“If you would care to sit over there, Dr Watson?”
Buxton indicated a seat on the far side of the table, between a young woman of around twenty-five, with light auburn hair and large, round brown eyes, and an older gentleman, who stood politely and gave a small nod of greeting as I approached.
“How do you do?” he said as I took my seat. “Stephen Reilly, at your service.”
He held out his hand and I shook it. From his deeply lined and heavily tanned face, and a very slight accent to his speech, I would have hazarded a guess that he was in his mid-sixties and, though English by birth, had spent much of his life abroad. His grip was firm and he exuded the unmistakable confidence of one used to command. A colonial administrator, perhaps, or a highly placed businessman with property somewhere in the further reaches of the Empire. No doubt he was looking to buy an estate back home in the English countryside, one to which he might retire in the twilight of his life.
Whatever the truth of the matter, there was no denying his manners. Before sitting, he indicated the young lady to my left. “May I introduce…”
“Julieanne Schell,” she interrupted, in a soft voice, holding out a pale, slim hand. Her accent was American, but cultured: New England, I thought. Her skin was flawless and her auburn hair held up in the latest style; on the other hand, the matching pearl earrings and necklace she wore were impressive but old-fashioned, as was the plainly decorated but expensive dress she wore. The unworldly daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant, I decided, come to England to complete her education. I could not conceive that she would have any genuine interest in buying Thorpe Manor, but her beauty was enough to light up the room where the feeble candles could not.
For a moment, I almost kissed her hand then, in the nick of time, remembered I was in an English country dining room and not a French romantic novel and satisfied myself with briefly squeezing her fingers as I introduced myself. I had the terrible feeling that I had actually blushed, and in an effort to regain my foolishly departed composure, I looked around the table at the other diners.
There were nine in total, including Holmes and myself. Mr Reilly and Miss Schell I had already accounted for (there was an unattended place setting to the lady’s left), and of Buxton’s life I already felt I knew more than enough. That left a saturnine gentleman at the bottom of the table, who glared down his nose at me but did not return my nod of greeting, and the three other guests sitting alongside Holmes on the opposite side of the table (Buxton having taken the seat at the top, with obvious pleasure). All were presumably wealthy enough to purchase the estate, but beyond that three men could not have been more dissimilar.
To Holmes’s right sat a slim, elderly gentleman of at least seventy, possibly a decade more. Small metal-rimmed spectacles sat in front of rheumy blue eyes, above a neatly trimmed white beard and moustache. That was virtually the only hair in evidence, however, for his head was completely bald, save for a sliver of silver at the top of each ear, which ran down the base of his skull at the back like the garlands reputedly given to Roman emperors. As he raised a water glass to his mouth, his whole arm shook and a little of the water spilled out and ran down the paper-thin skin of his hand. I was unable to hazard much about his background – a friend of the Thorpe family, perhaps, or one of Buxton’s acquaintances, a local historian invited to make up the numbers at dinner. As a medical man, however, I was confident in my diagnosis that he would be better served tucked up in bed with a hot drink than sitting in this draughty and poorly lit dining room.
If this frail old man was an unlikely addition to our company, the figure to Holmes’s left was a puzzle of an altogether greater magnitude. Thus far, everyone present had been – by my estimates, at least – the type of person one might expect to find at an estate sale. A colonial grandee, a wealthy New Englander, even an extremely elderly gentleman of uncertain origin; but this fourth newcomer was as much a fish out of water as I would be in a Bedouin tent.
Most obviously, he was a foreigner. His skin was brown, as were his eyes, and his hair, what I could see of it where it curled out from beneath a green turban, almost black. His jacket too was an emerald green and decorated with a gold medallion on the left breast. A gold earring hung from one ear. Physically, he was tall, at least as tall as Holmes, and broad-shouldered. He was in conversation with Buxton, but as I looked across at him he turned in my direction and I saw that his face was marred by a long scar, which ran from his left temple, across the corner of his left eye, to the edge of his mouth. The eye was not damaged, but the scar had puckered the skin enough to twist one side of his face very slightly, leaving him with a permanently leering expression. By his colouring, I knew he was not from Afghanistan or India, but other than that, all I could say was that he was from the east. What he was doing here in Thorpe Manor I could not begin to conjecture.
