On a winter’s evening in 1888, at 221B, soon after the publication of A Study in Scarlet and around the time of the events in The Valley of Fear, Watson is berating Holmes for his untidiness and famous domestic peccadilloes: his habit of keeping cigars in the coal scuttle, stashing tobacco in a Persian slipper, and pinning letters to the mantelpiece with a jackknife. It is hard to disagree with Watson’s complaint that pistol practice is best saved for outdoors. Yet Holmes’s decoration of the wall with bullet holes that spell out “VR” (Victoria Regina) is not only evidence of his patriotism, it is also a deft piece of contextual data from Conan Doyle, as June 1887 had marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

It is Holmes’s lackadaisical housekeeping that prompts him to tell Watson about the “Musgrave Ritual.” Ruefully accepting Watson’s suggestion to tidy up, Holmes starts with a box containing a record of his earlier cases and chances on one that “really is something a little recherché,” withdrawing a set of perplexing items: an old, crumpled piece of paper, a weathered key, a wooden peg attached to some string, and some rusty metal discs—the residual traces of the case.

The 1943 movie Sherlock Holmes Faces Death takes the name and ritual from “The Musgrave Ritual,” but bears little resemblance to the original story.

After his success as a student in the case of “The Gloria Scott,” Holmes earned a reputation as an investigator at university, spurring several fellow students to offer him investigative work. Reginald Musgrave—a shy and aristocratic man—was one of them. Having been out of touch for four years, Musgrave visits Holmes at his Montague Street lodgings, near the British Museum (and close to where Conan Doyle once lived). Musgrave tells Holmes that his father died two years ago, and that he is now in possession of Hurlstone, the family home. In response to an enquiry about his career, Holmes remarks, “I have taken to living by my wits,” making him a paradigm of the self-made man. Musgrave is pleased to hear it, since there is a mystery to be solved and the police are unable to shed any light on the matter.

Musgrave explains that the mystery concerns the disappearance of his butler, Richard Brunton, an educated man who has served the family for over 20 years. He is a notorious womanizer and recently broke off his engagement to a maid, Rachel Howells, in favor of another servant, causing great uproar.

In the small hours of the previous Thursday night, Musgrave had been unable to sleep, and had gone to retrieve a book from the billiards room. He was alarmed to see a light coming from under the door of the library and, suspecting burglars, he picked up an old battle-ax from a wall display and peeped in through a crack in the door. He was amazed to see his butler examining “a slip of paper which looked like a map.” Musgrave then watched as Brunton headed to the bureau, removed a second document, and began to study it carefully and meticulously. Furious, Musgrave confronted Brunton, who turned “livid with fear” and thrust the maplike paper into his pocket. Musgrave fired him on the spot, but Brunton managed to barter for a week’s notice.

Musgrave explains to Holmes that the document taken from the bureau was a strange old family “observance” called the Musgrave Ritual. This document is no secret, and consists of a series of arcane-sounding questions and answers that, for generations, each Musgrave has read out upon reaching maturity. Musgrave is certain the Ritual is of no relevance to the case, saying it is of “no practical use whatever.” Holmes clearly has other ideas, but allows his client to continue.

It was three days later that Brunton mysteriously vanished. His bed had not been slept in, and no one knows how he could have left the house—the doors and windows were locked. Also, his effects (except for a black suit and slippers) were all left behind. A thorough search of labyrinthine Hurlstone, parts of which date back to 1607, proved fruitless—no trace of the butler could be found.

In the meantime, another curious incident had occurred. When Rachel Howells, the second maid and Brunton’s snubbed fiancée, told Musgrave that the butler was missing, she suffered a hysterical attack and had to be confined to bed. Three days later, she too disappeared. Footprints ran from her window, across the lawn, and stopped at the edge of a lake. Musgrave and the staff suspected the worst of the “poor demented girl,” but dredging the lake had revealed only an old linen bag filled with “a mass of old rusted and discoloured metal and several dull-coloured pieces of pebble or glass.”

Holmes’s curiosity is aroused, and he says he must see the Ritual. Although Musgrave cannot see its relevance, he duly brings the document with him to Montague Street to show Holmes, pointing out that there is no date inscribed on it, but that the spelling is of the mid-17th century—almost the same age as the house itself. Holmes instantly grasps the document as being “immensely practical,” declaring the butler an extremely clever man with “a clearer insight than ten generations of his masters.”

That afternoon, Holmes travels down to Hurlstone with Musgrave. As he describes his journey, he intones to Watson that it had already become clear to him “that there were not three separate mysteries here, but one only”: the Ritual, as well as the disappearance of Brunton and Howells, all share a common denominator. To Holmes, it is clear that the Ritual is in fact a cipher, giving measurements that plot a course to a particular spot. If Holmes can find that, then he will almost certainly discover the secret that will enable him to solve the entire mystery.

The detective works through the document, applying his usual logic. The oak tree is easy to identify—it is situated directly in front of the house and extremely ancient, so it would have certainly been there when the Ritual was drawn up. He asks Musgrave if there is an elm, and learns that one was cut down after being struck by lightning 10 years before, but a mark on the lawn shows where the tree once stood (midway between the oak and the house). When questioned on the height of the tree, Musgrave conveniently recalls from his trigonometry lessons that it was exactly 64 feet tall. Holmes enquires if the butler ever asked him the same question and Musgrave, astonished, recalls that he had indeed, only a few months ago.

