by David Marcum
Holmes and I said our goodbyes and left Major Coulteney to ponder on Holmes suggestion.
Cheng showed us to the door. “You do not credit the Jade Dragon with any role in the affair, Mr. Holmes?” he murmured. “Despite his facing west and off the line of Qi? You do not think he disturbed the tranquillity of the morning?”
“I do not. And since he is now in my custody, a more congenial member of the Kowloon may take his place.”
Cheng nodded. “If you have a mind to put the Dragon to auction, gentlemen, I should advise a reserve of not less than twenty guineas.”
Holmes took the ornament from his pocket and smiled. “Really? I would have thought a jade of this excellence might fetch substantially more. I thought fifty at the very least.”
“Dragons are a drug on the market, sir. I doubt you would find a buyer at more than thirty.”
Holmes held out the figurine. “Thirty-five.”
Cheng bowed, took the figurine and slipped it into a fold in his robes. He took an envelope from his cuff, passed it to Holmes, bowed again and showed us out to a waiting hansom. “A very good day to you, gentlemen.”
I frowned at Holmes as we settled on the bench.
“The envelope contains a cheque on the London and Counties bank for thirty-five guineas. Cheng has an account with them with more than two hundred pounds on deposit, and he will receive a further five hundred from Admiral Coulteney’s will. He intends to make an offer, through intermediaries, for his master’s china, proposing to sell the items over a period of years and thus fund his ambition to own a public house. He will call it the Kowloon, the Nine Dragons Inn.” Holmes tapped on the roof of the cab and gave him a further instruction, and we stopped at a townhouse a hundred yards or so along Curzon Street.
Holmes indicated that I should accompany him, and we stepped down into the street. “Follow my lead,” he said. “And gird your loins. Her Ladyship is an American.”
The front door was opened by a footman, who on learning who we had come to see, ushered us into an ornately furnished drawing room where we waited, warming our coattails in front of a splendid fire. The door opened and a fine-featured lady of a certain age swept in wearing an afternoon dress.
She peered through gold pinz-nes at the calling card Holmes had given the servant. “You wish to see me, Mr. Holmes?” she said in a cold tone faintly tinged with an American accent.
“Lady Kennedy, it will not do,” said Holmes. “I understand your irritation at the loss of Ethel, who I am sure is the only person on earth who understood your hair, but consider, my dear madam, a butler is not a maid de chamber. They are entirely different orders of creation. It is as though Lady Coulteney pinched your comb, and you demanded her first-born in reparation. Ladies’ maids may be trained. A competent butler is born, not made, and a butler of Cheng’s excellence is a gift from a benevolent deity.”
Lady Kennedy pouted and made to turn away.
“You should also know that he intends to tender his resignation from the household of Lady Coulteney and take the lease on a public house in Torquay.”
“Torquay!” Lady Kennedy’s hands flew to her face in horror.
“I am afraid so. And not one of the more salubrious parts of the town.”
The footman showed us out, and we climbed back aboard the hansom.
“Lady Kennedy tried to suborn Cheng in retaliation for the loss of her maid, Ethel,” I said as we set off for Baker Street.”
Holmes nodded. “She stalked the poor man in the street, entreating him to defect. She pressed money on him, threatening to denounce him to Lady Coulteney unless he took it.”
“An odd form of blackmail,” I suggested. “No wonder he was so worn down, poor chap.”
Holmes took out the envelope and waved it. “Pagani’s tonight. Or would you prefer a roast at the Criterion?”
I considered. “The roast.” We sat in silence for a while as the cab jogged by the Park.
“A Burmese princess,” Holmes said with a smile. “They are accounted fetching by those who appreciate the glories of Oriental womanhood. Lady Nanda Coulteney has a nice ring to it.”
“A Catholic family, Holmes,” I reminded him. “Cheng advised his new master to call you in, expecting you to find him a way out of his dilemma. I believe we have been played, old man.”
“Do you?” Holmes answered, “Oh, by the way, before we left home yesterday afternoon, I instructed Mrs. Hudson to get the chimney sweep in, so all should be spick and span for our return to Baker Street after a most comfortable night away.” He yawned. “I must ask Cheng to send us the recipe for that curry.”
