Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

By Tim Symonds

It's the year 1906. Rumours abound that a deadly plot is hatching - not in the fog-ridden back-alleys of London's Limehouse district or the sinister Devon moors of the Hound of the Baskervilles but in faraway Peking. Holmes's task - discover whether such a plot exists and if so, foil it. But are the assassins targeting the young and progressive Ch'ing Emperor or his imperious aunt, the fearsome Empress Dowager Cixi? The murder of either could spark a civil war. The fate of China and the interests of Britain's vast Empire in the Orient could be at stake. Holmes and Watson take up the mission with their customary confidence – until they find they are no longer in the familiar landscapes of Edwardian England. Instead, they tumble into the Alice In Wonderland world of the Forbidden City.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MX Publishing
• Release date: Nov 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781787050365

Book preview

offered.

Chapter I

I Become Restless

The clock on the mantelpiece announced half-past two. I stared around me, fingers drumming on the desk. The framed medical diplomas inscribed ‘Dr. John H. Watson MD’ on the wall and the stethoscope lying on the writing-table told even the most casual observer it was a doctor’s consulting room, and I, in the round-backed chair, the practitioner in charge.

It was the year 1906. Another fine Edwardian summer would soon pass behind me. In the outside world Homo sapiens sapiens, the most influential species on the earth, was stretching himself. An Old Etonian by the name of Charles Rolls and a fine, self-educated mechanic by the name of Frederick Royce had unveiled a motor-car which was to become the legendary Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. Communications were advancing with blinding speed. The British Army and Royal Navy were experimenting with triodes and wireless telegraphy to replace the mechanical semaphore system, the Mk 1V heliograph and the Lime Light signalling lamp of my military days in India and Afghanistan. The French pioneer Guillaume Joseph Gabriel de La Landelle coined the word ‘aviation’ from ‘Avis’ the Latin word for bird.

My old comrade-in-arms Sherlock Holmes had been in self-imposed retirement on the Sussex Downs for three years, ‘watching the little working gangs of honey bees’ with the same fervour as he once investigated the criminal world in cases such as The Boscombe Valley Mystery and The Adventure Of The Noble Bachelor. Until– out of the blue - he announced his immediate retirement I thought I had become as immutable in his life as Bank Holidays and the Changing of the Guard are to the nation. Without Holmes at the helm I felt like a diver too suddenly hoisted, a sea-beast fished up from the depths. ‘Notoriety has become hateful to me,’ was his unsatisfactory explanation.

My abstracted gaze fixed on the clock-hand ticking the minutes. I reached into a drawer for my tobacco pouch. Awaiting the afternoon’s patients I resented the theft of time more than any theft of goods or money. My income lay largely in fees for treating the fashionable afflictions of the day such as gout, or the debilitating effect on society-women’s lung capacity of tight-laced corsets. ‘Hardly equal to discovering the mosquito’s role in transmitting malaria or heroic research into yellow fever,’ I muttered dolefully to myself. Many patients came with ailments attributable to ill-advised leisure pursuits, or, in the case of long-suffering Lady P_____, a spouse’s propensities. Married into one of the highest and most exalted names in England, she arrived regularly for treatment for Neisseria gonorrhoeae in a fetching pleated silk Fortuny dress, the luscious colour between pale red and dark pink, embellished with gold pomegranates.

I came to a decision. One quick pipe and then if no patient squeezed through the door I would take a life-enhancing promenade around Regent’s Park. A sharp walk sets the mind working. A note on the surgery door would ask the patients to return in the morning. The tutorial with my registrar could wait an hour or two.

***

The click of the door behind me brought a feeling of relief. At the Baker Street Underground railway a large poster next to a newspaper vendor proclaimed a brand-new exhibition at the menagerie at the north end of Regent’s Park, ‘to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the year the eminent Naturalist Charles Darwin became a Fellow of the Zoological Society’.

I purchased a copy of The Times. A familiar sight in our Baker Street days was Holmes rummaging and reading an immense litter of daily and weekly newspapers, with intervals of note-taking and meditation until our landlady brought us our evening meal. Then he would suddenly roll them all into a gigantic ball and toss them up on to a rack. Even in retirement Holmes insisted upon being supplied with newspaper clippings - criminal proceedings at the Old Bailey, the deaths of infamous criminals. Above all, references to himself. Like stage actors and prime ministers, one cannot expect a Consulting Detective even of Holmes’s fame to be free of all human weakness.

