It was almost suppertime when we arrived back in Baker Street. Normally Holmes’ first recourse on arriving home was to light a pipe, but today he made straight for the new fiddle. And rather than his usual, and to my mind rather turgid, choice of mournful dirges, he played a most jaunty jig that had my fingers tapping on the arm of the chair in time.
After supper we sat by the fireside with our smokes, talking about this and that and our visit to Kew. Holmes’ seemed somewhat distracted, and could scarcely keep his hands off the fiddle for more than ten minutes at a time. In the end I retired and left him to it. I fell asleep with a Scottish lullaby in my ears.
I woke in darkness. At first I wasn’t sure what exactly had brought me up out of sleep. Then I heard it: a mournful tune being played on the fiddle, the sound of which immediately brought to mind the funeral of one of my corporals back in the Afghan mountains. Then it had been the pipes, soaring through the valleys and echoing through the hills. Here it was the fiddle, but it was the same tune I remembered, and I felt the very same sadness and sense of loss.
I am man enough to admit there were fresh tears in my eyes as I threw on a dressing gown and headed for the front room, fully intending to berate Holmes, not for the first time, for his disregard for those who shared his apartments, but not his tastes .
I opened the door to a dark, empty, room. The last strains of the fiddle were only a memory in the air. Apart from the crackle of coals in the fire there was no other sound.
I returned to bed, wondering if I had in fact dreamed the whole thing.
3
I was loath to approach the matter with Holmes at breakfast, but in the end, I did not need to, for Mrs. Hudson had a complaint of her own.
“It’s probably my own fault for giving it to you, Mr. Holmes. But you kept me up half the night with your fiddle playing. And I didn’t know you knew so many Scots tunes.”
Holmes looked up from The Thunderer and raised an eyebrow.
“I assure you, Mrs. Hudson, I was in bed before midnight. If anyone kept you awake, it certainly was not I.”
“I heard you too, Holmes.” I said. That got me another raised eyebrow, and he went quiet. I knew that look too. That huge brain of his was starting to tick over. There was nothing for it now but for me to tell how I had been so rudely awoken. He made me tell it twice, and even had me try to hum the tune. I am afraid my attempts only served to irritate him further, as I haven’t a musical bone in my body.
Mrs. Hudson came to my rescue. She was able to sing, in a most pleasant Scots brogue, several of the old songs she had heard played the night before, one of which I recognized as the funeral lament from Afghanistan.
Holmes merely sat and listened to us both; then, without replying, left his breakfast to go cold and began an immediate study of the fiddle. I took the opportunity to polish off my breakfast before the inevitable.
It came half an hour later.
“Come, Watson. There is a mystery to be solved.”
He waved a sheaf of paper at me and pressed it into my hand, at the same time shepherding me toward the door. I only had time to see that it was a letter, and that it began Dear Mr. Holmes, before I found myself out on the pavement, with Holmes beside me hailing a cab.
Holmes directed the cab to an address in Islington. He sat with the fiddle in its case on his lap, and lit up one of his Russian cheroots.
“What’s this all about, Holmes?” I asked.
He waved a hand toward the letter I had in my hand.
“Read it, Watson. I found it sewn into the padding inside the case. It seems it is no coincidence that this fiddle found its way to me.”
I spread the paper out on my knee to iron out the crumples and started to read.
Dear Mr. Holmes,
Please excuse the subterfuge and do not blame Mrs. Hudson for my small deception in leading her to the fiddle, but this is a matter of some delicacy, and I cannot be seen to approach you directly.
By now you will have ascertained the nature of the instrument I have sent you. I hope that you will be the one to finally pierce its secrets. If you will meet me on Friday afternoon at 21 Upper Street, Islington, I can promise you another part of the puzzle, and a retainer of 100 guineas against a larger sum to be paid on successful resolution of the affair.
Yours, in secrecy.
The letter was not signed.
“Well, Watson, what do you think?”
I knew what was being asked. Holmes wanted to know what I could garner, not just from the letter, but from the paper itself.
“An elderly gentleman, in poor health” I began. “Judging by the shakiness of the hand, and the slightly archaic choice of words and sentence structure. The watermark tells us he is a man of some means, being able to afford the highest quality paper, and the ink itself looks to be high-grade black Indian. 21 Upper Street is at the more desirable end of that particular road, being, I think, one of the tall row of fine terraced dwellings put up in the early part of the century and kept in a state of good order. All in all, a man of some means.”
I handed the letter to Holmes.
He sniffed at the paper before folding it up and putting it away in an inside pocket. “You missed the important fact,” he said. “I believe we are visiting a clergyman, a Roman Catholic clergyman. An incense peculiar to that denomination, and a strong one at that, but there’s also a hint there of tobacco, a Virginia leaf if I’m not mistaken. So he is also a smoker, and not devout, at least a man not beyond succumbing to sins of the flesh. And if one, why not others?”
