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clutter of statues, memorials, and religious bric-a-brac that family chapels tended to collect over the centuries.
    With one modern exception. Beside the door, gazing across the intervening pews at the altar, was the portrait of a woman: thin, grey-eyed, with a nose too aquiline for conventional beauty. Her force of personality dominated the silent room.
    And something else: the silver-and-pearl brooch at her throat. My hand rose of its own volition to touch this very necklace, resting against my own skin, a most uncharacteristic present from Holmes on my eighteenth birthday. Inside it was a miniature image of his grandmother, the sister of the artist who had painted it, Horace Vernet. That side of the Holmes family—a family otherwise composed of stolid English country squires—proved to his mind (as he had once mused to Watson) that art in the blood was liable to take the strangest forms: surely only the artistic gift for observation and deduction could explain the marked abilities of both Holmes brothers.
    The tiny miniature did not give much scope for the artist’s gift of observation, but this portrait manifestly did. She appeared to be about my own age, but even in youth, she shone with the same blazing intelligence and understanding as the man at my side.
    “Your mother?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    She had died when Holmes was eleven. But for all his reaction now, the portrait might not have been there. When he had closed the door again, Holmes walked past me to the centre of the room and spread out his arms to declaim at the altar:
    ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.
    His voice, by nature somewhat high-pitched, was gathered by that vaulted ceiling and ushered back down at us, resonating like a struck G string. When he stopped speaking, the stones continued to murmur the words to themselves. Something like a whispering gallery, only delivering its sounds to all corners simultaneously.
    I was struck by a thought. “You’ve played the violin in here, haven’t you?”
    He turned and grinned. “Only when the vicar was out of earshot. If he caught me, I’d get a beating.”
    For a brief fraction of an instant, I saw the boy beneath the greying man. At my startled reaction, his humour faded. “What?” he asked.
    “Oh, Holmes. I wish—I wish we’d met when you were young.”
    “You’d have found me priggish, cocksure, and impatient. Just ask Mrs Hudson.”
    “Did she…? Oh, of course—you couldn’t have been more than, what, twenty, when you let rooms from her on Baker Street.”
    “About that. Though we’d met somewhat earlier.”
    “Had you? I feel I know so little about your past.”
    He snorted. “Yet the rest of the world seems to think it knows me all too well, thanks to Watson and his friend Doyle.”
    “When did you—”
    “Russell, this is hardly the time. I’d like to take a closer look at what’s going on at the front of the house, before we bring our ‘guests’ here.”
    Meekly, I followed. But as we passed out of the chapel, his gaze rose in a brief, pained, and involuntary glance, telling me beyond doubt that tonight’s labours were well justified: this place mattered to him.
    We spent an hour exploring first the grounds nearest the chapel, then what we could see of the house itself. As we stood pressed among the rhododendrons that flanked the entrance drive, my mind trying (and failing) to see any signs of Holmes in this most conventional of English façades, a sudden play of head-lamps came from the lane behind us. We ducked down, watching a lorry pass by. To my surprise, it came to a halt at the front entrance. A man in formal dress came out of the door, followed by a footman and maid who, under the other man’s direction, helped the lorry’s driver unload a number of anonymous crates.
    “Odd place