The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman is a Pride and Prejudice mystery, serialized here in chapters. This opening chapter is presented in the voice of Dr. John H. Watson; the manuscript that follows is narrated throughout by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"John," said my wife one evening last spring, looking up from a litter of papers that had colonised the whole of the dining table, "what was your grandmother Watson's name before she married?"

I considered the question over my pipe and was obliged to confess I had no idea.

"Your great-grandmother, then."

"My dear Mary, I could not swear to my grandmother's Christian name without notice. I am a doctor and a biographer. I leave the begats to the clergy."

She made a note and went back to her papers, and I thought no more of it. Mary had taken up the study of her own family that winter, in the patient way that women of her temper take up such things, with a deal of correspondence and a great many afternoons given over to parish registers. She had run her own people back as far as the registers would carry her, found them respectable and unremarkable in equal measure, and turned, for want of fresh quarry, to mine.

My people are north-country, and the north does not throw things away: within the fortnight a cousin of mine near Scarborough had sent down two hampers of family papers that nobody had opened since the Regency. Mary worked through them with her registers at her elbow. Somewhere in the second hamper was a journal, kept by some gentleman of the family in a hand like a cavalry charge; she gave an evening to it, reported that it concerned chiefly partridges, and set it aside in favour of the parish registers, which at least were legible. For three weeks the dining table was lost to us. Then one evening she set a single sheet beside my plate and stood watching me with a look of barely suppressed glee.

"Read it through twice," she said. "You will want to."

The line she had traced was mine, not hers; and it ran back, through a marriage in the early part of the century, to a Hertfordshire family of small fortune and considerable wit, and from there, by a turning I shall set out in its proper place, into the maternal ancestry of the two men I knew best in the world.

I read it through twice. Then I put on my coat and went to Baker Street.

Holmes heard me out without interruption, which was itself remarkable. When I had done he sat a moment with his fingertips together in the old attitude.

"You will want my brother," he said. "Mycroft has had the documents for some years."

"You knew of this?"

"I knew that there were papers in the family. Mycroft keeps such things." He reached for his pipe. "Go to the Diogenes, Watson. He will receive you, which you may take as the measure of how little the matter excites him."

I had my hand on the door when he spoke again.

"You understand that I am pleased to own you for a cousin," he said, without looking up from the pipe. "But you must not flatter yourself that the discovery raises you in my estimation. A man could not have been more valuable to me than you have already contrived to be, and the matter was settled long before our kinship was discovered." He struck a match. "Give my regards to Mycroft. He will not return them, but the form should be observed."

It is the nearest thing to a sentiment I ever had from him, and he buried it, as he buried all such things, under a remark about something else. I went down the stairs better pleased than the words alone would account for.

Mycroft Holmes received me in the Stranger's Room of the Diogenes Club the following afternoon, immense and immovable, and confirmed the whole of it before I had got my hat off. "Sit down, Doctor. Sherlock wired me this morning. You will want the manuscript."

"You have known of this — how long?"

"The better part of ten years."

"And it did not strike you as worth mentioning?"

"It struck me as a fact." He looked at me the way he looks at a column of figures that has added up correctly. "An interesting fact. I considered whether it bore upon anything, concluded that it did not, and gave my attention to matters that did. Had the connexion ever become relevant to any business in hand, you would have heard of it within the hour."

"Relevant to business," I said. "My kinship by blood to you and your brother?"

"Just so."

I have known few men who could deliver so extraordinary a thing so flatly, and I did not try to make him feel it more than he did. One does not improve Mycroft by prodding him.

He fetched the manuscript himself, trusting it to no club servant. It was a great square parcel, wrapped against the dust, heavier than it looked.

"What is it?" I asked. "Mary's paper goes no further than the names."

"An account of certain events in Hertfordshire and Kent, a matter of eighty years ago, set down some while afterward by the lady to whom they occurred. She had it privately circulated among the family. I have read it once." He pushed the club's ledger across for my signature. "I shall tell you nothing else about it, and within the week you will thank me for that."

"Is it so dull?"

"It is the other thing," said Mycroft, and rang for my coat.

It was long, and I read it through twice before I understood why I could not put it down. I had gone to it as a curiosity of the blood: a chance to see, as it were, the rough ore from which two such singular intelligences had been refined. I found an account, written by a lady of uncommon penetration, of the man she married; and in that man I met, set down plainly for the first time, a temper I had been studying at close quarters for the better part of twenty years without ever quite getting the measure of it.

