by David Marcum
“From the reign of the Qianlong Emperor of China,” Cheng continued. “The jade is a representation of Ao Guang, the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, who brought chaos to the world by creating droughts, storms, and other disasters. The dragon’s baneful influence, particularly during the full moon period, may be mitigated by surrounding the beast with images of the other eight dragons, or placing a cloth-of-gold cover over the image.”
“Like a tea cosy?” I suggested, “or a cloth over a budgie cage?”
“Thank you, Cheng, that will be all,” Major Coulteney said sharply
“I know I have seen Cheng somewhere before,” I said softly as the door closed behind the butler.
“He is something of a hero, I suppose,” the major said slowly, swirling his port in the light from a candelabrum. “He was at the Travellers picking up my sea trunks for transport here last month when a mob filled the street outside shouting Democratic slogans and calling for the downfall of the rich. They’d been pushed out of Trafalgar Square by the police, and a man with a red flag was leading them down Pall Mall. Members from the Travellers and several other clubs along Pall Mall returned their taunts with interest, and there was some violence - stone throwing and fisticuffs for the most part. The mob surged forward, intending to invade the Travellers, but they were stopped cold by Cheng at the head of a phalanx of Club footmen. Cheng planted himself in the doorway and held the pass wielding a Zulu knobkerrie from a display on the wall of the Smoking Room.
“He might have been overwhelmed, but a determined charge by members of the Diogenes Club cleared a path for a file of police constables to reach the doors and set up a defensive line. The man with the red flag-”
“John Burns,” I said.
“-led the mob on towards the Park and they vandalized the windows of the Carlton Club on the way. I am astonished that the wretch has been released uncharged. Various newspapers featured sketches of Cheng facing down the mob, some showing him as a Roman centurion chastising barbarians. The Daily Mail likened him to General Gordon of Khartoum confronting the mad Mahdists.”
“Good Lord,” I exclaimed. “He does not strike one as such a feisty fellow.”
Major Coulteney shrugged. “The press obviously sensationalised the incident.” The major regarded the glowing end of his cigar for a moment before he continued. “It is of no relevance to the matter in hand, but I should not like you to have the impression that Cheng is some sort of warrior saint. I know for a fact that he has had at least two assignations in Rupert Street with an unknown woman, heavily veiled.”
“You had him dogged?” Holmes asked.
“Of course not,” Major Coulteney answered, reddening. “The boot boy happened to be passing.”
The port circled the table for the last time, untouched, and Major Coulteney looked down at the table, still ill at ease. “I am happy that our dinner was undisturbed, but might I prevail on you gentlemen to stay the night? I’m sure Cheng has made the necessary arrangements - he is a mind reader. We might yet have a manifestation, and I should not like you to miss it.”
Holmes nodded acquiescence and, having thanked the major for a fine dinner, we smoked final cigars and said our goodnights. As his master had intimated, Cheng had made the necessary provisions for our comfort, and he led us up to our room with a pair of nightlights.
I stopped at a display case at the top of the stairs that I had not noticed on the way down. “I say, what splendid fishing flies.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You made these?”
“Indeed, sir, from instructions in an angling magazine and a little imagination. The author of the article suggested that it was essential to think like a trout while assembling the fly. Admiral Coulteney was pleased with the results, as were the trout.”
“I see,” I answered doubtfully.
“The final piece of the jigsaw,” Holmes murmured.
I slept very well. The sheets had been well-aired, the fire burned merrily, and I had curled my feet around a welcome hot water bottle. I woke up refreshed, and after our toilette, Holmes and I made our way downstairs to the breakfast room. He stopped on the landing, tapped his pocket and, having forgotten his magnifying glass, bid me go on as he darted back upstairs.
We breakfasted together in a pleasant room looking out over a lawn bordered by evergreens, both of us with our heads in our newspapers. Cheng supervised the service, wearing a bright yellow garment and with a matching pale yellow flower entwined in his hair. Our host joined us as the table was cleared, explaining that he had breakfasted earlier and just returned from a brisk walk. “I hope you slept well?” he enquired.
