by David Marcum
Ada stared at him. “When did you learn Hindi?” she whispered.
“You learnt my language for me, the least I could do was to learn yours,” the crown prince muttered, his cheeks aflame. “I should also tell you that I have M’s blessing, and I have sought your father’s approval through him, which, I am assured will be forthcoming. My father sends his regards as well.” He looked up at her hopefully. “So... will you?”
A beatific smile spread across our young princess’ visage. “Yes,” she whispered shyly. “Oui. Haan.”
The ring was slipped on. The euphoric groom-to-be picked her up and twirled about the room, both of them giggling like schoolchildren.
Holmes and I exchanged an amused glance.
“Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson,” Ada said breathlessly, as Kaarle finally released her. “Would you be our witnesses?”
Kaarle nodded enthusiastically. “Without you, we would be dead. Without you, we would have been torn apart. We owe you our life and our happiness. The traditional ceremonies in our respective kingdoms would be arduous, but we would like to have a small church wedding in London before we depart, and we would be very honoured if you would be our witnesses.”
Holmes had a strange look on his face. For an instant, I was afraid he would reply in the negative. He glanced at me and I nodded slightly.
“It would give us great pleasure,” Holmes said quietly.
Much to our embarrassment, the young couple flung themselves at us. I patted the boy’s back awkwardly while Holmes turned an alarming shade of red in the girl’s arms. Then Ada embraced me and Kaarle enveloped Holmes. When we were finally released, the prince laughed.
“Désolé,” he said, smiling. “We forget how reserved the British are.” He took his fiancée’s hand. “We shall be in touch, gentlemen. Au revoir.”
The young royals departed with a spring in their steps.
I could not contain my curiosity any longer. “Holmes, did you mete out romantic advice to the boy last night? Did you take him to this M you all keep talking about?”
Holmes nodded and refused to meet my eyes. I smiled to myself, preparing to tease my friend.
“Not a word, Watson!” he shook his head. “It was only logical.”
He turned dramatically, his greatcoat bellowing behind him like a cape, and, for the want of a better word, fled - quite possibly to delete all traces of sentimentality from his brain-attic!
The Adventure of the Inn on the Marsh
by Denis O. Smith
In glancing over the records I kept during the time I shared chambers with my eminent friend, the renowned detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I am struck by the many occasions on which what appeared at the outset to be but a trivial affair became, in the end, a deadly serious investigation. Not infrequently, too, a case which began in London would oblige us to travel far beyond the capital and deep into the countryside in search of a solution. The case associated with The Wild Goose of Welborne, which I shall now recount, provides a good illustration of both of these points.
It was a pleasant, breezy day during the first week of September, 1883, the sort of weather that seems to freshen the air after the heat of the summer, and freshen, too, one’s own energies and aspirations. Holmes and I had both spent the morning endeavouring to tidy and bring order to the sheaves of papers and documents which had built up on every surface during the previous months. We were about to take lunch, satisfied with our morning’s work, when a ring at the doorbell announced a visitor. A moment later, our landlady ushered a young couple into our sitting-room, announced as Mr. and Mrs. Philip Whittle.
“I am sorry to intrude if you are eating,” the young man said in an apologetic tone, “but this was the only time I could get away from work to see you.”
“Not at all,” returned Holmes affably, putting down his knife and fork and standing up from the table. “One can eat at any time. I had much rather hear what it is that has brought you here to see us.”
“We have had a very odd experience,” said the young man, as he and his wife seated themselves on the chairs I brought forward. “We cannot think what to make of it.”
“The details, if you please,” said Holmes.
“It is soon enough told. We stayed recently for a few days at an old inn, The Wild Goose, which lies in the marshland near the north Norfolk coast. It is the second time we have stayed there. The first time was at the beginning of June, when we stayed there for a week.”
“Upon the occasion of your honeymoon, no doubt.”
The young man looked surprised. “Yes, it was, as a matter of fact,” said he, “but how did you know?”
Sherlock Holmes chuckled in that odd, noiseless fashion which was peculiar to him. “Since your wife removed her gloves, she has been displaying two very fine rings upon the third finger of her left hand. One is undoubtedly a wedding ring, and the other, with a sparkling stone in it, is no doubt an engagement ring. They both appear relatively new and shiny, and, moreover, the wedding ring is still a little loose, as is apparent when your wife touches it with the fingers of her other hand, which she has done several times already. It demands no great leap of logic to surmise that your wedding took place not very long ago, and that your week’s holiday in Norfolk constituted your honeymoon.”
The young lady flushed to the roots of her hair.
“I apologize for alluding to your personal circumstances,” said Holmes quickly in an urbane tone. “It is a little hobby of mine - trifling and no doubt silly - to deduce facts about people from their personal appearance.”
“That is perfectly all right,” said Mrs. Whittle with a little smile.
