The Lammas Curse Read online

  “What?”

  “The Rajah of Govinda. The caption under the photo says he is attending the tournament as a special guest of Lord Cruddock because he is planning to stage a similar tournament in India next year. Golf has become as popular as cricket and polo in his homeland and golf courses have started springing up from one end of the subcontinent to the other.”

  “Let me see that!”

  He practically tore the magazine from her hands as she sat back in her seat wearing an inscrutable smile, sending bracelets of bluish smoke into the air and silently counting to three before delivering the coup de grace.

  “There’s another reason you cannot come.”

  “And what is that?” he huffed as he ground his Bradley to a pulp in the ashtray.

  “I cannot possibly invite you to stay in what could be very uncomfortable lodgings. For all I know Graymalkin could be nothing but draughty halls, cobweb curtains, walls dripping with damp, moss growing on the ceiling and a mad banshee haunting a crumbling tower.”

  His back stiffened against the padded leather seat as he squared his shoulders. “I will have you know I served as assistant surgeon in Afghanistan. I took a Jezail bullet at the battle of Maiwand. I am accustomed to hardship, privation, and sleeping rough. What’s more, I am a native Scot. I am familiar with Scottish geography, weather, laws, customs, idioms…and I know how to dance the Scottish reel!”

  2

  The Diogenes Club

  The Diogenes Club was an exclusive, luxurious, lunatic asylum for seriously wealthy misanthropes. If someone had locked the club members inside their own clubhouse and thrown away the key the inmates would have rewarded their gaoler generously. It was a refuge from all that London had to offer – dinner parties, debutante balls, musical soirees, opening nights at the opera, and every other torture invented by the charming, the effusive, the garrulous, the smiling, the sparkling and the scintillating. If John Donne had been a member of the Diogenes Club he would never have penned ‘no man is an island’. The members were all self-proclaimed islands floating in a sea called Society connected to the Ocean of Others. Yes, ‘hell was other people’ and the Diogenes Club was heaven. Dr Johnson is another who would never have gained membership. His pithy maxim: ‘When a man is bored with London, he is bored with Life’ was intended to sum up the eternal vitality of the City, but to the members of the Diogenes Club it summarised exactly why they hated London and shunned men like Dr Johnson who loved the sound of their own voice. The one and only maxim of the Diogenes Club was SHUTUP. Sound of any sort was prohibited. Last year, a member had been excommunicated for six months for coughing. Another got three months for sneezing. Appeals for clemency and mercy fell on deaf ears. The club members were sometimes accused of being misogynist but this was untrue and many a periwig earned a comfortable living prosecuting such blasphemy in a court of law where the presiding judge was himself a learned member. It was tacitly understood by anyone with half a brain that the members hated everyone equally – women and men, rich and poor, clever and stupid, intellectual and illiterate, Catholic and Protestant, Tory and Whig, Jews, Blacks, Arabs, Orientals, and so forth. They even hated each other.

  The Diogenes Club was a haven for the unclubbable. Here, in the pin-drop silence of unclubbableness where armchairs were arranged in groupings of one, the members could at last breathe easy. There was no false bonhomie, in fact, no bonhomie at all. There was no fear of the meet and greet, hail-fellow-well-met, slap on the back, shallow chit-chat, superficial repartee, or status conscious jockeying that confronted them daily in the outré-kingdom. A member arrived. The hall porter took his coat, scarf, gloves, cane and hat. There was no verbal exchange. The member then signed himself in and did one of two things – he proceeded up the stairs to his private chamber to have a lie-down or he proceeded to the sitting room, library, billiards or dining room. There was not a smoking room as such since smoking was permitted in all of the rooms and even on the stairs. Generally, he located a newspaper or a book, scanned for a vacant seat, and began to read. Sleeping was permitted but snoring was grounds for a black ball – three such balls and eviction was swift and merciless. However, it had been five years since a member had been black-balled for snoring as members were mindful to first go to their rooms and avail themselves of a nap. The butlers (they were never referred to as waiters) knew which member preferred what drink and words were superfluous. A raised brow, a nod, a grimace, was sufficient to convey the idea that a whiskey or brandy or coffee was required. Chess boards were positioned in alcoves to muffle the scrape or clink of figurines on the board should any member wish to play a game, more often than not the members enjoyed pitting their wits against themselves to limit excitement, likewise for billiards. The dining room was designed for minimal interaction. Small dinner tables were set for one, usually facing a wall, a marble column or a Chinese screen, minimizing the chance of eye-contact. Under no circumstance was a table to be found facing a window that might give onto the street, reminding an inmate that the world was still at large.

