Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman

by Tim Symonds

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘The real sword had already been spirited away.’

  He waved Mycroft’s letter at me.

  ‘“Shanghaied” as my brother said. Our dragoman must have considered providing us with a snapshot of the unfinished fake but he couldn’t risk it. He may have heard we inspected the sword in the oil painting. The snapshot he supplied had to be identical. He could only have taken that photograph if he had access to where they’d sequestered the real thing.’

  After a pause he added, ‘And then there was the incident at the necropolis.’

  ‘Which incident is that?’

  ‘When Mehmed’s widow incriminated our dragoman.’

  Marsh as deep as Grimpen Mire on the Devon moors was threatening to engulf me.

  ‘I don’t recall her doing anything of the sort,’ I replied.

  ‘But you do recall her telling us about the conspiratorial gaggle which met at her house for several nights?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She said they were led by a man anxious to hide his identity behind a hood?’

  ‘I remember that, but...’

  ‘And that the man with us in the cemetery was that same person?’

  ‘I’m certain she said nothing of the...’ I spluttered.

  ‘...when she switched to French to cut out any chance her words would be deliberately misreported. She looked at Shelmerdine and said ‘Comme lui’.’

  ‘‘Comme lui’?’ I parroted. ‘What of it? Shelmerdine was standing right by her. If she pointed up at him it was because he too wore a hood to hide his face.’

  ‘You wrote down her exact words, Watson. She said, “Those men, those men who were carrying him. I have seen some of them before. They were at my house. Always at night. I saw all their faces, except the man in charge. He wore a hood over his face. ‘Comme lui’.” But we were all wearing identical hoods. If it were simply the fact the leader of the plotters wore a hood like ours she would have used the plural and said “Comme vous”, referring to the three of us. She didn’t. She was warning us. She recognised him as the man in authority she’d observed in her own home. She deliberately used the singular - comme lui - to warn us. Our dragoman realised this immediately. You recall him jumping in with “Perhaps Allah will grant you a son from your last night with your husband - that is, if you escape with your head intact”. He was letting her know he could have her killed if she didn’t fall silent.’

  ‘If you’re right, why did Shelmerdine risk accompanying us to the cemetery?’

  ‘The Chief Armourer had been poisoned. The conspirators had no idea who’d been instrumental in Mehmed’s death. They had to find out if they were about to be identified.’

  ‘If Shelmerdine did publish the photo in the Journal de Constantinople,’ I began, ‘why on earth...?’

  ‘We were a present danger. His conspiracy was well advanced. By betraying our arrival he hoped we’d decide the game wasn’t worth the candle. Either we’d flee or Sir Edward would pull us out.’

  Holmes looked at me.

  ‘Watson, your weakness is you make a habit of liking people. You cultivate friendship far too fast. What made me suspect Shelmerdine wasn’t all he purported to be? I merely kept in mind he was exactly what Mycroft purported him to be.’

  He paused, pondering.

  ‘Nevertheless our dragoman was never the capo dei capi of the plot. You can tell old Masters by the sweep of their brush. Behind Shelmerdine spun a being on a quite different intellectual plane, my equal, even my superior. We may never discover who lurked behind him but I tell you, Watson, if I didn’t know for a definite fact that Professor Moriarty lies in a watery grave...

  ‘Any plot hatched by Saliha Naciye had to be simplicity itself, Lucrezia Borgian in its ruthlessness and crudity. But the other was a plan of exceptional cleverness. Photographing us from the moment of arrival, knowing we lacked any deep knowledge of naval etiquette, reaped its reward. The forgery, costly as it was, would delay discovery of the theft until the time was ripe.’

  Holmes added his own postscript.

  ‘We achieved Sir Edward’s goal. The Ottoman Empire will hold, at least for the while. We have kept Abd-ul-Hamid on his throne. I doubt if Saliha Naciye will make a second attempt to push him aside. If she tries again and fails she knows she’ll be seen floating in a gunny-sack in the Bosphorus.’

  Twilight was descending. It was time to change for dinner.

  Holmes reflected as we set off, ‘Shelmerdine’s death may have been a serious blow to the conspirators in the shadows behind him but our dragoman’s demise was a relief to Mehmed’s widow. Her life was never going to be safe while he lived.’