A Ghost from Christmas Past
by Thomas A. Turley
No doubt it is a sinful thing to rue the Christmas season. I do not mean the day itself, which remains for me - and all mankind - a day of joy, and hope, and spiritual renewal. I am no Ebenezer Scrooge; indeed, the tale of his redemption is my favourite of the many memorable works left to us by Mr. Dickens.
Yet, for the Watson family, the season surrounding Christmas Day has always been a time of sorrow. My mother’s early death, occurring on its very eve in 1858,[1] haunted my father and my brother until their own lives ended, decades later, in misery and squalor. As a three-time widower, I have not escaped the curse. It was but eight years ago, just after Christmas, that my beautiful Priscilla was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill her within weeks.[2] On December 22, 1891, I lost my beloved Mary with appalling suddenness. That remains a story, even now, that I am not prepared to tell.[3]
But it is of my first wife, and an even earlier Christmas, that I shall write today. Hitherto, I have said little of Constance in my memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, so little that some readers, understandably, have confused her with Mary in cases that predate The Sign of Four. My reticence has not been due to a lack of regard for my poor angel, although our marriage was not, by its untimely end, a happy one. Rather, it was the uncanny manner of her death that led me to keep silent. Unlike Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, my friend and literary agent, I am not a believer in the supernatural. I remain quite sure that I myself have never seen a ghost. Yet, on the night that Constance died, I was moved to consider, for the first and only time in my long life, the possibility that ghosts exist.
To tell this story properly, I must begin by writing of my brother. I have done so only once before, and then misleadingly. The Sign of Four contains a passage in which Sherlock Holmes, after deducing Henry’s tragic history by examining his watch, defends himself against my anger by protesting that he never knew I had a brother. That account was fiction. In fact, my friend had been aware of Henry for some years, for Holmes’s substantial loan had financed my attempt to save him. Early in 1884, I left Baker Street to take up residence in San Francisco, California. There my brother and I spent our last days together, and there I met and fell in love with Constance Adams.[4]
In many ways, my relationship with my elder brother helped to prepare me for my relationship with Holmes. Henry, like the great detective, possessed a far more agile mind than I do; he, too, had scant patience with slower-moving intellects. In his youth, my brother had seemed destined for a brilliant future, and it was our father’s final disappointment that he abandoned law to follow me into the army. For a brief time, we served together in Afghanistan. My role as regimental surgeon ended with a wound at Maiwand; Henry, after an unhappy love affair, drowned his promising intelligence career in alcohol.[5] He never recovered, for my brother far exceeded Sherlock Holmes in his capacity for self-destruction. I arrived in San Francisco to find him sick and destitute, having in three years squandered his entire inheritance.
Oscar Wilde, who visited the bayside city shortly before I did, posited that “anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.”[6] He concluded that it must be a delightful place, but that part of his bon mot failed the Watson brothe
rs utterly. I found Henry settled in the most squalid corner of the city, known as the Barbary Coast. As a den of iniquity, it outstripped both Whitechapel and the worst haunts of Paris, but my brother had taken to his foul surroundings like an alligator to a swamp. He invested our father’s legacy in a waterfront saloon, was swindled by his partner, and quickly lost himself in debt and dissipation. To my further horror, he had also married a young girl from the streets. She, at least, proved to be a gentle-natured, pretty creature, who nursed Henry devotedly when he became too ill to work. Even then, there was little wrong with my brother that rest, a better diet, and abstinence from whisky would not cure. His situation was by no means hopeless if his self-respect could be restored.
In order to support the three of us, I sought employment as a locum tenens at several local hospitals. The Sisters of Mercy, a group of Irish nuns resident in San Francisco since the 1850’s, put me to work at their clinic in Stockton Street.[7] Here I ministered daily to the dregs of Barbary Coast society: Drunken sailors, syphilitic prostitutes, and opium-addicted Chinamen. Unpleasant as it was, my experience later aided me in treating my poor friend Asa Whitney, although sadly he was one victim of the poppy whom I failed to cure.
