Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

by Tim Symonds

  ‘A final question before we go to our rooms and prepare for dinner,’ Holmes said suddenly. ‘I heard the General ask you how long it takes a ruptured eardrum to heal. I didn’t catch your reply.’

  ‘About two months to seal completely,’ I replied. ‘If no infection sets in, the patient can be out and about in four or five days, as long as he keeps the damaged ear dry.’

  ‘How often do you plan to check on the royal progress?’

  ‘If you are asking me to continue my part in this absurd sham, I could visit him any time. Tomorrow even. I would look forward to it,’ I added sarcastically. ‘In all my years in medicine I’ve never had the experience of changing perfectly clean bandages on a perfectly good ear.’

  ‘Tomorrow would indeed be opportune, dear chap.’ Holmes replied, ignoring my caustic tone. ‘When you see him, I have a particular question I want you to ask.’

  ‘Which being?’

  ‘Does he have an orchard of his own?’

  My jaw dropped.

  ‘An orchard of his own?’ I repeated. ‘Why on earth would you...?’

  ‘Don’t forget,’ my comrade cautioned.

  ‘I shan’t forget,’ I responded, perplexed.

  Holmes added, ‘Tomorrow, before the cock crows four times, we must pay a visit to the stretch of water looking out on the Temple of Imperial Longevity. Where the steam-launch is moored.’

  ‘May I ask what time it’ll be when the cock crows four times?’

  ‘The Ifugao tribe of the Philippines state that cocks crow four times during the night, with the third cockcrow at around four o’clock in the morning. And you, my dear friend, what do you plan for this evening? Another of Clark Russell’s sea stories? Working on your report for the General?’

  ‘Not the report. It’s already in his hands,’ I replied with satisfaction. ‘Every ‘i’ dotted, every ‘t’ crossed. Eighty-five recommendations. We can set off for England any time.’

  ‘Eighty-five recommendations! The topper most being...?’

  ‘On no account to deploy his tatterdemalion forces to pick a fight with any country for at least ten years. Except Nepal perhaps. Not even with our old friends, the Baker Street Irregulars with their catapults. By the way, I also mentioned in the most complimentary terms what an apt student we’ve found Wang Feng to be.’

  Holmes had begun to move towards his quarters. His head jerked round.

  ‘You did what?’ he returned, concern in his voice.

  ‘I mentioned your lectures, Holmes. I added a few complimentary words about Wang, how he grasps what we mean when we speak of justice for the people, trial by a jury of one’s equals, how a presumption of innocence is the cornerstone of British jurisprudence. That sort of thing. How surprised he was to learn that no-one, not even the King of England, is above the Law.’

  ‘Did you, Watson,’ Holmes responded, his eyes narrowing. ‘Did you indeed? Will Yuán have read those complimentary words by now?’

  My reference to Wang seemed to cause him dismay.

  ‘I presume so. I submitted the report three days ago.’

  ‘I assume it’s too late to retrieve it and scrub those words?’

  ‘It’s too late, yes, but why should I do so?’

  Holmes turned away without responding.

  ‘One last thing for you to mull over this evening, Watson,’ he called back. ‘The General mentioned black powder before you confirmed it. How did your friend know the firecracker was filled with black powder? The Emperor’s damaged side was deliberately obscured in deep shadow from the time he and the E-D arrived. How could he be so certain?’

  ‘Most probably a guess,’ I countered. ‘After all, Yuán could see the Emperor still had his head on his torso. With the crow on his shoulder, anything more powerful than black powder would have blown him to smithereens.’

  On an excuse I chose to dine alone. Afterwards I went for a stroll in the Temple gardens in the moonlight to think it all out anew. Holmes’s last question made me realise what a hopeless tangle I was in. I returned to my rooms to refresh my fuddled senses with a cup of tea, to no avail. It was high time to start on the long journey home. I’d been on trek for more than three months, much of it arduous. I had captured many sights of Peking and its hinterland on the Aeroscope. Only one reel remained.

