Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

by Tim Symonds

  This letter serves to compliment and admonish you alike for your admirable concern for the Kuang-hsü Emperor’s survival. Foiling our little game was a triumph of deduction of the first order, but it may have terrible consequences for my country. The Middle Kingdom has learnt through dreadful experience there can be no humanitarianism in ever-recurring rebellions. They are but one phase in the deadly struggle for life. Survival of the fittest implies the extermination of the unfit. Don’t you see in this Emperor the embodiment of Hamlet, a man who loathes himself and his fate? Like Hamlet he aspires to be decisive but is indecisive. Like Hamlet he is lost in the fog of his own madness. Hamlet seeks to revenge but stretches the moment of revenge as long as he can - how does this differ from the feelings of the Son of Heaven towards his aunt, the Empress Dowager?

  Worst of all, the Emperor has no interest in defence matters. He prefers not to think about them. Instead he practices calligraphy on fans and displays his treasured stone-rubbing collections to visitors. Our coasts have been left indefensible, wide open to invaders. Our gunboats are used for smuggling, their gun-barrels for laundry hangers.

  You may see His Imperial Majesty as a tragic hero struggling to do his best, but his destiny must not be to become the puppet of an alien race. With his survival China has been left in the greatest danger. It is not the Reformists we should fear. They remain of concern but not consequence. It is Tokyo which flatters and misleads a weak and deeply-suggestible Emperor. Even as I write, word has come that Japan’s villainous military attaché General Fukishima Yasumasa is at large in Hunan Province, assessing the likely impact of Dr. Watson’s reforms in revitalising the New Army.

  I am convinced only the Empress Dowager can best safeguard China. With great clarity she sees Japan for the danger it is. Allowing the Emperor to live, worse, obliging her to guarantee his life for two more years, leaves the Dynasty in constant danger. She will abide by her word but we tread on frost over ice.

  Internally too the Middle Kingdom remains in deep trouble. The August Mother will never countenance a State in which the laws of the ancestors have become obsolete. She holds that so splendid, so weighty a civilization as ours cannot afford to disturb its underpinnings lest the entire edifice crumbles. The ship of state would become rudderless. It would cast itself adrift on a chaotic sea, at the mercy of any wind. To her the dogs of change should be allowed to sleep.

  When the Old Buddha mounts the dragon for her journey to the Nine Springs, China will be in greater trouble still. Like a fan in Autumn, one day she will be laid upon a shelf. We say ‘When the tree falls, the shade is gone’.

  We must hope that the Great Ancestress lives at least as long as her adopted son, otherwise the map will undergo the most terrible transformation, to the disadvantage not only of Asia but to the Western Powers too. Japan already has Korea and Formosa. Her appetite for conquest is unquenchable. Tokyo will not stop at China, vast as we are, indigestible as we may make ourselves, like the pufferfish. She will want Baluchistan and Burmah and Malaya and Laos and Cambodia. One day even England may find herself in hand-to-hand combat with Dai Nippon Teikoku, the ‘Great Japanese Empire’.

  When you see Sir Edward Grey and your War Minister give them my kindest regards. Tell them the Empires of China and England hang together, even as lips and teeth. Beg them to sell no more first-class battleships to the Japanese. The Ironclads will be used ruthlessly against us.

  Implore them to pay heed to my words. This would be the greatest honour to me. Tell them I, even a General, must bow my head to the circumstances of the moment in the Middle Kingdom’s long history. It is truly said, ‘The great man will always frame his actions with careful regard for the exigencies of the moment, and trim his sail to the favouring breeze,’ yet I am and will always remain England’s staunchest friend in the whole of Asia.

  And, Sir Sherlock, please give my salutations to a fellow officer, your great friend Dr. Watson. Did he mention I have made him an Honorary Colonel in the New Army? His uniform will await him at his London premises.

  Yuán Shì-kai

  Grand Councillor and Foreign Minister’

  I nodded at the subaltern. He placed the letter in a pocket, stepped back a pace and saluted. We followed his movements until he stepped off the gangplank into the tender, dropping into the waving handkerchiefs and shrill goodbyes of relatives and friends of departing passengers. He turned, glanced up at us, and saluted once more.

