Death on a Pale Horse: Sherlock Holmes on Her Majesty's Secret Service

by Donald Thomas

  “Yet they failed?”

  “Only because of the suspicious ease with which they had fallen into the hands of the Tsar’s agents. That should have alerted all the great powers. Conflict was avoided, but distrust between nations has immeasurably increased. The name of the innocent and admirable Comtesse de Flandre was cynically exploited. Next time—and there will be a next time—our enemies will have learnt by their mistakes.”

  “But there was no war this time.”

  He shook his head.

  “It was close, Watson. The Russian High Command issued secret orders to its forward units to advance within sight of the Hungarian frontier. The Hungarian ministry replied with a confidential warning to St. Petersburg: ‘If war should be forced upon us, Hungary will do her duty.’ St. Petersburg at length offered promises of peace to the Austrian Emperor, but Vienna refused to suspend its military preparations in return for promises alone. It called up all reservists for ten days’ training in the use of the new repeating rifle. Mycroft tells me that Lord Salisbury summoned the Turkish Ambassador privately to Downing Street. The Prime Minister promised that England would never consent to an alteration in the balance of power in the Mediterranean. The Royal Navy put to sea. It was nearly a bonfire of all the treaties and all the hopes.”

  He slid the weighty scrapbook back into its place on the bottom shelf. I stood there, trying to remember how it was that I had not noticed his preoccupation with a great diplomatic crisis at the time. Of course! It had come and gone during that summer fortnight of my visit to the Devonshire cousins. I had lost myself in the pleasures of fishing for trout on Exmoor, among the steep rocky falls of Heddon’s Mouth by the Bristol Channel, or facing the breeze on the links of Woolacombe golf club above the sandhills and the Atlantic surges. Now that seemed like another world. Over all my thoughts lay a sense of awe that this brotherhood of political gangsters had brought millions of their fellow human beings to the brink of destruction in the name of financial profit.

  Holmes lay back luxuriously in his chair and sent up several blue-grey wreaths of smoke from his pipe.

  “The Comtesse de Flandre,” I said hopefully.

  He stood up abruptly, his back to the fireplace, and frowned at the carpet. “Why not try the new moon?”

  “I don’t think I follow you, Holmes.”

  “Do you not? Consider the message that was waiting for you this morning. I believe that the last two words, concerning the moon, may be more important than the esteemed Comtesse de Flandre. They specify a time. In doing so they eliminate at least twenty-seven of twenty-eight possible dates in the month ahead.”

  “It would be dark at the new moon.”

  “Indeed it would. Perhaps we are to meet our foe during the hours of darkness, that is to say approximately between seven o’clock at night and seven o’clock in the morning.”

  He turned again to the bookshelves and took out a familiar cheaply bound volume. It was the current issue of Old Moore’s Almanac, sold by the street vendors of Piccadilly. Flipping through it, he came to the tides and phases of the moon.

  “For what it matters, Watson, the new moon is on 29 March, just a couple of weeks away. We may suppose that it is the next new moon which is indicated. If not, then this message would have very little value as information or as an ultimatum.”

  “And the Comtesse de Flandre? Why should the phases of the moon matter to her? At this time of year, she is probably on her way to the Swiss lakes or the Venice Lido.”

  He struck a match and furrowed his brow. Something was going on in his mind, but for the life of me I could not tell what. He shook out the match, drew on his pipe, and his brow was clear again.

  “Riva,” he said presently. “It is a picturesque little town at the Austrian end of Lake Garda. There was a brief notice not long ago in the Court Circular of The Times. If memory serves, the Comtesse and her children were to be guests of her Sigmaringen cousins at their lakeside villa there during the early spring.”

  “What can the new moon mean to her out there? Or anywhere, come to that?”

  He walked across to the window and stood staring out across the reflected sunset of the foggy London sky. I knew better than to disturb him in such a mood.

  “Fool!” he said softly, a moment later, and I knew he did not mean me.

