“I brought the bust up with me, as you asked me to do.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
He picked up his hunting-crop and struck Napoleon.
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1904
When our visitor had disappeared Sherlock Holmes’s movements were such as to rivet our attention. He began by taking a clean white cloth from a drawer and laying it over the table. Then he placed his newly acquired bust in the centre of the cloth. Finally he picked up his hunting-crop and struck Napoleon a sharp blow on the top of the head. The figure broke into fragments, and Holmes bent eagerly over the shattered remains. Next instant, with a loud shout of triumph, he held up one splinter, in which a round, dark object was fixed like a plum in a pudding.
“Gentlemen,” he cried, “let me introduce you to the famous black pearl of the Borgias!”40
Lestrade and I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous impulse, we both broke out clapping as at the well-wrought crisis of a play. A flush of colour sprang to Holmes’s pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to its depths by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend.
Finally, he picked up his hunting crop and struck Napoleon a sharp blow on the top of the head.
Anonymous, Portland Oregonian, August 27, 1911
“Yes, gentlemen,” said he, “it is the most famous pearl now existing in the world, and it has been my good fortune, by a connected chain of inductive reasoning, to trace it from the Prince of Colonna’s41 bedroom at the Dacre Hotel, where it was lost, to the interior of this, the last of the six busts of Napoleon which were manufactured by Gelder & Co., of Stepney. You will remember, Lestrade, the sensation caused by the disappearance of this valuable jewel, and the vain efforts of the London police to recover it. I was myself consulted upon the case; but I was unable to throw any light upon it. Suspicion fell upon the maid of the Princess, who was an Italian; and it was proved that she had a brother in London, but we failed to trace any connection between them. The maid’s name was Lucretia Venucci, and there is no doubt in my mind that this Pietro who was murdered two nights ago was the brother. I have been looking up the dates in the old files of the paper, and I find that the disappearance of the pearl was exactly two days before the arrest of Beppo, for some crime of violence—an event which took place in the factory of Gelder & Co., at the very moment when these busts were being made. Now you clearly see the sequence of events, though you see them, of course, in the inverse order to the way in which they presented themselves to me. Beppo had the pearl in his possession. He may have stolen it from Pietro, he may have been Pietro’s confederate, he may have been the go-between of Pietro and his sister. It is of no consequence to us which is the correct solution.
“The main fact is that he had the pearl, and at that moment, when it was on his person, he was pursued by the police. He made for the factory in which he worked, and he knew that he had only a few minutes in which to conceal this enormously valuable prize, which would otherwise be found on him when he was searched. Six plaster casts of Napoleon were drying in the passage. One of them was still soft. In an instant Beppo, a skilful workman, made a small hole in the wet plaster, dropped in the pearl, and with a few touches covered over the aperture once more. It was an admirable hiding-place. No one could possibly find it. But Beppo was condemned to a year’s imprisonment, and in the meanwhile his six busts were scattered over London. He could not tell which contained his treasure. Only by breaking them could he see. Even shaking would tell him nothing for as the plaster was wet it was probable that the pearl would adhere to it—as, in fact, it has done. Beppo did not despair, and he conducted his search with considerable ingenuity and perseverance. Through a cousin who works with Gelder he found out the retail firms who had bought the busts. He managed to find employment with Morse Hudson,42 and in that way tracked down three of them. The pearl was not there. Then with the help of some Italian employeé he succeeded in finding out where the other three busts had gone. The first was at Harker’s. There he was dogged by his confederate, who held Beppo responsible for the loss of the pearl, and he stabbed him in the scuffle which followed.”
One of the plaster casts.
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1904
“If he was his confederate, why should he carry his photograph?” I asked.
