The Darlington Substitution (From The Deed Box of John H. Watson MD) Read online

  THE DARLINGTON SUBSTITUTION

  From the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD

  An untold Adventure of

  Sherlock Holmes

  Discovered by

  Hugh Ashton

  Front Cover

  Original image Hugh Ashton

  © August 2012 Hugh Ashton and

  Inknbeans Press

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgement to Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. For permission to use the Sherlock Holmes characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Also by Hugh Ashton and published by Inknbeans Press:

  Tales from the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD

  The Odessa Business

  The Case of the Missing Matchbox

  The Case of the Cormorant

  More from the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD

  The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness

  The Mystery of the Paradol Chamber

  The Giant Rat of Sumatra

  Secrets from the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD

  The Conk-Singleton Forgery Case

  The Enfield Rope

  The Strange Case of James Phillimore

  The Bradfield Push (print edition only)

  &

  Tales of Old Japanese

  Keiko’s House

  Haircuts

  Click

  Mrs Sakamoto’s Grouse

  The Old House

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Doctor John H. Watson, late of the Indian Army, whose friendship with the great detective Sherlock Holmes, and whose keen eye for description have given the world so much pleasure for so long.

  FOREWORD

  by Jeff Pearce

  I’VE always remembered a generous comment that John Jakes made about his place in literature, specifically when it came to historical fiction. Jakes is less popular these days, but for quite a while in the 1970s, you could find his paperbacks in every drugstore spin rack and on display tables of every bookshop. He soared up the bestseller charts with chronicles of his Kent family in Revolutionary and Civil War America. Now whatever you might think of his fiction, Jakes at least never gave himself airs, admitting, “Gore Vidal is a Mercedes. I'm a Vega.”

  His ultimate point was that both will take you where you want to go.

  I feel the same way about Hugh Ashton. He has been meticulously building Rolls-Royces for a while now, or if we want to change the metaphor to something more era-appropriate, he’s been lovingly restoring a fleet of hansom cabs, all carrying Sherlock and Watson to new stops. He’s braver than I am. For my novels, I’ve been getting by, swiping the odd pony left at a hitching post.

  You see these novels take work. The only thing I’ve found harder than writing historical fiction is writing history itself, which involves back strain as you hunch over source texts next to your keyboard. You must, quite literally, stop and check for each line that what you’re writing is true. Sure, with historical fiction, your hansom cab (or Mercedes, or Vega) must make a hard left and venture into the unconfirmed territory of the imagination. But you better have things plausible when you arrive.

  Hugh has proved himself a fan of my alternate history novel, Reich TV, but while I researched and checked and double-checked, I still shoehorned certain details to fit my narrative. Not many, mind you, but I did fudge a couple. Technically, that’s cheating. You can get away with this for “alternate” history, but even for historical novels, and I’ve done my share, I will move my chess pieces where I need to and push events a little bit... that way. My way.

  Gore Vidal hasn’t fudged things—most of the time (and when he does, he admits it, as he notes in Lincoln or his other novels). And neither does Hugh Ashton. To join him on one of his journeys in late 19th century Britain is to be enveloped in the smoke of the trains at King’s Cross Station and to feel the atmosphere of a grand manor sitting near the harsh and cold country near the Scottish border.

  But imagine the double duty of not only trying to capture an historical period, but to capture the voice of one of the most famous and influential authors in the world who wrote in that period? And this is where Hugh’s horsepower takes him swiftly past me in the race. I’ve had fun bringing Josephine Baker back to life, have dug through Paul Robeson’s astonishingly powerful and unapologetic blasts to the Red-baiting committee in the U.S. Congress, and I’ve offered a friendly wave to Hugh in passing as both he and I try to re-animate the most famous Nazi leaders, each of us using them to jump-charge plots of very different books. But could I write in say, Dylan Thomas’s style or pour out the lean, scaled-back prose of one of my own favourites, Erich Maria Remarque? Not me, not brave enough. Oh, no, not a chance!

  To read The Case of the Darlington Substitution is to hear Watson’s voice—to rediscover Doyle’s style. That’s no small feat for any novelist.

  And it’s an ambitious, possibly even courageous choice. After all, Sherlock has never gone away, not ever. As early as 1899, he was on the New York stage, and we’ve seen every possible re-imagining of him in books and films ever since, some of which are entertaining and some which are downright awful. We’ve had Sherlock at the worst of his drug addiction treated by Sigmund Freud. We’ve had Sherlock meeting Dracula, Sherlock meeting Jack the Ripper, Sherlock as a fool with a smarter Watson, all the way back to Jeremy Brett’s stately Holmes on British TV, kept strictly to the Canon.

