"The Musgrave Ritual"

The Musgrave Ritual.

The case begins Thursday, June 23, 1881.

Why?

TIME PASSES ON BAKER STREET:
"It was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them." "Month after month his papers accumulated until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner."

SEASON OF THE TELLING:
"I have some papers here," said my friend Sherlock Holmes as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to suggest to him that, as he had finished pasting extracts into his commonplace book, he might employ the next two hours in making our room a little more habitable."

THE STORY’S PLACE IN HOLMES’S BOX OF CASES: "Here’s the record of the Tarleton murders, and the case of Vamberry, the wine merchant, and the adventure of the old Russian woman, and the singular affair of the aluminum crutch, as well as a full account of Ricoletti of the club-foot, and his abominable wife. And here—ah, now, this really is something a little recherche." "He dived his arm down to the bottom of the chest . . ."

REFERENCES TO OTHER CASES:
"You may remember how the affair of the Gloria Scott, and my conversation with the unhappy man whose fate I told you of, first turned my attention in the direction of the profession which has become my life’s work." "Even when you knew me first, at the time of the affair which you have commemorated in ‘A Study in Scarlet,’ I had already established a considerable, though not a very lucrative, connection."

HOLMES’S RESIDENCE AT THE TIME OF THE CASE: "When I first came up to London I had rooms in Montague Street, just round the corner from the British Museum . . ."

THE SOURCE OF THE CASE:
"Now and again cases came in my way, principally through the introduction of old fellow-students, for during my last years at the university there was a good deal of talk there about myself and my methods. The third of these cases was that of the Musgrave Ritual . . ."

LENGTH OF TIME SINCE HOLMES SAW MUSGRAVE: "For four years I had seen nothing of him until one morning he walked into my room in Montague Street."

TIME SINCE MUSGRAVE’S FATHER DIED:
"He was carried off about two years ago."

THE MONTHS OF BRUNTON’S LOVE LIFE:
"A few months ago we were in hopes that he was about to settle down again, for he became engaged to Rachel Howells, our second housemaid; but he has thrown her over since then and taken up with Janet Tregellis . . ."

THE SOMETIMES-SUPPRESSED COUPLET:
"What was the month?"
"Sixth from the first."

THE DAY MUSGRAVE CATCHES BRUNTON:
"One day last week—on Thursday night, to be more exact."

BRUNTON’S PLEA FOR TIME:
"Only a week, sir? A fortnight—say at least a fortnight!"

THE DAYS AFTER MUSGRAVE CAUGHT BRUNTON:
"For two days after this Brunton was most assiduous in his attention to his duties. I made no allusion to what had passed and waited with some curiosity to see how he would cover his disgrace. On the third morning, however, he did not appear . . ."

DAYS AFTER BRUNTON’S DISAPPEARANCE THAT RACHEL DISAPPEARS: 
"For two days Rachel Howells had been so ill, sometimes delirious, sometimes hysterical, that a nurse had been employed to sit up with her at night. On the third night after Brunton’s disappearance, the nurse, finding her patient sleeping nicely, had dropped into a nap . . ."

DAYS AFTER RACHEL’S DISAPPEARANCE BEFORE HOLMES CALLED IN: 
"Although we made every possible search and inquiry yesterday, we know nothing of the fate either of Rachel Howells or of Richard Brunton."

HOLMES GETS DOWN TO BUSINESS:
"The same afternoon saw us both at Hurlstone."

ORIGINS OF HURLSTONE:
"Over the low, heavy-lintelled door, in the centre of this old part, is chiselled the date, 1607, but experts are agreed that the beams and stonework are really much older than this."

AGE OF THE OAK:
"It was there at the Norman Conquest in all probability." 

TIME WITHOUT AN ELM:
"It was struck by lightning ten years ago."

WHAT THE BARING-GOULD ANNOTATED SAYS:
October 2, 1879. 

WHAT ZEISLER, THE KING OF CHRONOLOGY, SAYS:
October 2, 1879.

THE BIRLSTONE RAILWAY’S TIMETABLE:
This pretty little puzzle was handled with such impressive mathematical and cosmological skill by Ernest Bloomfield Zeisler that even Baring-Gould bowed to his mastery in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. But the Smash must follow a different path, as always, and this time that path leads all the way back to Charles the First.

"What was the month?" asks the ancient ritual, in a passage mysteriously suppressed in many editions. The answer: "Sixth from the first." And while others might debate what exactly was the first month on the calendar back in 1649 A.D., my preferred thought is that "the first" refers to the man whom this whole ritual revolves around: Charles the First. While some might argue that he wasn’t called "Charles the First" immediately following his death, the passage merely refers to "the first," and, indeed, Charles was first in the minds of his followers, and as Holmes says, the advent of Charles II was already foreseen. Charles the First died on January 30, 1649. Six months later would have been June 30.

After dating "The Gloria Scott" in July of 1880 and discussed Holmes meeting Watson in the summer of 1881 back when A Study in Scarlet was the topic, it seems that I’m going to have to go with June of 1881 for this case’s placement. Brunton begs for "at least a fortnight" more on the job, presumably to finish his treasure hunt — a treasure hunt that needs to be performed on as close to June 30th as possible. A fortnight (fourteen days) before that is June 16th, a Thursday. (How perfect is that? Brunton was discovered on a Thursday.) Counting the days in Musgrave’s narrative, it then follows that Holmes took up the case on Thursday, June 23, 1881 — just in time to recreate the ritual on his own.