Chapter 3 ― The Disappearance of Rachel Musgrave (Part 6)

We emerged into a grassy expanse which sloped downward into a round crater, crowded all round by the thick bamboo. The dry grass underfoot faintly reflected the silvery light of the moon and stars. From the center of the crater rose up a brick tower which vaguely resembled a takenoko, and its foot was a bonfire where Sir Musgrave, Williams, and Sherlock Holmes sat drinking sake. They turned to look at our approach, their faces red both from the heat of the bonfire and from their imbibing.

“Seats for two!” slurred Holmes, waving around a marshmallow on the end of a twig. “Come, have a sup and share the view!”

William spread out a blanket for us, and Irene and I took our seats. Sitting around a bonfire beneath the starry sky reminded me of camping in the backyard as a boy with my late brother.

“You have found your way to the launching pad of the Moon Rocket project,” stated Sir Musgrave, looking upward at the tower. “My father Robert ordered this clearing be cut and this edifice constructed here. When he died the project was halted, and most of the machinery was carted away; now only the tower remains. One likes to be reminded that there was once a dream here, once. Now it serves as William’s abode.”

“It’s far too much space for one man,” remarked William, gazing across the field into the bamboo. His hair poked out from beneath his odd, floppy hat, matched by his unshaven chin. Yet there was something to his leisurely air which kept one from dismissing him as a simple bumpkin. Of the five of us, he alone seemed to inhabit almost a different time and space.

Irene Adler’s attention was drawn to him as well, and as she uncertainly nibbled at a marshmallow she observed the strange groundskeeper in the corner of her eye.

“Have we met before?” she asked eventually. “Your face seems familiar to me.”

“I’m sure it’s a trick of the mind,” he replied, claiming that he hardly left the bamboo grove; even the staff of Hurlstone hardly ever saw him. But this did not convince Irene Adler, and she continued to study him intently.

“This is the life, eh, Musgrave?” said Holmes emphatically, draining his sake cup. “A man needs relaxing times like these. Too often these days there’s something or other clamouring for one’s attention. Sherlock Holmes must solve mysteries! John H. Watson must write detective stories! Reginald Musgrave must attend to his estate! And so on. That is why we have lost sight of the true meaning of life.”

“And what is that?”

“What do you think? Friends, bonfires, and drinking sake beneath the glorious full moon!”

Now that I think upon it, perhaps Holmes’s amiable conversation with Reginald had been Holmes’s way of encouraging his old friend.

An air of calm, or perhaps resignation, lingered around the curious gathering. Sir Musgrave must have realized when Irene Adler and I emerged from the trees that his plan had failed. And Holmes, who must have had an inkling of what Musgrave had been planning, was now standing by his friend, just as William had asked him to do.

“Something strange occurred not long ago in the Chamber of the East of the East,” said Irene Adler. “We’ve come to inform you about it.”

“I see. And Madame Richborough?” asked Sir Musgrave in a quiet voice; from his manner it was obvious that he knew the game was up.

“She is still in one piece,” replied Adler.

Sir Musgrave nodded faintly.

“I know that it was you that arranged it all,” Adler pressed on, her gaze resolute. “But I don’t understand the rest.”

“Of course you don’t, Miss Adler,” said Sir Musgrave reassuringly. “I did not invite you to expose Madame Richborough. I invited you so that I could ascertain once and for all that this mystery which has plagued us for so long is beyond the capabilities of any detective to solve. By no means was your performance inadequate. Even Holmes could not have unraveled it.”

“Don’t be so sure, Musgrave,” said Holmes, warming his hands at the fire.

A flush of astonishment rose to Sir Musgrave’s cheeks.

“You mean you have solved the mystery?”

“I do not solve mysteries,” said Holmes matter-of-factly, looking into the flames. “I am retired, you know. I simply observe what is around me. It is no wonder that Miss Adler has had such a rough time of it; the nature of the Musgrave mystery is such that the more diligently you probe, the more impenetrable it becomes. It is from we detectives that mysteries are born, you see. In truth we need neither logic, nor science, nor spiritualism. We ought to simply accept the unknown as it is: that is all we can do.”

We gazed at him, mystified. In his quiet certitude we saw the Holmes of old restored to life once more.

“Mr. Holmes,” said Irene Adler, in wonder. “Do you mean to say that you have also solved the case of Miss Rachel’s case from twelve years ago?”

“I should not like to call what I did ‘solving’, exactly.”

“Then tell us, where did Miss Rachel go?”

“She didn’t go anywhere. She is still in that room.”

Sir Musgrave asked very quietly, “How do you come to that conclusion, Holmes?”

