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CHAPTER 1

In the year 1878 I was a teacher and chaplain to the Order of Our Lady of Mercy, an establishment of religious women who care for poor children at Charleston, South Carolina. It was a remarkable affair in relation to one of the nuns there that led me to seek out the assistance of a former acquaintance of mine, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

The train of events was so dark and bizarre, even threatening to both the sister and myself, that I was utterly at a loss as to how to proceed. A knowledge of the political situation in the American South at the time should help the reader to understand why I felt I could not confide in the authorities at Charleston. I went about my duties well enough, but found myself helplessly pacing my room at night and then falling asleep at odd hours, suddenly waking from a daylight nightmare to the sight of my students staring in amusement at me.

In desperation — and feeling an unfamiliar sense of fear — I went into retreat for a week to pray and contemplate what to do. One night, as I completed my spiritual exercises before retiring, a slight flicker of hope came to me. I remembered how Holmes, my former schoolmate, was able to solve even the most intractable puzzles that were presented to him. It occurred to me that I might seek his advice.

Of course, since then the name of Sherlock Holmes has become world famous due to his extraordinary adventures chronicled by his friend John Watson. For years I have been tempted to bring my own singular adventure with Holmes to the attention of the world, but the demands of my vocation have forced decades of delay. Now that I am slipping into retirement and have more leisure for writing, I imagine the reading public might benefit from this tale of the great detective and his very first collaborator — for I was Watson before Watson was Watson.

As a schoolboy at Stonyhurst College, I knew Sherlock Holmes only a little, but all the boys were aware of his prodigious powers of observation. He astonished us more than once. I recall an instance when he exonerated one of my school fellows who was accused of pilfering. Personal things — cricket bats, leather schoolbags, watches — were disappearing overnight, and Holmes deduced that the college porter was the thief. His deduction rested on a mere trifle. The porter had an ireful watchdog that never slept and made us miserable with its barking — oddly, Holmes pointed out, the dog had made no sound during the time the thefts must have occurred. A boy out of bed would have sent the dog into a frenzy, but its own master would have occasioned no qualms in the dog. Impressed at Holmes's observations, the rector faced down the porter and the wrong was righted.

Still, my memories of the ingenious Holmes were somewhat troubled. He was in and out of school, for his family wandered about Europe a good deal. He was not popular. When the boy accused of theft tried to thank him for his help, Holmes turned his back and walked away. Most of us, myself included to my shame, used to make fun of the silent, shy, skinny Holmes, and we thought it a piquant thing to chevvy him about the schoolyard. Because he declined to play cricket with us, we considered him a bit of an auntie, which perhaps explains why he excelled at the more defensive arts of fencing and boxing. In these, no one challenged him: We sensed even then that he was all by himself in a battle with the world.

Blessed with the frame of a boxer myself, I sparred with him a few times. Although I had the shoulders, I lacked the agility of body or mind that Holmes enjoyed. He always out-fought me — and out-thought me!

Even so, Holmes was an indifferent student except in chemistry, where he showed uncommon zeal. In other courses, he paid little attention to the lectures and occasioned some mirth more than once when asked a question:

"Mr. Holmes, be so kind as to explain the concept of a free press?"

"Yes, sir, that would be when the porter irons my trousers for me."

I, on the other hand, was an exceptional student, particularly in theology, languages, and history. (That is why the brothers recruited me early on to join them.) However, I was hopeless at chemistry, so in our seventh year I was thrown into a room with Holmes, who was charged with tutoring me. I didn't relish the idea. Holmes strewed our room with clothes and yellow-backed penny-dreadfuls and on rainy afternoons when we were expected to study he would rasp idly at his violin or slip away heaven knew where to smoke a pipe. Except for our chemistry sessions, he was largely oblivious to me and I to him. In fact, we were nearly opposites. My love of good company and good food (I always joked that luncheon and tea were my favorite "courses" at school) made me the reverse of Sherlock Holmes, to whom a good dinner and good company meant nothing.

However, I was drawn to his perverse chemistry experiments. He would coldly kill small animals — mice and rats he had captured — with concoctions of monkshood and ground hemlock kept in phials and scattered at random about our room. From Holmes I came to respect the berries of a bizarre plant called the "cuckoo pint," with which he stunned and paralyzed a number of mice. He would lead me through the forest in search of these plants, and it disturbed me to find them breeding like shadows amongst the innocent spring flowers.

"Here," he would point with his gloved finger, "and here. There is death in these woods."

Of course, I knew of his mania for tobacco, and his furtive smoking didn't bother me — I rather liked the aroma of a good pipe myself — but then one night I found him in the laboratory vigorously chewing tobacco, which was of course strictly forbidden in school. He uncovered a cupful of maggots he had collected from a dead rat in the garden and expectorated into it. The worms thrashed about and were still. It was a revolting experiment that carried its own peculiar fascination.

