A Soul of Steel (4 page)

Nuttall meets his eyes but says nothing.

By one-thirty P.M. the smoothbore batteries have exhausted their ammunition and withdrawn to the main ravine for restocking. Blackwood, severely wounded, is retiring to the rear also, a gravely wounded Fowell with him. Enemy irregulars harass the coattails of the valiant Sixty-sixth.

An hour and half later, the battle is over; a vast column of British soldiers and sepoys, native Indian forces, flee south toward Kandahar, mounted Afghans harrying its flanks.

Bodies litter the landscape, thousands of robed Afghans, hundreds of uniformed British troops. The severely wounded fall to the Afghan enemy and die before they can be rescued. Retreat is graceless as well as bitter, punctuated by the bullets of Afghan snipers and the knives of local peasants. Men and animals mill in chaos.

Among them wanders Lieutenant Hector Maclaine, dazed and disillusioned. By now the men have fought for hours without rest or food or water. At dusk, Maclaine ventures into a village in search of the one essential, water. Villagers converge upon him and five Indian soldiers, taking them prisoner. No one notices.

Also among these cheerless, fleeing men is the spy known as Cobra. The cavalry retreat, plunging back through camp, has awakened him from the violent blow to the head. He staggers onward, in the direction the British go: south to Kandahar, sixty miles over the hills and through the mountain passes.

Cobra doubts that he can make such a trek in his present condition, but he must. He must tell the command of Tiger’s perfidy. He must reach Kandahar. He must move one foot before the other one more time....

He falls, his face in the familiar dust. He is breathing sand now rather than air, and can feel the earth’s hot tremors as running men and hard-hooved beasts bound over this contested ground. Through the seven veils of dust thickening in the setting sun’s scarlet train, Cobra sees a figure from a fever dream lurching toward him: a man in uniform carrying a leather satchel.

It is too late, Cobra wants to say, but his dry, heat-blistered lips barely move. The man with the leather bag comes on.

Chapter Three

AFGHANISTAN PERCEIVED

London:
August 1888

“So, Watson,
you are thinking of Afghanistan again, I perceive.”

“I beg your pardon, Holmes?”

“Surely I need not apologize for being observant, Watson?”

“Indeed you should, when you go stealing into a man’s thoughts like this.”

“Then you admit it?”

“Admit what?”

“Afghanistan, of course.”

“I was not aware of dwelling on that unkindly land, but my thoughts may have drifted in that direction. No doubt you soon will tell me how you read them.”

Holmes leaned back in the velvet armchair with an expression of satisfaction. “Perhaps
you
would care to tell
me.”

“I do not know why, when you will pull the rug out from under my poor speculations, as you usually do.”

“Pshaw, Watson. You underestimate your own capacities. Think, man! It is
your
mind that I have presumed to read. Either refute my conclusion or explain it.”

I looked around our too-familiar rooms in Baker Street, trying to reconstruct the thoughts that had idly streamed through my mind while I had gazed out the bow window on the drizzle of a sullen summer day.

“I suppose,” I began, “that I was looking at something incriminating.”

Yet no souvenirs of my Army surgeon days in Afghanistan decorated the walls. Holmes was the sentimentalist, if I may be so bold as to call him that. At least he was the pack rat, for the domestic landscape teemed with memorabilia of his vocation as a consulting detective, not the least of which was the pointillist pattern of bullet holes punctuating the farther wall with the admirable initials V.R., for Victoria Regina.

“There is much incriminating to observe in these rooms,” Holmes said with a smile as he watched me. “Fortunately most of it has incriminated others, not ourselves. Go on.”

“Humph.”
Where exactly had I been staring when Holmes had interrupted my reverie? Out of the window? Not really. Ah.

“The photograph of General Gordon has led you in the direction of Afghanistan, has it not, Holmes?”

“How could it? ‘Chinese’ Gordon campaigned in China and died in Egypt, both sufficiently far from Afghanistan to have no obvious connection.”

“Still, I vaguely recall gazing at the old fellow’s gilt-embroidered uniform. At least he represents the rough quarter of the globe that Afghanistan shares.”

“Very well, Watson, very well! I confess. You were indeed musing on the late general, and a fine-looking subject for contemplation he makes in his fez, with his stars of rank festooning his Oriental tunic. But
you
were my ultimate clue on the direction of your thoughts.”

“I said nothing.”

“No, but you absently massaged your left shoulder, the site of the wound you took at Maiwand, which caused you to be cashiered out of the Army. Does the damp trouble you?”

“Not so much as the dryness of your deductions,” I mumbled, shifting on my chair and only realizing then that the shoulder did indeed ache a bit, as did my leg.

Holmes’s quick eyes followed my own to the leg. “A secondary wound, Watson?”

I stirred uneasily, pricked by an annoyance I seldom felt with Holmes, for all his amazing and eternal prescience.

“Merely the combined inroads of a damp day and a certain age,” said I, “common to inhabitants of our great but fogbound city. I am stiff from sitting.”

“Ah.” Holmes commented with the bland skepticism of a physician on hearing a symptom reported by its bearer. “No doubt. Although I have seen you favor the leg before.”

“The wound was in my shoulder, Holmes. You know that! The surgeons who treated me in Afghanistan know that! This nonsense of the leg is some sham you have manufactured to explain your deduction. I know what I am thinking and I do not require translations from nearby observers, no matter how brilliant.”

