Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman

We Pay Chiarezza Another Visit and Say Goodbye To Our Dragoman

Holmes was standing at the Palace gate next to a line of letter-writers each seated in front of eight to ten little porcelain saucers containing black and red ink. He took my arm impatiently, declaiming, ‘We have unfinished business. At the very least we must alert the Jewess.’

Within minutes we were aboard a cab on our way to the Tuesday Bazaar at Salipazari. The approach was lined with row upon row of stalls selling yellow boots bunched together like exotic fruits. On arrival our naval uniforms provided us with anonymity. We blended well with the military uniforms all around us. Stiff-backed Rittmeisters of the Breslau Cuirassiers from the S.S. Grosser Kurfürst and what appeared to be the entire British Navy sauntered around in twos and threes, saluting us and each other. Several were purchasing fine embroidered Brusa brocades, damasks, silks, and satins imported by Greeks, Jews and Armenians from Venice and Lyons.

‘There she is,’ I said.

We walked towards her. On sighting us Chiarezza pointed at her wares and called out, ‘Gentlemen, how can I be of help?’

Her welcoming smile dimmed when she noted Holmes’s grim visage.

‘Madam, we apprehended the Sultan’s thirteenth wife with the sword of state in her possession,’ my comrade informed her with deliberate inaccuracy. ‘We are here to tell you your life is in great danger.’

Chiarezza paled.

She said, ‘I shall start packing my goods. If Saliha Naciye is to die I have no future here. By tonight I shall be gone.’

I intervened.

‘Why would you risk your own life to assist the Sultan’s wife in a plot against her husband?’

An angry gleam came in her black eyes.

‘My people have had ill-usage at the hands of fortune. All we wanted was for the Sultan to sell land in Palestine to the Jews. More than 1200 years ago Sultan Omar prophesised Palestine would be returned to the Jews ‘forty-two moons hence’. That time is now.’

She began to empty the trays of rings into a large leather bag.

‘It’s our land. The land of our forefathers. God has promised it to us. It lies waiting for us. The landscape is empty, great tracts of country untilled, mines almost unworked. There are a few Jewish farmers in the Galilee, along the coast on the Sharon plain and in the Valley of Jezreel. The Arabs live in the hills and the mountains. We wanted the Padishah to sell a portion to a people with no land. Is that too much to ask? We would accept even marshy regions in the Upper Galilee and near Hadera, zones which produce more malaria than crops. Hamid was offered 150 million English pounds in gold. Do you realise how much that is? He says he wants good roads and more schools and ports. He could have paid off his debts with sufficient left over to build ten ports, a hundred good roads, a thousand schools.’

She shot a resentful glance towards the Palace.

‘Hamid threw the offer back in our faces. He told us we must forget about establishing a state for the Jews. He said, ‘The Sons of Abraham can live anywhere in the Ottoman Empire except Palestine’. His exact words were ‘Even if you pay me the weight of the earth in gold, I would never agree’. ‘

‘Is that when you asked to see Saliha Naciye?’ Holmes responded.

Chiarezza nodded.

‘Yildiz is a land where yes can mean no and no can mean yes. I asked her if the Sultan’s reply was a yes or a no. She told me Hamid was adamant about Palestine. I asked, woman to woman, how can we get His Imperial Highness to sell us land? She replied it would be impossible while her husband remained ruler of the Ottoman Empire.’

‘Was that when she put a proposal to you?’ I asked sharply. ‘Help her replace the Sultan with her son Mehmed Abid in return for a deal?’

Chiarezza maintained a momentary silence. Then, ‘Once Saliha Naciye became Regent a provisional government would immediately grant a charter for Palestine.’

‘And your part in the conspiracy?’ I persisted.

‘First, to guarantee the offer of the 150 million pounds in British gold still stood.’

‘And then?’ Holmes queried.

‘Radium paint.’

‘And the reliquary ring?’ I asked.

She turned to me. It was clear she had seen the Turkish newspaper revealing our identities.

‘Dr. Watson, the request for the ring lay in the arrangement of the posy. I delivered it to Saliha Naciye. It was returned to me with a hole drilled into the box.’

‘The box contained a substance?’ I asked.

Again she was silent.

‘You took the ring to the Chief Armourer’s wife?’ I prompted.

‘Yes. I told her the powder would enable her husband to give her a son.’

