by Tim Symonds
I said, ‘I don’t understand. Was it some sort of premonition?’
The Emperor grimaced.
‘It was no premonition. It was the nine dragons. To a Chinese acquainted with the custom of the Ch’ing that number on a Dragon robe spells dethroning and death.’
I said, ‘But I thought nine was a symbol of Imperial power and strength? Only an Emperor is permitted to wear...’
‘Only an Emperor wears the ‘nine dragons robe’ but these robes never have nine dragons stitched on them, only eight. The Emperor is himself a dragon. That brings the number up to nine. The message was clear. Nine dragons plus me makes ten, no longer the Imperial nine. The person who sent me the beizi no longer considered me Emperor.’
I stared at my patient utterly mystified. I visualised his rotating finger jutting from between the Empress Dowager and the General.
‘You implicated the General as the mastermind. Now you say you knew from the start Her Imperial Majesty was the driving force.’
‘Only the Divine Mother could have stitched nine dragons on the beizi. No-one else would have risked death by a thousand cuts for such treason. My first thoughts before entering the Temple of Longevity on the other side of the lake were to say nothing. I live in mortal and perpetual fear of her. I felt I could do nothing. I would carry on with my functions as usual despite the terrible pain in my ear.’
Exasperated beyond measure, I forgot the required form of address to an Emperor.
‘My dear fellow,’ I exclaimed, why in heaven’s name didn’t you disclose all this to Holmes! After all, he...’
‘Because,’ the Emperor interrupted, ‘something very strange occurred in the Temple. When I started to pray the spirits of my ancestors began speaking to me, giving me instructions. The voices told me there was a way I could turn the situation around, rid myself of my principal oppressor, my aunt. I was to make no accusation against her. I was even to emphasise how generous her gesture had been in sending me the beizi. I was to point Sir Sherlock towards Yuán, lay the blame solely on him. Only the General’s control over the New Army keeps the Old Buddha on her throne.
The ancestors said that if the General was arrested for treason, not even the Empress Dowager could save him from the most painful execution, including decapitation. With him removed from the scene, the spirits promised me within weeks she herself would be tumbled into her grave.’
The Emperor shrugged ruefully.
‘From the moment Sir Sherlock realised the cape could never truly have been my aunt’s and was designed by her solely with the plot in mind, I knew my plan for pinning the blame on the General alone was never to be. Otherwise...’ he paused, seeking the right metaphor, ‘otherwise I could have killed first one bird and then the second with the same stone and regained my throne.’
Holmes’s and my life in the world of crime had been filled to the brim with ‘ifs’. If I had not turned back early that day at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes’s life might not have been put in mortal danger at the hands of Professor Moriarty. Here in the Forbidden City, if Holmes had not brilliantly pinned the baleful plot together from clues other than the nine dragons on the beizi, we may not have needed to find a way to bargain for the life of the Guangxu Emperor. The Emperor would have been murdered.
As I wrote of Holmes in The Adventure Of The Yellow Face, ‘Now and again, however, it chanced that even when he erred the truth was still discovered.’
A poem by the famous Scotsman Robert Burns came to mind: ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley...’ –that is, ‘The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew...’.
If we hadn’t, as General put it, ‘grossly intruded’ in China’s internal affairs, the plot proposed by the Emperor’s ancestral spirits may have succeeded, eliminating both Yuán and the Empress Dowager. For the rest of my life I shall never know.
Chapter XVI
I Speculate about Mycroft Holmes’s True Rôle
Some weeks later, back in London, I exchanged my Chinese silver coins at Cox’s and placed five guineas on The White Knight to win the Ascot Gold Cup. It came in first. My film presentation (minus the orchard scene) at the Royal Geographical Society was a gratifying success, applauded by an audience which included no less than the elderly Florence Nightingale, the rising Member of Parliament Winston Churchill, the notable fiction writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the guest of honour, His Majesty King Edward V11, who received the signed photograph of the Empress Dowager with genuine curiosity and made me spend time with him in the tea-room recounting my adventures.
