Sherlock Holmes Investigates

 

And so our visitor began her tale.

"My name is Helen Steiner, and I am living with my stepfather, who is the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England, the Roylotts, on the western border of Surrey."

Holmes nodded his head. "The name is familiar to me," he said.

"The family was at one time among the richest in England, and its estates extended over the borders into Berkshire in the north, and Hampshire in the west. In the last century, however, four successive heirs were all of a dissipated and wasteful disposition; and the family ruin was eventually completed by a gambler in the days of the Regency. Nothing was left except a few acres of ground and the 200 year-old-house, which is itself crushed under a heavy mortgage. The last squire dragged out his existence there, living the horrible life of a poor aristocrat, but his only son, my stepfather, seeing that he must adapt himself to the new conditions, took a loan from a relative, which enabled him to obtain a medical degree. He went out to Calcutta, where by his professional skill and his force of character, he established a large practice. In a fit of anger, however, caused by some robberies in the house, he beat his butler to death, and narrowly escaped being hanged. As it was, he spent a long time in prison, and afterwards returned to England a morose and disappointed man.

Vocabulary:

Stepfather: The husband of a woman who has a child that is not his.
Saxons : The people of England who were conquered by the Normans in 1066.
Estates : Land owned by somebody.
Dissipated: Decadent, without morality.
Disposition : Character.
Regency: The time of George III’s madness, when the kingdom was ruled by his son (later George IV)
Crushed : Pressed flat by a heavy weight.
Mortgage : Money borrowed with a house as security.
Loan: Money borrowed from somebody.
Practice : The collective name for the patients of a doctor.
Fit : An attack of illness or emotion.
Morose : Angry and in a bad humour.