The Italian Secretary Read online

  ‘They are, Mycroft,’ Holmes called. ‘And if you are not careful, you shall place your left foot into “the blood that never dries.”’ After his brother had performed the fairest approximation of a leap that his heavy form would allow, Holmes continued: ‘It is likely taken from a pig or some other livestock, and has been there for better than twelve hours – so do spare yourself the mess.’

  Mycroft continued to look down and at the floor, frowning a bit and clicking his tongue. ‘Do you mean to say that it was for a glimpse of this nonsense that so much money changed hands? To say nothing of three good men’s lives being lost, while an honest young woman was ruined and nearly driven mad?’

  ‘No, no,’ Holmes mused, still tinkering with the lute, the tune it was producing making me less easy with every passing minute. ‘All of these things occurred, not because of that puddle, but because of these rooms and this palace – it was their peculiar power that transformed an animal’s blood into a bit of magic. Shadows into mad visions. Life into death …’

  Mycroft nodded in seeming agreement, then appeared to remember something: ‘Speaking of the girl,’ he said. ‘What has become of her?’

  I indicated the broken window, and Mycroft’s eyes went wide. ‘Fear not,’ I said quickly. ‘She is quite well.’

  ‘Rescued!’ Holmes erupted. ‘By Watson and the local constabulary. It was a brilliant feat, Mycroft – I should recommend them all for royal recognition. Particularly Watson.’

  ‘Indeed?’ said Mycroft. ‘Well, I shall first have to – confound it, Sherlock, will you desist with that instrument? Our work is not yet finished: Will Sadler is still at large in the park, somewhere, along with God only knows how many other accomplices!’

  ‘Fear not. There is only one.’ Then, so softly that his brother could not hear, he added: ‘And we shall not catch him …’ Holmes suddenly did stop playing the lute. ‘The ancient engine of Sadler’s,’ he said aloud. ‘You have secured it?’

  Mycroft’s features filled with evident disappointment. ‘We could not,’ he said. ‘I had thought it well guarded, but somehow—’

  Holmes lifted his head, as if he had expected this news: ‘Somehow, it has mysteriously ignited, and is burning even now …’ He then sighed once, in resignation.

  ‘How could you have known as much?’ his brother asked.

  Holmes shrugged, returning to the lute. ‘It is in keeping,’ he said, ‘with the events of the evening. No doubt Sadler doubled back on his pursuers and set fire to the thing himself.’

  Mycroft did not seem any more satisfied with this strained explanation than was Holmes; but then he looked about the room once again, rather more dubiously, and murmured, ‘We can only speculate.’

  ‘What “ancient engine”?’ I asked. ‘What are you two talking about?’

  ‘That’s right – Watson has not seen it!’ Holmes’s mood seemed to brighten considerably at my ignorance, or rather at the prospect of putting an end to it: He stood quickly, set the lute aside, and strode from the room. ‘Quickly, Watson!’ he said, slapping the sheets of music into his brother’s befuddled chest. ‘Before the thing has quite burned away!’

  Following behind him, I paused when I saw Mycroft studying the music. ‘Doctor,’ he said, holding out one large hand and taking hold of my arm. ‘I know my brother well enough to detect when something is of significance to a case.’ He held out the music. ‘What is this?’

  I thought hard for a moment of how best to relate the tale; but, finally, all I could say was, ‘Mr Holmes – have you a taste for Italian opera?’

  ‘Well – as much as the next man who works in Whitehall, I suppose.’

  It was not the soundest of affirmations. ‘Verdi?’ I enquired further.

  He shook his head. ‘Rather histrionic, for my blood.’

  Pushing the sheets back at him, I said only, ‘I should keep it that way, if I were you,’ and then moved on.

  By the time I caught up to Holmes, he was halfway out of a window in yet another bedchamber on the outer side of the palace. Opening the next window in the room, I took up a similar position – and saw, in the distance, a furious conflagration. A great, crane-like structure, made of mighty timbers and constructed on a wheeled base, was afire just beyond the northern line of the inner fence; and around it, one could just make out several police officers, who, having apparently surrendered any attempt to stop the blaze, were milling about and laughing in nervous awe at the sight before them.