Next to him, however, was someone of whom I could confidently state that I knew not only his profession but even his name. The peculiarly christened Amicable Watt was as well known in certain London circles as any government minister, and considerably wealthier. The son of an itinerant pedlar who had named each of his many children after an element of character he hoped they would exhibit in life, Watt had made his fortune by the age of twenty-five, starting at fourteen with a wheelbarrow from which he sold pots and pans. He had recently been described in The Times as a modern-day King Midas and was reputed to have interests in businesses as diverse as mining, banking and shipbuilding. Less well known was the fact that he had been suspected in the murder of two rivals as a young man, though he had never been charged, far less convicted. He caught my eye as I looked over at him and winked, a huge grin on his rather florid face. If initial impressions were any measure, Amicable Watt seemed likely to live up to his name.
The same could not be said of the scowling gentleman who made up the last of our number. Dressed in an old-fashioned black suit, with a stiff, high-collared shirt, he watched his fellow diners in the same manner in which a crow might observe a group of rabbits. His long face was frozen in a look of disdain, which had not shifted in the whole time we had been seated. It was impossible to tell who he might be, but should he turn out to be either a hangman or the owner of a particularly poorly run workhouse, I would not have been surprised.
“Are you a doctor of medicine, sir, or – like our host – an academic man?”
Any further thoughts on the matter were interrupted by a question from Mr Reilly who, I now realised, had been watching me quizzically as I scrutinised the other guests. I was suddenly conscious that I had been doing so for longer than I intended, and must have looked quite rude.
“Medicine,” I stammered; then, recognising that this lacked something as a response, went on to explain that I had trained in London and served with the army in Afghanistan, but was now in private practice back in the capital.
“You must have a very successful practice,” he observed. “Is it in Harley Street, perhaps?”
It was an odd question, and I wondered what had prompted it, only belatedly realising that he thought me a potential rival for the purchase of Thorpe Manor. I hurried to disabuse him of that notion.
“No, no, I’m simply down with my friend for a change of scenery and to help out the Thorpe family lawyer with a… small task.”
I was not sure, because we had not discussed it, but though Holmes had made no effort to disguise our particular interests from Buxton, I thought perhaps he would prefer that the reason for our presence was not widely known. At the same time, I knew that my hesitation had sounded unnecessarily mysterious and berated myself for becoming distracted and thus not being prepared with a more ready reply.
Reilly gave no indication that he had noticed, however. “So, you are not interested in purchasing the estate? I may say, if it is not too ill-mannered, that that fact pleases me a great deal. I have spent most of my life in Malaya, and wish now to retire and spend my final years at home, in England. You will forgive me, I hope, for my pleasure in know
ing there is one fewer bidder for the estate than I believed.”
Mark one on the scorecard, I thought with satisfaction. A career spent in the colonies and now returning home with his fortune. Reilly was exactly as I had imagined.
“Two fewer, in fact,” I corrected him with a smile. “My friend, Sherlock Holmes there, will also not be bidding. I assume Miss Schell, however…” I concluded, turning to the lady.
“It is Mrs Schell, Doctor,” she corrected me in turn, and it was only now that I glanced down and noticed the wedding ring on her left hand. “But yes, my husband and I will most likely be bidding on this fine old property. We hope to open our first English sanatorium here, to match the ones we already own in the States.”
So much for my unworldly Boston rose! “Your husband…?”
To my shock, she nodded at the geriatric gentleman on the other side of the table. And so much for my elderly friend of the family, I concluded ruefully. “Frederick, dear, say hello to Dr John Watson,” she called. The greeting seemed to catch him by surprise; he gave a start and peered myopically across at his wife.
