A Soul of Steel (2 page)

INSPECTOR FRANÇOIS LE VILLARD:
a Paris detective and admirer of the English detective who has translated Holmes’s monographs into French.

SARAH BERNHARDT
:
Internationally famed French actress

OSCAR WILDE
:
 
friend of Irene Adler; a literary wit and man of fashion about London

FOREWORD BY FIONA WITHERSPOON

My previous
works collated the nineteenth-century diaries of Penelope Huxleigh, a parson’s daughter, and recently discovered fragments from the supposedly fictional accounts of John H. Watson, M.D., regarding the activities of Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective. Readers of these works will know that it violates the scholar-editor’s code to intrude into the material at hand.

In previous volumes, I confined myself to the discreet afterword. There I merely smoothed out apparent inconsistencies between the Watson-related accounts of Sherlock Holmes so far published and new revelations from the Huxleigh diaries about the only woman admitted to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler.

Readers will also know that I have insisted from the first that Sherlock Holmes was no fictional construct, but a historic personage. Additionally, I argued that the Huxleigh diaries—with the details of Irene Adler’s life both previous and subsequent to her allegedly fictional meeting with Holmes in the story titled A
Scandal in Bohemia
—support my theory: Holmes was real; Irene Adler was real. Indeed, to my mind the only suspect personage in the Holmes canon is Watson. This may have been a convenient pseudonym for the actual biographer, who has successfully hidden behind the “authorship” of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a century.

Now I have uncovered evidence of such a startling nature, an “adventure” of Sherlock Holmes (although it is actually a lost adventure of Irene Adler) that is so linked to documentable historic events that I believe no rational person can read it without admitting that Holmes is far from a figment of anyone’s imagination. In addition, this new material sheds fascinating light on a personage later to become a key figure in the Holmes saga.

Because this evidence stems from incontestable historic events in the complex region known as “Afghanistan” only for the past century, I find it imperative to insert a modern section to preface the Huxleigh diaries and Watson fragments and to provide the needed narrative continuity. Rest assured that I have not abandoned the scholar’s code. To convey an authentically compelling tone, I have commissioned an unemployed historical novelist and former schoolmate of mine from Forth Worth, who steeped herself in the proper disciplines in order to portray the flavor of the times and the events themselves. Even the Holmes biographer (who may or may not have been Sir Arthur) on occasion used the omniscient third-person voice to depict events that none of the principals had witnessed.

So I follow in established footsteps, but beg the reader’s pardon and patience nevertheless. Chronology is paramount to the narrative that is about to unfold, which has sinister application to the conflict in Afghanistan in our day, as well as that in the twilight of the nineteenth century.

Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., F.I.A.* November 5, 1991

*Friends of Irene Adler

Oh, Gods! From the venom of the Cobra, the teeth of the Tiger,

and the vengeance of the Afghan—deliver us.

—
Hindu Saying

Chapter One

WHEN TWO STRONG MEN...

Near SANGBUR, AFGHANISTAN:
July 25,1880

In the
very lap of Asia lies a land so fierce and desolate—if not undefended—that were the demons of every faith to collaborate in creating a Hell that would prostrate Christian, Hebrew and Moslem alike in united terror, its name would remain... Afghanistan.

Stretching horizontally across the neck of the Indian subcontinent like a hangman’s noose, Afghanistan bridges Persia on the west and Tibet and China on the east; British India on the south; and to the north—the great outstretched Russian bearclaw.

Searing in summer and frigid in winter, this unholy landscape huddles behind the scimitar curves of two great mountain ranges—the Himalayas and Karakorum on the east, and on the west the six hundred ridged miles of the Hindu Kush.

Wherever men of adventure and a martial bent gather, the Hindu Kush is spoken of in awed tones. To the timid home-bound soul, it is enough to say that the phrase translates as “dead Hindu.”

No wonder is it that neither India nor Russia has extended its borders to meet across this dread wasteland. Nor is it any wonder that in the closing decades of the nineteenth century the two great nations of Russia and Britain should nervously dart closer to armed conflict there, like two dogs fighting over the same hideous bone. Possession and advantageous position are the only prizes of what has been called the Great Game between two strong empires. The bone itself is worthless, and bitter gnawing at that.

This is Tartary, ancient road of merchants and conquerors, the no-man’s-land separating the northern frontiers of India—Kashmir and the Kush—and the southern fringes of Russia—Tashkent and fabled Samarkand. A lonely wasteland to the unobservant eye, the arid vastness of Afghanistan supports dozens of warring tribes, united only in their devotion to freedom from foreign meddling and their willingness to wreak havoc on interlopers. The traveler, and woe to anyone foolish enough to go solitary into these bleak acres, is never as alone as he may think—or as he may be allowed to think, for a time.

Thus, should a wheeling vulture spy a human form cast lengthwise in a notch atop a bleak ridge, he will not swoop closer to investigate unless he is especially hungry. Such culinary booty is common after the bandits have made their usual forays. Every abandoned traveler is assured of a final, grisly welcome somewhere.

But the lone man visible only to the airborne vulture on this particular summer’s day was not lost, or mad, or abandoned. He was present for a purpose, and so was the telescopic spyglass pressed to one eye, its brass carefully darkened so no unnatural twinkle should alert any lurking marauders.

Even a spyglass could barely penetrate the jagged profiles of distance-blued mountain ranges and the tiny camel caravan trickling down a steep incline like a broken string of amber beads. Both men and the tough, two-humped beasts native to these forbidding steppes seemed cloaked in the sere shades of the desolate region, hardly more animate than the darker patches of thorn bushes and other scrubby vegetation that punctuate the frozen waves of sand and rock.