  Absorbed in thought we walked the hundred yards or so to the sturdy mansion, the loveliest of English homes. The duck with a huge spatulate bill and dark green head which had been standing patiently at our feet waddled alongside.

  As we walked, Holmes remarked almost wistfully, ‘I wish there were always a few sultans about. It’ll be a far duller world without such unscrupulous tradesmen. It might be disputed how far any singular gift in an individual is due to his ancestry rather than his own early training but villainy in the blood takes the strangest forms. A study of Abd-ul-Hamid’s family portraits - the line from forehead to upper lip, the arch and droop of the nose - is enough to convert a man to the doctrine of reincarnation. If you pricked Abd-ul-Hamid’s head the soul of every sultan before him, back to Osman Ghazi, would come hissing out like gas from a container.’

  Not for a second in Stamboul had we given thought to any wider consequences of our actions. Now a particular sentence in Mycroft’s letter, that Holmes had ‘single-handedly made a great war in Europe inevitable, and within ten years’, reverberated in my head. How was my comrade to react to an indictment of such magnitude - and from his own brother?

  I walked at Holmes’s side in apprehensive silence while he blew smoke rings into the air. On the front lawn some yards from the entrance to Chequers I decided to bring the matter up.

  ‘Holmes,’ I began, hesitantly, ‘there’s something Mycroft...’

  ‘You noted that, did you, Watson?’

  ‘...where Mycroft wrote, ‘the much-feared East Wind has begun to blow’.’

  Holmes smacked his hand on the letter.

  ‘Not that wretched East Wind! Rather I refer you to where my brother says - and I quote - ‘we came up against each other for the first time, and you came out in front’!’

  I turned to stare at him. Crow’s feet were forming around the austere grey eyes in a true and impulsive expression of pure happiness. This was the first deeply heartfelt grin I’d ever seen light up Holmes’s face.

  He waved the letter. Joyfully he repeated, ‘Mycroft admits it - I came out in front!’

  With an exultant gesture he said, ‘Next week we’ll dress, dine and enjoy an evening out. What do you say, a bottle of Montrachet tête-à-tête and a fine repast - none of your Everyman cut-off-the-joint-and-two-veg served by flat-footed old waiters in greasy dress-coats! We’ll start at that most restful temple of food, Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, Grand Divan Tavern. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is on at Covent Garden. If we hurry our meal we might get there just in time for Sachs’ full-bellied cobbling song.’

  ‘The Meistersinger on you, Holmes?’ I asked.

  My surgery, wound-pension and fewer and fewer royalties from my publishers all lumped together hardly stretched to getting my silk grosgrain opera hat and dress boots cleaned and the cost of a ticket for a Wagnerian comedy, let alone a splendid repast at Simpson’s.

  ‘Better still, my dear friend...’ He tapped a bulge in his pocket. ‘...on His Majesty King Edward’s Government! Our Foreign Secretary was as good as his word. We have a considerable number of five jacks to share. Once more you’ll dine on smoked Scottish sa
lmon, followed by treacle sponge with Madagascan vanilla custard - the very dishes I believe you ordered at the start of the case of the Bulgarian Codex.’

  The memory of Stamboul was fading, its kaleidoscope of colour and sights, the stench of rubbish piled up in the streets, the smell of rotting fish pervading the quayside, the manifold grotesqueries and intrigues. Even my primal terror in the face of the gastromancy.

  ‘And your dish?’ I asked.

  ‘I too shall order as I ordered then,’ he replied, ‘slices of roast beef delivered on a silver trolley. Perhaps, as then, another anonymous note will be delivered in a Bon Bon dish,’ adding with an uncommon self-mockery, ‘written with a J pen on royal cream paper.’

  The bit was clearly between his teeth.

  ‘If so, I shall quit my bees and you your chambers. We shall set off once more, like the scourging hounds of hell.’

  ***

  The weeks went by. The intense colours of high summer in Stamboul were overtaken by the cooler palette of memory running from silver and horse-back browns to perse. The Michaelmas daisies in Regent’s Park with their mass of misty purples came and went. Holmes had long since returned to the quietude of his bee-farm. My moustache had re-established itself.

