Holmes and Watson (15 page)

That same evening, as they sat beside a blazing fire, Holmes at last found time to give Watson a full explanation of the Baskerville affair and to tie up some of
the loose ends which still remained unresolved. Later, as a belated celebration, they went out to dine at Marcini’s before going to the opera to hear the De Reszke brothers sing in a performance of Meyerbeer’s
Les Huguenots
. Holmes hired a box for the occasion, further proof of his improved financial situation, a fact which would have set Watson’s mind at rest over the matter of the shared rent of the Baker Street lodgings. Holmes was now in a position to afford to pay the whole of it himself.

It must have been shortly after this that Holmes was summoned to Odessa to enquire into the Trepoff murder and then, after its conclusion, travelled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) for the case involving the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee. That, at least, is the inference, for, although Watson is far from clear on the details of this latter investigation, by using the phrase ‘at Trincomalee’, he seems to suggest that the case required Holmes’ presence at the scene of the tragedy.

During this same period, Holmes was also engaged on a delicate mission on behalf of the Dutch royal family,
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the word ‘mission’ again implying that he was required to travel to Holland in order to undertake the inquiry, which he successfully concluded. This was the second occasion during this period that royalty had asked for Holmes’ assistance, the first request having come from the King of Scandinavia, and suggests that his reputation for handling
highly confidential matters of state was spreading among the reigning European monarchs, many of whom were inter-related.

Of the two other cases, the Trepoff murder and the Atkinson tragedy, Watson supplies no details of their outcome. He himself only learnt about them from newspaper accounts, suggesting he and Holmes were not in direct contact during this period.

Although Watson gives no dates, it is possible to establish a rough timetable of Holmes’ activities over these months. We know the discussion with Watson over the Baskerville case took place at the end of November 1888 and that Holmes was back in Baker Street at some time before 20th March 1889 when, as will be seen in the next chapter, Watson called on him there.

If one assumes that Holmes left England for Russia on or about the 21st November and spent three weeks travelling to Odessa and investigating the Trepoff case, then he could have been back in England by mid-December. Assuming also that he departed for Ceylon almost immediately, a journey which would have taken about a month by sea, and that the Atkinson case was completed within a fortnight, it is quite possible that Holmes, even allowing another month for the return voyage, was home before the end of February. This would have given him enough time to undertake the mission on behalf of the Dutch royal family before returning to Baker Street before 20th March. It would have been a packed itinerary but one that was perfectly feasible within the available time.

Meanwhile, in Holmes’ absence, Watson’s marriage plans were taking shape. He and Mary found a suitable property in the Paddington district, not far from the mainline station, the staff of which was to prove a useful source of patients. Although Watson gives no clue to the exact whereabouts of his practice, it was probably only a few minutes’ walk from the station, for one of the guards took Mr Hatherley, an injured passenger, to Watson’s consulting room for treatment rather than to St Mary’s Hospital, which was almost next door to the terminus.

It is most unlikely that Watson and Mary Morstan went househunting in the Norfolk Square or Westbourne Terrace areas. These fashionable terraces of tall, stuccoed residences with their balconies and imposing porticoes would have been too expensive. But Watson could well have found an affordable property in such turnings as London Street or Spring Street, almost opposite Paddington station. Some of these houses are still standing, their exteriors largely unaltered since Watson’s time. Brick-built and of three or four storeys, they are more modest but still respectable and any one of them would have been suitable as a doctor’s premises. They are large enough to accommodate a consulting-room on the ground floor with plenty more space on the upper floors for private living quarters.

Apart from a few scattered references, there is no detailed description of either the interior or the exterior of the house. It was next door to another doctor’s practice, a fact which, like its proximity to Paddington station, was
to prove useful to Watson in the coming months. There were well-worn steps up to the front door – Holmes comments on them – and the hall floor was covered in linoleum, a practical touch this. With the coming and going of patients, sometimes in muddy boots, a carpet would soon have become worn out. In addition to Watson’s consulting-room, there was also a sitting-room on the ground floor. It is possible there was a more formal first-floor drawing-room. In ‘The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk’, Watson writes of going upstairs to speak to his wife.

The practice had belonged to Mr Farquhar, an elderly gentleman who suffered from St Vitus’ Dance. Because of his age and infirmity, the number of patients had decreased and the income had dropped from £1200 a year to a mere £300. But Watson could still draw his army pension which, added to the money he could expect from the practice, gave him an annual income of £500, enough for the Watsons to live on in reasonable comfort and to afford a servant. Besides, Watson had every confidence that, with his youth and energy, he could gradually build up the practice over the coming months.

