“What happened then?”
“They crept away then picked up speed and set off back down towards the road to Brighton - which now makes sense, after your explanation, Reverend. I fancy they had a vehicle waiting, as I heard the noise of an engine shortly after heading away towards the sea.”
The vicar nodded. He downed his drink, rooted in his pocket and threw some more coins on the bar.
“A drink for my shepherding friend there and take one yourself, landlord. Shepherd – Albert is it? – fetch your daughters home and tend to your flock. A good day to you both.”
And with that he swept from the pub with no sign at all of his former infirmity, his stick forgotten at the bar.
Chapter Eleven
Mr George Adlam
The Reverend Sherrinford of Ormond Sacker looked across the fields to the deep V of trees planted on the side of the Downs in honour of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. From his vantage point – a bench at the side of Streat Church – he could also see the imposing Elizabethan edifice, Streat Place, a hundred yards or so away.
He watched a figure emerge from the mansion and stride across to the lych-gate that connected the grounds of the house with the churchyard. He was a man in his late forties, short but strongly built, wearing a well-cut three-piece suit. He had a full head of greying hair and a set to his jaw that spoke of doggedness and determination.
The vicar rose as he approached.
“Mr George Adlam?”
“And you are?”
The vicar introduced himself.
“I had heard you were staying with Sir Nigel at Streat Place for a few days so I took the liberty of leaving the note for you.”
“Sir Nigel and I have done business together over many years,” Adlam said, eying the vicar cautiously. “Yet your note spoke of business with Dr Watson. I came out to tell you that business is my affair.”
“I come to you as a kind of intermediary,’ the vicar said.
“Indeed?” Adlam frowned and indicated the church behind them. “You are the vicar here?”
The vicar looked fondly at the squat flint and brick Saxon church.
“Alas, no, my living is far away - although I retain an interest in these parts.”
“You are an emissary of Dr Watson then – he has got wind of me?”
“Nor that.”
Adlam stepped away and clenched his jaw.
“Has that Belgian fellow betrayed my confidence?”
“I know of no Belgian fellow. I am a seeker after truth or, if that sounds too portentous, someone who seeks clarification. And with that clarification I might be able to help you.”
Adlam turned and looked the vicar up and down. He did not seem impressed but then he threw up his arms and pointed back to the bench.
“Very well, but let us be seated.”
They sat side by side and the vicar watched the side of Adlam’s face as the self-made man began to speak.
“My father was the illegitimate son of a ne’er do well, his mother a fine woman abandoned, age eighteen, by this scoundrel when she was with child. She worked herself to death bringing my father up and never, in all her long life, said a bad word about the man who left her in such a wretched state. Here is the measure of the woman: so filled was she with Christian charity she worried for years that some ill had befallen him.”
“He never attempted contact?”
“I’m sure he gave her not another thought, nor the son she was carrying for him. He’d taken the Queen’s shilling with the Third Buffs and been posted to India. Many years later my father discovered ill had befallen him, though not in the way my grandmother feared. A crocodile had taken off his leg whilst he bathed in the Ganges. He got work with an indigo planter but his employer was murdered in the Indian Mutiny and he himself was put under siege from the bloodthirsty rebels with other colonials in the old fort at Agra.”
“This story is familiar to me,” the vicar said. “I have read it. Would the absent father’s surname have been Small? Jonathan Small.”
“How do you come by that information?”
The vicar gave a self-conscious smile.
“I too know my Sherlock Holmes. This is the story of The Sign of the Four, the second full length account by Dr Watson of that fine detective’s adventures.”
“But do you know the amount of the great Agra treasure Jonathan Small acquired?”
“Acquired?” the vicar said mildly. “Was it not stolen after murdering the person pledged to safeguard it?”
Adlam didn’t seem to hear.
“I know the amount, down to the last ruby. I learned it by rote. Two hundred and eighty eight fine pearls. A large number of stones various, including onyxes, turquoises, beryls and cat’s-eyes. Sixty-one agates. Forty carbuncles, two hundred and ten sapphires, ninety-seven emeralds and one hundred and seventy rubies – although some of these were of inferior quality. There were also one hundred and forty-three diamonds of the first water, the best of which was ‘the Great Mogul’, the second largest stone in existence.”
The vicar frowned.
“This treasure – I do not understand why you hold Dr Watson responsible for its loss. As I recall, your tormented grandfather tossed it by the handful into the grey waters of the Thames during a frantic chase down the river.”
“According to Dr Watson.”
The vicar looked at him calmly.
“You believe otherwise?”
“I am certain of it.”
The vicar tugged on a sideburn.
“But have you approached Sherlock Holmes? No? Gracious, man, ask him yourself and replace suspicion with fact. You know he lives on the Downs?”
“Aye – a recluse I’ve heard. A shadow of his former self.”
An odd look crossed the vicar’s face. Adlam studied him for a moment.
“It’s not him I seek,” Adlam said. “He is Watson’s mouthpiece.” He leaned back in his seat. “You say you know the story.”
The vicar looked over his glasses.
“I thought I did.”
