John Adams - The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Lord Holdhurst was impatient. "History can surely wait, Mr Holmes."

"I fear you are wrong," Holmes replied.

His lordship looked irritated. "The evening has been planned carefully with His Majesty's safety in mind."

"And with his murder," Holmes said gravely.

"But where lies the danger?" his lordship cried.

"Here!"

Holmes whirled round and seized the antique ring from its box. "Mr Anthony," he cried, "you chose this ring, did you not? Put it on your finger, if you please."

Reluctantly, obviously thinking he must humour Holmes, he obeyed, drawing it on slowly.

"Now, Mr Anthony, I will shake your hand." Holmes advanced to him with his own outstretched.

The young man drew back, white-faced, drawing the ring off his finger. "You shall not." He backed hastily, turned and fled along the corridor.

"Watson, tell the guards to hold him," Holmes shouted.

I obeyed instantly, and it was the work of a minute or two before Anthony was held securely by two constables. When I returned, I saw Count Panelli had joined the astonished and annoyed Lord Holdhurst.

"Kindly inform me of what my secretary stands accused, Mr Holmes," he said icily.

"That ring-Count Panelli, I really would not risk your life by examining it too closely."

It was hastily replaced in its box by the nervous count.

"The Medicis," Holmes explained, "required protection against their enemies. They needed to kill by stealth however, and the gift of a ring to an enemy whom they wished to die a particularly unpleasant death by poison was one such method. The ring slides on to the finger, but if the wearer's hand is clasped and pressure applied in one particular spot, a needle shoots out that will kill instantly. I think you will find that this is such a ring."

"My secretary betrayed me?" Lord Holdhurst sat down, looking his full age for the first time. "He wished to assassinate the King? I cannot believe this."

"Lestrade's telegraph confirmed my suspicions. Mr Anthony speaks fluent Italian, the result of his having an Italian-or as he would say a Sicilian-mother. She is the sister of Giuseppe Rupallo, but before becoming your secretary Mr Anthony worked in Paris for Count Litvov. I think you will find he is behind this whole plan, no doubt with Rupallo's full support. For once Russian interests coincided with the Italian anarchists, the latter to throw Italian unity into civil warfare, the former to cause a rift between Italy and England."

"I understand now about Anthony and Rupallo, but how can you know that Litvov was involved?" Lord Holdhurst asked.

Holmes smiled. "The ring. The stone has been replaced. It is alexandrite, the stone precious to Russia alone and the Tsar in particular, and a gem that was only discovered earlier this century. It was Litvov's arrogant signature to the crime."

"And yet it betrayed him."

"How?" I asked, bewildered.

"By day alexandrite is green. By candlelight however it appears red. Blood red. 'Blood will be seen again today.' The death of poor Mandesi was to make us think that the assassination attempt had failed, hence the note; but this ring-that was the symbol of blood."

"My dear Mr Holmes, how can I thank you?" Lord Holdhurst said. "Litvov would undoubtedly have revealed the cause of the King's death if this terrible plan had worked. If Her Majesty's gift were known to have been the instrument of the murder, I hesitate to think what would have happened."

"I imagine," said Holmes, "that Her Majesty would not be pleased."

"But she has no gift to present now," Count Panelli said anxiously, after adding his thanks to Lord Holdhurst's. "That will not please her either."

Holmes thought for a moment. "Might I suggest that you find a length of the purest white silk, upon it place two green leaves and between them the stone from this ring-extracted with care of course. Red, green and white, the colours of the Italian flag, symbol of a united Italy, and most disquieting for Count Litvov to see a Russian stone presented to the King as a gift. A most fitting conclusion to a most appetising banquet of a case."

Peter Tremayne is the pseudonym of Celtic scholar and historian Peter Berresford Ellis. As Tremayne, he has published many novels, including the more than two dozen in his Sister Fidelma series of seventh-century historical mysteries. Tremayne's short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Emerald Magic and Dark Detectives, and has been collected in several volumes, most recently in An Ensuing Evil and Others (in which you'll find several other Holmes stories). His latest books are two Fidelma mysteries, The Council of the Cursed and The Dove of Death.

Even our closest friends are often an enigma to us, especially if we first met them as adults. It's often striking the first time you see someone you know well interacting with, for example, their parents. Suddenly so much about why that person behaves the way they do falls into place. In Conan Doyle's stories, Holmes is already a fully formed adult by the time Watson meets him, and very little of Holmes's past is ever revealed. Many readers have wondered, how does a little boy grow up to be Sherlock Holmes? What was he like as a teenager, or at university? The Disney movie Young Sherlock Holmes dealt with this subject, and the more engaging early sections of the film were less about solving mysteries and more about the simple pleasure of seeing a familiar character in a new light. Our next tale also deals with a younger version of Sherlock Holmes, and here we see a character who's very different from the Holmes we know-less confident in his deductions, more trusting of strangers-and yet we see in him hints of the man he will become, driven in no small part by the events that follow.

Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch box with my name, John H. Watson MD, Late Indian Army, painted on the lid. It is filled with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr. Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine.

– "The Problem of Thor Bridge"

This is one of those papers. I must confess that there are few occasions on which I have seen my estimable friend, Sherlock Holmes, the famous consulting detective, in a state of some agitation. He is usually so detached that the word calm seems unfit to describe his general demeanor. Yet I had called upon him one evening to learn his opinion of a manuscript draft account I had made of one of his cases which I had titled "The Problem of Thor Bridge."

To my surprise, I found him seated in an attitude of tension in his armchair, his pipe unlit, his long pale fingers clutching my handwritten pages, and his brows drawn together in disapproval. "Confound it, Watson," he greeted me sharply as I came through the door. "Must you show me up to public ridicule in this fashion?"

I was, admittedly, somewhat taken aback at his uncharacteristic greeting. "I rather thought you came well out of the story," I replied defensively. "After all, you helped a remarkable woman, as you yourself observed, while, as for Mr. Gibson, I believe that he did learn an object lesson-"

He cut me short. "Tush! I do not mean the case of Grace Dunbar, which, since you refer to it, was not as glamorous as your imaginative pen elaborates on. No, Watson, no! It is here"-he waved the papers at me-"here in your cumbersome preamble. You speak of some of my unsolved cases as if they were failures. I only mentioned them to you in passing, and now you tell me, and the readers of the Strand Magazine, that you have noted them down and deposited the record in that odious little tin dispatch box placed in Cox's Bank."