Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

Chapter I I Become Restless

The clock on the mantelpiece announced half-past two. I stared around me, fingers drumming on the desk. The framed medical diplomas inscribed ‘Dr. John H. Watson MD’ on the wall and the stethoscope lying on the writing-table told even the most casual observer it was a doctor’s consulting room, and I, in the round-backed chair, the practitioner in charge.

It was the year 1906. Another fine Edwardian summer would soon pass behind me. In the outside world Homo sapiens sapiens, the most influential species on the earth, was stretching himself. An Old Etonian by the name of Charles Rolls and a fine, self-educated mechanic by the name of Frederick Royce had unveiled a motor-car which was to become the legendary Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. Communications were advancing with blinding speed. The British Army and Royal Navy were experimenting with triodes and wireless telegraphy to replace the mechanical semaphore system, the Mk 1V heliograph and the Lime Light signalling lamp of my military days in India and Afghanistan. The French pioneer Guillaume Joseph Gabriel de La Landelle coined the word ‘aviation’ from ‘Avis’ the Latin word for bird.

My old comrade-in-arms Sherlock Holmes had been in self-imposed retirement on the Sussex Downs for three years, ‘watching the little working gangs of honey bees’ with the same fervour as he once investigated the criminal world in cases such as The Boscombe Valley Mystery and The Adventure Of The Noble Bachelor. Until– out of the blue - he announced his immediate retirement I thought I had become as immutable in his life as Bank Holidays and the Changing of the Guard are to the nation. Without Holmes at the helm I felt like a diver too suddenly hoisted, a sea-beast fished up from the depths. ‘Notoriety has become hateful to me,’ was his unsatisfactory explanation.

My abstracted gaze fixed on the clock-hand ticking the minutes. I reached into a drawer for my tobacco pouch. Awaiting the afternoon’s patients I resented the theft of time more than any theft of goods or money. My income lay largely in fees for treating the fashionable afflictions of the day such as gout, or the debilitating effect on society-women’s lung capacity of tight-laced corsets. ‘Hardly equal to discovering the mosquito’s role in transmitting malaria or heroic research into yellow fever,’ I muttered dolefully to myself. Many patients came with ailments attributable to ill-advised leisure pursuits, or, in the case of long-suffering Lady P_____, a spouse’s propensities. Married into one of the highest and most exalted names in England, she arrived regularly for treatment for Neisseria gonorrhoeae in a fetching pleated silk Fortuny dress, the luscious colour between pale red and dark pink, embellished with gold pomegranates.

I came to a decision. One quick pipe and then if no patient squeezed through the door I would take a life-enhancing promenade around Regent’s Park. A sharp walk sets the mind working. A note on the surgery door would ask the patients to return in the morning. The tutorial with my registrar could wait an hour or two.

The click of the door behind me brought a feeling of relief. At the Baker Street Underground railway a large poster next to a newspaper vendor proclaimed a brand-new exhibition at the menagerie at the north end of Regent’s Park, ‘to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the year the eminent Naturalist Charles Darwin became a Fellow of the Zoological Society’.

I purchased a copy of The Times. A familiar sight in our Baker Street days was Holmes rummaging and reading an immense litter of daily and weekly newspapers, with intervals of note-taking and meditation until our landlady brought us our evening meal. Then he would suddenly roll them all into a gigantic ball and toss them up on to a rack. Even in retirement Holmes insisted upon being supplied with newspaper clippings - criminal proceedings at the Old Bailey, the deaths of infamous criminals. Above all, references to himself. Like stage actors and prime ministers, one cannot expect a Consulting Detective even of Holmes’s fame to be free of all human weakness.

I entered the calm of the Park and chose a bench facing a small island in the lake colonised by a group of herons. According to The Times England was comfortingly alive and well. A letter to the Editor called for a Great National Monument to record for all time the majesty and reach of the British Empire, ‘an Empire which has attained the power and splendour probably hitherto unequalled in the history of the world’. The writer asked, ‘What evidence will be forthcoming, say, in eight thousand years’ time, for some future Flinders Petrie digging among the buried cities of the British Isles?’.

In another letter a Dr. W. K. Sibley of Duke Street, Grosvenor Square, W., author of a book on the treatment of disease by light and heat, attacked the tea-drinking habit. It was, he stated, ‘becoming almost as much a curse and cause of disease as alcohol’. Below Dr. Sibley’s letter a Dr. Yorke-Davies of Harley Street recommended tea but not infused for longer than five minutes. He announced himself a ‘strong advocate of teas grown in China’. Elsewhere the reader was told the Argentine tango was the rage of the dance-floor. London’s basements were springing into life as vegetarian restaurants.