“As a means of tracing him if he wished to inquire about him from any third person. That was the obvious reason. Well, after the murder I calculated that Beppo would probably hurry rather than delay his movements. He would fear that the police would read his secret, and so he hastened on before they should get ahead of him. Of course, I could not say that he had not found the pearl in Harker’s bust. I had not even concluded for certain that it was the pearl; but it was evident to me that he was looking for something, since he carried the bust past the other houses in order to break it in the garden which had a lamp overlooking it. Since Harker’s bust was one in three, the chances were exactly as I told you—two to one against the pearl being inside it. There remained two busts, and it was obvious that he would go for the London one first. I warned the inmates of the house, so as to avoid a second tragedy, and we went down, with the happiest results. By that time, of course, I knew for certain that it was the Borgia pearl that we were after. The name of the murdered man linked the one event with the other. There only remained a single bust—the Reading one—and the pearl must be there. I bought it in your presence from the owner—and there it lies.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Well,” said Lestrade, “I’ve seen you handle a good many cases, Mr. Holmes, but I don’t know that I ever knew a more workmanlike one than that. We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very43 proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.”
“Thank you!” said Holmes. “Thank you!” and as he turned away it seemed to me that he was more nearly moved by the softer human emotions than I had ever seen him. A moment later he was the cold and practical thinker once more. “Put the pearl in the safe, Watson,”44 said he, “and get out the papers of the Conk-Singleton forgery case. Good-bye, Lestrade. If any little problem comes your way I shall be happy, if I can, to give you a hint or two as to its solution.”
1 “The Six Napoleons” was published in the Strand Magazine in May 1904 and in Collier’s Weekly on April 30, 1904.
2 The words “which are not his own” have been added in the manuscript.
3 Manly Wade Wellman, in “The Great Man’s Great Son: An Inquiry into the Most Private Life of Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” identifies Morse Hudson both as the Hudson who blackmailed Squire Trevor (“The ‘Gloria Scott’”) and as the estranged husband of Holmes’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson.
4 The location may explain Lestrade’s supposition that he is dealing with a lunatic wrongdoer, for according to Augustus J. C. Hare, in his Walks in London (1878), “At the junction of Kennington Road and Lambeth Road is the new Bethlem Hospital, best known as Bedlam. It was called Bedlam even by Sir Thomas More, in whose time it was already a lunatic asylum.” England’s first institution devoted to the care of the mentally ill, the Bethlem Royal Hospital was founded in 1247 in Bishopsgate as the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem, and given over to the City of London as an insane asylum by Henry VIII in 1547. The institution—from whose name the word “bedlam” is derived—was more prison than hospital: “treatment” consisted largely of shackling the patients, and violence and anarchy were the rule rather than the exception. For a time, visitors could pay a penny to gawk at the chaotic spectacle, giving Bethlem more of the air of a madhouse than ever before.
Hare’s 1878 reference to the hospital’s being “new” is somewhat disingenuous; by then, Bethlem had been at its Lambeth Road location (in Southwark, which already hosted several prisons) for sixty-three years, having moved there in 1815 from Moorfields. Of course, given that Moorfields was Bethlem’s home for 140 years as well as the scene of its greatest notoriety, it is understandable that Bethlem and Moorfields would be married in the popular imagination. Conditions eventually improved at the Southwark location in the mid-1800s, with occupational and drug therapy being offered to patients in lieu of restraints. In 1930 the hospital relocated to Beckenham; today, the Southwark building houses the Imperial War Museum.
5 The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as meaning “wanton acts of vandalism” and notes the earliest recorded use in 1898. Kelvin Jones, in his Sherlock Holmes Dictionary, gives the origin as “said to be the name of a leader of a gang, possibly Hooley’s gang, a family resident in the mid-1890’s in Islington (W. Ware). The alternative theory is that the word derives from the Houlihans, an Irish family resident in the Borough (London).”
6 “Devine” may be Paul de Vigne (1843– 1901), a Belgian sculptor who lived in Paris until 1882, or possibly British sculptor James S. Deville (1776–1846).
