The Italian Secretary

by Caleb Carr

  To spare me the effort, Hackett simply moved to one wall and placed a hand on the border of a wooden panel, which drew away (as I had heard its corresponding number one floor below do when I discovered Miss Mackenzie) to reveal the privy stairs that led down to what had been, before Charles II’s renovation of the palace, Darnley’s rooms.

  ‘Thank you, Hackett,’ said I. ‘And so the men appeared from these stairs – seized Rizzio in the supper-room – and dragged him to the larger stairway before killing him. This “blood that never dries” was never here to begin with!’

  Hackett looked mystified. ‘And yet it has been, sir – aye, even before Lord Francis was ever born. My own father worked in the palace, Doctor, and told us of the stain. I saw it, in my youth, with my own eyes.’

  I looked to Holmes to find him still examining the blood on his fingers, but nodding, now, with the deepest intellectual satisfaction. ‘At last,’ he mused. ‘Hackett – you have provided the proverbial missing link in our antagonists’ chain of crime. For no confidence scheme such as this one can ever be created out of pure legend. In order for an entire city – indeed, an entire nation – to have believed that the blood of the wrongfully slain Rizzio was reappearing every night, there must have been some sort of a factual foundation upon which to build.’

  ‘But – what was it, Mr Holmes?’ Hackett asked anxiously. ‘What did I see on the floor, all those years ago?’

  Holmes merely lifted his shoulders. ‘So many things may pass for blood, Hackett: We might find that the unusual floorboards of this regal bedchamber were cut from an exotic wood, one whose oils and tannins do not truly dry for centuries – there are several such species. Or, more likely, some early and untraceable leak in the turret roof kept one spot not only moist but stained, as the water carried with it various forms of soil, dust, soot, and vermin excrement. Perpetual leaks and stains are known in nearly every ancient house – and are why many are demolished. But the important truth is that there was, indeed, a stain! And what, for many generations, was a stain, could easily become, if the perpetrator was clever enough about his business, a “pool” – for, as I have already told Dr Watson, it is in the nature of mankind to wish to believe such stories. Yes, we have a complete structure of our legend now—’

  Holmes’s moment of triumph was cut short by a voice, sudden and shrill, drifting up the stone stairway without: It was Mrs Hackett.

  ‘Mr Holmes – you must come down at once, oh, please, you must!’

  Holmes moved quickly to the antechamber doorway. ‘What is it, Mrs Hackett? My brother?’

  ‘Oh, indeed, sir!’ came the reply. ‘And in ever such a state! He looks as though he shall expire, sir!’

  Fascinated as we all had been by our discoveries, we fairly fell over one another getting to the winding staircase – although it was, of course, Holmes who quickly moved to the fore, concern for Mycroft at last showing in his legs, if it had not in his earlier manner.

  Chapter XIII

  THE LINES ARE DRAWN …

  We did not, thankfully, find Mycroft Holmes at death’s door when we descended to the dining-room – although it was easy to see why Mrs Hackett had thought him so. Upon reaching Waverley Station, Mycroft had been surprised to learn that not only had Lord Francis failed to ensure that a carriage from the palace was waiting to retrieve them; he was not planning to return to Holyroodhouse at all (not directly, at any rate). And although the military intelligence officer had eventually secured a hansom, the driver of said cab had ultimately proved unable to face down his fears and deliver his passengers – who had already been exhausted by more than a full day’s continuous travel – the whole way to the palace entrance:

  Mycroft and his escort had been deposited instead at the edge of the park, and from there had been forced to walk. The remaining leg of their trip was less than half a mile – but such was a greater distance than Mycroft’s legs normally traversed in a week, and it had generated enough exertion to quite take the wind from him, whilst simultaneously covering his brow with perspiration and ultimately making the poor housekeeper believe that his wheezing and gasps were signs of some mortal physical crisis.