  Chapter XI

  We Search for Clues by the Lake

  Dawn broke. My sleep had been fretful. Holmes said cocks in the Philippines crow just four times between sunset and sunrise. It seemed to me the cocks of Peking crowed all night. The Empress Dowager and the sages-in-ordinary were laboriously consulting their books for an auspicious day for our departure. They seemed in no hurry. General Yuán was no longer making himself as available to me as before, though he had thanked me profusely. He was, he told me, working carefully through my report with its multiplicity of recommendations and I would be well rewarded. Despite Holmes’s evident suspicions I saw no signs of a malevolent plot against the Son of Heaven nor, as General Yuán seemed to be implying, by the Emperor against his aunt.

  I pulled a pipe from my pocket and stared reflectively into the empty bowl. For Holmes to compare incompetent assassins who couldn’t distinguish between blasting jelly or black powder with Professor Moriarty, the most cunning and destructive foe we had ever faced, was, well...at the least hyperbole of a high order, even risible. Before my comrade sent Moriarty plunging to his death at the Reichenbach Falls, the latter was dubbed by Holmes himself ‘the Napoleon of crime...organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city of London...A genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker... the controlling brain of the criminal underworld’.

  Who here in the Purple City, I asked myself, could even remotely approximate a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations had not Holmes hurled him into the foaming waters of those waterfalls in distant Switzerland 16 years ago, a shattering event I recorded in The Final Problem?

  The sun had hardly cleared the oxblood-red walls of the Forbidden City when Holmes arrived at my door equipped with a green, white and mauve umbrella. We exchanged good-mornings and set off to where the Shishaquita was moored. At the small dock there were no guards and no sign of anyone aboard. Holmes left the umbrella with me while he hurried up the gangplank. He returned a minute later holding up an oilskin cape which he swirled from back to front and front to back like a bullfighter’s cape.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a feng ling. Compare this to the beizi the Emperor was wearing. What strikes you most?’

  ‘The material is very different,’ I replied. ‘This feng ling is a lot sturdier, but you’d expect that. It’s designed for heavy weather.’

  ‘Can you spot a further difference?’

  I studied the garment.

  ‘I’m sorry, Holmes. I can’t. It’s also yellow like the other. What are you referring to?’

  ‘The hood. This has a hood. The Emperor’s beizi didn’t.’

  ‘And that’s important?’

  ‘I believe so, yes,’ came the cryptic reply.

  He threw the oilskin back into the hold.

  ‘Let’s take a walk along the bank. I have an idea I’d like to explore. In the rustic days of your youth no doubt you dabbled in the fine art of poaching - committing offences against the Salmon Fisheries Acts?’

  Poaching! Decades fell away at the word. During the long summer school holidays my mother placed me on small farms for an agreed weekly payment. Those halcyon summers were spent exploring hedgerows and streams, spotting Scottish Crossbills, breathing the air of a freedom experienced only in one’s youth, returning to the farmstead in time for a filling evening meal of soup and chunks of home-made bread followed by the sleep of the innocents. There, in the Cairngorm Mountains, on the banks of Shee Water, my angling started with a net, a willow wand, a
bit of string, and a crooked pin, my catch lamprey, perch and the occasional sparling.

  By the time I was twelve I graduated to larger game as an apprentice to a professional poacher. The two of us worked the river with a couple of dogs, as silent as Basenjis ourselves, slipping unseen through a copse at dusk or slithering along the river bank to a trout-filled pool.

  My childhood adventures were now a set of snapshots in my memory - a cock-pheasant winging down from the branch of a beech to sun himself, the crex crex of corncrakes from the meadows, their presence betrayed only by their voice -waiting impatiently with Barry the Poacher to climb the high stone walls into the 6th Duke of G_____’s estate. Then up and over and away into the night, dogs, wires, gill nets, snares and the trusty old flintlock with the barrel filed down, soon crouched in reeds, knee-deep in water. Or lying full length in the grass next to a waterfall, slabbering dogs at our side.

