Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman

by Tim Symonds

  ‘A dragoman by the name of Eric Shelmerdine will be waiting for you at the Vinegar Sellers’ wharf when you step ashore. He is Levantine or Armenian, I’m not clear which. Useful name, Eric. Eric to the English, Éric to the French, Erich to the Kaiser’s men, Erik to the Hungarians. He purports to be a correspondent for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung and Pesti Naplo but the majority of his pay comes from the treasuries of half a dozen Powers - one being England. He is acquainted with the hubble-bubble pipe servants of every Pasha in Pera. In no time the telegraph wires buzz and their masters’ plots and plans are transmitted to us days in advance of (and far more truthful than) official reports.

  ‘There are two contending groups who might wish to steal the Sword of Osman, and bring about Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid’s overthrow. One is based in Salonika, initiated eight years ago by students at the Imperial Medical Academy. They call themselves “The Young Turks” (the ‘Young’ is a misnomer) and are led by a gentleman bearing the name Bahaeddin Shakir.’

  Our adventure began to seem real.

  ‘Their rival group is the League of Private Initiative and Decentralization, led by a prince in exile by the name of Sabahedrinne. His headquarters are in Paris, in a girls’ school (the headmistress occupies the room next door). The communications network is a cubbyhole for a telephone operator, the chancellery a single typist, and yet...and yet... it is not beyond fantastic that from such lowly beginnings either enterprise could overthrow the world’s strongest dictatorship.’

  This was followed by a not-especially-complimentary description of the Ottoman Sultan. ‘Abd-ul-Hamid II is a paragon of Oriental intriguers and dissimulators, less a bejewelled arachnid than a poisonous plant which cannot move to escape his predators. He is like the woody vine Aristolochia whose leaves are eaten by the larvae of swallowtail butterflies, thus making themselves unpalatable to their own predators. In earlier times a ruler of the Ottoman Empire would buckle on a sword and lead his troops into the fray. No longer. The ruler of a great empire sits in his Palace trembling like an aspen. There was a time Abd-ul-Hamid frequented the cafés on the Bosphorus incognito, with no fear the coffee would be poisoned. Now, the most elaborate precautions are taken with his food. Meals are cooked in kitchens with iron doors and barred windows and brought to him by officials in gold-embroidered uniforms wheeling a trolley containing the Imperial Dinner service. Each dish must be tasted by the Guardian of the Sultan’s Health and Life who, it’s said, tests it more on cats and dogs than himself. Abd-ul-Hamid prefers a humble stuffed marrow and cucumber to the elaborate concoctions his Greek chef can prepare. The taste of poison in such simple fare would be immediate.

  ‘Amusante? It may pay to bear in mind there is only one punishment in his code. Death by strangulation or death by drowning, tied in a sack at the end of a grapnel and hurled into the Bosphorus, often after days or weeks of the most unbearable torture.’

  As to the Sultan’s paranoia, ‘Year on year there’s a steady growth in the number of his spies, known as djournals. Greeks, Hebrews, Armenians, Syrians and Levantines alike, they are thought to total as many as the foreign spies and sympathizers infesting Petersburg - more than 20,000. Almost every shop and nargile café in Stamboul is run by them. Almost every customer is a djournal too. We joke that when two Jews get together they build three synagogues. In popular belief, if three Turkish subjects are seen together one at least is certain to be a spy. Whenever you see two perfectly respectable men conversing they will instantly cease conversation if a third person draws near.

  ‘There is a strong belief in the Evil Eye. The blue eye of the Frank (their term for all Europeans) is considered especially malign and sinister. What they will make of the colour of your eyes, Sherlock, I dare not think. As to the customs of the Turk, do not cross your feet at mealtimes, it is disrespectful to the table. Do not praise any item for as often as not it will be pressed into your hand - but not from generosity. Your praise has brought the Evil Eye upon it. It would bring bad luck to the owner if it were kept. Therefore you might make an exception to the rule and fulsomely admire a few Chinese vases and some Longquan celadon bowls, the spoils of centuries-long exchanges of gifts between Chinese emperors and Ottoman sultans. A few top class Chinese artefacts would sit well in the interior of the Diogenes Club. Ditto the Galata Bridge. An extra bridge across the Thames at The Temple would make access to the premises much easier for our legal fraternity (especially in their cups).’

