‘Stay still, Watson,’ came the low reply. ‘She is here. We’ve been brought to a place of augury and haruspication.’
Holmes turned back to the ruin. ‘Have you brought us here because you wish us harm?’ he called out.
A small object flew out and fell before us. It was a dried bean, painted green. I picked it up and passed it to my companion.
‘What do you make of this, Holmes?’ I whispered.
‘This is like the Oracle at Delphi,’ he replied loudly. ‘It is up to us to ask questions. They must be put to her in ways which can be answered by one or other of these coloured beans. If I’m right a red bean means yes, the green bean means no.’
‘Isn’t that so?’ he called out. A red bean dropped at my feet.
Holmes resumed his questions. Had she written the two notes shown to us by Professor Sobel? Red. Was it her intention to prevent Einstein gaining employment at the University? Green. Was the answer to why she had brought us to Serbia close to us now? Red.
We heard the sound of a carriage departing. Holmes lit a match and pushed open the dilapidated door. Scattered around the dust-ridden room were abandoned crocks, jugs, and a plethora of measuring containers and ladles. At the far side stood a charred screen decorated with icons. With a swift movement Holmes pushed it aside. A second burning match illuminated brass incense-burners, black with fire and age. At head height in front of us dangled the moustachioed military marionette from the puppet show. Close-set, unrepentant eyes stared at us, the same eyes which had turned to glare directly upon us after he had murdered the child. The forefinger of his outstretched arm pointed onward.
We followed the direction indicated by the spectral figure and came to a small flight of steps leading out to the overgrown back-garden. A spade stood upright in the ground. A piece of cloth was draped over the handle. It was the blanket from the child’s crib.
‘Holmes!’ I exclaimed, ‘why a spade?’
My companion gestured towards the lowest step. ‘Dig below there, Watson. I believe we are at the site of a burial.’
Two minutes passed. Westood looking down into the shallow excavation. Barely five inches below the surface a pair of empty eye sockets stared up at us. I brushed the rest of the soil from the bones. The energetic activity of the topsoil had corroded the flesh of a child between 18 months and two years of age.
The skeleton had the appearance of being placed hurriedly in the resting-place. I pulled out my old Army compass. The tiny corpse lay along an uneven north-east axis.
‘She wasn’t given a Christian burial,’ I remarked, ‘or she would lie on an east-west axis. They were clearly in a hurry. According to our hotel proprietor she may be a rusalka by now.’
‘You say ‘she’, Watson?’
‘I think we can say it’s female,’ I affirmed. ‘At birth the skeletal maturation as a whole is more advanced in girls, while compared to a boy’s these arm and leg bones are shorter.’
The line of bones lay loosely together, held by the tattered linen remnants of her frock. The agony of the contorted limbs struck me with a spasm of pain. My eyes blurred with tears. Wisps of dark hair still sprouted from the scalp, straggling down into the eye sockets. Tiny gold studs lay where the ear-lobes had been. I patted the hair into place. The sad assembly could hardly have filled our botanist’s tin vasculum used to fill with plant specimens. After a minute I rose to my feet.
‘I can confirm the child’s fate, Holmes. It was exactly as acted out by the puppeteers.’
My voice trembled. I pointed to a horseshoe-shaped bone between the chin and the thyroid cartilage. ‘Look at the lingual bone,’ I added.
‘What about it?’ Holmes demanded, kneeling down.
‘It’s fractured. She was throttled by someone using considerable force. They wanted it over with quickly.’
As though he were interrogating the bones Holmes said, ‘If this is Rózsika’s child... what does it all mean? Why have we have been brought to this grave? The author of those notes is telling us something, Watson, yet it is in no way clear to me what is wanted of us.’
He pushed himself up. ‘Replace the soil, my friend. We must talk to someone who can interpret what’s going on, what this all means. It’s time to take up Mycroft’s suggestion. Tomorrow we go to meet Miss Enid Durham.’
Chapter X
We Meet Edith Durham
Another tarantass took us to the Vaskrsenja Hristova Monastery. A young monk conducted us in silence to the Archimandrite, a tall man in the long black robes and high cap of the Orthodox ecclesiasts. He spoke in the oddest broken French.
‘From England,’ he repeated several times, incredulously. ‘Like Madame Durham, all the way from England to see Serbia. Quelle voyage! Veritablement des heros!’He assured us we were welcome, ‘for we are Christians, and is not hospitality one of the first of the Christian virtues?’
The mention of Edith Durham set us on the trail to meet her. She was visible from some way off, seated at an artist’s easel a short distance from the river bank, dressed as the New Woman in fiocchi - shirtwaist, tall stiff collar, necktie, and heavy serge skirt. The hair was cropped boyishly, the face neither plain nor pretty. I thought, so this is the intrepid woman who wanders through the Balkans among Albanians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Slovaks and a dozen other tribes and religions. Her observations and conclusions formed from scouring the Peninsular would be finding their way back to the new Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey.
‘So you are Mycroft’s famous brother,’ she said, inspecting Holmes as intently as she had been staring at the dead snake-eyed skink she was in the midst of painting.
Wasn’t spying a rather dangerous occupation, here in the Cockpit of Europe, I asked. Shortly after Holmes and I were last in the Balkans an American missionary by the name of Miss Stone was kidnapped and held to ransom on the Bulgarian border. Negotiations with the bandits were bungled and she was murdered. Miss Durham appeared undaunted.
‘I tell everyone I am like the Brothers Grimm, collecting folk tales and local superstitions,’ she replied. ‘For example, Dr. Watson, do you know the local cure for epilepsy? As a medical man you might find it useful.’
‘I don’t know, I’m afraid,’ I replied.
‘If you see a snake swallowing a frog, you must throw a black handkerchief over it. This gives the snake such a fright it disgorges the frog. The handkerchief can then be thrown over the head of anyone suffering an epileptic fit. The sufferer will immediately disgorge the disease.’
‘What is the reason you are touring Serbia at this time?’Holmes enquired.
‘The Pig War, of course,’ Miss Durham replied.
I struggled to keep a straight face. ‘The Pig War!’ I exclaimed.
‘There are rumours of an impending pig war between the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Serbia,’ she explained.
‘What exactly is a Pig War?’ I asked, exploding with laughter.
‘You may consider it a trivial matter, Dr. Watson,’ Miss Durham chided, ‘but it could lead to a general war. Pigs produced in Serbia are sold to the Austria-Hungarians but they are threatening an embargo. The pig market forms only a tiny part of the Austria-Hungarian economy but it’s of over-riding importance to the Serbs. Serbia’s Liberals and Radicals are fanatically devoted to Russia. They follow a policy of irritating Vienna at every opportunity, therefore Belgrade will break any embargo by selling her pigs via the Adriatic to France. A stratagem of this sort would seriously rile Franz Joseph and raise the temperature enormously.’
‘Why should that be of any special concern to England?’ I asked, perplexed.