  The scene recalled similar images from picture books in my youth, and as I strained to place them in context, I finally formed an idea of what the structure must once have been. ‘Holmes!’ I called. ‘That is a medieval siege weapon, is it not?’

  ‘A trebuchet, Watson,’ Holmes called, as he took a rather perilous seat in the sill of the open window. ‘It was my first suspicion, when I heard of Likely Will’s tastes – you will recall, perhaps, that, using such devices, medieval armies were known to hurl plague-ridden human bodies into cities that they held under siege. A similar tactic seemed the only possible explanation for the mystery of McKay’s body, its position and condition – and Miss Mackenzie, you will recall, confirmed that Sadler possessed such a thing. Nevertheless – I was glad to actually see it, for it was one of the more unusual explanations I have had to formulate!’

  ‘Indeed,’ I replied, suddenly noticing that I, like my friend, was smiling at the sight. ‘But it does the heart good to see it destroyed, does it not, Holmes?’

  ‘Most certainly.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we join in the search? For Sadler, that is.’

  Holmes merely shook his head calmly. ‘The police will likely find him – though undoubtedly idiosyncratic, Sadler’s was not the greatest malevolent force at work here. That power was embodied in Lord Francis – yet in truth, there is much about this affair that defies any simple or criminal explanation.’

  ‘You’ll have no argument from me, Holmes.’

  My friend looked up, clapping a hand onto one knee. ‘And now, perhaps we – Watson!’ His face had become suddenly horrified. ‘Look out, man!’

  From somewhere out of the left corner of the same eye, I detected a rapidly approaching object, and instinctively pulled back within the building. Just as I did, the still-sore drums of my ears were once again nearly split by the scream of some angry and obviously bewildered bird of prey: In fact, it was an enormous goshawk, which trailed two long leather thongs from its outstretched talons. These last were expert blades of dissection with which the bird had evidently intended to disfigure me as it once had Hackett: Holmes’s warning had been enough to alert me, and spare me that fate – but my heart and blood had been sent racing.

  ‘Damn the thing!’ I cried, looking about and realising that I had left the Holland and Holland in the supper-room. ‘Had I only remembered the rifle …!’

  Holmes laughed once. ‘And do you now profess to be such a marksman that you can take down even a large bird with a lone bullet in the dark?’

  I put my head back outside rather gingerly, in time to see the admittedly magnificent avian hunter gliding away into the moonlit heavens, away from the fire, the palace, and likely the hard taskmaster who had so cruelly wrenched it from the wild, breaking, if only for a time, its proud spirit.

  ‘No, Holmes. I do not – and I am glad, in fact, that the pitiable creature has got away.’

  ‘Let that be the symbol of this case, Watson,’ mused Holmes, as the bird screamed one final time. ‘If, indeed, it must have one. A noble if ferocious spirit, bent to the unnatural, nefarious purposes of a depraved human mind, has returned to the elemental world where it belongs, a world where life and death can once again make a form of preternatural sense that we civilised humans cannot hope to comprehend.’ Holmes kept his eyes upon the vanishing hawk. ‘If nothing else, we have taken that lesson from this place – and, with luck, we will be spared any further acquaintance with it …’

  Chapter XVI

  TWILIGHT ON BAKER STREET />
  The remainder of our stay in Scotland seems a time apart from those few strange and dangerous days in Holyroodhouse. Called to attend Her Majesty at Balmoral, Holmes and I felt that we must first do what we could to assist the police in laying hold of the remaining fugitives. True to Holmes’s prediction, Will Sadler was soon apprehended, trying to make his way out of the country by sea; and, on appearing in court, the man attempted to portray himself as the helpless pawn of a malevolent nobleman, a tactic that, in Scotland, could generally be relied on to produce a sympathetic reaction from the courts and the public; but not in this case. Angry that Sadler had so cynically manipulated one of their oldest legends and superstitions, the people of Edinburgh demanded harsh justice for the offender. Likely Will’s affability and friendship with many of the soldiers in the castle garrison, as well as his association with hotel barmen throughout the city, were forgotten (much to the relief of those men), and he was eventually given the chance to feel what Queen Mary once had: the terror of a long early morning walk to a lonely place of execution.

