The Midwinter Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes: Three Adventures & The Grand Gift of Sherlock (29 page)

[119]
The American ambassador to Great Britain from 1889-1893 was Robert Todd Lincoln, who was twenty-one years old when his father Abraham was assassinated.

[120]
Much of what Mycroft is describing has similarities to what occurred in
The Adventure of the Second Stain
, a post-Hiatus mystery in which Holmes is tasked with finding a letter before it can provoke a war.

[121]
“England expects that every man will do his duty” was Admiral Horatio Nelson’s famous signal sent to the fleet before the Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of Cádiz, Spain. Nelson was killed by a sniper’s bullet at the end of that conflict.

[122]
Watson clearly changed the name of the town, for Burford does not have a railway station. The closest one is in Shipton under Wychwood.

[123]
There is no Black Horse Inn located in Burford, though there is a ‘Red Horse Inn’ in nearby Shipton.

[124]
From c.1608 to 1814, approximately every 10-20 years the winter cold would be sufficient to freeze over the Thames sufficiently to allow steady traffic upon it. The Frost Fair of 1683-4 was described by John Evelyn as a “bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water.” Once the old London Bridge was torn down in 1831 and replaced with a new bridge with wider arches, the tide flowed more freely and the river moved too fast to freeze.

[125]
A reference to the novels of Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), whose work
The Moonstone
(1868) is widely considered the first detective story in the English language.

[126]
Being able to serve mince pies (filled with mixtures of savory meats and sweet fruits, all enhanced with Eastern spices) of a variety of different shapes were a status symbol at during Victorian Christmas.

[127]
The origins of this tradition are unknown, though they appear to date back to the middle ages. Twelfth Night is 6 January.

[128]
This is clearly an example of Watson’s way with women, which Holmes ruefully admires in
The Adventure of the Second Stain
.

[129]
A similar choice was made by Colonel Lysander Stark (
The Adventure of The Engineer’s Thumb
).

[130]
As evidenced in The Adventures of
Charles Augustus Milverton
and
the Bruce-Partington Plans
.

[131]
In
A Study in Scarlet
, amongst other tales.

[132]
Strangely, Meyer never seems to be brought to task for his role in Señor Márquez’s abduction and rough treatment, for Holmes considers him to be a suspect in the disappearance of the submarine technical papers (
The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
).

[133]
The dreaded brain-fever of the Victorian era did not often pass quickly. Other patients famously stricken by ‘brain-fever’ included Sir Henry Baskerville (Chapter XIV,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
), Percy Phelps (
The Naval Treaty
), Mr. John Turner (
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
), Miss Alice Rucastle (
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
), the Welsh housemaid Rachel Howells (
The Musgrave Ritual
), Mrs. Nancy Barclay (
The Adventure of the Crooked Man
), and Miss Sarah Cushing (
The Cardboard Box
).

[134]
Foolscap
is a traditional paper size from the British Commonwealth that was cut to the size of 8.5 × 13.5 inches, as opposed to the now standard A4 paper size of 8 x 13 inches. Watson was well known to have written on foolscap (Chapter I,
The Valley of Fear
and
The Adventures of the Bruce-Partington Plans & Norwood Builder
).

[135]
Watson’s battle with enteric (typhoid) fever in Peshawur, and its subsequent thinning of his frame, was related in Chapter I of
A Study in Scarlet
.

[136]
Two stone weight was the equivalent of about twenty-eight pounds.

[137]
Xanadu was the legendary home of Kubla Khan in the first line of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem (1816).

[138]
Watson was clearly conversant in both French (Chapter V,
A Study in Scarlet
) and German (Chapters VI & XII of
The Sign of Four
), but this talent did not extend to Spanish.

[139]
One of Holmes’ ‘simple’ calculations, derived from the spacing of telegraph poles on the line from Reading to Dartmoor, demonstrated that the trains of that era travelled at a speed of about fifty-three and a half miles per hour (
Silver Blaze
).

[140]
Reminiscent of both the false bell-pull rigged up by the nefarious Dr. Roylott in
The Adventure of the Specked Band
and the bell-rope cut down by Captain Crocker in
The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
.

[141]
A Bath chair was a primitive version of a wheelchair, invented c1750 in Bath, England. Professor Coram used one in
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
.

[142]
Holmes employed a similar method in Chapter III of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, only with Devonshire.

[143]
Holmes’ valuation of imagination here, and in other cases such as
The Musgrave Ritual
or
Silver Blaze
, seems at odds with his admonition not to theorize in the absence of the facts. Perhaps the mark of a true genius is to be able to hold such contradictory beliefs simultaneously!

[144]
Holmes also took notes on his shirt-cuff in
The Naval Treaty
.

[145]
This is an echo of the words that Holmes uses in Chapter XII of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
.

[146]
Holmes was certainly capable of humor, as evidenced here and in
The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
.

[147]
Whose handkerchief was this? Watson’s description sounds suspiciously feminine. Could this be some previously undescribed memento from
the
woman, Irene Adler?

[148]
A telephone would not be installed at 221B until c.1899 (
The Adventure of the Retired Colourman
), despite its invention in 1876 and general spread in the mid-1880’s. In many ways, Holmes was a bit old-fashioned. 

[149]
Bought for fifty-five shillings at a broker in Tottenham Court Road who did not understand that it was worth at least 500 pounds, as related in
The Cardboard Box
.