  If you’re a fan, like I am, you’ve gone and sampled many of them. Sitting in the auditorium of the Winnipeg Art Gallery for its weekly film fests, I got to see the old Basil Rathbone films that put Holmes in a modern (well, modern for 1942) Blitzed London. Thirty years later, here we are with Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss once again moving our consulting detective to a modern time in the TV show, Sherlock. Take your pick of Sherlocks. You can watch Benedict Cumberbatch, or you can watch Robert Downey Jr. have a go, but frankly, I think of the Guy Ritchie franchise as “Sherlock Lite.” Never mind historical accuracy, the two movies in the series barely bother to have our detective do any detecting at all; he’s too busy with “buddy banter,” action sequence antics and visual gags. Instead of a Vega, we’ve been whisked off in a go-cart.

  This all makes Hugh Ashton’s efforts far more rewarding. The pace is how it should be, and from the windows of his hansom cab, the view is more interesting... and far less blurred. I asked Hugh what he thinks makes his Sherlock stand apart from others.

  “I stick very closely to the Canon,” he answered simply. “I try to keep Holmes and Watson in character. And I try to have a good reason why the stories were not published before... I also try to build on the characters of Holmes and Watson. Rather than simply take [Doyle’s] characters and jerk them around like marionettes, I try to get into their skin and make them more alive.”

  I think he’s done better than mere re-animation. With Hugh holding the reins, the cab has taken us b
ack to the sitting room in Baker Street, where he’s already made sure the furniture is in its old places. Mrs. Hudson knows enough to bring us our tea and telegrams, and instead of a thunderous soundtrack that tells us what to feel in Dolby sound, or even the clever keypad tapping of Benedict Cumberbatch’s mobile phone in the BBC series, we have the pleasant and familiar violin of our hero. Here in our cloud of blue pipe-smoke, the room is familiar yet somehow refreshingly new.

  And so we’ve arrived, just in time for a case to unfold. Don’t wait on me, go on in. I’ll be along in a minute. Hurry now, the game’s afoot!

  Jeff Pearce is the author of close to twenty books, including works of history, current affairs and more than a dozen novels, such as Reich TV, The Karma Booth and Bianca: The Silver Age.

  Editor's notes

  I believed that the deed box containing the untold adventures of Sherlock Holmes as recorded by Dr. Watson had been emptied of all items of interest. Some of the “cases” described therein were little more than lists of names, dates and places, presumably rough jottings for future expanded descriptions.

  There were, however, several other cases written out in full, which will require extensive editing before they can be released to the world. Watson appears to have been sadly lacking in concentration when some of these were written. Some paragraphs appear to be missing, some events are described twice in the same adventure, and so on.

  As a result, I was about to lay the deed box to one side, after emptying it of all the papers, and removing the small particles of sealing wax and so on which had accumulated within the box. On turning it upside-down to accomplish this, I was astonished when what I had supposed to be the bottom of the box proved to be false, and fell to the ground. A thick envelope had been concealed under it, sealed with the now familiar impressions of the SH and W signet rings, and marked on the front in what I can only assume to be Sherlock Holmes’ sprawling, but at the same time splendidly legible, writing, “The Darlington Substitution Case”.

  Need I say that I was excited by this discovery? Of all of Holmes’ cases, there are only four that Watson described at great length, and of those, both A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear both contain a long digression in which the scene shifts to America. Even The Sign of Four contains a lengthy back-story that moves the action outside the main body of the case. I was therefore fully expecting to discover another such tale which, while interesting in its own right, would perhaps not have excited the same attention as a full-length account of a case, such as the Hound of the Baskervilles, which focussed its attention on Sherlock Holmes.

  The title was, naturally, familiar to me. In the case that Watson entitled A Scandal in Bohemia Holmes explains, “In the case of the Darlington substitution scandal, it was of use to me,” referring to his claim that the instinct of a woman in the event of a fire is to go to and protect the thing that she values most. It will be remembered that in the former case, he had Watson throw a small incendiary device to “smoke out” (if the pun may be excused) Irene Adler’s photograph of the King of Bohemia.

  Holmes also employed a deliberately set fire as a device in The Norwood Builder, and in A Scandal in Bohemia, he also refers to “the Arnsworth Castle business” where he used the stratagem. Without wishing to accuse Holmes of outright pyromania, it must be admitted that he appeared to have a predilection for this trick, which nonetheless appears to have produced the desired results in most instances.

