Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle

We Meet Siviter And White

Turned to gold in a sudden burst of sunlight, the squat building emitted an air of calm and stability, an English refuge. The roar of the Lanchester’s engine dropped abruptly as the vehicle came to a halt, waiting for the handsome wrought-iron gates to open. The gates hung from tall, weather-bitten posts patterned with centuries of epiphytes and surmounted by exquisite carvings of hops. A silver-grey oak dovecot was just visible above the walls and hedges of the house. Crows watched keenly from the great oak on Donkey Hill, their cawing a ceaseless accompaniment to the afternoon.

My companion sat in silence, staring forward at the house. I wondered what first impression he would make on the members of the Kipling League. In addition to his striking appearance, his ancestry (second cousin to the Ulster King of Arms and Chief Herald of Ireland) had bequeathed him a nonpareil sense of the practical and a fertile and retentive mind which sprang alive in the face of the supernatural. So Celtic is he in origins that at a miniature medal affair at Downing Street, after the dramatic solution of a Continental matter, I was asked in a low voice by a British Prime Minister to confirm Holmes’ place of birth. The eminent personage felt he must be a foreigner who spoke English well.

‘Julia’ squeezed between the finely-wrought gates, her voice reduced to a low growl. The grounds of the Armadillo of a building bulged with lines of potting-benches, garages, outhouses and oast-houses built with Staffordshire Blues. Blackbirds atop the yew hedges abandoned their song and flew in alarm to their sanctuaries, giving shrill warning of our arrival.

The vehicle came to a halt before a bronze statue of two defiant drummer-boys. Close to, solid rather than grand, Crick’s End looked what its builder, an ironmaster of the 17th Century, had wished it to be, the very image of a manse for the rising Middle Classes.

A servitor of indeterminate age and dark skin wearing a turban waited in the fore-court by the bronze, having seen (or more likely heard) our transport proceeding down the hill.

‘Staray mashay,’ I tried, placing my right hand over my heart. His head bobbled. With almost a sleight-of-hand gesture he swung his wrist so the palm faced the sky, forefingers slightly elongated. ‘Namaskār,’ he replied, taking my portmanteau and inclining his head towards the front of the house. ‘Or ‘Gurdaspu’, if you know the Punjab, Sahib’.

Head down, silent, without looking to either side, he walked us towards the entrance.

The brick pathway led us to the Corinthianesque porch. Carved into the sandstone beneath a small oak barometer on the porch’s outer left-hand pier were initials which I presumed correctly to be of the Siviter family: RS, CS, ES, and JS, and an unidentified other, CM. The door opened. The clatter of a piano resounding through the house ceased in mid-concerto. A maid-servant with a French accent and a rounded face freckled like a plover’s egg stood before us straight from the pages of Lettres de Mon Moulin. In a creaseless white apron and high starched collar she was as filled with grace as a Botticelli Venus. I smiled at her and was about to send her back into the interior with our cards when she was put aside. A man stepped out, dressed in putty-coloured - almost white - broad-cloth and, in surprising combination, a pale-grey patterned silk Ascot tie. It was our host.

Siviter looked of a slightly older age than his true middle or late forties, genial and breezy. His skin was dark by English standards. He sported a luxuriant dark moustache. Goldrimmed glasses over sharp little acetylene eyes were arched by outstanding eyebrows starting to bush with age. One or two teeth were false. At his side he held a brown soft felt hat with a broad, floppy brim and low crown. Stepping forward from beneath the fanlight to join us, he immediately placed it on his head.

In the open air he seemed remarkably small, the crown of the wideawake hardly reaching Holmes’ shoulder. I estimated his weight at less than nine stone, a slight amount for a man of his age. Author of the much-loved Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas, it was hard to believe he was the fourth best big-game shot our Eastern Empire had ever produced, a wonder with a 600 Express, a sporting rifle with a recoil so powerful it would break a man’s collar-bone if he fired it from a prone position. I marvelled that a man who still wrote extensively about the sapphire skies of India, picturesque buildings, minarets and domes, the camels, deserts, the sense of endless space and endless time should now be living contentedly in so confined a valley.

‘How very good of you to come, and at such short notice,’ he welcomed us warmly, guiding us towards the door. ‘Our patron Kipling himself would be here but he and his wife were called off to Vermont. They are selling up a property there.’

After these civilities we proceeded before him through the porch and open door and entered a dark-panelled hall where my hat, dust-coat and coat and umbrella were taken from me with a bright smile by the same Venus-like maid-servant who greeted our arrival at the porch. Her uniform emitted a slight smell of rose-geranium.