After examining the Musgrave Ritual, Holmes deduces what Brunton had already discovered, that the Ritual contained directions to a hidden treasure, entrusted to the Musgraves centuries ago. At a certain time of year, the directions can be followed using the shadows cast by the trees in the grounds of Hurlstone, Musgrave’s estate.

Holmes intuits from the wording of the Ritual that the starting spot must be the point that the elm’s shadow would have reached at the exact moment when the sun is just higher than the oak. He puts a rod into the ground where the elm had been, and follows its shadow to a point calculated on the basis of the elm’s 64-foot height. This takes him to a spot by the house that is marked by a “conical depression”—more evidence of Brunton having also followed the same path. From this starting point, Holmes begins to step north, east, south, and west, following the words of the Ritual. They lead him through a heavy old door in the house’s oldest part and into a stone passageway behind it where the “sun shone full upon the passage floor.” Holmes is convinced he has found the correct location.

However, when he looks down, hoping to see evidence of a hiding place beneath the paving—as the Ritual implies—to his dismay he sees that the paving stones were cemented together many years ago and Brunton cannot possibly have moved them. But Musgrave tells him that there is a cellar hidden beneath, and leads him down. Now it is clear they have found the correct spot—and they are not the only ones to have visited recently.

Here, in the dark cellar, they find Brunton’s “shepherd’s-check muffler” tied around an iron ring that is attached to a large, heavy flagstone in the floor. Although it might strike the reader as odd that this room was never investigated in the supposedly “cellar to garret” search, the intensifying excitement leaves no time to wonder about such intricacies. Anticipating what they might find, Holmes asks Musgrave to summon the county police. Then, with a police constable, Holmes lifts up the flagstone and peers into the hole beneath. There he sees a square chamber, a little deeper than the height of a man: on one side is a “brass-bound wooden box,” with an old key in its lock. On the other, a gruesome, black-clad corpse: the over-inquisitive butler.

Although the Ritual wording is beguiling, Holmesian experts agree that, in reality, there is no way the L-shaped house, the oak tree, and the elm could have been arranged in such a way that the Ritual makes sense; in addition, there are various other issues that have plagued the story since its publication. For instance, in the original version of the story, the reference to the time of year (June) was absent from the Ritual; Conan Doyle added it later, presumably after realizing that it would have a vital effect on the shadows’ trajectories. Yet even with this addition, the Ritual still doesn’t specify the time of day, which would put the elm’s shadow in an opposite direction depending on whether it was morning or evening. The story also does not account for new trees growing during the three centuries since the Ritual was penned; and the final two steps that lead into the corridor are made moving west, even though “the setting sun shone full upon the passage floor.” However, such discrepancies play no part in the thrilling climax of this story.

This illustration by Sidney Paget first appeared in The Strand Magazine. It shows Holmes, right, examining the ancient oak tree that was the first step mentioned in the Musgrave Ritual.

The discovery of Brunton’s body is tantalizingly inconclusive: Holmes has only solved part of the mystery. He reaches the full solution by using his trademark technique of putting “myself in the man’s place.” It is an apposite remark, since he has literally been tracing Brunton’s steps to the letter, following the felon’s every move in a manner more pronounced than anywhere else in the canon.

There is a moment of cheeky braggadocio from Holmes when he tells Watson that “the matter was simplified by Brunton’s intelligence being quite first-rate,” meaning (given Holmes’s own intellect) he didn’t need to take “the personal equation” into account. This was originally an astronomers’ term, coined when they realized that scientific measurements could be affected by subtle personal bias. Holmes’s use of the word preempts its employment in the 20th century by psychologists like Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung, who highlighted the effect of individual subjectivity in psychological judgments.

Holmes establishes that Brunton would have needed an accomplice to lift the flagstone, and correctly surmises that he had sought the help of his old flame, Rachel Howells. But Brunton had not counted on his former lover vindictively kicking away the wooden wedge keeping the stone raised, leaving him to suffocate in the airless chamber.

It is clear that the “treasure” Brunton was after was the bag of objects found in the lake, where Rachel must have thrown them before she fled. Having earlier painted her as hysterical, Conan Doyle now relies on another stereotype: her impulsive vengeance is written off as a sign of her “excitable Welsh temperament.”

The dirty coins beside Brunton’s corpse are from the time of Charles I, so Musgrave’s general dating of the Ritual was correct. He then says that his ancestor Ralph Musgrave had been a prominent Cavalier and “right-hand man to Charles II in his wanderings.” With a quick polish, Holmes achieves a dazzling shine on one of the old gems, and realizes the “double ring” of rusted metal is in fact the lost crown of the Stuarts, and the dull stones are its gems. All had been safely stored at Hurlstone in anticipation of the restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War.

In reality, the Stuart crown was melted down, but Conan Doyle exploits an alluring—and even historically plausible—possibility. Nevertheless, the “unfortunate oversight” of whichever Musgrave descendant failed to communicate the significance of the Ritual as successfully as the Ritual itself, meaning Charles II never reclaimed his crown, is a little perfunctory.

Holmes’s comment that “nothing was ever heard” of Rachel is a loose end as uncharacteristic of the detective as of Conan Doyle—chiefly given that she is surely guilty of the worst transgression. However, it is also worth noting there is one more crime that goes unpunished: Holmes never did get around to tidying up his room.