Death on a Pale Horse (36 page)

As it happened, the two gangways were not yet in place, having been hoisted side by side on to the paddle-box amidships to prevent strangers coming and going while the ship was docked. Some of her crew had taken advantage of their afternoon shore leave, sauntering down the pier for the seaman's privilege of a few hours in the bars and cafés of the old town. No doubt the captain and the first mate would be the first allowed aboard to supervise the stokers, who must lay the fires and raise steam before she sailed.

As I surveyed her from the window of the hotel dining room, through the vaporous light, the steamer was smaller and lower in the water than the vessel which had brought us over the day before. She was, as I later had reason to know, about five hundred tons, a little over two hundred feet long, and at least thirty feet broad amidships. With the deck extending over the paddle-boxes on either side, the “waist” amidships on these ships is wider than those more recent ferries driven by propellers. There were two funnels, yellow with black “admiralty” tops to trap cinders. The first-class deck saloon stood aft of these and the captain's navigating-bridge forward. I thought that in the present calm sea, she would do well enough for the sixty or seventy miles of this channel crossing.

I still could not believe that this was the ship or the place for some great adventure. If I had any concern at all, it was for the state of some of the crew after their visit to the old streets of Ostend. No one had so far returned to the ship and, though I had seen my portmanteau with other cases being wheeled from the hotel to the jetty by a porter, the gangways remained drawn up. The brown-and-cream vans of the Messageries Impériales had already arrived, and the chests for the mail-ship's strong-room had been unloaded under the eyes of the three guards with guns in their belts who would accompany them.

Plon Plon's war-chest must be weighed before being loaded, and again at Dover Harbour, to ensure that the weights were identical. In this way, the ferry company was absolved from blame if things went wrong at some other point of the journey. Now was the time I would have chosen to stage a robbery. The baggage was in the open air, not locked behind a steel grille. The robbers had the whole of Belgium to escape into, rather than being trapped on a ship in the middle of the English Channel. But nothing happened. There were, after all, six or eight guardians of the law with pistols or revolvers to hand. Surely we had hoaxed ourselves into believing that some master-stroke of villainy was in prospect?

I was thinking I might as well sit it out until tea-time, when a liveried post-boy appeared at my table and saluted me.

“Doctor Vastson?”

I looked up and he handed me an envelope. Though it was of a different colour to the English kind, I had no doubt that this contained a telegram. Who but Holmes knew that I was here? I slit it open and drew out a flimsy paper with a longer message than I had expected.

JNQFSBUJWFUIBUJSFNBJOJOCSVTTFMTTUPQQSFTFOU

TDFOFPGFWFOUTJTIFSFTUPQPVSDMJFOUTJOGPSNFE

ZPVXJMMCFUIFJSFTDPSUTUPQZPVSEVUJFTOPNJOB

MTUPQMFTUSBEFPSHSFHTPOBUEPWFSTUPQ

BDLOPXMFEHFNFNTOPUSFRVJSDFTUPQIPMNFT

What on earth was this? A cipher from Holmes, of course, though nothing in it identified him. And where from? Brussels, presumably. But what about? Any telegram was obviously urgent. I stared at the jumble of letters in growing panic. There was not a single name hidden here, not a single word that meant anything. I had no idea where to begin!

Worse still, the use of a cipher presumably meant that our enemies were on to us after all. They had penetrated our defences so expertly that we could no longer communicate in plain English nor trust the officials of the Belgian telegraph service. This revelation brought me up short. Had Holmes sent me these few lines of mere gibberish as a warning of all this? But I must assume that the nonsense before me could be decoded. I glared at it, wondering what the cipher might be and where I should begin.

At the end of twenty minutes, I was shaking with mental exhaustion and apprehension. Despite the raw cold of the day outside, I was also perspiring a little from the concentrated anxiety. To start with, I had guessed that the last six letters would be his name, as they would be on any telegram. So IPMNFT probably equalled HOLMES. But these letters made no sense anywhere else in the message.

