A Soul of Steel (38 page)

This was unjust. “It was not discovered until the girl came to clean this morning, and after all, you were not in until evening yesterday.”

Holmes emerged carefully from under my desk, his thin cheeks flushed from his efforts and the compelling oddity of the mottled souvenir. “I had some tidying up to do in the naval-treaty affair. How is Mrs. Watson taking this intriguing discovery?”

“She, of course, had a thrilling introduction to the world of mystery and crime in ‘The Sign of the Four,’ and—”

“ ‘The Sign of the Four,’ Watson? That is an abstruse figure of speech.”

I found myself at a loss, for Holmes had no notion about the extent of my literary recreations of his cases, even to the liberty of titles. “That is to say, the matter of the Agra treasure, in which her late father was involved. Mary, I can report, is absolutely unruffled, although she has no wish to inspect my late... visitor.”

“Hah!” barked Holmes in an outburst that passed for laughter. “Quite wise on the lady’s part. This fine fellow has grown a tad fragrant and had best be removed soon. Now I must inspect the windows.”

He went to the casement, magnifying glass in a white-knuckled grip, his sharp features bent to the lens with the intensity of a hound’s nose to the spoor.

“Keeping a ground-floor office has its drawbacks. You have had a brace of burglars in the last two days, Watson, although I doubt either of them were London cracksmen in search of remnants of the Agra treasure. Yet each bore something with him—a middling-size box. See where the wood has been rubbed raw? When a man swings one leg and then the next over a windowsill, anything that he is carrying is likely to scrape the frame.”

“But what is the point of bringing a poisonous snake into my office, Holmes?”

“The point is all too obvious. The motive is less so.” Holmes dropped to his knees before the window and undulated across the Turkey carpet to my desk.

“Our number-one man is powerful. Stealthy strides taken far apart. Boots of foreign manufacture—I should say German. Cologne. I see the impress of a most assertive nail in the right front sole. This was our cobra importer. See the line in the carpet where the container rested while our snake charmer prodded it under the desk? The man had no fear of his lethal partner, that is certain.”

“I see a small line in the carpet, Holmes, that is all. It could be the tracery of a design element.”

“Nonsense, Watson. It is the right front impression of a box two feet in length and, from the depth of the impression, roughly eighteen inches in height. The comer is marked because that is where the man leaned his not inconsiderable weight as he rose again once he had loosed the snake.”

“How could he be sure that it would stay hidden beneath my desk?”

“That is elementary.” Holmes rose to stalk to the window again. “He simply had to feed it beforehand. Snakes are torpid after eating, but if roused from slumber will strike at the interruption.”

“That is what Mary claims that I do following Sunday dinner,” I remarked.

“You make light of your uninvited guest, Watson, but its purpose was anything but to amuse,” Holmes said sharply. “And what is this in the flower bed outside the window? Traces of a lighter man, one still showing the effects of a recent illness. Note the uncertain footprints. This chap did not advance beyond the window frame. Ah—here is where he set down his casket.”

“These men sound more like the suitors in
The Merchant of Venice
than housebreakers, Holmes.”

“Their business was deadly serious, Watson. This second fellow does not set toe to carpet, so he suspects the nature of his vile precursor into the room. I refer to the serpent rather than to the human reptile who brought it. And examine the sill, where the new man’s fingernails have scored the wood... he was well aware of the cobra lying in wait. He must have watched for a while, then left—why?”

“I am sure that I cannot guess, Holmes.”

“No, I doubt that you can.”

Holmes returned to my desk and began to pull the carpet from beneath it until the snake’s long mottled form lay exposed
.
He then pored over the corpse, the magnifying glass to his eye.

“You can see where the scales are rubbed against the grain; the tender mercies of your unheeding foot. Do you remember doing this?”

“I remember the carpet being rumpled, that is all.”

“Fortunate for you that the reptile was already dead. The bite of an Asian cobra is deadly within minutes.”

“Do you mean to say that the first man deposited a dead cobra on my premises?”

“Absolutely not. The creature was alive, and ready to take lethal exception to your habit of rug-kicking, when the first man left it.”

“Then the second man killed it.”

“From the window, Watson? I have heard of snake charmers, but I doubt even they can induce death at a distance. Think how the annals of crime would swell were such a dread skill added to the murderer’s arsenal.”

“Then the second man left me to my fate.”

“I think not. He managed to disarm the snake somehow.
Hmm.
Those are tooth marks behind the head.”

“Human teeth?” I asked in horror.

Holmes rose from his inspection, his thin lips pursed.

“No.”

He walked to the back of my desk and gazed down at the surface and the empty chair before it. “Nothing was taken?”

“Er, no.”

“You sound uncertain.”

“Some... papers were disturbed.”

“What papers?”

“Simply... notes I had jotted to myself.”

“On your cases?”

“On... cases in which I was involved, yes.”

“Watson, you are hiding something from me. Out with it, dear fellow. This matter is too serious to allow for anything but total candor.”

“I merely noticed that some papers I had lying atop my desk were disturbed, but that was after I had returned to find the couple waiting in my rooms.”

“They could have riffled the papers at least, or killed the cobra, though I think that highly unlikely. Who did they say they were?”

“The man introduced himself as a solicitor, Feverall Marshwine. The woman was a Miss Buxleigh, who sought news of her missing suitor, who was lost at the battle of Maiwand.”

“Ahhh.”
Holmes cast himself into my chair. “I knew it involved perfidy abroad.”

“Maiwand was a deadly rout, but I doubt that there was much perfidy in it.”

