Implore them to pay heed to my words. This would be the greatest honour to me. Tell them I, even a General, must bow my head to the circumstances of the moment in the Middle Kingdom’s long history. It is truly said, ‘The great man will always frame his actions with careful regard for the exigencies of the moment, and trim his sail to the favouring breeze,’ yet I am and will always remain England’s staunchest friend in the whole of Asia.
And, Sir Sherlock, please give my salutations to a fellow officer, your great friend Dr. Watson. Did he mention I have made him an Honorary Colonel in the New Army? His uniform will await him at his London premises.
I nodded at the subaltern. He placed the letter in a pocket, stepped back a pace and saluted. We followed his movements until he stepped off the gangplank into the tender, dropping into the waving handkerchiefs and shrill goodbyes of relatives and friends of departing passengers. He turned, glanced up at us, and saluted once more.
With ‘Well, Colonel Watson, we can do without this on my person now’, Holmes reached into his pocket and pulled out the pipe-pistol he had pointed at General Yuán’s heart. I held out a hand for the formidable weapon. The aluminium stem unscrewed for loading. A knurled screw near the centre served as the trigger. Tucked in the wooden bowl were five extra cartridges.
‘Holmes,’ I said, handing it back. ‘I admit I too was worried when the subaltern turned up. Were we about to be hauled off the ship and arrested? Was General Yuán about to have us returned to the Forbidden City, or worse, transported in coffins to the Ancestral Tombs?’
‘Not the General,’ Holmes replied. ‘The Empress Dowager, perhaps, but never Yuán.’
There was something in his tone, an innuendo I didn’t understand.
‘Why do you say ‘Not the General’? Why not? He has the power until we sail into international waters.’
‘Power, yes, but ambition too,’ came the response. ‘I’m in no doubt Yuán hankers after a Dynasty of his own. The last thing he needs is English blood on his hands - look how he managed to restrain himself over the Aeroscope reel. I’m not sure whether a .25 bullet from this (he pointed at his pocket) would have penetrated all that clothing. He wants England and our Empire on his side. Let’s say the Old Buddha and the Emperor die within a short while of each other, hours even - such things happen in China. Who would be best placed to overthrow the Ch’ing, usurp the Throne, order a large jade seal, and two imperial robes, and set up his own Dynasty?’
He paused, the eyes twinkling.
‘...though for your readers it would have been quite poetic to meet our doom in the Purple City, with an offer of a place of pilgrimage near the Ch’ing Dynastic Tombs. ‘Alas, here lie the mortal remains of Dr. Watson, late of the Indian Army, far far from the Gatwick Races’.’
‘‘And his great Friend, the Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes, far, far from his bees’,’ I added.
It was high tide. Beneath us the wash from the aptly-named Yellow Sea was a turbid yellow, coloured by a flood of rich soil from far-distant Central Asian mountain ranges, the red loam of the Red Basin of Sze Chuan, the grey and yellow alluvium of China’s central provinces, swept down by the great Yangtze to merge with the cyan blue of the Pacific Ocean.
The Mongolia’s horn gave one long blast. Smoke belched from the 13,000 ton ship’s great stack. I took a last, lingering look at the harbour and beyond it the marshy flats and the vast reach of Cathay. Across the Pacific lay San Francisco, the Paris of the West, a city of fog. Thence overland to Boston and a further sea crossing to Europe. Soon the lofty white hulks for bonded Indian opium, the foreign ‘hongs’, the shipping offices, filatures and cotton mills with their ceaseless clang, big brown-sailed junks with huge rudders, and great white two-storeyed paddle arks from Ningpo and Hankow would shrink away and, like the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, become a distant memory.
A telegraphic message was delivered to the cabin. General Yuán was ordering full-scale manoeuvres at Hochien comprising nine Divisions, a demonstration of strength designed to subdue insurgent elements at home and grasping hands abroad. My appointment as an Honorary Colonel had been gazetted.
At Dinner Holmes picked his way in a desultory fashion through the Consommé Olga, and the Poached Salmon With Mousseline Sauce. I asked if he was suffering from mal-de-mer still within sight of land. He shook his head. The silence continued until the Waldorf Pudding when he took out a pipe and said, ‘It’s hard to believe we shall ever in our remaining years engage in anything as wondrous as our time here.’
I agreed that while that may be true, I was looking forward to oysters and a brace of grouse at the Tiger Inn, with something a little choice in white wines - and perhaps another of our own familiar meurtres à l’anglaise courtesy of a baffled Scotland Yard.
‘Nevertheless, for the record, Holmes,’ I said, at last laying down the dessert spoon, ‘there’s still something I haven’t grasped.’
The pipe with its freshly-coiling smoke came away from my comrade’s mouth.
‘Which is, old chap?’ came the amiable reply.
‘It wasn’t until I quoted Yuán’s words ‘If this is a plot there may be method in their madness’ late on that the connection to the murder of King Hamlet struck you. By then you had already concluded the puncturing of the Emperor’s eardrum was not some bizarre accident or foolish prank but stage one in a plot of exceptional cunning. How?’
‘Take the crow,’ came the reply. ‘Its behaviour. There are eight species of corvidae breeding in the Downs around my bee-farm - the carrion crow, the raven, the rook, the jackdaw, the jay, the magpie and so on. I know first-hand that no wild crow recently captured and then released would go anywhere near people. This one not only flew straight to the Emperor, it settled on his shoulder. It must have been trained from the nest to do so. If it had learnt to fly to just any shoulder it could have flown in all the points of the compass to discover a human-being to land on. Why the Emperor? He was no friend to the crow. You recall he shuddered at the memory. Clearly it was no pet of his yet it recognised something about him and sought a reward. Even the spot from which the crow was released ensured it came at the Emperor from the right, an unlucky direction. That alone pointed at a malevolent mind behind the attack.’
I followed this with another question.
‘It’s clear to me the Empress Dowager lost patience with the Emperor long ago. We know she and Yuán maintain that his very existence encourages the Japanese to dare the colonisation of China, with him as their puppet. Even training the crow means they must have planned the assassination for months. If so, why invite a world-famous Consulting Detective to Peking in the first place? Moreover, why, having done so, didn’t they speed our exit before the plot commenced? It doesn’t make sense. They even delayed the day of our departure on the grounds it had to be auspicious. It was during that period the war-crow was let loose on the Emperor. They could easily have waited. It was as though they wanted to carry out the assassination while you were there.’
‘That’s exactly what they wanted. The E-D together with Yuán and Li believed they had hatched and honed a plot so clever, so foolproof, that nobody in the world would spot it.’
‘Hubris?’
‘No doubt.’
‘But why take such a risk? Would any benefit accrue from you being there?’