The Italian Secretary Read online

  ‘Ah, but Watson, we’ve never been called to a place like Holyroodhouse!’

  ‘And why should a royal palace make any difference?’

  As Holmes replied, I found myself staring out of the window at the shop across the way with far greater dread than I had previously felt, or than seemed warranted by the situation:

  ‘The bodies of two men in the Queen’s employ – scheduled to have been involved in reconstructing the oldest portion of the structure, those rooms that were once the private realm of the Scottish Queen – are found dead as a result of an untold number of terrible wounds, before they could even begin their work. Do not the circumstances, the awful coincidences, call something and someone to mind?’

  I was about to protest continued ignorance; and then the beginnings of an old, a very old story began to draw in from the furthest corners of my memory, bringing a shudder with them.

  ‘Yes, Watson,’ Holmes said quietly, joining me at the window. ‘The Italian secretary …’ He, too, looked out of the window, and spoke the name with a strange fascination: ‘Rizzio …’

  ‘But – ’ My own voice, I noted, had dropped considerably in volume and conviction. ‘Holmes, that was three centuries ago!’

  ‘And yet it is said that he walks the palace halls still, seeking revenge …’

  My body shivered involuntarily again, a reaction that angered me. ‘Nonsense! And even if true, why in the world should—’

  ‘That is what we must determine, my friend – preferably before we reach our destination.’ Holmes glanced at the mantel clock. ‘The time, Watson – we must be away!’

  Chapter III

  NORTHWARD TO THE SCOTTISH BORDER

  Whatever illusions I had entertained about the experience of riding in a special train that had been commissioned by the royal household were dispelled when I saw the beast that awaited us alongside an old, disused platform just outside the main lines and structures of Euston Station. We had only just arrived at our departure point on schedule (wager or no wager, case or no case, Holmes would not think of getting aboard without at least a healthy amount of his own tobacco, prepared by his most trusted supplier, which had meant an indirect route to the station); and even in the near-darkness, or perhaps, indeed, because of it, the enormous engine, its lights glaring and its boiler at the steaming, snorting ready, stood in considerable contrast to the small, extremely solitary passenger car that, save for the coal trailer, was the train’s only complement: Our journey would sacrifice all luxury for speed, it seemed, an impression that was confirmed when we approached the car and found ourselves faced with a succession of cheerless, plain compartments. Those furthest ahead and behind were occupied by plain-clothed young men who, we were quickly given to understand, were not policemen. Just what they were, they did not say – and, knowing that this would present an irresistible and perhaps amusing challenge to Holmes, I did not give voice to my own instinctive impression that each of the men had a distinctly military bearing.

  Two of the squad, who appeared to be the leaders, approached us: one a sour-faced fellow with an arching nose that ended in an accusatory point, the other far more appealing and affable.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ said the latter. ‘If you’ll just climb aboard, we can get under way. Not a great deal of time for pleasantries, I’m afraid – but may I just say what a great honour it is for us all to have you both aboard?’

  ‘You may, Lieutenant—?’ Holmes enquired leadingly.

  The second young man smiled, as the first began to pace uneasily. ‘An excellent attempt, Mr Holmes. But I’m afraid we have orders to forgo names, as well as ranks – for the time being.’

  ‘And I suppose it would do no good to enquire as to who issued those orders?’

  ‘Not really, sir, no.’

  ‘We ought to be under way by now,’ said the first fellow brusquely.

  ‘Certainly,’ Holmes said, moving to the middle compartment of the passenger car. ‘But do remember, young sir, that reticence is not always the best guarantee of secrecy.’

  ‘Meaning, Mr Holmes?’ said the sour-faced young man, rather indignantly.