The caravan was too immeasurably distant to alarm the watcher, but he rolled over suddenly, aware of the vulture’s scant shadow, and turned a dark face to the blazing blue sky. Summer spread its searing, fawn-colored tent over Afghanistan and the heat was horrific, even under the billowing shade of a burnoose.

In an instant, the man collapsed his instrument and tucked it into the leather kit bag belted at his waist beneath the flowing robes. From the bag he pulled something that glinted in the hollow of his hand, a pocket watch, which he consulted. Then he snapped shut the engraved lid and quickly put it away.

The vulture shadow fattened without warning. The man scrambled to his haunches, stretching an arm for the Enfield rifle that lay alongside him, but caution came too late. Another robed man stood motionless below him on the ridge back, a Snider breech-loading rifle slung over one shoulder carelessly enough to be instantly available.

“You are late,” the first man said in a language shocking amid that arid wasteland—English.

“I forgo carrying a Burlington Arcade timepiece in Afghanistan,” the other said sardonically, moving closer. “One day all of your native dialects will not suffice to talk you out of some tight corner, Cobra.”

“Nor will your fabled trick of padding up behind a fellow unheard always save your skin, Tiger,” the first man replied with a mirthless grin that revealed disarmingly blackened teeth.

Tiger sat on a rock, baggy Turkish trousers ballooning around his knees. He doffed his burnoose’s hood, revealing a turban. Under those native wrappings lay a broad, intelligent brow and strong, pugnacious features that indeed boasted the ferocious jaws of a tiger—and unblinking eyes of bright, lapis blue.

“I need that tracker’s skill,” Tiger said with harsh pride. “I lack your facility for passing among these mountain bandits as one of them. But stealth serves me as well as boldness has served you. We are both yet alive.”

Cobra grunted. Unlike the other man, his skin had been toasted to the nut-brown color of a native, and his eyes, if a trifle hazel, seemed almost black in their swarthy setting. Yet beneath it all, and especially in conference with one of his own kind, lurked the aspect of a young English gentleman, no matter how dangerously he played at native tribesman.

“There will be battle,” Cobra said, weary of their usual jousting. He did not like Tiger, did not trust the man, though he was an old India hand; Cobra could not say why.

The turban nodded. “Battle, blood and dust. We will have a rare round of it in a day or two. The command underestimates the Amir’s forces, as usual. Burrows is a fool.”

“He has not seen much action,” Cobra admitted with the unease of a young officer discussing the commander. “And Ayub has some crackerjack artillery: two elephant-drawn heavy batteries, twenty-two horse artillery batteries and eighteen mule-drawn mountain batteries, not to mention seven bullock-drawn field batteries.”

“The lad can count!” the older man sneered in a way meant to pass as humor-at-arms. “You will soon be heading behind-lines to report all this?”

Cobra nodded. “Not that the command much listens to me.”

“The sash-and-sword set never puts much store in the advice of London lads gone native like yourself. You should have stayed in the regiment and clung to your spit-and-polish.”

“After the war it is the political chaps who advance,” Cobra put in. “And do they heed your reports any more than mine? So is your scouting done?”

“Oh, aye, I have sashayed up the ridges and down the gullies ’til the vultures are sick of the sight of me.”

“Better to be seen by them than by the Ghazi fanatics or the Afghan tribesmen.”

“Or the women!” Tiger gave a mock shudder. “The Ghazis may kill everything that moves for Allah, but I would rather face one any day. At all costs, do not get wounded and let the village women have at you, boy. They have a real taste for torture, even more than the men. Better to shoot yourself.”

“War stories.”

Tiger smiled. His teeth were strong and yellow, like a big cat’s, leaving no question of why he had earned his
nom
de guerre.
“War stories tend to be war truths. Remember that, and remember who told you.”

“But you have scouted no surprises for our troops?” Cobra asked.

“No hidden caches of elephant-drawn artillery, no. I have spent two weeks crawling around this bloody dust-laden kiln, and I should know.”

“Odd.” Cobra got out his spyglass and swept it over the parched landscape below. “Hyena said he had seen you up north recently, in Balkh, near the Russian border.”

“Hyena
said,
did he? Like all of his breed, he is much for slinking around after the danger—saying, and little for doing. But he is right, although it was a bit longer ago than that.”

Tiger leaned inward, his voice so compelling that Cobra lowered his glass to meet the bright blue gaze so ripe with conviction. “That is what I’ve come to pass to you today. The immediate area is clean as a camel’s tooth, but a Russian agent has been doing a mazurka hereabouts to no good. ‘Sable’ is the code name—vicious, surreptitious beasts they are, too. That is all I’ve discovered: except for the fact that an officer in our command has been compromised.”

“An officer? Will betray us? Why?”

Tiger shrugged. “Could be for gold, or for the rubies in the far Afghan hills—now there is a bribe to make a man’s heart clench, a ruby mine! Could be a woman in Simla, with eyes brighter than the Koh-i-noor diamond, but another officer’s wife, and blackmail. Oh, my poor lad, the world is rotten with fat fruit, ripe for teasing another’s will to one’s own. You are such a babe at espionage.”

Cobra stiffened in irritation, which no doubt further amused Tiger. “Still, I am the one to report back. What does it matter if the terrain favors us when one of our own may turn? Do you have a name?”

“A name.” For the first time, Tiger seemed uncertain.