  There was, however, one room where talking was permitted. It was a darkly panelled room, sparingly furnished, situated on the domestic side of the marble entrance hall. This was called The Stranger’s Room. A member could take a visitor into this room and talk freely, albeit in hushed tones. It was to this room that Dr Watson was ushered when he came to speak to Mr Mycroft Holmes.

  Mycroft waited until the door was fully closed, waving his visitor to a leather wing chair adjacent to the fireplace where a small coal fire burned quietly in the grate. “Congratulations on solving that nasty business in Devon, old chap. Who could have foreseen such a dastardly turn of events to rear their ugly head ten years after the hound from hell was put to rest, and who was that lovely, young, foreign creature that I heard had accompanied you?”

  “That’s what I came to speak to you about,” replied Dr Watson, an undercurrent of tension attaching itself to his tone as he endeavoured to fold himself as noiselessly as possible into a leather seat.

  Mycroft picked up on the tense undertone and offered his visitor a cigar from the humidor on the mahogany sideboard to put him at ease. The humidor was designed as a perfect miniature of the Temple of Solomon. “How intriguing! Are you planning to tie the knot again? You don’t need my permission, old chap. You are old enough to make your own mistakes.”

  Dr Watson coloured slightly at the reference to his six and forty years and was grateful for the dimness of the small chamber. A couple of reading lamps with green shades provided the only electric illumination. They imbued the room with a queer Neptunian glow.

  The room was not exactly a cheery place though it had nothing to do with the actual furniture which was of gentlemanly quality, or the fire which warmed but did not cook its occupants. It was like a necromancer’s den, otherworldly, wizardly, and Mycroft was the magician, the spellbinder, who could make things happen, or not. With a wave of his wand-like pen he could start wars and end them, topple governments, exile kings, queens and consorts, finance coups, cause banks and corporations to crash, and enrich or impoverish individuals at a whim, except he never acted on a whim. He gave careful consideration to all and everything, weighed up the pros and cons and consequences, and once a course of action was decided, acted without fear or favour. He was uncompromisingly benevolent but did not act from benevolence alone. He was immensely powerful yet few had ever heard of him. He worked for everyone and no one. The Treasury, The Foreign Office, The Home Office, The Admiralty, Her Majesty - all claimed to employ him, yet none could say how to contact him, what he earned, or exactly what he did.

  Sherlock had once described his elder brother in those terms, and as Dr Watson helped himself to a corona gordia from the humidor he recalled the description. Was Sherlock being deferential or critical? Reverential of unflattering? It was hard to tell with a man whose sarcasm came in a monotone devoid of humour noir.

  What else did Sherlock once say about the brother who was his senior by se
ven years?

  Some men looked at the world, saw the suffering, and turned to God. My brother, Mycroft, looked at the world, saw the suffering and knew straight off that an omniscient and omnipotent Being could not possibly exist. He was twelve years old when that truth struck him like a lightning bolt in the same way that the apple struck Newton. He had never heard of Diogenes or Zeno, but he soon made up for his ignorance. When the Sunday sermonisers assured him that heaven was reserved for the great and good and that the pagans, heretics and sinners of the world would spend eternity in hell, he immediately decided hell was the place for him. Better to burn with Hypatia and Plato, Maimonides and Ptolemy, he said, than be bored to tears with the most worshipful hypocrites, fornicators, looters and murderers of their day.

