Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman

by Tim Symonds

  We came into Abd-ul-Hamid’s presence. The Kizlar Agha advanced, bending his immense body almost double in loop upon loop of low salaams, like a great bloated sea-monster raising itself from the ocean deep. But it was Abd-ul-Hamid who captured my attention. He crouched in an enormous golden arm-chair. The black eyes fixed themselves upon us with from under their heavy lids with an expression of the most dreadful terror. The pink, filbert-shaped nails of one of the autocrat’s hands played nervously with the amber beads of a tesbieh. The other hand kept uneasily and restlessly beating up and down, a movement of which I had no doubt he was quite unconscious. The signs of mental distraction convinced me the germ of insanity was seeping out, a trait he and members of his House were reputed to inherit from their ancestor Sultan Ibrahim.

  The Sultan sprang to his feet, almost pulling us across to the cascade fountain where the noise of the falling water would cover our conversation from prying ears.

  ‘Now my enemies are closing in,’ he blazed. ‘Your presence here has unlocked Pandora’s box! I should never have agreed to Sir Edward’s request. Yesterday the theft of the Sword of Osman - and now more terrible news. My Chief Armourer Mehmed, the man you met yesterday, the finest sword-maker in the Empire, is dead. You presence has caused this - now you must save me from them! The Jebeji-bashi is dead!’ he repeated mournfully. ‘I shall miss Mehmed. There was not his equal as armourer in the entire world. His swords develop a vampire’s hunger. Once drawn, every blade he forged has to draw blood before it can be returned to its scabbard.’

  ‘What was the cause of the Chief Armourer’s death?’ I asked with professional interest.

  ‘His wife,’ our host shrieked. ‘He died from his wife. At the plotters’ behest she summoned her husband home to kill him. I’ve ordered her arrest. She will confess all. The executioners’ guild has seventy-seven instruments of torture. Better still, my Chief Black Eunuch has a special punishment for women.’

  The Sultan scurried back to the golden arm-chair.

  ‘Remind me,’ he called out to Kizlar Agha, ‘what do we call it?’

  ‘The Spider.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the Spider,’ the Sultan repeated. ‘It’s an instrument he chains to a wall. Eight red-hot iron claws sink into the woman’s breasts. When she’s yanked away from the wall, her breasts are ripped off. They stay behind in the claws.’

  He giggled.

  ‘-like a spider that’s eating its prey, you see!’

  He thrust a telegram at me.

  ‘Read!’ he commanded with swelling indignation. ‘Read!’

  The telegram had been dispatched from Greece. Oddly it was in English, the text succinct. It ordered the Sultan to abdicate ‘in favour of your son Prince Mehmed Abid or you too will suffer your Chief Armourer’s lot’.

  It set a deadline, the seventh of September.

  I passed the telegram to Holmes who read it silently.

  The Sultan’s voice rose to a shriek.

  ‘An ultimatum, Messieurs! The whole world speculates on my future. This is proof! Incontrovertible proof! A treasonous plot hatched like murderous hens by those wretched officers garrisoned in Salonika, men I provided with every advantage. I hear the mutinous officers have even selected a villa where I’m to live out the remainder of my days. A villa!’

  He thrust his hands into a pile of telegrams at his side.

  ‘Look! Look at these! Despatched from all over my Empire assuring me of my peoples’ love and respect. Salonika is not a city! It’s populated only by Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, followers of Shabbetai Zevi, Gipsies. Each of these groups keeps well away from each other as though fearing a contagion.’

  Holmes and I stood silent.

  ‘That date, Mr. Holmes,’ the Sultan flared, his breathing harsh, ‘that date - the date the traitors have chosen - is the thirtieth anniversary of my accession. Telegrams will be received here at Yildiz from every corner of my Empire, even from that city of vipery Salonika, congratulating me on my rule, while this...’ - he reached out and snatched the telegram back and shook it savagely - ‘this orders me to pack or meet my doom on that very same day.’

  A sudden piteous look overtook the bravado.

