Sherlock Holmes Vs Irene Adler: A Duel of Wits (The Irene Adler Series Book 4)

by San Cassimally

  When the two men went into the Gardens, Irene followed them in. Abélard Cachefesse was groggy and unsure about what was happening to him. The Muscovite sat him on a bench and told him what was going to happen to him, and gave him a warning.

  ‘Listen carefully you Belgian piece of filth, we will spare your miserable life this time. We’re only doing unto you what you did unto others. Now you’ve never met me, you do not know who I am, but should any fingers be pointed at me, it will only be because of what you would have told the Police. You are not to refuse to answer questions. Just give them conflicting responses. Mislead them, and we will let you live.’ That was what prompted him to incriminate Minahan. He hated this meddler anyway. If he were made to pay for this, then that would have been something positive resulting from my misfortune, he said to himself as he agreed with Holmes about the Irishman’s involvement.

  One day, Irene mused, when the Eye-gouging case would have been forgotten, out of respect for the man from Baker Street, she will tell him the whole story. He had only drawn the wrong conclusion because he was wilfully misled. A false confession is the single most difficult knot to unravel in crime-solving. From the ingredients provided to him, no human could have produced a different cake.

  IV

  Norfolk Island

  The tale of Yolanda Donoghan was revived by the Sydney Times when Barry Donovan was appointed Governor General of New South Wales. His great great grandmother had been a Gypsy transportee from Somerset. Published in the opposition newspapers with the purpose of heaving contempt and obloquy upon their political nemesis, the story had garnered the opposite effect, contributing to the creation of an aura of romanticism for the man who had acquired a not undeserved reputation for hard-heartedness. The other dailies naturally picked on this windfall and for weeks, they printed fantasies about the now near-sanctified Yolanda, to the extent of advocating a subscription to raise a statue to her, as a homage to an unsung section of the Australian population. What the newspapers failed to pick, or chose to ignore, was that it was Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes who had made it possible for the governor to see the light of the day.

  The whole world knows that reports of Holmes’ death at the Reichenbach Falls were grossly exaggerated. He had not only survived Moriarty’s assault with the help of Irene Adler, but with his contra-riposte he had despatched the evil professor into the void above the raging torrents. Holmes’ return to Baker Street after a long absence is usually described as mysterious, but the facts are now slowly emerging. Dr Watson’s account is very hazy, but Irene relates the circumstances in great details in The Case Book of Irene Adler. This can be resumed in a few lines for the lazy reader: She had infiltrated Baker Street under the assumed identity of Mrs Hudson, housekeeper. This was not because she had an innate servile nature. It was her means of protecting herself from a very real and mortal danger. The psychopathic King of Bohemia, an erstwhile lover, was determined to have her eliminated after she had terminated their affair. He had enlisted, first the services of Sherlock Holmes himself (under false pretences), and when that had yielded no result, he had sought the services of the infamous Moriarty to further his nefarious schemes. The evil professor, with his network on informers discovered where she was hiding, managed to kidnap her, drug her and take her by train all the way to Reichenbach in a wooden box, to be used as a bargaining chip to persuade Holmes to hand over the incriminating documents which he had accumulated which would have neutralised the Napoleon of crime. Holmes, in an attempt to rescue her, had delivered himself into his hands, but Irene had managed to save him in extremis after the epic combat on the ledge of the cataract. Watson, ignoring the part played by Irene, had indulged in half-truths in recounting this.

  Stunned by his near-death experience, the detective had agreed to Irene’s suggestion that they take a long break from London, and after a restful ocean cruise halfway round the world, they ended up in New South Wales. Which was where Yolanda had been embedded by the authorities to serve her sentence for the “aggravated theft” of a middling hen.

  Yolanda never denied that she had led a scandalous life, and even claimed that she fully deserved the appellation of Scarlet Woman, but her hypothetical advocate in the Court of Human Decency would ask the Jury the question: Was she born wicked? Or was she driven to wickedness by the force of circumstances? Was she even wicked?

  As an urchin, the only person in the whole world who had cared for her was Grandma Rosella. She had only the faintest of recollections of someone bent over her, when, as a baby she was ill, and presumed that it was the mother she had not really known. Rosella never explained what happened to her, and she assumed that she had died or had been kidnapped. Grandma had promised that she would tell her the full story some day, but that day never came.

  Toothless Rosella was a no-nonsense woman who was always telling the little girl off, but even as a child, she understood the difference between biting and barking. It was a cruel world, and the old woman was doing her best to instil into the waif who was soon to be exposed to the the harsh realities of the world the means of standing on her own two feet in its shifting sands. The helpless little thing instinctively understood that the last thing in the world the old woman wanted was to make her unhappy. Rosella did everything she could to keep her warm in winter and stop them starving. At least she tried. She had dabbled and failed at fortune-telling. She was no loafer, but jobs weren’t easy to find. As a young woman she had learnt weaving and working with gold and silver, but she did not possess the means of practising either. You needed money to invest in materials, wool, gold and silver, needles and looms to get started. Worse, where were the takers? The Gypsies in nearby camps were generous to a fault, but they were not any better-off themselves.