  Where Sherlock enjoyed physics, chemistry and empirical treatises, Mycroft enjoyed reading theological discourse because he liked to see the clever-dicks tying themselves in knots. If man did not invent God, God would have needed to invent Himself. That was the only hook on which all theological proofs would be hung stated Mycroft, aged fifteen, precociously at the family dinner table one Good Friday with the local vicar as an honoured guest. On his headstone he wanted the following engraved: Aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari posit. The convoluted logic of that phrase appealed to his sardonic soul which possessed humour noir in droves. But where Anselm was referring to a Supreme Being, Mycroft understood that only one thing made the world go round. Everyone thought it was Mammon – that was their fatal flaw - but even Mammon genuflected before the one thing that caused history to repeat ad infinitum. Think of any story ever written, and those yet to be written, starting with the story of the first man which was in fact a story about a woman. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible, Shakespeare, and every myth, legend and book of wisdom since man put flint to slab tapped the same vein.

  Hence, he had decided at an early age to rise above the dictate of humanity, not by denying it, repressing it, or corrupting it, but by acknowledging it and harnessing it. A man free from human entanglement could concentrate his mind wonderfully; he could rise above tawdry humanity by standing on the shoulders of all the numskulls who came before him.

  And yet, as with gods and men, there existed inside him a conflicted duality. He was a Stoic and an Epicurean, a Utilitarian and a Hedonist. He was neither socialist, Marxist, communist nor capitalist, but he could be any one of them when it suited him. He enjoyed fine food and good wine, he was fleshy and bulky and larger than life, a bit like Oscar Wilde minus the attention-seeking garb, dramatic gestures and death-wish.

  But as the delicious irony called Life would have it he had become the embodiment of that which he mocked: something a greater than which cannot be conceived!

  Lately, his eyesight had begun to fade and he had taken to wearing a lorgnette for reading. The frameless lenses, dangling from a gold cord when not needed, seemed to magnify his limpid, grey, owlish eyes.

  Sherlock once described his big brother as gross, and physically Mycroft was indeed the antithesis of his younger sibling, who had been gaunt, ascetic and athletic. But mentally – now there was the crux.

  Dr Watson had lived with Sherlock for several years before he even discovered his friend had a brother, and though he considered his friend a genius of the first order, his genius suffered from an inferiority complex compared to that of his polymath brother. Where Sherlock experimented, researched, toiled and deduced, Mycroft simply knew. He was a savant but not in one field as many savants are, but across the spectrum of all knowledge.

  “No need to feel abashed, old boy,” continued Mycroft, noting the doctor’s embarrassment as he proffered a box of lucifers. “I’ve heard she has impeccable connections, and is uncommonly bright for a woman, that’s a rarity worth capturing and nurturing.”

  Dr Watson struck a lucifer, puffed on his cigar and watched the end glow red. “No, no, I’m not thinking of tying the knot again. It would be a betrayal of my dear Mary. I could never think of replacing her no matter how beautiful or bright the young lady to be, but, well,” he paused mid-sentence and blew out the lucifer before redundantly tossing it onto the flames.

  Mycroft wasn’t used to getting things wrong and felt momentarily flustered. He almost barbecued the ends of his fingers as his lucifer burnt down. He dispatched it quickly to the pyre. “A glass of fire-water, old boy?” he said, holding up a crystal decanter of whiskey by way of invitation to join him in a nightcap, grateful that fizzy French champagne would not be called for after all. It always gave him gas. “I seem to have misinterpreted you, pray, go on.”

  “Well, this young lady claims to be the daughter of Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Ah! Another one!” chuckled Mycroft, handing his visitor a tumbler of golden elixir, before parking his substantial derriere on some leather padding that knew better than to protest. “That makes three this year, seven in total, but of course, you have come here tonight because you are taking this one seriously.”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know whether to take her seriously or not.”

  “What makes this one different?”

  “For starters, she’s not a nutter. She doesn’t appear deluded or mad. Secondly, she’s not after money. She’s quite wealthy in her own right. And finally, well, she has these mannerisms that uncannily mimic Sherlock.”