“Dr Watson is a friend of this fellow,” he said, placing a hand on top of Holmes’s arm. Unexpectedly, his voice was firm and clear, belying his physical frailty, even if his words seemed tangential to the general conversation. “Sherlock Holmes is his name. Comes from London, he says. Writes monographs. This fellow,” he went on, pointing a shaky finger at Amicable Watt, “claims to be called… mm… Friendly or some such thing. Don’t know the name of the other one,” he concluded, shifting his attention to the dark-skinned man on the other side of Holmes. “Said it, but I didn’t catch it.”
Thus addressed, the final member of our party rose to his feet and gave an extravagant bow from his waist.
“Perhaps it would be easiest if I were to introduce myself,” he began, in perfect English, with no trace of any accent beyond the slightly mannered drawl picked up in certain superior public schools. “My name is Alim Salah, and I have the good fortune to be the emissary of my uncle, the Sultan of Ghurid. Though Ghuridian by birth, I was sent by my uncle to be schooled in England and have lived here for many years. It is for this reason that I was chosen to conduct negotiations on his behalf for the purchase of Thorpe Manor and its attached estates and lands. If I may be frank, you have all wasted your time in coming to Thorpe Manor. Ghuridian pockets are far deeper than those of…” He hesitated, as though seeking the perfect description. “…shopkeepers, rubber farmers and women.”
Salah’s intention to cause offence was clear, and I felt Reilly stiffen in outrage at my side. “And what on God’s good earth would an Arab want with an English estate?” he snapped. The same question had occurred to me, though I would have expressed it with less venom.
Reilly’s tone appeared only to amuse Salah.
“For better reasons than anyone else seated at this table,” he replied with a cold smile. “To right a great wrong committed by you English brigands against my people, in fact. For reasons of justice!”
Before Reilly could respond, Holmes interjected. “Or a past injustice, perhaps. Such as the theft of a precious ruby.”
Both Reilly and Lawrence Buxton reacted with indignant exclamations to Holmes’s suggestion. For perhaps thirty seconds, the table was a tumult of sound and fury as Salah furiously – and loudly – confirmed that Ghurid was indeed the historical source of the Thorpe Ruby, stolen by a villainous Crusader, and Reilly and Buxton noisily objected both to the description and to any claim which Ghurid might make. Frederick Schell appeared largely oblivious to the argument raging about him, but the other guests observed proceedings with, in order from Amicable Watt to Mrs Schell, amusement, contempt and a degree of nervousness. Holmes, as ever, watched on with a sort of fascinated detachment, his eyes flicking from one speaker to the next, missing little but contributing nothing beyond the initial stimulus.
I do not know how matters would have ended had a small serving girl not entered, bearing a tray of soup bowls – and, on her heels, a tall, slim figure who, stepping from the shadows by the door, was revealed as the missing final guest for dinner.
* * *
Captain Hopkirk was a dashing young man, though not perhaps so dashing as to bring the furious dispute to an immediate halt. That honour lay with the serving girl who quickly moved between the diners and deposited bowls of greasy soup before them. As she did so, I quickly took stock of the captain.
Like Salah and Holmes, he was of above average height and equally broad shouldered, dressed in a tweed jacket and cavalry twill trousers, with an open-necked Tattersall shirt. Short, flat hair, a neatly trimmed moustache and a pronounced upright bearing combined with what I was certain was a Guards pin in his lapel to give him a military air befitting his rank. When he spoke, his voice was friendly and engaging and I felt myself warm to him at once.
“My apologies for the late arrival, but I had an appointment in town which I just couldn’t break. Regimental affair, you know.”
He smiled and gave a small shrug, as though to suggest that he would have broken off the engagement if he possibly could. Buxton stood and quickly made the introductions, glad, I suspect, to see the assembled guests settle down. The glare he aimed in the direction of Alim Salah did not go unnoticed, however. The Sultan’s emissary had certainly prodded a hornet’s nest with his announcement, and there would be repercussions to come, of that I was sure.
In the meantime, Hopkirk took his place at the far end of the table, and conversation – and dinner – recommenced.