There was no reference in the newspaper to Holmes. Had he at last buried his nose in his promised opus? He had already authored ‘The Typewriter and its Relation to Crime’. In A Case of Identity, Holmes noticed all the letters received by Mary Sutherland from a Mr. Hosmer Angel were typewritten. By soliciting a note from his suspect, Holmes brilliantly analysed the idiosyncrasies of the man’s typewriter and had him arrested. Fifteen years earlier it was I who prompted Holmes to consider writing a work to be titled ‘The Whole Art Of Observation And Detection’ after he lectured me on faces while we sped in an agile Hansom to the setting of ‘The Five Orange Pips’.

‘I am surprised, Watson,’ he chastised me, ‘how little you as a medical man make of facial expressions. You can glean much from a careful study. The great Charles Darwin says they can be grouped into fear, happiness, sadness, anger, contempt, disgust, and surprise. Homo sapiens does not communicate by word alone - our eyes, nose, forehead and cheeks all have their say. They reveal multitudes about what we are thinking, feeling, intending. Some emotions we recognise at once - a reddening face and eyes wide and staring are typical of anger, a clear danger signal, back down or you may be harmed. Flared nostrils also suggest hostility. By contrast, the skin turning white is an indication of fear, a bluish tinge extreme fear. The blood abandons the face and goes to muscles where its power is needed more.’

‘Surely, Holmes,’ I questioned, ‘any of us - especially a criminal - can learn to fake our facial expressions?’

‘Scarcely one in a dozen can flex the corners of the lips without also moving their chin muscles,’ came the reply. ‘The extra chin movement, that’s the giveaway.’

I folded the newspaper and gazed across the water. A troublesome shadow lay across the beneficent reign of King Edward. The Times reported in full on the Royal visit to his nephew, the German Kaiser Wilhelm. Such were the gathering tensions between our two countries that The Strand Magazine was considering publishing an article titled ‘Is The Kaiser Mad?’. The answer would be sought from ‘highly reputed psychologists’ including a Dr. Morton Prince. The magazine’s editor had half-made up his mind already. The subtitle asked the question ‘An Asylum - Or St. Helena?’.

Within minutes I was on the move again, heading towards the Zoological Gardens. A meeting was taking place on the Macclesfield Bridge. Some thirty well-dressed, well-mannered women were clustered around the banner of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. One of their number mounted an orange box and began to read aloud from a copy of a letter suffrage campaigner Mrs. Millicent Fawcett had just sent to the new Prime Minister on the subject of votes for women. I stopped to listen. The woman’s voice carried audibly on the slight breeze.

‘Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, this country has come to the end of the 19th Century and embarked on all the challenges and opportunities - dangers even - inherent in a new Century, yet we women - those many millions of us - British citizens all - do not have the right to vote. Without the vote we cannot decide who we wish to prosecute our views in Parliament. We cannot contribute our skills, our commitment, our voices, where it matters, seated on the green benches of the House of Commons, the so-called ‘Mother of Parliaments’. And who else other than women cannot vote? Prisoners in His Majesty’s gaols! Inmates of the Bethlem Royal Hospital for the insane in Southwark! The poorest and least educated men.’

At this the woman’s tone changed. She pointed in the direction of Downing Street.

‘I have a warning for you, Mr. Campbell-Bannerman. Unless a peaceful appeal to the Government has an effect, it must force many hundreds of women to abandon a patient, painstaking strategy in favour of attacking the very system itself. Women will set about harassing politicians, courting arrest and creating a spectacle wherever possible.’

She ended proclaiming in a loud voice, holding the copy aloft, ‘Yours very sincerely, Millicent Fawcett’.

At the name ‘Millicent Fawcett’ every woman present gave a loud cheer.

A young man next to me snorted. He wore a flamboyant day cravat displaying squares of blue elephants on crimson silk. He deliberately engaged my eye.

‘Can you imagine the chaos,’ he exclaimed, scorn in his voice, ‘if women got the vote!’

I reached towards him and delicately pinched the top of his neckwear.

‘Can you imagine,’ I replied equably, ‘anyone walking through Regent’s Park flaunting such a deplorable cravat?’

We both broke into friendly guffaws.

A Suffragist came over to us with a leaflet. She pointed upwards.

‘We women are taking to the air,’ she said.

I looked up. As reported in The Times, the Australian-born Suffragette Muriel Manners was up among the scudding clouds dropping yellow, green and white leaflets on London (‘like beautifully coloured birds’) from a hot-air balloon piloted by aeronaut Henry Spencer. Reluctantly, I turned towards home. Had I known what adventure lay in store hardly a week away my desultory pace would without question have had a spring in it.

I was busy for the next few days before a gap in the flow of patients opened up. I sent Holmes a telegram inviting myself for a weekend at his bee-farm. I planned to urge him at the very least to dictate some of the cases he conducted in past years where I was not at his side. There was his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, or the encounter with the ‘Queen of Disguise’. Or clearing up the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee. Plus the intriguing affair of the two Coptic Patriarchs. Holmes’s unpublished cases alone would guarantee his fame, a ‘notoriety’ which would last long after history swept all other contemporary detectives from memory.