She reached for a tray of red apes, black cats, and parti-coloured cockatoos, amusing mascots for sale to the owners of the touring cars beginning to invade Stamboul’s labyrinthine streets.

‘Gentlemen, I can give you a good price on these,’ she jested as she packed them away. ‘There won’t be too many landaulets where I’m going.’

We returned to our carriage. I took a last look back. Half-way down the alley-way I could see Chiarezza moving quickly to dismantle the rails of second-hand clothing.

I turned to Holmes, asking, ‘Why didn’t you reveal the fact the sword Saliha Naciye stole was a forgery? Or that you told the Sultan his wife was trying to protect him by taking the sword? Then Chiarezza wouldn’t have to...’

‘Chiarezza has a better chance of surviving if she wends her way to Palestine,’ Holmes returned. ‘I don’t suppose for a second the Sultan swallowed my concoction. I invented a plausible story for sparing his wife’s life but would that sinister eunuch at his side believe Saliha Naciye acted alone? Even if Abd-ul-Hamid forgives her, he’ll send out his spies to search for collaborators. Who supplied the radium paint? The trail will lead directly to the bazaar. It could become an excuse for a night of the long knives against the Hebrews. Chiarezza would suffer the dreadful ministrations of the Spider.’

The collection of hexagonal bird-cages and the Wardian boxes labelled and filled with plants stood at the ready just inside a Palace gate, awaiting transport to our ship. Holmes asked me to say goodbye to our host on both our parts and set off for Seraglio Point, the brilliants of the Turkish Order of the Medjidie First Class pinned to his breast.

I was taken to a small kiosk. Abd-ul-Hamid greeted me at the door. He was alone except for a pair of identical Angora cats asleep on a costly sable fur. A servant brought sweet tea in tulip-shaped glasses on dainty saucers enamelled in gold and lapis lazuli. A basket piled with plums and apricots sat on a table in the middle of the room, next to summer flowers in tall glasses of water - lavender, pink and white asters and red valerian.

‘My dear friend Ferdinand, the Knyaz of Bulgaria, sends me gifts of flowers and fruits three times a week, all the way from Sofia by special carriage on the Orient Express,’ the Sultan explained.

Once again I noted the surprisingly deep voice, emanating from so fragile a body.

The Ottoman Sultan added with mild contempt, ‘Even in his own country he’s known as ‘Foxy Ferdinand’. Here, every hubble-bubble café in Pera is infested with his djournals. I know because I’ve purchased most of the cafés for my own spies.’

With a scornful look he went on, ‘Foxy is a subtle and cunning man. He was here in ‘97, you know, to thank me, his Imperial Suzerain, for recognising him as hereditary prince of Bulgaria.’

He added, ‘I admire his talents. But what a flatterer. He calls me ‘un Potentate délicieux’. Ferdinand wants Constantinople, you know. He longs for his priests to sing High Mass in Sancta Sophia. His mother has told him his Bourbon blood will take him from a Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to a princeling in the Balkans to the throne of a Holy Roman Emperor. And he believes her. And why not? Her wealth has already catapulted him half-way there.’

He laughed.

‘But you must know all this from your time in Sofia, helping the Knyaz to recover the Codex Zographensis. What a yarn you produced from it, Dr. Watson - what a murder! Do the Bulgars really believe in vampires?’

The conversation switched. I was to take an important message to King Edward. It was too sensitive to put in writing.

‘Tell His Majesty that if I retain my throne for a few more years I shall do all in my power to keep my Empire out of the European war the Kaiser is bent on bringing about. However, if an attempt is made by elements of my Third Army to remove me, and they succeed, they will without doubt throw the Empire into the fray on the side of Berlin. If England is ranged against us I caution her to beware the Dardanelles. The Straits will soon be impervious to most forms of attack. My Minister for War has been hard at work. British bravery will not be enough.’

He waved out to sea. ‘Even against a hundred monsters like Dreadnought.’

It was clear his condition was no longer normal. Once more the black eyes shone with an unnatural brilliance. He beckoned me closer.

‘What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue. Dr. Watson, I appreciate the effort Mr. Holmes and you have made on my behalf but if your Foreign Secretary has any sense he’ll let the next lot of conspirators succeed! He would release me from my abominable burden. I dream of being unlocked from my chains. Thirty years is enough. I pray only to be left alone, unfettered by such heavy responsibilities. It’s certain the plotters will be back. I’ll tell them I do not need all my palaces.’