Very well. The sequence TUPQ appeared six times in five lines, at more or less regular intervals. I felt a flood of relief in the knowledge that a letter of the code would always have the same equivalent in the alphabet. Thank God! From now on it might be straightforward. If the encoding of every single letter had varied, I might try from now till Christmas without deciphering a word of this. The sequence TUPQ also appeared immediately before what I took to be the sender's name. In a telegram, this was invariably the punctuation STOP. At last I was getting somewhere and, surely, Holmes would not use a cipher that I had not a hope of breaking. Very well. I caught my breath and worked with a pencil on the back of a menu card until I began to get the better of this rampart of a hundred and ninety-two coded letters.

The letter F appeared twenty-five times. Other things being equal, that must be E, the most commonly used letter in English prose. Then J appeared twelve times, ahead of B at seven. I guessed that J was most likely to stand for I, made more frequent by its use as the personal pronoun. B was very probably A. With that last conclusion the system fell into place. I had soon divided the lines into words.

JNQFSBUJWF UIBU J SFNBJO JO CSVTTFMT TUPQ QSFTFOU

TDFOF PG FWFOUT JT IFSF TUPQ PVS DMJFOUT JOGPSNFE

ZPV XJMM CF UIFJS FTDPSU TUPQ ZPVS EVUJFT OPNJOBM

TUPQ MFTUSBEF PS HSFHTPO BU EPWFS TUPQ

BDLOPXMFEHFNFOU OPU SFRVJSDF TUPQ IPMNFT

He had simply replaced each letter with the one following it in the alphabet. It was childishly simple now but not in a moment of dismay when faced by an alphabetic rampart, infinite possibilities, and very little time to spare! Of course I had supposed from the start that he was not likely to send me a message I could not unravel—but that start had been a moment of panic. And if I could decode it, why was it that our enemies could not?

I completed the transposition of the letters.

IMPERATIVE THAT I REMAIN IN BRUSSELS STOP PRESENT SCENE

OF EVENTS IS HERE STOP OUR CLIENTS INFORMED YOU WILL BE

THEIR ESCORT STOP YOUR DUTIES NOMINAL STOP LESTRADE OR

GREGSON AT DOVER STOP ACKNOWLEDGEMENT NOT REQUIRED

STOP HOLMES

And that was all. I had been right. Whatever might be going on in Brussels, this was to be a channel crossing as uneventful as any other in the ship's itinerary. All the same, I swore that I was going to be the first passenger aboard the
Comtesse de Flandre
and not a face that followed me should escape my scrutiny. Not even if it were Holmes in disguise!

As a rule, passengers were permitted to board an hour before sailing time. I reached the gangways as they were being lowered into place, side by side, and made fast. I was dressed in my warm Harris tweed coat and my hat and carrying my black malacca cane, ready for the worst that the voyage could bring. My revolver was in the pocket of the coat, but much use did it seem to be now. Before I and a few others could get closer, the purser was at the gangway and his message was clear.

“Stokers' party and crew only just now. Thank you.”

We waited until they were aboard—and still we waited. Then the reason for this became apparent. It was the arrival of a four-wheeler drawn by a pair of white horses. Several men got down, one of them a stout figure in a frock coat with a glimpse of astrakhan collar and silk cravat. He was holding a top hat as if to save the trouble of taking it off to acknowledge the crowd. This was my first sight of Prince Napoleon-Jerome, Plon Plon. The lamp-light caught a heavy face with mouth turned down and eyes mournful. His head was bald at the top and the dark hair grizzled. Yet the profile was strong and impressive. Here and there people clapped, but for the most part the onlookers were quiet. Most of them probably did not recognise the claimant to the French throne. Waiting passengers stood back for him to pass with three soberly dressed civilians and two officers in dark blue uniforms and gold insignia.

After an interval to allow the royal party to settle itself in the first-class deck saloon, the purser stood back and I was, indeed, the first of the other passengers aboard. I had decided that the best vantage point would be at the steamer's rail just forward of the paddle-box. From there I could see every face that came up the gangways, until each arrival stepped on to the deck a few feet away from me. I could even watch them as they waited on the harbour pier for their turn to come aboard. Perhaps because this was a Friday sailing, there were far more than had come across from Dover, but the second-class travellers would be confined to the forward part of the ship.