“Because when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains must be the truth. No one saw her leave the grounds, and yet neither did the search unearth any evidence that she had met an untimely end. Miss Rachel did not leave Hurlstone Manor that day. Now turn your attention to what we witnessed in the Chamber of the East of the East: the piano playing her favourite melody; the phantasm of the girl herself; and the moon―her favourite celestial body, as I understand it. You often observed the night sky alongside her in your youth, did you not? All of these factors naturally led me to the truth. Miss Rachel has fallen into a deep sleep in the Chamber of the East of the East. What we saw during the seance tonight was a dream: Miss Rachel’s dream.”

“Just a moment, Mr. Holmes,” objected Irene Adler with a frown. “The Chamber of the East of the East has long been known as a hotbed of strange phenomena. Even supposing your wild theory that what we witnessed was Miss Rachel’s dream is true, she disappeared just twelve years ago. How do you explain everything that happened before that?”

It was plain that the incident from twelve years ago must still be at the forefront of her mind. When she and Mary had had that freakish experience, Miss Rachel had been with them.

“An astute observation,” smiled Holmes. “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is a metaphorical retelling of the origin of the chamber. What if all of the fantastical things which have been seen in this room over the ages were dreamed by someone sleeping in this room? For the past twelve years Miss Rachel has slept in this room. Who was it that preceded her? What did they dream of?”

“The bamboo grove…” whispered Irene Adler, as if in a trance.

Our gazes converged on the keeper of the bamboo.

“You are of the Musgrave line, William,” said Holmes. “And for a very long time it was you who slumbered within the Chamber of the East of the East. When Miss Rachel fell into her sleep, you awoke in her stead.”

In the flickering firelight, William’s face eased as though a burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

Was it I that was dreaming? I felt as though the grassland which surrounded the bonfire had separated from the earth and was floating up into the heavens. The old world I had believed in was crumbling away, and a new one was rising to take its place.

“Your conjecture is correct, Holmes,” said Reginald Musgrave. “I hardly expect any of you to believe it, but William is the brother of my great-grandfather.”

“Your father Robert did not believe me,” said Williams, staring into the flames. “He thought me a common huckster who sought to usurp the Musgrave name for my own benefit. The world has changed much since I fell into my slumber in the Chamber of the East of the East, and he cast me out into it without so much as a penny to my name. But I have loved the bamboo since I was a boy, and had learned much in the way of caring for it. A kindly gardener took me in as an assistant, and so I traveled all across this country. The years passed in the blink of an eye, and when I at last returned to Kyoto last year I learned that Robert Musgrave had died.”

William turned to look at Reginald.

“That was when I learned of the disappearance of Miss Rachel.”

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“I found Robert Musgrave’s conduct baffling,” continued Holmes, staring into the fire. “He expelled William from Hurlstone without conducting even a cursory inquiry. And he resented my presence at Hurlstone; not only did he seal the Chamber of the East of the East up tight, he even pressured the boarding school to silence Miss Adler. It was if he sought to bury any possibility that his daughter would be found. He was clearly frightened of something, and I suspected on several occasions that he might be responsible in some way for her disappearance.”

“My father hated the rumours about the chamber,” said Sir Musgrave. “They have circulated for many years, and when my father heard the staff gossiping he flew into a rage. Nothing but fairy tales and superstition, he said. Progress and harmony for mankind: our father drilled the motto of our house into us. A high-minded ideal, to be sure, yet one wonders whether it might not really be a statement of individual ambition, to shape the world as one deems fit. My father despised the unknown, the ungovernable. When Rachel disappeared into the mist, he must have seen it as a great betrayal, one that he found impossible to forgive.”

Robert Musgrave died eleven years after Miss Rachel disappeared, and hardly had he been laid to rest when William came to Hurlstone, late in the summer of last year. No one realized that he was the same man whom Robert had drummed out over a decade prior. But his credentials as a horticulturist were beyond question, and Reginald quickly resolved to hire him to tame the overgrown grove at Hurlstone.

“At first I hid the truth from Reginald,” said William. “I agonized over whether to confess to him, but over many a conversation here in the grove I came to believe that he was a trustworthy man. He did not seem the kind of man who would chase me away as his father did. Above all he was tormented by the facts of the case which had occurred twelve years ago, and I felt it my responsibility to tell him the truth.”

It had been a clear autumn evening, after the day’s duties were done. The soft chirruping of crickets came from all around as William stood in the round twilit clearing, the same clearing in which we now sat. The brick tower loomed overhead, and the pale crescent moon hung like a sliver of bone in the indigo sky.