I put my name down on a waiting list for an Aerocar, the air-cooled 24 horsepower four-cylinder model at a cost of 2,800 American dollars, including goggles, gauntlet gloves and de rigeur breeches. Once ‘in the saddle’ I planned to drive down to the Sussex countryside to demonstrate the Gabriel horn and gas headlights to Holmes. Having got whiff of my purchase he had already begun to goad me with references to Mr. Toad. He quoted in full from the newly-published children’s story The Wind In The Willows:
‘The Badger strode heavily into the room, and stood looking at the two animals with an expression full of seriousness. The Rat let his egg-spoon fall on the table-cloth, and sat open-mouthed.
‘The hour has come!’ said the Badger at last with great solemnity.
‘What hour?’ asked the Rat uneasily, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece.
‘WHOSE hour, you should rather say,’ replied the Badger. ‘Why, Toad’s hour! The hour of Toad! I said I would take him in hand as soon as the winter was well over, and I’m going to take him in hand to-day!’
‘Toad’s hour, of course!’ cried the Mole delightedly. ‘Hooray! I remember now! WE’LL teach him to be a sensible Toad!’
‘This very morning,’ continued the Badger, taking an arm-chair, ‘as I learnt last night from a trustworthy source, another new and exceptionally powerful motor-car will arrive at Toad Hall on approval or return. At this very moment, perhaps, Toad is busy arraying himself in those singularly hideous habiliments so dear to him, which transform him from a (comparatively) good-looking Toad into an Object which throws any decent-minded animal that comes across it into a violent fit.’
***
The fine Edwardian summer passed. Winter set in. I received a letter addressed in Holmes’s familiar spidery script. I unsheathed the letter-opener, sliced it through the envelope, and began to read:
‘Nr. East Dean 16thNovember, 1908
Dear Watson,
I would welcome your company. If your Toad-mobile has not yet been delivered from America, come this Saturday on the morning express to Eastbourne. A brougham will be waiting for you.
P.S. This morning I received a telephone call from Mycroft which may be of interest to you. Yesterday morning the Kuang-hsü Emperor was found dead. Cause not specified. Today the E-D died. There are signs the General is preparing to take over control of China.’
I put the letter down. My last view of the Empress Dowager flooded back, that once-beautiful haunted face, the questing eyes, and the drawn mouth.
***
It was not until I was aboard a two-horse Hansom for Charing Cross railway station to visit Holmes that a quite incredible thought struck me. It came like a bolt from the blue. Mycroft Holmes! What part had he really played? Did he truly have our deadly enemy Colonel Sebastian Moran in mind when he offered to route all my communications through the Political & Secret Department at the India Office? Or was it simply so he could monitor my every move, read my back-up notes, study whichever strategy I might put to General Yuán for improvements in China’s New Army? There had been neither hide nor hair of the malevolent Colonel at any point along my long and dangerous route to Peking, and certainly not in the Forbidden City itself.
The secretive Diogenes Club was a hot-bed of men in league with the China Association, r
etaining extreme loyalty to the British Empire. They would thereby have had access to all my private letters to Sherlock Holmes and the War Minister himself. The Club already acted like the Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office yet antagonistic to it. Could Mycroft have placed himself - behind Sir Edward Grey’s back - at the service of this band of rich and aristocratic men planning the incorporation of China into an already over-stretched British Empire? There was no doubt secrecy was high in his mind - the slap on the wrist he administered over my careless pencil-marks on the Royal Geographical Society’s maps when planning my route to Kashgar still made my face flush.
There was a highly suspicious clue. In the months I was abroad, a series of articles appeared in The Morning Post newspaper under the pseudonym G.E. ‘China’ Morrison. ‘In the interests of British trade,’ one article concluded, ‘the sole remedy is for His Majesty’s Government to establish a protectorate over the whole of China south of the Great Wall’.
