by Tim Symonds
I grabbed the pair of prismatic binoculars from around my neck and held them out.
I had scrambled out of an awkward place. The Sultan’s eyes lit up. With an expression of appreciation he grasped the strap and pulled it over his head.
Our exchange of gifts completed, my host clambered to his feet. As he led me towards the doorway he pointed at the remarkable pistol now in my pocket.
‘I absolutely hate putting anyone to death but it is important that a ruler does so once in a while.’
The thought clearly cheered him. He wiggled a forefinger.
‘Therefore,’ he continued, ‘every once in a while my trigger-finger gets itchy.’
His expression changed. He pressed my arm in a cold, dank grasp.
‘When you return to England, please give my good wishes to the King. Our paths intersect in many ways. He may rule over more than 50 million Muhammadans in India but I am their spiritual overlord. Tell him I want to deepen my friendship with England. England asks nothing of me and I have nothing to fear of her.’
Given the implied threat to encourage our Indian subjects to revolt, I asked, did the Sultan mean a cordial exchange of letters or a fully-fledged agreement such as the King had signed with France two years before?
‘An Entente!’ he exclaimed, his eyes lighting up. ‘Yes. Certainly. That would be good. An Entente Cordiale.’
He reflected for a moment.
‘Though perhaps not quite such an open one. More discreet. More surreptitious. We could get Foxy Ferdinand to word it. He’s a master of the politique de bascule.’
There was another pause, then, ‘Dr. Watson, it would benefit me greatly if England signed such an agreement. I could fend off the Young Turks with all their slavish admiration of the Kaiser.’
A crafty expression was drifting across the Sultan’s face. Unaware Sir Edward Grey was well apprised of his pact with the Kaiser he continued, ‘We could sign a secret military convention, a secret annexe. Guarantee the integrity of our territories if either of us is attacked. You will tell His Imperial Majesty what we have discussed?’ he asked eagerly.
‘The very next time I see him,’ I promised.
It was clear he and the Bulgarian Knyaz had much in common. Both would coquette first with one and then another of the Powers as they deemed best for the advancement of their interests, and as quickly double-cross the one or other.
Abd-ul-Hamid face brightened.
‘Dr. Watson, one more thing. Please thank Mr. Sherlock Holmes for the lecture on ears. How their shape is passed down father to son.’
‘What of it?’ I asked, mystified.
‘It has proved of quite inestimable value. Last night I conducted a survey of my fourteen sons. Four had ears they couldn’t possibly have inherited from me.’
With a ghastly grin he added, ‘At midnight my Head Gardener did a bit of weeding out.’ He pointed out at the glistening Bosphorus, calm and beautiful in the summer sun. ‘Their mothers too.’
Our association had come to its end. There was no photograph to mark the occasion, no formal finish. There was no vote of thanks, no valedictory speech. We just left off meeting. The dog barks, the caravan moves on.
The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine as I walked through the gardens of this Eastern palace for the last time. Bulbuls sang in the hedges and trees. With relief I emerged well before dusk set in. No other comparable space on earth could be as brooding and baleful even by day.
Holmes was waiting for me at an agreed rendezvous on Seraglio Point. From the heights we had a most excellent view to the shores of Scutari over the Sweet Waters, the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and its islands. I gave an amusing account of how I had presented my binoculars to the ‘Padishah’ before spending a short while bringing my notes up to date. I copied down the words of an earlier English traveller to these parts, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: ‘From where we stood, the faraway minarets of the city mingled with sea and shore, light and shade. The reds of the sunset were dissolving into greys. The softness and the Eastern charm could hardly be equalled anywhere else in the whole world’.
***
It was nearing the time to go to the water’s edge to await the arrival of the cases and cages and shake Stamboul’s dust and dung from our shoes. We engaged a Spider phaeton drawn by two smart snowy-coated stallions to take us down the steep slope to the Golden Horn. Dreadnought was dressed all over with flags. An anchor was suspended from the starboard deck edge. Her funnel covers had been removed. Steam billowed up. On Galata Bridge, gaggles of fishermen were trying their luck. Ever impatient, Holmes went ahead to the battleship. I stood alone at the dockside waiting for the birds and plants, reeling from the revelation he had made only moments earlier.