  The mention of the Diogenes made me smile. I recalled Holmes’s description of his brother’s favourite haven: ‘There are many men in London who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger’s Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion.’

  There was no danger I would be invited to apply for membership - or accept if the offer were made.

  I returned to the Mycroft letter.

  ‘Cuisine: for centuries the Spice Routes from Asia have been under the complete control of the Sultanate. Carts rumble daily into the Palace, loaded with conserves of almonds, pistachios, ginger, hazelnuts, orange-peel, aloes, coffee, and of course Rahat Lokum forged from the pulp of white grapes or mulberries. The demands of Yildiz are voracious - butter from Moldavia via the Black Sea, great quantities of plums, dates and prunes shipped in from Egypt. Honeys are brought from Rumania and Hungary. The purest comes from the Isle of Crete and is reserved for the Sultan himself. Turkish delicacies make even Dr. Watson’s favourite Sussex Puddle puddings or the roast meats at Simpson’s Grand Divan Tavern seem as bland and commonplace as brown Windsor soup and boiled plaice. For the best Rahat Lokum you should certainly visit Hadji Bekir’s Lumps of Delight factory, a small room near the Galata Bridge head. And of course you must sample the Turkish milk desserts - the muhallebi.

  ‘May I ask you to do me a favour and go to the Spice Market. Please bring back a few packages of saffron and my favourite Kofte Bahari - a mix of coriander, black pepper, cloves, bay leaves and wild thyme.’

  ***

  That evening I took a late walk to the day-and-night Post Office on the ground floor of Morley’s Hotel at Charing Cross to post my letter to Pretorius.

  We Prepare For Constantinople

  Letters were being composed and circulated thick and fast. One in Edward Grey’s spidery writing was sent on to me from Holmes’s bee-farm.

  FOREIGN OFFICE

  June 6, 1906

  ‘My dear Mr. Holmes, - at my suggestion Haldane, the Secretary of State for War, has offered to put HMS Dreadnought at your disposal. It suits his convenience. She needs to complete her sea-trials and gunnery. The manufacturers claim her new steam turbines and four propeller shafts give her a speed of 21 knots, 3 knots faster than battleships with traditional piston engines. The turbines as well as her gunnery need testing almost to destruction. Haldane was going to send her to the West Indies but he too has concerns about the Kaiser’s bellicose eye on our shipping lanes to Asia. If you board Dreadnought at Gibraltar she will carry you to the Eastern Mediterranean.

  ‘I suggest you disguise your identity almost from the minute you leave England. I have therefore arranged for the cost of authentic naval uniforms - working dress and full dress - and other accoutrements (including dress swords) to be covered by His Majesty’s Government. If your tailors pass your measurements to Gieves, Matthews & Seagroves, or if you drop by in person, they will provide everything. They fitted out the last person we sent undercover to Constantinople in a khaki garb, something between that of a Colonel and Brigadier. He posed as an Army doctor intent on studying the use of vegetables in Ottoman medicine but never made it back.

  ‘No doubt the Gieves people will remind you the
y dressed Stanley head to toe for his trek to the shores of Lake Tanganyika in search of Livingstone, just as when you collect your train tickets to Gibraltar from Thomas Cook & Son they will inform you they conveyed the relief force sent to Khartoum to rescue General ‘Chinese’ Gordon in 1884. Gieves is a centre of military gossip the equal of the In & Out Club so we have hinted your destination might be the Gold Coast.’

  I settled down in my armchair to read the final page.

