The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (19 page)

‘A man of that sort cannot resist the temptation to fight to the last ditch,' he said. ‘It was as well for you, my dear Rufus, that the guttersnipe did not plead guilty and say he was only repeating what a dozen other newspapers had written already. Then you might have had to indict 'em all and we should have had the gravest constitutional crisis on our hands for the last fifty years.'

Sir Rufus Isaacs with his dark dignity stared unsmiling at his companion.

‘The scoundrel has gone to prison, Winston,' he said suavely. ‘That will be the end of him. To the people of this country, a man who goes to prison on a jury's verdict is a liar. He might publish the marriage certificate itself and they would not believe him now.'

‘Well,' growled the Home Secretary cheerfully, ‘we may all thank God for that!'

As the world knows, there was spite enough to come but the worst damage had been avoided. No incriminating papers of any kind could be produced by Mylius and his gang. The libeller served his year in prison and was released. He made his way to New York and there, beyond the reach of English law, he published his booklet,
The Morganatic Marriage of George V
. In these pages he described, as he had not done in court, how Prince George had been at Gibraltar from 9 June until 25 June 1890, with ample time to reach Malta and return, and how a Miss Culme-Seymour was at Marseilles at the same time.

By then, of course, it was too late. The wretched fellow had been branded as a liar and a criminal. Sir Rufus Isaacs was quite right in predicting that no one would listen to him now, even with the marriage certificate in his hand. I believe that only Holmes and I knew the entire truth of why that certificate could not be produced, even had it existed. Now the whole disagreeable business was to be eclipsed by the splendour of the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary in Westminster Abbey, by the spontaneous affection and loyalty shown all along the route by their subjects. That was answer enough to the libel.

On the February evening of the trial I took a cab back through the damp streets of Holborn and Marylebone to Baker Street. Sherlock Holmes had retired in 1903 to Fulworth, near Cuckmere Haven on the Sussex coast. I never thought it would last. After six months, he had wearied sufficiently of his bee-keeping to spend two or three days of almost every week in our old haunts at 221B Baker Street. Though I had been married for nine years, Mrs Watson's occasional absences from London on family matters, and the discovery of a most efficient
locum
, had led me increasingly to spend a few days at a time in our old diggings. Indeed, I had been a regular visitor ever since the mystery of the Irish Crown Jewels.

There had been little news of the Mylius case in the evening papers, for they were scarcely prepared for it. Holmes had spent the day in tedious negotiation with the representatives of Lady Warwick but he was impatient to hear the outcome of the trial. He stood with his pipe in his hand and nodded at every sentence in my account, looking up only when I described Mary Culme-Seymour's slip in the witness-box. When I revealed how it had all ended with the removal of Mylius to begin his sentence in Wormwood Scrubs, he let out a long sigh.

‘It would not do for the truth to come out now, after all this time.'

‘The truth of the marriage or the lack of it?'

He drew his pipe from his lips and shook his head.

‘No, Watson. The truth of the part which you and I played in that intimate drama. I should not care for that to be known during the lifetime of either of us.'

In that observation, of course, he was quite right.

II

Such was the end of the story, the least sensational part of it. When this scandal of a bigamous marriage first threatened the British throne, we had confronted far worse men than Mylius, including one to whose existence I have only alluded obliquely in the past, under his alias of ‘Charles Augustus Milverton'. Our adventure began soon after breakfast on a sunny morning more than twenty years before during one of my residences at Baker Street. All one's instincts were to chuck work for the day and walk under the elms and chestnuts of Regent's Park. For Holmes, of course, that would not do. I do not believe that my friend ever chucked work for a single day of his life.

We had come home late the previous evening from a Joachim recital at the St James's Hall, where Holmes had sat with his eyes closed and a faint smile upon his lips as the great virtuoso filled the concert room with the plaintive melodies of Beethoven's Violin Concerto. As we entered the sitting-room and I turned up the lamp upon the table, the light fell upon a card. It had been left by Sir Arthur Bigge, who had scribbled in pencil on the reverse his intention of returning at 11
A
.
M
. next day. If it was impossible for us to receive him then, we should find him at the Army and Navy Club in St James's Square. The matter was of such urgency that he would not leave London until he had laid the facts of it before Sherlock Holmes. He did not need to be more precise, for all England knew that Sir Arthur Bigge, later Lord Stamfordham, was Assistant Private Secretary to Her Majesty the Queen.

