“And you … came a voice from the second floor, were pretty sweet on Tabitha, your cute little chica bonita from Madrid.”
The whirlwind did not let up. There had not been a chance for a single word from one of the adults present. The young man blushed and shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, yes, well her. But on the Bible quiz they put Miri and me on the same team, and dad, we killed them. Quite knocked the blocks off the other teams. They gave us both brand new Scofield Bibles as prizes.
“Mommy?... Daddy?” came the voice from up the stairs again. “What are these doing on my dresser?”
She came back into the room wearing a very perplexed look on her face and holding in her hands two envelopes.
“These were on my dresser. One is a letter to you, Daddy. The other is addressed to…to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”
Holmes immediately stood up and approached the young woman. “I am Sherlock Holmes. You may give that letter to me.”
The lad immediately jolted around and stared at Holmes. “You are Sherlock Holmes? In our house? Sherlock Holmes is in our house? That … that takes the biscuit. Daaaad? Are you helping Sherlock Holmes solve one of his mysteries? Is that why the two mutton-shankers were standing out on the pavement? That’s the best yet. Gosh, Mr. Holmes, this takes the Huntley. All my friends have read all your stories. Michaelmas starts next week. That will be so spot on for me to be able to tell them that my father is helping Sherlock Holmes. Gosh, Dad, you really are full of surprises this summer. We thought we were going to be in morbs all month with you not letting us go to Guernsey for the youth conference, and then at the last minute you did, and now we come home and you’re helping Sherlock Holmes.”
He walked over to his father, who was still seated and had yet to say anything, and playfully put his hand on his father’s forehead.
“Are you feeling all right, Dad? Did something happen, Momsy, when dad turned fifty?” He laughed playfully.
Then he looked back at Lestrade and me. “Are you Dr. Watson? And, you, sir, why you must be Inspector Lestrade. Oh, this is absolutely tooo much. Oh, I’m sorry this must be an important meeting we’ve interrupted. Let’s go, Sis, race you to the loo.”
With that the young man and young woman crashed and stomped and laughed on the way up the stairs and five adults were left in the parlor, completely walloped.
Chapter Twelve
This Circle of Misery
MR. CUSHING OPENED THE LETTER addressed to him, and Holmes did likewise. Inserted into Mr. Cushing’s letter was a tarot card –The Tower, in flames, with bodies falling from it. Inserted into Holmes’s card was The Fool.
The letter to Mr. Samuel Cushing. With copy to Mr. Sherlock Holmes:
By the time you read this you will have known for a mere three weeks something of the pain and suffering that I, my sister, and my mother have endured for the past thirty years – all because of you, Mr. Samuel Cushing.
In 1884, my father was a brave and loyal young officer in the B.E.F. and proudly serving under one of our country’s most heroic leaders, General Charles Gordon. My father belonged to the regiment of courageous men who defended the garrison and loyal subjects in Khartoum. He sent letters back to us, assuring us that reinforcements were on their way and that he would soon be home, safe and sound.
Those reinforcements never arrived. My father died on the night of 25 January, 1885 when the city he and his fellow soldiers was defending was besieged by the Mahdi. The reinforcements arrived two days later.
Do you know how my father died, Mr. Cushing? He was tortured. One by one, his fingers, his hands, his feet, his arms, his legs, and his genitals were cut off. Finally, they cut off his head. When his coffin arrived back in England two months later, no one warned us not to open it and bid our final respects to a brave man and wonderful loving husband and father. Inside the coffin were the various parts of his body, in no order. His severed head was looking up at us from the middle of the box. I have never been able to get the terror of that moment to leave my mind. My dear mother went partially mad. She lived out her life on a meager widow’s pension, cared for by the saints of the Methodist Church. My sister was disturbed for years, finally pulling her wits back together and marrying a widower when she was past forty. She now lives in some god-forsaken corner of Canada where I can only hope that the freezing temperatures have numbed her memory.
For my part, in honor of my father, I joined the B.E.F. and have served proudly all over the world. Every time I returned to England I did some more research and sought to learn just what had happened at Khartoum and why an entire regiment and ten thousand inhabitants of the city who were loyal to the Queen were allowed to be slaughtered. At first, I put the blame on Gladstone, but as I learned more, I understood that he and his cabinet acted on the advice and information provided to them by their mandarins in the Foreign Office. The oh-so-brilliant Cambridge man who had the Egypt-Sudan desk was named Samuel Cushing.
It was you, Mr. Cushing, that gave false and misleading information to the Cabinet. It was you who was responsible for the horrible death of my father and the destruction of my family.
When I retired from the B.E.F., I determined that somehow I would avenge the death of my father and I watched your home constantly. I saw how you had prospered, and risen at Whitehall, and become so respected as a Christian. As far as I am concerned, you are no more than a whited sepulcher.
I befriended your former man-servant and learned of your so-called ministry given to the household help. It was an easy thing to feign drunkenness and stroll into your gospel meeting and then to profess salvation through your fanatical faith. And so you hired me as your butler.