  He turned to the bookshelves again and drew out another flimsily bound handbook. It had the familiar livery of Bradshaw’s railway timetable, but he did not turn to the usual pages. I could tell from their colour that he had found an appendix detailing international rail services to Paris, Brussels, or Berlin and the steamer times for the Continental ferries. He stood motionless and performed a little mental arithmetic.

  “I believe, Watson, I owe you a very great apology for wasting your time over the identity of the Comtesse de Flandre.”

  “But not for revealing the activities of such political scoundrels as Rawdon Moran.”

  His face brightened a little and he looked up from the columns of figures.

  “You are correct. I believe, however, that our Comtesse de Flandre is not the sister of the King of Rumania, nor the wife of Philippe, Comte de Flandre, nor the mother of his five children. To be sure, she is a creature of the greatest elegance; but she has a heart of steel. She is also the property of a good many admirers.”

  He chuckled and I knew what was coming next.

  “She also has two paddle-wheels, two funnels, and a two-compound diagonal engine capable of driving her at sixteen knots.”

  For the first time in the course of this case, he put back his head and laughed with all the power of his lungs. As for the ship, I had little difficulty in imagining her. In my Scottish childhood, the Clyde and the other rivers, as well as the islands and coastal waters, depended for their transport and supplies on these trim well-balanced paddle steamers. Named after nobility and heroes of legend, they plied from pier to pier among the little harbours of the western coast. They were about two hundred feet long and some thirty feet in the beam. At a speed between twelve and twenty knots, they could carry as many as four or five hundred passengers. Their build made them exceptionally manoeuvrable and, being flat-bottomed, they could work in as little as six or eight feet of water. Under the top deck, there were saloons and a bar, providing cover in wet weather.

  He glanced at the timetable again.

  “It appears that the ship is owned by the Belgian government and works the Ostend-to-Dover crossing with another paddler, the Princesse Henriette. Strange, is it not, that the ships are named after the chaste and worthy Comtesse de Flandre and her daughter? It is one more indication of the public distaste felt for the libidinous and cruel King Leopold of the Belgians.”

  “But suppose the message is an enemy’s challenge rather than a friend’s warning. After all, what can a passenger ferry matter to men whose ambition is to precipitate war between major European powers? Is it not far more likely that their target is again the Comtesse de Flandre herself, rather than a cross-channel ferry which happens to be named after her?”

  He thought about this briefly and shook his head.

  “Watson, your taste for writing up our modest investigations as a romance of crime is, as you know, a matter of indifference to me. But I remain a simple soul. Common sense tells me that a new moon is less likely to be of consequence to a royal lady than to a passenger ship, its captain, and its crew. The state of the sky, the position of the stars, and the phases of the moon are the rulers of their lives. I daresay you are right and I am wrong, but that is how I see it. Moreover, I prefer the promise of skulduggery on the high seas to an invitation from the Italian lakes.”

  “But have we not been given a time and place where we are challenged to go and settle accounts? Are we not invited to ride from a view to a death by a man who is master of the kill?”

  “I believe you will find, Watson, that this is a message from a friend.”

  “And if you are wrong?”

  He winced, as if at a spasm of
pain.

  “My dear fellow, I am not in the habit of being wrong.”

  He knew more than he was telling me, but his expression was as innocent as a sleeping child’s. I tried again.

  “Holmes, if what you say is true, the last thing we should do is to go anywhere near this ship or the new moon!”

  His fingers beat a slow but impatient tattoo on the arm of his chair.

  “You think not?”

  “Suppose you are right and suppose this reference is to the ship. Our adversaries will watch us every moment from now on, as I am sure they have already done. If there are enough of them, the most amateur villains could accomplish that—and these are no amateurs. When the time comes, they need only lie in wait, as professional hunters do. For us, a ship is a natural trap if ever there was one. This may not even be the work of Rawdon Moran.”

