“Where’s the spondoolicks to be found?” he went on; “where’s the royal sparklers? They’ll be needed down the pawn shop in England, because that’s where the whole thing’s got to be launched from. But suppose this restoration was all to go smooth as goose grease, then your friend’s noble brother—and his friends—would be truly in the gravy for the help they’d given. I don’t somehow think he’d mind being Lord Mycroft Holmes of Mayfair, with a Légion d’Honneur medal into the bargain, would he?”
He paused and put down his coffee cup.
“Still, I’m sure you know about this already, sir. Otherwise I should never have dreamt of raising the subject.”
I left my breakfast aside but I sat down at the table. It had all come upon me too suddenly and too early in the day.
“Then Prince Napoleon-Jerome is our client.” It was a bewildered statement, but it sounded like a question. Lestrade inclined his head and spoke consolingly.
“Only for a bit, doctor. Just from Ostend to Dover. Even if he was to come to the throne now, he wouldn’t last long. For one thing, he’s too old. And as for his health, it don’t bear mentioning. What matters to him is getting his royal backside on the throne for a year or two, if you’ll pardon the expression. After that they’d get some young princeling to follow after him. Someone that’s every mother’s dream and every girl’s ambition. He could take his pick.”
He chortled again.
“Not like the girl he’s been keeping at Lancaster Gate—heard of her, have you? Cora Pearl? The Pearl from Plymouth, as she calls herself. The Pearl from Plymouth? She’s named as Emma Crouch in our Special Branch dossier. Cautioned for a bit of naughtiness in the Haymarket with a gentleman of importance a few years ago. Pearl from Plymouth! I’d give the baggage ‘Pearl from Plymouth,’ if she belonged to me.”
How I endured the next half-hour of these whimsies until Sherlock Holmes returned from Bayswater, I shall never know. Nor how I weathered a further half-hour before the inspector condescended to leave us and attend to his “busy” morning.
“Nothing is decided,” said Sherlock Holmes reassuringly, as soon as we were alone together. “I raised the matter in a telegram to Brother Mycroft first thing this morning. Something had to be done.”
“About the message at the Army and Navy club?”
“Just so. The Comtesse de Flandre. The period of new moon touches her steamer timetables on Friday week. I arranged for one of our little friends to slip away early this morning when no one was likely to notice him. I deduce that someone of importance is aimed at in this plot—but who? Our infant Mercury was to find out who had booked the first-class accommodation on the day in question. He informs me that the so-called royal saloon of the Comtesse de Flandre, which is in truth merely the first-class saloon on the after-deck, has been engaged for the Prince Napoleon-Jerome and his party.”
“To what purpose?”
“Plon Plon, as they call him, is leaving his exile at Prangins in Switzerland by rail and steamer for his London house in Lancaster Gate. From there, he will underwrite the coming election campaign to put General Boulanger in the Elysée Palace and himself in the Tuileries, wearing the crown of France. He is shipping to England a significant election war-chest, which I believe is the term used for the finances of a coup d’état.”
“What war-chest? Gold? Currency? Precious stones?”
“Not currency, I think. Other considerations apart, it would be too bulky. Also it would have to be in francs; and once this campaign to restore him begins in earnest, the franc will be destabilised. Gold bars to a sufficient value would be cumbersome. Whereas selected precious stones, packed in something no larger than a suitcase, might amount to a king’s ransom. To judge from movements on the commodities exchange over the past few weeks, that is where the money has gone. We must remember that in its recent history, the imperial family of France has sometimes had to escape its enemies at a moment’s notice. Even this prince once did so with the Queen of the Night in one pocket and a constellation of Mogul diamonds in his dressing case.”
I had had enough of this.
“What about the meeting at Lancaster Gate with Mycroft and Boulanger? What are we supposed to do? Are we to guard this trumpery during the channel dash while Moran or some brother villain tries to steal it?”
He looked at me as if I should have known better.
