Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1)

by Ralph Vaughan

  The Honourable Ronald Adair died on schedule, and it was the hardest task in Sherlock Holmes’ life for him to let it happen. Holmes was not an emotional man, hardly given to bouts of sentimentality, but he grieved the death of a man whose only mistake in life was to discover Colonel Sebastian Moran cheating at cards

  A senseless death, the papers called it, a murder without purpose. Holmes knew why the second son of the Earl of Maynooth, come to England from Australia for his mother’s cataract surgery, had to die, but that knowledge did not help him rest easier.

  When the boat-train from Dover arrived in London, Holmes, in disguise of the bookseller, observed himself newly arrived from Calais, trailed by the watcher he had picked up shortly before departing the Continent. It was an odd sensation, especially when, for an instant, he caught his own eye.

  From that point there was nothing for Holmes to do but arrive at 221-B Baker Street in the late afternoon, just as another elderly bookseller was colliding with Dr Watson in Oxford Street, and make sure the garrotter Parker saw him enter, and not leave. He smiled when he saw the wax bust which had been delivered that morning.

  He busied himself quietly, looking over journals and scrapbooks, wondering how he had allowed himself to be so long absent from the chase.

  That evening, just before Mrs Hudson entered the rooms to carry out instructions given when the bust arrived, Holmes locked himself in his room. The boredom! The tedium! The vexation of forced passivity! Never in Holmes’ life had it ever been harder to do nothing at all, to be relegated to the role of a watcher in the wings while the drama was played out. He almost yearned for his once-beloved seven-percent solution to make the ennui bearable, but that was part of the dead past.

  Then came the sound of breaking glass, a sharp cry of surprise from Mrs Hudson.

  Later, he heard voices, his own and that of Dr Watson. It seemed ages since he had talked to the dear fellow, though it had not been more than a week. He fought the urge to wring his faithful friend’s hand. And he stayed mute while Sir Reginald Dunning explained the plight of his brother.

  Only when the outer door had closed for the last time did Holmes unlock his room and venture into the flat. He turned up the gas, and sat and read and smoked. In the dim hours of the morning, he put aside his book and walked to the broken window, where the slight breezes were pushing the curtain back and forth. A hansom cab hurtled through the street below, and jounced violently in one of London’s many potholes. Disturbed from an apparent reverie, one of the passengers looked up at the lighted window of 221-B.

  The cab vanished into the darkness.

  Holmes turned away from the window and went to bed.

  He slept soundly, as if he had been awake a million years.

  Adventure of the Long-Suffering Landlady

  Oh Lord, there he goes again, Mrs Hudson thinks as shots crack rapidly overhead. First ‘VR’ bullet-pocked into the wall…now what? The bloody Magna Carta Liberatum?

  Probably nothing, but best to be sure. She turns from the tea tray, wipes her hands on her apron, and goes into the entryway.

  “My God!” she cries.

  A dark-jacketed lascar with a filthy bandanna around his throat lies on the stairway, blood oozing from a half-dozen bullet wounds. Unruly black hair shoots from under a seaman’s cap. His dark face is disfigured by an old scar that crawls from left temple to center chin, slicing across thin lips, turning them up in a snarl. A patch covers one eye; the other is tinged with a yellowish cloud.

  “You poor man!” she exclaims. “Don’t move! Stay where you are while I fetch Doctor Watson.”

  She starts up the stairs.

  The injured lascar chuckles after she passes him.

  Mrs Hudson halts, takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders and turns to face the now sitting man.

  “I think the disguise may be…adequate,” Sherlock Holmes says. “What say you, Mrs Hudson?”

  Another deep breath.

  “It is a very clever disguise, Mr Holmes,” she replies. “Very effective.”

  “Needs work, I think,” he says as he passes her. “Perhaps I shall find time later.”

  She starts back down the stairs.

  “Will tea be ready soon, Mrs Hudson?” he asks.

  “Yes, Mr Holmes,” she answers. “Just about finished.”

  “Very good, Mrs Hudson.”