‘How is it possible?’ I asked myself.
Holmes had sworn me to complete secrecy.
‘If you reveal what I’ve just told you to anyone - anyone at all,’ he adjured, ‘you’ll have broken the great trust between us, and the honour of your regiment in India - the Bombay Grenadiers, wasn’t it?’
‘No, Holmes, it wasn’t,’ I retorted coldly. ‘The Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, then the Berkshires.’
Ignoring my rebuke he insisted on an embargo on the information he had just imparted. I assented reluctantly.
‘Nevertheless Holmes, I find it impossible to believe what you say. I’m perfectly certain the air of Stamboul has got to you. You’re suffering from some unaccountable hallucination, what you called l’illusion des sosies.’
‘I’ll agree with you, my friend,’ he replied, ‘if when he turns up his sole topic of conversation is England’s weather.’
With that, Holmes stepped aboard the Haroony and chugged away.
***
Minutes later a timber-jam came down the slope, the motion akin to a ship in heavy seas, alarmingly tip-tilting to the verge of upsetting. The cart overflowed with Wardian cases filled with plants selected by the Sultan’s Head Gardener and cages choc-a-bloc with flurried birds destined for the Zoological Society. Some birds I recognised from my stint in Afghanistan - woodpeckers, rails and crakes, black storks, Glossy Ibises and a pair of Greater Flamingos.
Behind it hurried our dragoman, my Quarter Plate camera under one arm, some packages in his free hand. On sighting me at the waterside a frown was replaced by his eager half-smile. He handed over the camera and the packages of saffron and Kofte Bahari. We stood talking while the cases and cages were swung from the land into Dreadnought’s launch. I’d grown to like Shelmerdine in our short time together. I did not share Holmes’s unaccountable coolness, even deprecation towards him. Our interpreter had performed his task impeccably. His interpretation of language and culture was greatly enhanced by his knowledge of English customs, as displayed in, ‘If you meet Djafer Aga, take care. Don’t be fooled by your English concept of a eunuch. The First Black Eunuch is the third highest-ranking officer of the empire, after the Sultan and Ali Pasha, the Grand Vizier. He’s the equivalent of your erstwhile Grooms of the Stole’. Noting the smart naval uniforms at our first encounter he exclaimed (disingenuously, I realised later), ‘Mr. Holmes, a Royal Navy Commander! Dr. Watson, an RN Surgeon Lieutenant! I was expecting two middle-aged gentlemen sporting tweed suits, black silk cravats, bowler hats and Javanese canes’.
I pointed up at the Palace.
‘The Chief Armourer’s body,’ I asked. ‘What will happen to it? Will they...?’
Perhaps because we were parting for the last time he replied in a more unceremonious manner: ‘Terrible things, Doctor! After your revelations they’ll disinter his corpse from the boneyard and string his disjecta membra on pegs at the outside gate.’
‘Really!’ I exclaimed, revolted.
Shelmerdine grinned.
‘No, though you might expect that. In fact he’ll be treated with great respect.
The Padishah himself intends to chance his own life and attend a special ceremony at the grave-side...weeping.’
Startled, I asked, ‘Why would the Sultan...?’
‘Think of it, Dr. Watson, do you suppose Abd-ul-Hamid will want his people to know someone so close to him, so beholden to him, would throw his lot in with conspirators intent on sending the Great Khan packing - the Custodian of the holy sites of Makkah, Madinah and Jerusalem menaced by a plot at whose core lay his own bladesmith? For the same reason he’ll go along with Mr. Holmes’s ingenious exculpation of Saliha Naciye without believing a tittle of it. The Sultan knows the Chief Armourer could have replaced the Sword of Osman with a Prussian cavalryman’s rusty sabre from the Battle of Waterloo and she wouldn’t know the difference. She’ll survive only because it makes a much more favourable story to put around the bazaars that a plot by renegades to dethrone him was foiled rather than led by the mother of his son. You may be certain that Saliha Naciye will find her freedoms curtailed. There’ll be no further passage of nosegays between the seraglio and the bazaars.’
