The Falling Curtain (The Assassination of Sherlock Holmes Book 3) (29 page)

[70]
Clearly there is no Hag of Haybridge Cave, though she appears to have similar attributes to the ‘
Hag of the Mist,’ a Welsh spirit comparable to the Irish banshee.

[71]
Barker appears for certain only in the late
The Adventure of the Retired Colourman
, though he may also be the unnamed grandstanding detective noted by Watson in
The Adventure of the Empty House
.

[72]
The brake-van is the equivalent of an American ‘caboose.’

[73]
The last Anglo-Saxon King of England, Harold Godwinson was killed on 14 October 1066 by the Norman invaders under William the Conqueror.

[74]
Clearly not the far-more-famous Stratford-upon-Avon, but rather the similarly-named London suburb of Stratford.

[75]
In America, more popularly known as a handcar.

[76]
Actually, Holmes never said that, though he did mention the writing of a monograph on ‘the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand, with lithotypes of the hands of slaters, sailors, cork-cutters, compositors, weavers, and diamond-polishers’ (Chapter I,
The Sign of Four
).

[77]
A costermonger was a street seller of fruit and vegetables, ubiquitous in mid-Victorian England. They would use a loud sing-song cry or chant to attract attention. The term is derived from the words ‘costard’ (a now-extinct medieval variety of large, ribbed apple) and ‘monger’; a seller of goods.

[78]
A lost tale, alluded to in
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
: ‘As I turn over the pages I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech….’

[79]
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) was a French Romantic landscape and portrait painter, while William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was a French Realist painter, both of whom were collected by Mr. Thaddeus Sholto (Chapter IV,
The Sign of Four
). It makes sense that the painting sought by Watson would be in a room filled with other French artists. Of course, over time the paintings have been moved about, and currently, the Gallery’s paintings by Greuze are located on Level 0 in Room E, along with two paintings by Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), a relative of one Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

[80]
Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) was a French artist whose working career flourished between the years 1750 and 1800. This particular painting fetched not less than four thousand pounds at the 1865 Portalis sale, despite the fact that Professor Moriarty’s official university salary could be ascertained at seven hundred a year (Chapter II,
The Valley of Fear
).

[81]
Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723) and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) were famous English portrait-painters, both of whose works also hung upon the walls of Baskerville Hall (Chapter 13,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
).

[82]
J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) was the greatest of the British Romantic painters. Two of his most famous painting are
‘The Fighting Temeraire’
(1839) and 
‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus from Homer’s Odyssey’
(1829), the former especially a meditation upon obsolescence and the demise of heroic strength, the work of an artist confronting his own mortality.

[83]
The famous auction house founded in 1744, it is mentioned in both
The Adventures of the Illustrious Client
and
the Three Garridebs
.

[84]
Craquelure is the fine pattern of cracks formed on the surface of an oil painting, usually due to the process of aging.

[85]
Presumably the University College London, which was founded in 1826 in Bloomsbury as the first entirely secular university in England.

[86]
Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923) is considered the discoverer of X-rays in 1895. The first documented use of X-rays to authenticate art occurred by a year later in Frankfurt, Germany, so it’s dissemination to London by 1909 is entirely likely.

[87]
Holmes was much interested in palimpsests, manuscript pages which have been scraped or washed and then reused, during the time preceding
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
.

[88]
Lomax makes only one appearance in the Canon (
The Adventure of the Illustrious Client
), but also appears in two non-Canonical stories,
The Adventure of the Spanish Sovereign
, and
The Isle of Devils
.

[89]
A stone is an English unit of weight equal to 14 pounds or 6.35 kg, thus this man clocked in at about 266 pounds. Compare this to the enormous Godfrey Staunton, who was only ‘sixteen stone’ (
The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
).

[90]
‘Killer’ Evans, aka James Winter, first served five years in prison for shooting his partner, so it appears that he received eight years or less for his wounding of Watson (
The Adventure of The Three Garridebs
).

[91]
As detailed in Chapter XX of
The Sign of Four
.

[92]
The ‘pet’ of Jephro Rucastle in
The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
.

[93]
As detailed in Chapter XIV of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
.

[94]
Holmes first alluded to the remarkable case of the venomous lizard, or Gila, in
The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire
. The Gila is native only to the southwestern United States, but any description of how it got to England and who precisely was Eastland, has yet to be discovered.

[95]
The truncheon or baton was typically made from the extremely hard wood of the gutta-percha tree, native to the Malaysian peninsula. To this day, the typical London constable does not go armed with a gun.

[96]
Holmes told Evans: ‘If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive’ (
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs
).

[97]
This slang phrase first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1891.

[98]
Watson is perhaps being overly optimistic. While it is possible to stop wearing a sling after a few weeks, it can take three to four months to completely recover from a dislocated shoulder.

[99]
As Holmes mentions in
The Adventure of the Empty House
.

[100]
Another unchronicled case, why Mathews assaulted Major Broughton is not known.

[101]
Merton Place was the country estate purchased by Admiral Horatio Nelson during the temporary Peace of Amiens. Despite having previously lost the sight in his right eye on Corsica and his right arm at Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands, Nelson stood fast upon the deck of his flagship, the HMS
Victory
, as it crashed the French lines at Trafalgar. There he was struck down by the fatal bullet.

