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

by Donald Thomas

  As the half-lit stations slipped by, I tried to think as Holmes would think. In London, it is far easier than in any jungle for a determined man to stalk his prey. My friend had recently begun to make use of those juvenile ragamuffins and mudlarks whom he called his “Baker Street Irregulars.” They could gather gossip, eavesdrop on conversations, and track a man who would never suspect a child among so many of them in the city streets. But then what Holmes could do, Moran could do. Which man, woman, or child in my vicinity might not be in the colonel’s pay?

  Someone in the busy crowd at Baker Street station might still have been watching me as the train pulled out—or might even be on the train. There was no question of what I must do—or rather what I must not do. They would expect me to scramble out of the carriage, run back up the street to our rooms and report everything to Holmes. I confess I was angered at the thought that they regarded me as the weakling of the two. Anger sharpened my wits. Holmes had deductive and forensic gifts far beyond mine. But a man who has been through the slaughter of Maiwand and the siege of Kandahar does not take to his heels in the face of common criminals. It did me good to think of these masters of conspiracy as nothing but common felons.

  I stepped down from the carriage only when I reached my destination at St. James’s Park. I emerged from the steps into the sunlight with the park before me, Buckingham Palace to one side and Whitehall on the other. I did not think anyone had followed me up to the surface. Of course, there were dozens of people crossing the lawns, past the flower-beds, over the bridge and the lake to the Mall. A few were nursemaids with prams. Most were men whose suits and hats proclaimed them as going about the business of government. Almost anyone in that moving crowd might have been detailed to report on my movements, but I no longer cared. Past Marlborough House and the cabs of Pall Mall, I came to the club.

  The rooms are quiet in late morning. Roebuck, the porter at the desk, took my hat, coat, and gloves. From force of habit, I glanced at the baize notice-board, where letters to members await collection, held in place by a wire mesh. There were seldom any for me. I did not correspond much within the club, and I give my Baker Street address to friends and acquaintances as a rule. I scanned the board and saw one envelope with my name on it. It would be the steward’s bill for monthly expenses.

  Then I noticed a postage stamp on the envelope and knew that this had nothing to do with club business. It also came as an unwelcome surprise to see that the address of the club had been written in the same copperplate hand as on the first letter which “Samuel Dordona” had persuaded someone to write on his behalf. It even had the same punctilious style. “John H. Watson Esq., M.B., B.Ch.” The postmark confirmed that the envelope had been posted only two days earlier.

  I did not think anyone could be watching me here. A stranger would be challenged if he tried to follow me into the club lobby. Moran himself would never have been so foolish as to put up for election to membership. His right to the title of “colonel” must have been questioned at once, even if his conduct had not been known. I slid the envelope from behind the wire and walked slowly up the wide carpeted marble stairs to the library on the first floor. I chose an armchair in a corner with a window view of lawn and trees at the centre of the square. That was where a spy might linger, but I saw no one. I slit open the envelope.

  There was no letter—just a card of the kind used by doctors or dentists as a memorandum for appointments. Only the name and the date had been filled in, but I did not recognize the writing. Of course I had been prepared for threats or “warnings”; yet the five words on the card meant absolutely nothing. Had the envelope not been so precisely addressed, I should have thought that the message was intended for someone else.

  In the space left for a name, someone had entered Comtesse de Flandre. Where there was a space for the date, there were instead just two words: New Moon. And that was that. I stared at the words, but I faced a stone wall at the end of a blind alley. What the devil was this? I could find no meaning to the name or date, and yet the circumstances of their delivery suggested they must be of importance. Whoever sent the card knew that I belonged to the club. Had it been sent by someone who also knew that an envelope delivered among all the others coming to the club would slip through without notice more easily than one addressed to 221b Baker Street? That suggested a friend. But was it from friend or foe? Was it simply a reminder that I was safe nowhere, not even in my own club?

  I was determined that before I left the shelter of the Army and Navy I would know what this was all about. At least I could then write a message “to whom it might concern” and leave it in the trustworthy care of Roebuck at his desk, to be held in case I should suffer some unaccountable “accident.”

