Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (10 page)

“You will have neither, my short-tempered friend,” said Holmes calmly.

“Then I will have satisfaction some other way. Monsieur Holmes, do you fight?”

“I am not unskilled in pugilism and other forms of hand-to-hand combat.”

“Très bien
! Then I challenge you, right now, to fight me. We shall step outside and settle this like men.” Already de Villegrand had whisked off his velvet smoking jacket and was rolling up his shirtsleeves; the matter, to him, a foregone conclusion. He had invited Holmes to engage in fisticuffs; so they would.

Holmes rose, and I shot him a look, as if to say, “Are you mad? What are you doing?”

He batted my concerns aside, saying to de Villegrand, “It’s good we have Watson to hand, his medical expertise will prove invaluable should one or other of us suffer injury.”

“One of us will,” said the vicomte, throwing open the glass-panelled doors that gave on to a large, wrought-iron conservatory, which in turn gave on to the back garden. “And rest assured, Monsieur Holmes, it will not be
moi”

He exited. We followed. In the conservatory, he paused to pat the heads of a pair of stuffed animals which stood sentinel either side of the doorway. One was a grey wolf, the other a wild boar. “My trophies,” he told us. “I shot them myself in the Forest of Tronçais, when I was still in my teens. I take them with me wherever I go. They are my talismans.”

The message was clear. The vicomte wanted us to know that he was a hunter, unafraid of danger, not squeamish about bloodshed.

And both wolf and boar were intimidating, I cannot lie. The taxidermist had done a skilful job with them. Fangs and tusks bared, haunches hunched, they looked as though they were ready to charge at us at any moment and tear us to pieces.

Holmes must have spied the apprehension on my face, for he leaned close and said, “Fear not, Watson. If they magically come to life, I’ll protect you.”

“It’s not the stuffed creatures I’m worried about. It’s what they represent.”

“I see. It is a good thing, then, that
le vicomte
is not carrying a gun. And,” he added, “that I am not a dumb animal.”

We stood on the patch of lawn that was shortly to become a gladiatorial arena. De Villegrand set to limbering up, working out his shoulders and performing little jumps on the spot. Holmes doffed his jacket and gave it to me to hold. Then, as the vicomte had done, he unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rolled them up.

“Holmes,” I whispered, in a final attempt to talk him out of it, “this is not necessary. What’s to be gained? Apologise to de Villegrand. Call the fight off. Sparring with him is hardly the way to establish his guilt or innocence.”

“No,” said my companion, “but it is a reliable yardstick by which to take the measure of the man.”

“Someone who is so swift to challenge another to combat would not do so if he were not confident of his abilities in that field.”

“I am no slouch myself when it comes to the use of the fists, Watson. I boxed at university, remember, and have picked up various associated skills since. Our bout promises to be interesting as well as instructive.”

“Ifyou say so,” I sighed, accepting that he would not be dissuaded.

I stepped to one side, leaving Holmes and de Villegrand to square off against each other. I noticed a couple of faces peering out through a downstairs window of the villa. It was Benoît and Aurélie. Something told me that this was not the first time they had watched their employer enter into a physical altercation with another man. Benoît looked on quite avidly, his hangdog features for once animated.

“I should have you know, Monsieur Holmes,” said de Villegrand, “I am an exponent of the martial art known as
savate.
You have heard of it?”

Holmes nodded.
“La boxe française
is not unfamiliar to me.”

De Villegrand unleashed a couple of ferocious kicks in Holmes’s direction. They were showpieces, for display purposes only. Holmes, I am pleased to say, did not flinch, for all that de Villegrand’s shoe soles came within an inch of his nose.

“Savate
uses the feet primarily,” the vicomte said. “It was developed on the streets of Marseille, by sailors.”

“A somewhat lowly origin. I’m surprised a man like yourself would care to be associated with anything quite so
déclassé.”

“Ah, but that is the precise reason why I have studied it. No one in the circles in which I move would expect it of me. They prefer the more refined pugilistic sciences. That gives me the advantage.”