***

I entered the calm of the Park and chose a bench facing a small island in the lake colonised by a group of herons. According to The Times England was comfortingly alive and well. A letter to the Editor called for a Great National Monument to record for all time the majesty and reach of the British Empire, ‘an Empire which has attained the power and splendour probably hitherto unequalled in the history of the world’. The writer asked, ‘What evidence will be forthcoming, say, in eight thousand years’ time, for some future Flinders Petrie digging among the buried cities of the British Isles?’.

In another letter a Dr. W. K. Sibley of Duke Street, Grosvenor Square, W., author of a book on the treatment of disease by light and heat, attacked the tea-drinking habit. It was, he stated, ‘becoming almost as much a curse and cause of disease as alcohol’. Below Dr. Sibley’s letter a Dr. Yorke-Davies of Harley Street recommended tea but not infused for longer than five minutes. He announced himself a ‘strong advocate of teas grown in China’. Elsewhere the reader was told the Argentine tango was the rage of the dance-floor. London’s basements were springing into life as vegetarian restaurants.

There was no reference in the newspaper to Holmes. Had he at last buried his nose in his promised opus? He had already authored ‘The Typewriter and its Relation to Crime’. In A Case of Identity, Holmes noticed all the letters received by Mary Sutherland from a Mr. Hosmer Angel were typewritten. By soliciting a note from his suspect, Holmes brilliantly analysed the idiosyncrasies of the man’s typewriter and had him arrested. Fifteen years earlier it was I who prompted Holmes to consider writing a work to be titled ‘The Whole Art Of Observation And Detection’ after he lectured me on faces while we sped in an agile Hansom to the setting of ‘The Five Orange Pips’.

‘I am surprised, Watson,’ he chastised me, ‘how little you as a medical man make of facial expressions. You can glean much from a careful study. The great Charles Darwin says they can be grouped into fear, happiness, sadness, anger, contempt, disgust, and surprise. Homo sapiens does not communicate by word alone - our eyes, nose, forehead and cheeks all have their say. They reveal multitudes about what we are thinking, feeling, intending. Some emotions we recognise at once - a reddening face and eyes wide and staring are typical of anger, a clear danger signal, back down or you may be harmed. Flared nostrils also suggest hostility. By contrast, the skin turning white is an indication of fear, a bluish tinge extreme fear. The blood abandons the face and goes to muscles where its power is needed more.’

‘Surely, Holmes,’ I questioned, ‘any of us - especially a criminal - can learn to fake our facial expressions?’

‘Scarcely one in a dozen can flex the corners of the lips without also moving their chin muscles,’ came the reply. ‘The extra chin movement, that’s the giveaway.’

I folded the newspaper and gazed across the water. A troublesome shadow lay across the beneficent reign of King Edward. The Times reported in full on the Royal visit to his nephew, the German Kaiser Wilhelm. Such were the gathering tensions between our two countries that The Strand Magazine was considering publishing an article titled ‘Is The Kaiser Mad?’. The answer would be sought from ‘highly reputed psychologists’ including a Dr. Morton Prince. The magazine’s editor had half-made up his mind already. The subtitle asked the question ‘An Asylum - Or St. Helena?’.

Within minutes I was on the move again, heading towards the Zoological Gardens. A meeting was taking place on the Macclesfield Bridge. Some thirty well-dressed, well-mannered women were clustered around the banner of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. One of their number mounted an orange box and began to read aloud from a copy of a letter suffrage campaigner Mrs. Millicent Fawcett had just sent to the new Prime Minister on the subject of votes for women. I stopped to listen. The woman’s voice carried audibly on the slight breeze.

‘Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, this country has come to the end of the 19th Century and embarked on all the challenges and opportunities - dangers even - inherent in a new Century, yet we women - those many millions of us - British citizens all - do not have the right to vote. Without the vote we cannot decide who we wish to prosecute our views in Parliament. We cannot contribute our skills, our commitment, our voices, where it matters, seated on the green benches of the House of Commons, the so-called ‘Mother of Parliaments’. And who else other than women cannot vote? Prisoners in His Majesty’s gaols! Inmates of the Bethlem Royal Hospital for the insane in Southwark! The poorest and least educated men.’

At this the woman’s tone changed. She pointed in the direction of Downing Street.

‘I have a warning for you, Mr. Campbell-Bannerman. Unless a peaceful appeal to the Government has an effect, it must force many hundreds of women to abandon a patient, painstaking strategy in favour of attacking the very system itself. Women will set about harassing politicians, courting arrest and creating a spectacle wherever possible.’