  I looked at those five words again. Why were they not explained? With sudden unease, I wondered whether they had been written in desperate haste by someone like Colonel Pulleine or Joshua Sellon, someone who had no time to explain them. Someone who knew that he—or she—would be dead in a minute more. A killer might search the place of his murder but would hardly bother with an appointment card on a mantelpiece.

  I felt cold in that comfortable sunlit room with its leather arm-chairs and mahogany shelves of books. I thought of Moran again. Perhaps the card was from a killer rather than a corpse. A taunt or an invitation.

  I was determined to have the truth of this. To begin with, I tried to remember who the Comtesse de Flandre might be. I had certainly heard—or read—that name. An old-fashioned club library was one of the best places to identify her. A few minutes with European aristocracy in the current volume of the Almanach de Gotha informed me that Marie Luise, Comtesse de Flandre, was a Prussian princess, forty-four years old. She was married to Prince Philippe, Comte de Flandre. He in turn was brother of the childless and dissolute King Leopold II of Belgium. The Comte and Comtesse de Flandre had five children, of whom the young Prince Baudouin was now heir to the Belgian throne.

  But what could there be in all this? Anyone who read such sensational London newspapers as the Pall Mall Gazette knew of King Leopold II as a man of unsavoury reputation. His correspondence with Mrs. Mary Jefferies, the so-called White Slave Widow of recent infamy, had lately been read out at the Middlesex Sessions during her trial for keeping a house of ill repute. His character was even more widely known for the brutal treatment meted out to the tribes of his vast and newly acquired Congo Free State. It was the blameless Comtesse de Flandre herself who famously described this royal brother-in-law as the only man who could survive without such an organ as a heart in his body.

  What on earth had she to do with our case? From what I could now make out, thanks to the Almanach and the bound volumes of The Times, the Comtesse de Flandre was a figure of domestic virtue and public philanthropy. King Leopold’s sister-in-law would be as revolted as anyone by the stories of his Congolese tribesmen suffering amputation of a hand for returning without a full quota of harvested rubber. This unhappy land, dubbed “The Heart of Darkness,” was also the centre of an arms trade to the Transvaal and elsewhere, the destination of Colonel Moran’s Krupp field-guns and the heavy howitzers.

  By now I was scanning the newspaper columns for any clue that might connect such a worthy lady with the hateful underworld of Rawdon Moran and his cronies. She was born a princess of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, sister of the present King of Rumania and of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Her father had been Prime Minister of Prussia.

  The Comtesse’s visits to England were reserved for such anniversaries as our own Queen’s birthday or the military ceremonial of the Trooping of the Colour in St. James’s Park. On their arrival at Victoria Station from the channel ferry and during their residence at Claridge’s hotel, she and her husband were visited by foreign ambassadors and British statesmen from Benjamin Disraeli to Lord Salisbury, as well as by the most enlightened of our aristocracy. In her own country, she had been in the Royal Opera Box for the visit of the Shah of Persia and had been radiant at the opening of the Brussels Exhibi
tion.

  But what could this amiable lady have to do with the nightmare world of Moran? From what Henry Putney-Wilson had been able to tell us, a network of international criminals was deeply engaged in the trading of armaments via Belgium and its new Congo territory to the Transvaal and southern Africa. Had they encountered an obstacle which might be overcome by the removal of the Comtesse de Flandre? Was the note a warning from someone that harm was intended to this good lady at the next new moon—harm that did not exclude her assassination?

  At least one or two of the pieces in the puzzle could now be put in place, thanks to our meeting with Mycroft Holmes. Moran had come away from the Transvaal with whatever he could loot from the estate of Andreis Reuter. The amount had been less than he had expected, because the young man had belatedly judged him for the rogue that he was. All the same, with the aid of his cronies, there had been enough to set up the “colonel” as an international trader in guns and ammunition. He became an agent of the cosmopolitan criminal brotherhood in which Sherlock Holmes had always believed—“the higher criminal world,” as he was apt to call it. Moran’s ambition was no doubt to seize the supreme governorship of that world, perhaps literally by force of arms.