7 The original iconoclasts were destroyers of art (from Medieval Greek, Eikonoklasts, meaning “image breaker”). In the Byzantine empire of the eighth and ninth centuries, Christian sculptures and paintings were either destroyed or banned by those who considered them idolatrous, citing the Ten Commandments’ condemnation of images. Another wave of iconoclasm struck during the Protestant Reformation, and it was not until the nineteenth century that the word took on the more secular meaning of one who works to overthrow ideas or institutions. In this instance, Holmes would be familiar with the modern usage, but calls upon his vast historical knowledge to invoke the more literal definition.
8 French: A fixed idea; a monomania, also called “partial moral mania.”
9 Numerous pastiches and analyses of the “Abernetty business” have been written and are surveyed in detail in William Hyder’s “Parsley and Butter: The Abernetty Business.” Hyder concludes, without foundation, that no less than murder was involved. Is it not equally likely that a business—perhaps an inn or tavern—run by the Abernetty family was “dreadful” (that is, kept in poor sanitation), and that that condition was first brought to Holmes’s notice by the butter having been left out on a hot day? The connection between this observation and the ensuing investigation remains undetermined. A number of scholars consider whether and how fast parsley will sink into butter. Not surprisingly, they do not agree.
10 The observation of “round shoulders” has been added in the manuscript.
11 While “Central Press Syndicate” is a fabricated name, the Central News Agency was an English association for the collection and distribution of news to newspapers subscribing to its services. There were at least ten press and telegraphic associations in London in 1888. “It was to the Central News Agency,” observes William S. Baring-Gould, “that Jack the Ripper mailed two horribly jocund notes in late September and early October, 1888.”
12 Richard Lancelyn Green identifies this as Ponting Brothers, a shop that was located at 123-127 Kensington High Street and adjacent to the Metropolitan and District Railway Station. He further suggests that Watson’s fictional name for it was lifted from Harding’s Art Manuals, a popular series of books on art techniques.
13 The word is “devil” in the manuscript but has been softened to “fellow” in the Strand Magazine and book texts, a change (one among several in “The Six Napoleons”) that this editor discovered by using a computer to compare a typescript of the manuscript, prepared by William Hyder and published in “The Napoleon Bust Business Again,” to a typescript of the published text. The results, while not startling here, raise the tantalising question of who made the changes noted—Dr. Watson, the Strand Magazine editor, or perhaps Conan Doyle?
14 The original description, deleted in the manuscript, was “his great black beard bristling upwards.” Whether Mr. Harker imagined the beard or whether Watson suppressed the beard in order to conceal the victim’s true identity is unknown.
15 In the manuscript, this is originally “Camden Road,” amended to “Camden House Road.” However, “Campden House Road” appears in the Strand Magazine and all book editions. The Camden Road is a large street in Kentishtown, while Campden House Road is in Kensington. There is no “Camden House Road” in London. Someone apparently noted Watson’s error and corrected it before the manuscript was published. Newt and Lillian Williams note, in the Annotated “Annotated,” that this is a natural mistake, inasmuch as the “empty house” across from 221B Baker Street was Camden House (see “The Empty House”). H. W. Bell, in “Three Identifications,” states that there was no Campden House Road, but this is plainly contradicted by several Victorian atlases, which show the road as parallel to Campden Hill Road and adjacent to Campden House in Kensington.
16 Since 1703, the racecourse at Doncaster has been the venue for numerous horse races, including the celebrated St. Leger Stakes event, first held in 1776.
17 The word appears to be “hustled” in the manuscript, which makes sense, but apparently the editor had “busts” on his mind, and no one corrected this minor slip in either the Strand Magazine or the book texts.
18 “ ‘You ask about the Red Lamp,’ says the postscript to the preface of the American edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Round the Red Lamp (1894): ‘It is the usual sign of the general practitioner in England.’ ” The manuscript originally stated that the bust was broken “right under” the red lamp.
