Death on a Pale Horse: Sherlock Holmes on Her Majesty's Secret Service

by Donald Thomas

  * “The Ghost in the Machine” in Donald Thomas, The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes.

  5

  The letter in question came from Mr. Samuel Dordona. It arrived following breakfast on a cold March morning, some time after my return to England. Sherlock Holmes had been studying several envelopes. He never overlooked the evidence of an unopened letter. The skeletons of two kippers lay on his neglected plate.

  “I beg your pardon, Watson, this one is for you. See what you can make of the address.”

  He handed across the table an envelope of ivory bond paper, such as one buys in any good stationer’s shop. It was directed to me with punctilious care, my precise medical qualifications following my name. Someone had clearly “looked up” my history. Before opening it, I studied the handwriting.

  “It seems nothing out of the ordinary, Holmes. However, I believe my correspondent is not in his first youth. The script has an italic slope which the younger generation no longer acquire or, if they do, it is abandoned for something more casual once they are out of tutelage.”

  “Well done, Watson! Just so! The death of English copperplate hand!”

  “The address …” I studied it carefully. “The form of address is courteous, almost deferential. I am usually ‘Mr. J. Watson’ or perhaps ‘Dr. John Watson’ to my correspondents. This time we have the whole bag of tricks. John H. Watson, Esquire, M.B., B.Ch., St. Bartholmew’s Hospital, but directed ‘care of’ our present Baker Street address. Our new friend has clearly found me in the Medical Register.”

  “Who, then, I wonder?” Holmes inquired benignly.

  “A man of some little education,” I said condescendingly. “Also of extreme politeness. In my mind I think I see a clergyman. Not one of the Established Church, I feel. A Methodist? A Baptist, perhaps? Something of the kind. Will that do?”

  He chuckled with such quiet pleasure that I grew uneasy. When Sherlock Holmes chuckled, it was usually an ill omen for someone. Taking a clean knife, I carefully slit the cover and drew out a single sheet of paper, written on both sides. I laughed as I saw the concluding signature.

  “The Reverend Samuel Dordona of the Evangelical Overseas Medical Mission! You see? I was right!”

  He slapped the table-cloth with his hand.

  “Congratulations, old fellow! Were this the school’s examination-room, I should unhesitatingly award you ‘Summa cum laude.’ The instinct for divination runs in your blood at last. What can he want? Has someone rifled his Sunday collection plate or stolen his hymn-board?”

  I remained suspicious of his enthusiasm. Glancing at the top of the letter, I saw that Mr. Dordona had pinned a newspaper cutting to the page. It was two inches of a single column.

  “Our correspondent has sent us this as well.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Holmes said airily; “I felt the enclosure as I passed the envelope to you. I believe you will find it is clipped from a page of one of the weekly papers. The newsprint of the weeklies is of so much better and fuller weave than the dailies. One feels the difference in quality quite easily, even through the covering of such an envelope.”

  This air of superiority irritated me a little, but at least I should make him dependent on me for hearing what it was the newspaper had said.

  “‘Captain Jahleel Brenton Carey, 98th Regiment, of unfortunate history in Zululand, has, we regret to hear, died under mysterious circumstances in India, a victim of much persecution.’ That seems to be all.”

  I read it to myself again. Captain Jahleel Brenton Carey? It was a name I had heard. For the life of me, I could not place it just then. Certainly I did not connect it with my own time in India or Afghanistan. But even before Holmes could interrupt my thoughts, it came back to me.

  While I was convalescing at Peshawar, I had read a magazine article. It was in that radical weekly, the Pall Mall Gazette, I believe. The editor attacked the military authorities at the Horse Guards over various cases of injustice in the Army. If I remembered correctly, one of them was to do with the death of the claimant to the French throne, the Prince Imperial, in Zululand. Zululand!—that fateful name again! Much chance the poor young fellow ever had of sitting on the throne of France. His father had lost it after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The royal family had been exiled and the Third Republic had replaced it a dozen years ago.