He does not say how much he paid for the practice but the usual price at that time was one to one and a half times the annual income. Watson therefore probably paid between £300 and £450. Neither he nor Mary Morstan could have had much capital. Both had modest incomes, Watson relying entirely on his army pension and Mary Morstan on her salary as a governess, which in the late
1880s was about £50 a year, including board and lodging.
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They had probably managed to save a little but not enough to buy a suitable house and furnish it adequately.

However, Mary Morstan was in possession of the six pearls, part of the Agra treasure, which had been sent to her by Major Sholto, her late father’s army colleague. Presumably some, if not all, were sold to raise the necessary capital.

Watson says nothing at all about the wedding itself, whether it was a church or registry office ceremony. But wherever it was held, it was almost certainly a quiet affair. Neither he nor Mary had the money or the inclination for a lavish celebration and, as neither of them had any relatives living in England or many close friends, the number of guests was probably small.

Mrs Cecil Forrester and her family were probably present. So, too, was Mrs Hudson. It is unlikely Watson would have left her off the guest list. Colonel Hayter, Watson’s former army acquaintance from Reigate, may also have been invited as well as Mr and Mrs Whitney. The Whitneys were to play a small part in a subsequent case. Kate Whitney was an old school friend of Mary, and her husband, Isa, was to become one of Watson’s patients. Stamford, Watson’s former dresser at Bart’s who introduced Watson to Holmes, is another possible guest.

But one old friend was certainly not at the wedding.
This was Holmes himself, who was most probably out of England on one of his foreign investigations at the time. His absence is made quite clear. When several months later he called on Watson in June 1889, he asked after Mrs Watson, expressing the hope that she had recovered from the excitements of the Sholto affair. He had therefore not seen her since September 1888, the date of that case.

The date of the wedding cannot, however, be fixed. But it must have occurred between late November 1888, when Watson was still living in Baker Street, and well before 20th March, by which time Watson was already married and settled into the Paddington practice. Commentators have suggested various possibilities from December 1888 to January or February 1889. One of the two later months is the more likely. A December wedding would have hardly given Watson time to make all the necessary arrangements.

As it was, there was evidently some problem over the purchase of the Paddington practice. Watson states that they moved into the property shortly after the marriage. The delay may have been caused by a legal complication or the difficulty of finding suitable premises. Or they may have had to wait while builders or decorators finished refurbishing the house.

But, once installed, Watson was delighted with the arrangements. It was the first time he had owned his own home and he refers proudly to being master of his own establishment. A servant, Mary Jane, was engaged but soon proved unsatisfactory. She was a clumsy, careless girl and Mrs Watson was forced to give her notice.

Apart from this minor domestic inconvenience, Watson was a deeply contented man. During these first few weeks of marriage he put on seven and a half pounds in weight, a sure sign of a man at peace with himself and his world. However, when he picked up his newspaper and read the reports of Holmes’ latest exploits, he may have felt a small twinge of nostalgic regret for the old Baker Street days.

The events of the evening of 20th March 1889 certainly suggest that, for all his domestic happiness, he missed that element of adventure and excitement which his long association with Holmes had given him.

In the months following his marriage, Watson saw nothing of Holmes. As we have seen, Holmes was out of England for most of this period and when he finally returned to Baker Street, he preferred his own solitary life, shunning society and ‘alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition’, as Watson expresses it. This regular use of the drug could suggest more than his usual dependency. In his loneliness after Watson’s departure, he may well have found solace in cocaine, although he would
never have admitted this. When not drowsy with drugs, he threw himself into solving those cases which had baffled the police. Watson does not specify what these cases were.

Watson himself was also busy with what he calls his ‘home-centred interests’ and with building up his practice. He admits that his marriage had caused Holmes and himself to drift apart. It was a state of affairs which might have continued and grown worse as the weeks passed until the gap between them grew too wide to be bridged, unless one or other of them made an effort to close it.

Characteristically, it was Watson who took the initiative. It is doubtful if Holmes would have gone out of his way to seek out Watson first. His pride would have prevented it. It was also typical of Watson that he acted on impulse.

On the evening of 20th March 1889,
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he happened to be passing his former lodgings in Baker Street on his way home from visiting a patient. On reaching the familiar front door, he was seized by a sudden desire to see Holmes again and he gives a vivid description of standing outside on the pavement, watching his old friend’s tall, spare figure passing in silhouette across the blind as he paced up and down in the lighted sitting-room beyond.

To give Holmes his due, he welcomed Watson with his usual unaffected bonhomie. After waving him towards an armchair and tossing over his cigar-case, Holmes invited
him to help himself to a whisky and soda before remarking on how well he was looking.

‘Wedlock suits you,’ he commented.

