Sherlock Holmes - Gods of War

by James Lovegrove

  “A treasure trove of disguise and dissimulation,” said Holmes. “Why have I never visited this place before? I feel quite at home here.”

  “You always were something of an actor manqué,” I said. “Your propensity for impersonation while on an investigation suggests to me that by becoming a detective you missed your true calling as a thespian.”

  My friend picked up a tub of greasepaint. “There is a lot to be said for losing oneself in the role of another. It is like taking a holiday, a respite from the pressures of who one is.” He held the greasepaint aloft like Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull. “Perhaps I have for too long tried to be another Sherlock Holmes, playing at being retired. Perhaps I am at last rediscovering my metier. Events are conspiring to steer me back onto my predestined path.”

  “Hogwash. You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

  “You must at least allow me my fond indulgences.” He set down the greasepaint and tapped the countertop bell. “Is there no one here? How many bell rings does it take to summon service?”

  We heard activity from the backroom, and eventually a woman emerged, hastening into the shop with profuse apology. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot from crying, and her flaxen hair somewhat dishevelled. Notwithstanding, she was a comely creature. I would put her age at thirty or thirty-one – though it is not polite to speculate on such things – and she had a fine narrow nose and a smooth slender throat. Her dress was in the latest mode, with a low neckline and shirtwaist bodice, to which she had added a few striking sartorial touches such as a profusion of bracelets on both wrists and unusually long earrings.

  Dabbing at her eyes with a batik handkerchief, the lady enquired how she might be of assistance.

  “Do I have the pleasure of addressing Miss Elizabeth Vandenbergh?” said Holmes.

  “That you do. But you have me at a disadvantage, sir. You are…?”

  “Sherlock Holmes, and this is Dr Watson.”

  I doffed my hat to her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Elizabeth Vandenbergh. “I feel I ought to have recognised you. You do not look much like you do in the Strand.”

  “I’m afraid I must put that down to the passage of the years, and also to the fact that Mr Paget chooses to depict me with a considerably higher forehead than I actually possess, as well as a sharper and more aquiline nose.”

  “No, now that I look more closely, Mr Holmes, I perceive that he has captured your likeness well.”

  “How we see ourselves is often not how we truly are,” Holmes said philosophically. “Miss Vandenbergh, I beg your forgiveness for calling on you at what must be a difficult time. Watson and I came with a view to enquiring from a colleague as to your home address, whereupon we could present ourselves more formally at a time that suited you. We did not anticipate meeting you yourself on the premises. We imagined you would be elsewhere, having taken some time off in light of your present regrettable circumstances.”

  “A colleague?” said Elizabeth with a muted laugh. “I have none. I cannot afford to pay anyone’s wages but my own. I run this business single-handed. And my premises are also my home address. I own the entire building, and live in a small flat on the upstairs floor. Being a costumier is not the most lucrative form of employment, especially in a small, out-of-the-way town such as Eastbourne. My margins are narrow. I keep body and soul together, but only just.”

  “There is no Tripp at Tripp’s Costumiers, then?”

  “I kept the name after I bought the business off Roderick Tripp, the previous proprietor, last year. Everything else here is all mine, and all my responsibility. I stitch, I sew, I work the till, I sweep the floors, I do the accounts…” A delicate frown creased her brow. “But may I ask how you knew who I was, Mr Holmes, if you were not expecting to meet Elizabeth Vandenbergh?”

  “Your tears gave you away. The woman Watson and I are looking for has recently undergone a bereavement.”

  Elizabeth, with an impressive effort, steeled herself. “That she has. And would that I could close up the shop and take time off to grieve, but such is the parlous state of my finances that I must stay open for whatever passing trade I can hope to attract. There are bills to be paid, and I need every farthing I can earn. Also, it is better to be busy than to sit idle and brood. That may all seem rather unfeeling of me, but as the saying goes, if your head is intact you can have a thousand turbans. In other words, when times are hard you must do whatever you have to in order to keep going. Everything else is unimportant.”

