The Isle of Devils
Page 41
Generals Miramon and Mejía never abandoned their loyalty to Maximilian. They died seconds after him, executed by the same firing squad, the last words on their tongues, “Long live the Emperor!” Colonel Lopez, on the other hand, proved less trustworthy. In May 1867, Lopez was bribed by the Republican Army to open a gate into Santiago de Querétaro, albeit after first obtaining their agreement that Maximilian would be allowed to escape. Of course, the Republicans failed to hold their side of this devil’s bargain after the city fell. Maximilian’s attempt to break through the Republican lines via a cavalry charge led by Felix Salm-Salm failed, and Maximilian was captured.
Many of the gemstones in Maximilian’s coffer resemble those found in the Rajah’s iron box carried by the pretend merchant Achmet (Chapter XII, The Sign of the Four). Of course Maximilian’s treasure would never contain rubies and sapphires, since they are not found in South America. The emerald and diamond necklace and the twenty-one carat Maximilian Emerald Ring eventually made their way into the possession of the American heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887 – 1993) by unclear means. She was a great collector and art connoisseur and it seems likely that she obtained them in Paris, where she had the ring’s emerald reset by Cartier into a new ring flanked by baguette diamonds. She eventually donated both items, plus many others, to the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of Natural History.
The story of the Queen Isabella Emerald is much as Watson described it herein. Hernán Cortés was presented the nine-hundred sixty-four carat Stone of Judgment by King Montezuma in 1520, perhaps mistaking he conquistador for the return of Quetzalcoatl. The stone remained in Mexico for several hundred years in the possession of Cortés’ descendants until it was dispatched back to Spain. The ship’s manifest noted that it contained a hundred chests of emeralds, including the mystical Isabella Emerald, gold idols, gold and jade death masks of Aztec emperors, and crystal skulls. The ship was then lost in an accident, but contrary to Maximilian’s prediction, the Queen Isabella Emerald and an almost unbelievable amount of accompanying treasure were discovered in 1993 twelve miles off the coast of Florida. The emerald is still not on public display.
Strangely enough, the Empress Emerald entrusted to Commandant Harrier by Maximilian has been lost to the annals of history (see notes to Chapter XXV).
CHAPTER XXV: THE CONSTABLE’S DILEMMA
At his final moments, Maximilian spoke only in Spanish and gave his executioners a portion of gold not to shoot him in the head, so that his mother could see his face. His last words were, "I forgive everyone, and I ask everyone to forgive me. May my blood which is about to be shed be for the good of the country. Viva Mexico, viva la independencia!" Despite having taken the money, the Juarista firing squad shot him in the face. After Maximilian’s execution, in a small satchel around his neck, they discovered the almost near colorless forty-two carat “”Emperor Maximilian Diamond.” This diamond was returned to his widow, and was eventually sold to pay her medical expenses. It passed through many other hands, and its current location is unknown.
Oddly enough, the ‘Execution of Emperor Maximilian’ is now one of the most famous paintings of Édouard Manet, who was mentioned in Chapter XVIII by Dario Aicardi. It was painted in 1868 and is in the possession of the Kunsthalle Mannheim.
The Empress Carlota was not the only one to suffer from the terrible, yet enigmatic “brain fever,” which swept through Victorian times. 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).
If any reader doubts that a group of men would be motivated enough to track a man across the globe for over a dozen years in order to extract revenge, it should be noted that Watson’s very next adventure following the Bermuda Manuscript had a similar revenge motive, albeit one carried out by a solitary man, Mr. Jefferson Hope, who “determined that [he] should be judge, jury, and executioner” and tracked Drebber and Stangerson from 1860 to 1880 through St. Petersburg, Paris, and Copenhagen, eventually catching them in London (Chapter V, A Study in Scarlet). Another example would be the hunt of Mr. Aloysius Garcia and Signora Victor Durando for Don Murillo, the Tiger of San Pedro. They chased him from Paris to Rome to Madrid, and Barcelona, before finally locating him near Esher, Surrey, England (The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge). The revenge of the surviving Legionnaires (or their relatives) also contains faint echoes of the Japanese tale Chushingura, or the Forty-Seven Ronin, the earliest known account in the West was published in 1822.
Watson’s assertion that Dumas’ jade pipe stem must have hailed from Central America is not entirely true, as jade is also found in China, but we will let this oversight slide.