It was a wise approach. A more effusive welcome would have been out of character and embarrassing to both of them. A cooler response might have driven a final wedge between them. But with that one remark, Holmes signalled his acceptance of Watson’s marriage and his willingness to continue their friendship on its old footing. The ice, if any existed, was broken, and when Holmes followed it up with one of his brilliantly clever deductions from a few simple observations, a skill which had never failed to impress Watson, the gap was finally closed. In this instance, it concerned the state of Watson’s left shoe from which Holmes correctly deduced the existence of Mary Jane, the Watsons’ incorrigible servant-girl, to whom Mrs Watson had given notice.

From there, the conversation passed quite naturally to the latest case, which Holmes had been asked to investigate on behalf of an anonymous client who by a lucky chance arrived shortly afterwards. With characteristic diffidence, Watson offered to leave but was urged by Holmes to stay.

‘I am lost without my Boswell,’ he admitted, the nearest Holmes came to confessing he had missed Watson and how much he had relied on his help and companionship. And so Watson stayed and became involved not only in the case concerning the former opera singer, Irene Adler, and the King of Bohemia, but also in many other subsequent
inquiries, some of which he was later to chronicle. It was almost like old times.

In fact, Watson became so caught up with the case that he returned to Baker Street the following afternoon and stayed that night, the eagerness with which he seized on the chance to renew their former partnership suggesting that he had indeed missed Holmes’ company and the opportunity for adventure which it had afforded him.

The facts of Irene Adler’s background and career were already indexed in one of Holmes’ encyclopaedias of reference and he was able to report that she was American, born in New Jersey in 1856, which made her thirty-one at the time of the events of March 1889. A contralto, she had sung at La Scala, Milan, and also at the Imperial Opera house in Warsaw but had since retired from the stage and was living in London. During her career in Warsaw, she had met and formed a relationship with the King of Bohemia, of whom more later.

Watson is too discreet to define the exact nature of the connection between the two of them but it involved some compromising letters sent to her by the king and a photograph of them both taken together. It was the photograph in particular which the king wanted Holmes to retrieve, for Irene Adler had threatened to send it to the King of Scandinavia, whose daughter Holmes’ royal client was planning to marry. Such a scandal would have brought an end to the engagement. As we have already seen, the King of Scandinavia was one of Holmes’ clients during the latter end of the 1881–9 period.

The King of Bohemia refers to Irene Adler as a well-known adventuress, which may be an exaggeration. Given the circumstances, his attitude towards her was probably biased. She was certainly a beautiful and fascinating woman. Watson, always susceptible to feminine charms, was much taken with her. Even Holmes was attracted, although Watson is at pains to point out that his old friend was not in love with her. It was not in Holmes’ nature to feel any romantic passions, but by opening his account of the case with the striking sentence: ‘To Sherlock Holmes she is always
the
woman’, Watson may have been indulging in a little wishful thinking. If only Holmes were capable of love, then Irene Adler could well have been the type of woman he might have married: beautiful, talented, high-spirited with a mind and a will of her own.

Holmes is undoubtedly on the defensive about her. When he describes her as ‘the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet’, he is careful to make it clear that he is expressing the opinion of the ostlers in the mews behind her house, whom he had questioned in the course of his enquiries.

She was also intelligent, a necessary quality, for Holmes would not have been attracted to her if she had not possessed as fine a mind as his own. Despite his carefully organised plan to secure the photograph and the letters, Irene Adler managed to elude him and escape with her newly-married husband, taking the compromising photograph, and presumably the letters as well, with her.
In their place she left a photograph of herself alone. It was this photograph which Holmes claimed as his fee from the King of Bohemia, although he was later to receive a magnificent gold and amethyst snuff box from his client.

Holmes also kept the sovereign which Irene Adler had given him as payment for acting as a witness to her marriage to Godfrey Norton and which, Holmes informs Watson, he intended wearing on his watch-chain as a memento, the only recorded instance of Holmes showing any sign of sentimentality, although he may have intended it as an ironic reminder of the fact that Irene Adler had outwitted him. It was the first time Holmes had ever been beaten by a woman, a fact which he was still referring to ruefully seven months later, in September 1889 during the case of the Five Orange Pips.

But if Irene Adler’s identity can be established, what about Holmes’ supposedly royal client?

Whoever he was, he certainly was not the King of Bohemia.
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That country had ceased to be a separate kingdom in 1526 when, after the death of its own monarch, King Ferdinand of Austria contrived to have himself elected to the throne. In 1889 it was ruled over by the Hapsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, as part
of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Therefore Watson’s account of how Holmes deduced his client’s Bohemian background by examining the watermarks in his writing paper must be discounted. Holmes may indeed have made a similar examination but with entirely different results.

Nor should too much reliance be placed on Watson’s description of the king as a flamboyantly dressed giant of a man, six feet six inches in height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules. Watson has obviously disguised the man’s appearance in order that he should not be easily identified. The so-called King of Bohemia would not have given his permission for the account to be published had his real name and status been too obvious. All of these details should therefore be regarded as red herrings, designed to throw the reader off the scent. So, too, is the implication that the King of Bohemia had links with the Austrian Hapsburg family. Nevertheless, Watson has managed to include in his description of the king several clues which could point to his identity.

