A Soul of Steel (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) (43 page)

“Yes, it is unlikely to the point of incredulity,” Mr. Holmes noted dryly. “Why had you not returned from that rough quarter of the world for so long, Mr. Blodgett?”

Quentin and I kept our innocent visages bland.

“Severe fever following the battle of Maiwand,” Quentin answered. “I lost my senses and ultimately my memory. It was only in March when I was set upon by thieves in the bazaar at Peshawar and hit upon the head that I woke up whole again.”

“I have heard of such miraculous returns to the senses,” Mr. Holmes said. “It appears your path of late has been salted with happy mishaps.”

“Indeed.” Then Quentin drew a long face and took my hand. I was wearing kid gloves, naturally, but still could not quell a thrill of excitement utterly unrelated to the terrors of our impersonation. “Poor May has had restored to her a fiancé who is dogged by some malign god. An attempt was made on my life when I embarked from Bombay. Another occurred in Belgium; the latest and most exotic transpired in my hotel room on Oxford Street.”

“What was this latest assault?” Mr. Holmes inquired.

I gave a mock shudder, quite without guile.

“An... object was left in my room while I was out.” Quentin said. “A venomous serpent.”

“An Asian cobra, in fact,” Mr. Holmes interjected.

“Exactly!” Quentin regarded me with innocent joy. “Utterly amazing. You see, my dear, this is just the man to aid us.”

“How did you,” the detective inquired next, “live to tell the tale?”

Here Quentin looked modestly down. “I have lived in India for nearly a third of my life, sir, and have picked up some exotic habits, perhaps. One of my acquisitions is a devoted pet. I go nowhere without it.”

Holmes leaped out of the chair. “Of course! A mongoose.”

Quentin regarded me with another wondrous look. “Is not this amazing, my dear! Mr. Holmes is quick to the point of prescience. Surely he can help us. As you evidently know, Mr. Holmes, there is nothing a mongoose likes better than a dance-to-the-death with a cobra. My Messalina was out of her cage in a wink—clever with her feet, she is. All I found when I returned was a dead cobra... sorry, my dear... and a bit of damage to the draperies. Messalina can be quite a climber on occasion.”

Mr. Holmes drew a pocket watch and studied it in silence while its gold chain swung hypnotically. From the links swung a small yellow sun—a gold sovereign set into a bezel; an odd souvenir. I was pleased to have spotted a detail about Sherlock Holmes that I could legitimately report to Irene, as ordered. (Certainly I could never tell Irene the dreadful words Dr. Watson had penned about
the
man’s obsession with her!)

Mr. Holmes lifted his head intently like an animal. “Ah, I hear my associate’s step upon the stair. How convenient that your tale has reached a point where it should prove most interesting to him.”

He rose and opened the door to a man who was no surprise to me; the same Dr. Watson among whose writings I had shamelessly read and from under whose desk I had quite unintentionally kicked a dead snake.

I experienced some nervousness during the introductions, while Miss Buxleigh professed great amazement that Mr. Holmes knew Dr. Watson, but the doctor merely nodded politely at me and Quentin. All of Dr. Watson’s attention was on his friend.

“I am happy to see, Miss Buxleigh,” he said bluffly, “that you have managed to retrieve your missing fiancé, uh, Blodgett, is it?” He turned to the much taller, thinner man beside him. “Holmes, what has this to do with the Paddington mystery? Your note promised revelations.”

“And we shall have them, Watson,” Mr. Holmes said with great good humor, gesturing his friend to a velvet-lined armchair that must have been hot for the day. “Pray continue, Mr. Blodgett.”

“Not much more to say. I discreetly disposed of the snake—”

“Therein lies a tale,” Mr. Holmes commented
sotto voce
.

“—but I fear that an old tangle I have remembered from the war underlies this perfidy.”

“War?” Dr. Watson asked. “Perfidy?”

“Mr. Blodgett will explain directly.” Mr. Holmes fixed his disconcerting attention on Quentin.

That was Quentin’s cue to unravel the true tale within the false construct of our fiction as he told the detective and his companion what he had revealed to Godfrey, Irene and myself.

Quentin spoke thrillingly of his spy-work in Afghanistan and of his suspicions toward another British espionage agent called Tiger when the man slandered his friend, Lieutenant Maclaine. He dramatically described the blow to the head after his talk with Maclaine, and his awakening the next day in the midst of a harrowing British retreat.