Holmes once said something similar about a Spanish beauty, Beryl Garcia Stapleton: “A woman of Spanish blood does not condone such an injury so lightly” (Chapter XV, The Hound of the Baskervilles).
Clearly, Watson, despite his self-proclaimed many “vices” (Chapter I, A Study in Scarlet), was a deeply respectable man if he was able to inspire both Constable Dunkley, as well as Sherlock Holmes (The Adventure of the Abbey Grange) to consider him a representative of an entire British jury! But Watson was not the only one to take the law into his own hands. Holmes would later do so at the conclusion of many cases (including The Boscombe Valley Mystery and The Adventures of the Blue Carbuncle, Abbey Grange, Three Gables, Charles Augustus Milverton, & Devil’s Foot).
Dunkley’s encouragement of Watson to start writing was taken to heart. He would go on to author fifty-six of the most beloved tales ever penned.
The banks mentioned by Mr. Warburton are encountered again in the Canon, including Holder & Stevenson of Threadneedle Street (The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet), the Bank of France (The Red-Headed League), and the Credit Lyonnais (The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax & The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone), and the Deutsche Bank (Chapter II, The Valley of Fear).
Watson’s smashing of the Calvados bottle is strangely similar to Holmes’ smashing of the bust of Napoleon, but it must be a coincidence (The Six Napoleons).
Counting the Empress Emerald from this tale, Watson had a remarkable ability to be present for the recovery of some of the greatest jewels in history, such as the six Agra Pearls (The Sign of the Four), the Countess of Morcar’s Blue Carbuncle (from the eponymous Adventure), the Beryl Coronet (from the eponymous Adventure), the Black Pearl of the Borgias (The Adventure of the Six Napoleons), and the great 77-caret yellow Mazarin Crown Diamond (The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone). Unfortunately, he had not yet returned to England by 1879 and thus did miss out on both Holmes’ discovery of the Crown of St. Edward from Reginald Musgrave’s pond (The Musgrave Ritual), and Holmes’s handling of the case of the Farintosh Opal Tiara (The Speckled Band).
Where did Watson witness the aurora borealis, commonly known as the Northern Lights? Although we tend to think of them as being associated with the Scandinavian countries, the northernmost tip of Scotland has a geomagnetic latitude similar to that of Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki, and aurora sightings are not uncommon there. Perhaps Watson visited during one of his breaks from medical school?
Watson’s suspicion that there was a printing press in St. George’s was correct. It can still be visited in Featherbed Alley, though one wonders if it was originally located on Printer’s Alley?
Like so many other phrases in the English language, ‘The world is your oyster’ was coined by Shakespeare in Act II, Scene II of The Merry Wives of Windsor. And of course, Lucy’s quote ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea’ is from Act II, Scene II of Romeo and Juliet.
EPILOGUE: THE ORONTES
It is tempting to speculate that Holmes perhaps appr
opriated the ‘L.E.’ jack-knife from Watson and used it to transfix his unanswered correspondence into the very center of the wooden mantelpiece at 221B Baker Street (The Musgrave Ritual).
Elizabeth Foster would sell the Globe Hotel in 1882. Perhaps she received a sufficient portion of the proceeds from the sale of the Empress Emerald to enable her to retire?
Watson would begin read Henry Murger’s La Vie de Boheme shortly after moving into 221B Baker Street (Chapter V, A Study in Scarlet). The book, of course, would achieve a larger life when it became the basis for Giacomo Puccini’s masterpiece La Boheme (1896).
Like the jack-knife, one wonders whether Holmes appropriated this single Persian slipper from Watson as a place to store his pipe tobacco (The Musgrave Ritual, and The Adventures of the Naval Treaty, the Empty House, & the Illustrious Client)?
When Watson first met Holmes in the laboratory of St. Bart’s, he admitted to Holmes that he kept a “bull pup” (Chapter I, A Study in Scarlet). This utterance was made more mysterious by the complete absence in the rest of the Canon of any reference to a dog ever living at 221B Baker Street. Perhaps Watson was anticipating receiving Gladstone from his brother, but something ultimately prevented this reunion?
As mentioned before in the notes to Chapter VI, Watson would always get nervous around women that he was attracted to and reverse words in his sentences.