Neither of us had the least idea what had brought the young courtier from Windsor. He was by then in his thirties, a man of good family with a distinguished career as a young subaltern in the Zulu Wars of 1879–80. Slight of build and unassuming in manner, his fair-haired military moustache betraying his former profession, he was to serve loyally as Assistant Private Secretary until 1901, when he became Private Secretary to the late Queen's grandson, first as Prince of Wales and then as King George V. He seemed to me always to have about him an inbred air of anxiety. It was particularly marked on the following morning when we received him in Baker Street. Sir Arthur looked from one to the other of us, as he sat forward in the fireside arm-chair, where we had installed him.

‘Gentlemen,' he said quietly, ‘what I have to say must be said to you both, though it is repugnant to talk of such things at all. I know something of our antagonists and I am sure that this is not a commission to be undertaken by any one man. Before you ask me why I have not gone to your friend Lestrade at Scotland Yard, let me tell you simply that a prince of the blood is threatened with blackmail—not without reason, if one can use that term for such a loathsome crime. I will also tell you that neither the Prime Minister, the Attorney-General, nor any member of the government has been approached.'

Holmes stood at the window, looking down at the immaculately polished coachwork of the waiting carriage with its two glossy bay geldings. Unlike Sir Arthur, he spoke without the least trace of astonishment that such a crime should now threaten the stability of the British throne.

‘I assume you will not object, Sir Arthur, to telling us the name of the blackmailer. Will you also tell us the name of his intended victim? You have our word, of course, that neither will go beyond the walls of this room.'

Sir Arthur shrugged. ‘You will have to know both, Mr Holmes. From my presence here, it will not surprise you to know that Her Majesty's grandson, Prince George, is the object of this villainy, though it touches his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence.'

‘And your blackmailer?'

‘I cannot tell you the name of the plot's contriver, Mr Holmes. I know only of the man who presents himself as the agent of it.'

‘The agent?'

‘The agent of one who says that he wishes well to Her Majesty. One who has in his—or her—hands stolen papers that would infallibly bring disgrace on the royal house. Letters from two royal sons to women of a certain kind. Part of Prince George's private diary. The letters were easy to steal from their recipients—the diary easier than it should have been from a ship of the fleet. The client professes to be one who seeks only to ensure that the documents are never disclosed. To this end, he proposes to name a price!'

‘A loyal subject!' Holmes exclaimed sardonically. ‘Who represents this anonymous patriot?'

‘You have perhaps heard of the name of Charles Augustus Howell?'

‘Ah!' said Holmes reminiscently. ‘I know of him well enough, Sir Arthur. I have yet to meet him privately but his name occurs frequently in my files.'

‘What do you know of him, Mr Holmes?' For the first time there was a light of hope in Sir Arthur's eyes.

Holmes assumed a grimace of distaste. ‘You might call him an interesting subject, in his way. He has been a diver for pearls and sheikh of a North African tribe. He is Anglo-Portuguese by birth and escaped from criminal vengeance in Portugal after a card-sharping scandal when he was just sixteen years old. Since then he has followed a career of dishonour with dedication. As a young man, he was implicated in Orsini's plot to assassinate the French Emperor. He defrauded Mr Ruskin, as a secretary, and endeavoured to facilitate the great man's meetings with very young girls.'

The lines of Sir Arthur Bigge's face relaxed and he said thankfully, ‘Then you know the worst of him, Mr Holmes.'

