‘The very next time I see him,’ I promised.
It was clear he and the Bulgarian Knyaz had much in common. Both would coquette first with one and then another of the Powers as they deemed best for the advancement of their interests, and as quickly double-cross the one or other.
Abd-ul-Hamid face brightened.
‘Dr. Watson, one more thing. Please thank Mr. Sherlock Holmes for the lecture on ears. How their shape is passed down father to son.’
‘What of it?’ I asked, mystified.
‘It has proved of quite inestimable value. Last night I conducted a survey of my fourteen sons. Four had ears they couldn’t possibly have inherited from me.’
With a ghastly grin he added, ‘At midnight my Head Gardener did a bit of weeding out.’ He pointed out at the glistening Bosphorus, calm and beautiful in the summer sun. ‘Their mothers too.’
Our association had come to its end. There was no photograph to mark the occasion, no formal finish. There was no vote of thanks, no valedictory speech. We just left off meeting. The dog barks, the caravan moves on.
The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine as I walked through the gardens of this Eastern palace for the last time. Bulbuls sang in the hedges and trees. With relief I emerged well before dusk set in. No other comparable space on earth could be as brooding and baleful even by day.
Holmes was waiting for me at an agreed rendezvous on Seraglio Point. From the heights we had a most excellent view to the shores of Scutari over the Sweet Waters, the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and its islands. I gave an amusing account of how I had presented my binoculars to the ‘Padishah’ before spending a short while bringing my notes up to date. I copied down the words of an earlier English traveller to these parts, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: ‘From where we stood, the faraway minarets of the city mingled with sea and shore, light and shade. The reds of the sunset were dissolving into greys. The softness and the Eastern charm could hardly be equalled anywhere else in the whole world’.
It was nearing the time to go to the water’s edge to await the arrival of the cases and cages and shake Stamboul’s dust and dung from our shoes. We engaged a Spider phaeton drawn by two smart snowy-coated stallions to take us down the steep slope to the Golden Horn. Dreadnought was dressed all over with flags. An anchor was suspended from the starboard deck edge. Her funnel covers had been removed. Steam billowed up. On Galata Bridge, gaggles of fishermen were trying their luck. Ever impatient, Holmes went ahead to the battleship. I stood alone at the dockside waiting for the birds and plants, reeling from the revelation he had made only moments earlier.
‘How is it possible?’ I asked myself.
Holmes had sworn me to complete secrecy.
‘If you reveal what I’ve just told you to anyone - anyone at all,’ he adjured, ‘you’ll have broken the great trust between us, and the honour of your regiment in India - the Bombay Grenadiers, wasn’t it?’
‘No, Holmes, it wasn’t,’ I retorted coldly. ‘The Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, then the Berkshires.’
Ignoring my rebuke he insisted on an embargo on the information he had just imparted. I assented reluctantly.
‘Nevertheless Holmes, I find it impossible to believe what you say. I’m perfectly certain the air of Stamboul has got to you. You’re suffering from some unaccountable hallucination, what you called l’illusion des sosies.’
‘I’ll agree with you, my friend,’ he replied, ‘if when he turns up his sole topic of conversation is England’s weather.’
With that, Holmes stepped aboard the Haroony and chugged away.
Minutes later a timber-jam came down the slope, the motion akin to a ship in heavy seas, alarmingly tip-tilting to the verge of upsetting. The cart overflowed with Wardian cases filled with plants selected by the Sultan’s Head Gardener and cages choc-a-bloc with flurried birds destined for the Zoological Society. Some birds I recognised from my stint in Afghanistan - woodpeckers, rails and crakes, black storks, Glossy Ibises and a pair of Greater Flamingos.
Behind it hurried our dragoman, my Quarter Plate camera under one arm, some packages in his free hand. On sighting me at the waterside a frown was replaced by his eager half-smile. He handed over the camera and the packages of saffron and Kofte Bahari. We stood talking while the cases and cages were swung from the land into Dreadnought’s launch. I’d grown to like Shelmerdine in our short time together. I did not share Holmes’s unaccountable coolness, even deprecation towards him. Our interpreter had performed his task impeccably. His interpretation of language and culture was greatly enhanced by his knowledge of English customs, as displayed in, ‘If you meet Djafer Aga, take care. Don’t be fooled by your English concept of a eunuch. The First Black Eunuch is the third highest-ranking officer of the empire, after the Sultan and Ali Pasha, the Grand Vizier. He’s the equivalent of your erstwhile Grooms of the Stole’. Noting the smart naval uniforms at our first encounter he exclaimed (disingenuously, I realised later), ‘Mr. Holmes, a Royal Navy Commander! Dr. Watson, an RN Surgeon Lieutenant! I was expecting two middle-aged gentlemen sporting tweed suits, black silk cravats, bowler hats and Javanese canes’.
I pointed up at the Palace.
‘The Chief Armourer’s body,’ I asked. ‘What will happen to it? Will they...?’
Perhaps because we were parting for the last time he replied in a more unceremonious manner: ‘Terrible things, Doctor! After your revelations they’ll disinter his corpse from the boneyard and string his disjecta membra on pegs at the outside gate.’
‘Really!’ I exclaimed, revolted.
Shelmerdine grinned.
‘No, though you might expect that. In fact he’ll be treated with great respect. The Padishah himself intends to chance his own life and attend a special ceremony at the grave-side...weeping.’
Startled, I asked, ‘Why would the Sultan...?’
‘Think of it, Dr. Watson, do you suppose Abd-ul-Hamid will want his people to know someone so close to him, so beholden to him, would throw his lot in with conspirators intent on sending the Great Khan packing - the Custodian of the holy sites of Makkah, Madinah and Jerusalem menaced by a plot at whose core lay his own bladesmith? For the same reason he’ll go along with Mr. Holmes’s ingenious exculpation of Saliha Naciye without believing a tittle of it. The Sultan knows the Chief Armourer could have replaced the Sword of Osman with a Prussian cavalryman’s rusty sabre from the Battle of Waterloo and she wouldn’t know the difference. She’ll survive only because it makes a much more favourable story to put around the bazaars that a plot by renegades to dethrone him was foiled rather than led by the mother of his son. You may be certain that Saliha Naciye will find her freedoms curtailed. There’ll be no further passage of nosegays between the seraglio and the bazaars.’
‘Will you report Mehmed’s death in the newspapers?’
‘Certainly,’ he affirmed.
‘That he died of...?’
‘Gout.’
I reflected how Holmes and I had merely to make our way in the country of our birth, a land where the rule of law was preeminent, where justice could be obtained and a normal life led not just day to day but from conception to burial. By contrast, daily - hourly - Shelmerdine had to observe rules of etiquette as overblown and intricate as the Moghul. He had to survive a despotism where talk even in one’s kitchen was dangerous, to wend his way in a world of the utmost cruelty and unpredictability. Where life was so dispensable a sultan could drown his entire harem in a fit of jealousy and rage.