Table of Contents
ALSO BY DONALD THOMAS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
I - The Case of the Tell-tale Hands
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
II - The Case of the King’s evil
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
III - The Case of the Portuguese Sonnets
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
IV - The Case of Peter the Painter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
V - The Case of the Zimmermann Telegram
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
ALSO BY DONALD THOMAS
POETRY
Points of Contact Welcome to the Grand Hotel
FICTION
Prince Charlie’s Bluff The Flight of the Eagle The Blindfold Game Belladonna: A Lewis Carroll Nightmare
The Day the Sun Rose Twice
The Raising of Lizzie Meek
The Ripper’s Apprentice
Jekyll, Alias Hyde
Dancing in the Dark
The Arrest of Scotland Yard
Red Flowers for Lady Blue
The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes and the Running Noose
The Execution of Sherlock Holmes
BIOGRAPHY
Cardigan: The Hero of Balaclava Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea-Wolf Swinburne: The Poet in his World Robert Browning: A Life Within Life
Henry Fielding: A Life
The Marquis de Sade
Lewis Carroll: A Portrait With Background
CRIME AND DOCUMENTARY
A Long Time Burning: The History of Censorship in England
Freedom’s Frontier: Censorship in Modern Britain
State Trials: Treason and Libel
State Trials: The Public Conscience Honour Among Thieves: Three Classic Robberies Dead Giveaway: Murder Avenged from the Grave
Hanged in Error
The Victorian Underworld
An Underworld at War: Spies, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War
Villains’ Paradise: Britain’s Post-War Underworld The Everyman Book of Victorian Verse: The Post-Romantics The Everyman Book of Victorian Verse: The Pre-Raphaelites to the Nineties
Everyman Selected Poems of John Dryden
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE KING4S EVIL
Pegasus Books LLC
************Copyright TK************
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
For Robert, Peindre and Jane
I am most grateful for information on Byron’s handwriting from Dr Linda Shakespeare and for Charles Schlessiger’s fellow enthusiasm for the Great Detective.
I
The Case of the Tell-tale Hands
1
It was on a fine May morning in 1901 that Holmes and I first made the acquaintance of Raymond Ashley Savile, 3rd Earl of Blagdon. The Earl was in his mid-forties at the time of our meeting.
His grandfather, the 1st Earl of Blagdon, had gained a fortune and a title as the founder of Savile’s Commercial Bank in the City of London in 1839. In the heyday of Victoria’s England, Savile’s Bank had been a name to conjure with. Plain old John Savile, before he acquired his earldom, made his first million in the railway boom of the 1840s. He then sold his shares in the Great North Eastern Railway and its rivals shortly before the bubble burst. Whatever his profit, he doubled it—and doubled it again—through his stake in Ocean Coal, as well as in several of the new “department” stores which graced London’s West End in the later decades of the nineteenth century.
The old man died in 1897 and was succeeded by his eldest son who outlived him only for a few months. It was old John Savile’s grandson who then became the 3rd Earl of Blagdon. By that time, as Sherlock Holmes remarked acidly, the aristocratic title had passed through three generations and had been washed clean of the whiff and taint of “trade.” In the House of Lords and elsewhere, Raymond Ashley Savile stood equal with the descendants of Plantagenet knights and Elizabethan statesmen.
The name most closely associated with the Savile family and its title as Earls of Blagdon was that of their country house, Priorsfield. It had been built no more than forty years before Holmes and I first saw it. Infinite pains had been taken to suggest that a 16th century chateau of the Loire had been whisked up and set down in a valley of the River Thames, half way between Oxford and London.
Priorsfield was soon brought to our attention and I must say a word about it. It was best seen from a distance, as passengers on the Oxford train glimpsed it across the Berkshire meadows beyond Windsor. Despite the best efforts of the architect and the builders, its French Renaissance design had too much of the “new” in its appearance to be anything but the plaything of commercial success. The dome between its round towers with their conical roofs might as easily have graced the Winter Gardens Pavilion or the Grand Hotel of a popular seaside resort.
Other stately homes might be known for suits of armour or the banners of chivalry. Priorsfield’s fame came from glass cases of Sèvres porcelain, from gold lustre centrepieces with fresh flowers down the length of polished dining tables and overblown garden scenes painted in oils. The Earls of Blagdon walked on flower-decorated carpets ordered by Louis XIV for the halls of Versailles.
Raymond Ashley Savile came to see Sherlock Holmes by appointment. He was a tall rather gaunt man, perhaps in his prime but already with a pronounced stoop. It was not only this stoop which made the fair-complexioned and clean-shaven aristocrat appear to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders. He glanced at me, uneasily as I thought, swept his long morning-coat about him and sat down. He turned to my friend.