I watched you for days and soon discovered your adulterous relationship with your sister-in-law. You wretched hypocrite. You who stand up every Sunday morning and lead in prayer for the bread and the wine. You are a lecher and the world should know. Unfortunately, your foolish brother-in-law, Fairbairn, was greedy and stupid and used the information I gave him to blackmail you instead of exposing your hypocrisy to the world.
Undeserving though you are, you were blessed with exceptional children and it was not difficult to gain their confidence. All spring and summer they begged you to let them attend the European Conference for Christian Youth that was to be held in August on the Island of Guernsey. You refused on some nonsensical ground of not wanting them to be unequally yoked with those who were not your special type of believers.
So I sent in their registrations and intercepted the confirmations. I made the travel arrangements, and when they were returning from their Bible study I drove up to them, their bags packed, and announced that you had had a change of heart and had agreed to let them go. They were over the moon. But we had to rush. We sped to Victoria and from there to Portsmouth. By the time you were searching Kensington Gardens, they were on the night ferry across the Channel.
And then, Mr. Cushing, for the next three weeks you had a taste of what I, my sister, and my mother endured. You could feel the horror, the pain, the agony in your heart of knowing that those members of your family, those you loved so dearly, were being horribly tortured and put to death.
The appendages you received were not from your children, as you now know. They were, as Sherlock Holmes and Scotland Yard finally deduced, from bodies of young men and women who had already died and whose cadavers could be bought for a few quid under the table.
Now you have your children back. You are lucky. My father never returned, except in pieces. Now you can put your brief time of agony behind you. We never will.
By the time you read this, I will have departed England and be on the high seas.
Do not bother trying to find a Mr. Jim Browner.
He does not exist.
Lestrade and I had been reading over Holmes’s shoulder. Mrs. Cushing had been doing the same over her husband’s. We all finished reading at the same time and looked up at each other. Without speaking, Holmes, Lestrade and I rose and prepared to leave the room. I stepped over
to Samuel Cushing and shook his hand. Lestrade and Holmes did not.
That evening marked the arrival of the cool evenings of the late summer. Holmes and I sat by the hearth, lit for the first time since the spring. Holmes took the letter from his suit pocket and read it, and read it again.
“What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”
Historical Notes
The Russo-Japanese War took place in 1904 – 1905. The Japanese soundly defeated the Russians. The ownership of a few islands that are part of the archipelago between Hokkaido and Kamchatka is still disputed.
Tarot Cards emerged as a set of playing cards in fifteenth century Europe. The were adopted by occultists for use in divination in the eighteenth century and are still used widely for that purpose. The Rider Waite edition of the cards, designed by illustrator Pamela Coleman Smith, was created in 1909 and has been the most popular version of the cards since that time. In this story, The Box of Cards, the date of publication has been advanced.
The violation of fresh graves for the purpose of procuring cadavers for anatomy classes was quite common during the first half of the nineteenth century. The practice was curtailed by the Anatomy Act but sporadic incidences took place for many decades afterwards. The morgue for bodies of those who die at sea is fictional.
The Darbyites were a branch of the Plymouth Brethren movement and they, along with other branches of the Brethren Assemblies are still to be found throughout the world.
References to locations, roads, buildings and institutions in London in 1905 are generally accurate.
Collections One, Two, and Three – each with several more new Sherlock Holmes mysteries – are available as boxed sets at 40% off the price of buying them separately. Click here.
The Yellow Farce
A New Sherlock Holmes Mystery
Chapter One
Murder in the Orient, Expressed
Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
THE ABOVE LINES ARE UTTER NONSENSE, penned by one of our pampered, whinging poets as he cavorted in sunny Italy. The only way that April can ever be said to be pleasant in England is by comparison with the months of January, February and March, which are consistently cold, damp, and beastly miserable and thus marginally worse than April. The only way that the month of April, 1905, was pleasant for Sherlock Holmes and me was that we were not in England. We were on the other side of the earth attending to one of the most complex cases— the dangerous quest for the prized yellow ribbon, the splendid yellow kimono, and the priceless golden arrow—that had ever presented itself to the mind of the world’s most famous detective.
For over two months, from New Year’s Day, 1905 on, the drizzle, sleet, fog, and wind had not let up. Having retired from my regular medical practice, I had no excuse to leave and go to my surgery each morning. My beloved wife, tragically, passed away the previous year and I had, in retrospect not wisely, moved back in to share rooms with my friend and closest companion, Sherlock Holmes, the now famous—as a result of my stories about him—consulting detective. We had become two cranky bachelors, both beyond middle-aged, and it had become a chore not to find each other annoying.
Holmes was inevitably irascible whenever there were no interesting cases in his docket. Over the Christmas season, he had cleared the name of poor old Mrs. Rachel Abernetty, who Scotland Yard had accused of murdering her son-in-law. Holmes had proven that choking to death on Christmas pudding had a long and distinguished history in the annals of English tragedies and could not be blamed on the preparer of the dish, regardless of how greatly she despised the consumer.
