Free Sherlock Holmes and the King's Evil: And Other New Tales Featuring the World's Greatest Detective by Donald Thomas

eel-catchers and wild-fowl hunters on the mudbanks. The sands are dangerous, particularly after dark or in fog.”
    “Very good. Now may we return to your brothers and my question, which I think you have not quite answered? What manner of men are they?”
    “Roland is the younger,” she said simply, “The young people in the village taunt him as a stilt-walker.” She turned to me. “Perhaps you know what that means on the coast of the Wash, Dr Watson?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “Roland is called a stilt-walker because he is an enemy to change, even when others welcome it. The sea on that coast has been receding for centuries. Land is reclaimed from time to time by warping, as they call it. Sections of the marsh and sands are enclosed and dried out. They become pasture in the possession of sheep breeders or dairy farmers. They are lost to those who have always treated them as common land. The old fowlers, fishermen, goose-breeders. Centuries ago these men roamed the treacherous flats and sands by going on stilts. For years now they have been a dying breed. Their territory is stolen from them, even by the railway companies who have built embankments across the marsh and caused large sections of it to dry out. In short, to be called a stilt-walker is to be despised by the younger men.”
    “And what of your elder brother, the author of the letter?”
    Miss Chastelnau thought for a moment and then spoke carefully.
    “I know he is lonely. I fear that John Bunyan’s giant, Despair, is his companion. There is nothing of Roland in him. They both live by what they can get, by what they can make, hunt and catch. Yet Abraham also lives in a world of dreams and legends, scraps of history and romance. Would that he could find comfort in such things but they all seem to fail him.”
    “Yet it is admirable that he should dream,” said Holmes abruptly, sitting upright, “Are they loving brothers?”
    “No,” she said quietly, “I think they are not. Force of circumstance obliges them to share a single life in the barrack-room of the Old Light. I have no close knowledge but I think it is a life of indifference at the best.”
    She drew herself up in her chair as though she had come to the end of the matter. There was a pause.
    “That will not quite do.” said Holmes gently, “Unless I am much mistaken, there is something more to this mysterious disappearance. Something which you know and which, as yet, we have not heard. That will not do, Miss Chastelnau, if we are to be of service to you. Come now, pray let us have the rest of this most interesting account. ”
    She blushed a little but looked straight at him.
    “Mr Holmes, you have already mentioned the old church at Sutton Cross, the turret tower with a winding staircase to the roof and the beacon. After dark it still guides hunters and fishermen going to their nets or traps on the mudflats or the marsh. If a man can see that lantern and the foreshore lighthouse, he can judge his position on the flats long after dark. He can find his way home even when the tide is racing at his heels or in the fog. Men depend upon those two lights. By this time of autumn, fog and mist are as much the enemy as the incoming sea and the quivering sands.”
    She paused and for the first time showed a moment’s difficulty in continuing her story. Then she resumed.
    “Last Sunday, after Evensong, the sexton and the rector went up the tower in the dusk to light the lantern. Twilight was coming on but it was not quite dark. A mist was gathering with the incoming tide, coming down like a curtain across the shore. It had not quite reached the level of the marsh. As the two men began to climb the stone steps of the winding stairs, they heard a gunshot.”
    “A shot of what kind?”
    “A shotgun, Mr Holmes, fired from somewhere on the marshes. It is not uncommon by daylight but unusual in the dusk, except as a signal. By the time the two men came out on to the lead of the flat roof, the