Despite their purportedly mean and ignorant ways, Smith admired the ice-men for pursuing an honest living in their new country (“They can make more selling ices in our thoroughfares than in cutting throats round and about Naples”), but this sympathy was not necessarily shared by those Italians, such as Beppo, who created statuettes. These men, “better educated and skilful Italian artisans,” were elevated in social rank above the Calabrians, and tended to “express the profoundest contempt for their fellow-countrymen who sell ices in the streets.”
29 The manuscript replaces “Florence” with “Naples.” This may be Watson’s deliberate concealment—see note 30, below.
30 The secret criminal society known as the Mafia began as a number of private Sicilian armies, created in the late Middle Ages to repel foreign conquerers and then hired by landowners to protect their property from roving bandits. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sicilians distrustful of ineffectual (and frequently oppressive) local governments grew to rely instead upon the Mafia’s private form of justice, based as it was on omerta, a strict code of silence that forbade one from turning to the legal authorities for help. Victims and their family members were permitted to undertake vendettas (direct retribution) against those who had wronged them, and punishment for breaking the code of silence was severe. By 1900, the various Mafia families, loosely organised, had taken control of the economy in many parts of Sicily.
It is curious that Venucci, ostensibly from Naples, would be connected to the Mafia, which at that time was still centered in Sicily. Naples had its own criminal society, the Camorra. In the latter half of the eighteeenth century, the Camorra, an association that specialised in blackmail, bribery, and smuggling, was encouraged by the corrupt Bourbon regime to police the city and eliminate the opposition. A crackdown was instituted in the 1880s after the unification of Italy, and the Camorra began to decline in power; its grip was fatally loosened in 1911, after several of its members were convicted in a high-profile murder trial. While it is possible that Venucci could have been linked to the Mafia through Sicilian connections, it is equally likely that Lestrade (or the Saffron Hill inspector) was mistaken, and that Venucci was a member of the Camorra instead. In “The Red Circle,” Watson deliberately conceals Gorgiano’s membership in the “Black Hand” with a fictitious name for the secret society—perhaps here he is also taking steps to avoid displeasing the true organisation.
31 Watson originally miscounted the busts and made the odds “three to one” in the manuscript.
32 Originally “midnight” in the manuscript.
33 A special messenger who would convey a letter at a pre-paid or partly pre-paid rate. The Express Delivery Service was established by the post office in 1891. It was not until the queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 that the post office established free postal service for all households in England.
34 A storage room, usually at the top of a house. “Why on earth did Holmes not simply rely on the newspapers’ own files, or the public libraries?” wonders John Hall in Sidelights on Holmes. “In fact as late as 1887 at the time of The Sign of Four, that is precisely what he did do, for after being out a couple of hours he returns to tell Watson that he was ‘consulting the back files of the Times.’ ”
35 We see it in use as a weapon, however, only in “The Red-Headed League” and “A Case of Identity.”
36 In the manuscript, the phrase is “utter silence” but has been altered in the Strand Magazine and book texts.
37 Deleted in the manuscript is the phrase “and the Burglary Insurance people will have to pay me for my bust, so I have nothing to complain of.”
38 Lestrade is making a rare joke here. Clearly—unless appearances are monstrously deceiving—the villain is not a landowner whose family bears a coat of arms.
39 For reasons that may be connected with his disappearance from 1891 to 1894, Holmes apparently forbade Watson from publishing any post-Reichenbach tales until 1903, when publication of the stories later collected in the Return commenced in the Strand Magazine. (The Hound of the Baskervilles, which Watson published in serial form commencing in 1901, was likely a pre-Reichenbach case.)
40 The Borgia family, originally from Spain, came to wield considerable religious and political power in Italy, gaining a reputation for political ruthlessness in the process. Alfonso de Borja (1378–1458), the cardinal-archbishop of Valencia, moved to Rome when selected to serve as Pope Callixtus III in 1455; his nephew, Rodrigo (1431–1503), followed in his uncle’s footsteps and was named Pope Alexander VI in 1492. He fathered several illegitimate children, among them Cesare (1476–1507) and Lucrezia (1480–1523).
At first, Cesare also took the religious path, becoming the archbishop of Valencia and a cardinal. But after the death of his older brother (in whose murder Cesare may have had a hand), Cesare turned to politics, marrying the Frenchwoman Charlotte d’Albret to bolster a Borgia alliance with Louis XII. Named duke of Romagna by his father, Cesare strengthened his rule by conquering several territories, eliminating his enemies by luring them to a castle and strangling them. So brutal and absolute were Cesare’s methods that Machiavelli used him as a model in The Prince. His power declining following the death of Alexander, the succession of adversary Julius II, and a bout with debilitating illness, Cesare lost his land (even Louis XII turned on him, demanding the return of territories he’d seized) and his titles, fleeing to Spain, where he was arrested and thrown in prison. After escaping, Cesare died fighting rebel forces for his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre.