“Magnificently,” I answered.
“We are done,” said Holmes.
Major Coulteney and I gaped at him. “You’ve solved the case?” the major asked.
“At five-fifty-three yesterday afternoon,” Holmes replied. “Since then I have been tidying up, assembling the shards as it were. We might continue our discussion in the lair of the Jade Dragon.” He turned to Cheng. “I would be grateful if you would join us.”
Cheng bowed and led the way out and across the hall.
Holmes stopped. “I left my magnifying glass on the dresser in our room. Excuse me.” I frowned at him, and he winked back before he again loped upstairs!
He joined the major, Cheng, and me in the China room. “Have there been any recent changes in the household,” he asked. “You mentioned a new femme de chambre.”
“Ethel, but I hardly think she has a hand in this affair. She is with my mother in Lourdes.”
“The previous maid?”
“Carried off by the postman and wed at Gretna Green. My mother made strong representations to the postal authorities, but they will admit no responsibility.”
I heard a faint scraping sound and my head snapped around. One of the Chinese vases on the mantelpiece seemed to jiggle, then it flew through the air and crashed onto the parquet floor by the window, shattering into shards.
Cheng staggered to the wall, his face ashen as Holmes strode across the room, pulled out his magnifying glass and closely examined the floor, window frames, and the shards of porcelain. He stood. “Would you allow me to deal with this, Major? I believe that I will be able to rid you of this expensive nuisance in short order, given a free hand and with the help of Doctor Watson and Cheng.”
Major Coulteney coloured and he seemed about to remonstrate, but Holmes pre-empted him. “I must ask you to remain outside and whatever noises you may hear, however strange, you must not open the door. That is of the first importance. The Qi must not be allowed to dissipate until I have mastered the Jade Dragon.”
“Very well,” The major answered in a stiff tone. He talked out, closing the door behind him.
I blinked at Holmes. “I say, old man, should we not ask for a Bible?”
He rubbed his hands together, “Let us begin.”
“I think Cheng had better take a seat,” I suggested. “He is in shock.”
I settled the butler on a sofa and turned to face Holmes. He stood before the fireplace looking very much like a magician at the Alhambra about to pull a rabbit from an unlikely place.
“Would you mind passing me that Chinese vase?” he requested, directing me to one of the display cases. I gently removed a foot-tall, blue-and-white vase from its glass shelf and handed it carefully to Holmes. Cheng watched us white-faced and wide-eyed. “Do have a care, sir, that is an Imperial vase of Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty! It is priceless.”
Holmes lifted the blue-and-white vase above his head. “The solution to our problem is simple enough. We must convince the wraith to depart by showing our indifference to its destructive conduct.”
“Noooo!” Cheng cried, darting up from his seat, arms outstretched.
Holmes dashed the vase onto the grate whe
re it shattered into a thousand pieces. “There, that might get the attention of the Jade Dragon.”
Cheng hands flew to his mouth. “Oh, sir, how could you!” He collapsed back onto the sofa with his head in his hands.
Holmes smiled at him. “The game-”
“Is afoot?” I suggested.
Holmes sighed. “I was about to say to Cheng that the game is up. I think he could do with a reviving glass of brandy.”
“I was distressed beyond words by my master’s death,” Cheng said, holding a glass of brandy in both hands as if deriving warmth from it. Holmes and I sat on the sofa opposite him. “The admiral was, if I may be excused the liberty, like a father to me. When he died, and I heard that the young master was returning home, I was doubly distraught. I made an attempt at madness, gentlemen. For several days, I fancied myself a Ming Dynasty tea caddy, then a police constable on patrol, and finally a Mandalay river steamer: Toot, toot! But nobody seemed to notice.”
Holmes sniffed. “Might I suggest that your somewhat outlandish dress and manner made it difficult for your master and colleagues to give sufficient weight to any further peculiarities you accumulated?”