  Heavily bundled-up, I took a morning constitutional around the boating-lake in Regent’s Park. A question kept repeating in my mind. Moments before Holmes set off from the Ottoman shore that last time he astounded me by identifying Shelmerdine as the principal abettor in the second plot. He swore me to secrecy. His exact words were, ‘Watson, it must remain our secret, yours and mine, do you understand?’ As he flung himself aboard the tender and set off for Dreadnought he even added, ‘Shelmerdine remains of paramount value to England’. Within minutes I had broken my word. Within hours Shelmerdine was dead. Holmes’s reticence was a familiar and often frustrating characteristic. Why, I now asked myself, hadn’t he kept the startling revelation to himself until I rejoined him aboard the battleship?

  Standing there in the damp air of Regent’s Park the rose-tinted glasses through which I had long viewed my old friend were quickly becoming less rosy. He knew I would wait behind at the dockside until Shelmerdine brought Mycroft’s spices and returned my camera. The fact Holmes did not bide his time could mean only one thing: he had determined, correctly, that my affectionate regard for all things Holmesian would tempt me into a serious indiscretion. He meant me to reveal all to the dragoman. To use one of my comrade’s own phrases it was the only conclusion I could come to, ‘consistent with sanity’.

  I felt as stunned as if I’d been struck from behind by a Penang lawyer wielded by a dacoit. It would have occurred to Holmes that the Palace would have us in its eye to the very moment we quit the Empire’s shores. It was Holmes, purposefully, not I inadvertently, who set in motion the shot that dropped the dragoman on Galata Bridge.

  As I walked past the Heronry a second dramatic thought struck me. What role had Holmes’s brother Mycroft really played? The public disclosure of our identity through the flaming headlines in the Stambouli newspaper could not have been left to a dragoman’s initiative. Shelmerdine may have published the photograph of our arrival but only on specific orders. Whose orders? Was Mycroft the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making that not one Englishman in fifty thousand would ever dream of it - to dismantle the Ottoman Empire with all speed and at any cost?

  A casual rumour picked up - even invented - by the Diogenes Club concerning the Sword of Osman could have been transmitted back to the bazaars via provocateurs like Shelmerdine, to be acted upon by Saliha Naciye and the CUP or the rival Prince Sabahedrinne. Mycroft was aware the sword had been shanghaied before our arrival. He must have been in constant telegraphic communication with our dragoman. The meeting between Sir Edward Grey and Sherlock Holmes at the Foreign Secretary’s initiative must have come as a bombshell for Holmes’s brother. Mycroft’s letter delivered by special messenger to our train at Victoria with its mumbo jumbo about a new Convention on spies positively begged us to wiggle our way out of the case before it commenced. Looking back it seemed astonishing we weren’t assassinated the moment the Journal de Constantinople revealed our presence. The last undercover person fitted out by Gieves as an Army doctor intent, supposedly, on studying the use of vegetables in Ottoman medicine never made it back. We would have offered the simplest of targets for Shelmerdine’s co-conspirators at the crowded waterside. The open graves at the cemetery could have been dug specially for us. Our throats could have been slit in an instant when we confronted the Chief Armourer’s widow in the grove.

  Had we once more lived a charmed life? Or were we allowed to live because Holmes was Mycroft’s younger sibling?

  Postscript

  Several readers kindly asked after Philip Jacobus Pretorius. They recalled how the summons from Holmes to meet Edward Grey led to the abandonment of my planned visit to the great jungles of central Africa. Subsequent obligations led to further postponements until, as happens, the entire enterprise fell away, to be dreamed about on cold winters’ evenings. Soon after the outbreak of the Great War a letter arrived from Pretorius, by then an officer in the British Imperial Government attached to Admiral King-Hall. To enlist in the service Pretorius had had to escape from German-occupied territory in East Africa, undergoing an ordeal in the vast jungles quite unparalleled in my own experience, despite my warring years in the deadly Frontier Tribal Areas of British India. His exceptional scouting skills were to lead to the hunt for the German raider SMS Königsberg, a light cruiser of the Kaiser’s Imperial Navy named after the Capital of Prussia. On 20 September 1914 she surprised and sank the British protected cruiser HMS Pegasus in the Battle of Zanzibar. With Pretorius’s involvement, revenge was soon to hand.

