Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years

by Michael Kurland

  “Are you all right, Colonel?” Cynthia the nurse was asking.

  “Hmmm? Oh, yes, quite.”

  “For a moment there you looked a bit … I don’t know … lost.”

  “I am fine now,” he said, working up a smile. Then he stared at the newspaper photograph again.

  When Sir George Lennox left camp that night in May 1892, it was the last time anyone ever saw him. His disappearance was treated as death on the mountain, and he was hailed as a hero. Mackay, Foss, the man who called himself Greison, and the Sherpas, of course, made it back to the village without incident, and in the years that followed, Mackay never attempted to contradict the heroic legend surrounding Sir George Lennox, and sensed that no one would have believed him had he tried. Neither, to his knowledge, had Foss, with whom he had remained in contact until the bulldoggish mountaineer perished while on another expedition, not long after the turn of the century.

  Outside of the Sherpas, whom Mackay never saw again, only one other man knew the truth.

  Quite some time after the expedition, he had learned the true identity of the man who traveled under the names Sigerson and Greison. At the time of their meeting, of course, he had assumed, like the rest of the world, that Sherlock Holmes was dead. It was not until after the First World War that he had screwed up the courage to write a letter to him, addressing it simply to “S. Holmes, Sussex.” In the letter he reintroduced himself and happened to mention that, while he never achieved the rank of major general, he at least could tell the difference between a Mauser rifle and a javelin.

  It was nearly a year before the reply came, a brief note that read:

  My dear Mackay:

  I am delighted to hear you are well. And now that it is no longer a matter of life and death, let me confess that I have always detested Gilbert and Sullivan.

  Yrs.

  SH

  Mackay still had the note somewhere, along with his old journal. But for now, his full attention was on the newspaper photograph. Could it be true? Could it really be true?

  Of course not, it’s absurd, said his rational mind, his military mind. Still …

  With shaky, aged fingers, Colin Mackay folded the newspaper around the photograph and carefully tore along the creases until he had removed the photograph from the page. He would hang on to this one. For the first time in quite some time, he actually was looking forward to waking up the next day, just so he could spend the day contemplating the mystery of the picture, this alleged yeti photograph of Shipton’s that showed the monstrous print of a left foot with the second toe missing …

  Just like the foot of Sir George Lennox.

  Water from the Moon

  Carolyn Wheat

  To be or not to be—Sigerson. That was the question. The tall Englishman with the hawk nose pondered a case of identity as his mount lumbered through the dense forests of northern Siam, swaying the howdah on its back from side to side with a rhythmic regularity that had most British stomachs crying for mercy.

  He had received a telegram in Katmandu: GO TO CHIANG MAI AT ONCE STOP CONTACT AGENT BORNEO COMPANY STOP POLLUX.

  Pollux was, of course, his brother Mycroft. He was supposed to find the agent for the Borneo Company and introduce the word “castor” into the conversation. In return, he would be given intelligence to be sent via several safe addresses back to Whitehall. Thus was the Great Game played in the East; a Norwegian explorer made the chance acquaintance of a British teak wallah who passed along information gathered from a Siamese crown prince, a Kachin opium smuggler, a Karen elephant trainer, and a Chinese merchant. In this way did Whitehall extend its tentacles into the farthest reaches of its empire and beyond.

  Had anyone seen him receive the telegram? Did anyone suspect that the man who’d made news by penetrating the secret Tibetan capital of Lhasa and meeting with the high lama was now entering Siam on a mission for the British government?

  If anyone on earth suspected, then he must not retain the name Sigerson.

  He could not resume his own name, for that name belonged to a dead man.

  He hadn’t realized dying would be so inconvenient.

  The mahout grunted an order and the elephant stopped its surprisingly quick progress through the thick foliage. “Come to boat soon, Missa Sigson,” the brown man said. A smile quirked at the corners of the Englishman’s mouth. Why did a three-syllable name like Sigerson seem unpronounceable to a people whose king was called Chulalongkorn?