  But as to confederates, Sadler refused to the end to name any, even when he was told that such might bring commutation of his sentence. Perhaps, ultimately, he wished to protect his brother; perhaps he even had some deformed sense of honour; or perhaps, as I have always thought, he took with him to the grave stories that belonged there in the first place …

  Whatever the case, an entirely different sort of fate awaited Robert Sadler. Holmes, Mycroft, and myself made sure that the facts of what had occurred at the palace were so arranged, when related to the police, that Robert’s brave change of heart would be recognised and rewarded, while any former complicity in the purely fraudulent (as opposed to murderous) parts of Lord Francis’s schemes would be overlooked. As a result, Robert’s only ‘punishment’ was to be allowed to escort Miss Mackenzie back to the western loch country of her youth, where, we could only suppose, the pair would one day quietly marry, once the remarkable girl had quite recovered from her ordeal – as well as the birth of her child, whose paternity Robert both accepted and proclaimed. At the time of the couple’s departure from Holyroodhouse, Miss Mackenzie was already well on her way to this happier state: The characteristic spark had reignited within her eyes, and I confess to an older man’s envy of Sadler’s good luck – although ‘luck’ in fact had little to do with the matter, for he had worked hard and risked all to earn Miss Mackenzie’s trust and affection.

  Both of the Holmes brothers were again called on to use all the force of their personalities and reputations when Lord Francis’s father, the Duke of Hamilton, soon appeared and indignantly attempted take personal control of the family’s business at Holyroodhouse. Together, Holmes and Mycroft blocked the duke’s perhaps understandable but no less arrogant attempts to revise the history of recent events as a method of discrediting tales of his son’s infamous behaviour, and to halt his concurrent and similarly unjust efforts to lay blame on Hackett and his family for allowing discipline at the palace to dissipate to the point of chaos. Mycroft had thought recourse to Her Majesty in this matter might be necessary, but ultimately it was not: Both the Scottish press and Dennis McKay’s friends within the Scottish Nationalist party proved ready allies, and under all this combined pressure the duke ultimately (if rather suddenly) remembered the obligations of his rank: he graciously abandoned his activities, rewarded Hackett’s family for their loyalty, and satisfied himself with having his son’s name quietly overlooked during the prosecution of Will Sadler.

  It was with matters at the palace well settled, then, that the Holmeses and I finally set out for the Aberdeenshire Highlands, a spot whose beauty was, for this commoner, truly awe-inspiring, although my companions seemed to take it quite in stride. I shall not write in detail of what took place in the Victorian Gothic masterpiece that is Balmoral Castle, for words are inadequate to the occasion; and, even could I find them, Mycroft (who knows of my penchant for recording the details of my adventures with Holmes) has advised me that intimate details of the functioning of the royal household are best left out of tales of murder and mischief, and I have gladly accepted this admonition. I will say, however, that, quite beyond condescension, Her Majesty displayed real and extensive interest in, as well as concern about, our dangerous adventures; and that, in particular, she wished very much to know if we had seen or heard anything that might shed light upon the ancient legend concerning a wandering spirit in the palace. Whatever frank answers Holmes and I might have been tempted to give were artfully thwarted by Mycroft – and I can further report that Holmes’s original and remarkable claim that his brother enjoyed complete informality in the Queen’s presence was utterly vindicated: while he never took advantage of such when he was aware of the presence of others, I did once catch sight of Mycroft sitting with Her Majesty in one of the castle gardens – and had the pair been an elderly married couple in Hyde Park, they could scarcely have appeared more completely at their ease.

