“Oh, yes, Uncle Simon. The story of St. George and the Dragon.”
I looked at my sister. “Go ahead,” she sighed. “Up to bed with you. Both of you.”
So I lay next to the little boy in the darkness, barely able to stay awake as I mumbled my way through the old tale of a knight who saved a princess from a horrible dragon. In my half-dream the knight took on the form of Holmes and the princess the form of Sister Carolina. The dragon remained a dragon, choking out smoke from a red pipe in a black underground cell of London.
Then Gibby murmured, “St. George no longer fears the dragon. Now he must fear the princess.”
The next morning I put on an old suit of my brother-in-law’s, a derby too small for me, and wound a thick wool scarf round my mouth. A discarded greatcoat completed my attire, and I looked like a man who was trying to wear the clothes of his adolescence—in short, I was straining at the seams. I traveled in the darkness in a nearly empty Metropolitan to a nearly empty station, where I was startled from behind by a boy in a ragged porter’s waistcoat.
“Tuck?” he asked quietly. “I’m Deputy. I’m taking you to Mr. Aitch.”
“How did you know me?” I asked the boy, and then felt foolish, as I was the only passenger in the vast hall who had just booked the 6:59 to Liverpool.
Deputy led me to a locked compartment on the waiting train. He knocked and the door opened on Sister Carolina, now dressed in a plain brown nun’s habit and wearing spectacles. Of course Holmes bore no resemblance to himself. His costume was an odd combination of drudge and dandy—a top hat, a rude tie, an old frock coat, and a large pair of dirty Wellington boots. But most remarkable was the pinkish goatee, expertly applied and utterly transformative.
Deputy introduced me as if we were at a high-toned London club. “Mr. Tuck, may I present your travelin’ companions, Sister Alphonsa and Mr. Escott, a well-to-do plumber from Brixton.”
“Sister,” I said, touching my hat. “Mr. Escott. May I join you?”
“Certainly sir,” Holmes replied affably, applying a match to his clay pipe. “Plenty of room, plenty of room. I say, sir, have you any money?”
I sighed and produced a coin for Deputy, who smirked and left the train. Holmes locked the door behind him and drew the window curtain.
Immediately I examined Sister. Her face was tired and white. “Are you all right? I was deathly afraid for you. I had no idea where you were … “
“I’m well enough,” Sister replied coolly. “Mr. Holmes kindly arranged for me to stay at a place called the Nuns’ House, quite à propos, and has explained the need for my temporary change of identity.” She sniffed disapprovingly, pulled out her étui, and began work on yet another rosary. “I suppose it’s all for my protection.”
“It is indeed, dear Sister,” Holmes replied. “And it’s all part of the excitement.” He rubbed his hands with enthusiasm. “This is truly the most intriguing case I have yet encountered. We are going to have a splendid time together.”
Sister and I looked at him in disbelief.
“You may find it intriguing, sir,” she said, “but for me it has been an ordeal. Being hurried here and there across continents … I could wish for less intrigue.”
“Holmes, I am on pins and needles waiting for you to tell us what you have been doing.”
His eyes gleamed. “I have passed three days between Somerset House and the British Library, and I believe I have come close to tying one loose end of this case to the other.”
“Somerset House? The national archive?”
“On Thursday morning a self-made upstart, a plumber named Escott, visited the Registrar General to make inquiries about his ancestry. He believed he might be the rightful heir to the Earl of Shrewsbury, as his mother was named Talbot—as you know, the earldom belongs to the noble Talbot family. The registrars thought they would make a good joke of young Escott, so they actually let him examine the archives of Talbot births and deaths and marriages.
“Obviously, the names Talbot and Tarleton are close together in the alphabet, and Escott found himself by chance rummaging among the records of the Tarleton family—a most fruitful chance, I might add. To his not very great surprise, Escott learned that the Tarletons of Britain are somewhat involved with the history of the American South—one Tarleton in particular.