Dr. Watson listened intently at first, then began to fidget subtly, tapping his fingers on the velvet pile of his armchair, shifting to find a more comfortable position for his leg.

“Yes,” Dr. Watson interrupted when Quentin paused for breath, “Miss Buxleigh thought I might have treated you. I remember encountering only one case of a blow to the head at Maiwand. I received a wound from a jezail bullet to my shoulder shortly after. The man I treated could have been you, but I cannot swear to it, Blodgett. I am sorry.”

Quentin sat forward on the sofa. “I am not, Dr. Watson, for I am sure of it! I was indeed he whom you tended moments before being shot in the shoulder yourself. Heavens, man, how amazing that we should meet again nearly a decade after Maiwand. Remember the dust?”

Dr. Watson laughed shortly. “Dust and Ghazi fanatics by the yard—who could forget? And the infernal heat. But I confess, Blodgett, that I did not even recall the exact instant of my wounding until Miss Buxleigh brought it back by inquiring after you a few days ago.”

“How did you find Dr. Watson?” Sherlock Holmes inquired suddenly.

Quentin was ready for him. “The last name. He mentioned it at Maiwand, one of the first things I remembered once my memory was resurrected from the past.” Quentin turned to the doctor with genuine emotion. “You will never know how relieved I am to see you again, Doctor! I feel in some way that my mislaid past has been redeemed.”

“I have recaptured some lost memories myself,” the doctor admitted.

“These mysteries unravel at a fearsome pace without my aid,” Mr. Holmes noted wryly. “You two gentlemen would seem to have more in common than a battlefield meeting and bad memories. You both have been recent recipients of Asian cobras.”

“Blodgett, too?” Dr. Watson demanded. “What is going on, Holmes? Is London infected by some sort of imported-serpent ring?”

“For that answer we will have to apply to Mr. Jasper Blodgett. He can begin by explaining how he managed to find you in time to set his trained mongoose on the cobra in your consulting room.”

“No!” Dr. Watson appeared sincerely shocked. “A mongoose. Why, I never thought of that, Holmes.”

“It is fortunate that I did, then, although I had not yet tracked the owner of the mongoose. Remember the nail marks on your windowsill? Obviously an animal’s. Well, Mr. Blodgett?”

“Utter simplicity, Mr. Holmes. Having finally remembered the good doctor’s name, I had determined to find any physicians named Watson in England, for by last month I had realized that Tiger was tracking me. In fact, when I attempted to look up Dr. Watson in the records at Peshawar, I discovered that a previous party had recently found—and removed—them.

“That is when I knew your life to be in danger, Doctor, and why I came to London. That you were the proper Dr. Watson came clear shortly after I found your residence and set watch upon it, planning to introduce myself to you if I thought you a likely candidate.

“That very night I saw a housebreaker import a box into your study. I may not be a detective—” here Quentin nodded at Mr. Holmes with some pride in his voice “—but I know the average cracksman doesn’t convey goods, beyond a few tools, into a house he’s planning to rob. I looked in from the windowsill after he had gone—a good clean job he made of it, too—and soon heard the rasp of a creature that chills the blood of any man who has spent time in India, the cobra.”

“You happened to have the mongoose with you, no doubt,” Holmes suggested with a trace of disdain.

“After the cobra I found in my hotel bedchamber, I went nowhere without it,” Quentin said with such feeling that it took me a moment to realize that this was a complete untruth.

In the ensuing silence, Quentin and Mr. Holmes regarded each other with narrowed eyes. Quentin radiated conviction. I was quite perversely proud of him, even though he was lying through his teeth. Mr. Holmes exuded another attitude, one I could not quite name. Perhaps it was skepticism.

“Go on,” the detective urged my supposed fiancé. Quentin only said, “So I nipped onto the sill, set the cage down, and let Messalina loose to do her work—

“Oh, Jasper,” I found myself simpering like any genuine fiancée (and for a brief second, in a strange way, felt that I was), “weren’t you frightened that your adorable little pet would succumb to the awful snake, especially in the dark?”

“There, there, May,” he said, startling me, for I had forgotten my recent rechristening. “I had not a thing to worry about. No mongoose can choose when to confront a cobra, and Messalina has never lost yet. Cobras can be a sluggish, slow-swaying sort of snake as well as deadly.”