[150]
Watson would have expected such a thing from hearing the saga of his friend Percy Phelps, who lost just such a treaty ‘written in the French language’ (
The Naval Treaty
).

[151]
This story has similarities to the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask, the secreted away identical twin brother of Louis XIV, which was told by Alexandre Dumas in 1850. Perhaps Dumas was inspired by hearing rumors of the plight of Edward VI?

[152]
Simon Renard (1513-1573) was an advisor of Emperor Charles V, and later his son Philip II, of Spain. As ambassador to England he developed extraordinary influence over Mary I. He vigorously promoted her marriage to Philip, and was said by some to be virtually directing English affairs. He first came to London when Edward VI was dying, and was replaced by De Feria in autumn of 1555, although he continued to advise from afar on English affairs until Mary’s death in 1558.

[153]
Watson was not far from the truth. It is possible that at the time he was unfamiliar with the work of the American author Mark Twain, who in 1881 published the novel
The Prince and the Pauper,
which shares many plot elements with this letter, albeit with a much happier ending. The introduction to that novel runs: “I will set down a tale as it was told to me by one who had it of his father, which latter had it of HIS father, this last having in like manner had it of HIS father — and so on, back and still back, three hundred years and more, the fathers transmitting it to the sons and so preserving it. It may be history, it may be only a legend, a tradition. It may have happened, it may not have happened: but it COULD have happened. It may be that the wise and the learned believed it in the old days; it may be that only the unlearned and the simple loved it and credited it.” No other historical source for the switching of Edward VI can be located.

[154]
An obvious paraphrase of the discourse to Horatio (with ‘stranger’ substituted for the correct ‘more’) from
Hamlet
, Act I, Scene V.

[155]
The Fieschi Letter was discovered in 1878 by a French archivist in a registrar belonging to the Bishop of Maguelonne, preserved in the
Archives Departmentales d’Herault
. Testing suggests that it is not a forgery. It was written by a priest at Avignon named Manuele Fieschi to Edward III in c.1337. There is some evidence that the following year, his son, Edward III, travelled to Koblenz in the Holy Roman Empire, where he saw his incognito father one last time.

[156]
William II, son of the Conqueror, called ‘Rufus’ or ‘the Red’ for his red face, ruled from 1087-1100. While hunting in the New Forest near Brockenhurst he was killed by an arrow through his lung. His younger brother, Henry, abandoned the body in the woods and rode straight for the capital at Winchester in order to secure the treasury and have himself elected king the following day. Needless to say, Henry I has been long suspected of masterminding the ‘wayward’ arrow.

[157]
Richard II was imprisoned at Pontefract Castle near the end of 1399. There, probably by the orders of Henry IV, he was murdered either directly or by starvation. However, contemporary rumors persisted that he escaped and survived, and a man calling himself Richard served as a figurehead for continued resistance to the rule of Henry until ‘Richard’s’ death in 1419. He was buried as a king at a Dominican friary in Stirling.

[158]
The 12 and 9 year-old sons of Edward IV, Edward and Richard vanished from the Tower of London in 1483. Popularly believed to have been murdered by Sir James Tyrrell, acting under the orders of their uncle Richard III, the more plausible modern theory lays the blame at the feet of the usurper Henry VII.  This forms the plot of Josephine Tey’s novel
The Daughter of Time
(1951).

[159]
Perkin Warbeck was a pretender to the throne of England during the reign of Henry VII. He claimed to be Richard, Duke of York and younger son of Edward IV, who escaped from the Tower. His claim was supported by Margaret of York, Edward IV’s sister. After starting a rebellion against Henry VII, he was captured and executed upon the Tyburn tree on 23 November 1499. This forms the plot of a novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, entitled
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
(1830).

[160]
On 8 September 1560, the estranged wife of Lord Robert Dudley, ‘favorite’ of the Queen, was found with a broken neck at the foot of a flight of stairs. Although the coroner’s jury ruled it an accidental death, rumors abounded that the Earl ordered her murder in order to clear his path to possibly marrying the Queen. Elizabeth eventually decided to never wed, and contemporary scholars doubt Dudley’s role in Amy’s death. However, this was the plot for Sir Walter Scott’s popular novel
Kenilworth
(1821).

[161]
Watson is of course referring not to the American Civil War, but to the English one from 1642-51, fought between the Roundheads of Oliver Cromwell and the Cavaliers of the King (initially Charles I, and then Charles II after his father’s execution).

[162]
Such as time has obviously not yet come, since I am unable to confirm the tale of the Renard Letter by any source other than Watson’s manuscript. However, it may still be under the protection of the Official Secrets Act, the first of which went into effect on 26 August 1889, presumably at the bequest of Mycroft Holmes. This also may explain why Watson’s recounting of this case was suppressed for so long.

[163]
Holmes says the same thing to Lestrade at the conclusion of
The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
.

[164]
Although never formally stated, Lestrade appears to be talking about Prince Edward, who also peripherally appears in
The Adventures of the Beryl Coronet
and
the Illustrious Client
.

[165]
The exact etymology of the term ‘Boxing Day’ is unclear. It may come from a custom in the late Roman/early Christian era, wherein metal boxes placed outside churches were used to collect special offerings tied to the Feast of Saint Stephen, which falls on 26 December. In Great Britain, it was tradition that since the servants of the wealthy would have to wait on their masters on Christmas Day, they were allowed the next day to visit their own families. The employers would give each servant a box to take home containing gifts and leftover food.