#the fun bits

[quill-of-thoth]

Letters from Watson: The Engineer's Thumb

Part 1: The Fun Bits

Hatherly is "exceedingly pale" and Watson mentions agitation as a cause even though he's already noted the possibility for excessive blood loss, and that railway cases are "seldom trivial." Hooray for Victorian medicine.

Fun fact: if you're fainting from blood loss you already need a transfusion. As of '89 we are two decades before safe (relatively) blood transfusions, when the ABO clotting factors were discovered. However, given the pain and stress, the cause of Hatherly's fainting doesn't have to be hypovolemic shock. Hatherly did just lose a thumb.

A carbolised bandage would have been a bandage treated with phenol (carbolic acid) as a disinfectant. I would not recommend raiding Watson's stash for it, as carbolic acid can cause chemical burns.

I cannot decide if Holmes' habit of smoking all the leftovers of his previous day's pipes is gross or endearing.

In two years, Hatherly has earned 27 pounds and 10 shillings. (Using the trusty Bank of England inflation calculator, which does not DO fractions of a pound, this is just over 2,870 modern pounds, or $3590) He is not having a great start.

Reminder that a guinea is 1 pound, one shilling. 50 guineas is almost double the amount Hatherly has ever made in his entire practice. And yet the thing that actually makes him suspicious is that the consultation is scheduled for late at night, after the trains have stopped running.

Fuller's earth is a white, highly absorbent clay, used as a chemical filter and absorber. Actual mineral composition may vary, but the use it was named for was when wool processors (Fullers) would use it to clean oils and dirt from wool. This step would have been prior to spinning or felting the fiber.

A hydraulic press would be extremely unnecessary for shaping any kind of clay, since it's... clay. The first time I read this I confused Fuller's Earth with Diatomaceous earth, which is powdery in structure and therefore might need some kind of squishing to be formed into a brick.

I was unable to find any town or city named Eyford, so I'm assuming it's another slightly fictionalized location.

The horse trick here has always struck me as a clever insight on Holmes' part: of course, he is already aware that this is a scam of some kind, and that the secrecy measures would include a lot of misdirection

[quill-of-thoth]

Letters from Watson: The Engineer's Thumb

Part 3: The fun bits

Holmes' crime scrapbook immediately confirms that at least one other person has been murdered when the counterfeit operation has needed maitenance. I still wonder where the gang obtained the press (and how they got it installed) in the first place, as that's unlikely to be work they could get done in a single night.

Bradstreet's method for searching the countryside is actually a good idea - if the carriage ride hadn't been simulated. He believes that Hatherly was rescued by someone in the house, perhaps the woman or a servant. A possible other explanation is that he spent the walk back to the station in a fugue state that he doesn't remember.

Dr. Beecher (Stark's English partner) appears to have been known in town far more than Stark, very possibly he was normally in charge of keeping the operation secret and the household unremarkable, and Stark was in charge of other aspects.

[quill-of-thoth]

Letters from Watson: The Engineer's thumb

Part 2; The fun bits

A good part of the deduction in this case rests on this horse and carriage trick: between the inconsistency between Hatherly's calculations of about twelve miles, and Stark giving the distance as seven, we have the absolutely fresh horse. It must be clear quite early to Holmes that the carriage ride is a decoy, since Hatherly clearly got himself back to the train station despite his severe injury.

Hatherly notes the "absolute stillness" which he takes to mean that they're in the country. Not knowing much about the English countryside, I take it as a city boy not knowing that the sounds of nature at night can be fucking loud, and that the stillness he hears is a lack of the normal amount of people that would live in a country or small town house, because it's abandoned.

Based on the german-speaking woman's words, I am fairly certain that killing Hatherly was always the fall back plan. An orphaned bachelor with a failing consulting business would not be missed for potentially several days, at which point it could be extremely difficult to track him to Eyford. The carriage chicanery points to Stark and his partner initially planning to leave Hatherly alive, at least temporarily, but murder was always on the table.

The "chinchilla" beard is probably not a specific hair style, but just a tufty or scraggly beard.

The hydraulic press being built into a room, and the fact that neither Stark nor his partner thought of checking the gaskets, suggests to me that they likely had someone who knew more about presses involved in this forging operation when they started out. I wonder what happened to him?

[rumblethumps]

Sorry I haven’t been on in a while, I’ve been too busy thanking not only god but also jesus for Ryu’s route in nty