My feelings, as my reader may imagine, remained a mixture of anger at Holmes for having me make a trip to Venice which he knew would be fruitless, wonder at myself for not drawing any inferences about the King’s lack of interest in my investigation, and concern that harm might have come to young Tadzio.
I put the latter point to Holmes.
“From your description of events, nothing has happened. The King’s situation was a little like that of a pyromaniac. It is not an offence to have the inclination to light fires—an offence is only committed if the pyromaniac acts on his inclination. And, as I said at the hotel, nothing now can happen. I would not exclude the possibility of previous offences in the past, but I have no evidence that any such accusation has ever been levelled against him.”
Holmes and I were faced with twenty-four hours in close confinement on three trains and a ship. Over this time my anger at Holmes for sending me on what he knew to be a fool’s errand rose and fell.
Holmes defended himself robustly.
“There was something in the King’s story that made no sense. I had to satisfy myself that it was not so untoward that it would be irresponsible if I identified the person who, he said, was the object of his desiring. How better to keep the various options open than to have you keep an eye on him while I carried out my investigation?”
I suspect that my reader will now be most interested in the identification of the lady who had attended the King’s ball, gave the King such ambiguous clues about her identity, and then so abruptly disappeared, and I put this to Holmes as we finally drew into Victoria Station.
“If you would care to come to Baker Street tomorrow, I can resolve that for you over lunch.” He replied. “I feel I owe you as much.”
I arrived at 221 b on the next day expecting to be faced with Mrs Hudson’s solid fare. Instead a hansom stood before the door into which we climbed.
As we went east along the Marylebone Road, Holmes, rather to my surprise, as he had never shown an interest in local history, started to provide a commentary on the route. “So, we here leave Marylebone Road and head further east onto the Euston Road. This whole road system, along with Pentonville Road, was originally known as the New Road. But it was realised that it was impractical to have so long a road with a single name in a rapidly growing city, and the different sections were given separate names.”
“And now south down Tottenham Court Road,” he added a few minutes later, before saying, “we are now at the southern end of Charing Cross Road and arriving at the northeast corner of Trafalgar Square. Here we are right on the edge of the old city of London. St Martin in the Fields church which you see on your left was so called because it stood in fields outside the city walls.”
We turned left into the Strand.
“And now we are within the boundaries of the old city of London,” said Holmes. “And the Strand marks the old shoreline of the city. Within the city’s ancient walls there are no thoroughfares referred to as a road—only as streets, lanes, alleys, yards, and squares—because the word ‘road’ was not in common usage in medieval times when the old city of London was first built.”
As ever with Holmes, I wondered why I had not realised that the true import of the clues which we had been given.
“And now we turn right from the Strand and into Savoy Place,” continued Holmes. “You will note, Watson, that uniquely among British streets, in Savoy Place the traffic drives on the right.”
We went into the restaurant of the Savoy where Holmes had booked a table. We had barely sat down, when Auguste Escoffier came out of the kitchen.
“I received your note this morning, Mr Holmes.”
“Monsieur Escoffier, Watson,” said my friend turning to me, “is known as king of chefs and the chef of kings. So, he is a king who serves kings as the heads of every royal house in Europe are enthusiastic consumers of his cuisine. He has published the recipes of five sauces that are the staple of every noble kitchen.” Holmes turned to the chef who beamed at these words of praise. “I mentioned it was to your third child, your daughter Germaine, I wanted to speak. You may, by all means, stay here while we talk to her.”
As Monsieur Escoffier went to get his daughter, Holmes explained, “Monsieur Escoffier has been lived at this hotel for many years and I was able to find out his family’s records through the last census—not unlike how you approached the case in Venice, good Watson.”
A few minutes later, Mademoiselle Escoffier appeared. My reader will be used to the female characters in my stories being the fairest members of the fairer sex but this one—with tumbling golden locks, piercing blue eyes, and the slenderest frame—outshone them all, yet for all that she looked barely seventeen.
“Tell me about your appearance at the ball here last week,” said Holmes.
“There is not much to tell,” said Mademoiselle Escoffier in a soft clear voice with perfect but charmingly accented English. “I was determined to go to that ball even though I realised that the guests were beyond my station. Many of the guests at the ball were spending the night here and several had brought more than one ball gown and the other accoutrements for a ball. I am friendly with one of the people in housekeeping and so was able to gain access to the rooms of some of the guests.”
She turned to look at her father whose face was a mixture of pride in the resourcefulness of his daughter and concern about what further revelations might follow.
“The doormen had been provided by the hotel so I knew they would raise no objection when I entered the ballroom, and I told them to blame each other if my admission caused any problems. I was unsurprised that the King singled me out for his attention, but I found his conversation most disagreeable. He seemed far more interested in my being his maîtresse when I had thought he was looking for a wife.”
She tossed her head back in derision.
“Nevertheless, I danced with him, as I love to dance. But his attempts at conversation became more and more” she broke off to search for a word, “degueulasse…,” she finally added.