‘Morrison’ employed descriptions which eerily echoed information I had sent back. For instance, only one week after one of my own transmissions Morrison wrote in near-identical words in The Morning Post, ‘There is a growing seething unrest throughout China, especially in the southern cities of Amoy and Canton. It may already be impossible indefinitely to avert a serious outbreak. The New Army could well do with the presence of a mobile column of British troops at Weihaiwei in Shantung, or Hongkong, to give prompt support if a crisis arises’.
A few days later he recommended the Empress Dowager should, ‘by the threat of renewed force if necessary, be obliged to authorise the construction of a railway to connect British Burmah with the Upper Valley of the Yangtze’.
I too had suggested much the same, though without employing the phrase ‘by the threat of renewed force’.
Evidently these Old China Hands would stop at nothing. I recalled a remark of Mycroft’s which I thought at the time merely philosophical. ‘Great Empires,’ he opined, ‘are like the universe. The Persian Empire, the Umayyad Caliphate, even the Holy Roman Empire faltered and collapsed the moment they ceased expansion.’
Mycroft had had the bare-faced cheek to warn me of the Chinese inclination to circumlocution and deception! A change in Britain’s Government, the return to power of an expansionist-minded Prime Minister - Balfour replacing Campbell-Bannerman - and a take-over of China could easily ensue, helped immensely by the notes I compiled. My journey had commenced as an emissary, even an Ambassador of goodwill, for Sir Edward Grey. Mycroft had effectively turned me into a spy. He may well have contrived prior sight of my observations of China’s military capacity for that one reason - behind the back of his political masters, even that of his brother Sherlock, he and fellow members of the Diogenes Club intended to make England the non-pareil Power in the entire Extreme Orient, to gulp up vast swathes of China to add to our Indian Possessions. Their justification would be to thwart the ambitions of the Kaiser and the Berlin War Party.
My reports covered the New Army’s operational and movement orders, strength returns and locations, which mountain passes remained open during the winter (and their fortifications), directions and height of river flows etc. I had been at least the equal and possibly the superior in value to the established line of secret intelligence agents - so-called archaeologists (that well-known cover for espionage) or Moslem traders and native servants on the payroll of the Indian government whose work it was to keep the ‘Political And Secret’ files in the India Office Library up to date. Think of the value to Germany, the China Hands would say, if she gained control over China’s rich and widespread resources, essential war-time needs - wheat and cotton. Hard coal. Tin. Tungsten. Mercury.
I had provided a feasibility study of the weakness of the Hexi Corridor against an invasion by irregular forces. I described in detail physical obstacles, useful buildings and weak points in the Chinese defences such as the North Taku Fort, illustrating the plan and section, how the guns were covered with wooden sheds which concealed them and protected them from the weather.
I reflected on my options. There were none. Mycroft Holmes, the great spider at the centre of a Whitehall web, had deceived me once before, in the case of ‘the Sword of Osman’. Given Sherlock Holmes’s idolisation of his older brother there was nothing I could do. He would fix me with those steely eyes: ‘Evidence! Evidence! Evidence! Watson. You can’t make bricks without clay!’
Bringing the matter to my old comrade’s attention might lead to a serious and perhaps long-lasting breach between us which I determined to avoid, at any cost.
The Aerocar had arrived at the Liverpool Docks from America but would not clear customs for a further week. A familiar train took me to Eastbourne where a coach and pair awaited for the onward leg to Holmes’s bee-farm. The air had the sharp pinch of winter. I presented Holmes with a watercolour painting commissioned from Harris Bret. The artist had used my notes and his imagination to paint the Mongolia as she cleared the Shanghai customs and began to thread her way through American three- and four-masted sailing vessels and fine steamers of the Messageries Maritimes. Gaily painted native boats darted about like dragon-flies, local steamers, sampans, gunboats painted white. The White Ensign floated in a mild breeze from a modern man-of-war lying off the Consulate door.
Soon Holmes and I were seated in front of a blazing fire, like the old friends we were, reminiscing about our recent adventure.