I truly had expected that Holmes might slip aboard in disguise; but none of these, whom I saw at very close range, resembled him in the least. I do not underrate my friend's capacity for concealing his identity. Yet there is one thing that cannot be disguised, short of bandages or dark glasses, and that is the eyes. Not for nothing had I been a physician searching the gaze of my patients for hope, fear, or resignation. I looked at close range into the faces of those hundred or so who came aboard. I would swear on my life that none of them was Holmes nor, indeed, Colonel Rawdon Moran. His telegram seemed to have told the truth. The scene of events would be in Brussels.

As the light dwindled, the rising mist became a fog that closed upon us with the chill of a hoar frost. The ritual of departure began and with it came a fond memory of my childhood. It was low tide and the steamer had come in bows-first. To go astern in shallow water, against low tide and poor visibility, is unwise. Yet there was often no room for a ship to turn herself round in a small harbour where other vessels were moored. The answer is simple. A man in a rowing boat comes out, carries the loop of a heavy mooring rope from the winch in the stern of the ship to a bollard on the far quay. The winch is then used to wind the rope in and pull the stern round until the bows of the steamer face the tide. The loop from the bollard splashes into the sea, and the length of the mooring rope is wound in at the stern. How often had I seen the ferries perform this manoeuvre in the west coast harbours of my Scottish boyhood!

The oarsman in his little shell rowed out from the mole, collected the rope, rowed back, and looped it over the bollard. There was a clanking and a gust of steam from our stern as the heavy rope rose taut and dripping from the water. Our stern swung slowly round until the bows faced the sea. The loop was cast off by the oarsman standing at the end of the harbour jetty. The bridge telegraph above me rang “Half Ahead.”

We faced the dark with several hours and sixty or seventy miles of fog-bound sea in a flat calm ahead of us. We should round the Ruytingen lightship off Dunkirk, then turn north for Dover. British travellers “going foreign,” as the saying is, would have taken the shorter crossing to Dover from Calais. Unfortunately, our royal protégé, like all other claimants to the throne of France, had been permanently exiled by the laws of the Third Republic and was not to set foot on French soil.

The weather promised to be thick, but not so dense that the sailing had to be cancelled. As we eased past the end of Ostend's western pier, the bridge telegraph rang “Full Ahead” to the engine room and the two paddles picked up speed. Their wake frothed down either side of the ship as we slid into the seaway, past a tier of colliers and coasters. Presently we were steaming at about twelve knots, parallel with the flat winter sands. Behind a line of muddy surf, only a chain of lights from houses on the esplanade marked the shoreline that was fast receding into the gloom.

While I was leaning on the rail, watching our departure, the first mate had come to the foremast and hoisted a white oil-light almost twenty feet above the deck. He then turned, gave an order, and a second man standing behind him handed a box of lucifers to the ship's boy. The lad struck one of these and lit the green navigation light whose lantern was fixed to the forward edge of the starboard paddle-box. The seaman took the box back and went to attend to the red light on the port side.

On such Channel crossings in poor weather, I much prefer to “stick it out on deck,” smoking a pipe, rather than go down to the miasma of the refreshment saloon. The vibration of the ship's reciprocating engines under my feet and the beat of the paddles on either side of the hull was comforting, even on such a journey as this. We passed very little shipping. From time to time I could just make out the drifting ghost of a fishing smack or a lugger, its ochre-coloured sails catching the faint breeze as it made its way out from Ostend or Dunkirk to the fishing grounds of the North Sea.

After twenty minutes of standing amidships, I had lost the lights of the shoreline. The sea-mist closed in until it condensed into a silent fog whose droplets hung on my hat-brim and lapels. They call it mist, rather than fog, but it was so thick that from the bows of the
Comtesse de Flandre
I could no longer see the red, yellow, and black of the Belgian flag at the stern. Indeed, I could hardly make out the two life-boats on board, hanging aft in their hoists, conveniently close for first-class passengers. The first-class saloon, at present the “royal saloon,” was enclosed by a little metal gate across either side of the deck indicating to second-class passengers that they had reached the limit of their permitted territory.

I heard a voice behind me.

“Doctor Vastson, is it not?”

For a moment I expected to turn and see the liveried waiter from the Hotel de la Plage, but this was the younger of the two French military figures in their dark blue uniforms who had accompanied the Prince Napoleon-Jerome aboard.

“Lieutenant Theodore Cabell,” he said reassuringly with a slight click of the heels and a respectful inclination of his head towards me.