Curing an age-old curse: Lewis Barnavelt’s triumph
Spoiler Alert: Do not read if you are going to get the book. The book is difficult to find (only in print in the UK) and first editions are very expensive.
The fifth installment of the Lewis Barnavelt series, The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder, builds a nice storyline through Lewis’ character change. Lewis losing weight, his emulation of Sherlock Holmes with a knowledge of history, and his solidified friendship with Bertie help with the success of the book because these reveal how Lewis has now come into power through healing his families’ wounds that go back generations and across the Atlantic. This also shows why this installment is important to read and not just a fifth story that only connects with the others with a few references to past stories.
The book starts with Lewis and his uncle Jonathan in London asking Constable Dwiggins where Baker Street is. Dwiggins leads them to a house that he thinks is most likely to be 221B Baker Street. Lewis is able to confirm this by citing Arthur Conan Doyle’s descriptions of the house and his own deductions: it should be an apartment house that faces east, with the front door of the building having a semicircular fanlight just like the door of 221B Baker Street – also apparently this house is the only one with a building directly across. How could he recite these facts from memory? Why, because he is extremely obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, so it would be embarrassing if he didn’t. It doesn’t even stop there because he lists the Sherlock Holmes stories all three details are from. The clue that the building faces east is from “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” the clue about the semicircular fanlight is from “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” and the clue about the opposite-facing building is from “The Adventure of the Empty House.”
Lewis then hops in a train with Uncle Jonathan to Dinsdale in Sussex and while aboard, he learns why they are going to Dinsdale. Lewis sits there facing Uncle Jonathan in the first-class compartment (because let’s not forget why Uncle Jonathan doesn’t work) and learns about his deep roots in England which eventually branched off to the U.S.A. After this, Uncle Jonathan reveals that the British branch of the family owns a manor that is owned by Arthur Pelham Barnavelt. Best of all, according to Uncle Jonathan, this is a real manor.
“‘And he lives in a real manor house?’ Lewis asked, his tone excited. ‘You mean one like Baskerville Hall, in The Hound of the Baskervilles?’
‘Right,’ said Jonathan with a smile and a nod. ‘Only the name of this one is Barnavelt Manor.’”
The uncle and nephew duo get off the train and meet good old Arthur Pelham. Cousin Pelly drives them to the manor at an extremely fast pace of fifteen miles per hour in his Austin Seven and, “ahead of them sprawled a huge, grey stone house with leaded windows, two turrets, what seemed a dozen bay windows, numerous gables, and intricate, steeply pitched roofs shingled with shiny black slate.” Lewis silently remarks that the manor looks evil and haunted with the all-too empty windows, and that even the house is giving them a sinister grin. All that aside, Lewis meets the housekeeper’s son, Bertie, a blind British boy who wears dark glasses, and they explore a hedge maze and accidentally release demonic forces that reawaken Malachiah Pruitt. How do they do this? Well, Lewis finds a map of the hedge maze with an X marking the middle. Lewis puts on his deerstalker hat, leaves for the maze, and almost gets scared to death by Bertie who then comes along. The two of them enter the leafy labyrinth and approach a stone bench. Lewis eventually figures out that there is a secret opening under the bench, and they wiggle into the dark opening in search of treasure. They do not find treasure. What they do find is some type of ancient building that is still unnaturally clean on the floor. They approach a box with the top half of a circle in the middle, large enough to be an adult tomb. They are able to slide some of loose bricks by fractions of an inch, and then they release a load of hot air that smells of a dead person.
Malachiah Pruitt is the witch-finder who wants vengeance (get the title now?) against the Barnavelts. Why is this witch-finder ravenous for revenge? Why, because way back in the British Civil War (1642-1651), Martin Barnavelt, the ancestor of Lewis Barnavelt, dabbled in magic – and though Puritanism produced wonderful results (see The Mayflower), as with anything, extremism took hold, and Pruitt rushed in to take advantage of witch hysteria. Pruitt himself dabbled in magic and made it so that he would be immortal, but Martin Barnavelt attempted to remove that magic… so Pruitt decided to implant his curse on the family and insert his wickedness into the very root and branch of the grounds.
After the death of King Charles I, Pruitt laid claim to the Barnavelt Manor and kicked everyone out. He made a torture chamber out of the wine cellar and used it to force the accused to confess and rat out other witches. Eventually, Pruitt decided that Martin was a witch, and we are kept in the dark about why until about a hundred pages later. On page 138, Lewis and Bertie search the lumber room or attic and find a thin book which Lewis later finds out was Martin Barnavelt’s diary. According to Martin, Malachiah Pruitt had horrible conduct. In Martin’s diary, he wrote, “he had witnessed Witch Finder Pruitt’s persecution of ‘two poore harmless Women of the County, both Widows, and both doubtless innocent of any Evil whatever.’” The reason why Pruitt decided to come after Mr. Barnavelt was because Martin saw him performing magic. In the diary, Martin also admits to performing magic, but only to stop Pruitt from sentencing innocent souls to their death. Once the monarchy regained control and King Charles II was crowned, the members of his royal court spread rumors that Martin was one of Pruitt’s helpers. Like the fool Charles II was, he chose to believe them and decided not to give the Barnavelt Manor back until two years later. For revenge, Martin kept King Charles I’s crown in the brick vault in the hedge maze. Some time goes on as Lewis and Uncle Jonathan leave the manor to continue their journey through Europe, but Bernie informs Lewis through a postcard that something is wrong. Luckily, on the day he receives the postcard, he and Uncle Jonathan are going back to the manor.
