Приключения Шерлока Холмса / The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (сборник)

Interesting facts about Great Britain

Covent Garden is a historic marketplace which occupies a large area in the London City center. During the Middle Ages the territory belonged to Westminster Abbey. There were gardens and also an area where the markets and got its name – at first it sounded as “Convent Garden”, in which convent means monastery.

Henry VIII took for himself the land which belonged to Westminster Abbey, including the convent garden, and his son granted it as a gift to John Russel, Earl of Bedford. His family owned the land from 1552 to 1918. There emerged new buildings, piazza and the church of St. Paul’s. Gradually it began to be associated with an overcrowded place where poverty and crime throve. For example, Covent Garden impressed Charles Dickens who exclaimed: “Good Heaven! What wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want, and beggary, arose in my mind out of that place!”

Writing

7. What is peculiar about other places mentioned in the chapter? Choose one of them and prepare a report on it.

IV

“Here we are!” said Holmes cheerly as we entered the room. “The fire looks very seasonable in this weather. You look cold, Mr. Ryder. Please take the basket-chair. I will just put on my slippers before we settle this little matter of yours. Now, then! You want to know what became of those geese?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Or rather, I believe, of that goose. It was one bird, I imagine in which you were interested – white, with a black bar across the tail.”

Ryder quivered with emotion. “Oh, sir,” he cried, “can you tell me where it went to?”

“It came here.”

“Here?”

“Yes, and it turned out to be a most remarkable bird. I don’t wonder that you should be interested in it. It laid an egg after it was dead – the brightest little blue egg that ever was seen. I have it here in my museum.”

* * *

Our visitor staggered to his feet and clutched the fireplace with his right hand. Holmes unlocked his strongbox and held up the blue carbuncle, which shone out like a star, with a cold brilliant, many-pointed radiance. Ryder stood staring at it with a tense face, uncertain whether to claim or to disown it.

“The game’s up, Ryder,” said Holmes quietly. “Hold up, man, or you’ll be into the fire! Give him an arm back into his chair, Watson. He’s not got blood enough[71] to go in for crime with impunity. Give him a drop of brandy. So! Now he looks a little more human. What a shrimp it is, to be sure!”

For a moment he had staggered and nearly fallen, but the brandy brought a shade of color into his cheeks, and he sat staring with frightened eyes at his accuser.

“I have almost every link in my hands, and all the proofs which I could possibly need, so there is little which you need to tell me. Still, that little may as well be cleared up to make the case complete. You had heard, Ryder, of this blue stone of the Countess of Morcar’s?”

“It was Catherine Cusack who told me of it,” said he in a crackling voice.

“I see – her ladyship’s[72] waiting-maid. Well, the temptation of sudden wealth so easily acquired was too much for you, as it has been for better men before you; but you were not very scrupulous in the means you used. It seems to me, Ryder, that there is the making of a very pretty villain in you[73]. You knew that this man Horner, the plumber, had been concerned in some such matter before, and that suspicion would rest the more readily upon him. What did you do, then? You made some small job in my lady’s room – you and your confederate Cusack – and you managed that he should be sent for. Then, when he had left, you opened the jewel-case, raised the alarm, and this unfortunate man was arrested. You then—”