  “Such as?”

  “She has large hands for a woman with astonishingly elongated fingers which she steeples whenever she is cogitating.”

  “You described that mannerism in your books. She could merely be play-acting according to script.”

  Dr Watson grimaced thoughtfully. “Yes, I guess so, but when she speaks I hear Sherlock in every word that falls from her lips.”

  “I see.”

  “And sometimes when I aim a glance, not a studied look, mind you, I see Sherlock. It’s something in the set of her mouth or her eyes or the way she holds her head. I cannot put my finger on it but it is there all the same. It has happened more than once. The only significant difference is that she does not disdain society. She does not regard humanity as a scourge to be endured.”

  “Just as well. What is condoned in men is rarely tolerated in women. Does she play the violin?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Is she addicted to cocaine?”

  “No, er, well, I don’t think so. There has not been any indication of it so far.”

  “At least she is not adhering to scripture too scrupulously. How old is she?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “That puts her birth at 1875.”

  “Yes.”

  “You failed to mention her name.”

  “Countess Varvara Volodymyrovna.” Dr Watson enunciated the name like a schoolboy reciting a line of alphabetic alliteration. Mycroft’s bushy brows moved north, which was something of a coup. According to Sherlock, Mycroft was not a man who was easily surprised.

  “She is not a British citizen, then, but Russian.”

  “Ukrainian.”

  “That’s twice I have been wrong tonight. Russians would of course say Vladimir not Volodymyr. Who does she claim as her mater?”

  Dr Watson took a sip of golden ambrosia to lubricate his voice-box, or perhaps to defer the moment and score another coup. “Irene Adler.”

  Mycroft was not taken by surprise a second time. His lips formed a cynical smile as he puffed on his cigar. “Ah, another reason as to why you came to me, old boy. Let’s see now. Miss Adler was born in 1858. That would have made her 17 years of age at the time of the birth, and 16 or 17 at time of conception. And Sherlock would have been four years older. That puts him at 20 or 21. He would have completed his degree at Cambridge and found himself cast adrift, the ivory tower behind him and the mean streets of London before him, drifting aimlessly through the fog of endless boredom, dabbling in opiates, not yet settled on a vocation, not yet stumbling upon his metier. It is not improbable that in the clutches of the cocaine demon he may have conducted a hazy liaison with a young woma
n as he briefly trod the theatrical boards, possibly someone working as a pretty chorus girl or stage actress prior to recasting herself as a diva with the Warsaw Opera, whereby he fathered a child of which he knew nothing. And there’s no escaping the fact that Miss Adler has the singular honour of being the one and only woman who has ever rattled my little brother.”

  “Yes,” concurred Dr Watson with a resolute nod of his head, “in fact, to say he may have been secretly infatuated with her would not be stretching the point. After that incident at Reichenbach Falls I was trawling through his papers and in a secret compartment of his desk I found a photo of That Woman, yet I would not have described her as the most beautiful female who ever crossed the threshold of 221B Baker Street.”

  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” reminded Mycroft, flicking cigar ash onto the fire, “and let us not forget That Woman was possibly the most beguiling. It is possible Sherlock remembered her from their first encounter, either liminally or subliminally. What else do you know of her background?”

  “Miss Adler or Countess Volodymyrovna?”

  “The latter.”

  “She claims her mother gave her up without even naming her. She claims her mother simply gave her over to one of her lovers, Count Volodya Volodymyr. I believe he was a native of Odessa. The Count died when she was still quite young. She didn’t mention what age. She was subsequently raised by the Count’s unmarried sister, Countess Zoya Volodymyrovna.”

  “Ah, Countess Zoya, now there’s a name I recognize, an adventurous woman with a penchant for attracting powerful men, immensely wealthy in her own right. The young lady in question inherited her aunt’s estate?”

  “Yes, and that of her step-father too.”

  “Mmm, yes, that would make the young woman extraordinarily rich.”

  “She travelled extensively with her aunt and, shortly after the aunt died from a snake bite while they were in Australia, she married an Australian.”