While Lewis was away having fun in the rest of Europe, a suspicious man by the name of Mr. Matthew Prester moves into the gatekeeper’s house. He is able to reconstitute by eating blood, his newly-formed mouth dripping with it and feathers: he munched through the entire Barnavelt chicken coop. This results in Pelly and Bertie’s mom being nervous and edgy. Arriving back at the manor, Lewis reads through the diary again, and as he realizes that he has released Malachiah Pruitt, lightning strikes and he sees a “formless blob”, a “leering face with deep-set eyes”. Who is it? Is it the ghost of Pruitt? He then witnesses some sorcery: “two long bony hands weaving an intricate gesture in the air”. What is being shaped at this time? Well, the book explodes! It “burn[s] to nothing in a poof” and Lewis passes out.
He wakes up and finds Bertie’s mom, but she seems robotic and distant. She even gets angry when Lewis asks where Bertie is. Lewis decides to go outside and finds Jenkins, the butler, acting as if he were possessed, and he locks the driveway (the border to the maze where Pruitt’s disembodied ghost occupies root and branch of the labyrinth). Bertie’s mom then chases him into his room. Lewis sits there and decides that he needs to get out without Bertie’s mom noticing, so he makes a ladder. He sneaks over to Bertie’s window and whispers, “the game’s afoot” (a Holmes quip) just to make sure that Bertie is just Bertie, not a robotized version. Then, Lewis and Bertie decides that they should go to the toolshed and grab some hammers and chisels and crowbars to break open the vault.
In the vault, they find the Amulet of Constantine and what Lewis assumes was the crown of King Charles I. After this, they decide to go to Martin Barnavelt’s study and plan how to use the amulet, but right when they almost get out, an invisible creature chases after them only to be stopped by the Amulet of Constantine. The entity that inhabits the labyrinth is Malachiah Pruitt’s invisible servant (Pruitt has transformed into Prester, remember?) that has a solid form because Lewis can see the bent grass when it lays down. The servant is described as a “monstrous lion or tiger,” but it is “at least the size of a horse” (190). This is connected because back in the 1600s, Martin Barnavelt had banished the servant, and that killed Malachiah Pruitt. Lewis figured out that Mr. Matthew Prester is actually the ghost of Malachiah Pruitt, and that he has been able to hypnotize Bertie’s mom and Jenkins and kidnap Uncle Jonathan and Cousin Pelly after being let inside. Lewis and Bertie enter the study, hide the crown, and look through the bookshelves for any useful information. They find nothing, so they leave. Once they leave, they are chased down the hallway and slam into Cousin Pelly, who is under the spell. He leads them into a torture room that Malachiah Pruitt used back in the English Civil War, and in the room is Pruitt waiting for them, revived from a few more chicken sacrifices … and Uncle Jonathan is cuffed in his pajamas! Lewis ends up tying the Amulet of Constantine to the crown of King Charles I that Pruitt needed to rule the world, and then puts it on his head. Then, we end with everything being resolved. Bertie gets to see at the end too!
Through this ordeal, Lewis has gained a sense of confidence that he hadn’t had before. As Rose Rita says him in The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring, he was a “worrywart.” In this book, we see him talking his brain out of creating these disastrous scenarios that might not happen. “He could get lost. He could fall into a deep pit in the centre of the maze and starve to death there. He could catch pneumonia from the damp evening air.” This allowed him to face beasts like the invisible servant without panicking or chickening out, no offense to Pruitt. He also made friends with Bertie and now the Barnavelt Manor is free of Pruitt and the centuries’-old curse. This character growth is also shown in Lewis’ loss of weight, his idolizing of Sherlock Holmes as motivation, and his strong friendship with Bertie which all demonstrate Lewis’s gaining more control over himself. For example, he succeeds in losing weight, unlike in The Figure in the Shadows when he could not put himself up to the commitment even with the help of the Charles Atlas kit , and his idolization of Sherlock Holmes allows him to guide himself by thinking, “What would he do?” Also, his friendship with Bertie helps him keep control and not just sit there bawling his eyes out until he is forced to join his uncle in the dungeon. He saves the day and the Barnavelt name! But wherever Lewis goes, he seems to accidentally release dangerous magical entities, something that occurs in every Barnavelt novel – he is becoming a wizard after all.