Two further kicks came Holmes’s way, not feints this time but the real thing. The first swung at his head, de Villegrand spinning full circle as he delivered it. Holmes ducked sideways out of its path. The second followed swiftly, the vicomte crouching low and sweeping at Holmes’s ankle with his instep. This one Holmes barely managed to anticipate and avoid.

“You’re fast,” Holmes said.

“As are you, monsieur. But I will land a blow on you soon enough.”

There ensued a flurry of attacks from de Villegrand. He was like some whirling dervish, his legs flying in all directions, his body twisting and revolving. Holmes, for his part, met the assault with a series of blocking moves, deflecting the vicomte’s feet with a forearm or a shin. It was all I could do simply to follow the action with my eyes. The two of them had become intertwined blurs of motion.

Then, perhaps inevitably, de Villegrand made good on his threat. He got past Holmes’s guard and planted a firm, solid heel in my friend’s midriff. Holmes staggered backwards, the wind driven out of him. A subsequent kick caught him on the jaw and, to my horror, he fell.

He was on his feet again in a trice, but I could tell that he had been stunned and was groggy. He shook his head in order to clear it and wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth.

De Villegrand, after so impressive a display of sustained athleticism, was not even out of breath.

“I am loath,” he said, “to inflict further harm on you, monsieur, lest I damage that amazing brain of yours. Shall we call it quits and say that honour has been served?”

Mentally I urged Holmes to acquiesce to this suggestion.

“Why, my lord?” said Holmes. “We’re only just getting started.”

De Villegrand grinned savagely. “Then
en garde
again. Prepare yourself.”

Up came Holmes’s fists, as de Villegrand embarked on another dynamic volley of kicks. His legs lashed out at every level – aiming at the head, the abdomen, the thigh, the ankle – and sometimes they shot forwards like pistons and sometimes they hooked round from the side in an effort to knock my companion off his feet.

Holmes darted nimbly this way and that, staving off the attacks. He was defending himself more than adequately, but I found it puzzling, not to mention frustrating, that he would not actively retaliate. De Villegrand was making all the running, and Holmes seemed content to let him. I could not fathom why Holmes wasn’t trying to turn the tables and become the aggressor.

Once more de Villegrand managed to make contact with one of those spinning kicks of his, and Holmes was toppled. He hit the ground hard, narrowly missing the trunk of an acer which was then in its autumnal finery of crimson and gold.

De Villegrand paused, at last needing to catch his breath. Holmes, meanwhile, lay prostrate, and I was convinced I heard him emit a groan.

“Really!” I exclaimed. “Enough is enough. You’ve proved your point, de Villegrand. I am throwing in the towel on Holmes’s behalf.”

“You will do no such thing, Watson,” said my friend hoarsely, pushing himself onto his side. “The vicomte has been lucky, that’s all. A few of his blows have got through. It’s nothing.”

“Lucky?” growled de Villegrand. “You’re the one who is lucky, Monsieur Holmes. Lucky I haven’t knocked your block off, as you English say.”

He lunged at Holmes, making as if to stamp on him where he lay, but Holmes was quick, quicker than either I or de Villegrand might have expected. He sprang aside, panther-like, and the vicomte, in his blind rage, charged headlong into the acer. As the Frenchman recovered from his collision with the tree, Holmes was upon him, punching him several times about the torso. With a roar, de Villegrand launched a backward kick which my friend was forced to leap away from.

Holmes looked almost as fresh now as when the fight had started, and I perceived that his moments spent in distress on the grass had in fact been a sham, a pretence designed to make de Villegrand overconfident and entice him into precipitate action. This, then, was a fight as much on the mental plane as the physical, a battle of wits as well as fists.

Holmes circled his opponent. His hands were raised, half-cupped, and describing small serpentine arcs in the air.

“I, too, am a student of a martial art,” he said. “It is called
baritsu,
and it is little known outside Japan. It synthesises numerous different fighting styles, from wrestling to ju-jitsu. I would be very surprised if you were at all cognisant of it.”

I feel entitled to insert a digression here on the subject of
baritsu.
No one can censure me for halting the narrative briefly, since no one but me is ever likely to read it.