  The young Prince Louis Napoleon was generally known as the Prince Imperial. He had been prepared for a military life from his infancy. It was everything to him. Though an exile, he had entered Woolwich Academy as a French cadet in the British Army—and in a British uniform. Of course, he still dreamed of the day when he might be Emperor of the French. Meantime, he longed for the chance of fighting someone. When war came to Zululand, he insisted that the Zulus would do as well as anyone else.

  His widowed mother pleaded against this. Our own Queen protested. At last the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards, agreed to let the young man go out “on his own hook.” He was to be a battlefield tourist in the uniform of a British lieutenant. In other words, a pestering nuisance to those who would have to look after him. For the weekly picture papers, he dressed the part to perfection, complete with the sword which his great-uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, had carried at Austerlitz in 1805.

  All this had been in the newspapers that reached us in Kandahar. It was already three months after Isandhlwana. The Zulu tribes had been taught no end of a lesson by a British punitive expedition. As for the Prince, the radical press howled, “What if this feckless youth gets himself killed in Africa?” Impossible—but then defeat at Isandhlwana had seemed impossible!

  So that was how I had read of Captain Jahleel Brenton Carey and the 98th Regiment of Foot. This young captain had been the commander of Lord Chelmsford’s mounted detachment, whose sole duty was to accompany and protect the royal visitor. In plain English, Carey’s head had been on the block should anything go wrong. But, once again, our troops had long since gained the upper hand. Whole areas had been cleared of every Zulu in sight. Their villages, or kraals, had been destroyed. Isandhlwana had almost been avenged.

  Prince Louis Napoleon, carrying the hopes of Imperial France with him, embarked at Portsmouth. At the end of March 1879, he set foot in South Africa. By the beginning of June he was dead! Again the world asked: “How could it have happened?”

  All this came back to me in far less time than it takes to describe. Holmes strode across to those bookshelves which ran along one wall of our sitting-room. Its scrapbooks and works of reference were his curiously assorted library. In a moment more, a folio lay open on his table, pages pasted with small newspaper cuttings, in every printer’s type. He closed the volume with a look of satisfaction.

  “As I suspected, Watson, this is a minor item cut from the foot of a column in the Army and Navy Gazette. Unlike the rest of the military press, the editor is a barrack-room lawyer who tries to salt the Horse Guards’ tail once a week.”

  “I was in Afghanistan at the time,” I said helpfully. “Did this make as much noise in England as the newspapers pretended?”

  “Enough to put another nail in the coffin of Mr. Disraeli’s administration. Dizzy was out of office soon after, and Mr. Gladstone was in.”

  He stood with his back to the fireplace and gave a faint sardonic smile.

  “The Times, the Morning Post, and tutti quanti carried reports of the inquest and court-martial. For a few weeks, the Prince Imperial’s assassination made enough noise to bring fire down from heaven! Then it was forgotten.”

  He paused to charge his pipe with strong black shag tobacco. Drawing upon the lighted match, he continued:

  “They rode out—the prince and his guardians—to map an area of safe territory near the Blood River. The Zulu war was effectively over. King Cetewayo was in hiding. They caught him but never harmed him. Lord Chelmsford taught him to wear a silk top hat with morning dress and polished shoes. He was got ready for a voyage to England to be inspected by the Queen and given
lunch at Windsor Castle.”

  “Preposterous!”

  He shrugged.

  “The area of desert scrub had been thoroughly searched for the prince’s outing. There were no Zulus there nor anyone else. He was only going for the day, carefully escorted. The imperial party dismounted for lunch near an abandoned village by the Blood River. An hour or two later, having eaten their rations and drunk their picnic wine, they prepared to mount. At that moment the impossible happened, as it so often does in that strange country. A platoon of Zulus, with spears and captured British Army rifles, burst from the undergrowth. But still these fellows were on foot, thirty or forty yards away. The prince with his boot already in the stirrup should have got away without difficulty.”