  ‘Meaning that, by refusing conversation, you force me to rely on my observational skills,’ Holmes replied. ‘Which, I can assure you, are far more developed than my social talents. For example – while you were so conspicuously not speaking, I was able to make out the immutable stamp of the army upon your posture; and yet, your frame does not display any signs of rigorous physical exertion, nor your skin of outdoor duty. From which it is no great job to divine that you are either a low-level staff officer or a higher-ranking member of military intelligence. Given our present circumstances, which conclusion would you draw?’ The unpleasant fellow looked eviscerated, and Holmes approached him. ‘An amiable conversation can often be the best method of obfuscation imaginable – as your colleague from the Royal Navy, here, seems already to have learned.’ Rapping the army officer on the chest lightly with his knuckles, Holmes said, ‘Do remember that, won’t you?’ as he boarded the train. ‘And you, sir,’ he added, lowering the compartment window to address the second young man. ‘If you wish to succeed in your present career, some determined retraining of your sea gait would do you no harm!’

  The second fellow could not help but laugh quietly and give both Holmes and myself appreciative looks as he closed the door to our compartment. ‘Enjoy the trip, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘and do let us know if there is any way in which we can be of assistance …’ He then signalled to the other men before and behind us, and the train jerked into forward motion.

  Despite the more cheerful officer’s demeanour, a very unpleasant sort of anticipation – the foreboding that one has when one is not even sure upon whom one may rely, or why, a sensation that I had experienced quite often in Afghanistan – began at once to gather around our mission; and it would develop into a deep sense of philosophical malaise, even dread, during the trip northward. Holmes and I started out bravely enough, with a return to Mycroft’s telegram and an attempt to resolve our wager; but there really was very little left in the thing that could genuinely be called challenging. The mention of ‘Mr Webley’ was positively blatant (unless one happened to be unacquainted with British firearms); and in making such an obvious reference to the service revolver that he knew me to carry during our most dangerous cases, Mycroft indicated only that he believed our antagonists in the present business to be capable of extreme violence – arguably (given the fates of the two men who were the apparent subjects of the case) a superfluous warning. The somewhat absurd mention of a palm-reading as a means of self-protection might have been slightly esoteric, had I not been aware that at least one of Holmes’s criminal acquaintances, a certain ‘Porky’ Shinwell Johnson, was in the habit of carrying a devilish, peculiar-looking weapon that was actually called a ‘Palm-protector’: a single-shot pistol that fired a .32 calibre short round, and that fitted neatly within the palm of the hand. Its small barrel extended out from between the middle and ring fingers and its firing mechanism was triggered when sufficient pressure was applied by the heel of the hand to a lever. It had originally come to the London underworld by way of the criminal gangs of Chicago, and Shinwell Johnson, knowing of Holmes’s interest in exotic weapons, had even presented him with one, after they had co-operated on a particularly difficult matter; but why Mycroft should have specified bringing it to the palace, neither his brother nor I could tell. Holmes, however, had not questioned the directive, although he had entrusted the thing to my care on our departure for Euston.

  With our train by now firing like some gigantic rocket through a very black night – for a storm front had rolled in from the North Sea, as if to definitively extinguish any hope that we might not have entered into a sinister affair – we moved on to Mycroft’s next reference. ‘A pair of berths on the Caledonia’ seemed, to me, to serve a double purpose: It confirmed, in the unlikely event that we were in any doubt, that our destination was Scotland, while giving our o
pponent or opponents the impression that we had taken ship for a foreign port. A quick check of The Times told us that Mycroft had been careful to make sure that the Cunard steamship Caledonia was indeed departing Southampton for New York the very next day; and this offered me a small measure of reassurance, for (as Holmes had already mentioned) we knew that several truly determined and creative criminal minds correctly viewed the integrity of England’s telegraphy lines as a fairly minor obstacle to gathering intelligence on their antagonists; and the idea that some few among our own enemies might believe us bound for America met with my sincerest approval.

