Sherlock Holmes and The Case of The Bulgarian Codex

Chapter I IN WHICH WE DINE AT SIMPSON’S

SNORTING and champing at the bit like a high-strung warhorse, the Orient Express stayed its departure from the Gare de Strasbourg while Sherlock Holmes and I flung ourselves from a five-glass landau and clambered into the private cars of the Prince Regnant of Bulgaria. Our boxes tumbled in behind us. It was late on a Friday afternoon in April, in the year 1900. The case of the Bulgarian Codex had commenced. With a minatory scream the immense train pulled away on its long journey to Stamboul. Soon Paris was left behind. Without noise or jerk we were going fifty miles per hour without seeming to move.

Hardly two days earlier we found a visitor of European fame within the walls of our humble room in Baker Street, a being so utterly unusual in personality and mentality that I remember him in precise detail to this day, despite the passage of many chaotic and adventurous years.

I was seated at my writing-desk at 221B Baker Street putting the final touches to our most recent case for the Strand Magazine, with no more a thought about a fractious Balkan state than for the industrious navigators repairing the canals of Mars. The winter, never severe in the centre of London, was on the cusp of a warm and exhilarating spring. I looked across the garden to the back wall which leads into Mortimer Street. More than once, in fear of attack from Baker Street, Holmes and I made a quick exit by that route. Observing the unfurling leaves on the mighty London planes it was impossible to know we would soon be risking life and limb in a faraway country about which I - and most of the civilised world - knew or cared nothing. By early afternoon I would finish the manuscript, throw my pen at the wall as was my custom on completing each new chronicle, and take a comfortable stroll to the editor’s offices on Southampton Street. It would then be up to the Strand’s Art editor to commission a few simple line drawings from the established artist Mr. Sidney Paget.

Holmes came up the stairs at his customary three-at-a-time. He put his head around the door, a Coutts cheque flapping in his hand.

‘My dear Watson,’ he said in a most affable tone. ‘Courtesy of the mid-day post, the Duchess of Timau has at last settled her account. Name any restaurant in the whole of London and allow me to invite you to dine there this evening. Shall we say a fish-dinner at The Ship, in Greenwich?’

The invitation came as a welcome surprise. When fortune smiles on me I will lay out two days’ Army pension on partridge or an over-ripe pheasant at one of my clubs, or, for a special treat, Rother Rabbit with broccoli followed by Lady Pettus’ biscakes. Holmes, by contrast, even when he is the honoured guest of a wealthy client, has been known to call for a tin of his favourite over-salted Benitez corned beef.

‘Holmes, I accept this rare invitation,’ I replied, and added, ‘with alacrity.’

‘And if not The Ship, the place for our celebratory meal?’ Holmes pursued.

‘If you really do mean any restaurant in the whole of London I shall choose Simpson’s Grand Cigar Divan.’

‘A fine choice,’ Holmes acknowledged cheerily.

At seven o’ clock that evening, Simpson’s head waiter led us to a table overlooking the Strand. The window commanded a fine sweep of the Vaudeville and Strand theatres, busy beyond measure. Many famous men had sat here, not least Gladstone and most of the greatest authors of our time. Each Feast of All Souls, Charles Dickens booked this same table with fellow members of the Everlasting Club to discuss the occult, Egyptian magic and second sight.

We selected our meal from the superb bill of fare. After a suitable time the Chef appeared, walking imposingly alongside the lesser mortal propelling a silver dinner wagon. Holmes ordered slices of beef carved from large joints, with a due portion of fat. At a price well beyond my usual range, I partook of the smoked salmon, a signature dish of the establishment. For dessert, we chose the Grand Cigar Divan’s famous treacle sponge with a dressing of Madagascan vanilla custard.

As we progressed, Holmes’s mood became pensive. I enquired. He responded with a sigh.

‘Watson, I pine for change. While you attend to the Dark Arts, writing your chronicles, I sit in desolation waiting for the next ring of the door-bell. Our adventures of late have been somewhat parochial, summoned hither and thither to one or other bijou villa in a London suburb or English village. My study of chemistry and a new combination of gases is not enough. I am in the mood for something more exotic.’

‘Perhaps it is the effect of a new Century or this wonderful spring weather?’ I offered. ‘The season of unrest and change. It makes all Nature restless.’

‘Think what events are taking place elsewhere while we live out our tidy lives in Baker Street,’ my fellow-lodger went on, unheeding. ‘In Paris and Vienna it is the era of the Rothschilds, of brilliant cotillions and tableaux vivants. The Strausses conduct orchestras at Court balls. And ballooning - ballooning is becoming the fashion. Even that court actress, Katharina Schratt, has made three ascents.’

Although on the present occasion he was in a black sack coat and stiff collar, and looked eminently respectable, to listen to our landlady’s sighs as she dusted and brushed and wiped at such knick-knacks as a huge barbed-headed spear, a bear’s skull, a wall-plaque of the great Jewish fighter Dan Mendoza, rated by Holmes as the Father of the pugilistic science, a carving of the demi-god Maui, a harpoon engraved SS SEA UNICORN Dundee, a pair of seal’s paws and the tennis rackets and cricket gear he last employed in his short time at Oxford and Cambridge, tidy was not the word I would have used to describe Holmes’s life. Not even the large, cracked blue-and-white plate looted at the siege of Alexandria in 1882 by the son of one of my elderly patients or the butter-dish was immune from the residues of his chemical experiments.

‘Holmes,’ I began, laying down my napkin with a smile. ‘Surely you cannot be bored so soon? The greatest figures of our time welcome you to their tables. Only a fortnight has passed since you solved the case I shall title The Adventure of the Tall Man. How you deduced the imprints below the window were from stilts and not the legs of a ladder still escapes me.’

‘Watson, I value your effort to console me with my notoriety but I insist that every morning one must win a victory and every evening we must fight the good fight to retain our place. The crisis once over, the actors pass for ever out of our lives. For the moment the future seems more than unusually uncertain.’

To cheer him I responded, ‘Who knows when the next knock at our door or telegram will come, summoning us to the scene of another baffling crime?’

A small tureen sitting apart from the magnificent silverware on our table came to Holmes’s attention. We summoned the waiter. With the utmost earnestness he said he knew nothing about it. I pulled the tureen towards me and lifted the cover. Inside lay an envelope marked ‘Sherlock Holmes, Esq.’. It contained a sheet of pink-tinted note-paper upon which, in a scribbled hand, were inscribed the words: ‘I shall come to your premises at five o’ clock on matters of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated.’

I passed the note to Holmes. ‘Our recent successes have made us incautious,’ he remarked ruefully. ‘That tureen could as easily have served up a parboiled swamp adder.’ In a satisfied tone, he added, ‘Yet I deduce that the man who sent it is an opportunist, not an enemy with threats on our person in mind. To judge by the peremptory message he is accustomed to having his own way. And this note-paper. He is a man of some means. Such paper could not be bought under half a crown a packet.’

He returned the page to me. ‘See how peculiarly strong and stiff it is. Look at the watermark,’ he continued. ‘It is not an English paper at all. Your encouraging words may be coming true.’