Reginald walked into the clearing. He had gotten along with William from the first, and he would often come to have a friendly chat. That day he struck up a conversation about the ill-fated moon rocket project which his father had pursued so obsessively, and how it had all begun with the disappearance of his younger sister twelve years prior.

“That was when I confessed the truth to him,” said William.

“And did you believe him?” asked Holmes to Sir Musgrave, who shook his head.

“No. At first I couldn’t. Rachel’s disappearance brought on a wave of patronizing parasites who professed to know the truth of what had happened to her: reporters, diviners, amateur detectives…Madame Richborough and her spiritualist friends were among them, of course. But there was something about William that kept me from dismissing him as a petty charlatan. I searched the family records and found that indeed that my great-grandfather’s younger brother had vanished under mysterious circumstances from the library. I even discovered William’s diary and found within its pages a bookmark of pressed flowers which I knew Rachel had made; there is no question that she had been reading it before she disappeared.”

Following Rachel’s disappearance, Robert Musgrave had sealed the Chamber of the East of the East, allowing no one to go in or out. Soon the Chamber was forgotten, save the occasional mention in ghost stories. The night he discovered William’s diary, Reginald ventured alone into the old wing and stripped away the boards nailing the door to the chamber shut. The Chamber of the East of the East was open once more.

“I believed what William had told me. I believed that for twelve years, Rachel had been sleeping in that sealed room.” Reginald tossed another withered branch on the fire as he spoke. “And I understand now why it is that my younger sister was drawn to that room. It was not Father nor I who held up the House of Musgrave: it was Rachel. It must have worn on her, always having to play the perfect mademoiselle: a kind mistress to the waitstaff, an obedient daughter to our father, a devoted sister to me. She longed to get away from it all, and Father’s plans to marry her off must have been the final straw.”

The day after unsealing the Chamber of the East of the East, Reginald Musgrave headed into the bamboo grove. William was waiting for him, and together they began to devise a plan.

“I wanted to bring my sister back.”

“With Madame Richborough as a sacrifice?” said Holmes with raised eyebrows.

Sir Musgrave looked away.

Holmes continued: “The Chamber must have its sleeper. For twelve years it has been Miss Rachel, and before that it was William. In order to rescue your sister, you intended to have Madame Richborough take her place. And so you ordered Brunton to let her into the room. Fortunately things did not go according to plan.”

Sir Musgrave hung his head in shame, as did William.

“So you saw through everything then, Holmes?” interjected Irene Adler abruptly. When Holmes did not respond, she pressed on. “Why did you not act? You ought to have stopped this plot!”

“You intend to believe everything you have heard tonight, Miss Adler,” said Holmes finally, leveling his gaze at her. “Then consider what it means. In order to uncover the mystery of Miss Rachel’s disappearance, you must accept as fact the mystery of the Chamber of the East of the East. Yet the instant that you do so, you have ceased to become a detective. How can you hold on to your faith in truth and logic in the face of the existence of the unexplainable? What use is a detective when everything can be dismissed by a single word: magic? That is why I abandoned the investigation twelve years ago. Like Robert Musgrave, I too buried the matter in silence, so that I could preserve myself as a detective.”

“And now you want me to do the same?”

“You never should have involved yourself in the matter. This is what you will say: tonight, you saw nothing, you heard nothing, it was a quiet night at the Hurlstone manor. Some mysteries ought not to be solved.”

Irene Adler glowered squarely back at Holmes. In the golden firelight her face betrayed disappointment, and rage, and sadness. Then her lip quivered like a child’s, and tears brimmed at her almond-shaped eyes, glistening as they trickled down her cheeks. I could not remember the last time I had seen such raw emotion.

“How can you expect me to forget what I have seen?” she said quietly, wiping the tears away with balled fists.

“Miss Adler is right, Holmes,” said Reginald Musgrave. “One cannot simply forget.”

He looked around the round clearing, then up at the black shadow of the launch pad behind him. Above us the moon glowed silently in the sky.

“In his last years my father was obsessed with his moon rocket project,” he began. “I understand his pain now. To him, the mystery of the Chamber of the East of the East was something that ought to be buried and forgotten in the mists of history, an old wives’ tale that ought never be spoken of again. Surely it would never have occurred to him that it would reach out and snatch away his own beloved daughter. He could not simply accept that it could not be explained. That was why he sealed the chamber, and expelled William, and silenced all who knew about it, and tried so desperately to forget. Yet did that solve the problem? Of course it did not. Rachel loved the moon so, and I believe that in his own way my father was trying to bring her back. He died, in the end, of a broken heart.”

At the end of his tale he fell silent, pain etched into his features. Not one of us could find the words to assuage him, and so we could only stare glumly into the crackling bonfire.