Ted Riccardi - Between the Thames and the Tiber

I raised my glass and toasted both of my companions. By the time we departed, the food and drink of La Sonnambula had done their work. I recall only a sound sleep and Holmes knocking on my door, reminding me that we were scheduled to leave for London at once.

“Come along, old boy,” he said. “I have a note from our dear friend Lestrade who once again finds himself beyond his depth. Let us have our coffee. If we leave now, we will be in time to assist the poor chap.” Holmes handed me a large cup of caffè latte and the morning paper.

I wonder what Lestrade is up to now , I thought to myself. In the paper, I saw that a Mr. Peter Tomkins of Sloan Square had been murdered the day before and that Inspector Lestrade had requested that Mr. Sherlock Holmes join the investigation.

“Only the name is the same, old boy, only the name.”

I packed my few things and we were off to what my friend often referred to as the “great cesspool” of the British Empire.

A SINGULAR EVENT IN TRANQUEBAR

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE QUIET DAYS ON WHICH SHERLOCK Holmes proclaimed in a loud, determined voice that it was time for him to put his papers in order. By the time he had finished his morning tea, however, he had been diverted to his violin, which he plucked noisily, declaring that it needed new strings. His papers lay silent on his desk, forgotten and unattended, as he took up his bow and began a piece by Paganini.

He played beautifully, but, as was his habit, he played nothing all the way through to its close. The great composers for the romantic violin—Bruch, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms—became somehow sewn together into one large musical quilt of excerpts, which had its own peculiar unity. I said nothing, listening to my friend’s remarkable playing, when there was a firm knock at the door, one which we both recognized as that of Mrs. Hudson.

“Mr. Holmes, there is someone here to see ya’, very persistent, I would say. Why, he’s followed me right up. Go on, up ya go.”

A middle-aged man, oddly dressed in a green woollen cap and a long black cloak entered our quarters. He removed his hat, and I saw a man who was disheveled, his hair matted and stuck in clumps on his head, his face pasty, dark complected, almost dirty, certainly someone who had not slept in his own bed for several nights. His trousers were muddy and held up by a piece of rope which had been threaded through some crude holes made at the waist. He wore black chupples and thin stockings, also soaked with mud. His eyes were red-rimmed and almost cloudy, a condition that I had often seen in my medical practise as a strong indication of the use of opium. In all, an unhealthy eccentric, I thought to myself, bordering on the deliberately offensive.

“Mr. Holmes, I need you help and wise words. I am afraid that I shall go mad.”

“No need of that, Mr. . . . ?”

“McMillan, sir, John McMillan.”

Holmes stared at the man as one would stare at a puzzle of oddments, one in which the main elements were missing.

“I see that you have spent a good deal of the last day in Hyde Park . . . and that you were attacked by . . . something that soiled and tore your cloak.”

McMillan looked surprised at Holmes’s words. “You are most observant, Mr. Holmes. You are quite right,” said our guest.

“Let me see,” he continued. “You were born in India, lived there until you were perhaps eighteen or nineteen, when you left and settled in England. At some point you lived in Italy, where you served, in your penultimate posting, as assistant to a lady of aristocratic origin, then domiciled in the Abruzzi. The lady had also managed through her personal connections to have you positioned as a low functionary in the office of the consul general for Her Majesty’s Government in Naples. Before that, you had no permanent position, but supported yourself by tutoring and by occasional employment as a teacher in a boys’ school in Florence. You are now employed as a part-time janitor in Sussex.”

“Amazing, sir, you are correct on all points. How did you know?”

“Hardly a mystery, Mr. McMillan. I need not explain the arcane reasoning by which I arrived at all of my conclusions. You may note the following in brief: You are wearing a large rather common school ring which I have seen before worn by students of the Goodstock School in Madras. The graduates are a close-knit group of alumni, and it is not uncommon to see it and rings like it in the pawnshops in London these days. It is given to each student at the time of final matriculation. You have worn the ring for many years without removing it. It has become overly tight on your finger. In addition, your English, though native, bears the characteristic lilt of South Indian languages, the Dravidian so-called; finally, your cap was made in a small village in the Abruzzi, and is rarely worn outside of Italy. It has on its rim the seal that was once commonly given to honorary consuls. But, sir, please tell me and my friend Dr. Watson of your plight. And do sit. I see that you are exhausted by what has happened to you in the last day or so.”

“My story, if one can call it that, begins in India, Mr. Holmes, a country which I left thirty years ago, but in a frightening way has come back to haunt me. In any case, let me commence by telling you the needful. I was born in Madras fifty-one years ago, the son of John and Mary McMillan. My father was the editor of the Madras Observer , a highly respected newspaper. I was an excellent student, and I won many prizes for my schoolwork. As a reward, my father announced to me one day that, because of his love for India and my successful studies, he proposed that I should take a walking tour of the subcontinent before we settled in England. He offered to pay all my expenses along the way and encouraged me to travel not only with the rich and prosperous people I had been raised with, but with the poor as well, the latter being a means of knowing India which he said was avoided by most of our countrymen, who considered their lives there as a dreary bore.

“I of course jumped at the offer. Imagine, Mr. Holmes, having such an opportunity. I planned my route carefully. I decided to walk along the coast down to Cape Comorin and then up the Western Ghats, making full circles to the great religious sites of the interior. Early on in my trip, something happened which almost stopped me from going on. But I persisted and arrived back in Madras fifteen months after my trip began.”

“And what happened early on?”

“It happened in a place scarcely on any map, a small colony called Tranquebar.”

“Ah, yes,” said Holmes, “there is a Danish fort there and a convent of German nuns—Lutherans, I believe. We captured the fort and the land around it about a century ago.”

“You are again quite right, Mr. Holmes. I had been to the village many times in the past because there were also two temples on the beach, both filled with beautiful images carved in the stone but woefully neglected by both the Danes and by us, the English. Sometimes I would sit for hours in the ruins feeling the surf envelope me. Then I would help the fishermen with their nets.

“It was near sunset when I left the fishermen on that fateful night at the start of my long journey. The sea was calm, but there was a strong ominous wind which I thought might quickly turn into a tufan. I decided therefore to stay in the guest room of the nunnery. I took a path which I well knew through the small patch of thick forest that grew around the convent.

“And then, Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson, it happened: I was grAbbéd from the rear by assailants who forced me to the ground and tied me up with my feet stretched back and tied tightly to my wrists. They gagged me, making it impossible for me to cry out. It was dark and my captors said nothing. All that I could see was that they were naked except for the usual loincloths worn by the local fishermen. I shall never forget the strangest thing about them: their faces glowed a bright yellow in the dark as if they had rubbed some glistening ointment on their faces, something resembling the phosphorescent light of countless June bugs. They spoke not a word, but carried me silently to an obscure place in the wood, dropped me there on my stomach, and disappeared. Their faces seemed to float disembodied in the darkness as they passed into the night.