“I understand he must have tricked Mrs. Hudson into fetching the instrument to you, by some means yet to be discovered,” I said. “But what did he mean by the nature of the instrument?”
Holmes smiled. “That, I can explain. And it is pertinent to your nocturnal rambling of last night.”
He took out the fiddle and showed me its unusual design of piercing and holes on the main body. It was unlike anything I’d seen on any similar instrument.
“Tell me,” Holmes said. “The tune you heard. It was a bagpipe piece?”
I nodded.
Holmes lifted the fiddle to his face and blew gently across the holes. A bass drone filled the space inside our carriage, setting my teeth buzzing until he stopped.
“All in a very cunning design,” Holmes said. “Any wind produces a perfect-pitch drone that can be modified by judicious sloping of the board either into or against the prevailing air current. A perfect accompaniment for the old tunes of the Highlands, where this particular instrument was made.”
“What I heard last night was no mere drone,” I started.
Holmes interrupted me. “You know how drafty the room is,” he said. “The drone, the fact that you were half asleep, and the memory of the bagpipe tune all together at one time served to confuse you, tricking your memory into bringing the funeral to the front of your mind. Music can do that to you.”
I shook my head. “I assure you, Holmes. I was neither confused nor tricked.”
But he refused to countenance any explanation other than his own, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.
I had been right in my assessment of the location of the house. The carriage dropped us off outside a terrace of tall, elegant sandstone buildings. Number 21 proved as well-appointed as I expected. A nameplate on the door said it was the home of William Jones, Esquire. There was no mention of any denominational title, and while we waited I wondered whether Holmes might actually be mistaken about him being a clergyman. A few seconds later, a manservant answered the door and led us through a tall marbled hallway to a library I would be more than happy to lose myself in for a month.
An old man sat as close to a roaring fire as he could without getting scorched. I divested myself of my overcoat before joining Holmes in a sofa opposite. I had Holmes between the fire and my body, but even so, I started to sweat before the old man began to talk. There was an occasional table in front of us with a teapot and two cups, but I had no
desire to make myself any warmer than necessary. The old man was smoking a long clay pipe, so Holmes and I lit up, a cheroot for him, my trusty pipe for me. It was only then that we got down to business.
The old man spoke with a thin, wheezy voice that was little more than a whisper, his Scots brogue coming through strongly.
“You see before you, gentlemen, a life worn down by service to an uncaring deity,” he began. “For nearly sixty years, boy and man, I served, and all I got was a pair of bad knees and a body wracked with pain every time it gets damp.”
I could see that Holmes was already starting to get impatient, but our host looked like the kind of man who liked to talk, and I have learned over sitting in many such meetings that no amount of interruptions would be of any help here. We let him continue.
“It was only a stroke of luck … note that I do not say divine intervention … in the death of my father five years ago that allowed me to leave the church and take up residence here.”
He waved an arm feebly in the air, as if afraid it might fall off if he moved it around too vigorously.
“And once I had sampled for myself the fruits of Mammon, I found myself wanting more. I wanted those years I spent serving someone who did not care given back to me. So I started to search for an answer, for a way to begin again.”
Holmes sat back, a look of disgust on his face.
“If you have brought me here on false pretenses to chase an alchemical ghost, then you have misread your man…,” he said and started to rise. The old man waved him back down onto the sofa.
“And yet, you were intrigued enough by the fiddle to come and see what I had to say. Please indulge an old man for a short time. I promise, I will let you go on your way if you do not feel you can take the case. But I have something else to show you that I hope will sway you to my side of the argument.”
He clapped his hands, and the manservant came to the door. He carried a small leather-bound book in his hands that he passed to Holmes. Holmes put it in his lap without opening it.
“I assume this relates to the fiddle in some way?” he said.
The old man nodded. “It is the personal property of the man who made the instrument. Only part of it seems to be in straight English, enough to give me hope that it might be the answer I seek. But the rest is in a code that no one has managed to crack. I have it on good authority that you have an aptitude in these matters.”
Holmes lifted the book and read a page at random. I saw his eyes narrow in concentration. He put the book down, and his smile had gone.
“I suspect it to be total nonsense,” he said. “A wild-goose chase into alchemy and black magic. The history of the subject is riddled with false leads and secret codes. This may, indeed, be no more than an undecipherable hoax, designed with the specific purpose to waste time.”
“Nevertheless,” the old man said. “My promise stands. A hundred guineas are yours, if you will try to break the code. And five hundred more if you are successful.”
“I do not need the money,” Holmes said.
The old man laughed, then had to stop as a coughing fit hit him. It was several seconds before he could continue. “No. But you do need the challenge. Am I not right?”
Ten minutes later we were in a carriage on our way back to Baker Street. Holmes had the fiddle case on his lap. On top of that lay the small leather book.
We had a new client.
Holmes spent the journey back lost in rapt contemplation and muttering to himself. I only caught snatches of it.
“If it is a Cardan grille then we are sunk before we start, without the grille itself.