The lady, whom I shall call Elizabeth Darcy, was the keenest observer I have encountered on the page, and she missed very little. But the gift the manuscript explained to me was her husband's. In her account of Mr. Darcy I came at last upon the thing that years of watching Sherlock Holmes light a pipe and pronounce upon a stranger's regiment, his griefs, and his bootmaker had never made clear to me: what such a faculty costs the man who carries it, and what it asks of those obliged to live within range of it. Elizabeth Darcy reveals her husband to us. Her husband, in turn, has made my friend legible to me at last. The debt runs in that direction, and I am content to leave it there.

There is one further figure in these pages whom I cannot pass without a word, though I shall be brief, for the comparison does no kindness to anyone. The lady's father, a gentleman of wit and indolence in equal measure, sits among his books while the affairs of his house go forward without his hand. He sees everything and stirs for nothing. I have sat in the Stranger's Room of the Diogenes Club and watched the same economy of effort in a far greater mind, applied to far greater questions, and arriving too often at the same repose. I am fond of Mycroft Holmes. I will say no more than that.

One smaller irony I set down once and then leave alone: that it should fall to me, descended through the elder and gentler of the two sisters, to lay the younger sister's manuscript before the public. Elizabeth Darcy would, I think, have been amused. She was amused by most things, including herself, which is among the reasons one trusts her.

It was Mary who closed the circle. On the evening I finished the manuscript the second time, I told her something of what it contained; and she sat very still through the better part of it, and then went out of the room without a word, and came back carrying the journal with the unfortunate handwriting.

"John," she said. "The partridge gentleman was called Charles Bingley."

We read it together that night, she deciphering and I attending, until the candles wanted replacing. The diarist found in the second hamper was the amiable gentleman mentioned in these pages: the friend at Mr. Darcy's elbow, the husband of the elder sister, my own great-grandfather. He kept his cheerful, blotted, headlong record at the same time that the lady of this manuscript was watching everything he missed.

I will be honest about what I found in it, since the reader will discover it in any case. Mr. Bingley saw a great deal and understood very little of it, and set the whole down with perfect fidelity and no suspicion of what he carried. He records that his friend was grave, and gives three sentences to the covey. He is never once ahead of events. He is kind about everyone, including one or two persons about whom kindness was an error of some magnitude. And I read him with a discomfort that took me several entries to place, until Mary placed it for me by laughing at something I had not thought was a joke. I have passed my life at the elbow of a man who reads a stranger's history in his watch-chain, recording faithfully what I saw, and understanding it afterward, when it was explained to me. I know the office. It appears to be hereditary.

Three practical matters, and I have done.

First, as to discretion. The events the manuscript relates were grave, and some of those concerned left descendants who do not deserve to inherit the knowledge of them. I have altered the names of the guilty and of their nearest kin, and a handful of places besides. I have given away nothing of the resolution, and the reader who hopes I will spare him the lady's own unfolding of the business will be disappointed, and rightly. It is her story. She tells it in her own order.

Second, as to her manner of telling it. Elizabeth Darcy wrote these pages a great many years after the events they describe, from the settled vantage of a long marriage and a changed world. She knew, as she wrote, how every doubt resolved and every danger ended, and she declines, almost entirely, to make use of that knowledge. She keeps herself inside the season she is describing, with every error live and unredeemed, and she does not reach back from safety to comfort her younger self or to warn the reader. It is a discipline I have rarely seen sustained for ten pages together, and she sustains it for four hundred. I have tried to honour it by keeping out of her way.

Third, as to the journal. The lady's account cannot follow the gentlemen into the gun-room, onto the London road, behind the doors where her husband's part of the business was done. At those few points where her page cannot see, I have set in an entry of Mr. Bingley's in its proper place in the chronology. I have corrected nothing beyond what legibility demanded. The hand is dreadful and the spelling original, and Mary, who transcribed the entries, wishes it recorded that she has earned her place on this title page twice over. The reader will be ahead of the diarist on every page of his that follows, which is as it should be. He was ahead of nobody in his life, and was the better loved for it. The reader will always know whose page he is on.

When I had finished the manuscript the first time, I sent a note round to the Diogenes conceding that Mycroft had been right to tell me nothing. His reply was on my breakfast table by nine o'clock: "Of course. You now understand why I read it only once."

I have thought about that sentence a good deal since. The reader who finishes these pages will know what he meant by it — and will know, too, why a man who forgets nothing chose, in this one case, never to look again into the mirror it provided him, reflecting a man much like himself, and another man much like his brother, in the long-ago days of the Prince Regent.

— J. H. W.