‘Will you report Mehmed’s death in the newspapers?’
‘Certainly,’ he affirmed.
‘That he died of...?’
‘Gout.’
I reflected how Holmes and I had merely to make our way in the country of our birth, a land where the rule of law was preeminent, where justice could be obtained and a normal life led not just day to day but from conception to burial. By contrast, daily - hourly - Shelmerdine had to observe rules of etiquette as overblown and intricate as the Moghul. He had to survive a despotism where talk even in one’s kitchen was dangerous, to wend his way in a world of the utmost cruelty and unpredictability. Where life was so dispensable a sultan could drown his entire harem in a fit of jealousy and rage.
Shelmerdine dropped his voice. ‘Doctor, I hope I’ve been of some help in your endeavours...you said there was a second plot. The schemers must fear imminent exposure. As you and Mr. Holmes may never grace our shores again, kindly tell me - in the utmost confidence - what about this other conspiracy?’
I looked up at Yildiz. In my mind I could see the rose and tulip and fenugreek gardens, the bowers with ivy and wisterias, the lion statues, water pouring from their mouths, in whose proximity you could talk confidentially. Here too, at the water’s edge, we could talk in safety, our voices drowned by the constant roar of harbour traffic and the shouts of people selling their wares on Galata Bridge.
I answered, ‘The moment we recognised a forgery it was clear there was a second plot, organised with great care and brilliance. One which was at the very instant of being sprung. The real sword had already been stolen - but by whom? Had we not arrived when we did, I’m confident the conspiracy would have succeeded. The Sultan would be in exile. Or dead.’
‘Yet you have no clues at all to the malefactors’ identities?’
‘Regarding the head conspirator, no. Nothing,’ I replied. ‘Unfortunately, when Saliha Naciye poisoned the Chief Armourer, she killed off the trail. However my comrade has deduced the identity of the principal agent.’
‘The principal agent!’ Shelmerdine exclaimed.
His eyes, unblinking, were fixed on mine.
‘The mastermind’s agent,’ I affirmed. ‘You see, there was one critical difference between the plots.’
‘Which was?’
‘One conspiracy could only have been conducted from within the Palace. That was clearly Saliha Naciye’s.’
‘And the other?’
‘By a collaborator quartered outside the walls of Yildiz.’
‘Why certainly, we know the Young Turks...’
‘Nowhere near as far off as Salonika,’ I replied.
‘Then where?’
‘In the very heart of Stamboul.’
Shelmerdine looked shocked. After a short while he asked, ‘You say Mr. Holmes has worked out that villain’s identity?’
‘He has.’
‘If that’s so,’ Shelmerdine responded, ‘why doesn’t your colleague reveal his name to the Sultan?’
He gestured towards the Bosphorus. ‘So His Sublimity can wreak his customary revenge.’
‘Because the agent may well know where the true Sword of Osman lies concealed,’ I replied.
‘And that could be of value to you?’
‘To Holmes and me personally, no. To a certain Imperial Power, yes.’
The dragoman cast a speculative eye at HMS Dreadnought.
‘That Power being?’
‘One which doesn’t for the while seek the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.’
‘Ah,’ he said.
After a pause he asked, ‘By any chance would it be England?’
‘It’s possible.’
Shelmerdine laughed loudly as though relieved.
‘I can see your hands are tied,’ he continued. ‘But you say you know who he is, by name even?’
‘We shall never reveal the surrogate’s identity, certainly not to Yildiz.’
Shelmerdine held out his hand in a final goodbye. With a comical pomposity of manner he bowed solemnly.
‘It’s been,’ he said, ‘one of the great privileges of my life to have met you in person.’
Whether he meant Holmes and me or, flatteringly, me alone, I couldn’t tell.
As he turned to leave he remarked with uncommon familiarity, ‘Dr. Watson, I admire loyalty to one’s friends but I put it to you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes hasn’t the faintest idea who this agent is, any more than he can identify the mastermind. The great gumshoe bluffs.’