  ‘Their key to success lies in the Sword of Osman. The Sword is their malediction. Unless it’s returned within days - nay hours - I shall be caught like a rat in a trap. I’m certain the cooks and scullions and carpenters and electricians - even my gardeners - are preparing to flee.’

  Speaking as though the man was not at his side, the Sultan went on, ‘Even my Chief Black Eunuch will open the doors of the Palace to the assassins to avoid having the noose placed around his neck.’

  ‘Sir,’ I intervened, deeply attentive to Sir Edward Grey’s wish to keep this creature on his throne, ‘you seem to know who these conspirators are, where they live, how they communicate. Why haven’t you long since accepted the counsel of your advisers - and the admonitions of your thirteenth wife - and rounded up these scallywags? Why haven’t you already put them on trial?’

  The distraught figure before us cried with some bitterness, ‘And perhaps bring about the very events I fear most?’

  He made a grotesque attempt at a smile.

  ‘I am like the hen who is asked by the cook, “Dear fowl, would you like to be served up with a sweet sauce or a sour sauce - which do you prefer?” In either case I will be throttled, cooked and eaten.’

  His voice dropped to a rasping whisper. ‘They plan to kill me just as they killed my uncle, the late Sultan Abdülaziz. They said the Sultan killed himself! At the Old Seraglio. Can you believe it? Why should a sultan kill himself? When the holy men prepared the body for the tomb they saw a tiny mark above the heart. It could only have been the wound of a stiletto.’

  Tears welled up in his eyes. ‘When I’m murdered they’ll put my brother Reshad on the throne as their puppet. He’ll do whatever they say.’

  He gave us a despairing look.

  ‘Before you sits a man who doesn’t know which way to turn. It was my misfortune to come on the stage of history at a time the Empire was bankrupt and could not defend itself against its many enemies. What is life? It’s a seed blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act. We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Worse than a shadow - misery. In the face of aggression from without and sabotage from within, I wage as valiant a battle as I can and must, to preserve what remains of this once mighty Empire.’

  With a ghastly gesture, as though dangling from a noose, he added, ‘You see before you a man who is at present five feet six inches in your measurement. As a boy I prayed to the ninety-nine names of Allah to let me grow up to be five feet nine at least. One should beware what one asks of the All-Compassionate, the All-Merciful. Soon He may grant me my wish. Have you seen the corpses hanging beneath Galata Bridge, how they elongate?’

  From his trembling lips came loud, vaporous laughter.

  ‘I ordered my physician to measure the cadavers before and after. A man of my size who dies by the noose lengthens at least three of your inches. My boyhood prayer will come true.’

  A slight signal from the Chief Black Eunuch indicated it was time to leave. At the door I glanced back. God’s shadow on the Universe, the ruler of vast and mysterious dominions stretching from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, the Danube to the Nile, sat sessile, shrivelled, as catatonic as the mummy of Ramses the Second.

  The Sultan caught my look. A slight smile flickered briefly around his lips. His melancholy voice followed us out into the garden: ‘Dr. Watson, if word comes I’m to be deposed, they will find me reading your chronicles while their tread grows ever nearer. I shall start on The Return of Sherlock Holmes tonight.’

  In our carriage Holmes declared, as though to himself, ‘Dear me! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! I can see only two things
for certain at present. The sword goes missing. In Pera the Chief Armourer dies...’

  He looked at me. His eyebrows tightened.

  ‘Mehmed meets a violent death during the very hours we know a drama was being enacted in the Palace. Why?’

  ‘Chance, Holmes, surely?’ I protested. ‘Aren’t you reading too much into...’

  ‘You suggest the Chief Armourer’s murder so soon after the sword disappeared was mere coincidence? The odds against would be enormous.’

  He turned to stare back at Yildiz.

  ‘Clever idea, death, isn’t it, Watson?’ he mused. ‘I wonder who came up with it?’

  Back aboard the battleship Holmes and I separated to dress for dinner. As we parted he said, ‘We must pay a visit to a cemetery.’

  ‘A cemetery?’ I queried, perplexed. ‘Any cemetery?’

