The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (57 page)

But even as I spoke those words, my heart failed me. Certainly I had what had seemed glad tidings from Hertfordshire. But my news was of the foiling of an apparent attempt on the Count Palatine of Illyria, a ruler whom I had believed, on Holmes’s authority, to be needed urgently in a country prey to severe unrest. Yet I had heard not half an hour before from an eye-witness of impeccable antecedents that there was no unrest whatsoever in Illyria, and if that were so was not the whole of Holmes’s view of the situation a matter for doubt?

Yet I had broached the subject and must continue.

“I happened on my final visit to our friend, Mr Smith, the day before yesterday to notice lurking near the gates of the house a person dressed as a seaman,” I said.

Holmes in answer gave a groan yet louder than any before. It caused me to pause a little before continuing once more, in an altogether less assured manner.

“I considered it my duty, Holmes, to warn Mr Smith’s manservant of the presence of that individual, and to hint in general terms that the fellow might be some sort of burglar intent on the premises.”

Another deep groan greeted this information. Yet more falteringly I resumed.

“This morning, my dear chap, the manservant called to collect from me a quantity of nerve tonic that I had prepared for his master, and he told me that he had surprised just such a mysterious seaman in the grounds of the house last evening and that he had – ”

Here my hesitant account abruptly concluded. Holmes had given vent to yet another appalling groan, and I was able to see, too, that he was holding his body under the bedclothes in an altogether unnaturally stiff position.

A silence fell. In the quiet of the bedroom I could hear distinctly the buzzing of a bluebottle fly beating itself hopelessly against the window panes. At last I spoke again.

“Holmes. My dear old friend. Holmes. Tell me, am I right in my guess? Holmes, are you suffering from the effects of a thorough thrashing?”

Another silence. Once more I became aware of the useless buzzings of the fly upon the pane. Then Holmes answered.

“Yes, Watson, it is as you supposed.”

“But, my dear fellow, this is truly appalling. My action in warning that manservant resulted in your suffering injury. Can you forgive me?”

“The injury I can forgive,” Holmes answered. “The insult I suffered at the hands of that fellow I can forgive you, Watson, as I can forgive the man his unwitting action. But those who were its cause I cannot forgive. They are dangerous men, my friend, and at all costs they must be prevented from wreaking the harm they intend.”

I could not in the light of that answer bring myself to question in the least whether the men to whom Holmes had pointed existed, however keenly I recalled Maltravers Bressingham’s assertion that all was quiet in Illyria.

“Holmes,” I asked instead, “have you then some plan to act against these people?”

“I would be sadly failing in my duty, Watson, had I not taken the most stringent precautions on behalf of the Count Palatine, and I hope you have never found me lacking in that.”

“Indeed I have not.”

“Very well then. During the hours of daylight I think we need not fear too much. They are hardly likely to make an attempt that might easily be thwarted by a handful of honest English passersby. And in any case I have telegraphed the Hertfordshire police and given them a proper warning. But it is tonight, Watson, that I fear.”

“The Count’s last night in England, Holmes, if indeed …”

I bit back the qualifying phrase it had been on the tip of my tongue to add. Common sense dictated that the terrible situation Holmes foresaw was one that could not occur. Yet on many occasions before I had doubted him and he had in the outcome been proved abundantly right. So now I held my peace.

Holmes with difficulty raised himself up in the bed.

“Watson,” he said, “tonight as never before I shall require your active assistance. We must both keep watch. There is no other course open to me. But I fear I myself will be but a poor bruised champion should the affair come to blows. Will you assist me then? Will you bring that old Service revolver of yours and fight once more on the side of justice?”

“I will, Holmes, I will.”

What else could I have said?

The hour of dusk that autumn evening found us taking up our watch in Hertfordshire in that same thick rhododendron shrubbery where Holmes had hidden in the disguise of an old, wrinkled, brown-faced fellow at the beginning of this singular adventure. But where he had from deep within that leafy place of concealment looked out at the mellow brightness of afternoon, we now needed to step only a foot or two in among the bushes to be quite concealed and we looked out at a scene soon bathed in serene moonlight.