She ended proclaiming in a loud voice, holding the copy aloft, ‘Yours very sincerely, Millicent Fawcett’.

At the name ‘Millicent Fawcett’ every woman present gave a loud cheer.

A young man next to me snorted. He wore a flamboyant day cravat displaying squares of blue elephants on crimson silk. He deliberately engaged my eye.

‘Can you imagine the chaos,’ he exclaimed, scorn in his voice, ‘if women got the vote!’

I reached towards him and delicately pinched the top of his neckwear.

‘Can you imagine,’ I replied equably, ‘anyone walking through Regent’s Park flaunting such a deplorable cravat?’

We both broke into friendly guffaws.

A Suffragist came over to us with a leaflet. She pointed upwards.

‘We women are taking to the air,’ she said.

I looked up. As reported in The Times, the Australian-born Suffragette Muriel Manners was up among the scudding clouds dropping yellow, green and white leaflets on London (‘like beautifully coloured birds’) from a hot-air balloon piloted by aeronaut Henry Spencer. Reluctantly, I turned towards home. Had I known what adventure lay in store hardly a week away my desultory pace would without question have had a spring in it.

***

I was busy for the next few days before a gap in the flow of patients opened up. I sent Holmes a telegram inviting myself for a weekend at his bee-farm. I planned to urge him at the very least to dictate some of the cases he conducted in past years where I was not at his side. There was his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, or the encounter with the ‘Queen of Disguise’. Or clearing up the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee. Plus the intriguing affair of the two Coptic Patriarchs. Holmes’s unpublished cases alone would guarantee his fame, a ‘notoriety’ which would last long after history swept all other contemporary detectives from memory.

Chapter II

I Go Down to Sussex to See Holmes

Holmes accepted my self-invitation to visit him. I parcelled up a supply of books to freshen my old comrade’s shelves, including an advance copy of The Turnpike Sailor - Or Rhymes on the Road by Clark Russell, H. G. Wells’s A Short History Of The World, a new story by Rudyard Kipling titled A Washout, set in South Africa, and A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers, and the latest Philip’s Atlas of London.

My visit had a purpose over and above renewing our friendship and restocking book-shelves. The editors of The Strand planned a competition to choose the top twelve Sherlock Holmes cases. The readers would be faced with some forty to be weighed against each other. I was to obtain from Holmes a listing of his cases in the order he himself judged them. Where a reader’s entry precisely matched his, the former would receive a year’s free subscription to the magazine.

Aboard the train, the fine Sussex landscape unfolded at sixty miles per hour. I hazarded a guess Holmes would rate The Adventure of the Speckled Band with its deadly Indian swamp adder top of his list, or at the very least second. And for its involvement in a world of diplomacy and intrigue, The Adventure of the Second Stain. There was A Scandal In Bohemia, with more female interest than any other of our manifestos. Would the large American readership produce results similar to Britain’s?

I lit my pipe and considered. Yes, I thought, selecting twelve would challenge The Strand’s readers whichever side of the Ocean. Holmes could hardly overlook one case which dealt with the only foe who ever really extended him, and which deceived the public (and me) into the erroneous inference of his death. Therefore I would expect The Adventure of the Final Problem.

At Eastbourne I took a motor cab the two or three miles to Beachy Head and switched to a horse-drawn carriage for the remainder of the journey along the narrow country lanes and muddy tracks to Holmes’s farmstead. He was waiting for me on his verandah, tweed-suited, briar in hand, when the horse-drawn carriage from Beachy Head brought me to his isolated home. Though slightly stooped in the cooling air sweeping in from the Channel the tall, spare figure still reflected the time he was idolised by swordsmen everywhere as captain of the British épee and sabre teams, and the only foreign swordsman to be elected to France’s Académie des Armes.

Holmes welcomed the driver with, ‘A nice little brougham, I see it was once the pride of the Earl of Arundel,’ pointing to a painted-over trace of the previous owner’s coat of arms on the carriage doors, ‘and (referring to the horses) a pair of beauties. You must leave me your card.’

After such pleasantries he turned his attention to me.

‘I see you’ve put on seven and a half pounds since we last met,’ he chastised.

‘Seven at the most, Holmes!’ I retorted.

