“So to make a long story short, Chloë Someringforth has been entertaining this young lord who stole his mama’s jewels and lost all the money at gaming. And when he learned that my young Beatrice had in her hands a valuable painting, worthy maybe twice or three times the price his mama’s emeralds had fetched, first he tried to sweet-talk her, and then he tried to rob her. And Chloë apparently helped him, along with her fancy-talking personal maid, or at least that’s how I interpret the stories I got from the other servants last night.
“Beatrice managed to grab the painting away from this young lord and run out into the street. She somehow made it to Bond Street and got the picture in the hands of Signor Carrera. She had left the gallery and was in Oxford Street, trying to find a cab so she could get to me when Chloë came upon her. Beatrice cried out for help, but Chloë used all her charms to explain to the crowd that the young lady was unbalanced.”
“How can you possibly know this, unless you were there yourself?” I demanded.
“Some of it I had from the signor, and the rest I put together from what the other housemaids were saying when I was scrubbing the pots tonight. Chloë’s maid, she put out the story that my Beatrice was delirious with fever and that Chloë picked her up in Bond Street screaming her head off. They were beside themselves with the extra work, for the first housemaid was waiting on Chloë, while the lady’s maid stayed in the bedroom making sure that Beatrice didn’t get out, so they told me the whole story, not holding anything back. They said they didn’t think Chloë’s maid was sick, they’d had to bring her up a tray themselves and she looked in the pink of health, and this made them all crosser. Then that hoity-toity man who acts as the butler came in and warned them all against spreading tales if they wanted to get paid at the quarter, so I reckon he’s in on the plot, too. But anyone could guess the rest, and my word, servants do talk among themselves, as you know from your own work in disguise, Mr. Holmes.”
My friend sat rigid, furious at the condescension he perceived in Miss Butterworth’s compliment.
“Meanwhile, this Lord Frances Hoovering, he’d cut himself badly on the glass that was covering the painting. He checked himself into this Gloucester Hotel under an assumed name: I found his bloody gloves wadded up in the gutter before the street sweepers came by. He went into his room, beat himself about the face and then blamed it all on some intruder.”
“But why would he need to disguise himself?” I asked.
“Because he knew that Beatrice was taking the painting to Carrera’s—she’d let that slip before she realized what a pair of villains he and Chloë are—and he couldn’t afford for the signor or anyone else to recognize him. Covered up like that in bandages, no newspaperman would have known him. I went to the gallery first thing this morning but the signor was on his guard: Beatrice had warned him that someone might try to steal the painting and he didn’t know me from Adam or from Eve. The best I could do was to keep track of everyone. First I dressed up as that foul-smelling beggar following the young lord around, and then back to the gallery I went to see who might show up for the opening. And then away to Chloë’s to learn what I could of my poor young Beatrice.
“I saw there was no getting near her last night, not with the manservant standing guard outside the door, so I came back to see what the art dealer was up to. He was trying to take the painting to his own home, where he could put it in a safe, when the young lord and some hired bully jumped him. The signor had buttoned the painting inside his shirt, and before they could find it on his person, those young street Arabs of Mr. Holmes up and frightened off the attackers. I was lucky enough to follow the clamor and take him up and bring him back with me here. He finally was brought to believe that I meant him no harm.
“And now, Mr. Holmes, you get out of your sulks. Even Shakespeare didn’t always write perfect plays, and even you can’t be right but nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand. You and Dr. Watson come along with me and we’ll get Miss Beatrice out of her captivity fast enough.”
We did as Miss Butterworth commanded. While she changed into her charwoman’s costume, I visited the unfortunate gallery owner. He had been well-treated, his wounds properly bathed, and he was in a deep, drug-induced sleep.
As soon as I had finished my inspection of the dressings, I joined Holmes and Miss Butterworth and we set out for Cadogan Gardens, dismissing our cab on Sloan Street, for what charwoman can afford a hansom cab?
As soon as the under housemaid opened the area door, Miss Butterworth, and Holmes, disguised as a coal man, followed. I came in as a doctor, claiming that I had been sent for to treat the young lady with the dangerous fever.
