I stared at my patient utterly mystified. I visualised his rotating finger jutting from between the Empress Dowager and the General.
‘You implicated the General as the mastermind. Now you say you knew from the start Her Imperial Majesty was the driving force.’
‘Only the Divine Mother could have stitched nine dragons on the beizi. No-one else would have risked death by a thousand cuts for such treason. My first thoughts before entering the Temple of Longevity on the other side of the lake were to say nothing. I live in mortal and perpetual fear of her. I felt I could do nothing. I would carry on with my functions as usual despite the terrible pain in my ear.’
Exasperated beyond measure, I forgot the required form of address to an Emperor.
‘My dear fellow,’ I exclaimed, why in heaven’s name didn’t you disclose all this to Holmes! After all, he...’
‘Because,’ the Emperor interrupted, ‘something very strange occurred in the Temple. When I started to pray the spirits of my ancestors began speaking to me, giving me instructions. The voices told me there was a way I could turn the situation around, rid myself of my principal oppressor, my aunt. I was to make no accusation against her. I was even to emphasise how generous her gesture had been in sending me the beizi. I was to point Sir Sherlock towards Yuán, lay the blame solely on him. Only the General’s control over the New Army keeps the Old Buddha on her throne.
The ancestors said that if the General was arrested for treason, not even the Empress Dowager could save him from the most painful execution, including decapitation. With him removed from the scene, the spirits promised me within weeks she herself would be tumbled into her grave.’
The Emperor shrugged ruefully.
‘From the moment Sir Sherlock realised the cape could never truly have been my aunt’s and was designed by her solely with the plot in mind, I knew my plan for pinning the blame on the General alone was never to be. Otherwise...’ he paused, seeking the right metaphor, ‘otherwise I could have killed first one bird and then the second with the same stone and regained my throne.’
Holmes’s and my life in the world of crime had been filled to the brim with ‘ifs’. If I had not turned back early that day at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes’s life might not have been put in mortal danger at the hands of Professor Moriarty. Here in the Forbidden City, if Holmes had not brilliantly pinned the baleful plot together from clues other than the nine dragons on the beizi, we may not have needed to find a way to bargain for the life of the Guangxu Emperor. The Emperor would have been murdered.
As I wrote of Holmes in The Adventure Of The Yellow Face, ‘Now and again, however, it chanced that even when he erred the truth was still discovered.’
A poem by the famous Scotsman Robert Burns came to mind: ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley...’ –that is, ‘The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew...’.
If we hadn’t, as General put it, ‘grossly intruded’ in China’s internal affairs, the plot proposed by the Emperor’s ancestral spirits may have succeeded, eliminating both Yuán and the Empress Dowager. For the rest of my life I shall never know.
Chapter XVI
I Speculate about Mycroft Holmes’s True Rôle
Some weeks later, back in London, I exchanged my Chinese silver coins at Cox’s and placed five guineas on The White Knight to win the Ascot Gold Cup. It came in first. My film presentation (minus the orchard scene) at the Royal Geographical Society was a gratifying success, applauded by an audience which included no less than the elderly Florence Nightingale, the rising Member of Parliament Winston Churchill, the notable fiction writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the guest of honour, His Majesty King Edward V11, who received the signed photograph of the Empress Dowager with genuine curiosity and made me spend time with him in the tea-room recounting my adventures.
I put my name down on a waiting list for an Aerocar, the air-cooled 24 horsepower four-cylinder model at a cost of 2,800 American dollars, including goggles, gauntlet gloves and de rigeur breeches. Once ‘in the saddle’ I planned to drive down to the Sussex countryside to demonstrate the Gabriel horn and gas headlights to Holmes. Having got whiff of my purchase he had already begun to goad me with references to Mr. Toad. He quoted in full from the newly-published children’s story The Wind In The Willows:
‘The Badger strode heavily into the room, and stood looking at the two animals with an expression full of seriousness. The Rat let his egg-spoon fall on the table-cloth, and sat open-mouthed.
‘The hour has come!’ said the Badger at last with great solemnity.
‘What hour?’ asked the Rat uneasily, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece.
‘WHOSE hour, you should rather say,’ replied the Badger. ‘Why, Toad’s hour! The hour of Toad! I said I would take him in hand as soon as the winter was well over, and I’m going to take him in hand to-day!’
‘Toad’s hour, of course!’ cried the Mole delightedly. ‘Hooray! I remember now! WE’LL teach him to be a sensible Toad!’
‘This very morning,’ continued the Badger, taking an arm-chair, ‘as I learnt last night from a trustworthy source, another new and exceptionally powerful motor-car will arrive at Toad Hall on approval or return. At this very moment, perhaps, Toad is busy arraying himself in those singularly hideous habiliments so dear to him, which transform him from a (comparatively) good-looking Toad into an Object which throws any decent-minded animal that comes across it into a violent fit.’
The fine Edwardian summer passed. Winter set in. I received a letter addressed in Holmes’s familiar spidery script. I unsheathed the letter-opener, sliced it through the envelope, and began to read:
‘Nr. East Dean 16th November, 1908
Dear Watson,
I would welcome your company. If your Toad-mobile has not yet been delivered from America, come this Saturday on the morning express to Eastbourne. A brougham will be waiting for you.
P.S. This morning I received a telephone call from Mycroft which may be of interest to you. Yesterday morning the Kuang-hsü Emperor was found dead. Cause not specified. Today the E-D died. There are signs the General is preparing to take over control of China.’
I put the letter down. My last view of the Empress Dowager flooded back, that once-beautiful haunted face, the questing eyes, and the drawn mouth.
It was not until I was aboard a two-horse Hansom for Charing Cross railway station to visit Holmes that a quite incredible thought struck me. It came like a bolt from the blue. Mycroft Holmes! What part had he really played? Did he truly have our deadly enemy Colonel Sebastian Moran in mind when he offered to route all my communications through the Political & Secret Department at the India Office? Or was it simply so he could monitor my every move, read my back-up notes, study whichever strategy I might put to General Yuán for improvements in China’s New Army? There had been neither hide nor hair of the malevolent Colonel at any point along my long and dangerous route to Peking, and certainly not in the Forbidden City itself.
The secretive Diogenes Club was a hot-bed of men in league with the China Association, retaining extreme loyalty to the British Empire. They would thereby have had access to all my private letters to Sherlock Holmes and the War Minister himself. The Club already acted like the Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office yet antagonistic to it. Could Mycroft have placed himself - behind Sir Edward Grey’s back - at the service of this band of rich and aristocratic men planning the incorporation of China into an already over-stretched British Empire? There was no doubt secrecy was high in his mind - the slap on the wrist he administered over my careless pencil-marks on the Royal Geographical Society’s maps when planning my route to Kashgar still made my face flush.