  The first section of the telegraph’s final line – ‘My old crofter’ – Holmes and I had already interpreted; the second part – ‘will pull alongside at quarantine’ – could, I reasoned, be taken simply as the completion of the analogy, nothing more than a statement that Mycroft would meet our train at ‘quarantine,’ in nautical terms a station just outside a ship’s destination (where the condition of vessel, passengers, and crew could be inspected), and in our own case, some point far enough outside Edinburgh that Mycroft would have time to acquaint us with the true facts of the case under scrutiny before we reached the city. In this way did the matter of the telegram come to an abrupt end; and under ordinary circumstances, I should have felt a bit of pride at my own analysis of the thing. But there was a great deal of track yet to be traversed, on this particular night, and even at our considerable speed, many hours would pass before we reached the Scottish border. It seemed unlikely that we would be able to pass any of the intervening time sleeping, or in any other way avoiding the dark subject that Holmes had so tentatively broached before we’d left Baker Street, which had caused me to feel such mortal dread – to say nothing of doubts concerning my friend’s mental integrity.

  ‘It is a hideous story, Watson,’ Holmes mused, finally happy that he had a great quantity of his own ‘invigorating’ shag at hand. As some of it roasted hot in his pipe, he settled into a detailed analysis of man’s savagery to man in the same manner that an ordinary person might face a full plate of hearty food. True, the particular outrage of which he spoke that night had happened over three hundred years ago; but his idiosyncratic code of good and evil made no distinction between a crime committed recently and one that had taken place during another age altogether – if anything, the fact of justice long deferred only made his intellectual wheels grind all the faster.

  ‘Hideous, indeed, but instructive, in at least one sense,’ Holmes continued, his voice momentarily disdainful. ‘We have been accustomed, during our own era, to treat the Elizabethan as the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Drake – of high literature and higher patriotism. We forget that it had a particularly unseemly side, that it was a time during which far more Englishmen were burned at the stake than ever played upon the stage; when there were more spies trading in secrets and cutting throats than there were heroes walking the decks of defiant ships. Did not Marlowe himself meet death not as a wise, aged poet, but in the course of duty as a young secret agent, with another spy’s dagger driven through his eye-socket?’

  ‘Come now, Holmes,’ I protested, not without a certain sternness. I had always considered my brilliant friend’s political and historical opinions to be rather simplistic (I can still recall the fact that, when we first met, he confessed to never having heard of Thomas Carlyle, much less to having read any of his works), but in the main this presented no cause for argument between us: Simple though his interpretations may have been, they were usually in agreement with my own sentiments. But on occasion he could be what I considered naïvely cynical about such matters – and any man with a military background feels insults to his nation and its history with his heart, whatever his head may think of the actual facts of the case. ‘We’re talking,’ I continued, ‘about Scotland, not England.’

  ‘We are talking of a particularly revolting crime which, without the backing of powerful Englishmen – indeed, without the implicit co-operation of that supreme shape-shifter, Elizabeth – would never have been so much as attempted. No, Watson – this is one act of bloodshed that we cannot simply file away under “the sorts of things that happen in Scotland” – although its final form has led many supposed English “patriots” to so dismiss it.’

  However much it might have lacked nuance, his point was essentially correct. Indeed, it forced me to realise (less than comfortably, given my previous, rather scolding tone) that I had forgotten most of the details of the infamous murder of David Rizzio, private secretary, music instructor, and confidant to Mary, Queen of Scots. But Holmes was a master, as I have noted, of all such tales, regardless of the time and place of their occurrence; and I quickly found that he was only too ready to overlook the arch reaction of the retired soldier and to reacquaint me with every aspect of the business, as we continued to hurtle along through the Midlands and then the Yorkshire moors – a setting that, given the raging storm outside, could scarcely have been more perfect for the tale.