  ‘I must repeat that if the plotters manage to steal the Sword of Osman they will make tremendous use of it in the Sultan’s overthrow. Dr. Watson might ask why England should not stand aside and allow the ad hoc empire to be overthrown as a consequence of its own weight of corruption and misgovernment. After all, we have never guaranteed Turkey’s regions and we do not intend to. I reply, if England intervenes we shall be seen to do so from a position of insatiable greed for possessions. On the other hand, if we stand aside and watch the Sultan overthrown and the High Divan collapse England will be isolated and discredited, hated by those we refused to help, despised by others. The fall of the Sultan and his detestable camarilla may liberate forces which none of us can foresee. None of the Great Powers is désintéressé. A European war could break out for which the one certain outcome would be six skeletons sitting around the peace table surrounded by a vast wasteland. For these reasons HMG (except for an energetic minority of the Cabinet) believes it is vital for the time being to preserve the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.

  ‘Abd-ul-Hamid’s vast empire continues to crumble around him. Centuries of malign neglect of the Ottoman provinces have brought such chaos that if the Empire falls it would take a Cromwell, a Napoleon, or above all an Ivan the Terrible to bring order and discipline. Three million Greeks, the million Armenians and the three-quarters of a million Bulgarians, not forgetting the quarter-million Jews, all want release from Ottoman dominion. However, history dictates that, bad as despotism is, the first-fruits of the overthrow of tyranny are not love and liberty. Perverse consequences and unintended outcomes are the rule.

  ‘As to the custom of presenting gifts to His Imperial Majesty, a parcel will be delivered to Dr. Watson’s premises before you set off. Some rolls of Offenbach. The Sultan plays such tunes endlessly on his pianola. And separately, at the Sultan’s request, the most modern rifle of British manufacture.’

  The letter came to a personal and lyrical end:

  ‘I hope Dr. Watson as a keen fisherman will one day accept an invitation to my estate at Fallodon. We shall take our wet fly to the rivers of the North, the Lochy, the Cassley, the Helmsdale and the Findhorn. I would look forward to it very much. When I walk in a fine March wind and watch the ripples on a river and wonder if I could put a salmon fly as far as the opposite bank, I look God in the face and am refreshed._Yours sincerely, E. Grey’

  There was a postscript:

  ‘In addition to the gifts for the Sultan the Commodore of HMS Dreadnought will arrange for delivery of a specially-bound copy of The Return of Sherlock Holmes to His Imperial Majesty with our own Imperial Majesty’s compliments.’

  ***

  I returned the pages to the envelope. The grandfather clock in my waiting room struck the half-hour. A locum could attend to the remaining patients. I set off for George Street for a first appointment with the military tailors.

  On my arrival at Gieves a wave of nostalgia washed through me. Nothing had changed since I visited the warren of stairs and rooms years before, an Army surgeon at Netley. Ahead of me at the time lay a stint in the blistering heat of the North-West Frontier, a succession of punitive expeditions against offending Pathans, the Second Anglo-Afghan War, my disabling wound from a Jezail bullet at the Battle of Maiwand, enteric fever, and a final return to Portsmouth jetty on the Orontes.

  An elderly tailor approached. He stopped a few feet away and looked me over carefully, one finger to his mouth. A pair of cutting scissors dangled from a thumb. After a moment he put the scissors down and frowned at the appointment card.

  ‘Surgeon Lieutenant Samuel Learson,’ he said slowly. He looked back up at me. ‘Learson,’ he repeated. He shook his head. ‘Sir, thick neck, that strongly built man square jaw of yours, length of inside leg, and dropping seven and a half pounds off your weight... if the name Learson was not clearly written here I’d swear you were the young medical officer who came here in ‘79. A John something...ah! Watson, I recall.’

  Twenty minutes later he said, ‘Did you know that when Stanley greeted Livingstone he found the Scottish Congregationalist wearing a blue Gieves Consular hat?’ - the very tale he’d told when fitting me out for India twenty-seven years earlier.

  ***

  Five days and two fittings later the naval uniforms together with the ceremonial swords and two greatcoats were delivered to my premises by a smart coach. The outfits also included a pea coat each - short double-breasted jacket made of coarse wool with six brass buttons inscribed with anchors. I tried on the dress uniform. The trousers were tight, with side pockets and fob pocket on the jacket. On Mycroft’s instructions Gieves had supplied swords dating back to the reign of the late Great Queen when we might first have attained officer rank. The blades were about 30 inches in length, with a slight curve. A good amount of gilt remained to the hilts.