  “A noteworthy turn of phrase,” said Holmes.

  “So I have indeed shed tears, yes, but I must also get on with life.” The phlegmatic tenor of her statement was belied by the catch in her voice as she spoke. Miss Elizabeth Vandenbergh was putting on a very brave face, but she remained manifestly distraught. “What’s happened has happened. There are practicalities to consider. I just rather wish I hadn’t found out the news in such a roundabout way. I overheard someone talking about it in the queue at the bakers this morning. Apparently it’s all over town. Nobody, though, had the nerve to come to me in person and tell me. I had to learn it second-hand, as a rumour. Such is the regard in which I am held by certain persons.”

  “By certain persons you mean Craig Mallinson, I presume. After all, you are, or rather were, the paramour of Patrick Mallinson. That is correct?”

  She moved her head from side to side, as though in embarrassment or discomfort. “Paramour. What a terribly pukka word. Patrick and I were, one might say, more than friends. Not for long, and not without complication, but we definitely formed a deep attachment. His father has sent you, I take it.”

  Holmes allowed that he had.

  Elizabeth’s lip curled. “What – am I to blame for Patrick’s death? Has the high-and-mighty Craig Mallinson employed Mr Sherlock Holmes to build a case against me? Is this some petty act of vengeance on his part? If it is, sir, I should have you know that I am not a woman to be slighted or scorned. I am perfectly capable of defending my corner, like a fury if need be.”

  “Of that I have no doubt, madam,” said Holmes. “While in India, you would have been exposed to some level of hardship. It has tempered you like steel. I do not know of anyone, not even a lady’s companion, who has not returned from the subcontinent with an increased capacity for weathering the storms of life. Your disappointment in love while abroad has likewise inured you to storms of another kind – of the heart. The further reaches of the British Empire serve as a proving ground for all who go there. If it does not kill them, that is. Madras, was it?”

  “Mysore, as a matter of fact. But how did you…?” Elizabeth shook her head with a rueful smile. “Either you have researched my background or you are applying your famous analytical reasoning. On balance, I think it is the second of the two.”

  “And you would be correct in your surmise.”

  “Let me see. What clues did I give?”

  “For one thing –”

  “No, Mr Holmes, it was a rhetorical question. I intend to analyse your analysis. I am curious to determine if I can match my wits against yours.”

  It amused me to see someone – a member of the opposite sex, moreover – halt Holmes mid-flow and elect to take him on at his own game. It amused Holmes too, but in a more abstruse, scientific way.

  “My physical appearance would have been a factor,” Elizabeth said. “My choice in jewellery – these earrings, these bangles – and my handkerchief. I suppose all of that would have been evident to you, although as a rule most males pay scant attention to the niceties of how a woman looks or dresses. They note the obvious but not the subtleties, the details. Then there was my use of the word ‘pukka’. Doubtless that caught your attention.”

  “It is one of the many Hobson-Jobson loanwords that have entered our mother tongue from Hindi, via the Raj,” said Holmes. “But whereas others such as ‘pyjamas’, ‘verandah’ and ‘shampoo’ are in common usage, ‘pukka’ remains more rarefied and tends to be in the vocabulary onl
y of people who have actually lived and worked in India.”

  “I also quoted an Indian proverb. I have a store of those.”

  “Yes. ‘A thousand turbans’. That certainly bolstered the impression I was forming of your background.”

  “But how did you know that I had been a lady’s companion?”

  “Is that another rhetorical question?”

  “No, now I am genuinely asking. I can’t imagine the job has qualities which are immediately obvious in one’s bearing and speech.”

  “Here we come to the art of selecting the highest from a list of probabilities. Lady’s companion seemed a logical occupation for one of your gender, age, social standing and unmarried status who has lived abroad. Now that I know you were in Mysore, one of the princely states rather than one of the presidencies or provinces, it is clear you were not in the employ of a governor’s or lieutenant-governor’s wife, so I am going to opt instead for the wife of someone in the mercantile professions – a plantation owner.”