Four years on from the events I am relating, Holmes would call upon all his skills as a practitioner of the art of
baritsu
during his grim, life-or-death struggle with Professor Moriarty atop the Reichenbach Falls. However, several of my readers have felt moved to point out that
baritsu
itself only became popular in England at the turn of the century, too late for Holmes to have mastered it for his confrontation with Moriarty, let alone for this tussle with de Villegrand.

In this instance, though, as in so many others, Holmes was ahead of his time. He adopted
baritsu
long before any of his contemporaries, simply so that he could have an edge over his foes. He was forever enriching his arsenal of knowledge with new and advanced techniques, the better to fulfil his vocation.

My readers’ confusion may arise because a variant form of
baritsu,
known as
bartitsu,
enjoyed a brief vogue at the tail end of the nineteenth century. It was devised by a certain Edward William Barton-Wright, who learned
baritsu
while working as an engineer in the Far East in the mid-1890s and then brought it over to England, where he opened a club dedicated to its promotion and promulgation and even staged a few exhibition matches. He added the extra “t” to the name in order to make it chime with his surname and thus put his personal stamp on it.
Bartitsu
was an impure version of
baritsu,
according to Holmes, who was deeply scathing of it, calling it “a clumsy reproduction of an Old Master, worthy only to hang in a boudoir, not a gallery”.

De Villegrand, certainly, was unaware of the existence of
baritsu
, and scoffed loudly at its mention.

“You are bluffing, monsieur,” he said to Holmes. “You hope to intimidate me with some absurd made-up martial art, to bamboozle me. But I am not so easily misled.”

“It’s no bluff, your lordship,” Holmes responded.
“Baritsu
even includes elements of
savate.
Allow me to demonstrate.”

All at once, Holmes was executing a range of kicks similar to those de Villegrand had deployed. His lacked the blunt force of the Frenchman’s but more than compensated for that with their pinpoint accuracy and their almost balletic grace. De Villegrand protected himself with reciprocal kicks and some open-handed slaps, but he was undeniably rattled by the turn of events. He understood that, until now, Holmes had been merely toying with him, lulling him into a false sense of security. It was a blow to his considerable pride.

Holmes manoeuvred himself in close, at which point he switched to a different fighting style, one more akin to judo. He grasped de Villegrand’s clothing and flipped him neatly onto his back. As de Villegrand attempted to rise, Holmes grabbed him, lofted him up, doubled him over his thigh, and downed him again.
Savate
afforded the vicomte little in the way of riposte to this kind of manhandling. His kicks were rendered almost ineffectual when delivered from a prone or supine position. Repeatedly he was dumped onto the lawn by Holmes. Repeatedly he strove to regain his balance or the initiative, and failed.

At last Holmes let go of him and stepped back. De Villegrand was on all fours, panting stertorously, looking both disgruntled and nonplussed.

“I could continue to humiliate you,” Holmes said, “but I do not believe in labouring the point. You acquitted yourself admirably, my lord. I shall trouble you no further today.
Vive l’Entente Cordiale
indeed.”

With that parting shot, Holmes beckoned me to return him his jacket, and we both made our way back towards the conservatory. Behind us de Villegrand growled something deeply uncomplimentary in his native tongue, which I shall not reproduce here. He did not, however, pursue us. He remained where he was, a sorry sight, the picture of arrogance brought low.

As we passed indoors, I glanced at the window where the two servants were standing, spectators to the contest. Aurélie’s expression was more or less unreadable. On her brother’s face, however, I caught a distinct look of triumph, as though he were rejoicing at his employer’s humbling. The look vanished as he caught my gaze, his erstwhile blank lugubriousness reasserting itself, but I had seen it plainly, and resolved to remark upon it to Holmes.

Holmes eschewed catching a cab to Baker Street, declaring a wish to travel on foot instead, so that he might cogitate.

He seemed in no mood to talk, so I left him to his thoughts and instead imbibed impressions of the city around us. London remained in a febrile mood. I discerned on the faces of shopkeepers and passers-by clear signs of worry and strain. Some masked it better than others. Only children remained oblivious, gaily playing on doorsteps with their dolls and tin soldiers, for all the world without a care – which is how it should be.