‘Indeed, Sir Arthur. Howell is known in artistic circles, in the pawnbroking trade, and in houses of ill fame, whether they be the stews of Seven Dials or the more genteel mansions of Regent's Park and St John's Wood. He is provider of pleasures to the dissolute, though he does not spare the innocent. Some time ago, he was Mr Rossetti's agent and marketed pictures ascribed to that artist which were rank forgeries. Among poets, he facilitated Mr Swinburne's perverse enjoyments at a house in Circus Road, St John's Wood, and then blackmailed Admiral and Lady Swinburne as the price of his silence. He defrauded Mr Whistler in the matter of a valuable Japanese cabinet, which he “borrowed” and then sold simultaneously to two different dealers, leaving the artist to reimburse them both. I could tell you more, Sir Arthur, but I trust that will suffice to assure you that my files contain a number of facts about Mr Howell that are otherwise known only to the criminal and his victims.'

Though our visitor breathed more freely, a look of concern betrayed his unease at the extent of such depravity.

‘And what do you find his methods to be, Mr Holmes?'

Holmes walked from the window, sat in the opposite chair and chuckled.

‘His methods are not subtle but they are apt to succeed. Mr Rossetti was unfortunate enough to lose his wife, the beautiful Elizabeth Siddal, from an overdose of chloral. He was so distraught that he buried a notebook—the only copy of his poems—in his dead wife's coffin. After several years, Howell insisted that the gesture was quixotic, a ruinous loss to literature. He persuaded Mr Rossetti to have his wife exhumed from Highgate Cemetery at night and the poems retrieved. It was not the least improper. The Home Secretary signed an exhumation order. Yet, to the grieving husband, it was a necessity at which he shuddered. Within weeks he heard from Mr Howell—'

‘Did he?' Sir Arthur sat forward again, his face tight with anger. ‘Did he, by any chance, hear that certain sensitive letters and documents had been pasted into Howell's album? Did he hear that his friend Howell had fallen on hard times and been obliged to pawn his possessions—including that album? Did he hear that Howell was unable to redeem the album for lack of funds? Was he told by this blackguard that he would be best advised to go to the pawnbroker and negotiate before the album went to auction? And when he did so, did the pawnbroker demand a king's ransom to prevent these confidential papers being sold at an auction without reserve?'

‘It was the case in every detail,' Holmes said quietly. ‘Howell works hand in glove with one or two villains in the pawnbroking trade. Mr Rossetti's letters contained nothing dishonourable, yet he would have died rather than see his private feelings about the woman he loved held up to public auction and the curiosity of the multitude. Six hundred pounds was, I believe, the price.'

Sir Arthur looked pale, though he was thinking of Prince George rather than Mr Rossetti.

‘Could nothing be done to bring such a criminal to justice?'

Holmes spread out his bony fingers and studied them.

‘I beg you will not underestimate him, Sir Arthur. He shows a practised cunning. No law is broken. A man who writes a letter to another makes that other the owner of the letter. The other may not, of course, publish it without the consent of its author. In this case, publication was unnecessary to Howell's scheme. Possession by whomsoever he chose to buy the letters was sufficient threat. Had Howell attempted blackmail, he would have gone to prison for fourteen years. But he might claim that urging his victim to go quickly to the confederate pawnbroker and purchase the letters was a friendly act, designed to forestall embarrassment.'

‘Nothing was done?' Sir Arthur inquired fearfully.

‘No,' said Holmes abruptly. ‘Nor was anything done when the same trick was played upon Admiral and Lady Swinburne. Their son fell into a bohemian set and, among women at such houses as that in Circus Road, indulged passions that belong to the alienist rather than the moral censor. You have perhaps, Sir Arthur, noticed the works of the Baron von Krafft-Ebing in the past three or four years? The treatises on psycho-pathology of Cesare Lombroso or Démétrius Zambaco?'

Sir Arthur Bigge shook his head. It was evident from his expression that he had not the least idea what Holmes was talking about. The most arcane rituals of the Zulu tribes against whom he had fought as a young officer would have meant more to him than the great alienists whose works my friend had at his fingertips.

‘No matter,' Holmes said casually. ‘Suffice it to say that Admiral and Lady Swinburne paid a considerable sum for the album of letters describing Circus Road pleasures, which their conceited young son had addressed to his friend Howell. Howell pleaded again that poverty had forced him to pawn the correspondence and that he had not the money to redeem it before the sale must take place.'