He waved a hand around him.

‘A simple kiosk would suffice.’

As though taking the possibility of his overthrow seriously, he calculated on his fingers.

‘I could cut down the number of dependents. I would only need half a dozen concubines, a dozen or so eunuchs and perhaps twenty servants. Three or four kadins. And a couple of princes. And,’ pointing, ‘my angora cats. That would do. I’d be satisfied. I’d be relieved.’

‘In that case why doesn’t Your Imperial Majesty renounce the throne?’ I asked. ‘You are rich beyond most men’s dreams. You speak several languages. You have a young son, Mehmed Abid. A Regency could be established...’

The Sultan seemed scandalised at the suggestion.

‘I fear the consequences for my Empire,’ came the answer, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘I’m the oak which shades my peoples. You think a wall of iron as solid as the earth itself separates civilization from barbarism, some law of Nature dictates that where-ever civilization impinges upon barbarism, barbarism must give way?’

His eyes strayed to the window.

‘If I abdicate they will strip me of everything. Only my name would remain. You are blessed over me in at least one respect, Dr. Watson. When you release your shadow you go to your rest. You are an intermezzo. Like the Salamander, your tail may wriggle for a while, then all is done. Within a century your gravestone will be unreadable. Lichen will rewrite your name and alter the date of your birth and death. In one or two hundred years the passer-by will glance at your gravestone and not know whether you died in 1881 or 1931. A sultan is an opera seria. What I do will remain a matter of discussion and examination until the last intake of breath of the Ottoman Empire. According to the philosopher Ibn Khaldun, empires have lifespans like humans. They come and go like periodic comets. Empires are born, grow, reach maturity. Then they decline and die. Your Empire has reached maturity. Your feathers are ruffled only by minor ‘isms’ - secularism and socialism, suffragism, anti-vivisectionism, spiritualism and vegetarianism. My Empire is on the point of death, like an exploding star. Soon all our pomp will be one with Nineveh and Tyre. Revolutionaries hiding in Salonika are spreading out to propagate their doctrines as far as the barracks of Syria. Even telegraph operators with their eyeshades, Morse-code, and a deep knowledge of my affairs are disloyal to me to a man.’

My host beckoned me to approach him. His hands smelt of costly white eau de toilette.

‘Dr. Watson, your chronicles have pushed your comrade to the apex of his profession. You are fidus Achates to his Aeneas. The name of Sherlock Holmes is known all over Europe, all over Russia. All across America. Without you he would hardly have gained the public’s attention outside Baker Street. Certainly his name would not be known in every street in Stamboul. Whenever your chronicles are read to me I wonder, ‘What if I had chosen my fate?’ What if I hadn’t become a Sultan, what would I most wish I had been?’

‘And the answer?’

‘The world’s greatest consulting detective, no less.’

I turned to go. The Sultan’s deep voice restrained me.

‘Dr. Watson, before you leave I want you to accept a memento of your visit.’

He leaned over the edge of the sofa and pulled an ornate chest to the fore. At the touch of a hidden lever the lid sprang open to reveal a treasure of jewels, emerald necklaces and flower brooches made of exquisite blue and white diamonds. Rich purple of the amethyst vied for the sunlight with the gentler fire of rubies, deep-red sapphires and hundreds, perhaps thousands of flawless diamonds - maroon, green, deep blue, cushion-shaped from the Golconda mines of India, as wondrous as those I set eyes on once a long time before, at the Court of Sher Ali Khan.

‘In happy remembrance of your visit to my country I beg you to dip your hands into this chest,’ came the Sultan’s beguiling voice. ‘Take whatever you can grasp! I know your pen is influential all over the world. I am represented abroad as a despotic and cruel ruler. I’m certain you will write of me kindly, even if the Turkish historians discredit my reputation. I beg you to put my rule to the Western world in the proper light.’

I cast around for diplomatic words to escape my deep embarrassment.

‘Your Majesty,’ I stammered, ‘I cannot possibly accept such a... Why...Sir Edward would absolutely forbid me to...’

The Sultan’s hand rose abruptly. He kicked the lid of the box shut and reached inside his coat.

‘Then you must not refuse this gift,’ he continued, ‘or (at which he gave a loud laugh)...or you will insult me. Then the Commodore might have to fish you out of the Marmara Sea!’

