I had known Holmes for nearly four of my nineteen years, during which time he, along with his housekeeper, Mrs Hudson, and his old companion-at-arms and biographer, Dr Watson, had become my only family. I had studied with him, spent thousands of hours in his often abrasive but never dull company, and worked with him on several cases, including the intense and dangerous kidnapping the previous summer; by now I knew him better than I knew myself, and read instantly what his posture was telling me.
“Hum,” I grunted, a considering sound, and read slowly through the German document a third time with his unverbalised but clearly expressed scepticism in mind. After consideration I began to see what he objected to. “You may be right,” I admitted, and only after I said the words did I notice the consternation on the two swarthy faces across from us. With the sweet flavour of revenge on my tongue I nodded my head deliberately, then folded the letter back into its envelope and returned it to Holmes.
“I should say the flourishes on the final e’s and the angle of the dots clinch it,” I said nonchalantly, and held out my cup to Mahmoud. “Is there more coffee?”
That gentleman gave me a long, expressionless look before reaching for the brass coffee beaker, but Ali could not control himself.
“Is this a secret language?” he burst out. “The hand signs are invisible.”
“Merely the communication of true minds,” said Holmes. Turning his gaze on Mahmoud, he continued, “What Miss Russell has noticed is that one of the letters we so laboriously stole from the mullah’s safe is a fake.”
“A fake!” exclaimed Ali dramatically without looking at Mahmoud. “What do you—”
“Planted by you.” Ali made a strangling noise. “Written by you.”
Ali began to protest in an increasingly theatrical manner, but Mahmoud began a very small and quiet smile deep in his eyes, and eventually Ali sputtered to a halt. Holmes’ voice went hard. “The night we landed, you had your fun, trailing us about and pushing us into heaps of rotting fish and mounds of refuse. I protested at the time, yet since we left the town you have continued to lead us a song and dance through the Judean hills. I have said nothing, and if you do not think Russell has been remarkably patient, you do not know her. I understand that you found it necessary to test our mettle; in your position, I might have done the same. However, this has gone quite far enough.” He waggled the letter, then leant forward and dropped it onto the embers. That neither of our companions rushed to snatch it to safety was all the confirmation needed. Mahmoud’s forged letter from a purported German spy in Tiberius smoked for a moment on the coals, puffed into flame, and curled blackly. Holmes looked up from the fire. “Five days of keeping us in the dark is about three days more than I should have thought necessary, particularly considering the way it began. Make your decision: Trust us, or let us go our way.”
It was Mahmoud, still giving his impression of an amused stone, who broke the gaze, flicking a glance at me before he bent forward to dash the dregs from his coffee onto the letter’s crisp, trembling curl of ash, and continued the motion into standing upright. He handed his cup to Ali.
“We will go to Joshua now,” he said, and turned towards the depths of the tent.
“Ah,” said Holmes with a nod of satisfaction. “Joshua.”
Mahmoud paused with his hand on the tent’s central post. “You know Joshua?”
“I know of him.”
Mahmoud studied Holmes for a moment, and then went on into the tent.
“Who is Joshua?” I asked. Holmes looked at Ali with an eyebrow raised, inviting an explanation, but the man merely dusted his robes free of wood shavings and moved off to begin breaking camp. “Holmes?” I persisted.
“You know your Bible, Russell. Surely you don’t need me to explain his nom de guerre.”
“Joshua is a code name? For one of the military officers?”
“This Joshua prefers to remain in a more, shall we say, unrecognised position than at the head of his troops.”
I thought about it, then suggested, “The Book of Joshua; ‘He sent out two men to spy out the land?”
“Precisely so,” Holmes agreed, and, knocking his pipe out on the stones of the cook fire, went to empty his possessions from our tent.
FOUR
ث
Weapons are unnecessary on the main routes… but advisable on the others, as fire-arms, conspicuously carried, add a great deal to the importance with which the “Frank” is regarded by the natives.
—
BAEDEKER’S
Palestine and Syria
,
1912 EDITION
Now” being a relative thing when burdened by tents, water-skins, cooking pots, and mules, we did not get away until the middle of the morning. I packed up our meagre possessions and helped fold away the bell tent Holmes and I had shared since leaving Jaffa.
Once on the road, we headed slightly north of due east, in the direction of Jerusalem, although Ali admitted that we were only going as far as Beersheva. We followed the pattern that had been established our first day on the road: Ali and Mahmoud went in front, holding to a steady pace and never looking back except for Ali to shout the occasional command over his shoulder, telling us not to lag or stumble or let the mules stray. The two men led by as little as ten paces or as much as half a mile, and spent the whole time talking—or rather, Ali talked, with voice and hands, while Mahmoud listened and occasionally made response. Then came Holmes and myself, either in silence with my nose in the Koran or with him drilling me on Arabic grammar and vocabulary or lecturing me on customs and history. Behind us trailed the three mules, clattering and banging with the pots draped about them, obediently treading on our heels and breathing down our necks until we entered a village, when we had to take up their ropes lest the dogs spook them, or if we heard the rare sound of an approaching motorcar in the distance, which usually turned out to be an ancient Ford Tin Lizzie.
I had come to realise that Ali and Mahmoud were well known in this land. Mahmoud, despite his rough appearance, was a respected scribe and public reader. I found that they moved up and down the countryside in a more or less regular cycle, stopping for an hour or a week to draw up letters to distant relatives, contracts between neighbours, and pleas to the government, and to read letters received, or old newspapers, or even stories. The florid Arabic pleas to the Turkish rulers might recently have given way to more concise English documents, and the payment he accepted was now in Egyptian piastres and even the occasional English coin, but little else had changed. As we went along I began to appreciate the freedom the two brothers had, for they were familiar figures, and therefore accepted, but it was also accepted that they were different: nomads without livestock; lacking womenfolk but apparently no threat to the wives and daughters they came near; possessing a valuable skill that yet set them apart and gave them a touch of mystery and power; from no particular place, so the oddities in accent and vocabulary among us—Holmes’ proper kuffiyah and my own loosely wrapped turban, Ali’s Egyptian boots of shiny red leather and his long colourful jacket, our troop’s use of mules in a country that classified people either by the plebeian donkey-and-goat or the aristocratic camel-and-horse of the true Bedouin, our blue Berber eyes with the brown of our two Bedu companions, and even my spectacles—were not so much forgiven as expected, as if we formed a distinct and idiosyncratic tribe of our own. Ali and Mahmoud had lived this life for at least ten years, an ideal arrangement for a neighbouring (now occupying) government needing to keep watch on the activities of the countryside.