  ‘The cemetery where the Chief Armourer is to be buried. We need to investigate the circumstances of his death. Our dragoman will have to tell us where and when the funeral is to take place.’

  ***

  At dinner my comrade was particularly preoccupied, almost aloof, despite the cheery conversation around the table. The meal came to an end. We lit our pipes. The suggestion was made to play a few agreeable hands of Bull.

  ‘Surgeon Lieutenant Learson,’ the Commodore observed from the head of the immense mahogany table, ‘one advantage of putting into port here is fresh fruit from the Fethiye market.’

  His hands were grasping a large bowl piled high with cherries, apricots, pomegranates, lemons, unripe plums, grapes and figs. He gave the bowl a push towards me. It started on its journey down the polished surface, turning slowly, a carousel of purple, yellow, blue, green and red pennants. I saw Holmes’s head jerk forward. He was staring as though hypnotised by the bowl sliding towards us. He flung his napkin on the table and sprang to his feet.

  In a voice of thunder my comrade exclaimed, ‘Watson, we have been the stupidest fellows in Europe!’

  The Commodore and his sea-captains gaped as Holmes strode towards the Wardroom door beckoning me to accompany him. He turned back to address the bewildered company.

  ‘Gentlemen, the Surgeon Lieutenant and I thank you for an excellent repast. We must take our leave. Commodore, would you give orders for an inconspicuous boat to ferry us ashore in the morning?’

  Holmes withdrew a page from his pocket and scribbled on it.

  ‘We would appreciate it if you can arrange for this coded signal to be sent at once to our dragoman.’

  Outside, Holmes gripped my arm.

  ‘My dear fellow...’ I began, embarrassed at our abrupt exit.

  I was cut short.

  ‘Watson, the jewellery attached to Saliha Naciye’s hair in the garden...’

  ‘Just for that you tore us away from excellent company?’ I chided. ‘Couldn’t this have waited while we played a few hands of...’

  He propelled me swiftly across the deck to one of the immense guns, now silent and sinister in the light of the stars, the barrel pointing to the horizon.

  ‘My friend,’ came the savage reply, ‘do you suppose I would drag you away from your gambling if it was not of the utmost importance? I repeat, the jewels, what flowers did they depict? It’s imperative you remember precisely!’

  I cast my mind back to the still figure standing outside the window.

  I replied, ‘To the best of my recollection there were variegated buds, roses, jasmines, and jonquils. And ferns.’

  ‘Excellent, Watson,’ Holmes exclaimed. ‘And the jewels themselves?’

  ‘If we start at the buds, they were made from saltwater pearls, then the rubies...’

  ‘The colours, Watson, the colours! I believe you have the better of me in colour recall.’

  ‘The pearls...blue, champagne and green. And purple.’

  ‘As you say,’ Holmes breathed. ‘And the rubies? Again, the colour?’

  ‘Raspberry. And pink. And Pigeon’s-blood red. I would guess from Macedonia.’

  ‘You come into your own, Watson!

  ‘Next... jonquils...’

  ‘Yellow, if I’m not mistaken?’ Holmes broke in.

  ‘And something orange. I remember thinking it was the colour of a rare topaz. Finally, ferns. From peridots.’

  Shelmerdine had told us the Sultan’s peridots were sourced from meteorites which plunged into the great Anatolian Desert.

  ‘Peridots. So they were!’ Holmes exclaimed.

  I looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Surely you noticed?’ he pressed on. ‘The colours you described in her hair matched exactly in colour and order the garden flowers in the nosegay she held when we first glimpsed her outside the window.’

  ‘I confess I didn’t, Holmes,’ I responded. ‘Even if I had, what should I have made of it?’

  ‘That the jewels in her hair were a gift from the Sultan - they express a message of love. She matches them in the selection of flowers for the nosegay whenever she expects her Lord and Master to notice her - as when we observed her outside the window.’

  My brow furrowed.

  ‘Aren’t you making rather a meal of it? Given they’ve been married only two years and she has born him an heir...’