All was quiet. No feet trod the path beyond the beech hedge. In the garden no bird hopped to and fro, no insect buzzed. Up at the house, which beneath the light of the full moon we had under perfect observation, two lighted windows only showed how things lay, one high up from behind the drawn curtains of the bedroom where I had visited my mysterious patient, another low down, coming from the partly sunken windows of the kitchen where doubtless the manservant was preparing the light evening repast I myself had recommended.

Making myself as comfortable as I could and feeling with some pleasure the heavy weight of the revolver in my pocket, I set myself to endure a long vigil. By my side Holmes moved from time to time, less able than on other such occasions in the past to keep perfectly still, sore as were his limbs from the cudgel wielded, with mistaken honesty, by that European manservant now busy at the stove.

Our watch, however, was to be much shorter than I had expected. Scarcely half an hour had passed when, with complete unexpectedness, the quiet of the night was broken by a sharp voice from behind us.

“Stay where you are. One move and I would shoot.”

The voice I recognized in an instant from the strength of its foreign accent. It was that of Mr Smith’s loyal servant. Taking care not to give him cause to let loose a blast from the gun I was certain he must be aiming at our backs, I spoke up as calmly as I could.

“I am afraid that not for the first time your zeal has betrayed you,” I said. “Perhaps you will recognize my voice, as I have recognized yours. I am Dr Watson, your master’s medical attendant. I am here with my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, of whom perhaps you have heard.”

“It is the doctor?”

Behind me, as I remained still as a statue, I heard the crunching of the dried leaves underfoot and a moment later the manservant’s face was thrust into mine.

“Yes,” he said, “it is you. Good. I was keeping guard because of the many rogues there are about here, and I saw in the bushes a movement. I did not like. But it is you and your friend only. That is good.”

“You did well,” Holmes said to him. “I am happy to think that the Count has another alert watcher over him besides ourselves.”

“The Count?” said the servant. “What Count is this?”

“Why, man, your master. There is no need for pretence between the three of us. Dr Watson and I are well aware that the man up in the house there is no Mr Smith, but none other than the Count Palatine of Illyria.”

Holmes’s voice had dropped as he pronounced the name, but his secrecy was greeted in an altogether astonishing manner. The formerly gruff manservant broke into rich and noisy laughter.

“Mr Smith, my Mr Smith the Count Palatine of Illyria?” he choked out at last. “Why, though my master has travelled much, and though I began to serve him while he was in Austria, he has never so much as set foot in Illyria. Of that I can assure you, gentlemen, and as to being the Count Palatine …”

Again the manservant’s laughter overcame him, ringing loudly into the night air.

I do not know what Holmes would have done to silence the fellow, or what attitude he would have taken to this brazen assertion. For at that moment another voice made itself heard, a voice somewhat faint and quavering coming from up beside the house.

“What is this? What is going on there? Josef, is that you?”

It was my patient, certainly recovered from his nervous indisposition enough to venture out to see why there was such a hullabaloo in his grounds.

“Sir, it is the doctor and, sir, a friend of his, a friend with a most curious belief.”

At the sound of his servant’s reassuring voice my patient began to cross the lawn towards us. As he approached, Sherlock Holmes stepped from the shrubbery and went to meet him, his figure tall and commanding in the silvery moonlight. The two men came together in the full middle of the lawn.

“Good evening,” Holmes’s voice rang clear. “Whom have I the honour of addressing?”

As he spoke he thrust out a hand in greeting. My patient extended his own in reply. But then, with a movement as rapid as that of a striking snake, Holmes, instead of taking the offered hand and clasping it, seized its third finger, covered as always with its leather finger-stall, and jerked the protective sheath clean away.

There in the bright moonlight I saw for the first time the finger that had hitherto always been concealed from me. It wore no heavy royal signet ring, as indeed was unlikely on a finger of the right hand. It was instead curiously withered, a sight that to anyone other than a medical man might have been considered a little repulsive.