“Just so, sir. Then I attempted to convince myself that the very ideas I was coming up with - the poltergeist, the constable, tea caddy, and so on - were in themselves evidence of derangement. But I am a hard person to convince.” Cheng shook his head. “I had a rough childhood, but a varied and full life since, by grace of Admiral Coulteney. I owed him life, gentlemen, for his Lordship picked me up from the gutters of Kowloon and made a man of me, and I had promised him that I would never abandon the family. No, I could not in conscience leave Her Ladyship, but how could I stay? What was I to do?”
“And Ethel’s role in the matter,” Holmes asked.
“I see you know it all, sir. Ethel and I met at the Upper Servant’s Christmas Ball in Blackfriars last November, and a mutual understanding was reached between us. She agreed to leave her employment with Lady Kennedy and replace my mistress’s maid, who’d run off with the postman.”
I frowned. “I must admit that I am confused. Was your relationship with Major Coulteney so uncomfortable that you could not endure continuing in employment with his family after the admiral’s death?”
Cheng nodded. “We never got on, Doctor. Nor did he and his father, which was a cause of sadness for my mistress, his mother. I formed the impression that (forgive my forwardness, gentlemen) that young Master Albert blamed me for the coldness between him and his father.”
“He considered that you had replaced him in his father’s affections?” I asked.
“I hardly like to speculate, Doctor. Young Albert did not excel at school, and he was unable to follow in the admiral’s footsteps into the Navy due to the new scholastic provisions. He did not meet the requirements for Sandhurst, and it was only through a connection on Lady Alice’s side of the family that he found a place in the Indian Army.”
“He evidently did not share his father’s interest in porcelain,” I suggested.
“Nor angling,” Cheng added. “There were few topics on which father and son could converse, and those inevitably led to a row.” A malevolent gleam appeared in Cheng’s eyes for a moment, before he resumed his usual benign expression. “And then the cable came from Mandalay. Albert was coming home and bringing with him a wife.” Cheng’s lips curled, “And such a wife! I was at my wits’ end. The news sped the admiral to his grave, and nearly killed Her Ladyship.”
I frowned, utterly at a loss. “Not Ethel, surely!”
“A Burmese lady whose name begins with ‘N’,” Holmes said, smiling at me.
Cheng crossed himself. “Nanda, a heathen princess, so we are told. She is staying at Benson’s Private Hotel, in the ladies’ wing. She is a witch. She has entranced Lord Albert with the power of the Jade Dragon.”
Holmes beamed at me. “Cherchez la femme.”
“If I may, Holmes.” I turned to Cheng. “You must forget this nonsense of tea caddies and vases and poltergeists. And dragon ornaments and witches, for that matter. I say nothing of any Roman Catholic beliefs and observances, except to offer a medical opinion that excess in spiritual matters can have unfortunate consequences similar to abuse of drugs or alcohol. You must think of your sanity, old chap. Many a stout fellow has gone East and returned a mental wreck. Think on that. And you were born out there, which must be a heavy burden. Do not subject your mental faculties to excessive strain. You might consider transferring your allegiance to a religious body with a less effusive doctrine, one not quite so cluttered with saints and devils and so on-”
“The Salvation Army?” Holmes suggested.
“I was thinking of the Church of England, Holmes, and speaking only as a medical man.”
“I take no offence, Doctor,” Cheng said.
“And I would advise you to resign your position here. If the antagonism between you and your new master is to be augmented by his marriage, you will do your new mistress and Her Ladyship no good by remaining. Is there nobody on His Lordship’s staff who might take your place?”
Cheng considered. “A hard question, sir. William (his real name is Kenneth, but the admiral always insisted that his senior footman was a William) is competent. He could be trained. I could nurture him farther along the road to adequacy in a year or so. Yes, a year might be possible; I believe I could bring William up in that time, or a little more.”
“What will you do after you leave the family?”