  “Very good.”

  “A woman whose husband dealt in tea or rubber.”

  “Tea.”

  “And who would therefore have been living somewhere rural and remote, where erudite English-speaking company was thin on the ground. You, with your obvious intelligence and accomplishment, were there to provide her with the society she would otherwise constantly have been in want of.”

  “But how could you tell I lived so far south? India is not a small country by any means, yet you alighted immediately on the region right at the tip of the landmass.”

  “The ‘further reaches of the British Empire’, as I said. You were away for a number of years – again, a deduction in part based on your current age, if I am not being too indelicate, madam – and you were not likely to have been there for so long if the southern parts of India weren’t so much more inaccessible than the northern parts. One imagines that lady’s companions come and go more readily in Sind or the Punjab than they do in Madras and Mysore. It is not worth the extra journeying time if you do not then stay for a goodly period – long enough, indeed, to pick up a healthy grasp of the vernacular and the local expressions.”

  “Most ingenious, Mr Holmes,” said Elizabeth. “You are quite as clever as people say.”

  My friend responded with a nod that was halfway to being a bow. “There is a further indicator of your Indian sojourn that you may not be aware of, Miss Vandenbergh. You have adopted that peculiarly Indian mannerism of wobbling your head to show assent or acknowledgement. I am quite sure it is unconscious.”

  Elizabeth performed the action, knowingly. “How astute of you. If I do do that, I honestly don’t realise it. There is one other thing, however. You spoke of a ‘disappointment in love’. Was that a lucky guess? There can, after all, be few women who have not at some stage or other in their lives been let down by a man. Or am I to assume that the relatively sanguine face I am currently presenting to the world has some bearing on your inference?”

  “I have never in my life made a lucky guess,” said Holmes. “It strikes me that you have been through worse than you are experiencing right now. I am not saying you are hard-hearted, but your heart has been hardened, your outlook made pragmatic by some previous difficulty related to a romantic liaison. Is that why you came back to England a year ago?”

  Elizabeth’s cheeks flushed a little. “The two events are not unconnected. I became… entangled with a local man while out there. He was high-caste, the son of a nawab. He lived in a palace in the hills, with views out across steaming jungle and the Kaveri river. Monkeys roamed free among the trees in the courtyard, and he kept mynahs in a cage. My visits to his home, though infrequent, were like trips to a tropical Eden. He was mentor as well as friend. He gave me lessons in swordplay, Indian-style. I am proficient with both firangi and khanda, and I am also versed in the principles of kalaripayattu, a martial art practised in the southern Indian states. I could have been happy with him, I could even have become his nawab begum, his memsahib…” She uttered a wistful sigh. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

  “We have no objection to listening,” I said.

  “Good of you to say, doctor, but I have no wish to bore you with the sordid details of my past. To cut a long story short, my employer found out who I was consorting with and put a stop to it. He accused me of all sorts of vile sins, the least of which was that I had ‘gone native’. He maintained that the brown man and the white woman were not meant to be together. It was an abomination, an affront to British dignity and the natural order. He vowed to besmirch my reputation if I did not end the relationship, and while a part of me could not have cared less what he did, another more conservative part recoiled at the threat. I acceded to his demands. I wish I had not. He put me on a train up to Bombay and thence on the first available steamship back home, and for every single one of the thousands of miles I travelled, I wept. Only as the ship put in at Southampton did I buck up and swear to myself that I would never again be that timid and easily cowed. Nobody but me would dictate whom I chose to fall in love with.”

  “An admirable sentiment,” I said. “I applaud it.”

  “Poor Patrick, though,” she said. “I never meant to hurt him, certainly not so badly that he would take his own life. In fact, by telling him we were not to see each other any more, I hoped to save him.”

  “How so?” said Holmes.

  “It is complicated. Do you have time?”

  “As much as you require.”

  “Then allow me to make you both some tea, and I shall unburden myself further to you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE ENCHANTED SUMMER

  Elizabeth Vandenbergh flipped the sign hanging in the shop door from Open to Closed, saying, “I imagine my non-existent customers won’t miss me for half an hour or so.” Then she invited us into the back room.