Still chuckling, he withdrew the gold and ivory automatic.

He went on, ‘I understand you have a fine collection of such weapons. The Prince Regnant of Bulgaria gave you a Philadelphia Baby Derringer, did he not?’

Tapping me playfully on the arm, he continued, ‘No doubt Foxy told you it was the very pistol John Wilkes Booth used in his assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865?’

‘Yes, that is certainly what he told me.’

‘He gave me one too!’ responded the Sultan, ‘telling me the same story.’

We broke into helpless guffaws.

‘Dr. Watson,’ he resumed, handing the pistol to me, ‘you must not refuse me. This pistol deserves a good home. It’s caused the death of at least five would-be assassins by my very own hand. It could be useful to you one day too.’

Shelmerdine’s description of Abd-ul-Hamid’s enthusiasm for lawnmowers, cigarette lighters and musical boxes flashed into my mind. I replied, ‘Your Highness, I shall accept your gracious gift on one condition, that on behalf of Sherlock Holmes, England and myself, you will accept these very powerful Ross military binoculars.’

I grabbed the pair of prismatic binoculars from around my neck and held them out.

I had scrambled out of an awkward place. The Sultan’s eyes lit up. With an expression of appreciation he grasped the strap and pulled it over his head.

Our exchange of gifts completed, my host clambered to his feet. As he led me towards the doorway he pointed at the remarkable pistol now in my pocket.

‘I absolutely hate putting anyone to death but it is important that a ruler does so once in a while.’

The thought clearly cheered him. He wiggled a forefinger.

‘Therefore,’ he continued, ‘every once in a while my trigger-finger gets itchy.’

His expression changed. He pressed my arm in a cold, dank grasp.

‘When you return to England, please give my good wishes to the King. Our paths intersect in many ways. He may rule over more than 50 million Muhammadans in India but I am their spiritual overlord. Tell him I want to deepen my friendship with England. England asks nothing of me and I have nothing to fear of her.’

Given the implied threat to encourage our Indian subjects to revolt, I asked, did the Sultan mean a cordial exchange of letters or a fully-fledged agreement such as the King had signed with France two years before?

‘An Entente!’ he exclaimed, his eyes lighting up. ‘Yes. Certainly. That would be good. An Entente Cordiale.’

He reflected for a moment.

‘Though perhaps not quite such an open one. More discreet. More surreptitious. We could get Foxy Ferdinand to word it. He’s a master of the politique de bascule.’

There was another pause, then, ‘Dr. Watson, it would benefit me greatly if England signed such an agreement. I could fend off the Young Turks with all their slavish admiration of the Kaiser.’

A crafty expression was drifting across the Sultan’s face. Unaware Sir Edward Grey was well apprised of his pact with the Kaiser he continued, ‘We could sign a secret military convention, a secret annexe. Guarantee the integrity of our territories if either of us is attacked. You will tell His Imperial Majesty what we have discussed?’ he asked eagerly.

‘The very next time I see him,’ I promised.

It was clear he and the Bulgarian Knyaz had much in common. Both would coquette first with one and then another of the Powers as they deemed best for the advancement of their interests, and as quickly double-cross the one or other.

Abd-ul-Hamid face brightened.

‘Dr. Watson, one more thing. Please thank Mr. Sherlock Holmes for the lecture on ears. How their shape is passed down father to son.’

‘What of it?’ I asked, mystified.

‘It has proved of quite inestimable value. Last night I conducted a survey of my fourteen sons. Four had ears they couldn’t possibly have inherited from me.’

With a ghastly grin he added, ‘At midnight my Head Gardener did a bit of weeding out.’ He pointed out at the glistening Bosphorus, calm and beautiful in the summer sun. ‘Their mothers too.’

Our association had come to its end. There was no photograph to mark the occasion, no formal finish. There was no vote of thanks, no valedictory speech. We just left off meeting. The dog barks, the caravan moves on.

The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine as I walked through the gardens of this Eastern palace for the last time. Bulbuls sang in the hedges and trees. With relief I emerged well before dusk set in. No other comparable space on earth could be as brooding and baleful even by day.

