‘The Sultan of Turkey will come aboard soon after we set anchor. I’ll have to lay on a bit of pomp and ceremony and a display of uniforms. I take it you would like to meet the Khan of Khans and his party? If you come to the Gun-deck we’ll introduce you...’
Almost rudely, Holmes interrupted.
‘Thank you no, Commodore. The Lieutenant and I intend to go ashore at precisely that moment if you’ll make the arrangements.’
Without further explanation, Holmes said his goodnights and strode away.
Perplexed, I hurried after him.
‘Holmes, I thought our aim was to meet the Sultan. Why are we passing up such a golden opportunity?’
He waved a ciphered telegram at me.
‘Neither the Sultan nor we should wish to meet amid the throng of international Press and a hundred cameras. Besides, Mycroft’s agent has arranged a transport to take us to the Palace as soon as we can get ashore.’
The constellation Draco was still visible in the night sky when we dropped anchor. Across the Sea of Marmara I could see a thousand sparkling lights. Stamboul, the arm of the peninsular, was now within range of our immense guns. Like the ashes of a phoenix, the Scott Eccles affair would have to lie awaiting rebirth as a fully-fledged Sherlock Holmes manifesto. The material was unusually extensive. I sat on the bunk staring at it. I supposed I could break the chronicle into two parts. There was a knock on the cabin door. It was a steward returning my freshly-ironed Surgeon Lieutenant’s naval dress suit. The sword too had been polished and was returned with its scabbard.
As the sun rose, dark shapes around us suddenly became comprehensible. I climbed up to the Gun-deck. Our battleship was surrounded by the largest single assembly of warships I had ever seen. When we crept past the island of Malta by night, a Royal Navy squadron must have sailed out of Grand Harbour and fallen in behind us, accompanying us for the last fifteen hundred miles, unseen, swift and unlit. I counted 10 first-class battleships silhouetted against the pink sky, plus frigates, torpedo boat destroyers and various despatch vessels and depot ships and the great bulks of two armoured cruisers of 9800 tons, HMS Lancaster and HMS Suffolk, castles of steel with fourteen six-inch guns and four-inch armour plate.
I stood with Holmes on Dreadnought’s deck waiting for a pinnace from the dockyard to take us ashore. Great steamers from every country churned back and forth whistling incessantly. Across the shimmering waters of the Golden Horn richly painted private vessels with long up-curving prows carried distinguished passengers in the stern under silken canopies, the owner’s rank dictating the number of oars. Nearby was a ship of the North German Lloyd line, the S.S. Grosser Kurfürst. Her decks and bridge were alive with the flashes of the sun reflecting from a hundred telescopes pointed in our direction.
By the harbour the creaking board-walk known as Galata Bridge bound Europe with Asia, Frank with Moslem, civilization with barbarism. Below and around it, tiny against the immensity of our battleship, barges plied for hire, darting about in every direction among lateen-rigged yawls and feluccas. In a high state of anticipation onlookers in turbans, keffiahs and fezzes, and Europeanised Turks in Stamboulines, moved along the bridge in a steady stream with the sedan-bearers. English couples en route to India with white umbrellas and puggried sun-hats wandered alongside veiled women with long draping mantles and ribboned panniers. Firemen carried large skins of water ready to dampen down any sudden conflagrations.
The roar of the crowds and the sudden flare of a beacon on the hillside announced the Sultan was about to leave his Palace. Through my binoculars I watched the open phaeton emerge at a trot from a huge gate, heading for the Imperial caique moored at Tersane. It was escorted by a detachment of the Twelfth Royal Lancers composed of Khurds and Anatolians. A living swarm of courtiers, eunuchs, household aides and panting pashas in heavy gold-embroidered uniforms ran alongside. An enthusiastic crowd of about fifty people waited at its waterfront destination ready to remove the horses and pull the coach the final hundred yards.
I heard Holmes’s voice. There was tinge of urgency in it.
‘Watson, are you ready? We must go.’
He gestured as though sweeping me to a gangplank. The steam pinnace had arrived, the name Haroony in English lettering still fresh on its bow. Dreadnought’s crew briskly transferred the thirty or more wood-and-glass Wardian cases guising us as naval plant collectors.
I went to my cabin to pick up the Offenbach rolls and the Lee Enfield. Holmes and I each wedged under an arm a copy of Hooker’s On the Vegetation of the Galapagos Archipelago, a study of the plants Charles Darwin brought back on the Beagle. The wind blew straight in from the distant isles of Greece as we went down a gangway and clambered aboard the waiting transport, an awkward manoeuvre in naval dress uniform and sword.
I used the binoculars to watch the Imperial caique setting out. The Sultan and four personages of his suite were seated on a dais in crimson-magenta velvet under a gold and purple canopy, rowed at an impressive pace by forty oarsmen dressed in white with blue, red-tasselled caps. The whole looked like a gigantic water-boatman on the surface of a pond. The royal turban-bearer followed the Sultan’s caique in a smart, eighteen-oar ship’s cutter, holding up one of three royal turbans ornamented with herons’ feathers and huge jewelled aigrettes which he inclined to the right and left, acknowledging the prostrations and cheers of the onlookers on behalf of his Imperial master. He was followed by an ensemble of energetic musicians - two drums, flute, triangle and viola - standing at constant risk of tipping over the gunwale of their tiny craft.
We slowed to avoid our wake jolting the on-coming barge as it went on by. The caique presented a sight of Moghul-like magnificence. The Sultan wore a turban adorned with three upside-down aigrettes, the equivalent of crowns, reinforced with hooked gold chains, dancing with plumes sourced from half the globe - crested cranes, peacocks, herons, hawks, ostriches, and birds of paradise. Behind him, like a bulbous shadow, stood a gigantic Abyssinian of phenomenal stature, head abased, the innumerable chins melting into a mountain of flesh. He wore a huge hat in the shape of a sugar-loaf at a slant on the back of his head.
Minutes later the Imperial visitors stepped aboard Dreadnought. The heaviest guns ever mounted at sea began a 21-gun salute. Then it was the Turkish Navy’s turn to commence their own deafening salute, gun for gun.
Holmes and I stepped ashore. A sudden roar from the assembly on Galata Bridge drowned out the wailing note of the water-carriers and the raucous shouts of the Khurdish porters. We swung round to look. A submarine had bobbed up by the bridge. The Turks do not applaud with their hands. Their approval was signified by the hum of hundreds and hundreds of voices, a noise like the purring of a thousand cats. The telescopes aboard the S.S. Grosser Kurfürst swung to study the jouncing craft with the British navy White Ensign flapping in the slight breeze.
The steel wheels made a familiar growling sound as a Clarence emerged from the shade of a high wall at the Vinegar Sellers’ wharf. Behind it came a heavy two-wheeled cart to transport the pile of Wardian boxes, pulled by a jink-backed mare with feet like butcher’s blocks. I had seen this condition often when animals suffer an extreme wrench below the short ribs from a slip, or more often from being made to drag too great a burden. Both conveyances had a horseshoe with a central glass ‘evil eye’ dangling from the side to ward off bad things.
A man jumped out of the Clarence and greeted us. It was Mycroft’s man, Eric Shelmerdine. His English was so perfect he might have attended Eton College.