  Bolts of cloth lay in piles all around, sometimes stacked two or three deep against the wall. A treadle-powered sewing machine sat by the window. A dressmaker’s dummy was clad in a maharajah’s robes, which were festooned with pins and bearing the chalk marks that indicated where excess material was to be trimmed. The floor was littered with offcuts of fabric and twists of discarded thread.

  Elizabeth managed to find seating for all of us: a couple of chairs and a stool from the curtained-off booth that served as a changing area. She boiled a kettle on a small coal-fired potbellied stove which also heated the room. The tea was good, fragrant but rich. I complimented her on it, and she replied that tea was her great weakness.

  “I cannot abide anything but the highest-grade leaves, doctor,” she said. “Drinking fresh-picked chai in India spoiled me. I have a tin of this orange pekoe Darjeeling blend posted to me once a month by a specialist importer up in Kensington. It is my one small treat for myself.”

  Holmes, impatient as ever with the niceties of social intercourse, said, “You claim you hoped to save Patrick, Miss Vandenbergh. How would spurning him achieve that?”

  “I suppose spurning him was what I did,” Elizabeth said. “But it was for his own good. I could perhaps have gone about it in a gentler, kinder way, but my plan was to startle Patrick, to bring him to his senses. I told him curtly that he was to leave me alone and never darken my door again. It was a calculated and I may say selfless strategy. I knew his feelings would be hurt, and deeply, but I had to risk it. I had already delivered several ultimatums. I had to resort to drastic measures.”

  “This was in connection with his decision to forgo Cambridge?”

  “Oh no. Nothing to do with that. Admittedly it was silly of him to pass up a place at university for me, but it was a dramatic, romantic gesture typical of a young man. Patrick regarded it as a demonstration of the level of his affection. And I was flattered, although I was convinced, too, that distance need not be an obstacle to us and that I would be able to talk him into changing his mind, given time. Cambridge was not a bone of contention between us as it was between him and his fat
her. There would have been ways around it.”

  “Then something else drove a wedge between the two of you.”

  “Perhaps I should relate first how Patrick and I met.”

  “If it has some bearing on your later estrangement from him.”

  “It does, I think. I first laid eyes on Patrick in June, when he called in at the shop wishing to buy a bespoke costume. It was an unusual commission, quite challenging, hardly run-of-the-mill.”

  “What sort of costume?”

  “The Egyptian god Horus.”

  “Horus,” I said. “Is he the one with the jackal’s head?”

  “No, that’s Anubis, god of the dead,” said Elizabeth. “Horus has the head of a falcon. He’s a hunting god, among other things. I asked Patrick what he wanted the costume for, and he answered in vague terms. A fancy dress ball, I believe is what he said. I took his measurements, even though I am quite skilled at gauging clothing sizes at a glance. You, Mr Holmes, take an eleven collar, do you not? And you, Dr Watson, buy your trousers in a thirty-six waist, although I think a thirty-eight would be more appropriate.”

  I harrumphed, but she had me bang to rights. My wife had let out all my waistbands as far as they could go, and still the seams strained. However, I refused to admit defeat and order roomier trousers. It was a matter of personal pride.

  Elizabeth continued, “Patrick said that money was no object where the costume was concerned. The more opulent, the better. So I made sure to use plenty of gold crêpe de Chine silk and rich blue and white cotton with a high thread count. The outfit consisted of a wrap-around pleated skirt, gathered at the front, and a variety of amulets, armlets and wristlets. The falcon head I constructed out of papier-mâché, painted white and black with gold accents. Finally there was a kind of criss-crossing assemblage of metal discs worn on the chest and attaching at the back. It’s called a gorgerine. For that I stitched together hundreds of silvery sequins in a featherlike design on a crinoline backing. Using wood and gold paint I then fashioned a staff and ankh for the wearer to carry. They’re Horus’s signature symbolic regalia.