He was German; he was a thirty-year-old bachelor; he was hoping to marry a princess; he was of royal blood and possessed the hereditary title to a kingdom; at the time he consulted Holmes he had some connection with a Scandinavian monarch which a scandal might destroy and which was causing him great anxiety. Moreover, although the king was masked when he first arrived; Holmes recognised his voice and was familiar with his features once the mask was removed. In addition, Holmes
openly shows his disapproval of him during the interview. Finally, he was in London in March 1889.

Despite the obvious difficulties of identifying him, various candidates have been suggested, including Emperor Franz Joseph’s son, Crown Prince Rudolph, and even Edward, Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, both well-known womanisers.

Neither is convincing. In March 1889 Prince Rudolph was already dead. Two months earlier, on 30th January, his body was found at the hunting-lodge at Mayerling, together with that of his seventeen-year-old mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera. Both had been shot in circumstances which suggested that Prince Rudolph had first killed the Baroness before committing suicide.

As for Bertie, Prince of Wales, he is just as unlikely. Although he had married a Danish princess, Alexandra, which might accord with the King of Bohemia’s engagement to the daughter of the Scandinavian king, the wedding had taken place twenty-six years earlier in 1863. At the time of the events Watson is describing, the prince was forty-nine and so corpulent that he was known behind his back as ‘Tum-Tum’. Besides, however much Holmes might have disapproved of Bertie’s hedonistic lifestyle, he would not have treated the heir to the throne in quite so openly a cold and contemptuous manner.

Nor is there any obvious candidate among the numerous minor royal princes, grand dukes, dukes and counts scattered about Europe in the late 1880s.

There is, however, one man whose identity matches
the majority of Watson’s clues. He was a German count who, although not of royal descent, was the son of a prince and who could be regarded as heir, if not to a royal throne, then to a position of such power and prestige that it far outweighed any regal claim to some minor princedom. He was also a bachelor who, it was rumoured, was in love with a princess whom he was hoping to marry. She was not Scandinavian but German and a member of that other great European royal dynasty, the Hohenzollern family, to which the count in question had very close ties. There were, however, Scandinavian connections, but of a political rather than a matrimonial nature. In addition, his identity, if correct, would go a long way to explain Holmes’ cold and dismissive attitude towards him.

For good measure, there was also an opera singer – not Irene Adler it should be stressed – whose secret love affair with a semi-royal prince and a former suitor for the hand of the same Hohenzollern princess whom the count hoped to marry, led to his fall from grace and his retirement from public life shortly before the events of March 1889. His humiliation may well have served as an awful warning to the count of what might happen to him if his own liaison with an opera singer was made public.

As a final and deciding factor, the count in question was in London in March 1889 on a delicate diplomatic mission which the least breath of scandal could well have ruined. It is quite possible that Mycroft Holmes, who had important Government contacts, had invited his brother
to a reception in the count’s honour, which was how Holmes was able to recognise his client by his voice even before he removed the mask.

He was Count Herbert von Bismarck, German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and the son of Otto von Bismarck, the all-powerful chancellor to William II, the young German emperor, who had been awarded the title of Prince for services to the Hohenzollern imperial family. As Bismarck’s son, Count Herbert may well have set his sights on succeeding his father as chancellor to the Second Reich. In March 1889 he was forty years old and still a bachelor. Although this makes him ten years older than the age Watson ascribes to the King of Bohemia, this may be another red herring to confuse the scent.

The princess he was said to have fallen in love with and hoped to marry was Victoria, known in the family as Moretta. She was the second daughter of the late emperor, Kaiser Frederick III, and the former Empress Victoria (Vicky) who was herself the eldest daughter of yet another empress, Victoria, the English queen and matriarch. Moretta was therefore Queen Victoria’s granddaughter and niece to the Prince of Wales as well as being sister to the new young Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who had succeeded to the imperial throne less than a year earlier in June 1888, on the death of his father, Frederick III.

Count Herbert’s mission to London in March 1889 was to make friendly overtures to Great Britain in order to promote an Anglo-German alliance, a difficult task as the relationship between the two countries was far
from cordial. There were deep-seated personal as well as political problems.

Bertie, Prince of Wales, made no secret of his dislike and distrust of the autocratic chancellor and his son, whom he referred to as ‘those wicked Bismarcks’. To make matters worse, Vicky, the former empress, was disliked by the Germans for her too-liberal English views and for the influence Queen Victoria continued to exert over her eldest daughter, an unpopularity which the English royal family blamed largely on the Bismarcks for conducting a personal vendetta against the former princess royal.