“Did you challenge him?” I asked.
For a second (continued Holmes), Sir Joseph’s face froze, and then he said, “I did not know, Mr Holmes, that you too had an interest in Roman history.”
“I think your greater interest is in the setting of interest rates to suit your own personal interest,” was my riposte.
“Mr Holmes,” he replied, “I am here on holiday. I have your written word that the accounts of the Netherland-Sumatra Company are sound, and the only person who might differ in that view is Baron Maupertuis, who faces a long time behind bars for tax evasion—longer if he talks about the affairs of the Netherlands-Sumatra Company. Thus, of the two people in the whole world who have the inclination or the insight to suspect something untoward, one has given his word that nothing is afoot and will not want to rob himself of his reputation for credibility by contradicting himself, and the other is so tainted as a witness that his word will not be believed by anyone.”
“But you have acted as a public official to distort the currency markets,” I objected. “Pre-knowledge of movement of interest rates through knowing the connection between weather patterns and interest movements is of huge value to currency speculators.”
“But I have no interest in doing such a thing. All my assets are held in a blind trust over which I have no control.”
“I have no doubt,” I countered unabashed, looking at his entourage, “that the blind trust is as blind as Admiral Nelson, whom you are so fond of quoting. And your sisters, cousins and aunts, who seem to accompany you everywhere, will have been aware of the distortion, and will doubtless have benefitted from it by investing in the Netherlands-Sumatra Company.”
“Mr Holmes,” replied Sir Joseph, “you are accusing me of a crime which has no victims, and you have no evidence of any misdemeanour in respect of a company whose accounts you yourself have certified and have, by doing so, earned great public acclaim. I have acted at all times for the greater good by ensuring the stability of the currency markets. I will now dedicate myself to my interest in Roman history. I would suggest you focus your attention on whatever has brought you to Lyon.”
You will not be surprised, Watson, to hear that the office of the Netherlands-Sumatra Company was closed to callers when I eventually arrived there, and I confess that it was the realisation that Sir Joseph had hoodwinked me rather than any great subsequent labour on the case that reduced me to the state you found me in when you came to my room at the Hotel Dulong.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked.
“The Netherlands-Sumatra Company case is at an end. I have stated my opinion on its accounts and have earned thereby the quite unmerited chorus of approval for it to which Sir Joseph referred. The company’s inside knowledge on the movement of interest rates will last as long as Sir Joseph is the First Lord of the Treasury, unless, of course, he passes on the secret to his successor.
“But that means Baron Maupertuis will face a lengthy sentence on what I have no doubt are trumped-up charges. Does that not trouble you?”
Holmes would not meet my eye.
“And you have still not disclosed who your lady friend is,” I continued. “Or the child,” I added, as the enormity of the consequences to me of Holmes having a female companion came back to me with redoubled force.
“The person you describe as my lady-friend, good Watson, is my sister. She has been settled in France for many years and she styles herself Augusta Holmès. It was a condition of my discharge that I have someone to look after me when released and she has been performing that role, which is why I am here.”
“And it is she who writes to you as Sherlock Holmès?”
“That is so. I spent my early childhood in France. It was she who conferred on me the pet-name ‘Chère Loque’, which means “dear wreck” in French, after I had contracted the smallpox as a youth—although her nursing helped me make a complete recovery from the disease. I chose to adopt this pet-name as my official given name when I moved to England, although I anglicised the spelling.”
“So, what is your real given name?” I asked, scarce believing that my friend’s first name numbered among the misapprehensions under which I had been living.
But Holmes was not to be deflected from talking about his sister. “She has appended a grave accent to our family name,” he continued as though not having heard my interruption, “and when she writes to me, she adds it to my name as a mark of her affection.”
“And she is the mother of that child?”
“She is the mother of no fewer than three children. And,” added Holmes, a look of pride ghosting across his visage, “just as I am the world’s only consulting detective, she is its only female composer, or composatrice. She writes her music under the pseudonym Hermann Zenta to avoid public scrutiny of her activities.”
“She composes music?” I asked in astonishment. “Surely, as a woman, she is debarred from studying, and that would make it very hard for her to gain the skills to write music.”
“You are right to assume that women are not allowed to study as regular students at the French Conservatoire, but she takes private lessons from both César Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns.”
“But even now you have not explained why you have been so occupied for the last weeks and months that you have had a breakdown?”
“Under French law as under English, my sister is a chattel of her husband. He abandoned her and their children, of whom Helyonne, whom you have just seen, is the youngest. Yet, as her husband, he owns the intellectual property of her works, and this means he has the right to receive the royalties on it, which are a substantial sum, as her music grows in popularity. That would leave her penniless. To avoid this, as well as conducting the banking inquiry, I have been feverishly transcribing all her manuscripts into my own hand with a view to claiming in court that her works are in fact from my pen. I carried on this activity out of your sight as I did not wish to explain a private matter, but you have forced my hand.”