For the past three weeks, however, there had been nothing and, in addition to indulging in his longstanding habit of tobacco, he had gone so far as use his dangerous seven percent solution to relieve the monotony of existence. It was this turn of events that forced me to take strong measures for the protection of his health. The opportunity arose on a Sunday in early March where that rarest of English events occurred, a glorious sunny morning.
I insisted that we bestir ourselves and take a walk through the Park and refused to consider any objection he could offer. I prevailed, and the two of us donned our ulsters and proceeded a short block north on Baker Street and entered Regent’s Park. Unfortunately, we were not the only Londoners that had been struck with this idea. We escaped the families, children, and barking dogs and found a quiet bench close by the rugby pitch. He sat silently, lit his beloved pipe, and enjoyed a few minutes of solemn contemplation. The scowl had not departed from his face, and I sought in vain to find something to say that would cheer him up.
“You must admit, Holmes,” I tentatively offered, “that the sight of young English families, with their happy dogs and children, enjoying themselves in the sunshine, restores some optimism for the future of the human race.”
“I will admit no such thing, my good doctor. I concluded many years ago that a man who cannot stand either dogs or children cannot be all bad.”
“Oh, come, Holmes. I am quite sure that somewhere in the corner of your heartless heart there is some love for both children and animals.”
“Children must be tolerated, since without them the future of the human race would be in jeopardy. As to animals, you are quite correct, Watson. I do love animals. They are delicious.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Holmes, you cannot be that cynical. You must acknowledge that animals have a special place in the lives of an English family.”
“I do, indeed, so acknowledge. And that special place is beside the mashed potatoes and underneath the Yorkshire pudding.”
I was about to upbraid him until I caught the faint trace of a smile at the corner of his lips, a sure sign that his spirits had begun to soften.
We walked back to 221B Baker Street but did so by avoiding the crowded pathways and marching across the open fields. The ground was soft but quite walkable. The grass had a soft hue of green to the emerging shoots, the chestnuts were preparing to burst out in five-fold leaves, and scattered hither and thither were joyful tiny crocuses. The effect was irresistible, and even Sherlock Holmes could not stop his disposition from turning to the light. We chatted on about some of the events of the day and the latest on our king-sized King, and so on. By the time we had reached our abode, he was positively cheerful.
That mood vanished when we arrived at our door. Parked on the street in front of it was a finely appointed carriage, bearing the insignia of the Government of Great Britain. Its presence could only mean one thing—that some high-ranking official of His Majesty’s Government was waiting to meet with Sherlock Holmes. Before we grasped the handle of the door, it swung open in front of us, and standing in the doorway was our dear Mrs. Hudson, her face ashen, bordering on terrified.
“Mr. Holmes, she said in a trembling whisper, “it’s your brother.”
Holmes smiled warmly at her. “Is it now? And is he happy?”
“Why, no Mr. Holmes. He is not happy at all. I offered him tea and even some of your best brandy. But he just glowered at me and grunted and bid me leave him alone.”
“Why then, he must be in a good mood. If he were in a bad mood, he would be ripping pages out of my books or adulterating my chemical experiments. Take no heed of him, my dear lady. Come, Watson, nothing like a sunny day to go and poke the bear.”
He bounded up the seventeen stairs with a bit of a spring in his step. I had learned over the years that the intense sibling rivalry between these two towering howbeit non-conformist intellects was something that each of them secretly enjoyed. There existed a mutual if grudging respect, much as is common between two prize fighters who have just knocked each other silly for sixteen rounds.
“Ah,
my dear brother,” beamed Holmes as he strode into the room. “How sweet of you to drop by. If you came to wish me a happy birthday, I fear you are two months late. Ah ha, it must be the approaching Easter season. And my warmest Christian blessings to you as well, Mycroft. I know just how deeply you are touched by the Resurrection of our Lord.”
“Sherlock,” the oversized presence in the room snapped, “Where have you been? I have been waiting for over half an hour. Perhaps you have time to waste, but I do not.”
He did not rise off the sofa to greet his brother, which, given his now unhealthy girth, was not surprising. At one time he bore facial features that were similar to his younger sibling’s but now the effects of too much rich food and a total absence of exercise had taken their toll. He was the same height as Sherlock Holmes, but at least three stone, maybe four beyond him in weight. Getting up out of comfortable sofas was not a comfortable task for Sir Mycroft Holmes.
“On my doctor’s orders,” continued Holmes with feigned cheerfulness, “I have been taking my exercise for exercise’s sake in the Park. This good doctor is concerned about my health and my weight.”
While the part about his health was certainly true, the only concern I had for his weight was the lack of it. He had not an ounce of fat on his trim body, not as a result of bodily exercise but of eating no more than was necessary to keep him alive. Our dear Mrs. Hudson had tried in vain over a quarter of a century to “put some meat on his bones” but it had been for naught.
Sherlock Holmes Never Dies- Collection Four Page 23
