Week 3 Summary
The Hound of the Baskervilles — Week 3 of 8 Chapters V & VI Read along with us in The Weekly Serial app
Holmes is beaten.
Not dramatically. Not with a villain’s flourish. Just quietly, methodically, thread by thread.
By the end of Chapter V three separate lines of investigation have collapsed. Barrymore is confirmed at the Hall so not the bearded man in the cab. The cut page from The Times has vanished from every waste-paper basket in the hotels around Charing Cross. And the cabman, John Clayton, delivers the final blow: his mysterious fare gave a name before disappearing into Waterloo Station.
The name was Sherlock Holmes.
“A touch, Watson — an undeniable touch!” Holmes says, with something close to genuine admiration. “I feel a foil as quick and supple as my own.”
He has been outplayed in his own city, by someone who knew exactly who he was and anticipated every move. London, with its millions of people and its cab numbers and its hotel registers, has given him nothing. There is only one thing left to do.
Send Watson to Dartmoor.
The journey down occupies the first pages of Chapter VI, and Doyle uses every mile of it. Watch how England changes outside the carriage window, from brown earth turning ruddy, brick giving way to granite, lush Devon fields rolling up toward something darker on the horizon.
“There is your first sight of the moor,” says Dr Mortimer.
It appears as a grey, melancholy hill with a jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance. Baskerville stares at it. Watson reads something in his face, pride, recognition, the pull of blood and ancestry. Sir Henry has never actually seen Baskerville Hall, has spent most of his life in America and Canada, wears tweed and speaks with a slight Western accent. And yet here he is, drawn back across an ocean to a place he has never been, by a name and a death and a legend.
The wagonette swings off the main road and climbs through deep lanes with high banks, dripping moss, hart’s-tongue ferns, the rattle of wheels dying away in drifts of rotting leaves. Then the driver raises his whip.
“Baskerville Hall,” he says.
Two narrow towers above the trees. Lodge-gates of wrought iron. Boars’ heads on the pillars, blotched with lichen. And at the door, stepping from the shadow of the porch to greet them, a tall man with a square black beard.
Barrymore. Who was supposed to be here all along.
There is one more thing Doyle adds to the journey, almost as an afterthought. At the little wayside station, Watson notices two soldierly men in dark uniforms leaning on short rifles, watching the road. The driver explains it quietly.
A convict has escaped from Princetown prison. Three days gone. The farmers are frightened.
His name is Selden. The Notting Hill murderer.
Dartmoor’s prison, which you can still visit today was built specifically to house French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars, then repurposed as a civilian convict prison in 1850. By 1901 it held some of the most dangerous men in England. Selden is out there somewhere on the moor as Watson and Sir Henry sit down to their first silent dinner beneath the painted eyes of five centuries of Baskerville ancestors.
Watson lies awake that first night. The house is dark and cold, the moor visible through the curtains, broken rocks, long low curve, half moon behind racing clouds.
Then, in the very dead of the night, he hears it.
A woman sobbing. Muffled, strangling, somewhere inside the house. He lies still for half an hour, listening. Then silence. Nothing but the chiming clock and the rustle of ivy on the wall.
He will get no explanation in the morning.
