Donald Thomas - Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil

Holmes turned to him, calmly and with his decision made.

“Very well. I am His Majesty’s subject and shall obey. May the end be as quick and as bloodless as you propose.”

In the white anteroom with its gold-laced furniture it was impossible to miss a collective breath of relief.

Our negotiations with Fisher and Hall were not before time. In the course of that evening, a score of officers in their medalled mess jackets and formal dress took an unceremonious leave of the Court Ball. Despatch riders had brought orders to the Palace that two of our most famous regiments must return to camp. There was to be no delay, not even to enable reservists to reach them. Their battalions were to mobilise at present strength. At Liverpool Street station, they were to entrain for King’s Lynn to meet a possible German raiding party on the East Coast. The enemy might be expected as early as the next day’s summer dawn.

Such news brought with it a sense of complete unreality, as if we were taking part in a new play at the Haymarket or the Lyceum. All too soon, the same news was to be the talk of the hour.

Even as we discussed Fisher’s plans for Sherlock Holmes, I was doubtful that the enemy would be deceived for long. It was all very well for Sir John Fisher to boast how easily he could make fools of the Germans. The truth was that enemy spies might be anywhere in London, in guises of every kind. A citizen of a neutral country, let alone our own, might have private German sympathies. Holmes and I must assume, each time we left Baker Street, that either of us was being followed by a man or woman whose presence we had failed to detect.

We came to recognise one or two of those who quite plainly kept watch on us, though it would have been difficult to prove what law they were breaking. In any case, Holmes insisted that we must “let them be.” Far better to have such hangers-on where we could see them, than behind prison bars. We might not recognise the enemies who took their places, until it was too late.

There was a stout young man with a high flush and breathless movements. He would frequently appear in cap and gaiters where Cornwall Terrace joins Baker Street, like a stable-groom setting out for the park, just as Holmes stepped into his hansom cab. But this young look-out went no further. He crossed the road and turned away in the opposite direction, towards Marylebone. We could accuse him of nothing-and yet we were sure. His turning away was the signal for another watchdog. As the cab moved forward, this second man would very often appear round the corner from Park Street. He rode a bicycle, convenient for keeping a cab in view, and appeared much the older of the pair. His dark hair and pointed beard had the suggestion of being rimed by white frost. All the same, the nimbleness of his movements on the bicycle pedals hinted strongly to me that he was a younger man disguised. But we could hardly have him shot for that.

With one exception, these watchers were never interfered with. Our only mishap, early on, was the arrest of a gingerhaired giant with an entirely Germanic face. This was done by my intervention, largely to placate our nervous landlady, Mrs Hudson. Holmes was not in the house at the time. The man proved to be a plain-clothes sergeant of the Criminal Investigation Division, stationed at Paddington Green police station specifically for our protection. Needless to say, this well-intentioned error on my part delighted my friend.

His letter denouncing the futility of war, from Holmes to the Morning Post, had duly appeared. It was written with sufficient feeling to carry conviction to the unprejudiced reader. I feared we should receive a deluge of hostile post from wartime patriots but such was not the case. We were at an early stage of the conflict and tempers were not as hot as they subsequently became.

Every morning Holmes went by cab to the St James’s Library, off Pall Mall, to resume his work on the counterpoint of Orlando Lassus. The St James’s was a private library, founded by the great John Stuart Mill in the 1840s and restricted to members only. Membership was granted after personal recommendation and election, so that it was easy to check the names of those who made use of it. Holmes the musicologist appeared to work there until late in the afternoon, when he was driven back to Baker Street.

We were informed by Naval Intelligence that those who spied upon the library during the day probably did so from the rooms of an otherwise respectable European Club on the far side of the square. Its windows overlooked the library building. Yet even if these hidden onlookers in St James’s continued to keep watch, they no evidence of Holmes among the readers leaving or returning between his arrival in the morning and his departure for home at the end of the afternoon. They must content themselves with a young carpenter, who had been at work erecting shelves in the reading room, swinging his long bag and whistling as he went on his way to another job. Perhaps a bluff middle-aged fellow in a country suit arrived from Sussex or Surrey for an hour’s browsing among the shelves. An elderly scholar with pince-nez and an old-fashioned stove-pipe hat might appear from the Oxford train or the ecclesiastical figure of an avuncular rural dean would set out for his return to a West Country parish.

Those who have followed the adventures of Sherlock Holmes may at once guess the identity of the whistling carpenter, the bluff countryman, the shrivelled old scholar or the rural dean. Happily it was a fact unknown to German intelligence that in 1879, as an anonymous understudy and at short notice, Holmes had played Horatio to Sir Henry Irving’s Hamlet at the Lyceum. It was his one and only appearance on the London stage. Almost at once he was engaged to sail on an eight-month tour of the United States with the Sasanoff Shakespearean Company. It was not merely that he adopted the costume of the role he played. He assumed the expression, the manner, and the very soul of that part.

Yet I believe my friend considered that he reached the height of impersonation when the cab stopped in the Piccadilly square, the familiar figure strode up the library steps, the driver whipped up the horse and clattered round the corner into Pall Mall. As so often, the spies saw what they expected to see. Yet it was a trustworthy amateur, perhaps resting from the stage, who went up the steps to the library door, while the consulting detective covered by a shabby coat and hat drove the hansom smartly round the corner. Fifteen minutes later, he brought the horse and cab to rest in the securely guarded precincts of Old Admiralty Yard.

If anything more was needed to lay German suspicions to rest, Holmes published in the following spring two impeccable reviews of the polyphony of Orlando Lassus. His learned references to texts and manuscripts were in themselves several pages long. Orders for the journal were placed with Lindemann in neutral Geneva. The destination of two copies proved to be the Bureau of Military Intelligence in Berlin. It was from this moment that a noticeable falling off began in the numbers of those who tracked the hero of Baker Street on his daily journeys to Piccadilly and, presumably, among those who watched forlornly from the windows of the European Club.

If my friend expressed his reservations in the first months of the war, when the hopeful belief was that it would be over by Christmas, you may imagine his feelings as the Western Front settled into mud and slaughter. On a pleasant June evening, after almost two years of the conflict, we were sitting either side of our window, discussing the losses of British battle-cruisers in the engagement off Jutland, a fortnight earlier, and the loss of Lord Kitchener, Minister of War, in the sinking of the cruiser HMS Devonshire the previous week. Holmes seemed to be at his lowest ebb.