the adventure of the speckled band story

Holmes and Watson journey out to Surrey later that afternoon.

Holmes remarks that he himself is stronger than he looks and he bends the poker back into shape. He then grabs a fire poker, bends it as show of his strength, and leaves them. When Holmes refuses to say anything, Roylott tells them not to meddle in his affairs. He tells Holmes and Watson that he’s been tracing Helen’s movements, so he knows that she has just paid them a visit and he demands to know what she told them. Not long after Helen leaves their apartment, a large man with a threatening demeanor enters the room. Holmes and Watson then make plans to meet her at the Stoke Moran Manor later that day so they can begin investigating the mysterious incidents. Not long after this, Helen begins to hear the same low whistling sound that Julia had described to her. Soon after she makes the announcement, renovations begin on the exterior wall next to her bedroom, so Helen is forced to move into her sister’s former room, next door to Roylott. The sisters were in the habit of locking their doors and shuttering their windows-Roylott keeps a wild cheetah and baboon around the property as pets-so Julia’s death fully baffles Helen.īy the time she comes to visit Holmes and Watson, Helen herself has become engaged. Julia said, “It was the band! The speckled band!” and died. Helen ran over to see what happened and Julia, in a state of shock, fell to the ground in convulsions. This went on for some time, until, shortly before Julia’s wedding date, Helen heard a scream coming from her sister’s bedroom. Shortly thereafter, Julia told Helen that she began to hear a low whistling sound in the middle of the night. Two years ago, Helen tells Holmes and Watson, her sister got engaged. Stoner had left an inheritance to Roylott, with a stipulation that should her daughters get married, they would receive an annual income from this fund. Helen’s mother died and Roylott moved back into his family’s decaying Stoke Moran Manor, along with Helen and her twin sister Julia, all of them living in adjacent bedrooms in the building’s one inhabitable wing. When he was younger, Roylott embarked on a medical career in India, where he married the widowed Mrs.

Grimesby Roylott, is the sole remaining descendent of an old family whose fortune has been slowly reduced to nearly nothing after generations of waste and gambling. Watson’s telling of the narrative starts when a young woman, Helen Stoner, pays them a visit one morning, in desperate need of their help. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” begins with Watson recounting how, of the nearly seventy cases that he and Sherlock Holmes have embarked upon together as a detective duo, the one that he is about to narrate is among the most unusual of them.

The adventure of the speckled band story