  The shot startled the elephant, which raised its huge head and trumpeted its distress. The slow, lumbering gait gave way to a gallop that could have challenged the Derby winner. Holmes clung to the howdah with both hands, then realized there was nothing to be gained in remaining with the beast. He slipped out of the box, grabbed the elephant’s rope with one hand, and swung himself to the ground. He hit the bracken at speed, bruising his hip and twisting his ankle, while the elephant brayed and ran, knocking over small trees in its panic. Holmes rolled over and hid himself in the dense undergrowth as three men armed with rifles raced past him, chasing the beast.

  The mahout was dead. Holmes found his body near the place where he’d heard that first shot. Holmes laid several branches over the body, but not until after he’d taken the dead man’s food stores. He’d need to keep up his strength—and he’d need to shed his latest identity. It was clear that Sigerson was no longer a safe name under which to travel.

  Louis Leonowens was worried. He’d been expecting Castor for almost three weeks. He sat in his office at the Borneo Company in Chiang Mai and looked out at the familiar sight of elephants dragging teak logs toward the river, where they would float toward Bangkok. Even after all his years in Siam, the beasts continued to fascinate him. Though they possessed sufficient strength to lay waste to the entire plantation, they allowed themselves to be put through their paces by the tiny mahouts and their well-placed hooks.

  The hooks looked more vicious than they really were. Long sticks with a metal hook on the end, they were used to prod the elephants’ legs or to tickle that sensitive spot behind the flapping ears. As one mahout explained it, the prodding wasn’t painful, thanks to the pachyderm’s thick hide, but served to remind the beast that its trainer was near and expected obedience. Herd animals, the elephants expected to obey a leader, and the mahout’s job was to be his charge’s leader. Both trained together from a young age, and a mahout and his elephant were as married—in some cases, far more married—than that same mahout and his wife. Indeed, the Siamese had a saying that a marriage was like an elephant: the husband was the front legs and chose the direction, but the wife was the back legs, which provided the power.

  A man would come, Louis reminded himself. A man had always come. He would receive a mysterious message telling him to expect someone who would say a certain word, and when he heard that word, he was to turn over the dispatches. In this way the Crown kept abreast of the ever-changing situation in the Shan States to the north, where the more militant hill tribes fought British rule in Burma. The Crown kept abreast, and the Siamese king, the Borneo Company, and Louis Leonowens all maintained the appearance of neutrality.

  If a man did not come—but Louis didn’t want to dwell upon that possibility.

  The gaunt, feverish half skeleton who stumbled out of the jungle into the clearing bore but a passing resemblance to the healthy, hawk-nosed Englishman who had escaped the attack three weeks earlier. Hobbled by an injured leg, alternately sweating and shivering with fever, racked by an infection that weakened him, and in dire need of food and drink, this pitiful wreck lay twitching and moaning in the clearing until a kindly rice farmer tossed him onto the back of an oxcart and brought him to the missionaries at the McCormick Hospital.

  He lay in bed for the better part of a week, tossing and moaning in the throes of fever, making little progress in spite of heavy doses of quinine.

  “The elephant did nothing in the nighttime,” the delirious Englishman muttered. “That was the curious incident.” He tossed and
turned in his sweat-soaked sheets, rambling through random memories in his malaria-addled brain.

  Nurse Martha Stubbins paid him no mind. Who knew what people would say when the fever was upon them? She’d heard far worse in the Indian Army hospital where she’d trained. She motioned to Lucy to slide a bedpan under the moaning creature, just in case.

  Her assistant, Lucy Pritchard, was the daughter of an American missionary, determined to learn the profession of nursing despite her youth and newness in the country. She was a willing girl, eager to learn, but she was still awed, bewildered, and occasionally frankly terrified by the foreignness of her surroundings. Now she jumped as a heavily tattooed Shan entered the room and inquired about a fellow countryman in the native ward.

  “Who was that?” Lucy asked as the burly man made his way in the direction Martha had indicated. “He looks so fierce. He’s not Siamese, is he?”

