Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures

Making myself as comfortable as I could and feeling with some pleasure the heavy weight of the revolver in my pocket, I set myself to endure a long vigil. By my side Holmes moved from time to time, less able than on other such occasions in the past to keep perfectly still, sore as were his limbs from the cudgel wielded, with mistaken honesty, by that European manservant now busy at the stove.

Our watch, however, was to be much shorter than I had expected. Scarcely half an hour had passed when, with complete unexpectedness, the quiet of the night was broken by a sharp voice from behind us.

"Stay where you are. One move and I would shoot."

The voice I recognized in an instant from the strength of its foreign accent. It was that of Mr Smith's loyal servant. Taking care not to give him cause to let loose a blast from the gun I was certain he must be aiming at our backs, I spoke up as calmly as I could.

"I am afraid that not for the first time your zeal has betrayed you," I said. "Perhaps you will recognize my voice, as I have recognized yours. I am Dr Watson, your master's medical attendant. I am here with my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, of whom perhaps you have heard."

"It is the doctor?"

Behind me, as I remained still as a statue, I heard the crunching of the dried leaves underfoot and a moment later the manservant's face was thrust into mine.

"Yes," he said, "it is you. Good. I was keeping guard because of the many rogues there are about here, and I saw in the bushes a movement. I did not like. But it is you and your friend only. That is good."

"You did well," Holmes said to him. "I am happy to think that the Count has another alert watcher over him besides ourselves."

"The Count?" said the servant. "What Count is this?"

"Why, man, your master. There is no need for pretence between the three of us. Dr Watson and I are well aware that the man up in the house there is no Mr Smith, but none other than the Count Palatine of Illyria."

Holmes's voice had dropped as he pronounced the name, but his secrecy was greeted in an altogether astonishing manner. The formerly gruff manservant broke into rich and noisy laughter.

"Mr Smith, my Mr Smith the Count Palatine of Illyria?" he choked out at last. "Why, though my master has travelled much, and though I began to serve him while he was in Austria, he has never so much as set foot in Illyria. Of that I can assure you, gentlemen, and as to being the Count Palatine…"

Again the manservant's laughter overcame him, ringing loudly into the night air.

I do not know what Holmes would have done to silence the fellow, or what attitude he would have taken to this brazen assertion. For at that moment another voice made itself heard, a voice somewhat faint and quavering coming from up beside the house.

"What is this? What is going on there? Josef, is that you?"

It was my patient, certainly recovered from his nervous indisposition enough to venture out to see why there was such a hullabaloo in his grounds.

"Sir, it is the doctor and, sir, a friend of his, a friend with a most curious belief."

At the sound of his servant's reassuring voice my patient began to cross the lawn towards us. As he approached, Sherlock Holmes stepped from the shrubbery and went to meet him, his figure tall and commanding in the silvery moonlight. The two men came together in the full middle of the lawn.

"Good evening," Holmes's voice rang clear. "Whom have I the honour of addressing?"

As he spoke he thrust out a hand in greeting. My patient extended his own in reply. But then, with a movement as rapid as that of a striking snake, Holmes, instead of taking the offered hand and clasping it, seized its third finger, covered as always with its leather finger-stall, and jerked the protective sheath clean away.

There in the bright moonlight I saw for the first time the finger that had hitherto always been concealed from me. It wore no heavy royal signet ring, as indeed was unlikely on a finger of the right hand. It was instead curiously withered, a sight that to anyone other than a medical man might have been considered a little repulsive.

"You are not the Count Palatine of Illyria?" Holmes stammered then, more disconcerted than I had ever seen him in the whole of our long friendship.

"The Count Palatine of Illyria?" Mr Smith replied. "I assure you, my dear sir, I am far from being such a person. Whatever put a notion like that into your head?"

It was not until the last train of the day returning us to London was at the outskirts of the city that Holmes spoke to me.

"How often have I told you, Watson," he said, "that one must take into account all the factors relevant to a particular situation before making an assessment? A good many dozen times, I should say. So it was all the more reprehensible of me deliberately to have imported a factor into the Hertfordshire business that was the product, not of the simple truth, but of my own over-willing imagination. My dear fellow, I must tell you that there were no reports of unrest in Illyria."

"I knew it, Holmes. I had found out quite by chance."

"And you said nothing?"

"I trusted you, as I have trusted you always."

"And as, until now, I hope I have been worthy of your trust. But inaction has always been the curse of me, my dear fellow. It was the lack of stimulus that drove me to deceit now. You were right about your patient from the start. He never was other than a man with a not unusual nervousness of disposition.You were right, Watson, and I was wrong."

I heard the words. But I wished then, as I wish again now with all the fervour at my command, that they had never been uttered, that they had never needed to be uttered.

"Our client, Watson, would seem somewhat overwrought," remarked Sherlock Holmes without lowering his copy of The Times.

We were alone, but I had grown accustomed to the little puzzles which my friend was amused to propound. A glance at the window showed nothing but grey rain over Baker Street. I listened with care, and presently was pleased to say: "Aha! Someone is pacing outside the door. Not heavily, for I cannot discern the footsteps, but quite rapidly – as indicated by the regular sound from that floorboard with its very providential creak."

Holmes cast aside his newspaper and smiled. "Capital! But let us not confuse providence with forethought. That board has been carefully sprung in imitation of the device which in the Orient is known as a nightingale floor. More than once I have found its warning useful."

As I privately abandoned my notion of having the loose plank nailed down and silenced, there was a timid knock at the door.

"Come in," cried Holmes, and in a moment we had our first sight of young Martin Trail. He was robust of build but pale of feature, and advanced with a certain hesitation.

"You wish, I take it, to consult me," said Holmes pleasantly. "Indeed so, sir, if you are the celebrated Dr Watson."

A flash of displeasure crossed Holmes's face as he effected the necessary introductions; and then, I thought, he smiled to himself at his own vanity.

Traill said to me: "I should, perhaps, address you in private." "My colleague is privy to all my affairs," I assured him, suppressing a smile of my own.

"Very well. I dared to approach you, Dr Watson, since certain accounts which you have published show that you are not unacquainted with outré matters."

"Meretricious and over-sensationalized accounts," murmured Holmes under his breath.

I professed my readiness to listen to any tale, be it never so bizarre, and – not without what I fancied to be a flicker of evasiveness in his eyes – Martin Traill began.

"If I were a storyteller I would call myself hag-ridden…