  During the several days of trout and salmon fishing that followed our audience, Holmes and I had enormously good luck, for the streams and lochs on or adjacent to the various royal holdings in Scotland were well stocked and populated, and our hunger for simple recreation was almost inexhaustible. We did not speak of our adventure at Holyroodhouse during this time, beyond the occasional and meaningless reference, thus perpetuating one of the stranger human habits that I have, over the course of my life, been in a position to observe: The more remarkable and even unbelievable a set of events through which a given pair or group of people have lived, the less need they feel to speak of it. One might think that the sheer inexplicability of such matters would almost require conversation; yet it is that very quality which makes talk unnecessary. For there is, in the end, little if anything to say about such encounters and events: We each saw what we saw, or we believe we did, and argument or debate, analysis or conjecture, would each and all require further proofs – but these, God willing, we shall never obtain.

  There does remain, however, one small postscript to the matter of the Italian Secretary. Not long after Holmes and I had returned to Baker Street and resumed that routine which passed, when one lived in Holmes’s remarkable world, for ‘normal,’ we were one evening reviewing the day’s late newspaper editions in our sitting-room, and smoking furiously. It was a habit of Holmes’s to surrender to inactivity only reluctantly after an important (to say nothing of chilling) case; and I was lending him what assistance I could in the quest to find some new criminal matter on which to fix his activated mental energies. But the going was slow, the rewards few and frustrating; and the slower and more frustrating things became, the more both our appetites for tobacco seemed to rise, until, once again, we found that we had burned through both of our stores. I offered to make the trip to the tobacconist’s, hoping to avoid another unfortunate encounter between my friend and Mrs Hudson; and as I pulled on my jacket and was leaving the room, Holmes humorously suggested that I save myself a longer walk by simply purchasing whatever marginally decent tobacco the small sundries store across the way was offering that evening.

  Although I chuckled at this suggestion and dismissed it out of hand, I found that, when I had exited into the warm autumn twilight of Baker Street, I felt a strange desire and even drive to cross over and pass by the little shop. I had no intention of going in; I thought at most to offer the owner a greeting and pass on, although I could not say, even now, why this idea should have taken such hold of me.

  Mid-way across Baker Street, I passed into the shadow cast by several buildings; and my eyes, accustomed to the sunlight out of which I had just passed, required a moment to adjust to what seemed, by comparison, almost darkness. As I moved along towards the shop in this state, I looked towards its entrance—

  And I stopped suddenly. Ahead of me, walking aimlessly before the shop doorway, was (or so I thought) a young girl with golden hair (or was it simply the autumn light that made it seem so?) and a face that was a picture of innocence. Just how she was dr
essed I cannot now say; but it seemed to me at the time that she wore some wafting garment, like a delicate child’s nightgown, and that, at its edges, this garment almost disappeared in the shadows beneath the building. I had the idea that she was singing quietly to herself, although I could hear no sound; and as I slowly resumed walking, my heart began to beat much faster than it had during any similar encounter with a child. And then the girl looked up and directly at me:

  With a plaintive, almost sad expression on her young face, she urged me into the shop, which she herself then seemed to enter.

  Now quite beyond rational thought, I hurried along and quickly followed where I believed the girl had led. Here, I found the proprietor standing behind the short glass counter, himself perusing some foreign-language newspaper. He looked up, smiled wide, and greeted me with the pleasant expression that was his custom—

  But there was no sign of the young girl anywhere in the store.

  ‘Well, Doctor,’ said the Punjabi man, ‘what can I do for you this very fine evening?’

  I could form no answer, but continued to look about the store, increasingly urgently.

  ‘Doctor?’ the man repeated. ‘Are you quite well? Are you looking for something particularly?’

  I held up a finger, and pointed about the well-provisioned room, desperately trying to find my voice.

  ‘Do you require medical assistance, Doctor?’ the proprietor said, alarm now filling his voice. He rushed around the counter, and stood by me. ‘Have you been taken ill?’

  Shaking my head repeatedly, I was finally able to say, ‘Did – did not someone just come in here?’

  No sooner were the words out of my mouth than the proprietor’s expression changed – slowly, at first, but markedly. ‘Someone?’ he said. ‘Someone who?’

  ‘It was—’ I felt some reluctance, but my fear got the better of it. ‘It was a young girl – she was standing outside, just now …’