“She means distasteful,” interrupted the young lady’s father.
“Until at just before midnight he said he would like to see me dress as a boy and made another suggestion that nothing …rien, rien, rien…. will induce me to repeat.” She paused, apparently overcome by her revulsion at whatever the King had proposed.
It was a full minute before she spoke again.
“I ran in disgust from the ballroom, and, to make sure that I could not be followed, shot down a laundry chute which is concealed in a wall in the corridor. When I got to the bottom, I found I had lost a shoe, but I returned everything else to where it came from.”
“We were unable to account for why the shoe had no maker’s name.”
“My entire outfit belonged to Princess Beatrice of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a grand-daughter of the last queen,” said Mademoiselle Escoffier, apparently somewhat taken aback by our ignorance of the ways of royalty. “The royal family, of course, has its shoes made for it by hand by its own shoemaker who, as he works for the King, does not put a name into the shoes. I actually took two pairs of shoes from the princess’s bedroom as I was not sure which suited my dress better, and finally put on the pair which I decided I liked best in the kitchen.”
Mademoiselle Escoffier answered this last question with another coquettish toss of the head, and Holmes turned to me. “As my biographer, are there any other questions you would wish to ask Mademoiselle Escoffier?”
“No indeed,” I said, quite breathless both at the young lady’s beauty and her poise, “I feel that Mademoiselle Escoffier has an answer for everything.”
“In that case,” said Holmes, “perhaps, Monsieur Escoffier, you might like to see if you have any more venison left. Dr Watson has been unstinting in his praise for what you served him last time.”
“You see Watson,”
said Holmes, as we finished our meal, “it was obvious to me from the first that whoever had caught the King’s eye must have had an intimate knowledge of the hotel. Otherwise how could they get pass the doormen to get in, and how else could a lady in a ball-dress disappear completely when pursued hot-foot by two footmen?”
“That is clear to me,” I said, “but why did you need to me to accompany the King to Venice when you knew the object of his desires was not there?”
“I had my suspicions about the King’s story, but I could not deprive the young lady for whom he had expressed such ardent interest the opportunity of becoming a royal bride without substantiating those suspicions. It therefore suited me to have the King well away from London, and your suggestion of Venice, on which I must commend you for it met all the criteria set by the King’s recollection of his conversation with Mademoiselle Escoffier, enabled me to do that.”
“And what is to happen now?”
“The King of Bohemia will be succeeded by his daughter. The Roman Catholic Church’s canon law court in Bohemia took a less dim view of Princess Clotilde’s complaint than I do and rejected it as grounds for an annulment. She instigated a divorce in the civil courts, and so the King retained his dowry, and their daughter remained legitimate in the eyes of the church. Although the King and his wife had lived separate lives for many years, there is no legal impediment to a female heir.”
There was a silence.
“It seems to me, Holmes,” I said at last, “that in this case you have acted for the well-being of the public and have largely ignored your client’s original petition.”
“Although the King of Scandinavia was very cautious in what he said, I took the view that I would have to learn more about the King of Bohemia before I acted on the latter’s behalf. Given the predilections that I found he had, I am pleased that I did so, and I am pleased that I took steps to ensure that our association with the whole matter is unlikely to come to light.”
He paused and relit his pipe. Suddenly he looked care-worn in a way I had never seen in all our long friendship.
“Any such association is ruinous,” he said at last. “You may note that I ended my connection with the Baker Street Irregulars almost as soon as you started publishing accounts of our adventures. I knew you would publish more stories about me, and I could not take the risk that anyone would make unfounded suggestions. That is also why I have done my best to destroy any trace that either of us have been in the company of the King. This story too must wait for publication until long after we have both departed this vale of tears.”
An Encirclement Thwarted
It has long been a matter of speculation among my readers why His Last Bow should contain so many departures from the style used in the rest of the works which my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, allowed to be published in his lifetime.
It bears a subtitle, The War Service of Sherlock Holmes, it is told in the third person when it could, with only very minor modification, have been told in the first person with me adopting my customary role as narrator, and Holmes taunts the malefactor he apprehends.
Although none of these features on their own make the story unique, taken together they do indeed mark this narrative out.
In fact, Holmes’s war service before the Great War had a much wider remit than was disclosed in His Last Bow, and the following reveals for the first time one of the many other matters in which he was involved. The anomalies of style and content in His Last Bow were included, as my reader may by now have guessed, at the suggestion of the British government. As Mr Asquith, who was Prime Minister at the time, and who plays a major role in the rest of this narrative, put it, “If speculation is rife about the narrative voice, the use of a subtitle, and Mr Holmes’s behaviour towards the criminal in your story, Dr Watson, there might be less speculation as to what else he might have been doing in the service of his country at its time of peril.”