  ‘I make a meal of it for a reason which you might find of some interest,’ my comrade retorted icily, ‘which is that shortly after we left the Sultan’s presence she lay in wait for us with a nosegay to take to the bazaar, isn’t that so?’

  ‘She did,’ I agreed. ‘So?’

  ‘That bouquet, the one she begged us to deliver, naturally you noticed the sequence of flowers was entirely different from the one you’ve just described. Yet she couldn’t have plucked fresh flowers and settled their arrangement in so short a time.’

  Flustered, I asked, ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning, my friend,’ he returned darkly, ‘it wasn’t just a simple tussie-mussie. She prepared the bouquet ahead of our arrival.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘To transmit a message. Unknowingly we delivered a secret message. One which may have been pivotal in this matter.’

  ‘A message slipped into the nosegay?’ I exclaimed. ‘Who’d ever have thought...?’

  ‘...that she’d risk writing a note? No-one. She didn’t. Any one of the Palace retinue could have intercepted us before we left Yildiz.’

  ‘If it wasn’t a note tucked in the nosegay how else could she have sent it through us?’

  ‘The flowers were the message, how else! It could equally well have been a trug of fruit such as we saw on the Commodore’s table. Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall published Sur Le Langage des Fleurs over a hundred years ago. He described a secret language known to the Greek and Armenian women with the same access to the harems as the Jewess Chiarezza.’

  ‘Holmes,’ I said dismissively, ‘even so, the Sultan’s wife could merely have been asking for the latest hat from Paris.’

  ‘Then why the urgency?’ came the rejoinder. ‘Why should she approach two strangers to smuggle a posy out of Yildiz if it concerned only a hat?’

  ‘Then what?’ I asked.

  Holmes shook his head.

  ‘As yet I’ve no idea.’

  We Meet The Chief Armourer’s Widow

  Our message to Shelmerdine was met with a swift reply.

  ‘The Chief Armourer is to be buried tomorrow. He’ll be interred at the Eyüp Sultan Mosque near the tomb of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari where the Sancak-i Şerif, the banner of the Prophet, is kept. It’s on the western reaches of the Golden Horn. Come ashore at 8am.’

  The dragoman awaited us a slight distance from the jetty, seated on a cart decorated with high wooden arches hung with thick red woollen tassels. Two large oxen with the lustrous eyes of Brahma the Creator turned to watch us as
we approached. Shelmerdine stayed hidden behind the cart’s drapes.

  ‘Cover up your uniforms with these,’ he ordered.

  He threw each of us a pair of trousers known as şalvar and an outer cloak reaching to the ankles, with a cowl and long sleeves. Aboard the cart I saw we were now attired in exactly the same clothing as the dragoman. With a sombre look, he thrust a copy of the Journal de Constantinople into my hand. Shelmerdine had pencilled a translation of the headline in the margin. On the front page beneath a large advertisement in English for tinned Nestlé condensed milk (‘Protect your baby against cholera’) were the dramatic words ‘His Majesty’s Life in Peril? Who Are These Men? Could they be British Assassins?’ followed by ‘Skills of a Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of Baker Street Required’.

  The centre-piece was a large photograph taken on the morning Dreadnought dropped anchor. In the foreground, the Imperial barge was heading towards our battleship. A large arrow superimposed on the photo pointed past the barge to two people in naval uniforms clambering awkwardly into the Haroony. We were highlighted by a circle around us.

  Shelmerdine handed me a typed translation of the article.

  It read, ‘Who are these men? They were transported to our shores aboard the great new British battleship. At first sight they appear to be British Naval Officers. They wear the dress uniform of the British Royal Navy. That’s obvious to all. But reliable sources tell us discrepancies show them to be imposters. Look at their Ceremonial Swords. See how each sword rests in its scabbard. How can this be? The British Navy officer always carries his sword. Our special correspondent checked with the Naval Attaché in Pera. Whenever getting on or off a barge a genuine officer in the Royal Navy would employ the ‘Senior Officer’s Carry’ favoured by members of the British Royal Family.’