  Almost in the first week of our acquaintanceship, Holmes had ridden his favourite hobby-horse for my benefit. He believed firmly in this international aristocracy of crime. Such an intricate and worldwide association worked together for common purposes and was beyond the power of any police force to destroy. To my friend’s own knowledge, it included Rawdon Moran’s own brother Colonel Sebastian Moran; a further pair of brothers with a common Christian name, Professor James Moriarty and Colonel James Moriarty; blackmail and extortion was in the slippery and loathsome hands of Charles Augustus Milverton. Elsewhere the organisation embraced Giuseppe Gorgiano and the infamous Red Circle gang of Naples and Southern Italy; Hugo Oberstein, international dealer in such military papers as the Bruce Partington submarine plans; Captain James Calhoun, leader of a group of professional assassins from Savannah, Georgia; John Clay, an accomplished cracksman of Coburg Square in London’s East End; and very many more listed in the personal archives of Sherlock Holmes.

  Could such an organisation exist? A century ago, it would have been impossible. In our own age of international railways, telegraph wires, and ocean liners, it was impossible to prevent. A case soon came our way. A pair of the most determined felons gave each other alibis on opposite sides of the globe. Our friend Sir Edward Marshall Hall gained the acquittal of one man charged with bigamy. Descriptions and photographs apparently proved that the defendant was in prison in the United States at the time. Two years later, I was in court with Marshall Hall for the trial of the Lambeth Poisoner, Dr. Neill Cream. My companion recognised him as almost a twin of he who had stood trial for bigamy and been acquitted; Cream had given him an alibi as an Illinois gaol-bird.

  I stared long and hard at the oil paintings of Crimean generals on the library wall. Holmes and I were getting into this mystery deeper than we had ever intended. I could do no more good here. I slipped the card into my pocket, went down and called for my hat and coat, then set off for Baker Street. I would tell my story to Holmes and let him make what he could of it.

  7

  I explained everything to him. As usual, he ignored most of the evidence and seized on one item that was crucial to the entire narrative.

  “The Comtesse de Flandre?”

  “I fear she means nothing to me.”

  “Indeed? Does she not? There are others, my dear fellow, to whom she means a great deal. But few people are party to the secret.”

  He got up from his chair by the fireplace, where he had been listening in his usual attentive posture. His long legs had been stretched out, finger-tips touching in an attitude of payer, elbows resting on the arms of the chair, eyelids lightly closed. Now, turning up the ornamental gas-lamp below the picture rail, he crossed to the far wall of the room, whose long run of bookshelves made up his archive. The lowest shelf contained a run of large scrap-books, purchased at intervals from Appincourt, our Baker Street stationer. Other men might have filled the thick blank pages of these folio volumes with family mementoes or cuttings from favourite literature. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, hardly an evening passed without the appearance of a sturdy pair of tailor’s scissors as he set about the daily newspapers.

  From the pages of the morning’s Times or the evening Globe, he would cut some item that had caught his eye. It might be the use of a refined form of strychnine by a French widow-robber, now making his last vain appeal to the Court de Cassation. Or perhaps there had been a sensation in the Place de Greve, after the desperate fellow had been strapped to the fatal plank and tilted forward under the hoisted blade of the guillotine. As his severed head fell into the basket, the felon’s eyes were distinctly seen to turn and glare at Sanson the executioner. Most often, however, these brief paragraphs followed the progress of some petty villain who had risen from trivial burglaries in the slums of Whitechapel to the Olympian heights of homicide or extortion.

  With a brush of his left arm, Holmes swept clear a space in the rubble of his chemical table. He lugged out from the shelves a tall volume in marbled boards. Spreading it open, his long agile fingers turned the crackling pages, stiffened by the newsprint with which they had been pasted. He stopped at a panorama of cuttings, annotated heavily in rusty ink. I caught the word “Reichsanzeiger” and knew only enough German to tell me that this was an official compilation of confidential memoranda. Thanks to his elder brother, Holmes acquired occasional documents and reports that were not yet for public inspection. He traced a line across a column and rested it under the words “Comtesse de Flandre, Marie Louise Alexandrine Karoline, Princess of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.”