  Martha harrumphed. On the one hand, she disapproved of gently bred young ladies playing at Lady Bountiful in her hospital; on the other, she grudgingly acknowledged that, so far, Lucy had done all that she’d been asked to do, without complaint. It wasn’t her fault that she was from a faraway place called Kansas and had never seen a Shan tribesman before.

  “He’s Colonel Prothero’s manservant. He comes from the Shan States to the north,” Martha explained. “It’s a part of Siam that extends into Burma as well. It’s been a thorn in the side of the empire ever since Mandalay fell. The men scar themselves and put blue dye into the scars. It’s a way of warding off evil. Sometimes,” she went on, warming to her theme, “they put precious stones inside the cuts. It’s supposed to make them immune to bullet wounds.”

  Lucy’s face lit up with a smile that showed her uneven teeth and her good nature. “There are Indians in America like that, Ghost Dancers. They think dancing a certain way and wearing certain clothes will keep them from dying, too. Of course,” she said, her smile dimming, “the poor creatures are wrong and get slaughtered at once if they meet the cavalry.”

  “Oranges, bring me oranges,” the patient begged in a pathetically thin voice. “The five orange pips, all redheaded. All redheaded, and all in the league.” The gaunt man sat bolt upright in bed, his eyes bulging, his expression one of stark terror. “Beware the Red-Headed League!” he cried in a terrible voice.

  “Now, now,” Martha said in her most soothing tone, as she gripped the man’s bony shoulders and tried to force him down onto the bed. “No redheaded men here.”

  Despite his weakness, the unknown patient was too strong for Martha and Lucy combined. “Go fetch Khun Seng,” Martha said between gasps as she rested her full weight on the man’s legs.

  “Who?” Lucy asked.

  “The man with the blue scars,” Martha explained. “He’s in the native ward.”

  When Khun Seng arrived, he took charge of the situation at once. Years of service to Colonel Prothero in Burma had taught him Army discipline and Army dispatch. He grabbed the patient around the chest, lifted him out of bed as if he were no more than a rag doll, and waited while Lucy changed the sweat-soaked sheets. Martha Stubbins shoved a spoonful of laudanum into the man’s mouth, and Khun Seng placed the patient onto the bed with surprising tenderness.

  As he subsided into his drugged sleep, the man murmured, “The blue carbuncle. I must have the blue carbuncle.”

  “Strange notions these fever patients get,” Martha said. She didn’t notice that Khun Seng gazed sharply at the man in the bed, as if seeing him clearly for the first time.

  The next morning, the fever broke, and the sick man knew reason again. He no longer muttered about redheaded elephants in the nighttime or called out for a Dr. Watson to come to him. He was weak as a kitten and could barely swallow the thin rice gruel given to him, but he was awake and aware at last. He knew his name.

  “Sigerson,” he said in a rasping voice. “Arne Sigerson.”

  As soon as Louis Leonowens learned that Sigerson, the famous explorer, was lying in the McCormick Missionary Hospital recovering from fever, he breathed a sigh of relief. While Chiang Mai attracted many visitors, most had official business too obviously connected to the teak plantations to qualify them as Foreign Office spies. But Sigerson, a man traveling under a non-British passport, a man apparently out to tour the world, was the perfect spy. Sigerson must, therefore, be his expected visitor.

  With a light heart, he set out for the hospital. In short order, he secured the man’s release with the promise of caring for him at his own house.

  He half expected his guest to breathe the word “castor” as soon as the two left the hospital, but Sigerson did no such thing. As they walked with the slow gait of the sick toward the row of samlors outside the hospital—rickshaw affairs with bicycles propelling three-wheeled carts—the Norwegian grasped Louis’s arm and said in a low voice, “Never take the first samlor.”

  Louis nodded gravely; he’d known the dispatches carried news of the latest outbreak of war among the sawbwas, petty chieftains of the Shan tribes in British Burma, but he hadn’t considered that there might be treachery right here in Chiang Mai.