“You are not the Count Palatine of Illyria?” Holmes stammered then, more disconcerted than I had ever seen him in the whole of our long friendship.

“The Count Palatine of Illyria?” Mr Smith replied. “I assure you, my dear sir, I am far from being such a person. Whatever put a notion like that into your head?”

It was not until the last train of the day returning us to London was at the outskirts of the city that Holmes spoke to me.

“How often have I told you, Watson,” he said, “that one must take into account all the factors relevant to a particular situation before making an assessment? A good many dozen times, I should say. So it was all the more reprehensible of me deliberately to have imported a factor into the Hertfordshire business that was the product, not of the simple truth, but of my own over-willing imagination. My dear fellow, I must tell you that there were no reports of unrest in Illyria.”

“I knew it, Holmes. I had found out quite by chance.”

“And you said nothing?”

“I trusted you, as I have trusted you always.”

“And as, until now, I hope I have been worthy of your trust. But inaction has always been the curse of me, my dear fellow. It was the lack of stimulus that drove me to deceit now. You were right about your patient from the start. He never was other than a man with a not unusual nervousness of disposition. You were right, Watson, and I was wrong.”

I heard the words. But I wished then, as I wish again now with all the fervour at my command, that they had never been uttered, that they had never needed to be uttered.

The Repulsive Story of the Red Leech

David Langford

“Our client, Watson, would seem somewhat overwrought,” remarked Sherlock Holmes without lowering his copy of
The Times
.

We were alone, but I had grown accustomed to the little puzzles which my friend was amused to propound. A glance at the window showed nothing but grey rain over Baker Street. I listened with care, and presently was pleased to say: “Aha! Someone is pacing outside the door. Not heavily, for I cannot discern the footsteps, but quite rapidly – as indicated by the regular sound from that floorboard with its very providential creak.”

Holmes cast aside his newspaper and smiled. “Capital! But let us not confuse providence with forethought. That board has been carefully sprung in imitation of the device which in the Orient is known as a nightingale floor. More than once I have found its warning useful.”

As I privately abandoned my notion of having the loose plank nailed down and silenced, there was a timid knock at the door.

“Come in,” cried Holmes, and in a moment we had our first sight of young Martin Traill. He was robust of build but pale of feature, and advanced with a certain hesitation.

“You wish, I take it, to consult me,” said Holmes pleasantly.

“Indeed so, sir, if you are the celebrated Dr Watson.”

A flash of displeasure crossed Holmes’s face as he effected the necessary introductions; and then, I thought, he smiled to himself at his own vanity.

Traill said to me: “I should, perhaps, address you in private.”

“My colleague is privy to all my affairs,” I assured him, suppressing a smile of my own.

“Very well. I dared to approach you, Dr Watson, since certain accounts which you have published show that you are not unacquainted with
outré
matters.”

“Meretricious and over-sensationalized accounts,” murmured Holmes under his breath.

I professed my readiness to listen to any tale, be it never so bizarre, and – not without what I fancied to be a flicker of evasiveness in his eyes – Martin Traill began.

“If I were a storyteller I would call myself hag-ridden … harried by spirits. The facts are less dramatic, but, to me, perhaps more disturbing. I should explain that I am the heir to the very substantial estate of my late father, Sir Maximilian Traill, whose will makes me master of the entire fortune upon attaining the age of twenty-five. That birthday is months past: yet here I am, still living like a remittance-man on a monthly allowance, because I cannot sign a simple piece of paper.”

“A legal document that confirms you in your inheritance?” I hazarded.

“Exactly so.”

“Come, come,” said Holmes, reaching for a quire of foolscap and a pencil, “we must see this phenomenon. Pray write your name here, and Watson and I will stand guard against ghosts.”

Traill smiled a little sadly. “You scoff. I wish to God that I could scoff too.
This
is not a document that my hand refuses to touch: see!” And, though the fingers trembled a little, he signed his name bold and clear: Martin Maximilian Traill.

“I perceive,” said Holmes, “that you have no banking account.”