“Yes, Miss Buxleigh,”
the
man said in obviously insincere consolation, “we humans may learn quite a lesson from the interaction of mongoose and cobra. Its results are applicable to London affairs daily.”

I had the dreadful sense that the detective was playing with us all, including his friend, as a mongoose may taunt the slower-moving snake. In this he reminded me of Irene at her most sphinxlike.

I shuddered slightly at the insight. Mr. Holmes seemed as cold-blooded as his friend had described him in the pages I had read in Paddington. “...
his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.”
Now I saw that Irene shared some of that same clinical distance.

“Messy nipped back to her cage when the job was done,” Quentin said, describing, I am sure, exactly what had occurred. “I shut her up and slipped away, knowing Dr. Watson’s maid might have a bit of noxious tidying up to do on the morrow, but the doctor’s life was safe.”

“Indeed.” This time Dr. Watson shuddered. “The serpent was discovered under my desk, quite dead, but well positioned to bite me in the leg.”

“So Mr. Blodgett’s imported mongoose averted a tragedy and a second leg wound, Watson,” drawled the detective in an odiously knowing manner.

“There is no
first
leg wound, Holmes!” Dr. Watson insisted with some irritation. “I merely get a bit stiff in the joints as a lingering symptom of enteric fever. This London weather is dank to one who has broiled in the kiln of Afghanistan and India.”

“Utterly true,” Quentin put in fervently.

Mr. Holmes turned to him with an air of having toyed enough with too-tame prey. “So is there an explanation for this villainy, Mr. Blodgett, or is that what I am being consulted to detect?”

Quentin paused as if perplexed. “There you have me, Mr. Holmes. I have my suspicions, and we have the two dead cobras to show that something is up.”

“Not to mention the irregularities at the battle of Maiwand,” I prompted.

Quentin nodded soberly. “They are more than mere irregularities, my dear. If my suspicions are correct that the spy I knew as Tiger was secretly working for the Russians, it could mean that our troops lost that day only by treachery. Many more lives hang on that than poor Maclaine’s.”

“What are you saying, Blodgett?” Dr. Watson asked. “That an Englishman betrayed his own kind? Maiwand saw much carnage. I witnessed that before I myself was wounded. The Sixty-sixth Berkshires standing to cover the retreat took dreadful losses. I would be most angry to learn that all of this waste could have been avoided.”

“If I am right, Dr. Watson,” Quentin returned, “your own wounding could have been avoided. I now believe that the bullet that shattered your shoulder was intended for me. Tiger knew that I was suspicious. I am certain that he struck me on the head the night before battle, intending to kill me and have me taken for a casualty. During the retreat, he saw me still alive under your care, and used the dust and confusion as a cover to try again to kill me. That is why I have come all this way after all this time: to warn you and preserve you. To my mind, you saved my life that day by taking a bullet meant for me.”

Nothing could belie the sincerity of Quentin’s words, or the concern that had driven his return to an England that was not only personally dangerous, but dreaded. The two veterans sat silent, affected by the emotion in his voice as much as by what he had said.

“My dear fellow,” Mr. Holmes told Quentin with more warmth than he had yet used, “there is no doubt in my mind that you saved Watson’s life by introducing your animal ally into his consulting room, and for that I am most grateful. On that score rest easy. That does not mean that the puzzle is solved, or the wrongdoers brought to justice. Do you have any proof that this Tiger is the traitorous spy that you claim he is?”

“Only this, Mr. Holmes.” Quentin reached into the breast pocket of his department-store suit and withdrew the paper Irene and I had prized from Dr. Watson’s Afghanistan bag only a day before.

I quite loathed to see Quentin hand it over to the detective, who bounded up and swooped it away to the light of the bow window. Irene had insisted that a copy of this nine-year-old document would not deceive the eminent detective, that Quentin had to surrender this precious paper, his only proof of Tiger’s betrayal, if indeed the cryptic scrawls could prove that. Still, I hated seeing Quentin surrender another piece of the past in which he had submerged so much of his life.

“Now we have something to grasp,” Mr. Holmes exclaimed. “Watson, my glass!”

He hunched over the document as if to consume it with his eyes. When his associate brought a magnifying glass, Mr. Holmes swept it across as well as up and down both sides.

“Hah!
St. Petersburg deckle with a rag content that is no less than forty percent—and cut so that the watermark is conveniently missing.” His thin fingers rubbed the paper as appreciatively as Irene’s sensitive fingertips judged the weight of Chinese silk.