  He raised his forefinger an inch from his chair-arm and spoke quietly.

  “I think you are wrong there, Watson. This little matter has become personal between us.”

  “Well, then, he will have an alibi and half a dozen hired footpads whom we shall not know from Adam. On a ship of any kind, they have only to choose a convenient moment, shoot us through the head or hit us across it, and throw us overboard.”

  “They will most certainly have us in their sights,” he said thoughtfully; “I assume that they will know our every movement. They will also choose a time and place to their own advantage. And in that lies the greatest danger to them.”

  8

  Not long ago, I should have regarded the glance of a passing stranger as accidental. I should have supposed that the attitude of some lounger against a pillar of the Lyceum Theatre was habitual sloth. Now, I looked twice to see how such people reacted as I passed them. Did they communicate by a furtive signal to a confederate behind me? My apprehensions could never prove anything of the sort, but that left me all the more uneasy.

  I had gone to an exhibition in Kensington Gallery. I stood with my back to the door, studying a watercolour of a spirited young lady, “The Milkmaid of Cowes,” braving a stiff breeze to catch the attention of a Royal Yachtsman. The disadvantage of a picture hung to face doors and windows is that it also mirrors the interior of the room and the admirer. I did not at first catch a reflection of the person behind me until he began to turn away. Seen in the glass, it was the build of Moran seen from the rear, down to the whiskers and the cut of the hair.

  I swung round, hoping and believing I should confront a complete stranger. I was even prepared to find that it was Moran. Worst of all, this onlooker had vanished. In the time it took me to turn, it would have been easy for the image in the picture-glass to move deftly through half a dozen steps and disappear among the display-boards.

  There were two or three other incidents of a similar kind. In none of them could I be sure of anything. I was walking home from Maida Vale by lamplight. I turned into Clifton Gardens, where the Regents Park Canal runs down the centre of this leafy avenue. The cream-painted Regency terraces rose on either side and a broad pavement extended before them. There was no immediate means of access to the other side of the water from where I was walking. Suddenly he was standing there. Was it “he,” or not? The man wore a swell’s costume of silk hat and crimson-lined black cape with a silver-knobbed stick in his hand. He was stationary, staring across the dark water in the lamplight—either at me or through me.

  I hurried on to see if he would follow parallel. Half a minute later, I turned quickly and looked back. He had gone. I could see all the way to Warwick Avenue. But the broad walks on either side were suddenly empty. His only refuge would have been in one of the cream-terraced houses. But which one, if any? And was it he?

  The following day, with no such thoughts in mind, I was passing a newly refurbished apartment block in a busy stretch of the Marylebone Road. If ever I saw the outline of Moran, it was the foreman on the flat roof, giving orders to a workman with a wheelbarrow. The odds were a thousand to one against it being so. Yet how easily a tile or a brick from the piles of material on that roof might slip off and brain a passer-by in the street below!

  I came down to breakfast the next morning. Sherlock Holmes almost always rose late. Though he was apt to say that an exception disproves the rule, there were some occasions during a case when I would come down at my usual time and find him gone out on an errand of his own. So it was today. His plates were cleared away, but the Morning Post was smooth and unread.

  All the same, I was not prepared to look across the room and find our Scotland Yard friend, Lestrade, sitting in my fireside armchair and reading my copy of The Times. He had the grace to get up as I came in.

  “Good morning, doctor; I trust I find you well. Mr. Holmes and I met on the doorstep. I was arriving as he was leaving to keep an appointment with his brother, Sir Mycroft, at Lancaster Gate, or so he said. He was kind enough to suggest that I might sit here quietly and wait for him.”

  “Have you nothing else to do?”

  The question sounded more discourteous than I had intended. I was not best pleased to find Lestrade in occupation of our sitting-room at such an hour. The inspector chuckled at my question and settled his jacket more comfortably upon his shoulders. I noticed that, unusually for him, he was wearing semi-official tweeds. I wondered where he might have been—or where he was going to. He sounded full of himself.