  “No one was with him?”

  “Captain Carey and all but two of the escort made off together in one direction, startled but uninjured. They believed the prince was galloping alongside them. How could he not be? Even in the confusion they were sure they had seen him vault into the saddle. Or rather, they had seen his boot in the stirrup and the harness strap in the hand of this first-rate rider. He had never fallen from a horse in his life. What they did not see was that, as he pulled against the harness to swing himself up, the strap had broken. He fell back instantly, sprawling on the ground. Once he was down and his horse had bolted, it was all over in half a minute. The poor young fellow died fighting on foot with a half-empty pistol. His body was found next day.”

  “I never heard the details in Kandahar.”

  He stood in silence for a moment, as if paying a private tribute. Then he quoted softly, “A hopeless encounter but a hero’s end. ‘For how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?’”

  “Lord Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome.”

  “Quite so. This poor young man was brave to the last in the face of certain death. When he was found, there were seventeen assegai wounds in the front of his body and none anywhere else. He never turned his back to the foe. He was wearing his great uncle’s sword, Napoleon Bonaparte’s. That sword has never been seen since. Poor devil! He died a death that Bonaparte would have saluted. But the young prince was worthy of better things.”

  I was so enthralled by the story that I fear the Reverend Samuel Dordona’s letter was lost in my determination to hear the end of this account.

  “The court-martial of Captain Brenton Carey,” I said at last: “that was what I had read about in the Pall Mall Gazette.”

  Holmes sighed.

  “In truth, a field court-martial—a drum-head tribunal. It found Carey guilty as charged. Misconduct in the Face of the Enemy. But all the evidence suggested that there was no misconduct. All those men had to ride for their lives when the tribesmen appeared, and each felt sure the prince was with them. Before they knew otherwise, he was dead. As always in such circumstances, a scapegoat was needed.”

  “And the press?”

  “The press did what it does so well—and so often. It changed sides and had the best of both worlds. First it demanded that heads should fall, Captain Carey’s to begin with. After the court-martial, there were doubts as to who was truly to blame. The press then raised a hullabaloo over Carey having been sacrificed to shield the incompetence of his senior officers. The verdict of the court-martial was quashed. From the start, there was something rum about the evidence. Had I been there to defend him, I should have asked further questions. Most importantly, how did so many Zulus come to be in a place where they could not possibly have been, unless someone put them there? The ground had been scoured by military scouts. The whole area was within view.”

  He waved aside a drift of pipe-smoke and resumed.

  “Unfortunately, Watson, in the week when the poor young man was killed, I was elsewhere. Indeed, I was acting Hamlet’s father’s ghost on the boards of McVicker’s Theater in Madison Street, Chicago.”

  “And Captain Carey himself? What happened to him after the verdict was quashed?”

  He handed back the cutting.

  “According to the inquest upon him it seems that he remained in the Army, in a more menial capacity in India. A lowly pioneer corps officer, commanding fatigue details and hard labour. Come, old fellow. In all this excitement we have forgotten our evangelical clergyman. Pray be good enough to read out his letter.”

  He turned and sat in his favourite chair by the fireplace. His long legs were extended and crossed at the ankles, his fingers were placed together as if in prayer, and his chin was lowered on his chest in that attitude which always reminded me of some patient bird of prey, sharp-eyed behind drooping lids. I began to read the studious italic script of our reverend gentleman.

  “My dear Sir,

  “Conscious of what a busy man you must be, I ask you to forgive this letter from a total stranger. My request concerns information, to which I have unwillingly become a party. It relates to the strange death of Captain Jahleel Brenton Carey, late of the 98th Foot.