“The perfidy is evidencing itself here. Consider the cobra.” Holmes pointed eloquently with his magnifying glass to the front of the desk. “And these visitors are most suspicious.”

“They seemed quite credible.”

“Feverall Marshwine? My dear Watson, that is a childishly obvious pseudonym.”

“Why do you say so?”

Holmes smiled thinly. “You often chide me for my patchwork education, but even I know that Feverall Marshwine was a notorious eighteenth-century highwayman.”

“I have never heard of him!”

“We each have our areas of expertise. Mine is crime. Rely upon it, Watson. So what did these fictional personages Marshwine and Buxleigh want?”

“Tales of my experiences at the battle of Maiwand.”

“Did you oblige?”

“As much as I could. My memory of the disaster is clouded.”

“Much like poor Phelps’s memory of more recent events. Odd. His dilemma involved a treaty between nations; your puzzle seems to revolve around an old war between nations.”

“There can hardly be a relationship, Holmes.”

“The more unlikely the possibility of connection, the more likely the probability. Did this pair of visitors say why they specifically required your recollections of Maiwand?”

“Only that I may have tended the lady’s lost fiancé there.”

“Nine years is a long time to mourn.”

“That’s just it. The fellow went off his head and vanished. One Jasper Blodgett.”

Holmes raised a dubious eyebrow. “Blodgett. That name is ridiculous enough to be true. Perhaps your callers were innocent, though I am by no means convinced. Certainly the snake was not.”

“But nothing came of it, Holmes.”

“That does not mean that something cannot come of it. Quite the contrary. Do you have any paper—? Ah, here is some, under the Gray’s
Anatomy.”

“Here is fresh paper.” I leapt for the drawer and seized my poor scribblings from the desktop. I put several clean sheets of writing paper before Holmes, while he shook my pen until it drizzled ink.

“Excellent, Watson. That is what is so utterly valuable about you, old fellow. You are prepared for anything. Now pray do not worry about that cobra. I fancy that there is more dangerous human game about, and I vouchsafe I will catch it.”

Chapter Twenty-six

DR. WATSON'S BAG

On the
morrow we had our marching orders.

Godfrey and Quentin set off first thing, bound for the Military Archives to seek records of the military careers of John H. Watson, M.D., Emerson Quentin Stanhope and one Sylvester Morgan.

“What of...Grosvenor Square?” Quentin asked before he left.

Irene turned from adjusting her bonnet in the mirror. “I suggest that you not venture there yet, Quentin, unless you wish the residents to come under the closer scrutiny of Tiger.”

Quentin nodded, added a plush beaver top hat and cane to his attire, courtesy of Godfrey’s well-stocked trunk, and left with a last quizzical look at me.

I was swathed once again in the feature-blurring veiling that I had found the simplest and most effective disguise for someone of my theatrical ignorance.

“Do I look suitably demure?” Irene asked me. She did not often request the loan of my clothes. I was astounded to see her in them; the effect was much like confronting a distorted image of myself.

“You will never look demure,” I told her.

“Tsk, Nell, I am an actress. I can look like anything I wish.”

“Here,” said I, going over to assist her. “For one thing, you have tied the bonnet ribbons too successfully. There. Uneven tails and a loop turned inside-out looks much more ordinary. And your handbag straps are not twisted... that’s better. I do presume you wish to resemble a parson’s daughter with no deep abiding concern for the frivolities of fashion?”

“You do presume, Nell,” she chided me. “You are not nearly so dowdy as you imply.”

“Nearly?” said I.

Irene had swept away from the mirror. “Well?” she demanded.

She had donned my spring gown of Empire-green serge, with cream border stripes that edged her high neck, the mid-forearm-length sleeves, the bodice reveres and the pleated flounce on the hem. All in all a neat and quiet toilette that did nothing for her coloring. The skirt was a trifle too short, revealing two-tone brown spectator shoes tied with dull orange tassels.

“Irene, the shoes are dreadful with that gown!”

She grinned. “I thought so too. And now, for the
pièce de résistance.”
She whipped something from her thoroughly utilitarian leather handbag, which I had not seen since it had transported the photograph the King of Bohemia sought to Godfrey’s Temple chambers more than a year before. On her nose perched my pince-nez, now accompanied by a brown cord that was affixed to her bodice with a brooch bearing a cheap, foil-backed glass stone the color of tobacco spit.

The indignity done to my spectacles was as nothing compared to the transformation that now occurred. Somehow Irene’s posture altered: her shoulders rounded, her bosom sank, her toes pointed ever so slightly inward. A more gawky, unfortunate creature I had not spied since first catching sight of myself next to a full-blown Irene in Wilson’s Tea Room windows eight years before.

“How shall I see?” I wailed, that being the only issue I dared address.

“It will not be necessary. Besides, a squint will add a ‘character’ touch to your portrayal.”

Irene eyed me critically over the gold-wire frames of my purloined pince-nez. “You will have to be the Lady Bountiful of our pair, while I play the shortsighted church mouse. But you must take care not to put on too grand airs, or the whole effect will be ruined.”

“I? Put on airs? Irene, what can you be thinking of?”

She paused near the door to snatch up my umbrella, which was plain and black. “Ours is the more delicate mission, Nell. It may even be the more dangerous.”

“What could be more dangerous than consulting Sherlock Holmes?”

I thought of poor Quentin soon to be sent to beguile the foremost detective in... England in the service of some master plan Irene would not disclose.

She lifted the umbrella like a standard and swept open the door into the hotel’s dim-lit hall. “Broaching the second-most dangerous woman in London: Mrs. John H. Watson.”

“Who is the first, pray?” I inquired.

Irene simpered modestly over the pince-nez. “Myself.”