Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle

A Telegram Arrives

Holmes often stays in his bed until late in the day. At other times he rises with the first glimmer of dawn even before I have glanced at the clock or looked sleepily through my window at the outside world. On these not-infrequent occasions, he selects a coat from his collection as carefully as he chooses a pipe and trips with agility and anticipation down the stairs from the first-floor flat at 221b Baker Street. Sometimes he is gone all day, leaving behind a book by his chair, the pipe with the mended amber stem, and a sense of his presence. East London is his favourite stamping ground though it is undergoing sudden and savage industrialisation. Slavic agitators fleeing persecution have settled in communities around the River Lea, transforming them into principalities of crime. Few Londoners venture without need beyond the Hawksmoor Church of St. George’s-in-the-East except for those thwarted in love seeking Chinese love-potions concocted from hashish, geraniums, rose petals, lemon leaves, sugar and honey. On other occasions we will visit Narrow Street in Limehouse on matters concerning the Chinese secret society, the Hung League, that strange group of men who will only communicate with each other by pointing first at the sky, then down to the ground, and last to their own heart.

The area throngs with humanity - cooks from Hainan Island, Petticoat-lane fencers, boatswains from Canton, stewards from Ningpo, men with pointy beards and Homburg hats. Ships of the mercantile marine bring cargo from equatorial climes to London’s deep-water docks.

Holmes starts his explorations in earnest at Poverty Corner, walking many miles along the Thames, plunging into the vile alleys lurking behind the high wharves lining the north side of the river to the east of London Bridge. If wet weather prevails, as on the day whose events I now relate, he summons a street Arab and a tilbury, and in the instant is gone. He is as acquainted with St Katherine’s, Victoria, South West India, Albert and Tilbury docks as our neighbouring Regent’s Park. Fine ships still load for ‘Frisco or the Antipodes, the surrounds filled with cackling Creole beldames from Sierra Leone and holy men in turbans and gowns with a reputation for healing.

It was the 27th of May 1904 when the extraordinary and disturbing events of the Dead Boer took place. On referring to my notes I see that though I was living over my surgery at that period, I made one of my not infrequent overnight stays at my familiar old lodgings in Baker Street still filled with most of my clothing and possessions. In the morning I rose by eight o’ clock to find Holmes already returned from his sortie and finishing off a plate of the landlady’s eggs. He gave me a nod as I took my seat.

Mrs. Hudson’s breakfasts were designed more for my appetite than Holmes’. While he readily ate her eggs, he picked in desultory fashion at grilled kidneys, devilled chicken, cold ham and galantine. The kidneys (and galantine in particular) were marched across the table to my plate.

‘Holmes,’ I began, testing whether he was in a communicative humour. ‘What of your day?’

‘Watson, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your great interest and concern. I have had a most charming morning.’

‘And,’ I pursued, not discouraged by this over-effusive response, ‘what adventures among the slop-shops and gin-shops run by rascally lascars, the dark and deep waters of the docks, or murder-traps in streets mournful beyond expression have pursued you like meteors beckoned into Jupiter’s maw? Did you obey their notices against smoking, fighting, swearing and spitting?’

I added, ‘Would we had a hundred guineas for every poor devil who has been done to death in those vile dens.’

‘Adventures none but my discussions at the Blackwall Basin,’ Holmes responded in self-satisfied mood. He left the table and threw himself down into an armchair. ‘I find much of interest in Dockland, the bowsprits and jib-booms and silken sails of the Australian packets taking the early tide down-river homeward bound. The largesse of the Tropics and the Spanish Main - hogsheads and hillocks of coconuts, indigo, spice, saltpetre and tea. Where better than the Steam Packet beerhouse to purchase the Pipe-fish or the Surinam Toad?

‘Where indeed?’ I replied.

I had once accompanied Holmes to Schewzik’s Russian Vapour Baths, followed by a visit to the aforementioned Steam Packet beerhouse where I obliged the landlord by drinking a mug of tepid brown slop at twopence the pint, beneath a racing calendar punctuated by dead flies. I still recall the smell which comes alone in all the world from long years of herrings cooked on a gas grill.

‘Had Darwin spent more time in Rotherhithe or around Tower Hill,’ Holmes continued, ‘instead of years aboard the Beagle, he might have made a purchase of both tortoises and finches from the Galapagos Islands at the London docks and reasoned the mutability of species within the hour, thus saving himself a lengthy voyage and a year or more of mal-de-mer.’

‘As you say, Holmes.’