  Rosella did fetching and carrying, cleaning and fruit picking, but in lean times, she had to submit to the demands of the men with voracious sexual appetites who gave her three pence for the favour. Three pence meant bread for the mite, perhaps a banana and some milk. That Yolanda had adored her cannot come as a surprise to anybody.

  The old woman tried to hide from the little girl what happened when she disappeared behind the great oak with some leering gadgo. They said that things were improving in the country and that life for the next generation was bound to improve. She dreamt of sending Yolanda to school, hoping that she might learn to read and write and end up behind a desk. Or wearing a nursing uniform. How she’d like that. Her granddaughter would not have to feed herself by doing shameful things. As a teenager no one had told her that it was wrong to let men have their wicked ways with you, but from the beginning she had sensed that it was. However, if it was the means of putting bread into their mouths, did she have a choice? As long as she did not end up with a fat belly. She was only thirty-nine, but felt like she was sixty-six.

  Then one morning she started coughing blood, and could not move from the little shack they occupied. An old cowshed, the only thing left when the farm was burnt to the ground and the owners moved away. Yolanda was only nine, but she had to work all the hours God gave to find food for the two of them. She did everything, from feathering hens and geese for the market traders to collecting dog turd for the tanners, at a penny a bucket. She begged and got shooed away. And booted, to boot. She stole what she could, apples, a loaf of bread when the baker wasn’t looking. She fought with dogs for a bone outside the butcher’s. When she had her first bloods, Coleen, who sold buttons and thread at Stroud market, offered to show her how to make good money by letting those dirty Godless spalpeens play with you. Only you have to give me half of everything they give you. She had run home in tears to Rosella who made her swear that she would never do anything of the sort even if they were starving or freezing to death. If we really cannot go on, the old woman had said in a cracked voice, I’ll get a rope and we will hang ourselves from that chestnut over there.

  How they survived the bitter cold nights inside the draughty shed with scarcely any wood to burn is difficult to explain. Starv
ation is hard to define. Rosella was clearly dying away, and Yolanda, at a loss about how to save her, stole a hen from the market, in the hope that a nice chicken broth might revive her. She died all the same the following night, and next day the little stray was picked by the rozzers for her thieving. She would tell people many years later that never in her whole life had she shed more tears in one go. There lay her dear dead granny that she had been unable to save, and they were taking her away, leaving the corpse to rot with nobody to see she got a proper burial. All the Romany folk in Somerset and even further would have come pay their last respects to an esteemed elder, but who was to send word to them? Would Rosella come back as a mulo and haunt the earth if she were not given a proper send-off? Her port and anchor washed away.

  Mr Horace Corbilliard-Cursington, magistrate, positively glowed in his fine colourful silks and shiny silver wig, as he presided over proceedings at the Stroud Magistrate Court. He spoke in a refined but nasal squeaky voice. If we want to live in a peaceful and law-abiding land, we must be merciless in our dealings with scum, he began. He repeated the last word. SKUMM. He called this his first axiom. When one has a sense of beauty, one wants to see beautiful flowers in one’s garden, does one not? So what does one do, gentlemen? One roots out the wee..eeds that are not only a sore to the eyes, but which end up by garrotting one’s beautiful bloo..ooms. Nothing saddens me more than to see wickedness gaining dominion in children of such a young age. I find the Gypsy guttersnipe guilty of aggrr..avated theft, to wit: a plump hen which the rightful owner stated would have fetched him five shillings. I hereby sentence you, Yolanda X to be transported to New South Wales for a period of twelve years, in the forlorn hope that retribution will cleanse your soul of its wickedness, assuming that people like you have souls, and make you acceptable for reintegration into our grr..een and pleasant society. The truth was that magistrates had been not so secretly instructed by the Colonial Office to increase the number of females for transportation. Unless wives were provided for the restless male convict population, trouble was anticipated. The poor thing would wonder later how that clever magistrate discovered that she was called Yolanda Ecks. Rosella never told her.

  Thus it was that the grief-stricken orphan, scarcely aware of what was happening around her, found herself on the convict ship Sagacity bound for the antipodes. What Rosella had strived so hard to preserve for her, she lost on her first night at sea. At first they forced themselves on her, and offered food in return. Before they reached Port Jackson, she had had to submit to all who were willing to have her, the sailors and officers on board, including the captain. She found it less painful to let fellow convicts have their wicked ways with her, but she never stopped hating what she had to endure. She often suffered from bleeding, and in later years she would suspect that they might have been miscarriages.

  She was in a state of utter confusion when she arrived at Sunrise Farm, but Sylvia Morbick-Cullen treated the scum that she was with surprising kindness. On the other hand, Captain Arnold Morbick-Cullen, with his experience of keeping a tight rein on potential Irish rebels had a fearsome manner which resonated with his harsh scowling face. His clear ambition in life was to acquire the greatest wealth in the least possible time. He saw himself as the proud owner of lands stretching beyond the horizon, with tens of thousands of sheep and cattle, and millions of acres of orchard and wheat fields. To achieve this, he worked the fingers of the aborigines and the convicts attributed to him to the bones, encouraged them to tell on each other as a means of control over them, rewarding the sneaks with drink. Yolanda had immediately caught his eye the moment she arrived at the settlement. The only reason he did not try to get the young Gypsy who was not yet a teenager in his bed was his fear of Sylvia, who, he hoped would be the sole heir to her elderly London stockbroker father’s fortune.