Walking into the Grand Hall from the calm greens of Sussex was like following Aladdin into the Cave of Enchantment. Flowers were abundant, arranged daintily in every nook and corner. We were at once face to face with mounted heads from big game expeditions, at least one in eastern Africa to judge by a long-necked Gerenuk. Burne-Jones’ ‘The Mill’ was flanked by two water-colours by Pevensey of what I took to be gardens at Crick’s End. At their side, in remarkable contrast, hung a group of five sepia watercolours depicting Indian trades and professions. Above a fine Coromandel screen was a masterly oil-painting titled Bridge over the Thames at Barnes. It portrayed a choppy and turbulent river in its best grey winter-wear, carrying a red barge towards the interior of London. Next to it, another great waterway was represented by a painting of a dahabiah sailing down the Gambia River. Both were signed by Lesley Abdela, a female artist of Greek descent as yet unknown to me.

We were walked alongside rich and glossy tapestries draping the walls, including one of the lost Titian painting ‘Portrait of Isabella d’Este in Red’. Carpets, especially a gold kincob carpet five yards square, gave a touch of Eastern luxury, magnified by the faint smell of tobaccos and spices of India and the sudden, unexpected, sharp clean scent of kaffir lemon grass hanging in the cool dank air. Much of the remaining space was filled with an assemblage of tiny objects, some from the Far East, all from a distant past. Every item had been brought back to England in Gladstone bags specially built for elephants.

In the one step it was as though we were re-entering the Raj or other far-away land, an infinity of all that was beautiful, of utility and in good taste, a space that brought to the senses the cacophony of the sounds of the East - ships’ bells, splashing oars, native shrieks, a world where if you stared over the rain you might see Mowgli seated on the jetty, or if you cocked an ear the sound of giant kettle drums from a distant Salute State. I half-expected an Oriental figure to glide towards me, a Hindoo servant clad in yellow turban, with white, loose-fitting clothes and a yellow sash, attendant on his Maharaja, Nizam, Nawab, Khan, Maharawal, Jam, Raja or Rao, potentates whose arrival in villages was feared like the coming of locusts, so large were their entourages which, like those of Tudor and Stuart kings, had to be fed and watered without as much as a silver rupee in compensating payment.

Breaking into my reverie, Siviter told us he anticipated two further guests within the hour. A third, Lord Van Beers, was already in residence or at least on the grounds. He had spent the previous night in a tent in the garden, ‘For the sake of his joints,’ Siviter added with an ironical expression. ‘He tells me the house is too dank.’

The artist Pevensey, grandee President of the Royal Academy, was also for the moment away from Crick’s End, ‘putting finishing touches to one or two commissions’. He would return around mid-afternoon to a make-shift studio in Park Mill, at the lower end of the gardens, and planned to leave in the early evening, his work completed.

Our talk was to take place in the parlour at three o’clock. There was time for us to be conducted around the gardens. Coats back on, we followed Siviter out of the Grand Hall along a stone-flagged passage and through a side-door on to large terraced lawns where we were greeted by an assembly of leaping, barking, overjoyed Aberdeen terriers and a brace of black, curly-coated retrievers released from their shed, eager for exercise. From their sentry-duty at the front of the house, their ever-watchful eye had spotted what they took to be a stratagem by Siviter to leave them behind.

Millstones punctuated the brick paths. Two gigantic Chinese monals squawked at the dogs, rising near vertically to settle in the branches. The air was filled with the low drone of insects and the sudden sharper note of a bluefly shooting past us with its quivering, long-drawn hum like an insect tuning-fork. The beds bloomed with herbaceous plants and shrubs chosen for their hardiness.

The brick pathway turned to paving stone. The valley air was warming up in the intermittent early-afternoon sun but within the garden it was still cool, with a slight breeze. Overlooking a terraced lawn, stone seats like the sedilia of a church had been pushed into the yew-hedge, facing to the South and West for evening sun and warmth. Tucked away by a hedge we could see Van Beers’ tent.

At the sundial Siviter stopped. ‘It is my custom,’ he informed us solemnly, ‘to honour our President by offering a few lines which he composed seated on a canvas chair at this very spot.’ With an arm held high, an engaging, almost boyish smile on his face, he sang the antistrophe of ‘The Way through the Woods’:

At that second, daunted by the yap and yelp of the terriers below it, a grey squirrel leapt out of a small tree and bolted across the grass. It had until Christmas to live, Siviter informed us. After that he would shoot it, thereby the filberts the creature had filched from his trees and buried around the estate for winter fare would have a chance to germinate in the spring.

We came to a small clutch of dogs’ graves. On one was inscribed with clear affection, ‘Our Dachshund Billy 1888-1901, A Wise and Humorous Friend’.

Daffodils, scillas, wood anemones and fritillaries reached up through rough grass.

We crossed a bridge. Some fifty yards further we came to Park Mill. ‘Just look at the rabbeting, the mortising, the mitreing, the dovetailing, the joinery,’ Siviter exclaimed in admiration. ‘And done so long ago.’ He pointed at an assembly of wheels, pipes and cable. ‘But here, Gentlemen, is a miracle of our age, electric light at the touch of a switch. Put together by Sir William Willcocks, one of the most interesting fellows I have ever met, the very man who built the Aswan Dam and modestly spoke of it to me as ‘that trifling affair on the Nile’.’

