the references to A, to McCleod, and to Sampson. Mycroft was an occasional and reluctant visitor to the school, sent by our father to keep an eye on the youngest son, and despite his less-than-passing acquaintance with the boy, Mycroft’s extraordinary powers of recollection enabled him to identify A as my friend Adams. Adams, who was a year my senior, was a fellow with a comical turn of mind, given to a good deal of pranking and practical joking. The fact that he should select McCleod for those remarkable mental feats of Latin construal is itself an indication that he was up to one of his tricks when he told that ghost story. I must explain that McCleod was quite the class dullard, and was awarded the nickname, as a consequence of that unkind insensitivity which schoolboys tend to share, of ‘McClod’. Sampson provided the finishing touch. He did exist: He was our Latin teacher, he did possess that watch-chain; he was indeed given to setting us novel Latin exercises, and it is true that he vanished suddenly one day, though the reason generally bruited about for it was that he disappeared with the headmaster’s silver forks. My surmise then is that Adams’s account of the ghost of the Manor House was a fiction from beginning to end.

“The rest is really rather easy now, is it not? It is quite apparent that the story’s unknown auditor X was in fact Montague James himself. He succeeded in keeping himself, with a measure of coyness, out of direct identification in the story. It is equally apparent that Adams had come to acquire knowledge of James’s somewhat unorthodox beliefs in occult and paranormal phenomena. We may imagine now that Adams, true to nature, hatched a small plot, taking two of his friends into confidence. One friend was his companion in the smoking-room, whose sole role was that of a foil to Adams’s raconteur. The second friend was the owner of the country-house in Ireland.

“I am afraid there was also some sharp practice involved in this affair, and that Adams and his friend in Ireland were not motivated entirely and only by considerations of the pleasures to be had from pulling another’s leg. That watch-chain of Sampson’s was, as I have said, real enough. I suspect Sampson might have left it behind in the Manor House in his hurry to vanish with the silver, and that Adams took possession of it. I shouldn’t be surprised if James’s plan to spend some time with his friend in Ireland was common knowledge to Adams, and that Adams passed Sampson’s old watch-chain on to James’s host, for the latter to execute the sequel to the elaborate story earlier staged for James’s benefit by Adams and his companion in the smoking-room. Given James’s vulnerability to supernatural beliefs, and given also his strong professional interest in mediaeval artifacts, it would be natural to expect James to display considerable interest in Sampson’s charm. I personally have no doubt that his host in Ireland sold that watch-chain and the charm on it to James for a considerably fancy price, and that the proceeds were shared with Adams.

“In fact, after I arrived at this conclusion, I wrote to James, posing as a connoisseur and asking if he would consider selling that charm to me. He was very firm in his reply that the charm was not for sale, however high the price offered might be, though he himself had acquired it very dearly. He also drew my attention to the Byzantine origin of the charm, dwelling rather on some mystical properties it was supposed to possess. In the wrong hands, he believed that the charm could unleash powerful evil forces. In particular, excessive irreverence toward it could - as I believe I mentioned earlier - apparently freeze the blood of those guilty of calumniating it, or those associating with the guilty.

“Well, gentlemen, there you have my reconstruction of the Ghost of Manor House!”

“Is there no end to the ingenuity of the natural swindler, Mr. Holmes?” said Lestrade with a chuckle. “That was a genuinely instructive story on how money might be made out of ghosts. Thank you, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson. I have had a most enjoyable evening, involving spirits of one kind and the other. Ah, my hat and coat! As for that Byzantine charm,” he continued, as he was about to let himself out, “well, well, I can only hope that my coat will provide me with adequate protection against its freezing me to death.”

In the instant following Lestrade’s utterance, we felt a momentary wave of biting cold. “Did you feel that, gentlemen?” asked Lestrade from the doorway in a strained voice. For a moment I thought I glimpsed an expression of pure terror on his face which, for all I know, was a reflection of the expression on my own face. Without waiting for a reply, Lestrade closed the door behind him and left.

There was silence in the room for a long time after Lestrade’s exit. Sherlock Holmes broke it in due course, with a series of observations which were obviously keenly felt articles of faith with him. I discover from a perusal of my notes upon his cases that he repeated these very same sentiments, virtually word for word, in the course of an investigation which I have described elsewhere under the title of “The Devil’s Foot”.

“I am not,” said he, “prepared to admit diabolical intrusions into the affairs of men. Let us rule that entirely out of our minds. What does it profit us to ask ‘what human contrivance could possibly do something devilish?’ I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity, it is certainly beyond me. Yet we must exhaust all natural explanations before we fall back on a theory of the supernatural. That is why I give you an explanation of the Manor House case which is prosaic and earthly, though doubtless the same facts can be explained by Montague James’s fantastical reconstruction.”

“All the facts, Holmes?” I asked.

“Why, what do you mean, Watson? Is there any fact I have left out of the reckoning?”

“What about that momentary blast of cold after Lestrade’s crack at Sampson’s charm?”

“It is as you say: un colpo di vento.”

“But from where?”

“I did tell you, did I not, Watson, that the window was letting in gusts of cold wind?”

“But you also know you asked me to shut the window and to secure the latch, which I did.”

“Let me invite you to remark, Watson, that the latch has since come off, and the window opens and shuts in sympathy with the wind.”

“Why, that is so! But that has never happened before - how on earth could the latch come undone?”

“A loose screw? Rust at the edges? A careless closing of the window? The force of the wind?”

“Or the force unleashed by a Byzantine charm?”

“Ah, I see you are in your element this evening, Watson! You will not be denied! Well, well, I suppose there are occasions when you must be permitted to have the last word.”

It took me a minute to observe, “Which you have very nearly succeeded, my dear Holmes, in having yourself!”