We freed her quickly, and not a moment too soon, for the bonds with which she was restrained were taking a toll on her circulation, as was the lack of food and water on her general health. Miss Butterworth and I escorted her back to the American woman’s borrowed flat, where I tended the young lady, until I had the satisfaction of seeing her color somewhat restored. Signor Carrera was much improved as well. Indeed, he was almost exuberant for he was able to confirm that the painting was, indeed, by Titian.
Holmes, in the meantime, visited the Foreign Office, where he cabled the difficult news of his wife’s treachery to the Undersecretary for Oriental Affairs in Cairo. He had returned to Baker Street and was moodily playing at his violin when I let myself into the flat. At my attempt to report on Signor Carrera’s assessment of the portrait, Holmes cut me off.
“I shall retire, Watson. I am clearly no longer fit for this work. If I had taken your first suggestion to heart, and looked into the theft of the Duchess of Hoovering’s tiara, none of the rest of these events need have occurred. I should not have been shown up by an untrained middle-aged American woman.”
Before I could do more than mumble some incoherent phrases, Mrs. Hudson came up the stairs in great excitement to announce the Duke and Duchess of Hoovering. The noble couple did not stay long, but they wished somehow to convey the shame they felt on having a cadet who had so disgraced their lineage and their country.
“We are sending him to Kenya to work on our coffee plantation there,” her grace said, “in the hopes that having to work for his livelihood will give him a greater respect for the wealth that he squanders at play. In the meantime, Mr. Holmes, we hope you will undertake a most delicate mission for us in Budapest. As you may know, my sister is one of the Empress Elizabeth’s ladies in waiting. My sister believes that someone is attempting to poison Her Majesty, but it is impossible for her to mount an investigation herself.”
Holmes bowed and said he was, of course, her grace’s servant to command.
My wife having telegraphed her imminent return to London, I stayed at Baker Street only long enough to help my friend pack his bag. I escorted him to Waterloo for the night train to Paris and returned to my own home. You may imagine how eager I was to put the sorry business of Lord Frances Hoovering and Chloë Someringforth out of my mind, although I was of course delighted that my friend’s weakness for royalty had caused him to put down his violin and return to the chase. My one cause of unease was the sight of a beggar woman wrapped in numerous shawls boarding the third-class carriage of the Paris train. But surely, I thought as I sped through the streets, Miss Butterworth would not leave her young charge alone in London.
NOTE:Amelia Butterworth was the amateur detective created by American crime novelist Anna Katherine Green (1846-1935). Miss Butterworth assisted and, indeed, outshone Green’s investigative detective Ebenezer Gryce, whose methods of observation and deduction were similar to Holmes. The first Gryce novel, The Leavenworth Case, was published almost a decade before Sherlock Holmes first appeared. At the height of her popularity, Green’s novels sold in the millions of copies; she was Woodrow Wilson’s favorite popular writer.
THE MEMOIRS OF SILVER BLAZE
by Michael Sims
I shall not soon forget that awful night on the moors.
I was happy in King’s Pyland. At the time of my
story, I was in my fifth year. I had already been an eminent racer for years, but at heart I am still a romantic colt, and northern Dartmoor is wild and free. Not that Colonel Ross permitted me to race across the moors. No, I was too valuable for that. But I breathed the bold spirit of the moors from dawn to dusk. I loved the rugged hillsides, the towering granite tors, and the mists that often veiled it all for hours before the sun could make headway.
My mother taught me that a gentleman never boasts, and thus I face a quandary. I hope that mentioning a fact won’t brand me a braggart; possibly you have been on the continent and failed to recognize the name Silver Blaze. (I have a white forehead but no other white markings except a mottled off foreleg.) Thistle was my dam and Isonomy my sire. Yes, the Isonomy, who in 1878 won the Cambridgeshire at Newmarket, and the next year both the Ascot Gold Cup and the Manchester Plate, and the next the Ascot again. It was a legacy to trip even the most cocksure colt, yet I fancy I showed myself worthy. Foaled in 1885, I barely perspired in winning the Two Thousand Guinea Stake in my third year. At Ascot I won the St. James Place Stakes in a canter. At the time I speak of, I was the favorite in the Wessex Cup, with odds of three to one.
