Sherlock Holmes and The Case of The Bulgarian Codex

Chapter XXII WE CONTINUE OUR JOURNEY HOMEWARD

BY early evening we were comfortably reinstated in the Prince’s magnificent carriages aboard the Orient Express tucking into Venison and Red Wine pie followed by Orange Crème Caramel with Cointreau oranges. After dinner Holmes laid out a box of matches in front of him and lit up a Dublin-clay pipe primed with an especially rank shag purchased in Sofia, thick blue cloud-wreaths spinning up from him. His eyes sparkled.

‘Watson,’ he reminisced, ‘it is a pity you are not able to lay this most exotic case on the desk of your Editor. We shall console ourselves that the secret history of a nation is often so much more intimate and interesting than its public chronicles. Do you remember the unusual reception afforded us on our arrival at the Stone Wedding?’

‘Of course!’ I exclaimed.

‘How will you look back on it?’

‘It was the damnedest close-run thing. A few more yards and we’d have been blown to smithere - ’

‘A few more yards may have seen us killed, certainly,’ my comrade interrupted, ‘but it would have been entirely accidental.’

I stared at him. ‘How do you mean?’

‘It would not have been part of the script.’

‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to explain? What script?’

‘Do you recall Penderel Moon’s words on the Prince’s linguistic abilities?’

‘I remember them exactly. I am a great admirer of anyone who speaks so many languages so fluently.’

‘Remind me.’

‘He said: “the Prince is the finest of linguists. With his mother and foreign diplomats he converses in brilliant French. He addresses the Sobranje in excellent Bulgarian. He boasts in perfect English and Italian. He swears in the coarsest Hungarian, Macedonian and Russian, and he employs his native German dialect with the servants he brought with him from the family seat in Coburg”.’

‘Superb, Watson! Tell me, despite the effect of the explosion on your ears, did you notice which of those languages he employed to shout at our attackers?’

‘Only that it sounded guttural.’

‘It was Ostfränkisch, a German dialect which I have studied. Why should such a polyglot use a tongue of his native land to shout at Russian or Macedonian assassins if he swears like a trooper in both their languages?’

‘I have no idea, Holmes,’ I responded. ‘Why would such a polyglot do that?’

‘He wouldn’t.’

‘Then - ?’

‘Our robust welcome at the Stone Wedding was a piece of theatre arranged entirely for our entertainment. The fact that the incompetence of the Palace staff nearly blew us to smithereens is another matter.’

‘So what did he shout if it wasn’t what he told us at the time - ’ I looked at the note-book ‘‘‘ - You Macedonian assassin scum, lackeys of the crazy people in St. Petersburg, run for your lives. I have here with me Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson!”?’

Holmes replied, ‘His exact words were, “You bloody fools, you nearly killed Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, let alone me! I’ll have your arses for breakfast. I told you to detonate that stuff after the picnic, not now!”.’

We laughed uproariously. I patted my pocket. In it lay the Knyaz’s Philadelphia Baby Derringer used by John Wilkes Booth in his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It would go well in my small armoury with several other Baby Derringers, each sold as the very one employed to kill the American President on that terrible April night when I was just twelve years of age.