“Watson’s account is balderdash,” Adlam exclaimed. “Excuse my French, vicar. I’m a plain man. I believe that this treasure was not lost. I believe that Dr Watson distorted his account, that Miss Morstan actually inherited this fortune and that the good doctor married her for it.”
The vicar dipped his head and seemed lost in thought for a few moments.
“And when Mrs Watson nee Morstan died some years later,” Adlam continued, “Dr Watson was left in illicit possession of a fabulous wealth.”
The vicar looked over his spectacles.
“If what you say is true then Dr Watson has done no more than distort his narrative of events. Miss Morstan still deserved her inheritance.”
“How so?” Adlam said. “Her father perhaps deserved a small portion – a fifth - but did he take the risk of getting the treasure, or pay the cost of the crime? That was my grandfather. The bulk of the treasure belongs to my family and me.”
“There are others in England to lay claim to the treasure.”
“Who are they? Let them step forward and I will call them villains to their faces.”
“Their claim is as just as yours.”
“Other bastards of Jonathan Small? My father’s line has first claim because he was first born.”
“Not other bastards but other men.”
“Their claim, I repeat, has no validity.”
“But I must tell you it is equally valid.”
“How do you, a man of the church, know this?”
The vicar dipped his head.
“Let me ask you to recall the title of the story in which Dr Watson recounted your grandfather’s tale.”
“It was called The Sign of the Four.”
“Exactly. Three other men had equal claim to that fabulous fortune. And their descendants are here to collect what is owed them.”
Chapter Twelve
The Three Sikhs
1848-1859
[Tr
anslated from the Punjabi]
Chillianwallah. The 13th of January, 1849. Written in blood.
We fight like devils, fierce and untamed. Like tigers we leap upon our foe. Those East India Company dogs might transfix us on their bayonets yet still we cut at them until our dying breath. I am Abdullah Khan. I am no warrior. I am not hardened in battle. I am not skilled. I waste my rage. But I survive.
I should die. I try for a Bengal lancer, trapped in the thorn bushes, his bold, black horse with panicked eyes, rearing and wheeling, froth of fear on its flanks. The rider lashing out with the long blade of his lance, sending my sword flying away into the scrub.
Mahomet Akbar saves me. He stabs the lancer in the leg, drags him from his horse and slits his throat.
Akbar is my foster brother but this act binds us in a bond stronger than the blood we wade in or the love of our parents. Amid the roar and clash of battle I pick up my sword, we two young men exchange looks, then bound back into the fray.
After several years apart, we have met again a year earlier, in 1848, in Multan during what the British call the Second Sikh War. Dewan Mulraj has rebelled against the East India Company. Sher Singh Attarwilla, head of the Khalsa, the army of the Sikh empire, is ordered to send troops to quell the revolt. His father – Chattar Singh Attarwilla – is meanwhile plotting sedition in the north of the Punjab.
Mahomet Akbar and I are both Muslims yet both are in Sher Singh’s Sikh army when it too rebels and we move north to join Singh’s father. The Company announces that it will remove our young maharajah from his throne, annex the Punjab and confiscate the lands of any who join the revolt.
An East India Company Army of the Punjab is mustered under the command of Sir Hugh Gough. Gough’s army is a mix of Bengal native infantry, Bengal horse artillery and British battalions. Gough waits for the end of the monsoon season before he acts.
In November and December we skirmish with Gough’s men. There is an artillery duel at Ramnagar on the Chenab river. Multan falls in January 1849 but to balance that the Muslim garrison in Attock comes over to our side. Chattar Singh moves south to combine with his son’s forces. Gough goes out with his army to prevent this.
We are ranged against him near the village of Chillianwallah. We are five thousand horsemen, twenty five thousand foot-soldiers and sixty guns. We are spread across low hills on our left, scrub and jungle in our centre and two villages on our right. Mahomet and I are in the middle, hidden in scrub and jungle, under the command of Lal Singh, with two cavalry regiments, ten infantry battalions and seventeen guns.
Soldiers I now know to be the 24th Foot, just arrived in India, advance through the thick shrub for a bayonet attack. They lose touch with each other in the thorns yet still advance towards our artillery. We fire grapeshot. The damage it inflicts is terrible. Body parts, mostly unidentifiable, litter the ground and hang from bushes.
Brave men, these foot-soldiers reach our positions. We force them back. We capture their flags and kill their leader and their retreat is a rout.
The 14th Light Dragoons charge us. Through thorn scrub this is madness. The lancers get entangled. There is panic. They retreat. We chase them back to their lines and seize four guns.
Our brothers drop on every side but our courage never falters. By nightfall there are piles of our dead. At night I learn the cold brutality of war. Mahomed leads me in search of Company wounded. We kill them without pity and take their weapons.
We take back almost every one of the big guns the Company troops capture during the day.
I know that in that long day thousands of our brothers die but I know too the British pay a high cost for their victory. They lose many men but perhaps more important they lose face.
The face they lose in 1849 leads to the Rebellion in 1857. By now my friends and I are serving the British. At the end of the wars, the Punjab has been annexed to the East India company. We fight for our Sikh princes and our princes have declared loyalty to the Company. Our duty in 1857 is to crush the war for independence – the one the British call the Indian Mutiny.
