‘Watson,’ he reminisced, ‘it is a pity you are not able to lay this most exotic case on the desk of your Editor. We shall console ourselves that the secret history of a nation is often so much more intimate and interesting than its public chronicles. Do you remember the unusual reception afforded us on our arrival at the Stone Wedding?’
‘Of course!’ I exclaimed.
‘How will you look back on it?’
‘It was the damnedest close-run thing. A few more yards and we’d have been blown to smithere - ’
‘A few more yards may have seen us killed, certainly,’ my comrade interrupted, ‘but it would have been entirely accidental.’
I stared at him. ‘How do you mean?’
‘It would not have been part of the script.’
‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to explain? What script?’
‘Do you recall Penderel Moon’s words on the Prince’s linguistic abilities?’
‘I remember them exactly. I am a great admirer of anyone who speaks so many languages so fluently.’
‘Remind me.’
‘He said: “the Prince is the finest of linguists. With his mother and foreign diplomats he converses in brilliant French. He addresses the Sobranje in excellent Bulgarian. He boasts in perfect English and Italian. He swears in the coarsest Hungarian, Macedonian and Russian, and he employs his native German dialect with the servants he brought with him from the family seat in Coburg”.’
‘Superb, Watson! Tell me, despite the effect of the explosion on your ears, did you notice which of those languages he employed to shout at our attackers?’
‘Only that it sounded guttural.’
‘It was Ostfränkisch, a German dialect which I have studied. Why should such a polyglot use a tongue of his native land to shout at Russian or Macedonian assassins if he swears like a trooper in both their languages?’
‘I have no idea, Holmes,’ I responded. ‘Why would such a polyglot do that?’
‘He wouldn’t.’
‘Then - ?’
‘Our robust welcome at the Stone Wedding was a piece of theatre arranged entirely for our entertainment. The fact that the incompetence of the Palace staff nearly blew us to smithereens is another matter.’
‘So what did he shout if it wasn’t what he told us at the time - ’ I looked at the note-book ‘‘‘ - You Macedonian assassin scum, lackeys of the crazy people in St. Petersburg, run for your lives. I have here with me Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson!”?’
Holmes replied, ‘His exact words were, “You bloody fools, you nearly killed Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, let alone me! I’ll have your arses for breakfast. I told you to detonate that stuff after the picnic, not now!”.’
We laughed uproariously. I patted my pocket. In it lay the Knyaz’s Philadelphia Baby Derringer used by John Wilkes Booth in his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It would go well in my small armoury with several other Baby Derringers, each sold as the very one employed to kill the American President on that terrible April night when I was just twelve years of age.
Chapter XXIII
AFTERWORD
A FEW weeks after their return from Bulgaria, a package addressed to Watson arrived at 221B Baker Street from Capri. It contained a magnificent cat’s-eye and diamond tie-pin. A note in the Prince’s hand accompanied the gift: ‘To my great friend Dr. Watson, a small memento of your visit to my country. I am certain the blood of a Crusader runs in your veins. I feel that, should circumstances require it, you are quite capable of rising in your stirrups and dealing an infidel a blow with a mace which would cause him profound astonishment.’ A separate card stated: ‘This pin was purchased in Constantinople in 1890. Worn for 10 years by the Prince Regnant and future Tsar of Bulgaria.’
Accompanying it, for Holmes, was a scarlet shirt of the Tirailleurs de la Garde, ‘In token of sincere regard - and to brighten up your wardrobe’.
Six months after Holmes and Watson returned to England an unsigned note in a woman’s hand arrived at their Baker Street lodgings which read, ‘It may please you to know the ashes of the young woman found dead on Mount Vitosh have been retrieved from their resting place in the Church of St. Louis at Philippopolis and reburied in a quiet and beautiful glade in the grounds of the Kalchoff estate.’
‘Foxy’ Ferdinand did eventually remarry, in February 1908. His bride was the Princess Eleonore Caroline Gasparine Louise Reuss zu Köstritz. She was considered “a plain but practical... capable and kind-hearted woman.” It was another marriage of convenience and dynastic necessity.
In October 1908, Ferdinand proclaimed Bulgaria’s de jure independence from the Ottoman Empire and titled himself Tsar. A few years later he made a rare but grave error of judgment by taking his adoptive country into the Great War on the side of Kaiser Wilhelm. In 1918, by now a widower again, Ferdinand left Bulgaria for luxurious exile in Coburg for the final thirty years of his remarkable life. The ex-Tsar of Bulgaria died peacefully in his sleep during the night of September 10th 1948, at the age of eighty-seven. His surviving children, daughters Eudoxia and Nadezhda, were at his bedside. Heaven’s gift to the political cartoonists of Europe from his accession to the Bulgarian throne in 1887 to his fall in 1918 was no more.
Sir Penderel Moon remained for a while as British Legate to Bulgaria. On his departure from Sofia he received an official despatch from Sir Edward Grey, as follows:
‘I desire to take this opportunity to convey to you the high appreciation entertained by His Majesty’s Government of the manner in which you have filled the post of British representative at Sofia. Your interesting and able reports on the situation proved invaluable to His Majesty’s Government in their efforts for the maintenance of peace, and the moderating influences which you successfully exerted.’
Ten years after the events portrayed, Sir Penderel Moon, now honoured with the Most Distinguished Order of (military saints) Michael and George, was appointed British Ambassador to the great white Capital St. Petersburg. He was ambassador at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917.
His autobiography titled My Mission to Bulgaria Recollected at Leisure was published in 1923.
Acknowledgements
Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. To help reflect the atmosphere of those faraway days I have here and there taken favourite words and phrasing straight from the canon.
The superb historian Judith Rowbotham at Nottingham Trent University whose researches on Victorian and Edwardian crime and its historical context offer detective-fiction writers wonderful tools of the trade. I particular appreciate the attention to detail in going through the several re-writes of the Bulgarian Codex and making suggestions, most of which I took up.
Alun Hill FCIJ for running a sharp eye over both text and layout.
Ditto Ann Leander, formerly of the Bangkok Writers group, for running a further eye over the text and making valuable suggestions.
And Robert and Aileen Ribeiro, for going through with such a knowledgeable eye (as befits the owners of the house built by famous Holmes and Watson illustrator Walter Paget) as they did earlier with Sherlock Holmes And The Dead Boer At Scotney Castle (MX Publishing 2012).
Andrew in faraway Russia for mapping Holmes’s and Watson’s journeys to and within Bulgaria. (There are plans to translate the Bulgarian Codex into Russian)