“We shall be responsible for both, my dear fellow. I propose that the war-chest shall act as bait to our enemies. But the most valuable item on the ship will be the person of Plon Plon himself. His supporters, including some in the British government and a good many in Parliament, intend him to be the new Emperor of France before the season is over. One bullet put into him now would alter the course of history. Mycroft assures me that there will already be three armed guards in the mailroom to protect the treasure. That is normal. That mailroom is in the after part of the vessel, behind a locked steel grille. The Ostend steamers are operated by the Belgium government. They are designed and constructed to be secure.”
“What about the French?”
“The prince will have with him Baron Brunet, his chief of staff, who carries a useful revolver. There is also His Highness’s servant, Theodore Cabell. It will not surprise you to know that Cabell is a marksman and is also a captain in the royal bodyguard. His present name may be something of a nom de guerre. The principal danger would be from a sudden ambush carefully laid. Our task is to frustrate any such attempt. All in all, Napoleon-Jerome is thought to be safe enough at close quarters.”
“As I recall, Holmes, the Prince Imperial was murdered in circumstances where he was thought to be safe enough.”
He sat down, crossed his legs, and lounged.
“The very point I made to Mycroft. However, our government does not intend to lose its distinguished guest on a channel crossing. He is far less protected on a steamer than on an express train. His chief of staff and his bodyguard will sit with him in a locked and guarded first-class saloon until he is safely in Dover. One or two of our Scotland Yard friends will come aboard there. You and I will merely have a roving brief, keeping our wits and our noses alert for any whiff of danger during the voyage.”
As international law then stood, Plon Plon would come under the protection of the British crown as soon as the Comtesse de Flandre entered British territorial waters. Thanks to Mycroft’s discussions at Lancaster Gate that morning, such protection was to be represented solely by Sherlock Holmes, with my assistance, until we reached Dover. If the note waiting for me at my club was indeed a challenge, it was plain that his enemies as well as his friends knew well in advance of the prince’s plans. In that case, I drew an uncomfortable conclusion. Either we should discharge our duty to the prince successfully, or we should probably all be dead before the Comtesse de Flandre docked at Dover.
9
For the rest of the week, I found it difficult to share Holmes’s enthusiasm for a fight to the finish. We might simply be victims of our antagonists’ sense of fun. We should board the Comtesse de Flandre at Ostend and disembark at Dover eight hours later, just as though no villainy had been intended. We should watch in the darkness and fog without ever setting eyes upon Plon Plon and his little court in their “royal saloon.” Perhaps whatever meaning we had read into the cryptic words “Comtesse de Flandre” and “New Moon” was entirely of our own invention. Only time would tell. Worst than that, we might land in England to hear that some monstrous robbery or homicide had taken place elsewhere; all our careful planning would have merely ensured that we were not there to prevent it.
I lay awake and tried to imagine why even the most inventive gang of criminals would announce to the world that it was about to board such a ship, hold a prince to ransom, overcome armed guards and a steel grille, and then escape in the middle of the sea. They would be fools to try it. Moran, whatever else he might be, had shown he was no fool. They certainly dared not remain on board when the steamer docked in England, for the harbour police wo
uld be waiting at Dover, supplemented by waterguard officers and reinforced if necessary by a party of riflemen from the duty regiment at Dover Castle.
It made very little difference to me when Holmes announced that he was going ahead of me as far as Brussels, a seventy-mile journey by rail. He would travel back by train to Ostend and we should meet at the pier an hour before the Comtesse de Flandre sailed. My friend’s appointment, arranged by courtesy of Brother Mycroft, was with the British military attaché at our Brussels embassy. Though our mission involved a ship belonging to the Belgian government, it had been decided not to involve the authorities in Brussels or Ostend. Mycroft, always a prudent man, therefore insisted on having some diplomatic authority on our side in the event of what he vaguely called “complications.”
On the day of our crossing to Ostend, I woke with an unexpected lightness of heart. All this would prove to be a fuss about nothing. If the final accounting came with Colonel Rawdon Moran, as it might well do, it would take some other form. At any rate, it seemed most unlikely to come yet.