My companion signalled he was indeed in conversational mood.

‘Watson, I shall regret the passing of the barquentine. Each time I am in the upper docks there are fewer of them. They are the most beautiful of ships, possessed of the most aerial and graceful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse spars gives such bread^th and balance, steadying the main and mizen poles. Such sheer, like the waist of a lissom woman, finely poised, so sure of herself in profile.’

I duly jotted down the detail of the barquentine on the note-book beside my plate, adding a small sketch.

‘Holmes,’ I said, pointing to The Times left open at the astronomy section, ‘is it not fascinating to know that on August 27, AD 2003, Mars will be at its closest to our planet for 60,000 years? Percival Lowell thinks Man will by then get to our sister planet and shake hands with the builders of the Martian canals.’

Alas, I was robbed for ever of one of Holmes’ pungent comments by our landlady Mrs. Hudson coming in to remove the breakfast plates, clearing away the remnants - ‘crocodile left-overs’ as she cheerily called them - to feed an alley cat called Marmaduke, the best mouser in Baker Street, she told us repeatedly in an admiring tone. On this day, after Mrs. Hudson departed with the last of the breakfast plates, Holmes left the room, returning in a green velvet smoking jacket.

‘Watson,’ he commanded. ‘I have a new organic chemical investigation in train. Before I settle in, please be kind enough to approach the window - but with caution, I beg of you.’

My curiosity aroused, I went to the window and bent below the half-drawn blinds, peering out through the copious lengths of Mrs. Hudson’s best lace.

‘What am I to look at, Holmes? Is some crime of mysterious character taking place right before me?’ I enquired light-heartedly.

‘Anything odd, my dear fellow? Do you see anything odd?’

I stared down at the bustling street. A diligence pulled by a team of Boulonnais mares, destination Glasgow and ports to the Western Isles, was commencing its long journey. Ragged little Street Arabs known to Holmes and me as the Baker Street Irregulars were playing with home-made hoops along the paving, dropping them to run to the diligence’s sides, begging for a coin or fruit from well-dressed passengers tucked under cream-coloured linen dust sheets, cheerily mocking them with offers of farthing buns until the driver’s whip made them fall away.

‘Nothing odd catches my attention, Holmes, no,’ I replied.

‘Is there a man with amber eyes - a little above the middling height, sited where he can observe our entryway?’

‘Why yes, there is such a fellow but from where he stands he can watch a dozen doorways if need be. Why should it be ours?’

‘Please describe him further, Watson. I avoided glancing at him for too long on my return this morning.’

‘Collarless cotton shirt, corduroy trousers and a long-sleeved waistcoat reaching down almost to his knees, if that’s the man you mean.’

‘And selling hares?’

‘Indeed. He has one in each hand.’

‘And a brightly-coloured handkerchief around the neck?’

‘He does wear such a kerchief, Holmes, yes.’

‘As to his hat, remind me from your vantage point, does he wear a billy-cock or bowler?’

‘A bowler, Holmes. What does such clothing tell you?’

‘That the collarless cotton shirt, corduroy trousers and a long-sleeved waistcoat are not the daily accoutrements of a denizen of Baker Street. That should have caught your eye at once. It is obvious their owner is up fresh from the countryside.’

‘And the kerchief...?’

‘Emphatically a common labourer. It protects the neck from sunburn in the open field at harvest time or against the winter cold, just as you wrap your own throat with a cravat.’

‘And you conclude what from the fact he wears a bowler?’

‘...that he works on a great estate. A bowler does not start its life in a peasant cottage. Its youth is spent on a well-to-do head.’

I stared down at the watchful man. ‘Holmes, what of it? He wears the clothing of a country labourer, possibly from a great estate - why not? What of importance do you read into his presence - he is here to sell his hares.’

‘Then answer one more question and I shall release you from your vigil - does his coat still bulge on either side?’

‘It does, Holmes, yes, but only from further hares stuffed into a pair of inside pockets, and still alive. I can see them wriggle.’

‘Indeed,’ my companion replied, reaching for a pipe. ‘Those same pockets were a-wriggle when I saw him at sun-up today, fixed to that same spot as by the strongest glue, yet when a passing woman approached him to buy his wares, he waved her on. Why so?’

‘And you conclude...?’

‘As should you. The hares are a guise for skulking.’

Holmes lit a pipe. To judge by the level of rank smoke already set up in the room it was the second of the day. With affection I watched him puffing life into the shag. I felt nothing in life could ever sever the chain that was around us then.