Holmes was waiting for me at an agreed rendezvous on Seraglio Point. From the heights we had a most excellent view to the shores of Scutari over the Sweet Waters, the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and its islands. I gave an amusing account of how I had presented my binoculars to the ‘Padishah’ before spending a short while bringing my notes up to date. I copied down the words of an earlier English traveller to these parts, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: ‘From where we stood, the faraway minarets of the city mingled with sea and shore, light and shade. The reds of the sunset were dissolving into greys. The softness and the Eastern charm could hardly be equalled anywhere else in the whole world’.

It was nearing the time to go to the water’s edge to await the arrival of the cases and cages and shake Stamboul’s dust and dung from our shoes. We engaged a Spider phaeton drawn by two smart snowy-coated stallions to take us down the steep slope to the Golden Horn. Dreadnought was dressed all over with flags. An anchor was suspended from the starboard deck edge. Her funnel covers had been removed. Steam billowed up. On Galata Bridge, gaggles of fishermen were trying their luck. Ever impatient, Holmes went ahead to the battleship. I stood alone at the dockside waiting for the birds and plants, reeling from the revelation he had made only moments earlier.

‘How is it possible?’ I asked myself.

Holmes had sworn me to complete secrecy.

‘If you reveal what I’ve just told you to anyone - anyone at all,’ he adjured, ‘you’ll have broken the great trust between us, and the honour of your regiment in India - the Bombay Grenadiers, wasn’t it?’

‘No, Holmes, it wasn’t,’ I retorted coldly. ‘The Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, then the Berkshires.’

Ignoring my rebuke he insisted on an embargo on the information he had just imparted. I assented reluctantly.

‘Nevertheless Holmes, I find it impossible to believe what you say. I’m perfectly certain the air of Stamboul has got to you. You’re suffering from some unaccountable hallucination, what you called l’illusion des sosies.’

‘I’ll agree with you, my friend,’ he replied, ‘if when he turns up his sole topic of conversation is England’s weather.’

With that, Holmes stepped aboard the Haroony and chugged away.

Minutes later a timber-jam came down the slope, the motion akin to a ship in heavy seas, alarmingly tip-tilting to the verge of upsetting. The cart overflowed with Wardian cases filled with plants selected by the Sultan’s Head Gardener and cages choc-a-bloc with flurried birds destined for the Zoological Society. Some birds I recognised from my stint in Afghanistan - woodpeckers, rails and crakes, black storks, Glossy Ibises and a pair of Greater Flamingos.

Behind it hurried our dragoman, my Quarter Plate camera under one arm, some packages in his free hand. On sighting me at the waterside a frown was replaced by his eager half-smile. He handed over the camera and the packages of saffron and Kofte Bahari. We stood talking while the cases and cages were swung from the land into Dreadnought’s launch. I’d grown to like Shelmerdine in our short time together. I did not share Holmes’s unaccountable coolness, even deprecation towards him. Our interpreter had performed his task impeccably. His interpretation of language and culture was greatly enhanced by his knowledge of English customs, as displayed in, ‘If you meet Djafer Aga, take care. Don’t be fooled by your English concept of a eunuch. The First Black Eunuch is the third highest-ranking officer of the empire, after the Sultan and Ali Pasha, the Grand Vizier. He’s the equivalent of your erstwhile Grooms of the Stole’. Noting the smart naval uniforms at our first encounter he exclaimed (disingenuously, I realised later), ‘Mr. Holmes, a Royal Navy Commander! Dr. Watson, an RN Surgeon Lieutenant! I was expecting two middle-aged gentlemen sporting tweed suits, black silk cravats, bowler hats and Javanese canes’.

I pointed up at the Palace.

‘The Chief Armourer’s body,’ I asked. ‘What will happen to it? Will they...?’

Perhaps because we were parting for the last time he replied in a more unceremonious manner: ‘Terrible things, Doctor! After your revelations they’ll disinter his corpse from the boneyard and string his disjecta membra on pegs at the outside gate.’

‘Really!’ I exclaimed, revolted.

Shelmerdine grinned.

‘No, though you might expect that. In fact he’ll be treated with great respect. The Padishah himself intends to chance his own life and attend a special ceremony at the grave-side...weeping.’

Startled, I asked, ‘Why would the Sultan...?’