The Devonshire moor country round the stables is bleak and windy. About half a mile to the north there is a small cluster of villas which seem to be reserved as barns for lame and winded people. I have seen them seated in chairs on the lawn, their expressions reminding me of Black Simon after he broke his off foreleg in the St. Leger—wondering when they would come for him. Two miles distant across the moor lay Capleton, which a sly trainer named Silas Brown ran for Lord Backwater. Two miles to the west was the only sign of civilization: the village of Tavistock rising above the bracken and furze. Wild moors sprawled in every other direction, populated only by the occasional gypsies, who smell delightfully of pungent smoke but whose livestock is not of the highest class.
Mr. Straker, our groom, was a small man, light on his feet, who moved too quickly. He had been the colonel’s jockey for five years. But one cannot remain a colt forever; he had put on weight and could no longer ride as before, so he became a trainer for the colonel, and had served in this job for seven years. He had a bitterness about him that he tried to hide from Colonel Ross. Apparently he succeeded. Sure in his views of the world, the colonel accepted much without examination and, like dogs who have been unchallenged in their yard for too long, he never doubted his own bark. Indeed, with his trim whiskers and dapper alertness, the old colonel seemed like a terrier in gaiters and frock coat.
Mr. Straker’s modest house, where he lived with his wife and a single wan servant girl, was a couple of hundred yards from my stable. Three boys worked under Mr. Straker, tending my three friends and myself. At night two slept up in the chaff-cutting loft above the harness room and the third down with us horses. I liked the boys more than I liked Mr. Straker, who was gentle with us only when Colonel Ross was near. He was a hard man and solemn. Something was terribly amiss with Mr. Straker. Late one night I had glimpsed him in the paddock, laming a couple of sheep with a fierce little curved knife. The cries of the animals would have broken his heart if he had had one.
I remember it was late September, with the brambles and ferns bronzing the low hillsides. At nine on that fateful evening, they locked the stables. The other two boys went up to the house for supper, leaving Ned Hunter to wait for his as he combed and brushed us. A gentle lad, Ned, and steadfast. I felt safe in the stable with him. There also were Bayard, another winning colt, smug but plucky; the other two horses, Plym and Meavy, cousins bought together from Major Ignatius at Widecombe-in-the-Moor; and growly old Sharp, a hound with the bark of a sergeant-major but the heart of a butler.
Shortly afterward the maid, Edith Baxter, strolled down the lonely path from the house, with her lantern casting swinging shadows as she brought Ned his supper. I could smell that tonight it was curried mutton, as occasionally it had been before. She carried no beer, because the boys were permitted to drink only water, which they drew from a tap in the stable.
Ned had just led me in from my evening constitutional. He offered me a bucket of water, but I drank little because it was too cool for my taste and tickled my nostrils with the stench of tin. I was near the small open window, through which I could see Edith’s approach about to intersect that of a man who was stumbling awkwardly across the moor toward the stable. At that moment, Sharp rose suddenly from a nap and began to bark.
Apparently Edith had neither seen nor heard the stranger. She was less than a hundred feet from the stable—far enough that I could not yet smell her particular aroma of soap and sweat and a hint of lavender—when the man drew near and called for her to wait. Voices carry far around here.
Moor-born but not without qualities is our Edith. Wary but unafraid, she held up the lantern. Within its circle of light I could see a pale, nervy fellow in a gentlemanly cloth cap and gray tweeds. Gaiters guarded his trouser legs from mud and from the yellow furze blossoms that crouched in every nook among the lichen-mottled boulders of the moor. At his neck he wore an attention-getting cravat of black-and-red silk. He was somewhere over thirty years old and carried a heavy stick with a weighted knob—the kind that I have heard described as a Penang lawyer. A man of that stripe bears watching, and so does his stick.
“Can you tell me where I am?” he asked the maid.
Edith regarded him skeptically, as well she might.
“I had almost made up my mind to sleep on the moor,” he continued with an unconvincing friendliness, “when I saw the light of your lantern.”
“You are close to the King’s Pyland training stables,” said Edith at last.