  “I heard of you by chance as a medical man in military service, who has now sent in his papers to become a partner in a consulting detective agency. I confess that I do not know quite what that means. If I am correct, you can help me in your present profession more than you ever could as a physician. If you cannot assist me, then I fear no one else will. My story is hardly one that I can take to the Metropolitan Police. I believe that only a man who has seen service in India would believe it.

  “The manner of Captain Carey’s death will require a fuller explanation than I can give here. However, I listened to his dying words. The poor gentleman lingered almost two days after sustaining the frightful injuries that killed him. I am now assured that the accident that caused his death was no accident at all—but who would believe this after the inquest, least of all the police?

  “I am quite sure that the occasion of Captain Carey’s disgrace, when the young Prince Imperial was under his care and yet was cut down in a Zulu ambush, cannot have been a chance encounter with Africans. Like Captain Carey’s own subsequent death, it was no accident.”

  I paused and stared at Sherlock Homes. Could even he, with his intuitive genius, possibly have known that the letter would contain such a sentence? The room seemed cold and quiet as I read the conclusion of the message.

  “I believe that the knowledge I now carry exposes me to danger and indeed the threat of death. My only defence is in sharing it so that my adversaries may be assured that the truth will be published if anything should happen to me. It has been my calling to serve God in India rather than in England, but I have been away too long. I now come back to London almost as a foreigner and am attending the medical ‘First Aid’ short course at the London Mission School. After an absence of eleven years, there seems no one else but you in whom I can safely confide.

  “I beg, sir, that I may call upon you and your colleague Mr. Sherlock Holmes on Tuesday the 27th of March at 2 P.M. Should this not be convenient, I entreat that you will reply by return. In that case, I would ask you to nominate at once any other hour that might better suit you.

  “I remain yours faithfully,

  “Samuel Dordona, B. D., Evangelical Overseas Medical Mission

  “49 Carlyle Mansions, London SW.”

  “The deuce!” said Holmes thoughtfully, as I finished reading. “Our clerical friend has a turn for melodrama worthy of the stage of the Hoxton Britannia, has he not? You have never heard of him before this, I take it?”

  I shook my head. “Indeed I have not. Nor have I the faintest idea where he can have heard of me. But this letter is so curious. Why would an overseas medical mission be housed in a block of mansion apartments in Victoria?”

  “I daresay it is our client’s pied-a-terre during the month or two of his meagre furlough in England, before he returns to the Indian climate.”

  “He is to be our client, then?”

  Holmes’s mouth twisted a little with impatience. “To tell you the truth, Watson, we are not overburdened with clients ju
st now.”

  “You do not think that the whole story of a mystery in Captain Carey’s death might be schoolboy nonsense?”

  “The Army and Navy Gazette seems not to think so. It talks of a mystery, but I daresay the libel laws prevent it from putting the details into print.”

  With that, he turned and stared past me at the curtained window for a moment. Then he said, “Captain Carey was not otherwise mentioned to you during your time in India?”

  “My dear Holmes! We had more urgent business! When the Prince Imperial was killed, our brigade was marching to meet Ayub Khan at Maiwand! It was all over before I saw another newspaper from home.”

  “Of course,” he said quietly, “you are quite right.”

  “I recall there was small talk among the fellows convalescing at Peshawar about how quickly the loss of Isandhlwana was followed by the death of the prince, one disaster coming so soon on top of another. Then, of course, those were followed by reverses in our battles against the Dutch Boers at Laings Nek and Majuba Hill, only a little distance away from the first two. By rights, we should have beaten the Boer farmers hands-down. I call that curious.”

  He stared into the fireplace.

  “No, Watson. Not curious. Tragic, certainly. Dangerous to our military and imperial reputation indeed. But the word ‘curious’ might imply that these improbable disasters have no common connection. On the contrary, I should say that a common connection almost certainly unites them all.”

  “Where is your evidence? Where is the connection, at least?”

  We had not talked of evidence as yet. He sat upright in his chair and the languid indifference dropped away.