I learned from the Sisters that San Francisco ran an Almshouse for its indigents, located on an old Mexican ranch outside the city. When I visited (expecting some Dickensian horror), I found eighty acres of arable, well-watered land, sheltered behind two prominent hills known as the Twin Peaks. The Almshouse operated as a communal farm, its inmates providing labour in return for lodging, food, and medical care. So successful were they that the farm produced a surplus for sale in San Francisco’s markets.[8] In short, it seemed an ideal place for my brother to recover. I felt sure that a few months of fresh air, hard work, and - above all - clean living would make a man of him again. Henry was not easy to persuade, angrily declaring that manual labour was beneath his dignity as an ex-officer. Considering his recent degradation, I took this protest as a healthy sign. Fortunately, even a younger brother may assert his authority as a physician. By late summer, Henry and Alice had translated to Laguna Honda, where they settled into their new life very well.
With my brother in an improved financial and physical condition, I began to seek a more advantageous personal arrangement that would allow me to pay off Henry’s debts, as well as my own considerable arrears to Sherlock Holmes. In the spring of 1885, I was able to obtain custody of a small practice in Post Street,[9] whose incumbent had (in the parlance of the day) “gone to Texas” to escape his own pecuniary troubles. Debt seemed to be a common theme in San Francisco! My office was close to the city’s financial district and only a short cable-car ride from its hospitals, where I was by now well known. After hanging out my shingle, I looked forward to a better class of clientèle than I had met so far.
“A young lady to see you, Doctor.”
The speaker was my nurse Miss Bivins, a relic (in every sense) left by my predecessor. Tall, elderly, and dour, she nonetheless was fully competent, and admirable as a chaperone when examining young ladies. In this case, no chaperone was needed, for the patient she admitted was accompanied by another incarnation of Miss Bivins, dressed in the regalia of a Spanish dueña. The young lady introduced her companion as Teresa. Her name was Miss Constance Adams.
“I’ve come for my spring tonic.”
Her voice was light and clear, with traces of the graceful drawl found only in the southern states. I judged her to be no more than one-and-twenty: Short of stature, but with a pleasingly full figure and a rounded, dimpled face. The hair beneath her bonnet was dark auburn, and her prominent eyes a striking shade of blue. Although Miss Adams looked to be in perfect health, I noticed that she dressed severely, almost as though she was in mourning. Otherwise, her attire exhibited both wealth and taste.
“Are you in need of a tonic?” I enquired. “You don’t appear to be.”
“I have catarrh,” she insisted, with a charming pout.
“Dr. Richards prescribes Peruna for Miss Adams every spring,” Teresa interjected.[10]
“Dr. Richards has ‘gone to Texas’, and Peruna is little more than alcohol.”
My comments evoked a frown from the dueña, but a smile from my new patient. “What would you recommend, then, Dr. Watson?” she asked impishly.
“Fresh air and exercise, primarily. Do you walk?”
“I walk each morning in our garden, and in Golden Gate Park[11] some afternoons. In fine weather, we often make excursions to San Francisco Bay.”
“Sea air is normally healthy, but fogs from the bay can be uncomfortably cold, even in mid-summer. Not the best thing for catarrh. Have you ever visited Laguna Honda? The ground is higher there, and fog dissipates quickly in the morning sun. Most of the area is open farmland, with a spring-fed lagoon that’s quite delightful. My brother is a patient there. Perhaps,” I found myself proposing, “I could accompany you one day.”
“That,” proclaimed Teresa sternly, “would not be acceptable to Colonel Adams.”
“I had not thought of inviting Colonel Adams. But he would be more than welcome, if Miss Adams feels she needs a chaperone.”
“That role is mine, Señor.” The dueña rose. “Come, Miss Constance. It appears that the only suggestions this new doctor has to offer are improper ones.”
“Your pardon, ladies,” I said quickly. “Let me assure you that I meant no impropriety. I shall be more than happy to prescribe a tonic for Miss Adams. Though not one,” I added firmly, “containing alcohol.” I wrote out a prescription for a harmless nostrum and handed it to her.