“What will happen now?”
“Assuming my sleight of hand convinces the French court, I will be able to claim the royalties on her behalf and pass them to her as she tries to make her life as an independent woman.”
“Is their transcription such a big task?”
“My sister is to date the creator of three operas, eleven cantatas, many songs, orchestral works, and numerous piano pieces. And she was the author of the words to her vocal pieces as well as the score. So, this was a huge undertaking, especially since I had to make sketches for the works as well as final scores, in order to make my claim to have written them myself plausible in court. I have been copying her life’s creative output while dedicating myself to all the other investigations I have been conducting.”
My head was spinning at this latest revelation, and I asked, “So what is to happen next?”
“The task of transcription is now complete, and the court case to establish my authorship of her works will be heard next week.”
“But her husband is a monster. He abandons his wife with three children and still seeks to claim her earnings. Who is he? Is there no law that can touch him?”
Again, my friend paused.
“Her husband is Baron Maupertuis. And he is about to get his just deserts as a gaol sentence will prevent him claiming on his sister’s royalties.
“But,” I retorted, “the crime for which he is going to gaol is not that of abandoning his wife and family. It is for tax evasion. You may feel he deserves to go to prison for abandoning your sister, but his sentence will be for a different offence. And he will doubtless seek to overturn your claim to have written her works after he is released and, if he succeeds in his action, he will be able to resume his claim on his wife’s earnings.”
Holmes had no ready answer to my charge of moral hazard and lapsed into silence at this point. But, in fact
, Baron Maupertuis got only a light sentence for his tax crimes. Holmes, it turned out, was not the only person to have family in France, and Maupertuis’s judge, Serge Siffre-Poitier, Holmes was able to establish, was a second cousin of Sir Joseph Porter.
Nevertheless, arrest and imprisonment dealt a huge shock to the Baron Maupertuis’s health, and he went to a little lamented end shortly after his release. This meant that Madame Holmès was able to publish her works under her own name, and Holmes and I went to Paris to see La Montaigne Noire when it received its belated première in 1895. As the first opera by a woman to be staged at the Paris Opera, the piece caused a huge stir in the French press, although the presence of the grave accent in the composer’s name prevented the British press from linking the work to my friend, so its performance received little coverage in this country.
Finally, my reader may be wondering about the curious end to the concert at the Paris conservatoire, when Camille Saint-Saëns stormed off the stage at the première of Franck’s piano quintet.
As might be imagined, after the events described, I took an increased interest in French music—indeed Holmes and I went to the première of the French master’s mighty Organ Symphony at St James’s Hall in which, as well as conducting his own work, the composer was soloist in a performance of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto under the baton of Sir Arthur Sullivan. After the death of Saint-Saëns in 1921, I read the autobiography of Camille Saint-Saëns, which contained the following passage about Augusta Holmès written in an extravagant style I would not dream of copying.
“This beautiful sorceress was not satisfied merely with cultivating art and preaching art; au contraire, she caused it to flourish all about her. Just as Venus fecundated the world when she knotted her tresses, so Augusta Holmès shook over us her reddish locks, and when she was prodigal with the lightning of her eyes and the brilliance of her voice, we creators of art ran to our pens, our brushes, our chisels; and new works of art were born.”
The obituary of Saint-Saëns in the Times was even more forthcoming. It claimed that both Franck and Saint-Saëns were infatuated by the sister of Sherlock Holmes and that the recently deceased composer had proposed to Mademoiselle Holmès when she was his student (and was turned down by her). It suggested that the reason why Saint-Saëns had stormed out of the concert I had attended at the Paris Conservatoire was that he felt that Franck’s work was a musical declaration of love for the auburn page-turner of the manuscript score.
Certainly, the signal of discord between Franck and Saint-Saëns was no less clear than that conveyed by the first sea-lord to the Netherlands-Sumatra Company on the direction of interest rates, and a rather tawdry argument over a woman’s affections may well have been the explanation for it.
I would conclude by referring once again to my friend’s Book of Life article which he penned at the start of our collaboration. Sir Joseph Porter cited it in his commission about the weather and referred to it again when discussing interest rate setting with my friend. After the foregoing, in which macro-economic policy and human relationships had displayed such a disjunction between appearance and reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that Holmes himself never again displayed such certainty.
I should perhaps add that the French courts had no such uncertainty about my friend, Colonel Hayter, who was summarily found guilty of affray the day after the events described above. He was perhaps fortunate that his judge, by coincidence the same Serge Siffre-Poitier who was later to pass sentence on Baron Maupertuis, fixed the fine just after the sudden onset of a hot spell of weather in London had caused a rise in British interest rates.
The resultant surge in the value of the pound meant that the hit to his pocket was considerably less than would otherwise have been the case.
