Dot and Mr Holmes are talking about Giles Langton – and how he had to stop being a scientist because he was accused of stealing an invention thought up by Sir Charles d’Auberley’s son Herbert. Even though he hadn’t. And the invention was - a ‘Horse Soother’…
I need to catch up, thought Dot. I really do!
She put the ‘Chronicle of Physical Sciences’ back on a little table in front of her and took a deep breath. She had to ask, but she was frightened of looking stupid.
“Mr Holmes” she said “What is the Horse Soother, please?” she asked.
“Ah!” said Mr Holmes. “I’m so sorry, my dear – I should have explained!”
RE-lief, thought Dot.
“Well what it was meant to be” he went on, pacing up and down so that his long shadow went back and forth across the hundreds books on the walls “was a device for making horses calm. You know you have to “break a horse in”, so you can ride it?”
Dot nodded. There were some horses and ponies at Mount Park Riding School where she went that never seemed to have been broken in!
“Well, the claim for Giles’ ‘Majestic Horse Soother’ ” and here Mr Holmes looked very fierce “and I think we can safely say it really was his idea, was that his ‘Horse Soother’, a device that played soft sounds in the horse’s ear, would mean that a horse would be broken in in a matter of minutes. So you wouldn’t need to spend hours, days even, making the horse accept a rider on its back. Just think of the time and money that would save someone who owned a lot of horses!”
“Like Sir Charles?” said Dot.
“Just like him!” answered Mr Holmes, taking out his pipe and pointing it at her. “And everyone else who needs to break in a new horse – carriage men, cab drivers, carters, hunt masters – everyone!”
Dot paused. Of course! In the Victorian times, there were hundreds of thousands of horses all over the country, doing all the jobs we use cars and lorries and vans for nowadays – the ‘Horse Soother’ would have been really important!
“So…” she said “Sir Charles stole this invention, said Herbert had thought it up somehow – just to make money?”
“That is what I believe” said Sherlock Holmes, looking very serious. “That, I think, is the “great wrong” that you overheard Lady Sarah talking about, from your window. And that may be why someone is trying to get back at Sir Charles, in revenge – to kill him with all these ghostly happenings!”
Dot gasped. “But how?”
“Well” said Mr Holmes “You saw how he was tonight, before supper. He’s a man who gets very cross or very upset very easily. That’s what the “d’Auberley Choleric” means – when they get very angry, or worked up about something. It runs in their family. No fewer than SEVEN of Sir Charles’ ancestors have dropped down dead after getting angry - or after having a shock.”
Apart from Black Sir Crispin, thought Dot – dragged to his doom by the horse he had stolen from his victim Sir Thomas Manners. She shuddered at the thought of it.
Mr Holmes stopped pacing up and down for a moment and shook his head. “I was truly concerned I might have done it myself this very evening, when I said the words ‘Horse Soother’!”
“Now” he went on “If you wanted to take revenge, what better way than to get Sir Charles to kill himself – by getting so worked up he would have a heart attack, and die? By, let’s say, trying to scare and upset everyone at Dendringham Hall - by bringing to life a tale of a curse and a ghostly horseman?”
He looked hard into Dot’s eyes.
“And who do we know who loves and cares for Giles Langton – and might just have the will to do that?”
Dot opened her mouth to answer – but before she could reply, they heard a creaking of the floorboards outside the door of the reading room - a soft footstep passing, on the way towards the stairs that led to the floor above... and the steps to the attic!