By now we are three. Dost Singh, our friend from childhood has joined Mahomet and me. All strapping youths we had wrestled together and learned the use of the knife and the sword early. None of us are afraid to die.
The war or uprising – you may call it as you choose – is in central India. We three are sent to Agra to help the beleaguered foreigners there. Alongside us are the 3rd Bengal Fusiliers, two troops of horse and a battery of artillery.
Agra is a powder keg where friend and foe wear the same face. The commander of the English forces moves all the colonial refugees out of the city and over the river to the massive old fort. We three are given night duty guarding a distant and forgotten gate of this old building.
As is typical with the English rulers, veteran Sepoys are put under the supervision of an inexperienced man simply because he is English. He is a one-legged indigo-planter.
We three are honourable men but we despise our prince who has made us compromise our warrior code. A coward, he has also decided to back both sides – the uprising and the English. Dost Singh has learned that the prince intends to split his wealth so that, whichever side wins, half of his money will be safe. A merchant from his village, as cowardly as the prince, is bringing half of the prince’s vast treasure to the fort at Agra for safe-keeping.
Dost Singh has persuaded us – no, we have together resolved – that faced with such duplicity it does us no dishonour to steal this treasure. I do not believe any of us can shrug off the dishonour so easily but the treasure will, perhaps, make it possible to make amends.
Our problem is this English indigo-planter. He seems a decent man and we do not want to kill him but he stands in our way. After much discussion, we agree to invite him to join our venture. If he does not wish to join us, we will kill him.
One dark night, our one-legged officer lays his rifle aside to light his pipe and we are upon him. Singh presses a knife to his throat. The English utters something about us being traitors, believing we intend to betray the fort to the rebels.
“We are not traitors,” I say. “A merchant is arriving shortly with a treasure trove he wants to hide in the fort. We intend to kill him and seize the treasure, which does not rightfully belong to him or his master.”
“You have a choice, English,” Mahomet Akbar hisses. “Live a rich man or die this instant.”
He agrees to join us. We make a pact to share the treasure equally, each of us making a sign on a sheet of paper. The English calls it The Sign of the Four.
We take the merchant into a remote part of the fort to murder him but to our embarrassment he evades our attack. Fear gives him fleetness of foot but Dost Akbar gives chase and, with the help of the English, does the deed. We bury the merchant beneath stones in a remote part of the fort. We bury the treasure in a wall in the same room.
Our crime is discovered - the treasure is not - and we four men are sent to the Kalapani, the dread Black Water, where the prison colony has just been resurrected to deal with those guilty of crimes during the recent troubles.
There is a prison here as long ago as the tenth century. Indian prisoners through the centuries call it Black Water because of the fever-ridden swampland. It is a hellish place where thousands die from fever, from harsh treatment by brutal guards and from the terrible working and living conditions. The English call it Great Andaman, or the Andaman Islands. The new prison colony is at Port Blair.
It is in the Indian Ocean, nearer to Burma than India. We feel lost, abandoned. We do not anticipate surviving for long here. Thirty-three years later we are saying the same thing.
Chapter Thirteen
Black Water
1859 - 1880
It is a life of slavery. We start with only the clothes on our backs and the lash soon strips them from us or they rot in the pestilential swamp water in which we work from dawn until dusk. Day and night mosquitoes feed on our blood. Each evening we burn the leeches from our bod
ies. We sleep chained up on rotted straw crawling with vermin. Our sustenance is maggoty bread and a thin, grey dhal that is more like drool.
Within six months we are bags of bones, our heads huge on stick bodies, racked with ague. Dost Singh saves us. The guards have relaxed their vigilance – out of laziness rather than trust – and he scavenges for food each day. He knows the jungle. He brings us roots and fruits that he somehow knows will sustain us. How they taste is unimportant. Once he strays too far and is confronted by naked islanders who threaten him with iron-tipped spears. Another time he can scarcely drag himself from a salt swamp he has blundered into.
We are the Sign of the Four and we help each other. The English has it bad at first, bullied by every policeman with a grudge against the white man. But as the only white among hundreds of black faces he is taken up by the camp doctor who gives him a job as his assistant. We three observe his friendship develop with some of our captors, especially the brutal Major Sholto, the weak Captain Marston and the aloof Lieutenant Bromley Brown.
The English brings us food when he can. Often it is the scrapings of the plates of the warders but sometimes he manages some choice item. A little flesh returns to our bones.
Time passes. Months. Years. He is given a hut in Hope Town on the slopes of Mount Harriet and is left to himself. We dig ditches and plant yams. There is still much disease and death. He slips us medicines from the doctor’s supplies so we avoid the sickness that afflicts many.
In 1867 we hear of a ship – the Nineveh – wrecked on the reef of North Sentinel Island. Eighty-six people reach shore through the storm-tossed sea. They are attacked by the naked islanders with their iron-tipped spears. Only one survives.
Major Sholto tells us this as a warning against trying to escape.
“If I don’t capture you and mete out harsh punishment,” he says, that vicious look on his face, “the savages will capture you and do far worse.”
The Belgian and The Beekeeper Page 6
