Sherlock Holmes and The Case of The Bulgarian Codex

Chapter IV IN WHICH WE SET OFF FOR BULGARIA

WE quit Downing Street and boarded our train for Dover and beyond in good spirits. Holmes pulled on his striking Poshteen Long Coat with its many flaps and pockets and mesmeric promise of distant mountain ranges. The Capital’s murk had deepened. Half-obscured Hawksmoor spires, the indissoluble chaos of grey wheel traffic confounded in nebulous London fogs, and a perpetual ring of tram-horse hoofs fell away behind us. Soon we lost sight of the Thames and the river’s long reaches which I shall ever associate with our pursuit of the Andaman Islander in the earlier days of our career.

Half an hour or so down the line we halted to allow an oncoming train first use of a narrow tunnel. Below us, flowers on the sunny embankments slowed their rush the other way and allowed full examination. Comfrey with its bell-shaped, creamy yellow flowers stood guard over Common violets. Golden celandines with foliage as rich as liquorice grew side by side with figworts and patches of pink, blue and Tyrian purple milkwort.

I reflected on the bag of gold and banknotes tucked safely in our strong-box. Fees of this order underwrite Holmes’s generosity. Despite the vexations of tax collectors he turns away commercial offers of a most tempting kind. Recently a German pipe manufacturer offered attractive royalties for permission to produce a Meerschaum in the shape of Holmes’s head (‘emphasising your fine aquiline nose’). Royal Tunbridge Wells offered a fine payment ‘if you would let the Town Fathers raise a bronze statue to you next to one of Daniel Defoe’, portraying Holmes drinking the Spa’s ferrugious waters, over a brass plate affirming the springs ‘are favoured by Mr. Sherlock Holmes for the maintenance and improvement of his deductive skills’, and that the water would ‘cure the colic, the melancholy, and the vapours; make the lean fat, the fat lean; kill flat worms in the belly, loosen the clammy humours of the body, dry the over-moist brain’. A small film studio offered to make him ‘famous in every part of the world, from darkest Africa to the empty quarters of Mesopotamia’, if he would also cover the cost of making ‘Sherlock Holmes, the World’s Paramount Consultant Detective’.

At Dover we caught the SS Victoria, a graceful steam-boat constructed to order by the Abdela & Mitchell yards on the Manchester Ship Canal (‘Constructors of ships for the Nile, the Niger and Peruvian Amazon’). Our fellow passengers were mostly foreigners returning to Continental homes, and a scattering of English. The water was choppy in the aftermath of the storm. The heaving and yawing made me feel nauseous. I turned for distraction to the sheaf of papers pressed upon us as we quit Downing Street. In the margin Mycroft had scrawled: ‘We watch events unfolding in the region with trepidation. Bulgaria is pivotal. On three sides empires are disintegrating like great suns which have reached their end. We hope for the best, that these old empires will die peacefully in their sleep, but fear the worst. Even though Bulgaria may occupy a mere paragraph in an English history hundreds of pages long, among those ageing empires she bulks very large. Nevertheless, England holds the scales. If required, and despite a hullabaloo from Little Englanders, the British Empire must show its teeth. If it must, it will bite.’

To my relief the ferry, delayed by the residue of the storm, at last reached the calm waters of the French port. We boarded the train to Paris. By evening we were at the Gare de Strasbourg where the Orient Express was on the point of departing. A porter hurried us from our landau to Prince Ferdinand’s private carriages. Known in diplomatic circles as the Bulgarian foreign office on wheels, the compartments were an elegant marvel, the equal to the Pennsylvania Limited as the very quintessence of luxury, ‘un vrai bijou d’intimité voyageuse’. A brass plate indicated the London & North-west Railway company constructed the carriages, the same yards which provide carriages for our Queen-Empress’s journeys to Balmoral. The door handles of the toilets bore the Prince’s coat of arms. The furnishings had been purchased in Vienna as a job lot at a sale of a bankrupt lady singer, giving the whole a raffish Biedermeier femininity. Within minutes the maître d’hôtel handed us the evening’s menu, a choice of oysters, soup with Italian pasta, turbot with green sauce, chicken à la chasseur, fillet of beef with château potatoes, chaud-froid of game animals, lettuce, chocolate pudding, buffet of desserts. In such unparalleled luxury, Holmes and I sat through the first evening in thoughtful mood and silent companionship.

It was rare to be on a case with my comrade-in-arms in foreign parts. Several of Holmes’s greatest successes had been overseas without me or my service revolver at his side, among them the case of the Trepoff murder in Odessa, and his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca (an inquiry carried out at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope). Neither had I been with him in Narbonne and Nimes in the well-paid service of the French Republic, nor during the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee. There was, however, one never-to-be-forgotten journey when we travelled together to the Englischer Hof at Meiringen in search of ex-Professor Moriarty. Faithful readers will know of the shattering events which took place at the nearby Reichenbach Falls, events culminating in the death of the Napoleon of crime and the commencement of Holmes’s Great Hiatus.

An uneasy feeling overtook me as I recollected Mycroft’s words of warning: ‘Remember, Bulgaria is the only place in the world where you can go out in the morning any day of the year and get blown up by a bomb intended for someone else.’

Spurred on by uneasy memories of Moriarty and thoughts of assassination, I caught my friend’s eye.

‘Holmes,’ I began, breaking in to his reverie, ‘I should like to extract a promise.’

My comrade sat up at attention, his pipe halfway to his lips.

‘A promise, my dear chap?’

‘That when I pass on to the Silent Land my earthly remains may be buried next to yours.’

Holmes eyed me inquisitively. ‘A curious topic, Watson, my dear friend, though I perfectly accept it is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognise danger when it may be close upon us. Even the cat runs out of lives eventually.’

I went on, ‘If by then you have purchased your bee-farm in the Sussex Downs - ’

‘I assume you wish to be suitably distant from the hives of Italian bees?’

‘At least the quarter mile.’

‘And if you predecease me do you promise on your own dear mother’s grave not to rise up and haunt me?’

I held out my hand. ‘A deal, Holmes.’

‘Not yet, Watson. We have further negotiations to navigate before we shake on it. Can we agree a villager’s chain between us? I am a light sleeper in life, I shall expect to be so in the sleep of death. To bear your snores has been a singular penance in my present incarnation. For eternity it would be quite intolerable.’

‘At least the chain then,’ I agreed promptly.

‘And how would you like to be laid to your rest - in tropical sun-helmet, khaki uniform and puttees?’

‘That will do nicely, Holmes, yes.’

‘And what inscription on your stone?’

‘I prefer to leave that to you, my dear fellow, but a reference to the Watson Codex and my medical duties in Afghanistan would not come amiss. I also remind you that you are my junior only by a year or two.’

‘I think ‘Steel True’ would do.’

With unexpected sentimentality he added, ‘When you go to your grave, all the high-collared young men from the West End will go to their offices with crape bands tied around their top-hats. They will hold your death a horrible thing.’

Thus in perfect jollity and good fellowship the placement of my grave if not the wording on my stone was settled.