“His name was Colonel Banastre Tarleton, a commander of dragoons who made a mixed reputation fighting the Americans in the Revolution. In the late spring of 1780, Tarleton’s men attacked a force of Continentals at Waxhaws Creek in the Carolinas, who, outnumbered, raised a white flag. The account is confused, but it appears that the British attacked the surrendering army and butchered them where they stood. Thus the incident became known as the Waxhaws Massacre and Tarleton as ‘Bloody Ban.’ It was a pivot point in the war, as many American loyalists, revolted by Bloody Ban’s massacre, turned against the British, and militias sprouted up everywhere. Within a year, it was all over, and the Colonies were lost.”
Sister interrupted. “What does this battle—almost a century ago—have to do with my Tarleton boys?”
“That, dear sister, is the loose end I must tie up. But there is an undoubted connection, as you will see.” Again checking the window and the door, Holmes unrolled the bizarre message I had received in Charleston. It now looked much worn from Holmes’s repeated handling.
“What is this?” Sister asked, her face graying even more.
I explained the letter and the coded message we had found. Stiffening with fear and distrust, she drew back from me into the corner of the bench. “You have said nothing to me about this. You, my friend, my pastor, have kept it all from me for these many weeks?”
“I thought to protect you—I didn’t want you to be alarmed.”
She took a harsh breath and glared at me. I thought this unfair. I really had wanted to shield her from those morbid threats and expected that she would be grateful at our progress in unraveling the mystery of the Tarletons’ death. However, even after many decades of listening to women in the confessional, I can still state unequivocally that I do not understand them at all.
Holmes was holding the letter up to the window light. “You see, I have deciphered more of it.
O.
LET T.HE TAR LET ON,
B.eware! Let the Feathers reveal,
Raging bloody w.ax Fire be set,
On thy Bans! Awe thy Confessi.onal Seal!
Thou shalt drink Fate. in Wine, be it distilled Gall!
Hell’s bread shalt. avenged in Tartarus eat!
Even Thy Goddess in the d.epths of Acheron shall fall!
Revenge! T.hou shalt drink the shame of it Sweet!
Shad.owed Brotherhood! If we Heaven’s will cannot avert, Hell
Let us move. Charon bring thee o’er his Flood to meet,
In Ro.bes and burning Cross and Blood Drops to lie,
Even there. where the Prince of Air forever flames up howling,
PETIT AND PERDITION! BAP.ST AND BLAZES! STRICKEN AND SEALED!
CHAOS AND CURSES!
DO NOT OPEN PANDORAS BOX OR YOU WILL FEEL
THE WRATH OF THE KU, KLUX, KLAN!
Holmes had circled with a pencil a word in each line. “You see,” he said eagerly, “start with the first word of the first line, then the second of the second line, the third of the third, and so on. Read diagonally from the upper left-hand corner to the bottom right-hand corner.”
I read it slowly, with a darkening chill: “’Beware bloody Bans! fate in depths of Hell to lie howling curses!’”
Holmes was grinning at me.
“Bloody Ban’s fate?” I asked.
“What do you think? Chance or design?”
It was evidently not chance.
Holmes sat back in his seat, all at once contemplative. “Put the two messages together and you have ‘Let the Tarleton brothers lie, or beware Bloody Ban’s fate
in depths of hell to lie howling curses.’ Evidently, Tuck, if you don’t let the whole question of the Tarleton murders alone, whoever wrote this letter intends to send you to hell.” Then he peered down at me. “Well, to your death in any case.”
“It’s horrible,” Sister Carolina intoned from her corner.
Holmes continued in his neutral voice. “The reference to Bloody Ban Tarleton of Revolutionary War fame connects him to your Tarleton brothers who died at Gettysburg. The question is, what is the nature of that connection?”
“Perhaps there is no connection at all,” she said. “Perhaps it is all in your imagination and merely a coincidence in the arrangement of the words.”