As usual, I had packed my belongings and was ready while Holmes was still getting his things together. Despite my scepticism, I did not neglect to include my Webley revolver with its six chambers loaded.
“I suppose Belgian law is the same as ours,” I said cheerfully: “one is permitted to carry a firearm for reasonable self-defence.”
He shrugged this off: “I hardly think it will come to matters of Belgian law.”
He then closed the drawer of his “chemical table,” where he usually kept his Laroux pistolet. I had not seen it lying in its usual place and assumed he must already have it with him.
“It does no harm to be prepared,” I said gently.
If we were credulous enough to believe what we had been told, we had a good chance in the next few days of encountering one of the most ruthless men we were ever to meet. He appeared to be as intent upon assassinating the pair of us as anyone I had ever heard of. Yet I sensed that Holmes was going into combat unarmed.
The next twelve hours were as uneventful as I hoped the rest of our escort duty would prove to be. The sea journey to Ostend takes the form of a direct fifty-mile crossing from Dover to the Ruytingen lightship, a point roughly parallel with the French coast at Dunkirk. There follows a stretch of some twenty miles eastwards, passing the frontier of France and Belgium. The tidal harbour of Ostend, between two steamer piers, lies just beyond it.
I cannot recommend a voyage to Ostend out of season. The air was bitter with an east wind blowing, for there is no high ground to speak of between here and Siberia. The sky had the colour of lead, and we were surrounded by a constant rising mist from a chilly sea. This vapour blotted out even coastal views of the flat land extending through Belgium and Holland.
It was the middle of the week and there were relatively few other passengers. However, this cross-channel service is maintained every day and night of the year, for these are the mail services of the Belgian and British governments. Our companions included a monsignore, in his uniform dress of cassock and biretta. He might be an assassin in disguise but I thought it more likely that he was a future cardinal. A party of schoolgirls travelled with two stout middle-aged chaperones. Hardly the stuff of which murderers are made.
The time during which I was on my own in Ostend, while Holmes went to make diplomatic arrangements in Brussels, did not show the resort at its most appealing. To be sure, it has become fashionable enough in the summer season with its raised promenade along the Digue, its Assembly Rooms, grand hotels, even a villa for the visits of King Leopold and the royal family. Out of season, the bathing machines stood abandoned on the sands where a forlorn seashore is divided by wooden groins into separate beaches for men and women.
The docks consist of a tidal harbour with a steamer pier running out into deeper water at either side. A railway line extends along the eastern jetty and the Brussels train pulls in not more than twenty yards from the gangways of the channel steamers. Two ancient ironclad warships stood guard offshore, square gun-ports along their sides, a pair of squat funnels between their tall masts. A large-rigged sloop and an old bomb-ketch lay rotting on the mud of the shallows. Two other ferries had tied up already and were taking on stores.
I had nothing to do but await the return of Sherlock Holmes. I did this in my own room or else in the dining-room and lounge of the Hotel de la Plage. The service had been recommended to me as preferable to the Hotel de l’Océan, the only other first-class establishment on the shore.
Any reader of The Times will have noticed the number of letters complaining about the dismal unpunctuality of the ferry service between Ostend and Dover. To be fair, it is not the fault of the steamers but of the Belgian railway system. Frustrated correspondents complain of the consequences. Business mail is delayed, post is not delivered. Brokers in the City of London deal one or even two days late with transactions which in Paris or Frankfurt would have been punctually completed. Money is lost, and that is always a great thing.
It was something of a relief on the following day to see, through the mist, the shape of the Comtesse de Flandre moored at the eastern harbour pier, where the trains come in. She had probably sailed light from Antwerp, after coaling, and would remain alongside empty until sailing-time. Mycroft Holmes assured us that she would have been searched and inspected from stem to stern before even a single member of the crew was allowed back on board. To make assurance doubly sure, a pair of uniformed Belgian policemen kept their watch by the ship’s gangways, which was a customary precaution for international sailings.
