the hiding place in the old cellar, but then had found it impossible to lift the stone slab himself. So, he had been forced to draw someone else into his treasure hunt. He had unwisely chosen Rachel Howells, who had good reason to hate him. The two of them could have lifted the slab up, but they would have needed to support it while Brunton climbed down to fetch the treasure. Based on Rachel's sudden flight and disappearance, Holmes wondered if she had deliberately kicked the supports away and left Brunton to die, or if the slab had fallen back into place by itself and caused her to panic. As to the relics found in the bag retrieved from the mere, Holmes examined them and found that the metal parts were gold and the stones were gems. He believed that it was no less than King Charles I’s ("His who is gone") medieval crown of St. Edward, being kept for his eventual successor – his son, Charles II ("He who will come"), who would not be crowned until 11 years after the execution of Charles I. The ritual had been a guide to retrieving this important symbol, and Reginald confirms that one of his ancestors, Sir Ralph Musgrave, was a king's man. Holmes theorized that the original holder of the ritual had died before teaching his son about its significance. It had thus become nothing more than a quaint custom for more than 200 years. One final plot twist is that the Musgraves are allowed to keep the crown fragments, although the ritual makes it clear that they were only to keep the relic ″in trust″ as it was in fact Crown property. Publication history The story was originally published in the Strand Magazine in May 1893, with illustrations by Sidney Paget. It was later collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. The Strands text of the ritual did not specify the month in which the shadow of the elm should be measured (the shadow would be longer in winter and point in different directions throughout the year), but a couplet was added for the Memoirs identifying the month as the "sixth from the first". "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" was also published in the US in Harper's Weekly on 13 May 1893, and in the US edition of The Strand Magazine in June 1893. The story was published