He added, looking directly at Holmes, ‘You may not be a man of Empire but you cannot deny where-ever the English arrive, we find primitive tribal societies. As the President of our League puts it so well, it is England’s special duty to fight ‘The savage wars of peace /Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness cease’. When the time comes for us to depart, we shall leave behind roads, railways, telephone and telegraph systems, farms, factories, fisheries, mines, trained police, and a civil service.’

Subsequently the imperial figure of Willcocks, Siviter told us, ‘wandered through Babylon and Baghdad’, building dams on the Tigris and Euphrates.

He continued, ‘To drive the generator, Willcocks de-clutched the corn-grinding mechanism and installed this turbine. The current is carried by 250 yards of deep-sea cable to batteries in an outhouse. We get four hours of light from ten 60-watt bulbs each evening.’

I saw Holmes begin to look abstracted. To avoid breaking into a roar of laughter which would surely have hurt Siviter’s feelings, I burst out, ‘Ah, and I assume it takes a fair amount of water?’

‘2000 gallons an hour,’ replied Siviter triumphantly. ‘Through a 14-inch pipe. I would offer a demonstration but as you see, the pond is exceptionally low. We have used it up in supplying extra current for my guests.’

He pointed to the upper floor of the Mill.

‘We cleared the mill-attic as a workshop for the artist - you will know of him from his recent appointment as President of the Royal Academy. I commissioned him to paint an oil or two on the Fuseys’ estate at Scotney Castle across the Kent border, some twelve miles from here as the crow flies. Lord and Lady Fusey are great friends of mine. Pevensey should be back here shortly to hang the canvases up to dry.’

Our host turned us back the way we came Led by the dogs we retraced our steps through the gardens. As we picked our way across the Wild Garden Siviter entertained us with an amusing story of baboons chasing him on Table Mountain. This was followed by a more curious happening three years before, at Crick’s End, early on the second day of his residence. His wife and children were still in the former home at Roehampton. After a night of recurring fever (‘from my days in India’, Siviter reminded us) he rose before sun-up to make a cup of herbal tea, no servants having yet been engaged. Outside, a thick mist which rolled in during the night had yet to dissipate. He entered the breakfast-room to find himself staring at a sinister group of grey-beards, wizened monks as at a séance, attired in the black habit of the Dominican Order, immune to a battalion of cockroaches so thick on the stone floor they almost touched each other. To Siviter, not yet recovered from the fever, the monks had the look of uneasy spirits just risen from their graves. One wore a heavy habit enclosing his body like a bell, with a pilgrim’s staff and sack, a breviary on his lap. So clearly was such an assembly a ghostly inheritance passed on with the building or the hallucination of his still-disordered imagination and upset sensibility that ‘hoping the strange visitors were not too briskly summoning me away in the dim world that lies beyond the grave’, Siviter strode on towards the kitchen stove, expecting to walk right through them, but they were solid. He had a difficult apology to make. As they were there for alms he gave them the half a leg of mutton delivered the previous day, some capers, a generous monetary donation, a half-full brown stone jar of overproof West Indian rum, and several bottles of Kops Ale discovered in an armoire secrète. Damp had warped the cupboard’s doors and hampered the lock which had to be broken. ‘It was from that experience that I wrote the verses of The Portuguese Monk of the Barefooted Carmelites.’

It was nearing time for us to sup before we sang, or, rather, to take tea on a velvet lawn near the mulberry tree, at a long table covered by embroidered linen. Our repast would be informal, in the style anglais - standing under umbrellas in the drizzling rain. The meal comprised thin slices of bread and butter and a jelly compounded from the half-rotted small brown fruit of the medlar tree. It brought back my memories of Johnston’s Fluid Beef.

Siviter and I held a brief, rather conspiratorial chat on our methods of writing before reaching amiable agreement that our styles were Continents apart.

While closing in on the tea and medlar jelly, our host took us on a diversion through the house. On a tiger-skin rug in Siviter’s study stood a long, shallow fruit basket of insubstantial wicker-work, filled with a litter of curiosities - ancient broken pottery, delicate papyri, assorted bronze ornaments of Far East origins, a planchette, and such fandangles as a tiger’s tooth attached to a bell. Beyond lay a collection of green jade dishes and badly-cracked Imperial yellow rice bowls retrieved from an excavated tomb. Siviter explained Chinese Court etiquette prescribes that when a Sovereign dies, every rice or other bowl adorned with the royal cypher must be smashed, with fresh ones manufactured for the new Emperor. After he interviewed Tung Fu-Hsiang, leader of the Boxer rebellion, for the London Times he purchased this collection in the Native City, just outside the Chien-Men gate of Peking.

From such collection of almost unimpeachable authenticity and utmost rarity Siviter had built a European reputation in at least one branch of research, Asiatica, where his power of purse from sales of Eastern tales (nearly the equal of Kipling’s) gave him great advantage in the race for fame.