Sherlock Holmes and the Strange Death of Brigadier-General Delves by Tim Symonds

Author:Tim Symonds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: authentic adventures, Canonical, traditional, historical, Sherlockian, pastiche, Victorian London, murder, Maiwand, India, cholera, Kismet, Bailiwick, Guernsey, Damascus sabre, John Slade, waler, Brevet, Ghazi, shell-shock, Dancing Men, Raj
ISBN: 9781787059658
Publisher: Andrews UK
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

9: I Carry the News to Holmes

The sturdy British locomotive at Charing Cross Station let off a piercing whistle. A column of grey-white steam shot up from the funnel. I was on my way to Holmes’s bee-farm in the Sussex South Downs. Hardly three hours later the hackney carriage sent to fetch me clattered into the farm’s spacious yard. In the distance, through an extensive array of hives, the sun glinted on the English Channel. The contrast with my daily existence on the Western Front was palpable. Here in the countryside, other than bird-song and the occasional hum of honey-bees, the silence was absolute. The landscape was covered with patches of gorse. Their ripening pods were not yet ready to burst open with golden yellow flowers, emitting a loud pop. On a really warm summer’s day, a stand of them would sound like an artillery range.

Holmes took my hat and coat and led me inside. He had been arranging books which had once filled the shelves at 221B to overflowing. In one pile I spotted his rare copy of Eckermann’s Voodoism And The Negroid Religion next to Grant Allen’s The Origin of Tree Worship, followed by W. H. Hudson’s British Birds, and the Rev. Wood’s Out of Doors.

We moved out to the verandah. While my old friend studied Fenlon’s revelations I watched for a glimpse of lapwings or yellow hammers or barn owls, birds fond of chalky Sussex downlands and rocky cliffs, listening to the susurrus made by the breeze passing through the tall grasses.

I knew from childhood that bees forage for nectar and pollen from blooming plants within flight range. Although we had found it impossible to foster Mrs. Hudson’s house plants (largely due to Holmes’s chemical experiments and the smoky coal fires in the sitting-room), I prided myself on a botanical bent. My own magnum opus was the list of nineteen varieties of plants in ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’. Even in advanced age Holmes remained an expert on flower scents, specifically 75 perfumes. Unlike the French perfumes, English ones were generally derived from single blooms – Night-scented Stock, Orange Blossom, Gardenia, Eau de Primrose, Violetta and Bluebell.

I sat with a feeling of tranquillity greater than I had felt for many months. I determined to add a leafiness to the open Sussex landscape to remind Holmes of cases where trees and plants had been essential allies, on at least four occasions saving our lives.

On the advice of the Sporting Times I had just put twenty guineas on a gelding in the forthcoming Greenham Stakes at Newbury. If the horse came home (as it did), I would pay for a landscape gardener to plant a particular array of plants and trees around the farmhouse. Laurels would take their place among the horticultural array. The shrub provided us a secure hiding place in ‘The Valley of Fear’. Holmes even crashed through a laurel in ‘The Illustrious Client’. Somewhere there should be white jessamine to bring back how Holmes identified Beryl Stapleton’s perfume in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’.

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