  Mycroft’s journey back from Balmoral had otherwise gone without incident, despite his having revealed, as Holmes had feared, all that he knew concerning the investigation at Holyroodhouse – and when he learned how fortunate his journey’s seemingly innocuous conclusion had in fact been, he settled into an odd brew of relief, amazement, and anger: relief, for reasons various and apparent; amazement, that he had suspected nothing in Lord Francis’s manner that would have indicated the real nature of the latter’s activities; anger, at both himself and his brother, for having allowed Lord Francis into the royal presence at all. Immediately, Mycroft dispatched our dour old friend from military intelligence into the city, to try to locate the young lord of Holyroodhouse; but, following the man’s departure, he continued to upbraid himself for ever having taken Lord Francis to Balmoral. Holmes did his best to insist that his brother should feel no responsibility for this seeming risk, that he himself deserved to bear the entire weight of whatever danger had existed; but that it had been, in the first place, necessary to our forming a better picture of what had been happening at Holyroodhouse, and in the second, no real risk at all, being as it had been safe to assume that Mycroft could be relied upon to attend to the Queen’s safety more sensibly than any man alive, even if he for some reason did not, during the trip to Balmoral, begin to understand Lord Francis’s true nature.

  ‘But how could you think that I would determine Hamilton’s devilry, Sherlock?’ Mycroft demanded, once Mrs Hackett had produced a decanter of dry sherry and several glasses.

  ‘You will forgive me, Mycroft!’ Holmes nearly shouted in reply, in that tone of irritability that often comes over those who have found that a close relation who they thought in mortal peril has come through it safely. ‘But I believed the face that this man presents to the world to be so false that persons of common sense must, after a time, find it transparent – as the staff of this household evidently did long ago. And yet here are you and Watson both, telling me that you found nothing objectionable in it—’

  ‘My dear Holmes,’ I interjected, with no little irritation of my own, ‘I had known the fellow less than a day, and your brother had not had his acquaintance for very much longer. As you yourself said to me on the train, we do not all share the same skills and strengths – so I hope you will forgive our less than encyclopaedic knowledge of the criminal type, its permutations, and the most arcane methods of detecting any and all such.’

  ‘Well said, Doctor,’ added Mycroft, after sweeping down three full glasses of sherry like so much water. ‘Had I spent as much time crawling through gutters and opium dens as have you, Sherlock, I might perhaps have marked a certain disingenuousness in Lord Francis—’

  ‘Hyperbole will not pass for argument, Mycroft,’ Holmes answered, trying very hard to regain an even tone. ‘You might easily have formed a suspicion that your estimate of the man was wanting long before you even arrived here.’

  ‘And pray tell me, comrade of my youth,’ said Mycroft, his fourth glass of sherry bolstering his confidence, ‘how I should have done that.’

  ‘By analysing what you already knew!’ rejoined his brother. ‘This case was plainly unconnected to any international or political plots, from the very beginning.’

  ‘Eh?’ Mycroft’s head snapped around at an unusual pace. ‘Now you go too far, Sherlock – really you do. How can you possibly claim as much?’

  ‘Brother—’ Holmes took a dining-chair, turned it to its side as he placed it before his brother, and then sat with his arm dangling over the straight back of the thing. ‘Surely, surely you must, at the very least, have seriously doubted the notion that all of these attempts on the life of the Queen of which you have told us have been somehow connected to one another.’

  The query seemed at the same time a plea; and it forced me to remember Holmes’s origi
nal opinion that the ‘entire notion’ of a long string of connected assassination attempts was in fact ‘too much’ – ‘too much’ to be considered seriously, yes, but also ‘too much,’ or rather too many, in the literal sense. And, apparently, his brother had felt the same way, at least in part: Mycroft breathed deeply, frowned, and said, in a less than forceful tone, ‘The belief in such a connection was and has long been that of many to whom the Queen has entrusted her day-to-day security. And I believe such men – whose names, you understand, I shall not mention, in this context – to have always been honest in those opinions. In addition, in order to obtain the co-operation of Her Majesty in any way towards schemes that I thought might enhance her actual safety, it has proved necessary to accept certain fundamental terms of operation based upon those opinions.’