“Of course, I considered that possibility until I discovered yet another hidden message in the letter.” Holmes held it up again to the light and invited me to read the fourth word in from the end of each line:
“Let … wax … awe … be … avenged … of … shame … upon … his … blood … forever … sealed.”
Holmes read it this way: “’Let Waxhaw be avenged of shame upon his blood forever sealed.’ It strongly suggests that the death of the Tarleton brothers had something to do with revenge for the Waxhaws Massacre upon Bloody Ban’s descendancy.”
“So your theory is that someone killed Col. Tarleton’s descendants in order to settle a score over a century-old massacre? It seems very far-fetched,” I said.
“Doesn’t it? But you yourself, Tuck, have spoken of the Southern gentleman’s obsession with honor. Memories are long in the Old South, aren’t they?”
“Indeed they are. But why would the Ku Klux Klan become involved in such a petty old disgrace? And why threaten me over it?”
“Because you threatened them. You talked at the fête at the city hall about delving into the deaths of the Tarletons, which, as it appears, makes certain people—perhaps very prominent people—uneasy in the society of Charleston.”
“Then the answer to the mystery lies in that circle of men I spoke to that night,” said I. “If I can remember who they were, we should be able to investigate each one and identify the culpable party. Someone who bore a long grudge against the descendants of Colonel Banastre Tarleton.”
“Perhaps,” Holmes responded, casually enveloping himself in pipe smoke. “There is, however, a problem with my theory. It doesn’t account for one glaring fact.”
“Which fact?”
“That Colonel Banastre Tarleton had no descendants.”
Chapter 10
We passed an hour or so clacking up the Midlands railway beneath a cheerless autumn sky. Sister worked anxiously on a rosary, her gloved hands busy boring holes in dried berries with a silver bodkin and then lacing each berry onto a cord. On the other bench, veiled like a mountain under a cloud, Holmes disappeared into his thoughts.
For my part, I didn’t know what to think. If Tarleton had no descendants, then the killer of the boys at Gettysburg had made a grotesque error—or was simply striking out madly at anyone with the Tarleton name.
Another possibility occurred to me. Although Colonel Tarleton lacked legitimate descendants, could he have had the other kind? “Let Waxhaw be avenged of shame upon his blood.” Tarleton’s blood didn’t have to be lawful blood.
Wouldn’t it be intriguing to know the origin of the Tarletons of Georgia?
Still, who would care at this late date? The only individuals I spoke to about the Tarletons were some of the most eminent men in the South.
Which led me to the other bedeviling question: Just who were those men in that circle at the Charleston fête? I remembered the amber paneling of the room, the Trumbull portrait of George Washington, the powdered skin of the ladies warmly wrinkled in the light from the sconces; but I met the men only briefly and they were indistinguishable to me—mostly fat old soldiers in black suits or Confederate regalia.
As I tried to conjure up names and to picture their faces, gradually they came back to me.
There were two governors in the circle: General Hampton of South Carolina, and the other from Georgia; Mayor Sale of Charleston; the mayor of Atlanta—Calhoun, I think; and three or four more. I just couldn’t remember… . A Mr. Gary, or Kerry? A Mr. Buford? A distasteful younger man named Tillman, it seems… .
I stood to fetch my notecase when Holmes handed me his, along with a pencil. “Here,” he said, “Write them down.”
“Write what down?”
“The names of the men you spoke to in Charleston.”
I was startled. “How on earth did you know that I was thinking about them at this very moment?”
“You were contemplating the lack of a Tarleton descendancy and it occurred to you that there might be an illegitimate strain. Then you asked yourself who would care; the answer, obviously, would be those who knew about your interest in the Tarleton murders. At that point, you began to rack your brain for their names.”
“But you would have to read my mind to know all of that.”
“I am not a mind reader,” Holmes said. “From the logical starting point, I followed your thoughts by reading your face and the motion of your lips. I watched you struggling with names and when you stood up to rummage for your notecase, I knew you had succeeded in remembering them. It is an old trick, made famous by the American genius Poe in his detective tales.”