“Oh, indeed!” exclaimed he. “What a stroke of luck!” He was not much of an actor. He looked at the dish in her hand and said, “I understand that a stable-boy sleeps there alone every night. Perhaps that is his supper which you are carrying to him. Now I am sure that you would not be too proud to earn the price of a new dress, would you?”
Despite Edith’s unwelcoming expression, he reached between the lapels of his tweed coat to a waistcoat pocket and withdrew a folded paper. “See that the boy has this tonight, and you shall have the prettiest frock that money can buy.”
Edith is no fool. Without another word she dodged around the man. Because the stable was locked, she ran to the little open window through which she usually passed the supper dish to the boy on duty. Her sudden appearance started Sharp barking again. Ned was at the window and Edith thrust the laden plate into his hands as she began describing her encounter. They did not seem aware that the tweedy man was walking up to the window in the dark, crunching across the ground and smelling of wool and pipe smoke. They were caught off guard when he appeared at the window. He held cupped in his hand a single folded bank note. Sharp was growling deep in his throat and the man watched him carefully.
In a hail-fellow-well-met tone, he said immediately to Ned, “Good evening. I want to have a word with you.” I heard him rest his heavy stick against the outside wall.
Brave Ned is not one to cower. “What business have you here?” he demanded.
“It’s business that may put something into your pocket,” the man replied in an oily tone. “You’ve two horses in for the Wessex Cup—Silver Blaze and Bayard. Let me have the straight tip, and you won’t be a loser. Is it a fact that at the weights Bayard could give the other a hundred yards in five furlongs, and that the stable have put their money on him?”
I don’t mean to slight young Bayard, who from fetlock to mane is fully two-thirds the foal he imagines himself to be, but that is a base prevarication over which I will not linger.
“So you’re one of those damned touts!” cried Ned. I fear that working in a stable does not refine one’s language. Yet, as Mater always said, a horse must remain a gentleman or lady no matter how one’s servants behave.
“I’ll show you how we serve them in King’s Pyland!” cried impetuous Ned. He leaped up and dashed across the stable to free Sharp, who rose
to the occasion with a fearful bellow. Edith was already running back to the house.
As the boy unlocked the front door, Sharp raced out, bellowing, “I was half asleep! How dare you interrupt me? I eat strangers for supper!” Sharp tends to exaggerate, but his gruff bark was convincing.
Ned locked the door behind them and raced into the darkness. Soon, panting, he returned without the stranger. Later I heard him tell the other boys that he had lost him in the darkness.
That night it rained hard. Without a wind, it fell straight down from the sagging clouds and drenched moor and farmyard alike. In the middle of the night, I heard someone sloshing through the mud from the direction of Straker’s house, just before I smelled Straker himself. He was always surrounded by the scent of Cavendish tobacco, which he smoked in a briar-root pipe clamped between his yellow teeth.
Soon Straker quietly unlocked the door and came in almost without a sound, his wet mackintosh waterproof dripping onto the straw. Sharp looked up and wagged his tail but did not bark.
Ned sprawled in his chair, snoring. He had fallen into a deep sleep shortly after eating his mutton; he had actually dropped his water cup, which lay sideways on the straw floor. For some time I had entertained myself with trying to guess when Ned would slide to the ground in his stupor, which I thought would result in an amusing surprise. But he must have been more deeply asleep than ever before, because not even the trainer’s arrival in the barn woke him. Straker watched the boy closely for a minute, then finally turned toward me. He paused again when one of the boys in the loft stirred, but apparently neither had awakened. I had known both to sleep through thunderstorms.
To my surprise—and, I admit, my alarm—Straker came over to me and, without the hypocritical murmurs and gentle pats he gave me in Colonel Ross’s presence, he roughly pulled a bridle over my head and inserted the bit. I tossed my head and instantly he slapped my cheek, making me bite my tongue. I yelped. He twisted the reins in his left hand and gathered them close under my chin. I ought to have fought back then, but training and manners slowed my reaction. From his bed in the straw, Sharp watched us with concern, his tail still but his eyes following our every move.
In the Company of Sherlock Holmes Page 5