“Such a hobby may prove useful in this case, if it helps you get to the bottom of the matter,” remarked Whittle. “We were married at the very end of May, and immediately took a week’s holiday in Norfolk, as you surmised. One or two of my married friends had spent their honeymoons at the sea-side, at Margate, Brighton and places like that, but my fancy was for somewhere a little quieter, and Prudence agreed. When we heard from a cousin of mine of The Wild Goose, on the Welborne Marsh in Norfolk, it sounded ideal. It is a wild and beautiful spot, very popular with bird-watchers, I understand, as it is a haven for birds of all kinds. We spent most of the week there, in walks over the countryside or by the sea, and when we moved to Cromer, for the last two days of our holiday - even though Cromer itself is a quiet, charming and select sort of seaside town - it seemed to us very noisy and bustling compared with where we had been staying.
“We had enjoyed our stay at The Wild Goose so much that when the opportunity arose recently to take another brief holiday, both Prudence and I at once thought of returning there. We therefore travelled down to Norfolk last Friday, and stayed until Monday morning. However, the pleasure of being there, which we had been looking forward to so much, was marred by one odd little circumstance. As I was entering our details in the register, I turned the pages back to see the entries for the beginning of June, with Prudence looking over my shoulder. You will appreciate, no doubt, that the occasion of our honeymoon meant a lot to us both, and the urge to see ‘Mr. and Mrs. Whittle’ written somewhere for the first time was irresistible. Imagine our astonishment and dismay, then, to see that on the week in question there was no trace of our names whatsoever! Of course, I looked on the page before and the page after, but we were not there. Our names had simply vanished from the book completely, as if our visit to The Wild Goose had never taken place!”
Holmes rubbed his hands together in delight, a look of interest on his face.
“Did it appear to you that a page had been removed from the book?” he asked.
Whittle shook his head. “Perhaps it had, but if so, it must have been done very neatly, for I didn’t notice anything of the sort. Besides, there were other names written in on the dates we had stayed there. It was not that everyone’s name
had disappeared from that week, just ours.”
“Did you recognize any of these other names?”
“No, but I scarcely knew the name of anyone else that was staying there. We rather kept ourselves to ourselves, if you know what I mean, when we were there in June. As a matter of fact, it was very quiet then, anyway; there were very few other people staying there. I understand it gets much busier during the wild-fowling season. But the register now shows that a Miss Stebbing, a Mr. and Mrs. Williams, and a Mr. and Mrs. Myers were staying there at the same time as we were, and I don’t remember any of those people.”
“Did you mention the matter to anyone at the inn?”
“I certainly did. I mentioned it to the girl who was attending us as we signed in. But she said she had only worked there for a month and didn’t know anything about it. ‘If you’ve got any questions,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to ask Mr. Trunch.’”
“He being the landlord?”
“Exactly. I raised the matter with him that evening. He said he couldn’t remember as far back as June. ‘I have lots of visitors coming and going all the time,’ he said. ‘You can’t expect me to remember everyone.’ I pointed out to him that his memory was not the issue. Rather, it was the disappearance of our names from his register. He then suggested that we must be mistaken. ‘I don’t think you were ever here at all,’ he said, and suggested that we had, rather, stayed at The Old Duck, which lies about three miles distant, across the marsh. Of course, it is ridiculous to suppose that a man could forget in three months where he had spent the very first holiday with his wife, but when I pointed that out to him, he became very irritable and almost abusive, and I had to let the matter drop. I must say his manner quite spoiled our memory of our previous visit there.”
“It is certainly an odd experience,” remarked Sherlock Holmes after a moment, “but there may be some rational explanation for it. Perhaps, for instance, a jug of water was accidentally spilled onto the register, rendering some of the pages illegible, including the one on which your names were written. Then, perhaps in attempting to rewrite the page from memory, someone has simply failed to recall your name. It may be that the ‘Mr. and Mrs. Williams’ which is now written in the book was someone’s attempt to remember your name. Of course, that would not explain the landlord’s unpleasant manner towards you. One would imagine that if such an explanation were the case, he would simply have informed you of the fact. But perhaps he has an unusually poor memory, and is embarrassed about it. Perhaps he drinks heavily. If so, he wouldn’t be the first landlord of a remote country pub to consume all the profits in liquid measures, and I understand that excessive drinking has a very detrimental effect on the memory. Or is there something else?” he enquired, eyeing the young man closely.
Whittle nodded. “There has been a further development, which we have both found very upsetting, and for which such simple explanations cannot account.”
“Very well. Pray proceed.”
“We returned to London on Monday, having enjoyed our few days away despite the inauspicious beginning. Yesterday morning, however, this letter arrived by the first post.” As he spoke, the young man took an envelope from his inside pocket and passed it to Holmes, who took from it a single sheet of paper which he unfolded upon his knee and studied intently for a few moments.
“What do you make of it, Watson?” said he, as he passed the letter to me and turned his attention to the envelope. The note, which was not signed, was a brief one, written in black ink in the centre of an oddly square-shaped sheet of paper, and ran as follows:
Asking many questions can be a dangerous course. Keep out of matters that do not concern you, and mind your business. This is a warning to you.
