Sherlock Holmes and Young Winston - The Jubilee Plot

by Mike Hogan

  “The tipping problem can be easily solved,” I suggested, ignoring Holmes gibe. “I sit in the driver’s seat at the back, pedalling and steering, you occupy the front seat and pedal. The difference in our relative weights will ensure that we are stable. To make certainty more certain sure, I got the manufacturers to add these little foot rests and handles on the centre shaft above the rear wheel, making it a triple. Churchill, jump up and show Holmes.”

  The boy leapt up and stood on the foot-rests behind the back saddle. The Humber slowly tipped upright, to the delight of the crowd that had collected around her. A wag at the back sang the Christy Minstrels’ song from some years back, The Great Velocipede.

  “There, equilibrium is easily attained. The extra weight gives the rear wheel a better bite, which helps the steering. If the Humber has a fault, it is that the steering is a trifle soft. With Churchill’s weight at the back, the third wheel can really engage. I have not the slightest doubt, Holmes, that this machine would beat a hansom through the streets of London on paved, Macadam or dirt streets. She does not like cobbles, naturally.”

  “I see,” said Holmes. “You are the steersman of this contraption, I sit in front of you, and Churchill takes his ease standing behind. Is that the idea?”

  “Exactly. We will be independent of cab drivers and able to take off to a case within seconds of an alarm. The machine may be swiftly loaded in the guard’s van of a train, so we will need no local transport when we range outside the city. Moreover, it is almost cost-free: just a little oil or a touch of paint now and then. My dear fellow, we spend an inordinate amount on cabs; you would blanch at the figures.”

  I patted the Humber affectionately. “The Earl of Albemarle rides a Humber.” I coughed. “By the way, old chap, the correct terms are ‘Captain’ for the driver and ‘Stoker’ for the front peddler.”

  “And Churchill is the cabin boy.”

  “I had her painted in the regimental colour of the Sixty-Sixth, the Berkshires,” I said. “I thought of calling her Irene.”

  “Billy,” said Holmes, “fetch a hansom.”

  “How can you be sure that Morgan and the Donovans are in the pay of the British, Holmes?” I asked as we made our way to Pall Mall. “The dossiers we received from Mycroft were perfectly damning.”

  “I had a strong suspicion before we left our shores for France. Davitt and Egan told me.”

  “Good Lord,” I exclaimed. “Was that before I arrived at the Golden Lion?”

  “Quite the contrary, my dear fellow, it was as we left. You remember what Davitt said after he advised us to be careful in France?”

  “He told us to bring our overcoats - to Paris in June forsooth!”

  “He said that we would meet ‘lovers of pleasure on the banks of that rueful stream, the Seine, rather than lovers of God’, and then he suggested that we wrap up warm.”

  “Well?”

  “You do not recall your Milton, my dear fellow:

  ‘Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;

  Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,

  Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;

  Cocytus, nam’d of lamentation loud

  Heard on the rueful stream;’

  The rueful stream is the Cocytus, one of the five rivers encircling Hell. You will remember that it spills into a frozen lake in the ninth and lowest circle of Hades. Satan spends a good deal of time there, gnawing on Judas: it is the home of traitors.”

  “Good Lord. What a convoluted sort of clue. Why didn’t the fellow come right out and say that he suspected his compatriots in France of being British agents?”

  Holmes shrugged a Gallic shrug as we stopped opposite the Diogenes Club. We descended from our cab outside the now familiar building in Pall Mall where Mycroft lodged.

  I checked my watch. “Seventeen minutes, Holmes. The Humber would have had us here in half the time.”

  “My dear fellow,” said Holmes testily. “Much as I may be annoyed with my brother, I would not make him a silent, sniggering, laughing-stock with his fellow members of the Diogenes Club by parking a bright-green pedal cart outside his house and opposite their windows.”

  He nodded at a fine carriage with a coat of arms on the doors that was parked in front of our cab. “Particularly when he has noble guests.”

  I followed him into the lobby. The same idiot boy conducted us up the staircase to the first floor. Holmes stopped him on the landing.

  “The man who delivered packages a few days ago for Mr Holmes, Colonel Delacy and Mr Melas - was he the clergyman who visited the Colonel the day before, or a different man?”