[102]
After his death in 1805, Nelson was considered for many years the pinnacle of British courage, on par with Lord Wellington, and surpassing John Churchill, 1
st
Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722). Nelson was finally surpassed by Marlborough’s descendent Winston, c.1945.

[103]
Patterson was killed by Parker the garrotter, as detailed in
The Adventure of the Pharaoh’s Curse
.

[104]
Captain Powell was the army balloonist whose body was found at Runnymede in
The Problem at Threadneedle Street.

[105]
This was formed in 1865, first as the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and then in 1904, as the London Fire Brigade, following two centuries where various insurance companies established units to combat fires that occurred only in buildings that their respective companies insured.

[106]
Watson first mentioned the existence of these in
The Adventure of Black Peter
: ‘He had at least five small refuges in different parts of London in which he was able to change his personality.’

[107]
Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia stayed at the Langham while employing Holmes (
A Scandal in Bohemia
).

[108]
As recounted in Chapter I of
A Study in Scarlet
.

[109]
Holmes mentions his distrust of packages, like the one sent to him by Culverton Smith, at the end of
The Adventure of the Dying Detective
.

[110]
Holmes’ use of cocaine was primarily documented in such cases as
The Sign of Four
,
A Scandal in Bohemia
,
The Five Orange Pips
, and others. Unfortunately, as this case shows, Watson was correct when he said that: “the fiend was not dead, but sleeping” (
The Adventure of the Missing-Three Quarter
).

[111]
There are many such examples of human-perpetrated horrors in the Canon, but the one that made Holmes most introspective was the slaying of Sarah Cushing and Alec Fairbairn by Jim Browner (
The Cardboard Box
).

[112]
While there may be others in the unpublished papers of Dr. Watson, the major examples of Holmes failing his clients are the cases of Mr. John Openshaw (
The Five Orange Pips
) and Mr. Hilton Cubitt (
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
).

[113]
In Chapter V of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
.

[114]
The mottos of the firm, as reported in
The Adventure of the Creeping Man
.

[115]
Although not conclusive, Watson said that: ‘the stage lost a fine actor when he became a specialist in crime’ (
A Scandal in Bohemia
), and it has been widely considered that Holmes was part of an acting troupe before he changed careers.  If these suspicions are true, those old personal connections might explain how Holmes managed to engage so many actors in such a short period of time.

[116]
Although not all of the details fit precisely, it is thought that this is a Watsonian name-change for the former public house on Hampstead known as Jack Straw’s Castle.

[117]
The astute reader will note that these are the aliases used by Holmes & Watson in
The Adventure of the Stock-Broker’s Clerk.

[118]
Given the vast separation in time, it seems that Holmes actually employed two separate page boys named Billy, one c.1888 (
The Valley of Fear
) and another from c.1901-1903 (
The Problem of Thor Bridge
and
The Mazarin Stone)
.

[119]
Cartwright only appears in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
.

[120]
Wiggins, former leader of the Baker Street Irregulars appears in
A Study in Scarlet
and
The Sign of Four
, as well as the non-Canonical
The Adventure of the Manufactured Miracle
. Simpson only appears in
The Adventure of the Crooked Man
. Likely young teenagers at the time, since those adventures took place roughly twenty years before the events detailed herein, Wiggins and Simpson would now be in their mid-thirties.

[121]
Likely Arthur Hughes (1832–1915), a Pre-Raphaelite painter and illustrator.

[122]
Newnes Publishing was best known for printing the Strand Magazine.

[123]
Having almost been robbed by John Clay in
The Adventure of the Red-Headed League
.

[124]
The Trevors hailed from Donnithorpe, a little hamlet just to the north of Langmere, in the country of the Broads, which is a part of Norfolk comprised of large, marshy wetlands.

[125]
After learning of the perfidy of his father, Victor Trevor was so heartbroken that he abandoned his home and went out to the tea plantings at Terai, a region of northern India and southern Nepal. It seems that after a span of some thirty-plus years (for
The
‘Gloria Scott’ is thought to have taken place in 1874), Trevor finally decided to return home.

[126]
The fowling piece, or shotgun, was enhanced in 1871 by British gun-maker T. Murcott’s hammerless model, nicknamed the mousetrap.

[127]
Watson’s math is difficult to follow, primarily due to his notoriously loose handling of dates, and his occasional reticence when mentioning personal matters that did not directly impact upon a case. However, he and Holmes lived together from roughly 1881 to 1888 (i.e. 8 years), and then roughly 1894 to 1903 (i.e. 9 more years).

[128]
As noted several times in the Canon, Holmes had a habit of skipping meals entirely when engaged upon a particularly engrossing case. However, he was equally capable of indulging in both the repasts of Mrs. Hudson, and a variety of restaurants around town, but also in spontaneous gourmet meals (such as was described in Chapter X of
The Sign of Four
and
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
). Holmes and Watson enjoy several different drinks in the Canon, including a bottle of Montrachet, made from the Chardonnay grape (
The Adventured of the Veiled Lodger
), and a Beaune, from the Pinot Noir grape (Chapter I,
The Sign of Four
), both produce in the Burgundy region of France.