I chuckled and shook my head as I wrote. Then Sister spoke from her corner.
“Your powers seem beyond the human, Mr. Holmes. I have been bothered by your characterization of me in Rome … that I had suffered … known deprivation and illness, although I have been well-to-do and enjoy wealthy relations. It is all true, but how could you have known these things?”
“Dear Sister, look at your hands. The profound callouses on the palms, although years old now, indicate a period of rough labor to which your hands were unaccustomed. A lady like yourself would scarcely have done such labor unless it were necessary for survival. Your overall drawn demeanor points to a draining illness in the past, from which you have fortunately recovered.
“I deduce wealthy relations from your gloves. You have many fine leather pairs, which you change frequently, and you purchased more of them from an expensive shop in Rome. Fine kid gloves are a luxury not generally associated with a religious woman under a vow of poverty, thus indicating a source of income that is not yours.”
Sister folded her hands as if to hide the gloves. “That is admirable, Mr. Holmes. I have indeed suffered as you say during the late war, and I have fought the typhoid, and I do depend on the kindness of my family for a few small indulgences.”
“All of this is elementary,” said Holmes. “But I sense that I have not truly fathomed your mystery, Sister Carolina.”
“My mystery, as you call it, is why my friends had to die. My purpose is justice. That is the only mystery with which you need concern yourself,” she responded, bending her head again over her handiwork. “It appears to me you have made little enough progress in that direction, for all your powers.”
Holmes laughed and pulled from his coat a flat piece of card paper. “In my hand I hold a considerable milestone in our progress, due to my hours in the British Library.” He held it up for us to see. “It is a postal card which I purchased in London only two days ago.”
The copy of a painting of a woman from a century before, the card read “Mrs. Robinson entitled Perdita by Gainsborough.”
As we peered at the picture, Holmes explained. “Mrs. Robinson was a young actress who took command of the English stage in the 1770s. Her performance as Perdita in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale captivated the Prince of Wales himself, and she became his mistress. When he tired of her, another suitor became enthralled with the abandoned lady—his name was Colonel Banastre Tarleton, recently returned from the Revolutionary War in America.
“For him, she gave up the stage and moved to his family seat at Finch House in Liverpool wher
e she languished for many years. Despite her hopes, the haughty colonel never married her—she was, after all, not his equal in society—but there was a confinement in 1783 which left Perdita inexplicably crippled for the rest of her life. It was given out that the lady miscarried.”
“Holmes. You believe there was a child,” said I.
“It is a capital error to theorize without facts, but that is a possibility I mean to run to ground.”
“Thus our journey to Liverpool.”
“That is one reason for it.”
We gazed for a while at the melancholy portrait of a woman in ruffled silks with blue ties at her bodice and a small dog at her side. Even the grey landscape breathed abandonment.
“Perdita,” I whispered. “’The Lost One.’”
“Lost indeed,” said Holmes. “Eventually, Bloody Ban tossed her aside and wed an acceptable lady, but there was no issue of that marriage. So, if the unlamented Tarleton does have descendants, it is likely to Perdita that we must look.”
A tiny detail of the painting caught my eye. “She holds something in her hand.”
“You noticed that,” said Holmes, smiling.
“A miniature? A little picture within a picture? A cameo?”
“A depiction of someone, perhaps the Prince of Wales, perhaps Tarleton, perhaps … .”
“A child?”
“I have examined the original Gainsborough at Hertford House—the Marquess owed me a favor—but the image is too small and dark to make out,” Holmes replied.
“So your powers of perception have met their limit,” the sister said, piercing another bead with a blunt needle.
Just then came the sound of the tea trolley from the corridor. Holmes leapt up and offered to get tea for everyone, which surprised me—he usually had no time for food and drink. “Have you a few coins?” he asked me.
Moments later he returned with two cups of tea and biscuits on a tray. “Only two?” I asked.
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