The story that follows also explains why nothing more is heard of Inspector Gregson after the case of The Red Circle and draws heavily on one of Holmes’s monographs. My reader will be aware of my friend’s contribution to the specialist literature on tobacco ash, tattoos, beekeeping, medieval music, footprints, and codes to which he refers without expanding. Some or all of these may be included in further accounts of his adventures, but in this work it is my friend’s monograph on codes which emerges as the magnum opus of the genre that it is.
It was eight o’clock in the evening of that day of infamy—Sunday the 28th of June 1914—when there was a tap on our door. I was at that time in practice although my surgery was closed at such an hour. I answered the door myself and, standing on the doorstep, was Sherlock Holmes. He still cut the tall lean figure of his heyday but had a goatee beard for which he made a slightly shame-faced apology.
“I am in the service of the country, dear Watson, and even my smooth chin must be sacrificed in its cause.”
I would characterise the friendship between Holmes and me in the years leading up to the first German war as sporadic though warm. He occasionally came to our house in Queen Square where I had my practice when he needed accommodation in London, but I otherwise saw him seldom.
“I am delighted to see you, my dear fellow,” I said, throwing wide the door.
“And I you, Watson. Could you put me up for one night?”
“Of course, my friend,” said I, “but what brings you to London?”
“I received at my bee-keeper’s cottage this afternoon a telegram from the prime minister. He suggested we meet here as he would like to conduct a meeting away from the fevered atmosphere of Westminster.”
“Are you able to tell me what it is he wished to discuss?”
“I would be reluctant to speculate on matters of state other than to say it can only be something very grave that would cause him to seek my counsel at such short notice. He will be here at nine, and I would welcome the presence of my Boswell at the meeting.”
At nine o’clock sharp, there was another knock on the door, and I found myself greeting on the door-step, not only the plump and slightly puffy-faced Mr Asquith, but also a tawny-bearded man, whom the Prime Minister presented to us as Mr Gregson, but whom Holmes and I knew by his old police rank as Inspector Gregson, and whom we had last seen in the story The Red Circle.
Asquith spoke first.
“Gentleman, what I am about to say will not yet be known to you, but it will be on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow. Today has seen the assassination of the Austrian crown-prince, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and of his wife, Sophie, as they were driving in an open-topped car in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.”
“This is a very grave matter, Prime Minister,” said my friend, “but how can I help you in this? This is surely the responsibility of the Bosnian authorities.”
“The assassins, although not perhaps all those behind the assassins, were arrested at the scene of the crime. But the assassination has much wider ramifications. Europe is a powder keg. One spark could cause an explosion, and this could be it. At the same time, the military strengths of the Entente powers—the Russians, the French and us on the one hand—and of the Central powers—Germany, Austria, and Turkey on the other—are evenly matched. Never has a small advantage to one side been of greater leverage.”
“You make yourself plain, Prime Minister, but you surely have not convened this meeting just to tell me this.”
“Indeed so, Mr Holmes. Something else has arisen at the same time the investigation of which is more obviously suited to your talents. I cannot believe this other matter is unrelated to today’s assassination, but I will leave it to Mr Gregson to elaborate.”
“You will recall, Mr Holmes,” began Gregson, “our work together in the 1880s and 1890s. As Inspector Gregson, I was present at many of your greatest triumphs—A Study in Scarlet, The Greek Interpreter, and—the last time we saw each other—T
he Red Circle. In that last case, you decoded a message between the main players in the investigation which had a key part in unravelling the matter. I was so impressed by your work, that I was inspired to read your monograph on ciphers, A Qualitative Study of Replacement Code Creation and Decryption with Observations on Best Practices for Code Security and Code Breaking, to which you refer in The Dancing Men. I thought your slim volume was of extraordinary interest, not only because you elucidated one-hundred and sixty ciphers which turn letters into a code, but also because of its additional observations.”
I could see that Holmes was pleased by this encomium and Gregson continued.
“Shortly after reading your work, I was recruited by the British Secret Service, and I am now plain Mr Gregson, although for some of my work I go under a variety of names. I have learnt languages—German, French, and Russian among others—and have acquired skills in advanced mathematics and in semiotics to enhance my code-breaking capabilities. But I have a most urgent coding matter I am unable to resolve, and it is on this I would wish to talk to you now.”
“Pray continue.”
“The assassination of which the prime minster has spoken occurred at a quarter past ten this morning Bosnian time. The news was telegraphed around the world, and we know that it was received in Berlin within the hour. An hour after that, our source in the Berlin war ministry gave his British handler a piece of paper, with the information that the text on it was a coded message that was being passed to all German military missions on the continent of Europe.”
“And what was the coded message?”
“It was terse in the extreme—I have it here.”
Gregson passed Holmes a piece of paper on which was written the following, “952, 395, 239, 523”.
Holmes sat poised over the slip of paper with these four numbers on. It was quite five minutes before he put it down on the table and looked up. He opened his mouth to speak, but paused to pick it up again, and then he studied it for another five minutes. When he eventually spoke, it was in a voice shorn of its normal incisiveness.
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