  With ‘Well, Colonel Watson, we can do without this on my person now’, Holmes reached into his pocket and pulled out the pipe-pistol he had pointed at General Yuán’s heart. I held out a hand for the formidable weapon. The aluminium stem unscrewed for loading. A knurled screw near the centre served as the trigger. Tucked in the wooden bowl were five extra cartridges.

  ‘Holmes,’ I said, handing it back. ‘I admit I too was worried when the subaltern turned up. Were we about to be hauled off the ship and arrested? Was General Yuán about to have us returned to the Forbidden City, or worse, transported in coffins to the Ancestral Tombs?’

  ‘Not the General,’ Holmes replied. ‘The Empress Dowager, perhaps, but never Yuán.’

  There was something in his tone, an innuendo I didn’t understand.

  ‘Why do you say ‘Not the General’? Why not? He has the power until we sail into international waters.’

  ‘Power, yes, but ambition too,’ came the response. ‘I’m in no doubt Yuán hankers after a Dynasty of his own. The last thing he needs is English blood on his hands - look how he managed to restrain himself over the Aeroscope reel. I’m not sure whether a .25 bullet from this (he pointed at his pocket) would have penetrated all that clothing. He wants England and our Empire on his side. Let’s say the Old Buddha and the Emperor die within a short while of each other, hours even - such things happen in China. Who would be best placed to overthrow the Ch’ing, usurp the Throne, order a large jade seal, and two imperial robes, and set up his own Dynasty?’

  He paused, the eyes twinkling.

  ‘...though for your readers it would have been quite poetic to meet our doom in the Purple City, with an offer of a place of pilgrimage near the Ch’ing Dynastic Tombs. ‘Alas, here lie the mortal remains of Dr. Watson, late of the Indian Army, far far from the Gatwick Races’.’

  ‘‘And his great Friend, the Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes, far, far from his bees’,’ I added.

  ***

  It was high tide. Beneath us the wash from the aptly-named Yellow Sea was a turbid yellow, coloured by a flood of rich soil from far-distant Central Asian mountain ranges, the red loam of the Red Basin of Sze Chuan, the grey and yellow alluvium of China’s central provinces, swept down by the great Yangtze to merge with the cyan blue of the Pacific Ocean.

  The Mongolia’s horn gave one long blast. Smoke belched from the 13,000 ton ship’s great stack. I took a last, lingering look at the harbour and beyond it the marshy flats and the vast reach of Cathay. Across the Pacific lay San Francisco, the Paris of the West, a city of fog. Thence overland to Boston and a further sea crossing to Europe. Soon the lofty white hulks for bonded Indian opium, the foreign ‘hongs’, the shipping offices, filatures and cotton mills with their ceaseless clang, big brown-sailed junks with huge rudders, and great white two-storeyed paddle arks from Ningpo and Hankow would shrink away and, like the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, become a distant memory.

  A telegraphic message was delivered to the cabin. General Yuán was ordering full-scale manoeuvres at Hochien comprising nine Divisions, a demonstration of strength designed to subdue insurgent elements at home and grasping hands abroad. My appointment as an Honorary Colonel had been gazetted.

  At Dinner Holmes picked his way in a desultory fashion through the Consommé Olga, and the Poached Salmon With Mousseline Sauce. I asked if he was suffering from mal-de-mer still within sight of land. He shook his head. The silence continued until t
he Waldorf Pudding when he took out a pipe and said, ‘It’s hard to believe we shall ever in our remaining years engage in anything as wondrous as our time here.’

  I agreed that while that may be true, I was looking forward to oysters and a brace of grouse at the Tiger Inn, with something a little choice in white wines - and perhaps another of our own familiar meurtres à l’anglaise courtesy of a baffled Scotland Yard.

  ‘Nevertheless, for the record, Holmes,’ I said, at last laying down the dessert spoon, ‘there’s still something I haven’t grasped.’

  The pipe with its freshly-coiling smoke came away from my comrade’s mouth.

  ‘Which is, old chap?’ came the amiable reply.