19 Taking Holmes’s remark to Lestrade literally, Charles Fisher argues that Horace Harker was himself Jack the Ripper. Or, could Mr. Harker have been related to Jonathan Harker, solicitor and counsellor to Count Dracula, a portion of whose correspondence was first published in 1897?
20 This sentence has been added in the manuscript.
21 Radical leaders of the French Revolution were known as Red Republicans, after the red “liberty caps” (or the Bonnet Rouge) they wore to signify their support for republicanism. There was also a London socialist newspaper called the Red Republican. Founded by George Julian Harney, it published the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto in 1850. From Hudson’s context, it is difficult to determine which political movement he was referring to, although both may be seen as having violent connotations.
22 Originally described in the manuscript as an “odd job man.”
23 James Edward Holroyd, in Baker Street By-Ways, questions this narrative. “How, in driving from Kennington to Stepney, would you pass successively through ‘fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London and literary London?’ ” he asks, pointing out that those neighbourhoods lie north of the Thames, but that the quickest route to Stepney would involve staying on the south side of the river and crossing over at London Bridge or Tower Bridge. Perhaps, suggests Holroyd, either Watson or Conan Doyle wrote up this passage while mistakenly envisioning the journey from Kensington (from which the directions are correct), rather than Kennington. “This might have been excusable in Conan Doyle,” he writes, “but not surely in Watson who had been in practice in Kensington for some years.”
But D. Martin Dakin rises to Watson’s defence, imagining that Holmes had to make a stop at Scotland Yard that, being inconsequential, was not dwelt upon by Watson. Such a trip would involve crossing the Thames near Westminster, which could have constituted “the fringe of fashionable London” (if leaving from Kensington, Dakin notes, they would have passed through the middle of Westminster, not “the fringe”). From there, Dakin traces their journey through “the Embankment and Northumberland Avenue for hotel London (plenty of big hotels there), and the Strand for theatrical London; and from there on it is plain sailing.”
24 The manager did not know Beppo’s last name, yet he had no trouble finding his name in the ledger, o
bserves James Edward Holroyd. “I should like to have seen the index to that pay-list. How do you enter the name of a man who has no surname? As Beppo ‘X’? Or was the index conducted on the simple Holmesian principle of first names first as in Victor Lynch, the forger?” (Holroyd here refers to the entry under “V” in Holmes’s “good old index,” mentioned in “The Sussex Vampire.”)
25 Deleted in the manuscript is the incomplete phrase “I may tell you that it is his evidence which is I depend upon to.”
26 In English editions of the Canon, the word is curiously “busts.” The original Strand Magazine text reads “bust,” as does the Doubleday edition of the Canon.
27 The street identification has been added in the manuscript.
28 The Italian consul, Signor Silvestrelli, published a report at Rome in February 1895 that there were two great Italian centres in London, the oldest being in Holborn (and known as “Saffron Hill”) and composed of “organ-men, ice-vendors, ambulant merchants, plaster-bust sellers, models for artists, &c [italics added].” The other, newer centre was in Soho, where Italians with a slightly higher class of occupation resided: artists, cooks, hoteliers, restauranteurs, tailors, teachers, and watchmakers. In all, Signor Silvestrelli reported, there were about 12,000 Italians living in London at the time, with Holborn representing “the black point, as it is mostly composed of Southern Italians, whose reputation is not good.”
In Street Life in London (1877), Adolphe Smith came to something of a similar conclusion, describing Saffron Hill as a uniquely self-enclosed society that was noisy with the bustle of the ubiquitous “ice-men” who sold Italian ices throughout the rest of London. Matter-of-factly labelling some of these men “the worst characters that Italy produces,” Smith charged that those who claimed to be Neapolitan had likely never even seen Naples, and were merely covering up for a more unsavoury background. “As a matter of fact, a very large number of the street ice-sellers are Calabrians, and are, therefore, semi-barbarous mountaineers.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 32