Lucrezia Borgia played less of an active role in her family’s many crimes, instead functioning mainly as a sort of pawn in forging alliances. In all, she married three times, each marriage serving a handy political purpose for her father and her brother. Her first marriage, to Giovanni Sforza in 1492, was annulled when the pope switched allegiances from Milan to Naples; Sforza left Rome fearing for his life. Alexander then played up the Naples angle, marrying Lucrezia off to Alfonso, the illegitimate son to Alfonso II of the powerful Aragón family. Yet the advantages of this marriage, too, crumbled, when Cesare established his own alliance with Louis XII and began amassing power in Romagna, thereby threatening Naples. Alfonso, now expendable, narrowly escaped death on the steps of St. Peter’s and later, recovering from his wounds, was strangled by a servant of Cesare’s. (A year after Alfonso’s death, Lucrezia was seen with a three-year-old boy, whom many allege was her son with either Cesare or Alexander.) Lucrezia’s third union, to Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara, was intended to aid Cesare’s Romagna campaign but also proved the balm to Lucrezia’s tumultuous life. As duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia opened her court to artists and poets, and in the history of the Italian Renaissance she is renowned as a brilliant and generous patron of the arts.
41 According to Donald Redmond, two princes of Colonna were living in 1900: Don Fabrizio of Avella, a soldier and civic official who was named senator in 1888, and Don Prospero of Sonnino, a cavalry officer who became senator in 1900.
42 In the manuscript, the employer is not identified, and the phrase “one of them” appears in place of “Morse Hudson.” Evidently, someone determined later that the reader needed to be reminded that Holmes had already determined that Beppo was employed by Morse Hudson, for the Strand Magazine and book texts all read as above.
43 The word “damned” has been replaced with “very” in the manuscript.
44 Holmes handled this and other cases (“The Reigate Squires,” “Black Peter,” “The Golden Pince-Nez,” “The Abbey Grange,” “The Cardboard Box,” “The Dying Detective,” A Study in Scarlet, The Valley of Fear) solely for the experience, that is, without a paying client. Some scholars speculate that Holmes may have been quietly compensated by the police inspectors, to enhance their careers. While there is no evidence that Lestrade paid Holmes (in this case, anyway), Holmes appears to turn his experience to tangible profit. He displays no qualms about keeping the fruits of his investigation, figuring, perhaps, that “to the
victor go the spoils.” The pearl’s rightful owner—the Prince of Colonna—on the other hand, still has no idea his treasure has been recovered. “Holmes had no title to the pearl at all,” S. T. L. Harbottle charges. “He was in fact a receiver of stolen goods.” And yet Holmes acts as if he is merely the next person in the line of succession to the pearl. “There was no suggestion of returning the pearl to the Prince—far from it,” continues Harbottle. “ ‘Put the pearl in the safe, Watson,’ said Holmes quite unblushingly. . . .”
Not only was the pearl “enormously valuable,” but it likely would have been heavily insured. Ian McQueen believes that Holmes ultimately did not keep the pearl but instead turned it in for a reward. Surely, McQueen observes, Holmes had a dual purpose in “looking up the dates in the old files of the paper,” as he simultaneously would have searched for any advertisement that the loss adjuster would have run. Note that when he received the bust from Sandeford, he had a document of transfer already prepared, with Watson and Lestrade conveniently serving as his two witnesses.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE STUDENTS1
“The Three Students” provides a trove of background information for scholars regarding Holmes’s university years. The crime presented here—regarding a student who cheats on an exam—pales in comparison to those of other stories, but the wealth of details regarding college life makes for a rewarding tale. What also makes the case memorable is that one of the first published pieces of Sherlockian scholarship, written by editor and critic Andrew Lang, examined its events at length. So implausible are the facts of “The Three Students” that some suggest the entire case was a diversion, a joke created by Watson and an old friend of Holmes to mystify the detective.
IT WAS IN THE YEAR ’95 that a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great University towns, and it was during this time that the small but instructive adventure which I am about to relate befell us. It will be obvious that any details which would help the reader to exactly identify the college or the criminal would be injudicious and offensive.2 So painful a scandal may well be allowed to die out. With due discretion the incident itself may, however, be described, since it serves to illustrate some of those qualities for which my friend was remarkable. I will endeavour in my statement to avoid such terms as would serve to limit the events to any particular place, or give a clue as to the people concerned.
We were residing at the time in furnished lodgings close to a library where Sherlock Holmes was pursuing some labourious researches in early English charters—researches which led to results so striking that they may be the subject of one of my future narratives.3 Here it was that one evening we received a visit from an acquaintance, Mr. Hilton Soames, tutor4 and lecturer at the College of St. Luke’s. Mr. Soames was a tall, spare man, of a nervous and excitable temperament. I had always known him5 to be restless in his manner, but on this particular occasion he was in such a state of uncontrollable agitation that it was clear something very unusual had occurred.
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1904
“I trust, Mr. Holmes, that you can spare me a few hours of your valuable time. We have had a very painful incident at St. Luke’s, and really, but for the happy chance of your being in the town, I should have been at a loss what to do.”
“I am very busy just now, and I desire no distractions,” my friend answered. “I should much prefer that you called in the aid of the police.”