Holmes bid me enter the house and waved me to an armchair, throwing across a case of cigars, and indicating a spirit case and the old gasogene in the corner. I glanced around. Except for an unfamiliar tidiness due, presumably, to a housekeeper, the old landmarks from 221B, Baker Street were all in their place. There was the chemical corner and there the acid-stained, deal-topped table. The diagrams, the pipe-rack, even the Persian slipper containing his tobacco, and finally the precious violin, a Stradivarius bought on Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings, the four strings tuned in perfect fifths.

Noting where my glance had stopped, Holmes remarked, ‘Do you know who was the fastest violinist ever?’

‘I don’t,’ I replied. ‘And to tell the truth I’m not...’

‘Paganini. He was recorded playing 12 notes per second.’

Holmes lit a pipe and leant against the mantel, regarding me with his singularly introspective look. Smoke-rings chased each other up to the ceiling. I asked if he maintained contact with ‘old friends’ at Scotland Yard, those involved in many of our most famous cases, Inspectors Althelney Jones, and Gregson, the ferret-like Lestrade, or Algar from the Liverpool Force.

‘Hardly, my dear fellow,’ came the amused reply. ‘The best function Scotland Yard serves is to make the pseudoscience of astrology look respectable.’

The gap of months melted away.

The evening found us in a picturesque old room with sanded floors and high-backed settles at our favourite haunt, the Tiger Inn, situated half a mile inland from the chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters. Holmes was determined to add to my knowledge of bees. I was equally determined to resist. I blamed their siren calls for my comrade’s premature retirement. Nevertheless, on the completion of a fine dessert the conversation went –

‘Watson, I’ve estimated how far a bee flies to gather the nectar needed to produce a quart of honey. How many miles would you say?’

‘I haven’t the faintest, Holmes.’

‘48,000 miles. Isn’t that a fact worth noting?’

‘I can’t think to which sane person it would be,’ I replied.

An hour or so later, with a fine bottle of Clos du Bourg inside us, we returned on foot to the farmhouse under an immense buttermilk sky, the full moon stepping from cloud to cloud. We settled into two arm-chairs, the tobacco jar on a table exactly equidistant between us.

‘Well, Watson,’ my old friend began, thumbing tobacco into his favourite blackened clay pipe, ‘as to the list you mention, I’ve given it considerable thought since your letter arrived. Among the grimmest of our cases is The Speckled Band. That, I’m sure, will be quite high on any list.’

Holmes’s pipe stabbed at me like a sixth finger, just as it had at our old quarters at 221B, Baker Street. The deep-set grey eyes twinkled.

‘Then there are the cases in which you strive the difficult task of explaining away my alleged death and which introduce a villain as vile as Colonel Sebastian Moran. They deserve their place.’

I wrote down The Final Problem, A Scandal In Bohemia, and The Empty House.

He continued, ‘But as to my top choice - rather, choices - I have settled on three which I recall with the utmost satisfaction and enjoyment. In fact I would place them equal first.’

‘And they are?’ I asked pencil poised.

‘Silver Blaze. And, like you,’ he continued, guessing at my likely choice, ‘our time on those strange Devon moors in The Hound of the Baskervilles. We must include The Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter. Serbia was a strange land, almost beyond imagination.’

The following day found me back at the Marylebone surgery. The waiting-room echoed with a medley of coughs and sneezes, the pitches in novel combinations perfectly suited to a Schönberg composition. The last of my patients in the memorandum-book was Lord P______ himself, a man immersed in large public questions and listed in Sherlock Holmes’s ‘general encyclopaedia of reference’. Unaware his wife was a patient, he confessed he was once more suffering from a disease prevalent among those who benefitted themselves of the multitudes of ‘ladies of the night’ filling the streets of the Capital. I administered an injection of mercury into the urethra.

I had just told him to pull up his trousers when, after a single urgent knock, the receptionist threw open the door and beckoned me to follow her. Apologising to the heroically indiscreet nobleman I hurried out with the practioner’s immediate assumption something dramatic had occurred. Had someone - not for the first time - fallen in front of a train at nearby Paddington Station, scattering their limbs to the four corners? Orbeen knocked down by a speeding Wolseley-Siddeley van in the busy street outside my very premises, given the automobile had graduated from a noisy fad to a passion in all parts of the country?

Worse, could Sherlock Holmes have suffered a grievous accident, isolated as he was on his bee-farm on the South Downs? He mentioned on the last occasion that over the years his usually mild Apis Mellifera had stung him precisely 7,860 times. My professional advice had been forthright. Avoid being stung again. An allergy could set in out of the blue, whether the first or the 7,861st sting. Within minutes it could trigger a potentially deadly anaphylactic reaction.