Another time he put a brick in a pot, filled it with dried tobacco and water up to the brick, and set a teacup on top of the brick. He then covered the pot, heated it over the gas burner, and whispered, "Fetch some ice from the larder." I ran to the kitchen and brought back a bucket of ice, which he placed on top of the pot.

"Quick! Uncover the pot!" I seized the lid. Holmes carefully removed the cup and poured a steaming, light-brown liquid from it into a glass beaker. We repeated this maneuver several times until Holmes was satisfied; he knelt before the beaker and gazed at it for a long time before he spoke.

"A distillation of nicotine," he breathed. "An evil mystery. The essence of death, as lethal as cyanide, and yet I cannot live without it." Hungrily inhaling the remaining steam from the pot, he closed his eyes and went into a reverie from which I knew he would not emerge that night.

In the end, I did well at my chemistry levels.

Our acquaintance faded naturally as I went to seminary and Holmes to Oxford. Upon my ordination, I was posted across the water to the diocese of Charleston and lost track of him. I heard from some old boys that Holmes had left his studies to become a kind of "mender" of delicate problems for the aristocracy; and now, a mender was precisely what I needed. If anyone had a delicate problem, I did, and I could hardly wait until the morning to telegraph to England and inform him of the particulars.

Since I had no idea of Holmes's address, I wired the old rector at Stonyhurst for it, who obligingly inquired of Sherlock's brother (a heavy-boned, intimidating older boy we had known only as Big Mike), who in turn sent me the address of a convent pensione in Rome.

Rome! By a remarkable act of Providence, I was already booked to sail for Rome the following week. Sister Carolina, the nun who had created for me such a knotty problem, had decided to go into the cloister and wanted to make a pilgrimage to Rome before disappearing forever under the veil. My bishop asked me to accompany her, a request I accepted eagerly, for I had never been to Rome, and my heart was captivated at the thought of praying at the See of St. Peter, my patron!

Now I had an even more pressing reason for my pilgrimage: to find Holmes. If I had only known what a strange and dangerous journey lay ahead of me, I might have declined the bishop's request and stayed at home in Charleston to face my problem there. But as I reflect on it, I believe now that it was meant to be — and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

ROME

Enraptured by the late sun on a quiet piazza, we came at last to the address in Rome wired to me by the brother of Sherlock Holmes. Our little carrello stopped in front of a convent that looked as old as Christianity itself, the walls fissured like cobwebs and a Gothic window black with the smoke of centuries. I thought it was charming, and Sister Carolina tried to make agreeable noises, but I could tell it was just an old pile of plaster to her.

So this was our destination. After we had spent so many days tumbling on the ocean, in and out of one raucous Continental port after another, the fountain and flowers in this little square calmed and warmed my heart. Sun-browned children cooled themselves in the water, and a bony old priest in Roman hat and cassock hobbled round the corner in a sweat. Still, Sister shivered with autumn cold even though buried under heavy black robes and gloves. I hoped she would be able to rest here.

Abruptly, that hope was shattered, as was the Gothic window over our heads.

We both screamed as the glass exploded with a sharp retort. Green, blue, and red splinters blasted us like pellets from a shotgun. The children screeched, there were loud shouts from inside the building — but most startling of all, the lean old priest sprang into our carriage and seized the reins from the driver.

Shocked, I shouted at him to stop, but the priest whacked at the horse and we were off at full speed. All at once we were chasing a bizarre figure dressed in a peaked cap and a white silk gown, who vaulted from nowhere across our view and dashed into a side street.

As he ran, the muscular fellow tore at the silk and swept the cap from his head. Shreds of silk caught at us; the cap hit the horse full in the eyes. The animal leapt backward with a panicked scream. The priest struggled to control it, and the horse was off again in pursuit of the man who was now streaming tatters of white cloth as he ran.

We nearly overturned as we bowled into the busy Via Cavour. I was yelling "stop" at the priest and the priest was yelling "stop" at the man in tattered silk. Sister Carolina was a soundless, bouncing jumble of black habit, her face blanched and eyes tight shut. Baffled by the dusty traffic of omnibuses and carrelli, the priest urged the horse on mercilessly but in vain. The runner mixed with the crowd thronging the Termini, the grand new depot of Rome, and by the time our carriage reached it, the portals of the station had swallowed him up.

The old priest brought the wagon to a halt and stared bleakly at the crowd, oblivious to us. I saw to Sister Carolina, who waved me away faintly, and then slapped him on the shoulder. I was angry. I didn't care if he understood English or not.

"What is the meaning of this? What do you think you're doing, Padre? Are you mad?"

He continued searching the crowd.

"There is a respectable religious woman in this carriage who has just had the fright of her life! I demand you get out of it and leave the reins to the driver."