‘We need not worry, Watson,’ Holmes continued, smiling. ‘We shall watch for him through the morning. I am sure we shall soon discover whether a new game is at last afoot.’

For a while I lingered by the window, looking down on the rushing stream of life. My companion’s switch to a smoking-jacket from his outdoor wear signalled he would settle down to his chemical experiment. From out of his alchemical laboratory had appeared crucibles, alembics and a microscope. Our chambers were always full of chemicals, coal-tar derivatives, and criminal relics which had ways of wandering into unlikely positions or turning up in the butter-dish.

Holmes preferred the sitting-room, especially in the morning, with the two broad windows facing east. It offered a cheerful and well-lit space, though in risk of being overwhelmed by a tumble of Holmes’ books. His presence in this room was in part a reaction to the clutter of his study, so empty when we had first viewed it, now brimming with mementoes of a full life - billiard cues, boxing gloves and punching ball, make-up table with tiny tongs for curling our magnificent false walrus moustaches, a poison fang of the extinct 100-foot-long Bothrodon of South Africa. Framed newspaper cartoons and pictures of criminals adorned two walls, including the as-yet uncaught cambrioleur Arsène Lupin. One cupboard was crammed with the paraphernalia for our disguises - two huge pairs of shapeless porpoise-hide boots with tabs on, purchased from dustmen, beside a pair of smaller, lighter boots removed for a sum from the living feet of a milk deliveryman

Over the length of my association with Sherlock Holmes we averaged a new case every month. Earlier in the year we had had a run of public and private cases the equal of the annus mirabilis of 1895 but the past twelve weeks had been filled with tedium. Such fallow periods prove as irksome for Holmes as for me. It was like watching a butterfly fold up its wings and return to its chrysalis. He put it to me drily, only one important thing had happened in the last three months, and that was that nothing had happened. Like all special gifts Holmes remarkable powers needed a constant burnish lest they corrode through lack of use.

Most cases arrive on the instant - a soft footfall up the stairs followed by a knock at our sitting-room door, or a summons from Scotland Yard. Others lie like a virus in the blood, dormant for years. I am storing a length of parchment received some months before. Over the signature of the wife of a British Ambassador it read:

‘Yuan Shih Kai is the Chinaman of the future, and on his success or failure to maintain himself in his present exalted and powerful position depends much of the future of China. He stands almost alone for reform, progress and education. He is honest in money matters, a thing almost unknown in Chinese public life. But his enemies are many and powerful. It is to be hoped he may prevail against them. The present time in China is intensely interesting, and her destiny is rapidly shaping itself.’

She warns Yuan’s life might be in danger if he comes to England, any attack designed to provoke an international incident.

Holmes’ announcement that a new chemical investigation was in train was not entirely welcome. His engagement in this endeavour made it clear I was in for a pottering day. Perhaps I would walk to Stamford’s in Long Acre and pick up the latest maps. Or drop into one of the Bond Street picture galleries, though it was not a very fine morning for a stroll. More likely I would return to one of Clark Russell’s fine sea-stories. I opted for my favourite seat at the fireside, tucked under the ornate overmantle laden with Holmes’ correspondence. One letter in a bold, masterful hand brought round from the Upper Baker Street Post-office, opened but apparently unanswered, invited him to seek a seat in Parliament for a Party ‘whose name and location on the political spectrum you yourself may choose’.

As I settled in I recalled my friend Eddie Marsh asking how I turn my notes into pamphlets. I told him I always started with a dash -some such phrase as ‘I had never before encountered such a singular case’. I pepper the pages with ‘Inspector Lestrade and John Yates of the Yard (and/or the local police) were baffled’ or best of all, ‘Our official detectives may blunder in the matter of intelligence, but never in that of courage’.’

Lost in these thoughts and impervious to Holmes’ light snore (he often fell asleep pipette in hand), it seemed but a moment later our clocks chimed a quarter to ten. I imply that the several pendulum clocks struck as one at the half quarter but because we usually failed to set each in turn, and we prohibited Mrs. Hudson from undertaking this manly task, they took to serenading us across a length of time, almost continuously, like the chiming bells of the great Cathedral at Rouen when the Dukes of Normandy and Brittany were crowned.

Sharp at eight minutes to ten the last of the quarter chimes ceased. Almost immediately the front-door bell rang.

‘What is it, Watson?’ Holmes asked, opening his eyes. ‘Surely the morning post comes at eight o’ clock and twelve?’

