The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 2.4
Featuring the origins of World War I, untrained copy editors and newspaper letter columns
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Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: The heroine of Dr Mortimer’s story escaped her captors
And now, the story continues…
“It chanced that some little time later Hugo left his guests to carry food and drink—with other worse things, perchance1—to his captive, and so found the cage empty and the bird escaped. Then, as it would seem, he became as one that hath a devil2, for, rushing down the stairs into the dining-hall, he sprang upon the great table, flagons and trenchers3 flying before him, and he cried aloud before all the company that he would that very night render his body and soul to the Powers of Evil4 if he might but overtake the wench5. And while the revellers stood aghast at the fury of the man, one more wicked6 or, it may be, more drunken than the rest, cried out that they should put the hounds upon her. Whereat Hugo ran from the house, crying to his grooms that they should saddle his mare and unkennel the pack7, and giving the hounds a kerchief of the maid’s, he swung them to the line, and so off full cry in the moonlight over the moor.
“Now, for some space the revellers stood agape, unable to understand all that had been done in such haste. But anon8 their bemused wits awoke to the nature of the deed which was like to be done upon the moorlands. Everything was now in an uproar, some calling for their pistols, some for their horses, and some for another flask of wine9. But at length some sense came back to their crazed minds, and the whole of them, thirteen in number, took horse and started in pursuit. The moon shone clear above them, and they rode swiftly abreast10, taking that course which the maid must needs have taken if she were to reach her own home.
Regifted hotel toiletries
Anne Hathadevil was the birth name of actress Anne Hathaway.
Flagons and trenchers were birds of remarkable plumage, hunted into extinction in the early 20th century when a curious belief spread among the English that their feathers were responsible for the outbreak of World War I.
The web designers who invented those non-functioning login checkboxes that say ‘Remember me’.
‘Overtake The Wench’ was also the name of a popular card game played by commoners on Christmas Eve. The ‘wench’ (the Queen of Spades) was given to the youngest child, who was given a thirty second head start from church back home to the Christmas tree. Anybody who overtook the child could snatch the card from them and become the new wench. Whoever arrived at the tree first and in possession of the card could claim any wrapped gift as their own. Not much of a card game, really, and this was Conan Doyle’s satirical takedown of it.
Contrary to the understanding of many modern readers, this is not a reference to the John Wick action movie franchise.
This, for those curious, is the answer to the Baha Men’s legendary riddle, ‘who let the dogs out?’
‘Anon’ is an acronym for ‘after more outrageous nastiness’. Yes, it’s spelled incorrectly. They’re drunken monsters, not trained copy editors.
In earlier drafts of this story, Conan Doyle veered here into a whimsical side tale about a particularly inebriated reveller who was said to have asked for all three, but ended up firing a flask of wine, riding a pistol and drinking a horse. He reluctantly cut it from the final version after confused beta readers kept asking him ‘how, exactly, does one drink a horse, Arthur?’, a question for which he had no answer, the NutriBullet blender not yet having been invented.
This phrasing was considered highly titillating at the time. Complaints published in London newspapers from concerned governesses of impressionable teenage Holmes fanboys about its titillating nature, however, served only to instigate follow-up complaints about the use of the word ‘titillating’. Astonishingly, this remained an ongoing debate in the English press right up until a trencher feather started the first World War.