For his part, the driver was still hanging on, his old head down, sobbing and gripping the seat with both hands.

Then the priest slowly turned his glaring eyes on me.

"Tuck!" he whispered. He grabbed my hand hard, almost as a warning. "Calm yourself."

I couldn't understand what I was hearing. Tuck? No one had called me Tuck in years.

"It is I," he breathed in my ear. "Holmes."

"Hol-!" I almost shouted his name, but he held up a stern finger.

It was Holmes!

'Quiet!" he murmured. "You must not speak my name. Sit down and we will have this noble Roman charioteer return us whence we came." I stared in shock at him: The disguise was perfect — he had transformed himself into the very model of an Italian cleric, with cavernous cheeks and just the right touch of shrewd sanctimony in the eyes, a man of twenty-five who looked three times his age.

I settled back in the carriage and whispered to Sister Carolina, who was holding her gloved hands over her eyes and barely breathing. "It's all right. We're returning to the convent now." Holmes sat in silence next to the still skittish driver, who turned the carriage round reluctantly and never took his eyes off Holmes all of the way back to our destination.

Roman police were standing about the entry to the convent as a monumental nun swept shards of glass and stone away from the door, shrieking all the while in unintelligible Italian at no one in particular. We descended from the carriage, I paid the driver (a little extra, for he looked terribly queasy), and he brought down the baggage while the baffled police tried to decide whether to stop us or let us through. One constable with impressive mustaches stepped forward as if to question us, but the nun recognized Holmes.

"Signore, avanti, avanti." She ushered Holmes through the door. To the officer she shouted "Via!" and he stumbled backwards. Then noticing us, she gestured us toward the door and cried "Thees-a-way!" Then she slammed the door behind us.

It was cool and dim inside, for which we, in our hot, sweat-sullied clothes, were most grateful. Holmes introduced us to the giant nun.

"This is Sister Ugolin. She will see to you." Abruptly he turned and went back out into the piazza.

Sister Ugolin snorted. "It is always so with him," she said in forceful English, took hold of Sister Carolina's elbow, and guided us through the dark hall toward a reception room.

"Seester will stay in the 'ow-you-say cloister, and you, Padre, will be in a cella for the uomini" — she glanced up at my confused face — "thee room for thee men," she shouted at me as if I were deaf.

Taking stock of my bedraggled companion, she cooed "Oh lapovera seester," embraced her, released her, and then hugged her even tighter against her vast bulk. I thought she was going to cry. For her part, Sister Carolina was in a daze. It had all been too much.

Clucking like a plump chicken, shouting promises about tea and riposo mixed with imprecations about la finestra (the broken window), Sister Ugolin herded us along to our rooms. Mine was a yellowish stone cell with a cot, but clean and quiet and supplied with a large white basin of fresh water, which, liberally rubbed on my dusty body, enlivened me considerably. Then I sat on the cot in my drawers and wondered what had just happened to us.

I had not known what to expect when encountering Holmes again, but this welcome was more striking than anything I had imagined. It's true that at school I was known as "Tuck." We often played at Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and because of my liking for food and drink I was "Friar Tuck" (I ran on the sturdy side, so the name fit). Everyone had nicknames, usually ironic — there was "Rhomboid" Fotheringale, so called because he was no good at maths, and "Ickle-Pretty" Gower, as homely a face as the Creator ever made. I believe even Holmes had a nickname for a time — "Soapy," of course, because of his lack of hygiene.

But why the elaborate fancy dress, and the exploding window, and the wild dash across the city after a man in a silken gown and a dunce hat? What was all that, then? And where on earth was that giantess with the tea?

A knock came at my door. It was Holmes, still in his disguise, although he was no longer hunched over with "age." He put his finger to his lips and motioned for me to follow him. I dressed and we slipped out across the square and behind a decrepit house across from the convent. We glanced up at a rope ladder that hung from the roof, but what really took our attention was a curious machine lying in pieces on the ground. Holmes picked up the pieces and expertly re-assembled them into what looked like a small cannon.

Holmes murmured, it seemed mostly to himself, "A Girardoni air rifle, created by a Tyrolean clockmaker a century ago and carried by the Americans Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition to the Pacific Ocean. The Germans call it the Windbixel — it is silent, potent, and deadly."

I whistled, as much at Holmes's display of knowledge as at the vile contraption itself.

"So someone climbed up on the roof and fired this thing at the stained-glass window? But why?"

"Because the shooter knew it was my lodging." Holmes responded quietly.

"They were trying to kill you?"

"I don't believe so." He hesitated. "The motive is deeper than that."

"And that motive would be?"

Holmes said nothing — he was still examining the gun minutely.

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Excerpted from "The Tartleton Murders"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Breck England.
Excerpted by permission of Mango Media, Inc..
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