  ‘Including the absurd?’ Holmes said. ‘Mycroft, you have had nine attempts on Her Majesty’s life, all committed by youths or young men within a few years’ age of each other – an age, in short, when most such fellows are more anxious about their ability to make a mark on the world than they will ever be. That mark seems, at that age, so difficult, so complex, as to be impossible to achieve – and yet, to the disturbed few, there is always the method of creating one’s own fame by destroying, or merely attempting to destroy, one who already possesses such dynamic stature. The modus operandi in each case was also so consistent, so idiosyncratic, as to lead to the inescapable assumption that they read of each other’s attempts and imitated the same – assuming, that is, that the water supply of English schools has not been tainted by some peculiar fungus that induces an urge towards assassination! Finally, and again in every case, the punishment universally meted out was such as would only have offered encouragement to any future aspirant. He might have his momentary notoriety, and then, for his pains, be transported away from the very cause of his anguish: The anonymous crush of life on our little island. You must have known that in our age, when the popular press makes celebrated beings of the most infamously banal souls, such a quest was, in most if not all cases, sufficient motivation for these supposedly “deadly” attacks on Her Majesty?’

  ‘Yes, I have indeed considered all that, Sherlock, of course I have!’ Mycroft replied quickly. ‘And a good deal more along such lines, besides; but, as I say, those more intimately involved with the Queen’s daily safety have not done, nor would they ever do, likewise. Remember of whom we speak – men who, while personally valiant and loyal, are ill-tutored in anything, save gamekeeping.’ He lifted his glass in Robert Sadler’s direction. ‘You will forgive me, I am sure, young man.’

  ‘Aye, sir, indeed,’ replied the fellow. ‘If there’s one thing for which I wouldn’t like to think myself responsible, it’s the safety of Her Majesty – I’ve no’ the training for such, and have often wondered, when she stays here, why she does no’ seek out more gentlemen such as yourselves.’ His head dropped for a moment. ‘If only to protect her home from the likes of my brother and myself …’

  As I turned back to the Holmeses, my eyes lingered just long enough on Sadler to catch a quick glimpse of Miss Mackenzie offering some condoling whispers to her one-time protector; and I wondered if, already, the gravity of the situation was not inducing a shift in her affections from one brother to the other.

  ‘Well said, my boy,’ Mycroft replied. ‘This, in addition to all else that I have heard since my return, marks you as truly penitent. And so, there you have it, Sherlock – whatever my opinions, the Queen’s own simply would not allow, as I have told you already, for their implementation. And then, as well, this last attempt on Her Majesty seemed as though it might, in fact, represent a departure from the others: there existed the possibility, at least, that an attentive foreign secret service, such as the German Emperor is known to employ, might seek to capitalise on Scottish nationalist ambitions by enlisting a young assassin who fitted the pattern of the other youths, and encouraging him to make another attempt, based in deeper motivations. If he failed, his case would be treated as just another in a long line, and he should likely be transported without serious interrogation; if he succeeded, as you yourself have said, the one effective brake on the Kaiser’s ambitions and behaviour would be removed. It would have been irresponsible for me not to consider the possibility that such was happening!’

  ‘Indeed, Mycroft,’ Holmes said, ‘save for one qualifying consideration: Dennis McKay, or, more properly, his murder. Had German agents been manipulating some young and impressionable nationalist from Glasgow whose family was known to McKay, do you not think that the plot would have been found out by that older leader of that group – who lived in the very same city and was perhaps of the boy’s personal acquaintance – and reported to the police, so that their movement would not be associated with so spectacularly unpopular a crime? And yet, Robert tells us, McKay was not murdered for any reason involving politics or political vengeance.’

  As Holmes looked to him, Robert Sadler spoke again. ‘No, sir. My brother and Lord Francis decided to do away with both Sir Alistair and Mr McKay because they’d found out what we’d been up to in the tower – Sir Alistair by accident, during his explorations of the various rooms, and Mr McKay because he never believed that Sir Alistair had met with any accident at all, and kept to poking about, even after the police seemed ready to give in. Both Lord Francis and Will knew, by that time, that I would never have joined them in any such schemes as murder – that I would, in fact, have tried to stop them; and so they made sure that I was well away from the palace when the acts were committed.’