  “We all have a good deal to do this morning, doctor, but my visit here is a great part of it. Now do not allow me to stand between you and your breakfast.”

  He made a gesture of invitation towards the table, for all the world as though he were the host and I a guest in his house. I had no intention of eating my breakfast as a performance where he was to be the audience.

  “What brings you here so early?”

  He sat down again without invitation, as if to establish an indefinite tenancy. I noticed that Mrs. Hudson’s Molly had provided him with a cup of coffee.

  “What brings me here, sir, is much the same thing as takes Mr. Holmes and Sir Mycroft to Lancaster Gate.”

  I had no idea why my colleague and Brother Mycroft had gone to the Bayswater Road. All the same, I was damned if I would beg an explanation. Something like an evil smile of triumph lightened the inspector’s face. He almost wagged his finger at me.

  “Ah,” he said quietly, “I daresay Mr. Holmes has not told you about Lancaster Gate. Then I shall do so. I’m sure Mr. Holmes and I have no secrets from you.”

  The man was quite insufferable. Had I been fortified by a good breakfast, I should no doubt have dealt with him more robustly. As it was, I said grimly, “I shall be content to discuss the matter with Mr. Holmes on his return.”

  But there was no stopping him.

  “Your channel crossing on Friday week, sir. The Comtesse de Flandre.”

  It shook me a little that he should know of it already.

  “What of it?”

  He looked surprised.

  “Well, naturally it has taken Mr. Holmes to Lancaster Gate. To discuss the arrangements with Prince Napoleon-Jerome’s chiefof-staff. General Boulanger, I believe.”

  I was lost. Like anyone who had read the newspapers, I knew that since the assassination of the Prince Imperial, his stout and elderly cousin Prince Napoleon-Jerome, known to all the world as “Plon Plon,” had become the claimant to the French throne. But I should have thought he was as far from being Emperor of the French as the poor young man had been, after two decades of the Republic. Of course the novelty of that Republic was more than a little tarnished. There had been a tumultuous movement in France in favour of the maverick General Georges Boulanger, winner of elections in that country. His great and popular promises even extended to restoring the Empire, in the person of Plon Plon as Napoleon IV, upon democratic principles.

  Lestrade spoke quietly and confidentially.

  “First thing this morning, Mr. Holmes took it upon himself to send one of his little ragamuffins to Leadenhall Street, to the shipping agents. Such fi
rms open their doors almost as early as the railway stations. This little shaver was to engage accommodation for the two of you in the first-class saloon of the Comtesse de Flandre on Friday week. Back comes the message that the entire saloon is already taken by a certain party. So you’ll be travelling second class.”

  Having savoured the pleasure of our discomfiture, Lestrade continued.

  “Mr. Holmes’s budding spy kept his little ears open, asked a few questions of the messenger boys round those offices, and found out who that certain party is.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, naturally, Prince Napoleon-Jerome and his suite, coming back to London from exile in Switzerland. As soon as Mr. Holmes hears this, a message goes to your colleague’s noble brother. Sir Mycroft is to meet your friend at once. At the prince’s town house in Lancaster Gate.”

  Lestrade beamed and chuckled, just as though this were the best thing he had heard in years.

  “After all,” he said at last, “you’ll be crossing on the steamer anyway. Same crossing as Prince Napoleon. He’s an exile and there’s a law says he can’t set foot on the soil of France. There’s no way he can get between his estate in Switzerland and his mansion in London except by going through Belgium—and that means Ostend.”

  “Why should he need us?”

  Lestrade looked very uncomfortable, as if he ought to say nothing.

  “Put it this way, doctor. What’s boiling up in France? General Bou-lon-geur hoping to be president next month and the monarchy brought back. That can’t be done for nothing.”

  He illustrated the impossibility by a sucking sound and rubbing the tips of his thumb and forefinger together knowingly.