  Mrs Hudson starts toward the kitchen when there is a furtive rapping at the door. She throws it open almost immediately, but no one is within sight. She glances up and down Baker Street, but sees only the usual traffic. She trips over a poorly wrapped parcel on the stoop. She picks it up, glances at the loathsome green idol within and sighs with annoyance.

  Blasted Cthulhu cultists!

  In no mood for their tomfoolery, she shoves the little statue into a closet with the other bric-a-brac.

  Entering the kitchen, she sees a vague figure flee from peering through the utility window. She starts filling the clotted cream container. A shadow passes over the window before her, distracting her so that she almost drops the little porcelain cup.

  A row of crude dancing men has been drawn on the window with black grease-paint.

  Clean that later, she thinks. I will be late with his tray.

  Urgent knocking upon the back kitchen door draws her from her task. It is Police Constable Dickerson.

  “Pardon me, ma’am,” he says, casting a covetous glance at the biscuits and cut sandwiches. “Seen a man wearing a loudly checked jacket? He may be carrying a knife dripping blood.”

  “No,” she says, closing the door in the constable’s face.

  Almost to the tray, she hears a loud, persistent rapping at the front door. With each passing second, the louder and more imperious the rapping. When she opens the door a young woman in a blue dress and dark travelling-cloak almost hits her in the face.

  “I must consult Sherlock Holmes immediately, it is a matter of life and death,” the visitor says breathlessly. “He must advise me on whether I should attend Lord Bentham’s party here in London or accept Lady Weatherly’s week-end invitation to her country estate in Surrey.”

  “Life and death?”

  “Oh, yes, very much so,” the young woman confirms, “and then there is the matter of the masked bicyclist.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Is that man across the street watching me, or you?”

  Mrs Hudson steps forward and sees a hansom cab on the other side of Baker Street, just in front of the empty house. A bearded man wearing a top hat is staring toward her with a goggling blue eye, but he raps the roof of the cab with the silver dinosaur-headed handle of his walking stick and the cab leaps away. Mrs Hudson turns but the young woman is already pounding noisily up the stairs.

  “Not my problem,” Mrs Hudson mutters and starts to close the door.

  “Post!”

  Mrs Hudson takes the package and carries it into the kitchen. She sets the package aside and returns to the tea tray. The ticking from the package is really quite annoying, so she thrusts it into the rinse water in the sink. She will toss it when she has time.

  As she picks up the pot, there is a loud crash and clatter in the hallway. Rushing out, she finds the umbrella stand knocked over, again. No one is around, of course, but on the floor are some tell-tale prints…the prints of a giant hound.

  It’s that blasted bull pup Doctor Watson keeps, she thinks as she pulls a cloth from an apron pocket and wipes up the tracks. At least the dog does not bark in the night.

  The door bursts open and a mob of street Arabs flows around her, clambering up the stairs in their muddy shoes, leaving grease and grime from unwashed hands on the banister and the wall. She slams the door close but it bangs open again to reveal rat-faced Inspector Lestrade looking simultaneously grim and perplexed; one look at the landlady and he flees to the safety of 221B.

  The door closes, but someone knocks before she is even halfway to the kitchen. When she sees the caller, she places her hands resolutely o
n her wide hips and scowls.

  “Mr Holmes is not available, as usual!” she snaps. “But Inspector Lestrade is here, and I am sure he wants to ask you about that dead albatross, Professor Moriarty.”

  Holmes’ old mathematics tutor runs as if Lord Harry were breathing fire on his tail.

  Back in the kitchen at last, the tea piping, the sandwiches cut and the biscuits arranged, she hefts the tray, carries it up the stairs and makes her way to Holmes’ table-side. The others can stare all they want, but no hand-outs to riff-raff!

  “Oh, Mrs Hudson,” Holmes says as she moves away. “Do try to be more punctual with the tea next time.”

  A deep breath.

  “Yes, Mr Holmes,” she says. “Very good, Mr Holmes.”

  But she must rush now and leave her lodger – he is about to expound upon 243 varieties of cigar ash, and someone is pounding on the front door.