The impudent use of ‘gumshoe’ riled me. When he had taken a few paces I called out, ‘The great gumshoe never bluffs, Shelmerdine’.
I pointed up at the Palace glinting in the evening sun. ‘But don’t worry, the skeleton in your closet is perfectly safe with us.’
I stepped on to the loaded pinnace and debouched. Because of the dragoman’s unaccustomed effrontery I had broken the solemn vow wrung from me by Holmes barely thirty minutes earlier. Shelmerdine stood alone among the hustle and bustle of the shore. He called out something, his words indistinguishable in the hubbub of evening traffic and the whistling of boats.
***
Early the next morning a steamboat passed close to our battleship. A small package addressed ‘to the Surgeon Lieutenant’ was thrown up to a watchful crew member. I opened the parcel to discover a stonepast dish from the Iznik potteries. A beautiful bird, blue, champagne and green, rested on gently swaying plants bearing pinkish-purple carnations, yellow tulips, and cyan hyacinths. There was no note. The colours of the dish’s flowers echoed the nosegay Saliha Naciye held to her nostrils when we first caught sight of her through the pavilion window. The Sultan’s thirteenth wife had already devised a new line of communication to the outside world.
Led by Dreadnought the fleet steamed into the Sea of Marmara on its journey back to Gibraltar. Within minutes we attained full speed. I watched the minarets and domes of the ancient city fast disappearing behind us. As with Alice returning from Wonderland, ‘all would change to dull reality’. The curtain of a past which had swung aside only days before was swinging shut. The brilliance of Yildiz, the kiosks and rooms - the gardens - all would evanesce. The Sultan, the Chief and Second Black Eunuchs, the dead Chief Armourer, the exiled Chiarezza, Saliha Naciye herself, in or out of the luminous ghillie suit, Stamboul and its smells and bazaars and spies and yelps of stray dogs, would tip-toe away to a dark place, like the genii of One Thousand And One Nights. It would only be through access to my notes that I would recollect reality from myth.
The British fleet came alive with lights, flags and semaphore, at pains to show the Navy as competent and ready for action. Dreadnought’s heavy guns thundered. The detonations would make all Stamboul’s hermetically latticed windows shake. It was
a convincing adieu, a demonstration of England’s ability to ‘hit first, hit hard and go on hitting’ anywhere in the world. About seven sea miles out we heard a single cannon shot from the direction of the General Staff Headquarters in Tophane. I looked at my pocket watch. It was around a quarter past nine, the customary time for the cannon to announce the death of a traitor.
***
Eight days after we steamed away from Galata Bridge Gibraltar loomed. For the final stage of the journey I assisted the battleship’s regular naval surgeon in treatment of the pox from which it seemed half the crew now suffered. On the last night at sea Holmes presented Commander Bacon with a precious First Edition of The Washing Away of Wrongs, composed in 1235 A.D. by the Chinese death investigator Sung Tz’u. In return the Commander presented us with the fruit bowl which had set Holmes on Saliha Naciye’s trail, now filled with the finest dates, almonds, dried apricots, topped with Rahat loukoum from Hadji Bekir’s Lumps of Delight factory near the Galata Bridge head.
At sun-up I packed my belongings and left them at the open cabin door. A rating hurried out from the electric telegraph booth. He stopped when he saw me and held out a sealed envelope.
‘Lieutenant Learson, sir, if you’re on your way to join Commander Hewitt, could I ask you to hand this to him? It came this morning.’
He paused.
‘And, sir, any chance you could leave The Mystery of the Ocean Star behind when you go?’
I gave Holmes the message. He read it and passed it across to me without comment.
‘Sir Edward Grey to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
BALMORAL CASTLE
August 3, 1906.
‘My dear Holmes, I have discussed with the King in private your latest endeavours on our country’s behalf. You have not only his deepest thanks and those of His Majesty’s Government (even though neither’s gratitude cannot be openly displayed) but those of His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, who professes to be ‘touché jusqu’aux larmes’ by your kindness and concern. Critics may find many mistakes and short-comings in England’s foreign policy of the last hundred years but it is at least a tenable view that in this instance the conduct of those affairs has been suited to the development and needs of our Empire.