  The year was 1566; the scene of the outrage, of course, Holyroodhouse, or, as it had been more simply known, then, the Palace of Holyrood (a name derived from the most precious relic of the long-abandoned abbey, an object that its caretakers firmly believed to be a sliver of the True Cross). As the young Catholic heir to the Scottish throne, Mary had been taught that she had a likely and legitimate claim to Elizabeth’s English mantle as well: for while the most direct Tudor line looked to end with the Virgin Queen, Mary was a young and presumably fertile great-granddaughter of that dynasty’s founder, Henry VII. She had, therefore, been enlisted as an unwitting pawn in the attempt by France (her mother’s native land) to ring Protestant England with the armies of True Belief: Besides spending most of her youth in the French court, rather than in her father’s troubled realm, Mary was ultimately selected to be the bride of the sickly young French king. When her new husband’s complaints quickly proved mortal, the lovely young widow – only eighteen years old – discovered that a life full of noteworthy new opportunities, rather than one of mournful seclusion, opened up before her. Continental princes beat a hasty path to her door, and it was soon apparent that, of all the roads she herself might take, return to Scotland was by far the most difficult and dangerous, since that kingdom had become an officially Protestant domain during the years she had been away from it.

  But Mary had a spirit that, in our own era, would have placed her in that ever-growing class of women we call adventuresses: after many months of entertaining this and that princely suitor, as well as sparking the start of what would become a deadly rivalry with her ‘English cousin’ (a rivalry both political and personal, but more the latter than the former, according to many who witnessed it), Mary decided to risk all on a lonely return to her homeland and a solitary reclamation of the Scottish throne.

  Much of her native country responded warmly to the courage of her ploy, for it implied great respect for the wishes of her people. The citizens of the capital, in particular, welcomed her – so much so that when she (being used to and indeed loving Continental ways) moved the royal seat from formidable but gloomy Edinburgh Castle to the courtly Palace of Holyrood just outside the westernmost edge of the city, there was no great outcry. Mary surrounded herself with Scots ladies to join those that had accompanied her from abroad, and immediately set herself to studying the Scots dialect (so that she could speak it while receiving the country’s nobles), as well as to learning the favourite Scottish pastimes of hunting, archery, music, golf, and dancing. In general she did well at all such pursuits – and she put the capstone to her efforts by making no move to reassert Catholicism as the land’s true faith.

  ‘And yet what a shock it must have been, for such a still-young queen, Watson!’ Holmes observed. ‘To come home from almost a lifetime amid the fineries of Europe to a country considered so barbaric by her French in-laws and friends that the very term for being repeatedly run through with a blade was simply poignarder à l’écossais – a terrible harbinger of the crime that Ma
ry was to herself witness.’ Holmes settled further into the comfort of his overcoat as the air that blew in through the compartment’s open window grew ever colder. ‘And a telling point of convergence between that crime of long ago and the more recent evils that we ourselves are on our way to investigate …’

  At that, I remembered anew just how Messrs Sinclair and McKay – those poor, dead men who had been almost forgotten in the creeping timelessness of Holmes’s steam-powered ride through some of the less creditable episodes of our history – had met their fates: poignarder à l’écossais, ‘stabbed in the Scottish mode.’ Was my friend, I wondered silently, really suggesting a connection between those nearly ancient royal intrigues and our current case?

  ‘A rather obvious question fills your face, Watson,’ Holmes remarked, quite accurately. ‘But believe me when I say that only time will provide your answer. Allow me, therefore, to finish my tale:

  ‘After four years of successfully navigating the troubled and often frighteningly bloodied waters of Scottish politics, Mary encountered the issue of marriage once again: Her nobles and subjects wished an heir, and they continued to make it clear that they did not wish the father of that heir – a child who might, after all, grow to be the ruler of both Scotland and England – to be either foreign-born or Catholic. A native, Protestant nobleman was required; and Mary displayed an unfortunate and utter lack of judgement when she suddenly fell in what she believed was love with Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. In France he was called “the agreeable nincompoop” (the original French phrase is quite beyond my powers), but Darnley was nevertheless reputed to be as physically beautiful as was Mary – their brief passion seems to have been based on little other than lust. Darnley’s stupidity, however, would prove to have longer-lasting effects than his charms: It made her new prince a desirable instrument for those nobles who wished to finally eradicate all Catholic influence on their Queen, beginning with those Papist courtiers, foreign and Scot, with whom she continued to people her most intimate circle.’