  An Incident In the Night

  Aboard the HMS Orontes

  1880

  Doctor John H. Watson awoke from a dream of fire and blood, of shooting and clattering sabers and men breathing their last breaths as he worked feverishly to save limbs and lives.

  It was Afghanistan, of course, and it seemed for a long moment as if that land of sere deserts and floating mountains was at hand, just beyond the canvas walls of his field surgery, but then it all shimmered into darkness. He was not in a tent, he realised, not encamped in the midst of war, but far from land, surrounded by the rolling sea, alone in the endless night.

  Watson sat on the edge of his bunk and reached for a towel. Despite the chill, he was sweating, but he could not say whether it was from the nightmare that had again come upon him, or from the lingering effects of emetic fever. He wiped perspiration from his face and neck, then threw the sodden cloth aside.

  And his bullet wound was paining him greatly. As the years passed, the discomfort might (or might not) lessen, but it would never vanish entirely. No matter how he shifted about, it still hurt. That Afghani tribal fighter, shooting blindly into the encampment from the boulder-strewn hillside at Maiwand with a primitive Jezail flintlock, would never know the outcome of that shot, nor the lifelong embarrassment it would give Watson. He knew where he had been shot, but as far as what he told others…he only hoped he could keep straight the revealed location, as the last thing he needed was a phantom bullet wandering from limb to limb, not that anyone but he would ever truly care.

  No use trying to seek sleep again, he thought. Between the nightmares, the pain, the sweats and the claustrophobic closeness of life aboard the troopship, any sort of rest was impossible. And there was the forced idleness. He had obtained his medical degree at the University of London in 1878, then had trained as an army surgeon at Netley before joining his regiment in Afghanistan, so, surely, there was some practical work he could put his hands to aboard ship, but that suggestion, when put to Captain Perkins, had been met with a cold eye.

  The enlisted men had their non-coms to keep them in line, and the regular officers certainly did not mind the long hours of drinking and playing cards, but Watson fit into neither group, and the discipline aboard ship was to keep the crew as separated as possible from the soldiers returning to England.

  He usually busied himself with books brought on board, but he had exhausted all but one medical journal six months old, and the Orontes itself held a very poor selection in its meager library. Climbing out of bed and pulling on his clothing, Watson seated himself at the tiny desk in the cramped quarters and lit the small lamp bolted to the desk-top. From a dispatch bag wedged between a trunk and a desk-leg he pulled a neat sheaf of papers, which contained notes he had jotted in England and later upon his sojourn. He had had in mind publishing a journal of his experiences during the Second Afghan Campaign, for although he had a literary turn of mind he did not feel he had the talent for writing popular fiction of any kind, but even that modest idea now seemed less tenantable: his training had been rushed, his service had been brief, and he was faced with the very real question of who would want to read anything written by a former military man on half pay who had so far accomplished so little in any career. It was more likely he would either purchase some retiring physician’s private practice or, much more likely, serve as locum for doctors and surgeons until he could get onto more solid footing. If for no other reason than financial, he would have to put aside any thoughts of becoming a writer, just as he would have to seriously consider finding a flat-mate upon his return to London.

  Time and circumstance conspire to poison dreams, he thought as he considered his present and immediate future. There is no profit in cursing fate. At least I can squarely face the truth – any truth is better than indefinite doubt. Perhaps I shall not be a writer, but, nevertheless, I shall do something worthy of note.

  Still, he jotted down some odd ideas and musings that had come to him during evening mess, as well as scraps of overheard conversation, for it was his nature to observe and record, a nature he could not deny, nor did he truly desire to; he returned the papers to the bag, and the bag to its place. Grabbing a coat and his pipe, Watson quietly departed his quarters and made for the deck.

  They were somewhere in the vicinity of the Cape, or so he had picked up from various comments at the Captain’s Table that night. The brilliant stars, brighter than he had ever seen before, even in the crystal-aired deserts of Afghanistan, were mirrored in the sea, so it appeared to him as if the ship were adrift in the vastness of the cosmos, a small and insignificant craft, less than a mote in the Eye of God. He did not recall ever having felt so alone, so far from the haunts of man.