  “The packages came by messenger, sir. I don’t know nothing about a clergyman.”

  “I think you do. He was a young man who went up smiling and came down scowling. How much did he tip you?”

  “Nothing, sir. I don’t know the gentleman.”

  “And you didn’t let the gas men in with their ladders, I suppose.”

  “Don’t know nothing, sir,” the boy said sullenly.

  “How many boxes did the messenger deliver?” I asked in a more friendly tone. “Have a sweety.”

  “Thank you kindly, sir,” the boy said, taking a humbug. “One package for each tenant, four in all. I put the Colonel’s outside his door as he was hiding again. He goes funny sometimes and he says that the Wahhabis is after him. He frightened the post-office messengers so much by waving his elephant gun about that they refuse to deliver beyond the lobby. I have to fag up and down with letters and such.”

  We continued to Mycroft’s door. It was taller and grander than the doors of the flats on the floor above. Again, two apartments were opposite each other.

  “Who lives in the other flat?” I asked the boy.

  “Major Smythe. That’s not his real name. He’s a spy against the Russians. He’s in India now.”

  “Where is his cake parcel?”

  “In mum’s pantry downstairs. It’s a tin sent from the Queen for the Major on account of the Jubilee and his glorious service on the North-West Frontier. We’ll give it him if he comes back.”

  “Fetch,” said Holmes, knocking on Mycroft’s door. It was unlocked, and it swung slowly open.

  We found Mycroft in his sitting room. Holmes immediately launched into a tirade that backed his brother to the windows.

  I sat back in an armchair looking about me as the two brothers nipped and snapped at each other, gesticulating like a pair of French waiters feuding over the tip. The usually taciturn Mycroft was stung by Holmes’ charge that we had been sent to France on a wild goose chase.

  Mycroft’s sitting room could not have been more different to that of Mr Melas directly above, or that of Colonel Delacy’s apartment opposite Melas. It was as if Mycroft had transferred a section of the Diogenes Club from the other side of the street and planted it in his rooms. The same deep, maroon leather club chairs and sofas were in regimented lines, the same occasional tables topped with oil lamps or potted plants were between them, and the same sort of dark paintings hung between the bookshelves. The smell of beeswax, Rowland’s Macassar Oil and cigar smoke pervaded the atmosphere. The only difference between the Diogenes Club and Mycroft’s rooms was the amount of noise generated by the Holmes brothers.

  The full-length French windows were wide open, but not a breath of air disturbed the sitting room. I felt myself nodding off.

  “Watson,” cried Holmes. I jerked awake. “You will support me. Morgan is a desiccated husk of a man. He poses no threat whatsoever to Her Majesty.”

  “No, Holmes, I will not. He is not a dry husk: he is soused, soaked and blotted with wine, brandy and absinthe. I infer the wine, he stank of brandy, and we saw the green poison delivered at the appointed hour. He has lost the military bearing noted in his description in the Home Office dossier. He displ
ays the characteristic blotchy red and yellowish skin of the slave to spirits. His liver will not last another eighteen months. I informed him of that certainty in blunt and, if I may say so, cheerful terms.”

  Holmes waved my comments away. “I presume that the Thompson couple are your agents, Mycroft. Just who is the foppish chief constable employed by?”

  “Chief Constable Williamson is ours. I have no idea to whom the Thompsons report. They may be left over from Monro’s predecessor, a high-flown fellow who was partial to conspiracies. He affected a wig and a false beard. Now that you have stopped shouting, Brother, may I offer you and Doctor Watson some tea? A friend sent some fine, whole-leaf black he gets from an estate near Kandy in Ceylon. Let me do the honours.”

  He put four spoonfuls of black tea into an ornate silver teapot and filled it with boiling water from a tea urn. “There are water biscuits, but the only cake I have is the tainted Dundee. I eat a thin slice each evening before going to bed. It is an effective soporific.”

  “According to your dossier,” Holmes continued in a more moderate, but still exasperated tone, “Michael ‘Dynamite’ Donovan planned the murders in Phoenix Park, he intended to hurl Mr Monro’s grenades into the House of Commons, he is hand-in-glove with the Mahdi in the Sudan, and he contrived the elopement of Maharajah Duleep and his flight to Moscow. He is the consummate dynamitard and yet he is in your pay.”