‘Think of it, Dr. Watson, do you suppose Abd-ul-Hamid will want his people to know someone so close to him, so beholden to him, would throw his lot in with conspirators intent on sending the Great Khan packing - the Custodian of the holy sites of Makkah, Madinah and Jerusalem menaced by a plot at whose core lay his own bladesmith? For the same reason he’ll go along with Mr. Holmes’s ingenious exculpation of Saliha Naciye without believing a tittle of it. The Sultan knows the Chief Armourer could have replaced the Sword of Osman with a Prussian cavalryman’s rusty sabre from the Battle of Waterloo and she wouldn’t know the difference. She’ll survive only because it makes a much more favourable story to put around the bazaars that a plot by renegades to dethrone him was foiled rather than led by the mother of his son. You may be certain that Saliha Naciye will find her freedoms curtailed. There’ll be no further passage of nosegays between the seraglio and the bazaars.’

‘Will you report Mehmed’s death in the newspapers?’

‘Certainly,’ he affirmed.

‘That he died of...?’

‘Gout.’

I reflected how Holmes and I had merely to make our way in the country of our birth, a land where the rule of law was preeminent, where justice could be obtained and a normal life led not just day to day but from conception to burial. By contrast, daily - hourly - Shelmerdine had to observe rules of etiquette as overblown and intricate as the Moghul. He had to survive a despotism where talk even in one’s kitchen was dangerous, to wend his way in a world of the utmost cruelty and unpredictability. Where life was so dispensable a sultan could drown his entire harem in a fit of jealousy and rage.

Shelmerdine dropped his voice. ‘Doctor, I hope I’ve been of some help in your endeavours...you said there was a second plot. The schemers must fear imminent exposure. As you and Mr. Holmes may never grace our shores again, kindly tell me - in the utmost confidence - what about this other conspiracy?’

I looked up at Yildiz. In my mind I could see the rose and tulip and fenugreek gardens, the bowers with ivy and wisterias, the lion statues, water pouring from their mouths, in whose proximity you could talk confidentially. Here too, at the water’s edge, we could talk in safety, our voices drowned by the constant roar of harbour traffic and the shouts of people selling their wares on Galata Bridge.

I answered, ‘The moment we recognised a forgery it was clear there was a second plot, organised with great care and brilliance. One which was at the very instant of being sprung. The real sword had already been stolen - but by whom? Had we not arrived when we did, I’m confident the conspiracy would have succeeded. The Sultan would be in exile. Or dead.’

‘Yet you have no clues at all to the malefactors’ identities?’

‘Regarding the head conspirator, no. Nothing,’ I replied. ‘Unfortunately, when Saliha Naciye poisoned the Chief Armourer, she killed off the trail. However my comrade has deduced the identity of the principal agent.’

‘The principal agent!’ Shelmerdine exclaimed.

His eyes, unblinking, were fixed on mine.

‘The mastermind’s agent,’ I affirmed. ‘You see, there was one critical difference between the plots.’

‘Which was?’

‘One conspiracy could only have been conducted from within the Palace. That was clearly Saliha Naciye’s.’

‘And the other?’

‘By a collaborator quartered outside the walls of Yildiz.’

‘Why certainly, we know the Young Turks...’

‘Nowhere near as far off as Salonika,’ I replied.

‘Then where?’

‘In the very heart of Stamboul.’

Shelmerdine looked shocked. After a short while he asked, ‘You say Mr. Holmes has worked out that villain’s identity?’

‘He has.’

‘If that’s so,’ Shelmerdine responded, ‘why doesn’t your colleague reveal his name to the Sultan?’

He gestured towards the Bosphorus. ‘So His Sublimity can wreak his customary revenge.’

‘Because the agent may well know where the true Sword of Osman lies concealed,’ I replied.

‘And that could be of value to you?’

‘To Holmes and me personally, no. To a certain Imperial Power, yes.’

The dragoman cast a speculative eye at HMS Dreadnought.

‘That Power being?’

‘One which doesn’t for the while seek the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.’

‘Ah,’ he said.

After a pause he asked, ‘By any chance would it be England?’

‘It’s possible.’

Shelmerdine laughed loudly as though relieved.

‘I can see your hands are tied,’ he continued. ‘But you say you know who he is, by name even?’

‘We shall never reveal the surrogate’s identity, certainly not to Yildiz.’

Shelmerdine held out his hand in a final goodbye. With a comical pomposity of manner he bowed solemnly.

‘It’s been,’ he said, ‘one of the great privileges of my life to have met you in person.’

Whether he meant Holmes and me or, flatteringly, me alone, I couldn’t tell.