“Mr Holmes, what I have to tell you must remain between ourselves.”
“Of course, my lord,” said Holmes courteously, “However you may speak as freely before Dr Watson as to myself. Indeed, it is advisable that you should do so. The resolution of most difficulties benefits from a second opinion. It is far better that my friend and colleague should hear of the matter from your own lips. Indeed, I would consider it essential.”
In this polite but inflexible manner, Sherlock Holmes had laid down the law to the aristocracy on many occasions. Lord Blagdon paused, as if he might even now stand up and take his leave. Then he sighed and began his explanation.
“Mr Holmes, you are probably aware that my father’s youngest brother was Lord Frederick Savile who together with his young wife was killed in the Clapham train crash of 1879.”
“Indeed, my lord,” said Holmes quie
tly.
“He left a five-year-old son, Lord Arthur Savile, who was brought up by my father as if he had been my younger brother rather than my cousin. We were not close, of course, because there was a gap of almost twenty years between us. However, I have always behaved towards him as though he were more than a young cousin. He will only carry the courtesy title of Lord Arthur Savile and therefore cannot inherit. However, I have seen to it that he need not want for money. He left Oxford without a degree but, curiously, he had the makings of a budding pianist. Were he not otherwise provided for—and had he the persistence-1 daresay he might have made a career in that way.”
“I take some interest in concert music,” said Holmes casually, “and have heard of Lord Arthur’s remarkable talent. I am sorry he has not cultivated it. His private impromptu performance at Priorsfield of Chopin’s C sharp minor study, several years ago, was described to me by the great Vladimir de Pachmann himself as a tour de force. It might not have done for him to play in public but he was a most accomplished performer.”
The Earl inclined his head in acknowledgement.
“It is a matter of character, Mr Holmes. Unfortunately it is not his accomplishments which are the subject of my present visit. To speak frankly he is better known in certain outlandish and Bohemian areas of London society than I should care to be. As for his music, he plays less and less, except occasionally in the company of his family. Let me be plain. I am attached to Lord Arthur and I have helped him, from time to time, as I have been able. But his conduct is become a matter of concern.”
Holmes raised one eyebrow.
“I cannot presume, my lord, to take your cousin’s conduct in hand.”
The Earl of Blagdon reassured him with a lift of the hand.
“I do not suggest that he is vicious or wild. There is nothing of drink, or gambling, or womanising. Rather, he is not merely eccentric but he seems to collect eccentricities for their own sake, if you follow me.”
“I believe I do, my lord.”
“I certainly could not say that he is insane. A man may believe that character can be determined through phrenology by reading the bumps of the skull, as he has done in extremes, and yet he is not insane. He may enlist in the ranks of those Rosicrucians known as The Magicians of the Golden Dawn; yet no alienist would lock him up in Bedlam. He may swear to the appearance of apparitions of the dead at the command of a spiritualist medium, yet that is his freedom of belief. It is when he becomes—shall I say a collector of such oddities?—that I am concerned for him.”
“Unless there be fraud or coercion of some kind,” said Holmes gently, “I doubt whether I am the right person to approach. Dr Watson, on the other hand ...”
“What if it should touch upon crime?”
“That, of course, is a quite different matter.”
“What if he should burgle, by night, the houses of his own family? What if he should do it to no purpose? It is not only his eccentricities, though they are bad enough, but a growing oddity and perhaps criminality of conduct which brings me here.”
Holmes straightened in his chair.
“I think, my lord, that you had better explain that a little.”
Lord E3lagdon seemed to bow increasingly under the weight of his concern.
“Last Friday, Mr Holmes, a week ago precisely and in the middle of the night, Lord Arthur came secretly to the grounds of Priorsfield. He opened a sash-window of the library on the ground floor, pushing back the catch with a blade of some kind. He must than have climbed over the sill, which is easy enough, and walked through the lower level of the house to the north drawing-room. The chief feature of this room is a full-size Louis Phillippe display-case, containing the finest items of porcelain in the Priorsfield collection. One of the housekeepers had heard the window being opened and had gone to investigate. She was in time to see Lord Arthur entering the drawing-room. He did not see her. Because he is sometimes a visitor to Priorsfield, she did not challenge him at once but alerted my valet, who in turn woke me.”
“I take it that your brother was a regular guest at Priorsfield but not on this occasion? If he wished to visit the house, he had only to ask?”
“Of course. He could treat it as his home for, in a sense, it was. That is why such incidents have made his conduct so disturbing for some time. I came downstairs quietly in order to observe him without attracting his notice. I watched him open the cabinet. It took him a moment or two and I cannot tell you whether he picked the lock or merely turned a key which he had had made. He may have taken an impression on one of his visits and had a key cut.”