  Mycroft Holmes appeared increasingly displeased and uncomfortable. ‘Sherlock, of course each of these considerations played some part in my thinking – but when we are talking of the safety of the Queen, one can be forgiven, I think, for errors caused by over-zealousness!’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Holmes replied dubiously and, I thought, rather ungenerously; and in so doing, he reminded me yet again of how simplistic his political opinions could sometimes be. ‘But, whether or not they are forgivable,’ he went on, ‘they remain errors, and must not become the basis of further misconceptions. Let us simply agree that politics and the loyalty each of us owes to the Crown’ – and here he shot Mycroft a look that said plainly how much he was understating the issue, for the sake of his brother’s pride – ‘blinded you to the true dangers and evils of this house – and let us further agree, now, to eliminate politics from our plan to finally terminate the criminal careers of Lord Francis Hamilton and Likely Will Sadler.’

  Mycroft gave a firm nod of affirmation, setting his sherry glass aside; and before long, we had indeed moved on to the question of how best to vanquish our foes:

  The principal difficulty facing us was that we still had no definite proof with which to approach the local police, Scotland Yard, or even the garrison in Edinburgh Castle. Nevertheless, we quickly did make just such approaches: Holmes ventured off to the police, while Mycroft and I ascended Castle Hill once more, to enter the mighty fortress on its summit. Our luck here was as predicted: My worries that the activities of Will and Robert Sadler had in some way been tolerated, if not actually facilitated, by members of the garrison were obviously shared by its commandant, who had no desire to delve any deeper into the matter by ‘exceeding his authority’ and involving his command in what were, to his way of thinking, matters at Holyroodhouse that were clearly the province of the police – particularly not, at any rate, while the Queen herself was at Balmoral. (We could have wired Her Majesty, of course, and elicited a royal command for military cooperation; but by the time we completed this process, the affair would likely have been decided – in one way or the other.) Rather than seize the initiative, the garrison commander referred us to those same police; and it was a measure of how limited our tactical choices had grown that neither Mycroft nor I could think of anything to do save follow the referral.

  Our trip to the headquarters of the local authorities in order to lend support to our comrade was cut short, however, when we enco
untered the exiting Holmes, who related the opinions of the senior officers of that force concerning our decision to leave them out of our inquiries and efforts. When we had some ‘actual evidence,’ Holmes had been advised (such evidence going unnamed, but clearly not including tall tales of a ghillie or supposed ‘hair samples’), this reaction would of course be tempered; but the officers had obligations enough to attend to in Scotland’s capital (not least their own investigations into the deaths of Sinclair and McKay) without taking the time to chase about after men who could not be definitely implicated in the proceedings, or even certainly stated to be any longer in Edinburgh.

  Incredible as it seems, then, even in retrospect, our small band was to be left to defend our own lives, as well as the honour of Holyroodhouse, alone. Holmes and I had, of course, faced long odds before; but the odds in this situation had dimensions that seemed to transcend ordinary notions of length, and to stretch into the past – into History itself.

  Chapter XIV

  …AND BATTLE IS JOINED

  By the time that Holmes, Mycroft, and I returned to the palace, darkness was fast descending, upon both the parkland around us and our spirits. It would be for Mycroft to transform the moment, by attempting to marshal our small force into an optimistic unit that could offer a carefully co-ordinated resistance to what we were sure would be an attempt by Lord Francis and Likely Will to retrieve their hard (if illicitly) won treasure that very night. It now seemed beyond question that this was why Lord Francis had not accompanied Mycroft back to the palace upon the pair’s return from Balmoral: Although he could not have known how much we had learned of his own and his henchman’s activities, the knowledge that we were investigating more than merely the obvious explanation of the murders of Sinclair and McKay would have offered two reasons for him to take flight: to avoid apprehension, and to ascertain the disposition of his own forces from Likely Will. But the crystallisation of our certainty as to our enemies’ plans came shortly after our arrival back at the palace, when Robert Sadler made an almost offhanded reference to his brother’s having ascertained Holmes’s and my own true identities the night before, through the method we had most feared: betrayal at the Roxburghe Hotel. So concentrated had I been on the necessity of bribing the desk clerk that I had flatly forgotten that although I was acquainted with the barman Jackson, he would require similar remuneration for his silence; lacking it, he had given us up without even realising it. Sadler had thought we must have known as much, based on our certainty that Likely Will and Lord Francis intended to break and enter; and while this new intelligence did nothing to affect our plans (thus making the fact that we had learned of it so late almost meaningless), both Robert and I found an extra measure of responsibility difficult to escape.