“It may indeed be a hoax. Nothing but gibberish. And yet there seems to be a cadence to it, an underlying structure that points at language….”
This was not the first time I had seen Holmes tackle a coded message. I knew we might be in for a long haul in which I would have to ensure he was fed, watered and rested while he clashed minds with a cryptographer who might already be long dead.
I had already steeled myself for the coming ordeal by the time we arrived back at the apartments, where Holmes wasted no time in getting started. He went straight to his work desk and began to pore over the small book. From time to time he would mutter to himself or pick up the fiddle and examine it more closely, but mostly he sat very still, nothing but his eyes moving as he scrutinized the page.
And that was that for the rest of the day, apart from a single break he took for a smoke late in the evening.
“Do you have any idea what it is yet?” I asked as he lit a pipe.
“Oh, I know exactly what it is,” Holmes said. “Stuff and nonsense.”
He went to the desk and returned with the book.
“It says so on the very first page.”
He showed me the inscription on the frontispiece, done in a florid, over-elaborate hand.
Ye Twelve Concordances of ye Red Serpent. In wch is succinctly and methodically handled ye making of ae stane of ye philosophers, his excellent effectes and admirable vertues in the practise of this blessed worke.
“Alchemy and mumbo-jumbo,” Holmes said, not concealing his disdain. “And yet the cipher itself is most cunning. But I will have its secrets, Watson; you mark my words.”
3
Any confidence Holmes might have had in an early conclusion soon faded. As the night wore on, he became increasingly frustrated. Mrs. Hudson left in some alarm after being snarled at when she arrived with a late supper. I ate most of Holmes’ share on the grounds that at least one of us needed to keep mind and body together. After a small glass of Scotch I sat in the armchair, smoking and watching my friend become increasingly fretful.
Around two o’clock in the morning he took a break for another smoke, and I tried to talk him into taking a longer rest and getting some sleep.
He would have none of it. “I will beat it, or it will beat me,” he said, and chewed angrily on the stem of his pipe.
I decided on another tack. “Tell me about it,” I said. “Talking over a problem sometimes helps to clear the thoughts.”
“Not for me, it doesn’t,” Holmes said, but he humored me.
“It was obviously written in Scotland at the end of the fifteenth or during the sixteenth century,” he began. “It is an alphabetic script, but I can see no patterns which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. Most codes from the early sixteenth century onward in Europe are derived from the Stenographica of Johannes Trethemius. He was also a churchman, and an alchemist as well, trying to conceal his methods. I thought at first that this might be his work, but he had a limited number of tricks, and this work does not seem to have used any of them.”
By now Holmes was talking to himself rather than to me, working out the problem in his mind as he spoke.
“The word-length distribution is different from most of the Latin root languages, but correlation analysis seems to indicate that the spaces are indeed intended as word separators.
“There are practically no words of more than ten characters, yet there are also remarkably few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar; some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section. While Semitic alphabets have many letters that are written differently depending on whether they occur at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word, letters of the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets are generally written the same way regardless of their position within a word.”
Holmes stopped and sighed loudly. “It is all most vexing, Watson.”
As if to answer his sigh, a draft blew down the chimney. The old fiddle let out a soft, melodious drone, and a page of the book turned in the breeze.
Holmes sat up with a start. “Is it really that simple?”
He almost knocked over his chair in the rush to get back to the table. Firstly he picked up the fiddle, studying the peculiar pattern of carved dots on the main board. He took a sh
eet of paper from his desk and began methodically tracing the dots onto it before cutting out the holes in the paper with a medical scalpel and trimming the paper to be the same size as a sheaf of the book.
He laid the paper over a page of the book, spent some time manipulating it as if searching for something, then let out a cry of triumph. “My very first guess was right, Watson. It is indeed a Cardan grille. And I have just discovered the nature of the stencil.”
He spent the next five minutes transcribing the letters that appeared in the holes when the paper was placed over the pages of text. He turned to me with a big smile on his face. “The job is done, Watson.”
He handed me what he had written.
Begin a fast of forty days starting during the full moon, drinking only May dew collected with a cloth of pure white linen and eating only a biscuit or crust of dried bread.
I handed it back to him.
“What does it mean, Holmes?”
He laughed again.
“I have no idea. It is all alchemy and mumbo-jumbo. However, the content of the text is of no consequence. I have cracked the cipher, that is all that was asked of me.”
We sat for the next half hour, Holmes talking about the history of Carden grille ciphers, most of which went completely over my head. Eventually tiredness overtook me and I made my slow way to bed.
3
Once again I was woken by the sound of the fiddle. This time I knew, instinctively, that the room beyond was empty, even before I opened the door. A soft drone filled the space, joined by a high lilting Highland air that felt almost peaceful. I also knew there was no way on earth that a simple violin could be constructed to produce music of such ethereal beauty, but, standing there in the dark, it did not matter. It felt as if I floated in infinity, lost in a place where there was only peace.
Sherlock Holmes: The Quality of Mercy and Other Stories Page 8