“No, no, my dear sir; such a course is utterly impossible. When once the law is evoked it cannot be stayed again, and this is just one of those cases where, for the credit of the college, it is most essential to avoid scandal.6 Your discretion is as well known as your powers, and you are the one man in the world who can help me. I beg you, Mr. Holmes, to do what you can.”
“I trust, Mr. Holmes, that you can spare me a few hours.”
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1904
My friend’s temper had not improved since he had been deprived of the congenial surroundings of Baker Street. Without his scrap-books, his chemicals, and his homely untidiness, he was an uncomfortable man. He shrugged his shoulders in ungracious acquiescence,7 while our visitor in hurried words and with much excitable gesticulation poured forth his story.
“I must explain to you, Mr. Holmes, that to-morrow8 is the first day of the examination for the Fortescue Scholarship. I am one of the examiners. My subject is Greek, and the first of the papers consists of a large passage of Greek translation which the candidate has not seen. This passage is printed on the examination paper, and it would naturally be an immense advantage if the candidate could prepare it in advance. For this reason great care is taken to keep the paper secret.
“To-day about three o’clock the proofs of this paper arrived from the printers. The exercise consists of half a chapter of Thucydides.9 I had to read it over carefully, as the text must be absolutely10 correct. At four-thirty my task was not yet completed.11 I had, however, promised to take tea in a friend’s rooms, so I left the proof upon my desk. I was absent rather more than an hour.
“You are aware, Mr. Holmes, that our college doors are double—a green baize12 one within and a heavy oak one without. As I approached my outer door I was amazed to see a key in it. For an instant I imagined that I had left my own there, but on feeling in my pocket I found that it was all right. The only duplicate which existed, so far as I knew, was that which belonged to my servant, Bannister, a man who has looked after my room for ten years, and whose honesty is absolutely above suspicion. I found that the key was indeed his, that he had entered my room to know if I wanted tea, and that he had very carelessly left the key in the door when he came out. His visit to my room must have been within a very few minutes of my leaving it. His forgetfulness about the key would have mattered little upon any other occasion, but on this one day it has produced the most deplorable consequences.
“The moment I looked at my table I was aware that some one had rummaged among my papers. The proof was in three long slips.13 I had left them all together. Now, I found that one of them was lying on the floor, one was on the side-table near the window, and the third was where I had left it.”
Holmes stirred for the first time.
“The first page on the floor, the second in the window, and the third where you left it,” said he.
“Exactly, Mr. Holmes. You amaze me. How could you possibly know that?”
“Pray continue your very interesting statement.”
“For an instant I imagined that Bannister had taken the unpardonable liberty of examining my papers. He denied it, however, with the utmost earnestness, and I am convinced that he was speaking the truth. The alternative was that someone passing had observed the key in the door, had known that I was out, and had entered to look at the papers. A large sum of money is at stake, for the scholarship is a very valuable one, and an unscrupulous man might very well run a risk in order to gain an advantage over his fellows.
“Bannister was very much upset by the incident. He had nearly fainted when we found that the papers had undoubtedly been tampered with. I gave him a little brandy and left him collapsed in a chair while I made a most careful examination of the room. I soon saw that the intruder had left other traces of his presence besides the rumpled papers. On the table in the window were several shreds from a pencil which had been sharpened. A broken tip of lead was lying there also. Evidently the rascal had copied the paper14 in a great hurry, had broken his pencil, and had been compelled to put a fresh point to it.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
“Excellent!” said Holmes, who was recovering his good humour as his attention became more engrossed by the case. “Fortune has been your friend.”
“This was not all. I have a new writing-table with a fine surface of red leather. I am prepared to swear, and so is Bannister, that it was smooth and unstained. Now I found a cle
an cut in it about three inches long—not a mere scratch, but a positive cut. Not only this, but on the table I found a small ball of black dough, or clay, with specks of something which looks like sawdust in it, I am convinced that these marks were left by the man who rifled the papers. There were no foot marks and no other evidence as to his identity. I was at my wit’s end, when suddenly the happy thought occurred to me that you were in the town, and I came straight round to put the matter into your hands. Do help me, Mr. Holmes! You see my dilemma. Either I must find the man, or else the examination must be postponed until fresh papers are prepared, and since this cannot be done without explanation, there will ensue a hideous scandal, which will throw a cloud not only on the college but on the University. Above all things, I desire to settle the matter quietly and discreetly.”
“I shall be happy to look into it and to give you such advice as I can,” said Holmes, rising and putting on his overcoat. “The case is not entirely devoid of interest. Had anyone visited you in your room after the papers came to you?”
“Yes; young Daulat Ras, an Indian student, who lives on the same stair, came in to ask me some particular about the examination.”
“For which he was entered?”
“Yes.”
“And the papers were on your table?”
“To the best of my belief they were rolled up.”
“But might be recognized as proofs?”
“Possibly.”
“No one else in your room?”
“No.”
“Did anyone know that these proofs would be there?”
“No one save the printer.”
“Did this man Bannister know?”
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 33