  ‘See under that overhang?’ I could hear old Barry’s voice whispering. ‘There, in that hollow. Two salmon. Resting before their final effort to reach the spawning beds. The smaller one, he probably weighs just four or five pounds, but that other one, in the shadow. I reckon it’s twice as big.’

  However intent we were on our quarry, it was imperative to keep eye and ear open for rustling in the undergrowth for the Estate gamekeeper, a careful and successful preserver of game and a fine shot.

  Holmes’s voice cut into my reverie. He was peering intently around us.

  ‘Let’s say you were a poacher somewhere along here. There’s fish a-plenty in the waters. Where would you hide?’

  I studied the river-bank. The drooping branches and interlacing roots of willow trees form the perfect hide on the edges of rivers and lakes.

  I pointed.

  ‘Those willows,’ I replied.

  At the very moment my finger fell back there was the faint flicker of a fishing line.

  ‘Holmes,’ I breathed. ‘There is someone there. May I recommend the method used for catching us poachers in my youth? Pounce fast from behind while shrieking like banshees!’

  The old trick worked wonders. Within seconds our present quarry was wriggling in my hands like a trout, a barefoot lad in worn-out trousers. While Holmes questioned the boy, two fish gawped glassily back at me from the lad’s bucket. Finally my comrade said, ‘Watson, you can free our young poacher. The young man admits he comes here almost every day. He was here yesterday morning. He says he heard a dull thud, presumably the Mandarin cracker. He was too terrified to step out from the hide to investigate. The penalty for poaching the Emperor’s fish is immediate strangulation by the eunuchs, or at the very least the bastinado.’

  ‘Have you asked him if he knows why there were no guards at the dock yesterday to meet the Emperor?’ I enquired.

  ‘I’m about to,’ Holmes replied, settling himself companionably next to the shaking boy and speaking to him in Mandarin.

  Few Chinese expect a foreigner to cope with their language. Our captive stared back at Holmes in amazement. His expressive face indicated ‘It’s almost as if this man is speaking Chinese, though of course it’s impossible...it must be a mirage’.

  My comrade spoke in a ‘lingua franca’ Chinese, a Peking-inflected Mandarin. Not for the first time envy was tinged with overwhelming admiration for Holmes’s exceptional ability with tongues. In preparation for my trip I had obtained a copy of Jane Rowbotham Edkin’s Mandarin Phrase-Book & Vocabulary. The slightest alteration of tone or inflection completely changes the meaning of what appears to be precisely the same word, Mrs. Edkins explained. If you say tāng with a high tone it means soup. However, táng with a rising tone means sugar.

  ***

  Among the clump of willows, the boy’s responses came in anxious rushes. He arrived before sun-up, as usual. He settled into this favourite place where his fishing tackle was normally impossible to spot. Today he had been careless or we would, he told us, never have spotted him. He knew the Emperor was due to go to the Temple the previous day because he saw the Palace guards waiting at the Paifang. To his surprise they formed a line and marched away. Yes, this was before the Emperor came. No, he didn’t know why they left. There was nobody else around. He had risked staying longer to fish because the barges which usually accompanied the Emperor across the water hadn’t turned up.

  Holmes stood up. Our captive looked palpably relieved we weren’t going to tear off a limb for breakfast.

  ‘When I say there was nobody else around,’ the boy said suddenly, ‘I mean there were no Chinese, only a ‘Fan-qui’.’

  I had already learnt the word Fan-qui. It was a not-especially complimentary term for a westerner. It originally meant a devil who’d assumed human shape.

  The small captive gestured towards the Imperial quay. The Fan-qui had arrived on a steam-launch. He spoke a few words to the head of the guards.

  ‘That’s when the bannermen lined up and left,’ the boy told us.

  ‘And the Fan-qui?’ Holmes asked. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘His steam-launch took him away.’

  ‘What did he look like, this foreigner?’

  ‘I couldn’t see his face,’ our captive replied. ‘He must have had a bad cold. He held a handkerchief over his nose and mouth all the time.’

  Holmes asked, ‘How did you know he was a Fan-qui then? He was much too far away for you to hear him speaking.’