Editorial note by Dr Watson’s literary executor, Howard Durham
I discovered Dr Watson’s literary reliquiae at the Public Record Office in Kew in the summer of 2015 and have been editing them for publication since then.
The identification of a hitherto unknown sister of the great Sherlock Holmes required additional authentication as Augusta Holmès is hardly a household name, but in fact biographical details about her were easily found.
She was born in 1847 and so was, like Mycroft Holmes, seven years older than the great Baker Street detective. The female figure on the cover of this work is she, and there was no shortage of portraits to choose from when preparing this work for publication. Her birth records do not indicate whether she was Mycroft’s twin or whether either Mycroft Holmes or Augusta Holmès or both were in fact half-siblings of Sherlock Holmes, or Chère Loque Holmès, as Augusta Holmès seems to have preferred to call him.
I was unable to find any records of a marriage between her and Count Maupertuis, and it may be that the union to which Sherlock Holmes refers was one transacted in secret outside France. French Conservatory records, by contrast, confirm that she studied privately with both Franck and Saint-Saëns, and the latter freely admitted, as the above extract from his autobiography shows, that she was as a muse to him. She was an active composer, and one of the very few French female composers of her generation. Music-loving readers might like to listen to her works, published under the name Hermann Zenta, which are now freely available on modern recordings under her own name. Here is a link to one of her orchestral pieces, La Nuit et l’Amour. Readers may also like to listen to Franck’s piano quintet which had such an effect on Camille Saint-Saëns. César Franck, Piano Quintet in F minor.
Further research also revealed that she did not just serve as a muse to Franck and Saint-Saëns. Even her estranged husband was inspired by her to write poetry under the name Catulle Mendès, and under the link below, readers may like to see a picture by the great August Renoir of Madame Holmès’s three children—who are also, of course, the three known nieces of Sherlock Holmes. The original painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Madame Holmès’ Daughters, 1888
Having established that Augusta Holmès was indeed a historical figure as well as the historicity of the events Dr Watson described at the première of Franck’s piano quintet, I felt it incumbent upon me to investigate Dr Watson’s claim that the British government changed interest rates based on a comparison between the previous day’s weather forecast and the actual weather which had been the subject of the forecast rather than in a belief that they had any economic impact.
I confess I considered this suggestion utterly preposterous and assumed that the implausibility of this thesis was the reason for the long suppression of The Sorceress and the Sea-Lord.
As the narrative above demonstrates, proving that the British Government sets interest rates dependent on weather patterns is hard to do, but I would point out to the reader the following facts:
WH Smith of the founding family of the stationery chain was first lord of the Treasury from January 1887 to October 1891—the time frame referred to in the foregoing. Gilbert and Sullivan, in their light opera HMS Pinafore, pilloried him, but referred to him as Sir Joseph Porter to avoid legal complications, although Smith acquired the sobriquet “Pinafore” Smith thereafter. Dr Watson’s use of the name Sir Joseph Porter to represent WH Smith was doubtless for the same reasons of legal prudence.
In the four years and ten months that WH Smith was First Lord of the Treasury, interest rates changed thirty-four times, or more often than every other month.
In the hundred-and-six years following his relinquishment of the post they changed on average three times a year.
Since 1997, interest rate setting has been a decision vested in the Bank of England rather than the British government, and over the ten years to the end of 2019, they have changed a mere three times in total.
Over the twenty years since 1999, weather forecasting techniques have so improved that forecasts for four days are now as accurate as weather forecasts for a day ahead were then. This is due to the greate
r use of satellites and a wider spread of observation posts, enabling developments in the weather to be tracked across a wider area.
It is thus demonstrable that the frequency of changes in interest rates has dropped to the lowest levels ever seen.
Sir Joseph Porter, as I shall continue to call the sea-lord and First Lord of the Treasury, agreed with Sherlock Holmes that a change in interest rates reflected a failure in the government’s stewardship of the economy.
It is for the reader to decide whether this greater stability in interest rates is due to improved economic management or to improvements in the ability of meteorologists to forecast the weather.
De Profundis
The horror does not leave me. I have been back in England for many months, yet the matter I am about to relate clings to me still.
I set out the course of events of which I would tell as a story of suspense as this is how I am used to ordering a narrative. Some will feel that such an approach is inappropriate for these gravest matters that I describe. I can accept this criticism but the way I relate events is an accurate reflection of how I experienced what happened. Many of the events of this narrative, no matter when this account is read, will in any case be all too well known to my readers.
Why then, might be asked, in that case relate this matter at all?
I have two answers to this.
The first is that this is a matter of duty to later generations.
Those who witnessed what I was amongst the very first to see must record their memories so that what we saw can never be denied or diminished.
The second is a selfish reason.
I hope that by setting the matter on paper, I can put some distance between it and me so that, while I cannot forget it, it stops dominating my every waking moment as well as my fitful sleep.
The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 6 Page 12