As he turned to leave he remarked with uncommon familiarity, ‘Dr. Watson, I admire loyalty to one’s friends but I put it to you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes hasn’t the faintest idea who this agent is, any more than he can identify the mastermind. The great gumshoe bluffs.’

The impudent use of ‘gumshoe’ riled me. When he had taken a few paces I called out, ‘The great gumshoe never bluffs, Shelmerdine’.

I pointed up at the Palace glinting in the evening sun. ‘But don’t worry, the skeleton in your closet is perfectly safe with us.’

I stepped on to the loaded pinnace and debouched. Because of the dragoman’s unaccustomed effrontery I had broken the solemn vow wrung from me by Holmes barely thirty minutes earlier. Shelmerdine stood alone among the hustle and bustle of the shore. He called out something, his words indistinguishable in the hubbub of evening traffic and the whistling of boats.

Early the next morning a steamboat passed close to our battleship. A small package addressed ‘to the Surgeon Lieutenant’ was thrown up to a watchful crew member. I opened the parcel to discover a stonepast dish from the Iznik potteries. A beautiful bird, blue, champagne and green, rested on gently swaying plants bearing pinkish-purple carnations, yellow tulips, and cyan hyacinths. There was no note. The colours of the dish’s flowers echoed the nosegay Saliha Naciye held to her nostrils when we first caught sight of her through the pavilion window. The Sultan’s thirteenth wife had already devised a new line of communication to the outside world.

Led by Dreadnought the fleet steamed into the Sea of Marmara on its journey back to Gibraltar. Within minutes we attained full speed. I watched the minarets and domes of the ancient city fast disappearing behind us. As with Alice returning from Wonderland, ‘all would change to dull reality’. The curtain of a past which had swung aside only days before was swinging shut. The brilliance of Yildiz, the kiosks and rooms - the gardens - all would evanesce. The Sultan, the Chief and Second Black Eunuchs, the dead Chief Armourer, the exiled Chiarezza, Saliha Naciye herself, in or out of the luminous ghillie suit, Stamboul and its smells and bazaars and spies and yelps of stray dogs, would tip-toe away to a dark place, like the genii of One Thousand And One Nights. It would only be through access to my notes that I would recollect reality from myth.

The British fleet came alive with lights, flags and semaphore, at pains to show the Navy as competent and ready for action. Dreadnought’s heavy guns thundered. The detonations would make all Stamboul’s hermetically latticed windows shake. It was a convincing adieu, a demonstration of England’s ability to ‘hit first, hit hard and go on hitting’ anywhere in the world. About seven sea miles out we heard a single cannon shot from the direction of the General Staff Headquarters in Tophane. I looked at my pocket watch. It was around a quarter past nine, the customary time for the cannon to announce the death of a traitor.

Eight days after we steamed away from Galata Bridge Gibraltar loomed. For the final stage of the journey I assisted the battleship’s regular naval surgeon in treatment of the pox from which it seemed half the crew now suffered. On the last night at sea Holmes presented Commander Bacon with a precious First Edition of The Washing Away of Wrongs, composed in 1235 A.D. by the Chinese death investigator Sung Tz’u. In return the Commander presented us with the fruit bowl which had set Holmes on Saliha Naciye’s trail, now filled with the finest dates, almonds, dried apricots, topped with Rahat loukoum from Hadji Bekir’s Lumps of Delight factory near the Galata Bridge head.

At sun-up I packed my belongings and left them at the open cabin door. A rating hurried out from the electric telegraph booth. He stopped when he saw me and held out a sealed envelope.

‘Lieutenant Learson, sir, if you’re on your way to join Commander Hewitt, could I ask you to hand this to him? It came this morning.’

He paused.

‘And, sir, any chance you could leave The Mystery of the Ocean Star behind when you go?’

I gave Holmes the message. He read it and passed it across to me without comment.

I read the next sentence and lowered the page. Tears sprang to my eyes. Grey was expressing exactly how I felt about my own dear, dead wife. He wrote,

Those words would have been entirely appropriate etched on Mary’s stone in the tiny Brightling cemetery, adjacent to the church where we were married, in whose nearby wooded valleys we spent our honeymoon. In the event the mason carved the exquisite line from The Rubaiyat - ‘The Bird of Time has but a little way/To fly...’

I returned to Grey’s letter.