As it happened, the two gangways were not yet in place, having been hoisted side by side on to the paddle-box amidships to prevent strangers coming and going while the ship was docked. Some of her crew had taken advantage of their afternoon shore leave, sauntering down the pier for the seaman’s privilege of a few hours in the bars and cafés of the old town. No doubt the captain and the first mate would be the first allowed aboard to supervise the stokers, who must lay the fires and raise steam before she sailed.
As I surveyed her from the window of the hotel dining room, through the vaporous light, the steamer was smaller and lower in the water than the vessel which had brought us over the day before. She was, as I later had reason to know, about five hundred tons, a little over two hundred feet long, and at least thirty feet broad amidships. With the deck extending over the paddle-boxes on either side, the “waist” amidships on these ships is wider than those more recent ferries driven by propellers. There were two funnels, yellow with black “admiralty” tops to trap cinders. The first-class deck saloon stood aft of these and the captain’s navigating-bridge forward. I thought that in the present calm sea, she would do well enough for the sixty or seventy miles of this channel crossing.
I still could not believe that this was the ship or the place for some great adventure. If I had any concern at all, it was for the state of some of the crew after their visit to the old streets of Ostend. No one had so far returned to the ship and, though I had seen my portmanteau with other cases being wheeled from the hotel to the jetty by a porter, the gangways remained drawn up. The brown-and-cream vans of the Messageries Impériales had already arrived, and the chests for the mail-ship’s strong-room had been unloaded under the eyes of the three guards with guns in their belts who would accompany them.
Plon Plon’s war-chest must be weighed before being loaded, and again at Dover Harbour, to ensure that the weights were identical. In this way, the ferry company was absolved from blame if things went wrong at some other point of the journey. Now was the time I would have chosen to stage a robbery. The baggage was in the open air, not locked behind a steel grille. The robbers had the whole of Belgium to escape into, rather than being trapped on a ship in the middle of the English Channel. But nothing happened. There were, after all, six or eight guardians of the law with pistols or revolvers to hand. Surely we had hoaxed ourselves into believing that some master-stroke of villainy was in prospect?
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I was thinking I might as well sit it out until tea-time, when a liveried post-boy appeared at my table and saluted me.
“Doctor Vastson?”
I looked up and he handed me an envelope. Though it was of a different colour to the English kind, I had no doubt that this contained a telegram. Who but Holmes knew that I was here? I slit it open and drew out a flimsy paper with a longer message than I had expected.
JNQFSBUJWFUIBUJSFNBJOJOCSVTTFMTTUPQQSFTFOU
TDFOFPGFWFOUTJTIFSFTUPQPVSDMJFOUTJOGPSNFE
ZPVXJMMCFUIFJSFTDPSUTUPQZPVSEVUJFTOPNJOB
MTUPQMFTUSBEFPSHSFHTPOBUEPWFSTUPQ
BDLOPXMFEHFNFNTOPUSFRVJSDFTUPQIPMNFT
What on earth was this? A cipher from Holmes, of course, though nothing in it identified him. And where from? Brussels, presumably. But what about? Any telegram was obviously urgent. I stared at the jumble of letters in growing panic. There was not a single name hidden here, not a single word that meant anything. I had no idea where to begin!
Worse still, the use of a cipher presumably meant that our enemies were on to us after all. They had penetrated our defences so expertly that we could no longer communicate in plain English nor trust the officials of the Belgian telegraph service. This revelation brought me up short. Had Holmes sent me these few lines of mere gibberish as a warning of all this? But I must assume that the nonsense before me could be decoded. I glared at it, wondering what the cipher might be and where I should begin.
At the end of twenty minutes, I was shaking with mental exhaustion and apprehension. Despite the raw cold of the day outside, I was also perspiring a little from the concentrated anxiety. To start with, I had guessed that the last six letters would be his name, as they would be on any telegram. So IPMNFT probably equalled HOLMES. But these letters made no sense anywhere else in the message.
Death on a Pale Horse: Sherlock Holmes on Her Majesty's Secret Service Page 27