  The End

  Notes From The Author

  My Endpieces seem to grow in length with each succeeding Sherlock Holmes adventure I write. Kindly readers tell me they enjoy reading this section but of course you do not need to bother. I add them simply for interest and colour. I list the books I have read as background including memoirs of the Edwardian age in England and Turkey. Some of the writing is so atmospheric I incorporate small bits into Holmes’s and Watson’s Stamboul adventure. I have also tended to use the spelling current in the Edwardian period, so for example Mombasa was often Mombassa, diplomats spelt Baghdad without the ‘h’, hence Bagdad, and Kiev as Kieff, and the ‘s’ many British now prefer to use in words like ‘civilisation’ was then a ‘z’, like the USA today.

  Readers of my other ‘sherlocks’ will have realised I have very considerable admiration for Dr. John H. Watson. There’s no doubt the Sultan was correct. If Watson had not taken on the task of chronicling Holmes’s cases, the latter’s career as a Great Detective may never have taken off. It was sheer kismet the former Army doctor on a wound-pension needed to find and share the cost of digs in London in 1881 at the precise time the peripatetic young Sherlock Holmes did too. I have little time for the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce depiction as a well-intentioned bumbler, loyal but clueless. Watson said of himself, ‘If I have one quality upon earth it is common sense’. He was also eager, chivalrous and courageous. Much more than Holmes he was like his creator Arthur Conan Doyle. Like Doyle, Watson had the qualities of a good doctor - kindliness, optimism and a healthy scepticism. Watson had another value to Holmes. Medicine is said to be as much the ability to gain the confidence of the patient as it is an abstract science.

  ‘Your best friends would hardly call you a schemer, Watson,’ Holmes told him, adding later, ‘I never get to your limits. There are unexplored possibilities about you.’

  It’s not possible to trace the various paths by which Conan Doyle himself created Watson. While writing these notes I was on the train to London Charing Cross from deepest East Sussex reading The Crooked Scythe by George Ewart Evans, an anthology of memories of men and women of a past era - farm labourers, shepherds, horsemen, blacksmi
ths, wheelwrights, sailors, fisherman, miners, maltsters, domestic servants. The introduction by a David Gentleman described the author Evans as follows:

  ‘George was in his mid-fifties when I first saw him...upright and vigorous, with an open and friendly manner and a clear, piercing gaze. He looked the part of a countryman, in a tweed jacket, a hat also of tweed, drill trousers, and stout brown shoes. As I grew to know him, I discovered that he was sympathetic and generous with help and encouragement. He was intelligent and shrewd; his judgements, though seldom sharply expressed, were acute and rational. In conversation he was tolerant and unassertive, but it was soon clear he held independent views with firmness and conviction.’

  I’m certain this is how Watson’s many friends at the Junior United Services club and at the Gatwick races would have viewed him too, a man of gentility though of limited means and no property. We should all have friends who wear stout brown shoes.

  At several points in this new adventure I mention Watson’s unfulfilled plans to go to Africa (‘the Dark Continent with its great herds of elephants, odd-toed ungulates on the Luangwa, hippo on the Shire River, the Tsavo man-eating lions, dust, blood, sleeping sickness, malaria, alcoholism, the smell of camp-fires long extinguished...’). Writing about his plans took me back nostalgically to my own late-teenage years in East and Central Africa. One day I shall get Watson there too.

  Miscellany

  Abd-ul-Hamid 11 (22 September 1842 - 10 February 1918). Variously spelt Abdul Hamid and Abdülhamid. 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. An article in the Manchester Guardian on July 24 1905 reported an attempt on the Sultan’s life when he attended the Mosque. Titled ‘The Sultan’s Escape’, the Manchester Guardian commented, ‘Judging by the number killed (the majority of them soldiers lining the road near the Mosque) and by the material damage, the bomb used must have been a formidable engine... the Sultan preserved the most remarkable sang froid, although a wild panic ensued among the onlookers...’