Week 4 - Summary
The Hound of the Baskervilles — Week 4 of 8 Chapters VII & VIII. Read along with us in The Weekly Serial app
Everyone on the moor is hiding something.
Barrymore lied about the sobbing. The postmaster’s boy delivered the telegram to Mrs Barrymore, not to Barrymore himself — so Holmes’s clever ruse proved nothing. Beryl Stapleton warns Watson to leave Dartmoor immediately, then runs half a mile across the moor to retract it before her brother notices she’s gone. Stapleton himself watches Watson with small, light eyes that miss nothing, smile fixed, butterfly net in hand, giving nothing away.
And somewhere out there on the moor, Selden the Notting Hill murderer is still hiding in the dark.
Watson puts it better than anyone could:
“Life has become like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point the track.”
The Grimpen Mire arrives in Chapter VII without warning. Stapleton and Watson are walking the moor path when something brown begins rolling and tossing in the green sedges ahead. A long neck shoots upward. A dreadful cry echoes across the open ground.
A moorland pony, sucked under. Gone in minutes.
“It’s a bad place, the great Grimpen Mire,” says Stapleton cheerfully.
Then he mentions, almost as an aside, that he knows a path through it to the islands at the centre — rare plants, rare butterflies, worth the risk. For God’s sake don’t try it yourself, he adds. You wouldn’t come back.
Dartmoor’s bogs are real and they are exactly as Doyle describes them. The bright green patches of bog moss — vivid, almost luminous against the darker moor — are the giveaway if you know to look for them. Underneath is waterlogged peat that can be metres deep. The moor ponies that wander in rarely come out. Locals have known for centuries which paths are safe and which are not, knowledge passed down through generations because the cost of forgetting it is fatal. Doyle didn’t invent the Grimpen Mire. He just gave it a name.
Chapter VIII does something quietly radical. Watson stops narrating and starts writing letters.
“From this point onward I will follow the course of events by transcribing my own letters to Mr Sherlock Holmes which lie before me on the table.”
It’s a shift that changes everything. We lose the smooth retrospective confidence of Watson-as-narrator and gain something rawer — Watson in the middle of events he doesn’t yet understand, reporting facts to Holmes because Holmes told him to, suppressing his own theories because Holmes told him to do that too. The letters have a different texture. More uncertainty. More atmosphere bleeding through the professional report.
It also reminds us, quietly, that Holmes is still out there somewhere. Reading these letters. Thinking.
The chapter ends with Barrymore.
Two in the morning. A stealthy step in the corridor. Watson follows — and finds the butler crouched at an unlit window in an unfurnished room, candle held against the glass, staring out into the blackness of the moor. Rigid with expectation. Waiting for something.
Then a deep groan. The candle extinguished. Slow footsteps retreating back down the corridor.
Watson has no explanation. Neither do we. But somewhere out there in the dark, across the Grimpen Mire, on a moor that swallows things whole and gives nothing back — something was watching for that light.