  I turned to the working dress. Holmes as Commander had three gold cuff bands with white between them. Mine as a Naval Surgeon had two gold cuff bands separated by the Surgeon’s red distinction stripe. Neither uniform bore the executive curl, the small loop on the top rim of cuff lace or shoulder tab. This insignia would, have put us in the chain of command over the ship or crew, giving us an authority and visibility we didn’t wish for. The absence of the curl would help explain the lack of knowledge expected of an experienced seaman officer while not precluding us from holding the King’s Commission.

  To an Army man the etiquette of the Senior Service was deeply confusing. I was going to need guidance in the matter of protocol. A private note from the Commodore of HMS Dreadnought supplied it:

  ‘Dear Dr. Watson, I and my crew look forward to your arrival aboard. Officially we are to conduct running trials and test our main guns and anti-torpedo boat defensive armament en route to the West Indies. As far as the world is concerned that’s where we shall be going, but (as you know) both the Secretary of State for War and the Foreign Secretary are alarmed at the intensification of interest from the Kaiser into Ottoman affairs. German hegemony of any sort in the Near East could seriously impair our ability to use those sea routes in times of war, including access to the Suez Canal. Therefore, rather than sailing to the West Indies we shall steam in the greatest secrecy from Gibraltar to Turkey in record time - aided by the fact the seawater flow from Gib is eastward in the Strait’s surface waters. We shall plan our arrival in Constantinople just before dawn to make greater impact on the Diplomatic community in Pera when it takes its first yawn of the day and glances out of the window. Only the Sultan himself will be informed of the exact time of our arrival.

  ‘By now Gieves will have made your uniforms, both working dress and full dress according to regulations, including sword knots etc. Uniforms should be worn except when engaged in activities such as sport for which uniform would be inappropriate. Meetings with the Sultan or Grand Vizier will merit full dress (don’t forget the swords).

  ‘In your instance, as a Surgeon Lieutenant, you should learn the different style of salute. Naval surgeons do not stand for the loyal toast. Also, although Royal Navy medical officers are qualified doctors, they do not use the Dr. prefix.’

  The letter was signed Reginald Bacon.

  A few days later, a brevet-major from the India 2nd Battalion by the name of Crum, formerly of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, visited me with a package. Crum was a fine old soldier who had seen much of the world. Among the gifts for the Sultan was a most unusual sniper rifle, a modified, lengthened Short Magazine Lee E
nfield produced by Parker Hale in the heart of Birmingham’s Gun Quarter. It came with a dozen boxes of cartridges and a state-of-the-art Karl Kahles Telorar rifle scope. The package had been specially put together by the leading ballistician, Sir Charles Ross, 9th Baronet, owner of vast estates in Scotland. A note said the rounds had been engineered to achieve a muzzle velocity of over 2800 feet per second. Accompanying the rifle was a rubberised ghillie suit, a cloth garment covered in loose strips of burlap designed to resemble leaves and twigs. When manufactured correctly, the suit moved in the wind in the same way as the surrounding foliage.

  ***

  Our departure was imminent. Holmes and I had already decided to use the pseudonyms we employed abroad once before: Holmes would return to being Naval Commander George Archibald Hewitt, the name of England’s foremost forger. I would be Surgeon Lieutenant Samuel Learson, the country’s most notorious safe-breaker.

  Mycroft Holmes had taken charge of our arrangements. He wrote, ‘Dear Dr. Watson, on the day and hour arranged, you will find a motor car brougham waiting at the kerb to take you to the station in time for the Continental Express. It will be driven by a jarvey with a heavy black cloak tipped at the collar with red. Allow time for the journey. The carriage will take you twenty minutes in the wrong direction to throw off any ill-wishers. The second first-class train carriage from the front is reserved for you and Sherlock. I enclose an albumen print by the Abdullah Frères of the Imperial Yıldız palace and the Hamidiye Mosque. At Sherlock’s request, your dragoman will have a photographic enlargement of the sword at the ready on your arrival.’