I came into the reception room at a rush to be met by a smart salute from a chauffeur standing at attention. He politely asked me to step outside where I was asked to confirm my particulars (‘You are Dr. John H. Watson?’ ‘And the H stands for what, sir?’) before he reached into his jacket. He handed over a special telegram stamped Private and Secret.

The telegram was from Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary. Not yet enveloped in the international fame he was to gain, Sir Edward had two useful attributes - a good Parliamentary seat, and money. His grandfather left him a private income, a baronet’s hereditary title and an estate of about 2,000 acres.

The message read, ‘Dear Dr. Watson, it would greatly honour War Minister Haldane and me if you could attend a private meeting tomorrow. If so, shall we say the India Office at 10am? It will be very good to see you again. Very sincerely yours, E. Grey.’

Sir Edward was a countryman after my own heart. On the first occasion we met he told me, ‘I’d far rather catch a three-pound trout on the River Itchen than make a highly successful speech in the House’.

His Parliamentary colleague Richard Burdon Haldane, already regarded as one of Britain’s greatest War Ministers, had been elected in 1885 as a Liberal of Imperialist bent.

I scribbled a reply and handed it to the chauffeur, keeping my patients waiting long enough for him to answer questions about his vehicle. He explained the functioning of the water-cooled brake drums and told me he had graduated from the Daimler Company’s school of instruction for chauffeurs just off the Gray’s Inn Road.

Driver and the magnificent 40 horsepower Napier roared off followed by my envious eye. I planned to take the plunge and equip myself with a motor-car. There was an interesting new automobile, the Aerocar, an air-cooled, four-cylinder luxury car delivered from America for about £700 which included cap, goggles and gauntlet gloves.

I reread the telegram. There was a puzzling omission. It made no mention of Sherlock Holmes.

Chapter III

I am Invited to the Foreign Office to Meet an Oriental Potentate

The newly-constructed Bakerloo Line on the Underground took me to Embankment followed by a short walk along the Thames to the Foreign Office & India Office. The Departments were housed in a vast Victorian Italianate building deliberately designed to impress, like the Royal Courts of Justice, providing a sumptuous setting for affairs of state and diplomatic functions.

I was ushered into the Durbar Court. Doric columns on the ground floor and Ionic on the second were of polished red Peterhead granite, while the top floor Corinthian columns were of grey Aberdeen granite. The flooring was of Greek, Sicilian and Belgian marble. A man in livery greeted me. To my surprise he led me out of the building to a small side-entrance overlooking the Charles Steps and St. James’s Park. Almost furtively Sir Edward was waiting there. We shook hands, the Foreign Secretary greeting me with a polite ‘Good to see you again, Dr. Watson’. Throwing a cautionary glance at a fog-spectacles hawker on the opposite pavement, he said, ‘For the

Reviews for Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

[amserstudios · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I received a free copy of this book from the author, but after reading it I just HAD to buy a physical copy to add to my Sherlock Holmes collection! If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan and you haven't read anything by Tim Symonds YOU ARE MISSING OUT!!Like many Sherlock Holmes stories, you get an introduction to the narrative of Dr. Watson and the setting. It's a calm, steady, necessary expedition that benefits the complicated mysteries of this Sherlock novel well.From this you learn Sherlock and Watson no longer live together for the consulting detective has settled down in quiet Sussex. Personally, I love the retired Sherlock stories because they prove that no matter how old the great detective Holmes and his trusty Dr. Watson get, they're always going to be the most incredible team in fictitious history!Tim Symonds is not humble about this fact, which I love.This author has done some of the most authentic Sherlock Holmes writing I have ever read! And believe me, I have read a LOT of Sherlock Holmes in my time!I don't know if this author has ever been to China or not, but I sure feel like I have after reading this! What's even better is I feel like I've fallen into a worm hole and gotten popped out in 1900's-China! The text used to describe this fascinating setting is as busy as it is disorienting, no doubt making it all that much more realistic for the time, place, and scenario.The author has clearly mastered the art of foreshadowing because, even though I had to have Sherlock point it out to me, all of the evidence and bits of information relevant to the story are written RIGHT THERE!! I love being tricked just as much as I love being guided in the right direction and Tim Symonds has managed to do both. Amazing piece of literature! I would love to see this converted at some point to hit the big screen. I can picture Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce playing these roles and even though that's no longer possible, I would have a field day seeing the old fashion Holmes and Watson back on screen by some fresh writing and faces!