  “The material was based on claims by Donovan himself,” said Mycroft testily. “And there was a Parnellite pamphlet sent to the newspapers last month that gloated over his exploits. Milk and sugar, Doctor?”

  I helped myself.

  “The lump sugar is so much more convenient,” said Mycroft.

  “That nonsense with Maharaja Duleep,” said Holmes. “Was that one of Monro’s predecessor’s conspiracies?”

  “Oh no, Sherlock, that was my idea,” Mycroft said cheerfully. “That was my idea entirely. We needed to discredit Katkov and his conspirators, make a laughing stock of a potential mischief-maker and, most imperative of all, avert a Continental war. I devised a plan that effected everything necessary. Lord Salisbury was most complimentary, and the Foreign Secretary told me, in confidence, that Chancellor Bismarck thought it the neatest coup of the decade.”

  He sipped his tea complacently.

  “What was your plan?” I asked after the long, long silence that followed.

  Holmes gave me a frigid look.

  “You will know, Doctor,” Mycroft began, leaning forward with an uncharacteristic brilliant spark of fervour in his eyes, “that earlier this year we were closer to war with Russia than at any time since the Crimean conflict. A powerful faction in the Imperial Court at Saint Petersburg had formed around an alliance of ambitious generals and the ultra-right-wing editor Mikhail Katkov and his nationalist cronies.”

  “The Prime Minister mentioned Mr Katkov with disapprobation,” I said.

  Mycroft nodded. “His faction urged the Tsar to pursue the pan-Slavist vision of his assassinated father by lunging at Turkey through the Balkans. He would take the land from his current borders to the Bosporus. That would mean immediate war with Great Britain. We are treaty bound.

  “The great railway that is being constructed with such un-Russian energy and haste would convey Imperial troops to the Afghan border. A convenient prophecy would predict that the Sikh’s dispossessed Maharajah, Duleep Singh, was about to return. The best regiments in the Indian Army would rebel against their British masters and put Duleep on the throne of the Lion of the Punjab. Russian armies would cross into India; Indian princes would ally with them and drive us out. We might, depending on circumstances, be able to cling to Ceylon.”

  “Poppycock,” said Holmes. “Russia would be mad to make the attempt. The Royal Navy would annihilate their fleet, take their capital and destroy their trade. We would plant a complaisant crown-duke on the throne. They would lose.”

  “Naturally, they would lose,” said Mycroft crossly. “The Russian Foreign Minister, Monsieur de Giers, is well aware that they would lose. He was in despair. An unholy alliance of nationalists and revolutionaries, nihilists of the most fanatical type, would welcome a lost war. They want to bog us down in a campaign of terror while their political movements flourish like toadstools in the ruins of ancient Slav cities. Russia would be infested with committees of seedy bureaucrats meeting in dank, half-destroyed churches, hatching dynamite plots and preaching atheism. It would lead to democracy of the darkest possible hue.”

  There was a knock at the door and the page entered with a brown-paper package. Holmes gestured for him to put it on the table. The boy did so and hesitated, looking at me. I gave him tuppence and he retired.

  “The danger of war - a European war of hitherto unparalleled destruction - hung over us last winter,” Mycroft continued. “By last month, Katkov had wormed his way close enough to the Tsar to present his proposition. It aided him immensely that Alexander had dreamt a prophetic dream of martial glory and Eastern conquest.”

  “Indigestion,” said Holmes.

  “Maharaja Duleep was in Paris writing alternately offensive and cringing letters to the Queen. She was most upset at his treachery. He had been a fetching and polite youth at thirteen and a half when Dalhousie forced him to hand Her Majesty the Punjab, and incidentally the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Duleep the older had pamphlets printed in France outlining our rapine of his father’s treasury.”

  “There’s some truth there,” said Holmes. “Lord Dalhousie was little better than a dacoit. He grabbed the Maharajah’s jewels and young Duleep as spoils of our victory against the Sikhs. I presume that these pamphlets were printed by the Donovan brothers.”

  Mycroft nodded. “They also introduced Duleep to General Trent-Hall.”

