‘Tell her we only wish to know how her husband died,’ I ordered.
Hesitantly the Armourer’s widow began to talk. An edict had arrived from the Palace. Her husband Mehmed and she were to try for a child. For a boy. Immediately.
‘Why should the Palace order that?’ I asked.
‘They wanted Mehmed to have a son,’ came the reply. ‘No other Armourer knew his methods. Many times the Palace begged him to pass on the alchemy to another. He always refused, saying he would only pass his secrets to a son, otherwise he would go to his grave with them.’
She threw us a pleading look.
‘Mehmed was thirty years my elder. I was his third wife. We had no children. Only girls.’
‘The edict you received,’ I heard Holmes ask, ‘was it from the Sultan himself?’
She hesitated. Holmes assumed his sternest aspect.
‘Tell her we are her best hope,’ he commanded.
The woman replied in a low voice.
‘She says she has no hope,’ Shelmerdine translated.
Staring towards the fresh grave, the woman cried piteously, ‘They will drown me in the sea. I shall soon join my husband in Jannah - or Jahannam.’
After a long pause she looked back at us.
‘The order came through an emissary.’
‘Male or female?’ asked Holmes.
‘A woman. She came to Pera. She said she was acting on orders from the Palace.’
‘Was this woman dressed in a lace-trimmed dress beneath a black çarşaf,’ Holmes continued.
She looked at him in stupefaction, nodding.
‘You see, Watson,’ Holmes muttered, ‘it was Chiarezza. Her hurry was such she didn’t even take time to hide her identity.’
He turned back to the widow.
‘Please continue.’
‘She said His Imperial Highness was concerned that Mehmed was getting old. The emissary said the Chief Astrologer foretold Allah the Dispenser of Events would smile on us that very night if I summoned my husband. The woman gave me a potion to add to Mehmed’s evening meal. She said it was specially prepared by the Chief Pharmacist. The potion would make him strong and I would bear him a son.’
‘And you did as you were told?’ I asked.
‘Of course. I begged Mehmed to come home. Mostly His Majesty keeps him at the Palace.’
‘How did you secrete the potion in his food?’ Holmes asked.
In the desperate hope these two strangers from another world could help her, the widow removed a small object from her clothing and stretched an open hand towards us. In her palm lay a reliquary ring. I gazed at it dumbfounded.
‘Watson,’ Holmes said quietly, ‘I believe that’s what you went back for at the bazaar, rather than the gold watch, isn’t that so?’
I took the ring from the woman and examined it.
‘It’s certainly very similar,’ I replied.
‘Very similar, yes, but is it identical? Look carefully. We must be certain.’
‘Yes,’ I affirmed, ‘it’s identical sure enough. See the scratch on the toadstone. It’s the very ring the Jewess showed us.’
‘Except,’ Holmes went on, ‘for one small but critical fact. It is no longer a reliquary ring. Note the hole freshly bored through the bronze. At someone’s instruction it has transmogrified into a poison ring in the great tradition of the Borgias. Watson, if you had informed me this ring was missing when you returned to buy it, we may have prevented the Chief Armourer’s death.’
I turned back to the unfortunate woman. In as sympathetic a tone as I could muster, I asked, ‘And how soon did your husband... pass away... after you administered this potion?’
Shelmerdine translated my question into Turkish. She broke into heavy sobs.
‘Hardly had he... I did as I was instructed. I sprinkled it on his favourite dish, okra with cinnamon to deepen the flavours. Then we went to our bed and made love.’
Her shoulders shook with grief.
‘I must have sprinkled too much.’
She stumbled and repeated, ‘Hardly had he...’
She added something in a whisper to Shelmerdine.
He turned back to us.
‘She says just after he carried out his function as a husband things went wrong,’ Shelmerdine translated. ‘Mehmed sat up and cried out he was dying. He started to complain of pins and needles. His face and limbs went numb.’
A tearful description of the Chief Armourer’s final moments followed. Abdominal pain was followed by dizziness, hyperventilation and sweating. As was the custom among the Palace retinue her husband kept an antidote to poison called Tiryak al-Faruq, prepared with painstaking care by the Chief Physician. However the antidote seemed only to intensify his agony and speed his death. Confusion set in. Mehmed no longer recognised his wife or where he was. He died in her arms.
The widow added something in a firmer voice. Our interpreter looked dubious.
‘She claims he just had time to make the Shahada, the declaration of faith.’
I tapped the ring over my palm. Tiny specks of a powder fell from the box.
‘Monkshood!’ Holmes and I proclaimed in unison.
We were familiar with the plant and the poisonous aconite it produced. A considerable part of the attic at our old Baker Street lodgings had been taken over by Holmes’s phials of poisons. The array was visited regularly by plain clothes detectives from the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department, and even the French Sûreté Nationale and America’s Pinkerton detectives. Because of the shape of its flowers monkshood is also called Devil’s Helmet or Friar’s Cap, or more prosaically wolf’s bane. It was said Cleopatra used aconite to kill her brother Ptolemy XIV so she could put her son on his throne. The only post-mortem signs are those of asphyxia. The poison’s very name in Greek means ‘without struggle’.
‘Holmes, you and the Sultan were correct,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a fatal overdose of an aphrodisiac like cantharidin. It was deliberate murder.’
‘Directed by whose hand I wonder?’ Holmes mused. ‘Hardly the Sultan’s - and certainly not this woman’s.’
With our attention on her the widow gestured towards her husband’s now-deserted grave. To my surprise she switched to French.
‘Those men, those men who were carrying my husband’s body. I have seen some of them before. They were at our house. They came there three nights in a row. I saw their faces, except the man in charge. He always wore a hood over his face.’
She peered up at Shelmerdine.
‘Comme lui,’ she said. ‘Like him.’
Abruptly our interpreter interrupted the distraught woman. In rapid French he said, ‘Perhaps Allah will grant you a son from your last coupling with your husband,’ adding, ‘that is, if you escape with your head intact.’
Holmes intervened. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. He gestured towards the woman.
‘Shelmerdine, tell her she has our greatest sympathy. We shall do our best to protect her.’
We turned away. While our interpreter went for a cab Holmes said quietly, ‘We must get to work. Otherwise we may be about to let down England’s Foreign Secretary, our paymaster, very badly.’
We Engage In Smoke And Mirrors
While the cabbie’s tired horses stumbled their way along the precipitous streets from the cemetery down towards the shoreline Holmes said nothing. I contented myself with Shelmerdine’s conversation. His knowledge of the great city, its history and the ins and outs of the Sultanate was extraordinary and detailed. Now and then I caught my comrade staring at him in a peculiar pensive way.
The dragoman dropped us at the pier. We watched while the carriage rattled away. Holmes swung round to me.