  I looked over his shoulder and said, I fear rather foolishly, “Holmes, you have the advantage of me.”

  He chuckled and again flattened the surface of the broad page with his hand. “Happily for the good people of England, Watson, they sleep soundly in their beds. They are oblivious to those darkling plains of Europe where Mr. Mathew Arnold’s ignorant armies clash by night. They do not yet know how close the powers of Europe came to a major war a matter of months ago. We owed that crisis to Rawdon Moran and his masters, for there are even mightier villains than he. Such men have come close to accomplishing the greatest criminal conspiracies of modern times. The damage is still far from being undone. To this point, they appear to have been merely flexing their muscles for the grand assault that will one day come. These are the documents that prove the case.”

  “But why should they want a war?”

  He looked at me with unfathomable sympathy.

  “My dear Watson, why should a grocer want his customers to grow hungry—or a tailor to see his clients grow ragged? Who will profit from a modern war in Europe? Not the poor young heroes who will be slaughtered in their thousands by the devices of an industrial age. Not the householders who, with their wives and children, will be bombarded from the land, from the sea, and very probably in future from the air. But who else?”

  “The merchants of murder!” I took up a phrase he had used earlier when talking of Moran or his kind and tossed it back at him. He nodded slowly.

  “Very good, Watson. And whom do we know whose litany is a hymn of homage to the houses of Krupp and Maxim-Nordenfelt, Creuzot and Howitzer, Colt and Armstrong, Enfield and Webley? Why be content with the Congo and the Transvaal if all Europe is hungry for weapons?”

  “But there has been no European war. What was their plot?”

  He turned to another page.

  “A few months ago, they decided to see what they could do, by forged despatches, to strike up the diplomats’ dance of death. To bring two great power blocs of Europe to war, Austria and Germany on one side, France and Russia on the other, the old Turkish Empire and the straits of the Dardanelles with access to the Mediterranean to be the prize. The gateway to the East. If there were war, well and good. If not,
the world would see how far a criminal clique could push the nations towards one. The war was to be precipitated by a German prince claiming the throne of Bulgaria, Ferdinand of Coburg, kinsman of the Comtesse de Flandre. She is also sister to his closest ally, the King of Rumania.”

  “And her part in all this?”

  “The Comtesse was the innocent recipient of forged letters purporting to be written by Prince Ferdinand. They were intercepted, as the authors intended, by secret agents of Tsar Alexander. Their contents were forwarded to St. Petersburg. Ferdinand appeared to promise his kinswoman that he had a secret treaty with Count Bismarck to defeat the Russian army in the provinces of the Black Sea. With perfect truth, the despatches pointed out that Russia could not sustain the cost of an all-out war longer than a few weeks. The so-called Prince Ferdinand therefore asked the Comtesse de Flandre to act as a loyal German princess and sister-in-law of King Leopold of Belgium. France would be quick to seek revenge for her defeat of 1870 by joining Russia against Austria and Germany. A Belgian army need only hamper a French advance in the Vosges for a few days. Only for as long as it took Germany and Austria to knock out Russia. A victorious Bismarck would impose terms. Belgium would never again have cause to fear her powerful French neighbour. That was the scheme outlined in the forged diplomatic papers by Moran and his associates. There was not a word of truth in this concoction, but it was so plausible that it nearly did the trick.”

  “It was close to the truth of what might happen in any case!”

  “Precisely. The entire continent was set to go up in flames. There were also forged letters between Count Bismarck in Berlin and the German ambassador in Vienna, Prince Reuss, confirming the tale.”

  “And how was a war averted?”

  Sherlock Holmes became modesty itself.

  “At the eleventh hour, Brother Mycroft was kind enough to think that my own modest talents might be of some little use in saving the peace of Europe. What did I find? Our rulers are profoundly neurotic. Our adversaries must have been gratified at the mischief they were able to make with so little effort. Do not underestimate them, Watson! The forged letters from Prince Reuss to his master Count Bismarck were almost perfect. Those from Prince Ferdinand to the Comtesse de Flandre approached perfection.”