  “The leader of the Fenians in Europe is your absinthe-addicted puppet,” said Holmes. “He offered the Maharajah a phantom army of Irishmen to join his rebellious subjects, led by the fabulous General Morgan. Ha! Duleep was encouraged to leap into the arms of the Tsar by the British government.”

  “Exactly,” Mycroft confirmed with a self-satisfied smile. “My plan was maturing well. We had a timely stroke of luck in March, just before Duleep’s intended departure for Russia, when a nitro-glycerine-soaked nihilist attempted to assassinate Tsar Alexander. Unlike the attack on his father, the attempt failed. It concentrated the Tsar’s mind wonderfully. I think you know the rest. Trent-Hall persuaded Duleep to travel on the passport of Michael ‘Dynamite’ Donovan. The Maharajah was intercepted as he changed trains in Berlin, and our agents stripped him of his money. At the border, the Russian guards were convinced that Duleep was a circus magician, and his young mistress from Kennington was a fortune-teller. He was rescued by Katkov and brought to Moscow, where he clung, for fun it seems, to his identity as Michael Donovan.”

  “The man must be demented,” I exclaimed.

  “Last month, Katkov presented the Tsar with a detailed memorandum in which he outlined a plan that would wrench India out of the hands of England. Alexander was impressed until his foreign minister, briefed by us -”

  “You,” said Holmes dismissively.

  “- was able to inform His Imperial Majesty that Katkov’s ‘Michael Donovan’ was a rebel who boasted of plans to murder Queen Victoria with explosives. We hinted that Katkov’s dynamitard might then turn his attention to other European monarchs. Alexander was not amused.”

  “It is incredible, Mycroft,” Holmes said. “Trent-Hall, the head of the Fenian Brotherhood in Europe is doing Foreign Office bidding and Morgan is in your pay. Yet your spies dog them and they are vilified in Parliament and the Press. The Donovan brothers, also your creatures, concoct spine-chilling tales of dynamite mayhem in the British and international newspapers that have no basis whatsoever in fact. You have cornered the market in dynamite plots.”

  “I averted a European war, Holmes,” sai
d Mycroft stiffly. “And I confounded the knavish tricks of a potent enemy of Great Britain. What is that noise?”

  Holmes went to the open windows followed by his brother.

  “It is skylarking delivery boys,” said Holmes turning away and giving me a fierce look.

  “They have no packages on their tricycle,” said Mycroft looking out of the window. “A buxom young lady is steering the contraption. Isn’t that Lord Randolph’s son, Winston on the back? The boy waves energetically, ah, their balance is lost.”

  There was a loud clang from the street below. Mycroft turned away from the window.

  “They have come to grief against the lamp-post outside the Diogenes Club.”

  Holmes stood with his back to the empty fireplace and his thumbs under the lapels of his frock coat. “You could not have played for such high stakes without the knowledge and approval of the Prime Minister. I begin to feel for Parnell. The Times links him with the Paris bomb fanatics; he aggressively denies the charge. If he is innocent, the damning letters in the newspaper are as counterfeit as the seditious pamphlets concocted by the Donovan brothers, but he cannot prove them so. If he is guilty, he is on the side of the fake dynamite faction in France and in bed with Lord Salisbury!”

  “Did someone call?” said the Prime Minister poking his head around the door.

  “It is not a Tory trait to find fault,” said Lord Salisbury settling himself on the sofa and accepting a light for his cigar from Mycroft.

  “We accept the vagaries of human nature. To err is human after all. What I abhor most is fanaticism. We must govern the upper classes, the bourgeoisie, and the working classes. The last two are simple to control; it is the aristocrats that cause the trouble. All legislation is unwelcome to the top people, as tending to disturb a state of things with which they are well satisfied. My party must work at less speed, and at a lower temperature than our opponents. Our actions must be tentative and cautious, not sweeping and dramatic.”

  He surveyed our blank faces.

  “In other words, it is no part of my job to dismantle the Union and throw the reluctant inhabitants of Ireland to the dynamiters, and I will not do so. I would abjure my oath of office, give Gibraltar to the Spanish and reject the Thirty-Nine Articles before I would break the Union. I speak hyperbolically. Oh, hello Winston.”