“I have a sum put away, sir, and I had thought to take the lease on a public house in a pleasant village, Devon perhaps.”
“Very well.” I frowned at Cheng. “The poltergeist or whatever. That was your work?”
He blanched. “The wiggling of objects on the mantel sir, yes, and I must admit to the destruction of the first vase.” He gazed in melancholy at the heap of broken porcelain by the window. “But the second vase was the dragon, and then Mr. Holmes-” He sobbed into his cupped hands.
I turned to Holmes. “No one could fault your bravura, old man, but it was a rather expensive way to make a point.”
Holmes smiled. “Was it? You saw the debris of the first broken vase brought to us by the skivvy. Have you no observations to make?”
I sniffed. “I expect I saw, but I did not observe.”
“Exactly. You did not notice that the chips were granular in texture and far too thick to be fine Chinese porcelain, totally unlike the traditional hard-paste translucence of the true Ming Chenghua. It was plaster of Paris.”
“A fake!”
“The vase, together with five other blanks, was the product of the Gelder and Co., of Stepney, as indicated by the name branded into the wooden crate under Cheng’s bed upstairs.”
I glared at Cheng, who hung his head even further. “I had blank replicas made of some of the finer pieces, so that I could practice painting them, sir. I wanted to put myself in the mind of their creator to further understand the process.”
“As you did with the trout flies,” I said, and instantly a lamp was lit in my mind. I turned to Holmes. “I have it! You said yesterday that the fishing flies were the last piece of the jigsaw! I have it! Fishing line!”
Holmes smiled. “The rod room is at the back of the house, directly behind us. It was there that I stationed Maggie with one of Admiral Coulteney’s split bamboo rods, the line running outside the house, in through the window pulley, and attached to a handle of the vase on the mantle.” He held up a shard of blue-and-white. “Plaster of Paris,” and tossed it to the floor. “I hope she hasn’t damaged the rod. As you saw, the gentle, teasing pull I had suborned her with a sixpence to make on the line at exactly ten this morning was more of fearful yank. Cheng played his vase along the mantel like a trout in a pond. The skivvy’s previous experience of fishing may have been from a coracle, but what she lacked in fine
sse was made up for in raw power.”
Holmes ushered me to the window by the fireplace, pulled a curtain aside and indicated the window pulley in the sash frame. “You see? There is very slightly more wear on the inner side of the pulley, where the fishing line ran.”
“Or perhaps the Coulteneys do not take as much care with their sash windows as we do,” I said. “All three vases were fakes? The Jade Dragon and Qi and so on were so much nonsense?”
“The originals are in Cheng’s wardrobe, wrapped in tissue.” Holmes turned to Cheng. “You suggested that Major Coulteney contact me and request that I investigate the phenomenon. Why?”
“I thought your presence might bring matters to a head, Mr. Holmes. Your name is well-known among the higher servants, in the best houses of course, and well respected.”
Holmes rubbed his hands together. “Let us report our successful vanquishing of the baleful dragon to our client.
Major Coulteney shook Holmes’s hand. “I say, old man, I owe you a thankee.”
“Not at all. Cheng is quite back to his old self, and as long as the dragon is moved to a new home, it will be de-fused, as it were, and you will have no more visitations.”
“Not the faintest taint of negative Qi remains,” I suggested, giving Holmes an admonishing look. “And as you can see, the vases have miraculously reassembled themselves.”
The major took the jade dragon from the mantel and held it out to Holmes. “Then you won’t mind if I give you this. Do with it what you will. I think it’s best out of this house before my mother returns.”
Holmes slipped the figurine into his coat pocket. “You mentioned your impending marriage, Major. Has a date been set?”
Major Coulteney flushed, and his hand went to his tiepin. “Not yet. Arrangements in such cases take a very long time. The embroidery alone might take months.”
“Just so. Then might I suggest that you make an agreement with your butler for him to give a year’s notice? That would enable him to train a successor, and give time for your mother to become used to the new circumstances.”