  ‘It wasn’t until I quoted Yuán’s words ‘If this is a plot there may be method in their madness’ late on that the connection to the murder of King Hamlet struck you. By then you had already concluded the puncturing of the Emperor’s eardrum was not some bizarre accident or foolish prank but stage one in a plot of exceptional cunning. How?’

  ‘Take the crow,’ came the reply. ‘Its behaviour. There are eight species of corvidae breeding in the Downs around my bee-farm - the carrion crow, the raven, the rook, the jackdaw, the jay, the magpie and so on. I know first-hand that no wild crow recently captured and then released would go anywhere near people. This one not only flew straight to the Emperor, it settled on his shoulder. It must have been trained from the nest to do so. If it had learnt to fly to just any shoulder it could have flown in all the points of the compass to discover a human-being to land on. Why the Emperor? He was no friend to the crow. You recall he shuddered at the memory. Clearly it was no pet of his yet it recognised something about him and sought a reward. Even the spot from which the crow was released ensured it came at the Emperor from the right, an unlucky direction. That alone pointed at a malevolent mind behind the attack.’

  I followed this with another question.

  ‘It’s clear to me the Empress Dowager lost patience with the Emperor long ago. We know she and Yuán maintain that his very existence encourages the Japanese to dare the colonisation of China, with him as their puppet. Even training the crow means they must have planned the assassination for months. If so, why invite a world-famous Consulting Detective to Peking in the first place? Moreover, why, having done so, didn’t they speed our exit before the plot commenced? It doesn’t make sense. They even delayed the day of our departure on the grounds it had to be auspicious. It was during that period the war-crow was let loose on the Emperor. They could easily have waited. It was as though they wanted to carry out the assassination while you were there.’

  ‘That’s exactly what they wanted. The E-D together with Yuán and Li believed they had hatched and honed a plot so clever, so foolproof, that nobody in the world would spot it.’

  ‘Hubris?’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘But why take such a risk? Would any benefit accrue from you being there?’

  ‘My reputation is strong in the world outside China. If I had failed to spot a murder had been committed - even an Emperor’s - the Great Powers would accept it was just one of those things, an unfortunate death from natural causes. As it was, step by step the plotters made serious blunders.’

  ‘Among them?’

  ‘For example over the Pekingese dog Shadza.’

  ‘How was that a serious blunder?’ I asked, flabbergasted.

  ‘By contrast with the eunuch’s shattered tympanum you were called in late. Didn’t that strike you as odd? Otherwise, you’ll recall telling me, you might have saved its life at the first sign of distress.’

  I gazed blankly at my companion.

  ‘Holmes, are you telling me the dog’s death was connected to the orchard plot?’

  ‘Of course it was! It was a necessary part of it. What was the final question they needed answering before launching the crow?‘Would a plant entirely unknown in China, plucked by Yuán from the floor of an obscure forest in England, really do the job?’ Was the alkaloid deadly enough? Would it work as they wished, namely irretrievably destroy the internal organs slowly, over a period of some days? They got their answer with Shadza. I know of no poison able to effect such damage on a dog which wouldn’t do the same to a human. If the wretched, betrayed dog lingered for three or four days before dying painfully from the rupture of just about every internal organ, so would the Emperor.

  At first I paid no attention - the dog was dead, unfortunate creature - until you told me the E-D not only refused to let you perform an autopsy, she even said no to analyzing the extraneous fluids. Why? I wondered. Testing the fluids would require no butchery of the corpse. Then it struck me. She feared you might identify the toxin from your experience with such plants in England.’

  ‘Holmes!’ I exclaimed, ‘it’s absurd - preposterous - to believe the Empress Dowager would allow her favourite Pekingese to be poisoned, deliberately so.’ I added coldly, ‘I have met only one human being who deliberately and in cold blood poisoned a dog, and that man was you, a Scottish terrier if you recall.’