We listened to the sound of footsteps coming hurriedly up the stairs and crossing the landing accompanied by audible expressions of excitement upon our landlady’s part. One of her crisper knocks followed. At Holmes’ ‘Enter, Mrs. Hudson!’ she rushed in, breathless and excited, holding out a telegram on a brass salver.

Holmes glanced at the envelope and threw it over to me.

‘A reply-paid telegram, Watson, and delivered by the district messenger service. As you have your eye-glasses on your nose already, do read it aloud. Mrs. Hudson, please return shortly for our response, and be ready to hasten to the post-office at Wigmore Street.’

Mrs. Hudson departed with unconcealed reluctance.

I took a letter-opener to the envelope. My heart gave a leap when I espied the sender’s name.

‘Holmes,’ I reported, ‘you are invited to Crick’s End. By the President of the Kipling League.’

A Jacobean mansion in Sussex, Crick’s End was the home of David Siviter, a poet (or to some more cynical, ‘versifier’) whose work was much published in the Westminster Gazette. While not held to be a writer of Rudyard Kipling’s genius, he had much talent of the supple kind which lent itself to the popular vein - novelist, journalist, critic or historian as occasion suited.

‘I am invited by the President of the Kipling League?’ Holmes asked, incredulous. ‘Who might that be?’

‘Why, David Siviter,’ I responded.

‘David Siviter?’

‘Surely you have him in your great index volume? Rumour has it he rivals Bridges as a future Poet Laureate. They say he is nearly the equal of Rudyard Kipling in knowledge of the East.’

‘So the President of the Kipling League - acolyte to the great verse-maker himself, and author of many a tale from East of Eden, you say?’

‘Yes, Holmes. That is he.’

‘Invites me to his home?’

‘He does.’

‘Crick’s End, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which is where, exactly?’

‘In the east of Sussex.’

‘And when?’

‘At once. He invites you to catch the three-ten train this afternoon from Charing Cross.’

Holmes sat bolt upright in his chair. A look of anger crossed his face. ‘At once, you say? This afternoon no less? He who I now recall speaks to the orang-utans and elephants at the Regent’s Park Zoo? He demands my presence at once!’

I protested, ‘Many of us speak to the orang-utans and elephants at the Regent’s Park Zoo!’

‘In Malay and Hindustani?’

The angry expression gave way to one of enquiry.

‘Watson,’ he went on, ‘why would this poetaster not send the invitation a week or more ago on featheredge hand-wove or foreign notepaper, in envelopes at a shilling a packet, as parvenus do, rather than by the district messenger service at 3d the half-mile? There is haste in this invitation, surely?’

‘I admit it is not a Saturday-to-Monday but your asperity may lie with telegrams. They are the origin of that cousin of brevity - curtness - in us all, at sixpence for each and every word.’

He emitted a further burst of indignation. ‘Reply-paid! How kind of this Kipling League to save us five shillings! Is that a courtesy... or contempt? But do go on, my dear Watson,’ he urged in a more emollient tone. ‘From your expression even a Scotland Yard inspector could see how flattered I should be.’

I returned to the telegram and read aloud. ‘‘Dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes, we would most earnestly ask you...’’ I looked up. ‘Hardly imperious, Holmes,’ I demurred, repeating, ‘‘we would most earnestly ask you...to take the three-ten train from Charing Cross to Etchingham where you shall be met by a motorised barouche with Mr. Dudeney at the wheel’.’

The telegram took on a more confidential note, ‘Inclement weather in the form of a thin rain has disrupted our outdoor plans’. This was followed by a witty parenthesis, ‘Holding members of the Kipling League together, indoors or out, is harder than herding cats’.

The message ended in an admiring tone, ‘Unanimously we have elected to invite you to pass to us some of that insight into the criminal mind for which you are so famed’.

At this recitation, Holmes wrenched the small brier-root pipe from his mouth. He leapt up so quickly from his chair it was as though he spoke in flight. Not known for strength of voice, on this occasion he managed a bull-like roar.

‘They have pre-empted my choice of acceptance!’ he cried. ‘Do you note how he refers to his chauffeur by name? Clearly he assumes we are shortly to be acquainted! ‘Inclement weather in the form of thin rain has disrupted our outdoor plans’! They wish me to entertain them like a performing seal? Am I to be a visiting jester or a calf for baiting? Should I attend as though in pantomime at the Richmond Theatre, with an eye-patch, a salt tang about me and a parrot on either shoulder?’