  ‘His clothes,’ came the reply. ‘He wasn’t wearing Chinese clothes. He wore a flat straw hat on his head like some foreigners wear. And his jacket.’

  The boy’s finger drew invisible lines up and down.

  ‘He wore a jacket with blue and green and red stripes.’

  At Holmes’s translation I blurted out, ‘How amazing! That’s identical to the outfit I suggested General Yuán should order from Lock’s.’

  That night I reflected on the young Han’s words. My conversation on poaching with Holmes left me with a deep sense of nostalgia. I stared up at the ornate ceiling, reflecting on the mid summers of my youth, weeks mellow and immemorial, the hayfields awaiting the scythe, the grazing meadows alive with white bonneted girls and sunburnt boys with flowers in our caps, milk-pails waiting, silver white among the nettles.

  ***

  Early on the morrow a sedan came to take me to the Emperor for his medical check-up. It took place in his claustrophobic secret room. Again my patient looked pleased to see me. The young eunuch brought us tea. To maintain the charade I changed the perfectly clean bandages on the good ear while inspecting the damaged one. I was keen to obtain an answer to Holmes’s peculiar question, ‘Does the Emperor have a private orchard?’

  I began, ‘Your Highness, sunlight has a therapeutic value. Now the weather is favourable I recommend you take an occasional afternoon rest en plein air.’

  ‘Certainly. It was ever my practice.’

  ‘Do you have a favourite spot?’ I pursued. ‘Where you can be entirely private? For example an orchard?’

  ‘My favourite place is indeed in an orchard,’ came the reply.

  He described how when he was a boy, exhausted from his studies of philology and philosophy, he fell asleep in a meadow approached through a dense grove of arbor-vitae. In a dream he fell in love with a beautiful woman. The red ribbon attached to her glittering headdress indicated she had met a violent death. When he awoke he was obsessed by her.

  ‘She was beautiful beyond belief. Whenever the burdens of the day overwhelm me, I return to the exact spot under a pipa tree to refresh myself in sleep.’

  The Emperor loved the tree, now 30 feet tall, he told me, because of its sweet-scented flowers and red mulberry trees, and delicious fruit. Over the years the meadow had grown into his private orchard. With his own hands he planted cherry trees and maples and red mulberry trees, grouping them in colourful masses. At determined points he grew Chi
nese dates (Jujubes) from the seed of 1000-year-old wild trees in Shandong and Shaanxi, winter peaches, plums and pears from seed brought from the Yellow River valley.

  ‘Is anyone allowed to approach you among these trees?’ I asked.

  ‘Without my permission, no-one. Not even this eunuch, though...’

  The Emperor’s glance went to the door.

  ‘...when I fall asleep my mouth drops open. Sometimes Her Imperial Majesty delights in approaching me quietly and popping a bonbon in my mouth for when I wake up.’

  With a slight smile he added, ‘Perhaps her intention is for the sweet to stick to my mouth and prevent me from talking too much to the Reformers.’

  ***

  In the evening I went in search of Holmes. He was sitting on the flight of steps leading from our Temple quarters. He greeted me perfunctorily, with the frown of someone deep in thought. After several minutes’ silence, I ventured,

  ‘It’s a pity the young poacher couldn’t be more helpful. He saw nothing of the attack on the Emperor.’

  ‘My dear chap,’ Holmes replied, ‘his description of the Fan-qui was helpful enough. Even if he’d observed who-ever set the crow loose on the Emperor, you know how unreliable such testimony can be. An eyewitness will swear under oath there were seven dacoits firing pistols when it was one man with a life-preserver. Many times around the dinner table you yourself tell how your batman Murray reported the bullet fired from a Jezail rifle at the Battle of Maiwand hit you in the right shoulder when everyone can deduce from your stiff left arm it struck you on the opposite side.’

  After a moment staring at me thoughtfully, Holmes asked, ‘Can you go back over your encounter with Yuán at the Emperor’s Palace after the General and the Empress Dowager rushed in? You spoke with him,’ he prompted. ‘Remind me. What was the gist of the conversation?’