  Having been subjected to the lust of men, completely helpless in stopping them, Yolanda was now accustomed to the idea that men had rights over her. They passed her round like men smoking a pipe around a little fire, and if she demurred they thrashed her. Most men she found repulsive, but, admittedly, there were a few who, to her shame, gave her pleasure.

  She had been here for three years when Danny arrived one morning. He was in a sorry state after five months at sea, but she was unaccountably drawn to him. It is said that Gypsies know. He turned out to be a loving boy. He was barely nineteen. He had been accused of setting fire to a barn in Dorset, where he had laboured from dawn to dusk for five years for a pittance. When the master had responded to a demand for a rise by cutting the wages of the churls from nine shillings to seven, in despair, Danny and his fellow-workers had downed their spades, and in the ensuing turmoil, he had wrecked a threshing machine, but he had nothing to do with the fire. The master had randomly pointed the finger and the police had arrested him. In court, instead of lying he had admitted to disabling the threshing machine, and the magistrate had taken this as an admission of the crime of arson and sentenced him to twelve years in the penal colony. The truth was that it was Nathaniel Donovan, Danny’s cousin, who had burnt the barn, and he could have saved the younger boy from transportation by confessing his part in it, seeing that he was being transported anyway, but he could not see why he should be the only one to pay. Admittedly he was quite fond of the younger kinsman, and selfishly hoped that it would make exile easier if he had his younger kinsman around.

  Yolanda did not beat about the bush, and immediately made it clear to young Danny that she thought he was her dream come true. As she was the unofficial provider of sexual comfort for the workforce, she saw no reason why she should withhold from the sweet boy she fancied, favours she was forcibly required to give to others. It took no more than twenty-four hours for the boy to become besotted with the black-eyed, black-haired burgeoning baggage, who was finally beginning to put on some flesh on her meagre frame. The boy understood that it would be impossible for her to stop giving to the workforce what they saw as their god-given rights, but he had hoped that his older cousin would not demand the same favours after he had confided in him his feelings for her.

  Danny had no doubt whatsoever that he was the only one she loved. She hated that she had to continue “servicing” the others. Obviously no one would give up on what they had been accustomed to. Captain Morbick-Cullen was well aware of what was going on, but the last thing he needed was a resentful workforce, so he looked the other way. As he himself would have wished to bed the Gypsy girl, he developed an acute hatred for the boy who everybody knew was the one she had given her heart to. Furthermore, Nathaniel who had wormed his way into the Captain’s good books, had told him that he, Nathaniel, was blameless in the riots, and that it was young Danny the real troublemaker. He was only guilty of loyalty to the family, and had not wanted to leave the innocent and naive lad without protection in a faraway country. Morbick-Cullen often said that he admired loyalty, and the scheming cousin went up one notch in his esteem. Why the Captain did not view Nathaniel’s telling on his fellow convicts as disloyal was never explained.

  Is a man whose woman sleeps with just one other man any less of a cuckold than if she slept with a whole regiment? In any case, as Nathaniel, who was as strong as a bull anyway, and had acquired a position of authority at the Sunrise, he was able to dictate to his fellows that Yolanda was out of bounds for them. They could do what they liked with other women, convicts or Aborigines, he instructed, but Yolanda was out of bounds. Danny had no say in the matter. Whether he saw this as more acceptable, is again not known with absolute certainty, but human nature being the web of intricacy that it is, it is suspected that what the boy felt was counter-intuitive. She hated the new arrangement even more. The girl so clearly loved his younger cousin, and the clear disgust with which she submitted to Nathaniel, gnawed at the foreman’s insides like vitriol on copper. However, unless he got the boy out of the way, he could not see how this would change.

  He knew that his young cousin had worshipped him once. He was quite fond of the boy in hi
s own way, but with Yolanda between them, the love was getting strained on both sides. If only an accident would happen to Danny. On the farm, with so much going on all the time, there was great potential for unforeseen fatalities. Could Danny be placed in the path of a falling tree? A rooftop slippage? A cut with a rusty saw leading to gangrene and death? No, that would be too painful. He would sincerely mourn him of course, but love is a blind dictator. He wasn’t sure whether he had it in him to put into practice any of the insane schemes sprouting in his fevered brain, dictated by his love for the Gypsy girl and watered by his innate deviousness. He knew that he was fickle, selfish, cowardly, but was his wickedness strong enough to ignite when mixed with his passion? He knew that he would never be able to kill his cousin in cold blood, shoot him or stab him. All he could contemplate was instigating a fatal accident.

  An opportunity arose shortly after he had resolved that it had to be by the death of his rival. They were erecting a massive barn on the farm, when Bilongong asked to see Morbick-Cullen who was partaking of a big cup of string tea under tarpaulin.