  Once inside the carriage, Sigerson sat, blanket over his shoulders, and stared out at the Old City of Chiang Mai with its elaborate teak mansions, white domed pagodas, and open marketplaces. Eager as he was to complete his part of the business, Louis approved of the man’s caution. There would be time enough at home to discuss their deep affairs.

  He was annoyed to discover that he wasn’t to be alone with his guest. Colonel Prothero, late of the British Army, sat on the open teak verandah with a gin and tonic in his hand.

  “Leonowens,” he said in his booming parade-ground voice, “I took the liberty of stopping in to meet your distinguished guest. I’m sure you know that Sigerson here is the man who penetrated the secrets of Tibet.”

  Louis allowed himself to be introduced to his own guest, giving himself only a moment to wonder how the colonel knew Sigerson would be there. The colonel, as he knew to his cost, had a way of finding things out, and was always on the cutting edge of happenings in Chiang Mai. The colonel also had a way of assuming command no matter where he was—or in whose house he found himself. Louis suggested, rather pointedly, that the explorer needed rest, but Sigerson said he felt up to sitting on the verandah and drinking some fruit juice, so Louis rang for a servant.

  “So, Leonowens,” the colonel boomed, “our little village and your house will boast two famous men while Sigerson is here.” He punctuated his words with a bark that Louis had come to recognize as a particularly mirthless laugh.

  The explorer raised a single eyebrow. It was clear he had no idea why Louis could lay claim to fame. Louis sighed and embarked upon his tale.

  “The colonel will have his little joke,” Louis said affably, although he privately wished the colonel’s humor were not quite so heavy-handed. “It is not, properly speaking, my fame, but my mother’s. She wrote a book many years ago in which she told the story of our coming to Siam.”

  “Ah, of course,” the thin Norwegian replied. “Your mother was the royal tutor. I remember now. She wrote a most fascinating account of her experiences with the present king’s father.”

  “My mother’s account was rather too highly colored for my taste. Those who encouraged her to write her story were fascinated by tales of Oriental barbarity, and I’m afraid she obliged them rather too thoroughly.” He smiled, but the smile held a hint of pain. “One cannot always separate fact from fiction when a Boswell puts your life in print.”

  The mention of Boswell triggered something in the back of the explorer’s mind. A Boswell who added rather too much romance to what ought to be tales of the scientific—but what did that mean? What had he to do with science? He brushed the thought aside; surely it came from the fog and mist of illness.

  Two days later, when Sigerson had begun to exhibit signs of increasing strength, the colonel held a dinner party in his honor. Louis had by that time begun to wonder if Sigerson was, in fact, Castor
. Frustrated by his guest’s reticence, he had himself introduced the subject of castor beans, which were grown in the area, into the conversation with no visible results. The man’s entire conversation had been castor-free even when they were alone.

  Could it be that Sigerson wasn’t Castor, and that his true contact was still at large?

  What, then, would he do with the information he’d gathered—information that had to be in Whitehall’s hands at the earliest opportunity? He dared not go through more open channels; the king of Siam, his boyhood friend, held on to the independence of his country only because he’d learned to walk a very fine line. Louis did not want to be the one to blur that line and cause trouble for his onetime schoolmate. Louis pondered the question so intently that he scarcely listened to the polite talk going on around him.

  The colonel sat at the head of his elaborately set table, his wife at the foot. “We usually serve English food,” she said in her high, fluting voice, “but in honor of our distinguished guest, I thought it would be amusing to make a meal of Siamese dishes. My cooks have been preparing this feast for two days.”

  Small, slender brown women wearing long, colorful skirts tiptoed into the bungalow’s dining room carrying trays with many small plates. These they set in the center of the table instead of at the place of any single diner. Apparently one took samples of each dish and added condiments in the form of chopped green herbs, hot-looking orange chilis, and other, less identifiable, substances in a riot of colors ranging from saffron yellow to deep purple to flaming red.

  “It is said,” Sigerson remarked in his light, ironic voice, “that Siamese curries sting like a serpent, stimulate like strychnine, and are as subtle and sensual as a Chinese courtesan.”