[00:14.79]READING
[00:16.43]THE MOONSTONE
[00:17.87]The novel The Moonstone is set in England in 1848m by the story really began 50 years earlier.
[00:27.01]The Moonstone is a huge yellow diamond that was once part of a statue of the moon god in India.
[00:34.46]An Englishman murdered three holy men,
[00:37.30]stole the diamond from the temple and brought it back with him to London.
[00:41.87]When his sister heard about this,
[00:44.12]she would no speak to any more.
[00:45.95]The diamond was cure and the man lived a sad,
[00:49.71]lonely life without friends or family.
[00:52.85]When he died he left the Moonstone to his sister’s daughter,Rachel,
[00:56.95]in and act of revenge, passing on his bad fortune to her.
[01:01.28]Rachel would receive the Moonstone as a present on the reception for her eighteenth birthday.
[01:07.03]Rachel Verinder is a beautiful and wealthy young woman.
[01:10.69]She lives with her mother and several servants in a fine house in the north of England.
[01:15.94]She spends the day s before her birthday party with her childhood friend Franklin Blake,
[01:20.27]painting a door in her sitting room with flowers and birds.
[01:24.95]They work together on it and finish it on Rachel’s birthday.
[01:28.76]Franklin, who is a smoker, is very considerate towards Rachel.
[01:33.02]His move to quit smoking cigars to please her is seen by the servants as evidence that he is in love with Rachel.
[01:40.49]The Moonstone is the most splendid gift to Rachel at her birthday party.
[01:45.53]All the guests are astonished by its size and rare beauty.
[01:49.84]Buy from the moment Rachel fastens it to her dress,
[01:53.29]things start going wrong.
[01:55.33]Is it coincidence or is it the Moonstone’s bad luck that causes the tension and strange thins that happen during the rest of the evening?
[02:04.58]First of all, one of the guests, Godfrey,
[02:08.10]asks Rachel to marry him, but she declines.
[02:11.03]Godfrey is an elegant and successful bachelor with many lady admirers.
[02:16.36]Then over dinner, Franklin mentions that he has not been sleeping well since he gave up smoking and Dr Candy,
[02:22.32]the local doctor, offers to write him a prescription for some medicine.
[02:27.75]Franklin’s reply that doctors just guess which drug they should recommend,
[02:32.40]makes Dr Candy extremely angry.
[02:35.45]Finally some Indians in unusual foreign clothes come to the house offering to entertain the guests,
[02:42.80]but they are not very skilled and behave strangely.
[02:46.61]At the end of the party everyone leaves except for Franklin and Godfrey,
[02:51.34]who are staying the night
[02:52.90]Before going to bed, Rachel puts the diamond in a drawer of a cupboard in her sitting room,
[02:57.92]but the following morning it is gone. T
[03:00.27]Troubled by the loss of such a valuable jewel,
[03:03.51]Rachel’s mother hires the famous detective Sergeant Cuff to investigate the theft.
[03:09.15]As the story develops,
[03:10.90]we discover some secrets about the people at the house that night,
[03:14.66]and the reasons why they might have stolen the diamond.
[03:17.51]At first Sergeant cuff suspects the Indians.
[03:20.99]He finds of that they are not real entertainers,
[03:24.23]but religious followers of the moon god.
[03:27.10]They follow the Moonstone around the world waiting for an opportunity to take the diamond back to India.
[03:33.66]The detective wonders whether they did somewhere in the house until everyone was asleep and then stole it.
[03:40.71]He goes on asking questions about the party and learns about Franklin’s quarrel with Dr Candy.
[03:47.34]He also hears that Godfrey was disappointed when refused to marry him.
[03:48.57]Did Dr Candy or Godfrey take the Moonstone as revenge for loss of face?
[03:54.34]The servants also had opportunities to steal the Moonstone.
[03:58.18]Sergeant Cuff discovers that Rosanna, the maid,
[04:01.94]was a thief before Rachel’s mother gave her the job.
[04:05.60]The other servants report that she has recently been busy doing something in her room late at night,
[04:11.87]and often goes for walks alone
[04:13.98]Rosanna also seems very fond of Franklin.
[04:17.46]The detective believes she may have taken the diamond either from force of habit of to cause a disagreement between Rachel and Franklin.
[04:26.71]Finally he considers Rachel and Franklin.
[04:29.58]Rachel is stubborn in resisting his enquiries about the Moonstone to the degree that she makes it seem as if she does not want the mystery to solved.
[04:39.04]Did she steal the diamond herself?
[04:42.20]Perhaps she has debts that need to be paid.
[04:44.94]Franklin, on the other hand, gives the detective as much assistance as he can.
[04:49.67]Why is he so enthusiastic when the whole investigation clearly annoys Rachel?
[04:55.44]Sergeant Cuff has one vital clue.
