Case of Witchcraft

Joe Revill

Description

A tale of witchcraft in the Northern Isles, in which some long-concealed secrets are revealed - concerning not only the Dark Arts but also the Great Detective himself.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 19 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780922911
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
A CASE OF WITCHCRAFT
A Novel of Sherlock Holmes .
BY
JOE REVILL



Publisher Information
First edition published in 2011 by
MX Publishing Limited,
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX.
www.mxpublishing.com
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2011, 2012 Joe Revill
The right of Joe Revill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him 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 in this work are fictitious. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and not those of or MX Publishing Limited.
Cover design by Staunch Design



Dedication
TO
THE
ETERNAL
BELOVED.



Preface
THE BOOK which you are holding is indeed (as its title-page declares) ‘a novel of Sherlock Holmes’, but it is not a pastiche - which is to say that it was not composed in imitation of the canonical narratives supposedly written by Dr. Watson. The Doctor plays little part in this story, and the point of view throughout is that of Sherlock Holmes himself.


This story shows Holmes as a real man, living in the real world of late Victorian Britain, and it contains much that Dr. Watson would have considered unsuitable for publication: conversations about sex, philosophy, and politics, for example - not to mention a dénouement which would have seemed too disturbing for Victorian readers, and may still have the power to shock.
Read the following pages expecting the familiar style of Dr. Watson’s narratives, and you will be disappointed; read them without such expectations, and you may find, as did one perceptive reviewer, that they provide “a new insight into the most private recesses of the mind of Sherlock Holmes.”



Chapter I
FRIDAY, OCTOBER THE TWENTY-SEVENTH, 1899 .
“I DO not know if you can help me, Mr. Holmes; but I am sure that, if you cannot, no one can!”
The speaker was a pale but resolute blonde in her late thirties, tall and slender, dressed in an unfashionable suit of powder-blue, with leg-o’-mutton sleeves. The white band of her hat was slightly soiled by the London rain. She was good-looking in an aristocratic, faintly equine way, and evidently in considerable distress. From her card, Holmes knew her to be Miss Emily Tollemache, the resident of a vicarage in Devonshire.
“Some tea, Mrs. Hudson! And you, my poor young lady, pray come and sit by the fire. This afternoon’s weather has been most inclement.” He motioned her towards the armchair from which he had risen on her arrival. When she was comfortably seated, he moved the little room’s third armchair, which was of wicker-work construction, to a position equidistant from her chair and that of his friend Dr. Watson, whose apparent lack of chivalry was excused by the bandaged leg which rested on a footstool.
“I suppose, gentlemen, that you have heard of my father, the Reverend Mr. Melchior Tollemache?”
“A folklorist of some renown, I believe.”
“Some years ago I read his book on were-wolves!” added Watson. “The breadth of your father’s erudition is matched only by the grace of his style - although in that work I found his subject-matter to be somewhat gruesome.”
“Indeed. It has ever been my father’s aspiration to shine the light of scholarship into the darkness of primitive superstition, and by exposing it to diminish its power. Yet now I fear that he himself has fallen into that dark world, and that its age-old horrors have destroyed him!”
“You speak figuratively?”
“No, Mr. Holmes: my father is missing, and may, I fear, be slain - at the hands of Devil-worshippers!”
“Calm yourself, dear lady, and tell us the facts which have led you to so extraordinary a conclusion.”
“Very well.” She breathed deeply. “I shall tell you all that I know, although to explain all that has happened I must begin far back, and tell you of my father’s research.
“For more than two years the Reverend Mr. Tollemache has been studying the folk-tale of Cinderella . When he first read the many variants in Miss Cox’s collection, he believed that he could distinguish three different types of the tale; and these he supposed, from their present distribution and their characteristic narrative elements, to have originated independently: one in Asia, another in the Mediterranean region, and a third in Northern Europe - although these three original tales have undoubtedly been somewhat confused with one another by story-tellers over the centuries. That which most interested him was the Northern Cinderella , as represented primarily in the folklore of Iceland and Scandinavia. Are you acquainted with such tales, Mr. Holmes?”
Holmes shook his head. “My investigations of the real world have left me little time for studies of fantasy.”
“Of course. One forgets how obscure such matters must appear to all but a fellow-student. I should say, then, that these Northern stories differ greatly from the Cinderella that you may have encountered in the nursery. Their central character is the daughter of a petty King, who marries for a second time after the untimely death of his wife. His new Queen - who is usually said to be a Witch - comes with a daughter of her own, and the two girls soon become rivals for the affection of both the King and his people. Those who dislike the black-haired Queen refer to her as ‘The Crow’, and, naturally, to her daughter as ‘The Crow’s Daughter’, by which name the tale itself is often known. Rejected by her infatuated father, the persecuted Cinderella-figure is sent into a lonely exile, from which she is eventually rescued by the intervention of a handsome young King, who marries her and places her upon the throne of her father’s Kingdom, while her stepsister and stepmother are deposed and punished, rather horribly.”
“Indeed: that resembles rather a chapter from some Dark-Age historian than one of the Grimms’ fairy-tales.”
“Just so, Mr. Holmes. Although fantastic or supernatural elements are present in many versions, the basic story sounds like something that could well have happened in the real world. My father’s intuition told him that it had indeed done so, and he set about trying to determine exactly when and where these events had occurred. For months the village postman would bring us almost daily correspondence from foreign scholars, and parcels containing maps, dictionaries, or volumes of folk-tales in uncouth languages. At length, by putting together various clues in the stories, Father deduced that the tale had originated very early in the Viking Age, and that its setting had been in the Northern Isles, most probably upon the largest of them, Trowley” (it rhymed with holy ), “whose very name appears to signify ‘the Isle of Witches’.”
“So it does,” said Holmes; “ Trolla-ey in the Old Norse, if I am not mistaken.”
Miss Tollemache gave a quick smile, the first that Holmes had seen from her. “Papa’s first thought was to write to the clergymen in those parts, but few responded to his letters - and those who did were most unhelpful. So he decided to visit the Island himself, to see if any recollection of the story might persist among uneducated people there.
“He went up to Trowley ten days ago, and since then I have received two long letters from him, the last of them written on Sunday. We are very close, and he always says that explaining something to me helps him to understand it better. His letters were mostly concerned with the progress of his researches.”
“Have you brought these letters?”
“Naturally, Mr. Holmes. But I will tell you briefly of their purport. He found the local clergy as unhelpful in person as they had been in correspondence. Generally, the natives seemed either ignorant of the story or unwilling to discuss it. The local antiquarian said that he had no knowledge of such events; that if they had ever happened, it must have been in the days before the first Earl of Trowley had been appointed by the Norwegian King - and of that distant time there survived no record, even in the sagas of the Icelanders. The trail seemed cold; but, knowing that ecclesiastical records often contain material of interest to the folklorist, my father went to search in the archives of the Cathedral, and there he found something remarkable.”
“And what was that?”
“In the books of Church Discipline, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were several references to men and women being fined or publicly humiliated for telling The Tale of the Witches , or The Tale of the Two Witches . Most remarkably of all, my father discovered an Episcopal letter, written in good fifteenth-century Latin, part of which decreed: Let the Tale of the Witches be told no more, for those that delight in it are mostly Witches themselves, who would rejoice to see the Church of Christ overthrown and the Reign of the Crow restored .”
“This evidence seems remarkably supportive of your father’s hypothesis! I suppose that there can be no suspicion of... creativity?”
Miss Tollemache appeared to be considering this idea for the first time, but she did not seem offended. “To be absolutely honest, as befits a vicar’s daughter, I don’t know; but I shouldn’t have thought so. Father