“Thank you, Dr. Watson.” Placing the prescription in her reticule, Constance also rose. “I must not detain you further. I am volunteering at St. Mary’s Hospital this afternoon.”
“As it happens, I go there later for my evening rounds.” My association with a Catholic institution earned a nod from the dueña. At the door, Constance suddenly turned back to me.
“You’re from Scotland, Doctor, are you not?”
“Yes, I was born in Stranraer. However, I lived most of my life below the Tweed before coming here from London.”
“My mother is English.” She seemed to muse on that fact momentarily. “It’s been many years since I have seen her.”
“Come, Miss Constance.” Teresa took her charge’s arm and positively hustled her from my consulting room.
After they departed, I pondered my unseemly conduct with dismay. I realised that I had, of late, enjoyed little social contact with young ladies, passing my days with the “soiled doves” I treated at St. Mary’s Hospital. Had I, like Henry, lost the manners of a gentleman by associating with such company? Resolving to behave correctly towards her in the future, I was nonetheless determined to see more of Constance Adams.
In pursuit of that objective, I revised the schedule of my daily rounds to coincide with my fair patient’s hours as a volunteer. Her dueña did not join in these public duties, so it was easy to arrange “fortuitous” encounters on the cable car that took Constance to the hospital. Soon this became our regular routine. Over the weeks, we progressed to less defensible excursions: Joint attendance at receptions for St. Mary’s volunteers, post-luncheon strolls through the park in Stockton Street, even late-afternoon visits to the zoological gardens.[12] Once - daring greatly - Constance persuaded an old schoolmate to invite us both to tea.
In the course of these adventures, I learned more about her. She had come from a region of Alabama known as the Black Belt - so called for the richness of the soil, not the hands that tilled it. Her father, a wealthy cotton planter, had married a young English lady while on a European tour. When the South seceded, he - like most of his class - joined the Rebel army, rising to the rank of colonel. Constance was conceived during her father’s convalescence from a wound in 1863. From the moment of her birth (as she mournfully expressed it), “everything went d
ownhill” for the family. Union raiders cut a swath of destruction through the Black Belt, freeing the slaves on whom its affluence depended. Constance’s older brother died of fever. Following Lee’s surrender, Colonel Adams returned to find a grieving wife, a ruined plantation, and a daughter he had never seen. His wife left for England two years later. In 1869, Constance and her father removed to San Francisco. She could not remember any other home.
With each passing day, our liking for each other deepened, and by early summer I had begun to think of Constance Adams as a potential wife. However, when I proposed making the acquaintance of her father, she at once demurred.
“Oh, no, John. Papa’s health would not permit it.”
“Then could I not call upon him in my medical capacity?”
She shook her head decidedly. “Papa has his own physician: Dr. Victor. He wouldn’t like it if I brought in another doctor - especially anyone who was interested in me!”
This seemed an odd criterion for rejecting a physician. I was intrigued by Constance’s continued reticence about the Colonel, whom she seldom mentioned of her own accord. On my next visit to Laguna Honda, I decided to ask Henry (who, after all, had run a public house) if he knew anything about the man.
After a year residing in the Almshouse, my brother had improved considerably from the shattered wreck I met on my arrival. The doctors had managed to cure his opium addiction, and he had recently forsaken alcohol. By day, Henry laboured almost frantically in the ranch’s fields and orchards, having long since abandoned his objection to hard work. His nights were quietly occupied with Alice in their rooms in the communal dormitory. I was pleased to see that he had resumed his study of law books. Not unnaturally, my query about Adams - bringing with it a reminder of his old life - seemed to disturb him, but he answered readily enough.
“Old Adams? Yes, I remember him. They say he came here nearly twenty years ago, took up the shipping business, and made a modest fortune. Unhealthy-looking ogre. I’ve been told he fought with Bedford Forrest’s cavalry, but if he was anything like his present weight in those days, I pity the horse that had to carry him! Used to rent our spare room at the Parrot - ‘eighty-two or -three, it must have been. Sometimes I’d go in to take them whisky. God, I wish I had some now!”