He switched to a grim tone. ‘We shall make good use of their reply-paid communication. Watson, take hold of a form and a pencil. Concoct a reply to the following effect ... ’

Alarmed at a display of temper that I did not discern was largely dissembled, I offered in a faltering voice, ‘Holmes, you have a clear day, it would be great practice for our oft-discussed lecture tours. I am sure you will learn to defend yourself... ’, at which words my companion fell back down.

‘Sixpence a word, you say? It does not take a strong lens to see he has money to spend.’

He squinted at me through the fug of tobacco smoke. ‘Continue, Watson. Tell me more about our host.’

‘He is the second-highest paid author in the world, after Kipling himself. Siviter’s work brings him five shillings a word, amounting to more than thirty thousand pounds a year. Even with income tax at a third ...’

‘Pray go on...’ interrupted my companion, glancing at a large standing-clock, the more accurate time-piece of our collection. ‘He says ‘We’, that is, they... the League...by which he means?’

‘Siviter himself, of course. He mentions Alfred Weit and Sir Julius Wernher - and Viscount Van Beers,’ I replied.

One of England’s most famed Administrators, Stanley, Lord Van Beers had been much in the South African news of late because of the controversy over indentured Chinese labour. During the recent South African War the English cinemas showed flickering film of him in a canteen on a good-will tour of the Veld. His middling years contrasted with a photograph taken during the Anglo-Zulu war a quarter century before. The young man stood smart in his rifleman’s green undress uniform, a bandolier over his shoulder, black patent-leather despatch case to hand.

David Siviter’s name had come up only a week or two before, on a visit to the Athenaeum for a nostalgic and pleasant evening with a retired Regimental friend. We were soon joined by Eddie Marsh, newly-appointed Private Secretary at the Colonial Office, and something of an alter ego of mine since I found he had been at Cambridge with my boyhood companion Tadpole Phelps. On the evening I refer to, during a discussion of the West End stage and in particular Barrie, out of the blue Marsh said, ‘I tell you, Watson, a great actor is lost in Siviter. I was staying with the Desboroughs at Taplow Court and playing the game of guessing historical scenes when Siviter took the stage. I can’t recall anyone guessing his subject, which turned out to be the High Priest giving Judas the thirty pieces of silver - that made no matter. The point was the impression he created of something afoot was unutterably sinister and malicious’.

I returned to the telegram and read the post-script aloud. ‘And Pevensey hopes to introduce himself’. A famous artist, Pevensey maintained a substantial income painting the landed gentry and their estates. Some decades earlier, at the high-water mark in the great Queen Victoria’s reign, Pevensey made his name depicting trials of the human spirit by the demands of duty and honour. His best-known oil titled ‘Loyal To The Very End’ was a succès d’estime at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

‘Holmes,’ I continued, ‘there is a Post Post-script. ‘A hamper and a bottle of vintage wine will be delivered to the Pullman car at Waterloo or London Bridge. Cost of same will be born by Siviter, in addition to ‘a small requital’ for your trouble,’ which,’ I started to read out for Holmes’ delectation, ‘amounts to ...’

Holmes’ hand rose swiftly, pointing at Mrs. Hudson’s shadow by the door... ‘a substantial sum and all expenses,’ I interposed. ‘Holmes,’ I exhorted, ‘I suggest you get into your country clothes and go.’

He gave a further glance at the grandfather clock. ‘They offer great inducements, Watson. Very well. As you are so keen, we shall spend the afternoon in Sussex. Take this down, confirm I shall catch the three-ten train and inform them you will be accompanying me, that is, my dear fellow, if you can tear yourself away from your manifestos. And Watson, bring the latest gazetteer. We shall learn more of Siviter and Van Beers en route.’

I handed Holmes the completed telegram. His long, thin arm shot out backwards.

‘Mrs. Hudson, I know you are at our door. Please use the reply-paid envelope and hasten with it to the Telegraph Office.’

He turned his face to me. ‘When Mrs. Hudson returns, pray ask her to whistle for a covered cab to take us to the station, a quiet, well-mannered brougham to be precise. I have no wish to get wet twice today, even if in obeisance to your orders I am to commence the life of a circus flea.’

With the man with the amber eyes patently in mind, he ordered, ‘And, Watson, ask our landlady to procure not the first nor the second but the third brougham passing by. We must take such precautions as would prevent it being one which has been placed ready for us.’

With a light tread I repaired to my old dressing-room to select the clothing I would wear to Crick’s End.