[04:55.55]He has found a smear in the wet paint on the door of Rachel’s sitting room that was not there during the party.
[05:02.71]Whoever is guilty must have a stain on his or her clothes.
[05:02.81]If he find the stained garment, he will have found the thief.
[05:06.89]So who stole the Moonstone?
[05:09.53]INTEGRATING SKILLS
[05:14.70]Reading
[05:16.03]SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF THE MOONSTONE
[05:18.38]The case of the Moonstone was most unusual.
[05:21.62]I knew that the answer was in the smear of paint on Rachel Verinder’s sitting room door,
[05:27.06]but I couldn’t find the garment which made the mark.
[05:29.80]At the time Rachel was behaving very strangely,
[05:33.04]especially when she refused to answer my questions.
[05:35.99]I was convinced that she had taken her own diamond,
[05:39.52]and that Rosanna and assisted her.
[05:41.55]I assumed her maid had taken Rachel’s garment with the paint stain,
[05:45.37]hidden it, and then secretly made a new one in her room during the night.
[05:49.91]However, what happened later proved me wrong.
[05:53.68]After the party Rachel went to London.
[05:55.95]Where Godfrey again asked her to marry him,
[05:58.59]and this time she accepted.
[06:00.62]However, when she found out that Godfrey had heavy debts and only wanted to marry her for her money,
[06:06.55]she cancelled the wedding.
[06:07.70]This made me curious, and when I heard that some Indians had attacked Godfrey,
[06:12.67]I became even more interested.
[06:14.52]I began to wonder whether I had been mistaken about Rachel and Rosanna.
[06:19.04]Franklin Blake, meanwhile, received a letter from Rosanna saying that she knew what he had done on the night the Moonstone disappeared.
[06:27.06]She had found paint stains on his clothes when she cleaned his room.
[06:30.93]She admitted that she had hidden the evidence because she loved him and wanted to keep him out of trouble.
[06:36.65]The letter confused Franklin and he decided that he had to talk to Rachel,
[06:41.51]even though she was still angry with him.
[06:43.75]When they met, Franklin was shocked to hear Rachel telling him that she had seen him take the diamond but had protected him from me by not answering my questions.
[06:53.18]Poor Franklin found the new deeply disturbing.
[06:56.21]Was it possible that he had stolen Rachel’s diamond and then forgotten that he did it?
[07:01.36]In all my years as a detective I have never heard of a thief having such a loss of memory.
[07:06.79]And where had he put the jewel if he had taken it?
[07:09.95]Fortunately, Dr Candy had the solution.
[07:12.80]You may remember that Franklin was suffering from lack of sleep at the time of Rachel’s birthday,
[07:18.36]and had upset Cr Candy with his remarks about doctors.
[07:22.02]Later that evening Dr Candy had put some opium into Franklin’s drink to prove to him that it would help.
[07:28.79]Franklin slept very well that night dreaming about the diamond,
[07:32.57]and without waking up, he had moved it to his bedroom where he thought it would be safer.
[07:37.62]Franklin and Rachel were both delighted to discover that Franklin was innocent after all.
[07:42.76]It warmed my heart to see them so happy together,
[07:45.90]but the diamond was still missing.
[07:47.86]We could not find it in Franklin’s bedroom
[07:50.26]Where was it? They asked me to find it,
[07:52.90]so I continued my investigation.
[07:55.22]This time I was more successful and eventually discovered the real thief:
[07:59.48]Godfrey! It turned out that Godfrey had also seen Franklin move the diamond that night and,
[08:05.85]knowing that Franklin would be accused, he had taken it.
[08:09.51]The diamond seemed to be the perfect solution to his financial problems,
[08:13.61]but was, in fact, the start of many difficulties.
[08:17.82]Godfrey found it impossible to sell the Moonstone in England because everyone knew it was stolen.
[08:23.75]Desperate for money, he tried to persuade Rachel to marry him,
[08:27.30]but when she changed her mind, he had no choice but to go abroad to sell the diamond.
[08:32.47]My detective work finally led me to the ship where I found Godfrey.
[08:37.10]Unfortunately I arrived too late. Godfrey was dead and the Moonstone was gone.
[08:43.47]I am embarrassed to admit that I made many mistakes in this investigation.
[08:42.47]If you guessed who had committed the crime,
[08:44.61]then you are better detective than the famous Sergeant Cuff!
[08:47.96]I have never found the Moonstone,
[08:50.20]and I cannot prove who killed Godfrey.
[08:52.48]I wonder, however, whether perhaps justice was done after all.
[08:56.92]Godfrey paid a high price for his crime.
[08:59.69]He lost the jewel and his life,
[09:01.91]while Franklin and Rachel are very much in love and engaged to be married.
[09:06.95]As for the Moonstone, I have heard that it has somehow returned to its true home in India,
[09:12.80]where it once again decorates the forehead of the statue of the moon god |