Chapter Four
Dinner for Eight
I had hoped to break the ice with Hopkirk by enquiring about his military service, but almost as soon as he sat down, Mrs Schell all but monopolised his attention. It quickly became clear that they were already known to one another and, in one of the rare breaks in their conversation, I was able to ascertain that the captain had met the Schells in San Moritz three years ago, while the American couple were on their honeymoon.
“Freddie and Julieanne were good enough to invite a tired old soldier like me to join them over drinks one night, and we soon became firm friends,” Hopkirk explained. He lowered his voice a little and leaned across Mrs Schell in order that I might hear him clearly. “Sadly, Freddie does not keep in the most robust of health – something of a handicap in the owner of a collection of health spas – and he asked me to squire his new wife around, to show her the sights and what not. Of course, I was happy to do so.”
“James could not have been more helpful,” Mrs Schell confirmed, with a fond smile. “We have army officers back in the States, naturally, but none to compare with Captain Hopkirk. I would have felt quite terrified to venture out into the cities of Europe on my own, and the local guides were not to be trusted, so it was truly a Godsend when a gentleman like the captain crossed our path.”
Was it an uncharitable thought, as I watched the two of them together, to conjecture that they would have been better suited as husband and wife than the young and vivacious Mrs Schell and her elderly and infirm spouse? She was a striking woman, but I struggled to imagine that her marriage was a love match. I was just wondering how to phrase that question delicately when talk switched to the various diversions to be had in the French Riviera (an area I had never visited) and though I tried to follow the conversation, it soon descended into a series of private jokes and reminiscences. With nothing to contribute, I turned my attention back to the rest of the room.
Conversation remained strained after the earlier emotional flare-up. Holmes was involved in a one-sided discussion with Mr Schell – I heard him mention Pasteur’s experiments concerning food preservation, but Schell gave no sign of noticing – while Buxton and Reilly were muttering to one another in conspiratorial tones and casting venomous glances across at Salah. Amicable Watt was attempting to engage his unfriendly neighbour in conversation, with little success. I heard him say, “Well, Judge Pennington…” however, so at least I now knew his name and profession. I
had not been too far off the mark with my guess of hangman, after all.
As for the man who had started the argument, Alim Salah sat in splendid isolation, exhibiting no sign that he regretted his words or their consequences. On the contrary, a half-smile played on his lips as he looked about the room, and I found myself wondering what he had intended to achieve. Perhaps his aim had simply been to discomfit the people against whom he would be bidding?
The serving girl had just entered with the main course of mutton and potatoes, already plated, and before she could lay them out before us, I took the opportunity to swap seats with Buxton and introduced myself to the scar-faced Ghuridian.
“It is a difficult thing to hear, that your countryman has behaved dishonourably,” he said, prodding at his food without enthusiasm, “especially after so great a time has passed. But the people of Ghurid have long felt the shame of the loss of the ruby, and though the purchase of the thief’s lands will not erase that shame, my uncle believes that it is important symbolically.”
His measured tone suggested that his earlier insults had indeed been deliberately calculated to antagonise his competitors in the purchase of the Thorpe estate. “I was told a local legend today that the ruby is still hidden somewhere in the house,” I said, and was not surprised that Salah too had heard the story.
“Of course, that is part of my uncle’s thinking. Primarily, we intend the manor house to be used by our diplomats and members of the royal family on visits to England, but we will also certainly have every inch of the house and grounds searched.”
“So the legend is true, then? Insofar as it relates to the ruby being stolen from a temple and brought back to England?”
“It is.”
“And the band of assassins sent to Thorpe Manor to kill him and retrieve the stone? Is that also true?”
“It is as true as any other story from almost a thousand years ago, Dr Watson,” Salah chuckled. “But the Ghuridian legend matches the English one in every respect, which must count for something. It says that the sultan of the time sent a quartet of highly trained fida’i – assassins, you would call them – to hunt down the desecrator of our holy places and bring back the temple ruby. They tracked him across desert, forest and sea to the home of the infidel, but he would not say where he had hidden his prize, in spite of the most fearsome tortures. The fida’i returned to Ghurid empty-handed, and they and their entire families were put to death for their failure.”
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes--Sherlock Holmes and the Crusader's Curse Page 3