  He filled his pipe with rough-cut shag from the pouch in his jacket pocket and lighted it. He exhaled a lazy stream of blue smoke into the velvet night.

  “Good evening, Doctor Watson,” greeted a soft voice. “Having trouble sleeping? Same here, I’m afraid. Whoever said an ocean voyage was the most relaxing mode of travel has never had the pleasure of sailing on a troopship. I wonder, could I bother you for a bit of that shag? I’ll gladly pay.”

  It was Moresby, a young lieutenant of Cavalry who had lost an eye and his right leg during the battle, and nearly his life when his horse was shot from under him; his left arm, too, was of limited use – though the bones had been reset as best as possible the damage had just been too severe. A once-fit young man had been reduced to dependency upon canes and society’s pity.

  “Here you go,” Watson said. “Keep your money, lad. I have plenty. Besides, fellow travellers and all that. How are you feeling?”

  “Not as well as I should hope, but thanks.” He stuffed the pungent tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, lighted it and took a contemplative puff. “Thank you, Doctor. Much appreciated.”

  “It’s filthy stuff really,” Watson commented. “Local mix, definitely not with a touch of latakia; I shudder to think what went into it.”

  “My tobacconist would probably be appalled,” Moresby admitted.

  “But out here…”

  “Yes, like bad port wine and any book,” Moresby agreed. “Out here, you learn to appreciate even the smallest comfort.”

  “Yes,” Watson allowed, “but when I get back to England I’ll dispose of this native weed; if I ever again smell the strong stink of rough-cut shag it will be too soon.”

  “Nights like this make a chap feel very small, don’t you agree?” Moresby murmured.

  Watson nodded. Though the Orontes was well over three hundred feet in length and 44 feet at the beam, displacing in excess of five thousand tons, it really did seem much smaller than a child’s toy boat, afloat within a shimmering washbasin. At this neap of the morning there were stiff and steady winds out of the south-southeast, so the ship’s boilers were being rested, and all the shrouds of the three-master were billowing.

  “What are your plans when we return to London, Moresby?” Doctor Watson asked.

  “I haven’t really given it much thought,” Moresby admitted.

  “Got a girl waiting back home?�
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  “Not anymore?”

  “Oh.” Watson eyed the young man, pale in the starlight of the southern climes. He hesitated. While he was no alienist, he knew very well ailments of the flesh could exacerbated by turmoil of the mind; still, he had no real desire to delve into that private maelstrom. He held silent, but felt guilty for so doing.

  “She broke it off,” Moresby explained, biting the words sharply. “I wrote to her, telling what happened to me. Her return letter arrived just before we sailed. Seemed she could not face life with a cripple. Not that I blame her, not really…who could?”

  “Damned shame,” Watson muttered, discomfited.

  “I don’t resent her decision,” Moresby continued.

  “That’s decent of you, old man.”

  Moresby shrugged. “What else can I do?”

  For long minutes they smoked their pipes in silence, each man occupied with his own thoughts. The sea splashed rhythmically against the hull as the ship cut a luminescent swath through the star-filled sea beneath swirling constellations never seen above the dark domes and spires of London.

  “What the devil was that?” Moresby asked suddenly.

  Watson shifted his gaze from the dizzying reaches of the sails to the southern darkness, where Moresby was peering intently.

  “What is it?” Watson questioned. “I don’t see anything.”

  “I thought I saw…” the young lieutenant said. “Yes, there it is, a light, moving just above the horizon…do you see it?

  The stars were so bright and abundant that the darkness of the sea created a more definite horizon than existed during the brief daylight hours, when ocean and sky met in a vague grey haze. At first Watson saw nothing but the sharp line where the glimmering stars of the sky met the reflected shimmering stars of the sea. Then he saw it, a faint reddish light in the distance.

  The light might have been mistaken for another star, but it moved, and as it moved it pulsed in a very slow interval. For long moments it remained barely visible, then faded to nothingness, dark so long that Watson wondered if he had really seen it at all, if it had not been a trick played by the deepness of the night and the desire to not be alone in the immensity of the world, whereupon it slowly pulsed back into visibility, slightly brighter than before, and nearer.