***
Soon after the sun set over the ancient landscape Holmes pointed towards the kitchen.
‘Now, Watson, I insist you allow me to prepare a meal for us here. The lady that ‘does’ for me has consumed all the birds’ nests you gifted me on our return - or says she has - but I have consulted my Ledger of the Imperial Kitchens. I can commend a recipe for Swallow’s Nest soup. If it pleases the Imperial palate it may well please yours. There are a few dozen swallows’ nests in my barn. Their owners have vacated them. Alternatively,’ he added, seemingly unaware of my horrified expression, ‘I could try my hand at Cold Fish Maw Wrapped in Egg Skin. There’s some sort of fish in the ice-box. The hens have left a few eggs under the hedges. What do you think?’
I had been obliged to try the soup in Peking, along with sea-slugs. Interwoven strands of salivary cement of white-nest swiftlets dissolve in water and give the liquid a gelatinous texture. I was not keen on a second go. Nor did the thought of Cold Fish Maw wrapped in Egg Skin whet the appetite.
I fretted, ‘I don’t recall you acquiring any culinary skills during our many years in Baker Street. While I appreciate Swallow’s Nest soup is highly nutritious - calcium and iron and potassium and magnesium - and as for the Cold Fish Maw, it sounds quite delicious - I wonder if...’ I pointed my nose southward, ‘for the sake of Auld Lang Syne we should patronise our friends at the Tiger Inn instead? I’m very keen on their deep fried Whitebait...’
Arms linked, we went out into the courtyard. Releasing me Holmes clapped his hands. From out of the shade of tall bushes a brougham came rolling towards us. It was the carriage formerly owned by the Earl of Arundel.
‘Holmes!’ I exclaimed, chortling, ‘you anticipated my response all along!’
Even as we clambered into the carriage an urgent communication from Scotland Yard was winging its way to Holmes’s farmstead.
***
We returned on foot by starlight, the celestial bodies illuminating the grassy hills once covered by self-sown native broadleaves felled and coppiced by short, swarthy, dark-haired, dark-eyed, long-skulled Ancient Britons, the island’s earliest inhabitants, long before Julius Caesar and his cohorts came to conquer and enslave them.
The housekeeper was waiting for us, an open envelope clutched in her trembling hand. ‘Our lives are in mortal danger!’ she cried, thrusting a page at us.
It was from Inspector Gregson of the Yard.
‘Rumours abound in Limehouse,’ he wrote, ‘that anew and dea
dly master-criminal has you in his sights. The only description we have of him comes from the last words of one of his victims: ‘a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan...’.’
The letter continued, ‘Take great care even on your walks to and from The Tiger Inn. His favourite weapons include pythons and cobras ... fungi and bacilli ... and black spiders.’
Were we soon to encounter this new ‘Napoleon of Crime’ right here in England? Could this be connected to our ‘gross intrusion’ into the internal affairs of that near-mythical Middle Kingdom now seemingly so far away? In the dark I stared back over the grassland of the South Downs. Was he out there somewhere, even now?
Holmes’s new Chinese soothsayer disguise would have to work wonders if the rumour proved to be true.
Finis
Epilogue
The Ch’ing (or Qing) dynasty, also called the Empire of the Great Ch’ing, or the Manchu dynasty, was the last imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to its ignominious collapse in 1912. Ch’ing connotes the words ‘clean’ and ‘fresh’.
The real Kuang-hsü Emperor’s death. On November 14, 1908, with his face turned towards the south, the traditional direction in which the sovereign must die, the young Emperor’s unhappy and unfortunate spirit left - or was more likely forced from - his body at the hour of the cock (early evening). Court physicians reported his final days were sleepless and tormented with stomach cramps. He could not urinate. His heart beat grew faster. His face burned purple. His tongue turned yellow. All symptoms which had no connection with any of his known previous illnesses. In a last but typically futile, defiant gesture, he refused to be dressed in the traditional vestments of death, the Robes of Longevity.