  I referred to an incident in the case of murder I titled ‘A Study In Scarlet’ which took place in 1881 or early 1882, not long after I had first become acquainted with Holmes. A baffled Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard was at our Baker Street lodgings. Holmes sent me downstairs to our landlady to fetch an elderly Scottish terrier. My comrade was holding a small chip ointment box containing a couple of pills. Before our startled eyes Holmes fed the animal one of the pills, then, when that had no evident effect, he cut the other pill in two, dissolved it in water, added milk to make it palatable, and presented it to the terrier, whereupon the unfortunate creature gave a convulsive shiver in every limb, and lay as rigid and lifeless as if it had been struck by lightning.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ came the quick reply, ‘if you recall, we had a murder to solve - and besides, the terrier was old and sickly. I call it a mercy killing. This doesn’t seem to have been the case with Shadza. The food fed to Shadza was as closely regulated and tasted by eunuchs as the Empress Dowager’s herself.’

  ‘Again, Holmes, especially if what you deduce is correct, why did they call me in at all?’

  ‘To leave us with the impression accidents do happen. If a most favoured Royal pet can inadvertently ingest toxic plants, so can Royal humans.’

  ***

  We were passing in sight of the Senkaku Islands when a steward came along the row of cabins with a news-sheet containing items of interest from across China. Even as we left the Empire’s territorial waters events from the mainland were still catching up with us. My attention was caught by a piece from the provincial city of Ningpo. It was headed ‘Palace Eunuch Found Dead’.

  ‘Word has arrived of another unexplained killing in the Forbidden City. The victim has been identified as a eunuch from Ningpo by the name of Kou Liancai in the employ of the Emperor. He was bound hand and foot and dumped in an open, fly-infested pauper’s pit. The eye-brows had been sliced off. Street dogs had commenced devouring him. Although the head has definitely been identified as Kou’s, the torso lying by (having being severed from its head) had the genitalia intact.’

  The news-sheet described how a heavy blow from a sword had removed the young man’s head. Deliberately severing the head from the trunk meant Kou could not serve the Emperor in the Hall of Hades as he had in this life. He may well have endured fearful torture before the coup de grace, another reason why the real torso may have been disposed of separately, death by slicing being solely within the Empress Dowager’s power to order. The penal regulations obliged the torturer to cut in a specified order; eye-brows first, then the shoulders, the breasts, the arms, the legs and then, finally, the heart. I reflected on the chilling contrast between the living, undamaged Kou and the wreckage of that same human-being now, a contrast I confronted many a time as an Army surgeon in the face of the scimitars of Ayub Kha
n’s Afghan warriors.

  Li must have realised how Kou had connived in Holmes’s ingenious trickery. The Aeroscope had been operated from high up in the pipa tree, the only hiding-place with a direct line of sight to the resting Emperor and the orchard path. No man of my or Holmes’s age would have had the dexterity to operate the camera while hanging on for dear life so high in the canopy.

  I put the newsletter down. Kou’s murder bore the hallmark of the Chief Eunuch’s vindictive handiwork on the orders of his mistress. Only the Empress Dowager could have specified ‘no coffin and no funeral’. All doubt in my mind about the death of the Empress Dowager’s favourite dog dissipated.

  Now the Celestial Emperor was entirely alone, an exposed and pitiable figure. My mind returned to a furtive conversation held when I checked the eardrum for the last time. Emboldened by the way my patient seemed driven to unload his cares upon me, a stranger from a distant land, I ventured, ‘You told me Her Imperial Majesty expected you at any moment to die - to become a guest on high. What made you think that?’

  The Emperor reached over his shoulder, the index finger pointing downward.

  ‘The beizi she ordered me to wear on the journey to the Temple. The one she took away to destroy.’

  ‘What about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Do you recall the embroidery on the back?’

  ‘Of course!’ I replied.

  I had paid particular attention to the dragons’ snake-like appearance and the unusual four legs and five paws.

  ‘Dragons stitched with jewel-beetle wing-cases,’ I continued.

  ‘Do you recall how many dragons?’ the Emperor asked.

  ‘As a matter of fact, no,’ I conceded. ‘Quite a few.’

  ‘Nine,’ said the Emperor. ‘There were nine. When I stood on the Shishaquita and donned the cape, I was sure it was to be my last journey on earth. I didn’t expect to reach the other side of the lake. I even sent Kou down into the bowels of the launch to seek out an assassin’s bomb. Finally we set off. And then, sure enough, the war-crow came.’