The Execution of Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF Page A

interest, and the man who brought the glass sometimes glanced away if distracted by sound or movement. It was possible for Holmes to tip a little from his glass so that it fell upon the woolen socks covering his feet while he sat crossed-legged. The man who came to take the empty glass away would lean toward him, perhaps to smell the sweetness on his breath. It was always there, and this seemed to satisfy them that they had reduced their captive to obedience. They would not risk giving him an overdose without Milverton’s authority, and it seemed that Milverton was usually elsewhere.
    After he had spent several nights battling against the drug’s effects, the upper level of what he called his twilight sleep became easier to attain. In this state, Holmes knew that he had once heard the rumble of a man’s breath. With their prisoner helpless, the guards usually spent the night sleeping on the wooden chair. This item of intelligence began to form the basis of their captive’s plan. A night or two later, lying half-conscious, he heard something more. It would have meant little to most men, but to Sherlock Holmes it made clear a large part of the mystery of his abduction.
    At first he was not quite sure, in the fog-like vapours of hyoscine, that he had truly heard it. Yet he knew that if it were real, it must come again. It seemed like the boom of the dreadful engine to which he was attached as he struggled to consciousness. He now heard it again, four times in quick succession. It was no engine, but a large clock. If it had struck four, he would wait until five to judge its direction. Yet, to his surprise, the four booms came again in much less than a minute. This time it had a deeper tone and, almost at once, he heard it four times more in a note higher than either of the other two. Holmes, the musician, composer, and author of a critique on the motets of Orlando Lassus, enjoyed the gift of perfect pitch. He had only to hear a sound in order to pick out its equivalent on a keyboard.
    That night he had heard E natural four times, B flat in the octave below, and then G natural in the octave higher. No man ever knew the streets of London and their great buildings as he did. In campanology, those three bells and those intervals between them occur only in the striking of St. Sepulchre’s, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the descant of St. Martin’s-le-Grand. He woke next morning with the exultation of a child at Christmas. What might have been inaudible in the remote ‘courtroom’ or when the streets were crowded could be heard in the silent hours between the last drunkards shouting their way homeward and the carts at dawn making their way to market. He knew, as surely as if he had drawn lines of triangulation on a map, that he was in the grim and disused limbo of Newgate prison. The vaulted space forming the ‘courtroom’ was at the meeting of the four great passageways, like aisles and transepts under a cathedral tower.
    Until a few months before, as my readers may recall, Newgate had been the most feared and fearful gaol in England’s history, filled with many of the worst specimens of mankind. It was a detentional prison where they were held during their trials. Those condemned to death or corporal punishments remained until the dates of their executions or whatever form of penalty had been ordered. A corridor with fifteen death cells and the execution shed in the yard outside had a simple motto on its archway: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ Holmes now had not the least doubt that it was in one of these cells that he was held prisoner. No one in the world outside would think of searching for him in this disused fortress of despair.
    His enemies had timed their revenge with devilish precision. Parliament and the City of London had resolved to pull down the ancient prison in Newgate Street and build the court of the Old Bailey on its site. The last man in the condemned cells had been hanged in 1901, as had the