He waved us to our seats and went on, ‘In response, this will trigger an immediate attack on Russia by the Austria-Hungarian Emperor. Then the French would mobilise. They have a secret reinsurance Treaty with Russia and would immediately join in on St. Petersburg’s side. In turn, the Germans would come in against them. Meanwhile the Russians could wipe out the Turkish and Bulgarian Black Sea fleets in a single engagement. We would see the Tsar’s warships steaming through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, threatening Her Britannic Majesty’s routes to India. The balance of power we have striven to maintain since Bonaparte would be overthrown, the threat to our Empire significant.’
Mycroft pointed to a wall-map. ‘The moment your boots touch the soil of Bulgaria you will be in topsy-turvy land. Balkan geography is complicated, the history intricate, the politics inexplicable. Certainty becomes uncertainty, the unexpected the prosaic. Nothing you take for granted in England will offer you a blueprint for your stay. Bulgaria is a land of danger, plague, treason and sudden death. You will feel you are forever on the edge of something unexpected. The Prince rules a Balkan state which has just awoken from a quincentennial sleep. The Capital Sofia is little more than a Turkish provincial town, some thousands of people crammed into ramshackle one-storeyed wooden houses, every saloon bar and lodgings infested like Agadir with the secret agents of the Great Powers. It is the odiferous monument to half a millennium of Ottoman civil maladministration, the squalor relieved solely by its fine setting on the slopes of Mount Vitosh.’
‘Mycroft, what more do you know about our client?’ I asked.
‘Only that he is not to be taken lightly, addicted as he might be to table-rapping, palmistry, and crystal-gazing,’ came the reply. ‘The owner of a face dominated by a Bourbon nose and huge ears may have the look of the Maharaja of Mysore’s legendary white elephant but his wily nature suggests the quality of the fox. The Foreign Office believes he may have something rather larger in mind for the Codex than the ceremony he mentioned.’
‘Namely?’ I pursued.
‘The struggle of the Cross against the Crescent. He has aspirations to throw off the Ottoman yoke and resume the ancient Bulgarian title of Tsar.’
Mycroft stood up. ‘But before I forget - ’ He took hold of a fine ebony-handled sword stick, withdrawing a thin triangular-section blade about three feet in length. The silver ferrule bore a lozenge-shaped hallmark indicating a French origin. He returned it to its cane sheath and passed it to Holmes.
‘We would be grateful if you would present this to Prince Ferdinand. It was a personal gift to the Prime Minister from the President of France but the Knyaz - as he is addressed in Bulgaria - may be more in need of it in Sofia than the Marquess here in London.’
He looked hard at his brother. ‘Sherlock, I ask you not to adopt your customary sneering approach to Royalty and the Aristocracy. This opera buffa principality may be in the hands of a minor Coburg but he surrounds himself in an icy hinterland of horror. Like Henry VIII he sleeps on eight mattresses rolled upon daily by his bed-makers to be sure assassins haven’t stuffed them with poisoned daggers. He survives through absolutism tempered by assassination. In some parts of the Balkans suspected enemies are denounced and dragged off, convicted within the hour of treasonable conspiracy on the flimsiest evidence, and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment in the dungeons of a distant fortress. Rulers like Ferdinand have learnt the quieter ways to rid themselves of their enemies - a carriage accident with a runaway horse, a shot fired at night in a deserted street.’
He continued, ‘It is rumoured Ferdinand dabbles in unusual ‘-ism’s, such as occultism, cabalism, and spiritualism. Persons suspiciously like Black Magicians flit around and inside the Palace at various times. People swear that each day in the Palace grounds Ferdinand buries the gloves and ties he wore that day, intoning strange sentences with a mysterious air. In reality the menace to his world comes not from malign spirits but from a pocketful of far graver ‘-isms’: militarism, imperialism, and nationalism.’
Mycroft walked around us to the door and turned to face us.
‘I am instructing the British Legate in Sofia to meet you at the earliest possible opportunity. His name is Sir Penderel Moon. He will give you a complete briefing on the Prince. There is someone else I should mention - Colonel Kalchoff, the War Minister, a dangerous man. We intercept his telegrams. He leans strongly towards Berlin. If war threatens between England and Germany, he could convince Prince Ferdinand to take the Kaiser’s side.’
His face took on a lighter expression. ‘Gentlemen, I’m sorry your tea failed to arrive. No. 10 Downing Street is littered with the skeletons of bonnes who starved to death trying to find this cubby-hole. Dr. Watson, I hope you have packed your Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with a cloth cap for your head in the Balkan sun. The fishing is remarkably good, and wild-duck shooting is as excellent as in the fens, You might bag a capercailzie. The Prince is keen on blasting away. At the Imperial shoot at Spala last October the Times’ correspondent rated him the worst seat on a horse but the second-best grouse-bagger among the whole of European royalty. Only our own Prince of Wales is a better shot.’
He opened the door. ‘I envy you both. A few days in the Prince’s private carriages on the Orient Express, an hour or so aboard the ferry crossing the Danube - no enteric fever in the Balkans at present.’
A member of the Downing Street staff led us away. Mycroft called after us, ‘Sherlock, I have a personal request. Ferdinand adores generals’ uniforms, of which he has a great many. Do bring one back for your brother from your grateful client. It would go down wonderfully well at the Diogenes Club.’
Chapter IV
IN WHICH WE SET OFF FOR BULGARIA
WE quit Downing Street and boarded our train for Dover and beyond in good spirits. Holmes pulled on his striking Poshteen Long Coat with its many flaps and pockets and mesmeric promise of distant mountain ranges. The Capital’s murk had deepened. Half-obscured Hawksmoor spires, the indissoluble chaos of grey wheel traffic confounded in nebulous London fogs, and a perpetual ring of tram-horse hoofs fell away behind us. Soon we lost sight of the Thames and the river’s long reaches which I shall ever associate with our pursuit of the Andaman Islander in the earlier days of our career.
Half an hour or so down the line we halted to allow an oncoming train first use of a narrow tunnel. Below us, flowers on the sunny embankments slowed their rush the other way and allowed full examination. Comfrey with its bell-shaped, creamy yellow flowers stood guard over Common violets. Golden celandines with foliage as rich as liquorice grew side by side with figworts and patches of pink, blue and Tyrian purple milkwort.
I reflected on the bag of gold and banknotes tucked safely in our strong-box. Fees of this order underwrite Holmes’s generosity. Despite the vexations of tax collectors he turns away commercial offers of a most tempting kind. Recently a German pipe manufacturer offered attractive royalties for permission to produce a Meerschaum in the shape of Holmes’s head (‘emphasising your fine aquiline nose’). Royal Tunbridge Wells offered a fine payment ‘if you would let the Town Fathers raise a bronze statue to you next to one of Daniel Defoe’, portraying Holmes drinking the Spa’s ferrugious waters, over a brass plate affirming the springs ‘are favoured by Mr. Sherlock Holmes for the maintenance and improvement of his deductive skills’, and that the water would ‘cure the colic, the melancholy, and the vapours; make the lean fat, the fat lean; kill flat worms in the belly, loosen the clammy humours of the body, dry the over-moist brain’. A small film studio offered to make him ‘famous in every part of the world, from darkest Africa to the empty quarters of Mesopotamia’, if he would also cover the cost of making ‘Sherlock Holmes, the World’s Paramount Consultant Detective’.