Here we have some confirmation of the theory of Dorothy L. Sayers, who claimed that the fact that Watson’s wife once called him ‘James’ was an affectionate spin on his middle name Hamish, which means James in Scottish Gaelic (The Man with The Twisted Lip). This was a common Victorian practice, as seen in the case of Mrs. Effie Munro, who calls her husband Grant by his nickname ‘Jack’ (The Yellow Face) and Miss Presbury who calls Mr. Trevor Bennett by the same pet-name ‘Jack’ (The Adventure of the Creeping Man).
‘Journeys end in lovers meeting’ is of course from Act II, Scene III of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The French have many ways of saying goodbye, each with a subtle shade of difference. Adieu is used for true goodbyes in the sense of you are either unsure whether or not you will see the person again, or, if you do see him again, it will be a very long time, while à bientôt means ‘see you soon.’
Tradition holds that Watson met Holmes at St. Bart’s Hospital on the first of January, 1881.
Unfortunately, Watson would not see his brother again. Although when they parted Henry was left with good prospects of advancement in the British Army, he threw away his chances by sheer carelessness. His was drummed out of the 99th Regiment, and washed up in America to live for some time in poverty, with occasional short intervals of prosperity. Eventually, however, he took to drink and died around early 1887 (Chapter I, The Sign of the Four).
According to an apocryphal play, Watson’s acquaintance onboard the Orontes, Sir Montague Brown, the aristocratic English globetrotter would apparently meet up with Watson again on the streets of San Francisco (see notes below).
In the Canon, Watson would list his title in two different ways: “Late of the Army Medical Department” (Chapter I, A Study in Scarlet) or “Late Indian Army” (The Problem of Thor Bridge). Since Watson was never actually in the Indian Army, but rather part of the British Army stationed in India, the latter is clearly either a mis-remembrance on his part, or more likely a typographical error by his first literary agent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or by the printer of the Case-Book, John Murray.
Because Watson apparently mailed the account of the Bermuda Manuscript to his brother shortly after landing on a Portsmouth jetty, it is unclear whether he ever reunited with Ms. Lucy Harrier. However, in 2001, a long-suppressed play was unveiled that might throw some light upon the subject. That play was entitled Angels of Darkness and was apparently written by Watson’s first literary agent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Although the exact genesis of the play is unclear, it seems likely that Conan Doyle wrote it during a period of great personal turmoil, for it is filled with historical inaccuracies about his friend John H. Watson, M.D. And yet portions of that manuscript feel as if they contain hints of the truth. In the play, Watson travels to San Francisco around 1884 and there woos a young woman, returning with her to England in order to wed. In the play, her name is given as Lucy Ferrier. That is patently absurd since the real Lucy Ferrier unfortunately is known to have died in Salt Lake City around 1860 (Part II, Chapter V, A Study in Scarlet). It seems much more likely that Conan Doyle heard the name wrong, and Watson instead journeyed to San Francisco to reunite with Lucy Harrier. If so, then tragically she must have died before 1888, when Watson encountered Ms. Mary Morstan (The Sign of the Four). But if their marriage lasted but only a few short years, in the absence of any of Watson’s other early writings coming to light, we can simply imagine that Watson and Lucy might have found great happiness together, however brief.
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About the Type
This book is set in Baskerville Old Face, a transitional serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham, England. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, positioned between the old style typefaces of William Caslon, and the modern styles of Giambattista Bodoni and Firmin Didot. The typeface was designed to reflect Baskerville's ideals of perfection, for which he chose simplicity and quiet refinement. His background as a writing master is evident in the distinctive swash tail on the uppercase Q and in the cursive serifs in the Baskerville Italic. The refined feeling of the typeface makes it an excellent choice to convey dignity and tradition.
It is unclear whether this John Baskerville is in fact one of the two sons of Hugo, who in 1742 set down the chronicle of the Curse of the Baskervilles.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CRAIG JANACEK is a frequent visitor to the isle of Bermuda and a devoted Sherlockian, who hopes to someday be invested as a Baker Street Irregular. He hails from Southern California, studied at Pembroke College (Cambridge, England), and is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and did specialty training at Stanford University. His other books include The Anger of Achilles Peterson and The Oxford Deception. In addition to fiction, he publishes frequently on medical topics. He is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and lives nearby with his wife, Margaret, and two children, Owen and Danica. Craig Janacek is a pseudonym.
For augmented content, connect with him online at: http://craigjanacek.wordpress.com.