“Of course not, dear fellow,” Holmes murmured contritely. “I merely wondered why you might be thinking of Afghanistan at this late date. Obviously,” he finished insincerely, “I was mistaken.”

I said no more. Seldom did my friendship with Holmes tread near the shoals of irritation, but this was one of those rare times. It was ridiculous to suppose that I should care to dwell on Afghanistan after the severe wound and the tedious, long recovery I endured in that unhappy landscape.

The jezail bullet that shattered my shoulder bone and sheared the subclavian artery would have been fatal if my orderly, Murray, had not flung me over a packhorse and rushed me to the British lines. When I was recovering at Peshawar in India, enteric fever hammered me down. For months I lingered on the borderline of death itself.

A mere shadow of myself shipped home for England on the troopship
Orontes
in 1881. That was the shade who had met Sherlock Holmes. When we two decided to share rooms, I little guessed what an unforeseen tack my life would take as I became a witness to my friend’s astonishing deductive abilities. Yet I did not always welcome his keen and tireless mind presuming to read mine.

Afghanistan, indeed. For once my detective friend was on a false trail. I had virtually forgotten Afghanistan. Even if I had not been inclined to do so, months of fever-ridden illness had wiped most details of my wounding and recovery from my memory, thoroughly enough even to baffle the mind-reading abilities of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Chapter Four

PEARLS BEFORE PARROTS

“Araggk
. Pieces
of eight. Pieces of eight.” Casanova peered over my shoulder and cocked his gaudy head.

“You may be able to intone flawless French,” the former governess in me said severely, “but you cannot count in any language. There are only five pieces here.”

The gleam of rubies, diamonds and pearls matched the appetite in Casanova’s beady eye. It was fortunate that he was caged, for I suspected that he would have snatched up one of my prizes in a thrice otherwise.

The parrot ambled down his scabrous perch, chortling to himself, while I returned to my self-appointed duty of tending the family fortune.

For a peerless beauty of her era, my American friend Irene Adler Norton had precious few jewels to show for it. She who had introduced Tiffany’s spectacular shoulder-to-hip corsage of diamonds to the Milan opera audiences, and who had worn Queen Marie Antoinette’s lost Zone of Diamonds around her waist at her wedding (albeit discreetly under her overskirt) had not retained these fabulous treasures, being too poor or too indifferent.

The array that sparkled in her tapestry-covered jewel box was modest, yet each item told a story. On rainy days it amused me to polish my memories along with Irene’s jewels, for she herself could never be bothered to fuss over her possessions, no matter how rare or valuable.

So I shined true treasure along with mere souvenir. The outstanding single piece was a twenty-five-carat diamond, the only one Irene had kept from the French queen’s long-lost, floor-length girdle of jewels. The next most valuable piece was undoubtedly the diamond choker mounted on velvet. This was a gesture of thanks from Charles Lewis Tiffany, the world-famous jeweler to whom Irene sold the queen’s Zone once she had whisked it from under the rather prominent nose of the Baker Street consulting detective Sherlock Holmes.

The most precious article glittered on my palm like a giant dewdrop—a Tiffany piece modest in cost and execution, but the first gift from Irene’s husband-to-be, barrister Godfrey Norton. Godfrey, who displayed a legal precision even when under the influence of a romantic impulse, had chosen the perfect insignia for my friend: a diamond-studded musical clef intersecting an equally resplendent key at an angle reminiscent of crossed swords.

“Music and mystery,” I can still hear Godfrey saying with that tone of light seriousness that so becomes him. “They are the keynotes of your life, my dear Irene.”

Music, I fear, had become a background motif once Irene was forced to leave the Prague opera and to live in virtual anonymity in Paris after the affair of the King of Bohemia’s photograph, not to mention the possible pursuit of Sherlock Holmes.

Mystery, however, was proving to be a less fragile pastime.

I centered the clef and key on the moss-green velvet within the jewel box and considered the next item. As in a wax museum, the more gruesome exhibits had the more enduring fascination. I picked up the blood-bright ruby brooch shaped like a five-pointed star.

It lay on my palm, a glorious singular stigmata, the only gift that Irene had accepted from Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, King of Bohemia. He had meant it to be a consolation prize for relegating Irene from potential royal bride to certain royal mistress after his succession to the throne on the death of his father.

Irene, who had refused all jewels during their courtship, accepted this last poisonous symbol of the King’s personal betrayal, and fled—with myself—across most of Europe.

To recover the photograph of the two together that Irene took with her as a safeguard, King Willie pursued her to London. When his thugs failed to dent Irene’s armor of cool wit, he engaged Sherlock Holmes to recover the photograph, but even that did not help him. The ruby brooch shone like limpid drops of blood under the brisk buffing of my cloth, and I dropped it to the velvet with sudden distaste.

On the Valencia-lace dresser scarf awaiting my attentions lay another loathsome object—not by its associations but by design. This was the work of Charles Tiffany’s son Louis—a tortured representation of an anonymous sea slug decked with pearls. Irene insisted that the work was unique, would one day even be valuable, but she was ever an optimist on all fronts. I was sorely tempted to “lose” the ugly thing during one of my cleaning ventures. Certainly the world would not miss a single sinuous and bilious enameled brooch.