“What a very unpleasant and menacing letter!” I remarked to Whittle. “I am not surprised it has upset you both.”
“It was posted in central London,” said Holmes, “so it is unlikely to have come directly from the landlord of The Wild Goose himself. But the information that you have been ‘asking questions’ must surely have come from him, so he is evidently in communication with someone in London. The paper is unusually thick and heavy, but is an odd size. I wonder-”
He took his lens from the shelf and examined the letter closely through it. “Something has been cut off the top of the sheet,” he said, “probably a printed heading which included an address. It has been carelessly done, though: there are a couple of tiny black marks at the top edge, where the scissors have clipped the bottom of a row of printed letters. There seems something familiar about it. Let me see-”
He sprang from his chair and began rummaging through the piles of old letters on his desk, which he had spent the morning putting in order. Presently he selected one and held it up beside the letter Whittle had received. “This is a letter of thanks I received from a client to whom I had been of service a few months ago,” he said. “I think it is the same. Yes, undoubtedly it is the same. See,” he continued, passing the sheets to our visitors. “The type of paper is a precise match, and the little traces of a line of printing that the scissors have left correspond exactly to this line on the other sheet.”
“But that letter is from the German embassy!” I cried in astonishment, as I leaned over to verify his observations. “I cannot believe the German embassy would send such a crude threatening letter to Mr. and Mrs. Whittle! And why should they, anyway?”
Holmes nodded. “The Germans may be a forceful people, but - in my experience, at least - they like things to be done in a legal and proper manner. There is evidently nothing official about this letter. I imagine that someone employed at the embassy, acting on his own initiative, and without official sanction, has simply used a sheet of official notepaper as it was to hand, having cut the top couple of inches off to preserve, as he hoped, his anonymity.”
“Then it is of no help to us in solving the problem.”
“I should not say that, Watson. It confirms, after all, our suspicions that the writer of the note is probably a foreigner, as suggested by his incorrect rendering of the common idiom, ‘mind your own business’. Can you recall, Mr. Whittle, if there were any foreigners staying at The Wild Goose at the time of your first visit there?”
“Yes,” replied Whittle. “Now you mention it, I do recollect that there were two men there who I thought were probably foreign. One was middle-aged, with close-cropped sandy hair and a very large moustache, the other was a young fellow, about my own age, a little on the plump side. They kept very much to themselves and never spoke to us, but I overheard them talking once or twice. Sometimes they spoke in English, but with very strong accents, and sometimes in a foreign language. It may have been German for all I know - I am not familiar with that language, so I can’t say.”
“We thought they were probably keen bird-watchers,” added Mrs. Whittle. “The landlord had told us that people come from all over Europe to study the birds on the Welborne Marsh.”
“One evening when we were eating,” Whittle continued, “a third man arrived and joined them at their table, a tall man with a bald head, and they all talked together very quietly. Later that evening, when we were in bed, I heard what sounded like a quarrel developing downstairs - raised voices and so on - and I remember wondering if it was these foreigners, but I fell asleep and heard no more.”
“Nor me,” added Mrs. Whittle. “Later in the night, though, I was abruptly awakened by a strange loud cry, as of pain or fear, and thought at first that it had come from downstairs. But when I mentioned it to the landlord in the morning, he said it was probably an owl, or one of the marshland birds, some of which have very strange cries that can sound almost human, he said.”
“Anyway,” continued Whittle, “the two foreign gentlemen left the next day, soon after breakfast. We didn’t see the third man at all, so we presumed he’d left earlier, before we got up.”
Holmes nodded his head and sat in silen
t thought for some time.
“I shall look into the matter for you,” said he at length, addressing his visitors, “and let you know what I discover. As for the unpleasant letter you have received, I should not worry too much about it. It is a warning, after all, and not a direct threat, probably designed simply to deter you from asking any further questions. If you go about your daily business in your usual way, I don’t think you will be troubled. However, it cannot hurt to observe due caution. Keep your eyes and ears open at all times, and avoid lonely places and dark alley-ways.”
When Mr. and Mrs. Whittle had left, Holmes hurried through his lunch and went out immediately afterwards. He returned two hours later, but there was a look of disappointment on his features.
“I have been scouring the back issues of the daily papers,” he explained to me as he threw himself into an armchair by the hearth and took his old clay pipe from the rack. “My reasoning was that as the menacing letter had been posted in London and written on a sheet of paper from the German embassy, then the mystery was as much connected with London as it was with Norfolk, and the solution might as well be found here as there. However, all my efforts have uncovered precisely nothing, which is a somewhat frustrating result, although not so uncommon as you may suppose when you are compiling those records you keep of my successes.”
“I don’t imagine it helped that you didn’t really know what you were looking for.”
“A perceptive remark,” said my friend, nodding his head. “I have looked closely at all the newspapers that appeared in the last week of May and the first week of June without finding anything there which refers in any relevant way to the German Empire, the Norfolk coast, German visitors to this country - whether to Norfolk or elsewhere - or anything else which might possibly have a bearing on the problem. However, I have learned one thing this afternoon.”