“We shall be able to determine that,” I said quickly but Holmes frowned me into silence.
“He did not need to turn on the electric light,” Lord Blagdon continued, “having chosen a night of full moon through open curtains. I could not see precisely what he was doing for his back was towards me. However he was facing the display of Sèvres vases, jardinières, dishes and boxes, with the door of the cabinet partly open. These items are glazed in royal blue or pink, picked out in gold, inset with garden scenes of fetes galantes or Classical mythology. He struck a match very briefly, as he stood there, and seemed to find what he wanted at once. His movements were quick, though quiet. Indeed, I heard nothing all the time he was there and I cannot tell you whether he moved or opened any of the pieces, though I believe he must have done.”
“What did he take?” I asked.
Lord Blagdon swung round to me.
“Nothing, Dr Watson! Nothing! If the housekeeper had not heard the library window being opened, we should never have suspected that he had been there.”
“Whereupon,” Holmes interposed, “he closed and locked the display cabinet, passed from the drawing-room to the library, left by way of the window, closed it after him, but could not lock it?”
“Quite correct, Mr Holmes. I was dismayed when I first saw him because I feared he had got himself into money trouble and was robbing his own family to pay off his debts. What if he was in such trouble and was robbing us at the command of criminals? You see?”
“Indeed I do. But has the window been found unlocked since then?”
“Never. It has been examined every morning.”
“Excellent. And where did he go when he left the house on the night in question?”
“I can only assume that he walked across the garden, along the road to the village and waited for the first morning train from Priorsfield Halt.”
“That is good to know. It suggests that he had no accomplices and was probably not working on the orders of anyone else. Of course, he might have been examining the objects in order to facilitate a robbery by some other person. However, I think not. He could have done that more easily while he was a guest in the house. In any case, he has not returned in the past week.”
“I lad I known that he wanted to, he would have been welcome to come to the house and examine the porcelain to his heart’s content. That is what makes it so disturbing. As it is, he did no harm that I could see. I thought it best to observe but say nothing.”
“You did quite right, my lord” said Holmes reassuringly.
“The curious thing is that he did not wear gloves that night.”
“Surely he had no need to,” I said, “Chief Inspector Henry at Scotland Yard can read finger-prints like a book. But who would look for prints without evidence of a crime? Had the housekeeper not seen him, there would have been neither evidence nor suspicion.”
Lord Blagdon shook his head.
“You misunderstand. For the past six months, Lord Arthur has worn gloves, invariably out of doors and frequently at other times. He says nothing of this, will not discuss it, but we infer that he suffers from a rash or some such ailment.”
There was a note of scepticism in Holmes’s reply.
“Does he wear gloves when he plays the piano?”
Lord Blagdon bridled a little at this.
“Of course not but he has largely given up his music.”
; “Or at the dinner table?”
“Once or twice. Of late, when he has been our guest, he has taken meals in his room. That is the least of his eccentricities.”
“And when did you last hear him play the piano—without gloves, as you say?”
“About four weeks ago. It was in the afternoon with only a few family members present—and they were not paying much attention during their game of whist. He played one of the Schumann Carnaval pieces, just the first one. Then he stopped, closed the lid of the piano keyboard, folded his hands together and left to go to his room.”
“An accomplished musician indeed,” said Holmes graciously, “Since you were present, did you see any obvious marks or disfigurement of the hands?”
“No,” said Lord Blagdon, “I was, however, sitting at a little distance and naturally saw only the backs of his hands. I did not see a rash of any kind.”
“Let us conclude, then, that whatever causes Lord Arthur to wear gloves, it did not do so while he was playing Schumann. And has the instrument been played since?”
“No, the lid is closed and locked when it is not in use.”
“Has the keyboard been dusted?”
“I think not. It was locked as usual and I do not recall Mrs Rowley the housekeeper asking for the key since then.”
“Excellent!” said Holmes, “In that case, I believe we may take a first step towards the resolution of your difficulty.”
When we were alone together, Holmes jotted two or three words on the back of his shirt-cuff as an aide-memoire and then looked up.
“I confess, Watson, that this promises to be one of the most intriguing cases to come our way for a little while. First of all however, by his lordship’s leave, I think we must examine the locus in quo as the lawyers call it—the scene of this little mystery.”
2
So it was that three days later, on Monday morning, we stepped down from our train at the quiet wooden platform of Priorsfield Halt to find a pony and trap waiting for us. It was that time of year when the riverside elms were in full leaf. The broad stretch of the Thames sparkled in sunlight, carrying an occasional pleasure steamer rippling upstream to Oxford from Windsor.
Sherlock Holmes and the King's Evil: And Other New Tales Featuring the World's Greatest Detective Page 1
