Brunells shone the beam of his lantern towards a turning off of the path, heading round past the village to the Pottery Pier. He turned onto it without uttering so much as a farewell to Holmes. But if he had thought to proceed on his own, Holmes thought otherwise, stepping smartly beside him as though they were yoked together.
“I don’t suppose you heard the sound of those cries while you were in the Cambridge Wood?” he asked.
“Cries?” retorted Brunells, turning his head for just an instant in Holmes’s direction. “Sure I did, but they didn’t come from there. Hard things to read: sounds coming from a distance on a harbour island. Other sounds, from off the island, can carry over the water for miles. Most likely they came from offshore, from a yacht hired by some party of holidaymakers on a lark—a boon to the off-licence trade, and a menace to shipping, I can tell you. The people who live here on the island hear a lot of it in the summer months.”
“I hadn’t thought that you lived on Brownsea Island,” said Holmes.
“I don’t.”
“Then you are rather behind your time for going home, aren’t you?”
“A little trick I’d decided to spring on our Mr. Harrowrigg today,” Brunells explained, with a hint of smugness in his voice. “No doubt you’ll learn first-hand that the old man won’t let anyone off of the island from the Pottery Pier, without giving them a frisky once-over in their pockets. Mind you, it’s always been his way—a sort of diverting hobby with no other object than to play the show-off. But lately, he’s become insufferable about it, running after one of those fancies that pop into that head of his, from time-to-time. Well, he won’t have the satisfaction of running through my pockets this night. I figure, at his age, his ‘mainspring’ in him runs down a mite fast; and once it does, he probably won’t wind back up again, without at least a good eight or nine hours’ sleep. When that happens, I can slip away in my boat; with my pockets untouched, and him in a right stew about it when he wakes up again.”
“I had seen him last, about an hour and a half ago,” said Holmes, “headed in the direction of Maryland village.”
“Ah! He has a little cottage there,” Brunells replied. “No doubt he’s finally given his little game a miss, for once. He has had rather more stimulation to wear him out the past few days, with the Boy Scouts’ arrival here on the island; and those cocked hats of theirs reminding him of the hats of the Cavaliers. And he swears those fleurs-de-lys the patrol leaders are wearing on their hats are connected to perhaps the most fabled relic from the Rebellion: of which I’ve no doubt, Mr. Holmes, you have some little recollection.”
“Oh yes: the Stuarts’ crown,” remarked Holmes, and (eager to establish his place in its provenance) added, “taken from the martyred King Charles the First by his rebel captors, and broken up and scattered in 1649; its pieces recovered and hidden for safekeeping by Sir Ralph Musgrave by or about 1659; and discovered by Sherlock Holmes in 1879.”
“Discovered by Richard Brunton!” Brunells corrected him with a bounding upper-handedness so indelicate that it rankled the usually slow-tempered detective. To this insult he added the injurious observation, “You had only discovered his body, and over the dead man’s body, claimed his discovery of the crown for yourself.”
“Ah, well, Mr. Brunells,” said Holmes lightly, to give his detractor the lightest possible regard, “in the discovery of relics we are all scavengers of the dead. But speaking of old relics, you’d begun to tell me of our scavenging old friend’s latest fixation over the fleurs that General Baden-Powell’s patrol leaders wear.”
“Oh, right!” replied Brunells. “Only, it’s more what you might call ‘fleur-mania’, with that look that gets in his eyes sometimes, and he hangs about at the edge of their camp like a jackal might do, expecting to be thrown some scraps from their table. But the ‘scraps’ he waits for are four pieces of the Stuarts’ crown, which he says were never found by the Cavalier Musgraves. He’s all right as long as he can see the fleurs-de-lys still pinned safely on the patrol leaders’ hats. But, out of sight of them, he becomes anxious they may’ve fallen into someone else’s pockets in the meantime; and that’s when his fingers start to get busy. He won’t approach the boys or their general directly about giving them to him. To that end, Mr. Harrowrigg’s composed in his mind a sort of curious sequel to the Musgrave Ritual, which he’s persuaded that one particular member of the Curlew patrol is a part of.”
“Yes, he did mention a roll with the names of the Curlew patrol, which ‘found its way into his hands’,” said Holmes.
“Just so,” Brunells agreed. “Mr. Harrowrigg claims it’s written proof, in the general’s own hand, that there’s a Musgrave in the camp: a boy named Reginald Giles. It has to do with him being the only one of the Boy Scouts with one of the two hereditary Christian names that the Hurlstone Musgraves have passed down, in an alternate succession of their generations, since the days of the Rebellion.”
“Ralph and Reginald,” Holmes reflected on the names. “Neither of these is peculiar to the Hurlstone Musgraves alone. You know, I have always been rather intrigued by a certain method to the madness in people, right up to the point where it goes all helter-skelter at the end. Mr. Harrowrigg’s collations are a good case in point, with this extraordinarily arbitrary means of singling out that one boy, based on his all-too-common first name alone.”
“Well, he’ll certainly try to make sense of it to you in the morning,” Brunells promised him, “never fear about that.”
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