  And in this case, which to my delight I discovered to be concentrated on Holmes, and which sheds new light on his character, as well as that of Watson, the ruse worked once again. The adventure is surely one of the more thrilling of Holmes’ exploits, and he finds himself up against one of the most dangerous adversaries in his career. The touch of superstition and sorcery here is in some ways reminiscent of his adventures on Dartmoor in pursuit of the Hound of the Baskervilles, but his opponent is more cunning and dangerous than Stapleton ever proved to be. Holmes, however, is more than a match against his adversary, and holds his own admirably.

  Watson, though, has several embarrassing moments that it must have cost him dear to set down, and which are almost certainly the reason for the concealment of this adventure for so long. Once again, we are made almost painfully aware of the double standards of morality in the Victorian era, with the middle class, as represented by Watson, standing for what we now refer to as “Victorian values”, and the aristocracy having their own rules, which seem amazingly free and easy, even by today’s relaxed standards.

  For those unfamiliar with the British system of nobility and titles, a few words of explanation are necessary. Although the son of a British lord is not a member of the nobility in his own right, he is allowed to use a secondary title of his father, should such a thing exist. His son in turn is permitted to use the third title of his grandfather. In this case, the Earl of Darlington, who was addressed as Lord Darlington, and was also be referred to in that way, also held the title of Baron of Hareby, and his son was therefore addressed and referred to as Lord Hareby. Another title he held was that of Baron of Wittingford, and Hareby’s son therefore became Lord Wittingford. The rules are complex, but it appears that Watson has largely followed the correct procedures in his references to the family.

  An additional note is necessary with regard to Watson’s reporting of the spoken words of those with whom he came in contact. It is to be feared that whatever skills he may have possessed in the relating of the adventures he shared with his friend, and his undoubted expertise in the presentation of the facts appertaining to the cases, John Watson unfortunately appears to have suffered from a “cloth ear” when it comes to reporting speech.

  In this particular adventure (and not this one alone), he often appears to have set down the meaning of the words that he heard, rather than the actual words themselves. Occasionally, though, he seems to have added a little phrasing or vocabulary to distinguish speakers of an English that differs from the “standard” middle-class English spoken by Holmes and himself. Even in the latter case related to the major players in these cases, however, it is hard to believe that Holmes or Watson spoke the exact words as recorded here (or in other adventures). The words that Watson put into the mouths of those characters featured in his accounts who hail from other regions or social classes are likewise often somewhat unlikely.

  Even so, there is a certain charm attached to Watson’s rendition of the speech of the characters in the adventures he describes, and it would be presumptuous of me to attempt any changes to this. As Holmes remarks in The Lion’s Mane, “how much he [Watson] might have made of such a wonderful happening and my eventual triumph”, showing that Holmes himself, however much he may have deprecated Watson’s sensational accounts of his (Holmes’) exploits, was not immune to the spells that his friend’s narratives could cast over those who read them.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to all who have assisted in making this book what it is.

  First and foremost, all my readers, and my Facebook and Twitter friends. The support and encouragement I receive on an almost daily basis is a spur to my efforts to produce tales of the greatest fictional detective ever which will satisfy those who have known and loved Sherlock Holmes since their childhoods, and those who are coming to 221B Baker-street for the first time.

  Once more, Jo, the Boss Bean at Inknbeans Press, provided encouragement and advice. The book is all the better for her eyes and ears.

  And Yoshiko, my wife, who continues to support me in my quest to reconstruct Victorian London from a small town a little south of Yokohama.

  Part I - The Mace of Succession

  Chapter 1: Lord Darlington of Hareby Hall

  OF all the adventures I experienced with my friend Sherlock Holmes, one of the most intriguing was that in which we found ourselves involved at the behest of the late Earl of Darlington.

  Holmes had recently returned from a visit to the Continent, about which he remained close-lipped, which in my experience be
tokened a commission executed for some powerful patron, when Mrs. Hudson brought up a telegram.

  “It’s reply-paid, sir,” she said to Holmes. “Will there be an answer?” She waited patiently as Holmes ripped open the envelope and perused the contents.

  “There will be an answer, Mrs. Hudson,” he informed her, scribbling a few words on a sheet of notepaper and handing it to her. “Thank you.”

  “What was that?” I asked, as our landlady made her way downstairs. “Are you at liberty to provide me with details?”

  “I suppose that I am free to tell you all I know of the business, which is virtually nothing.” He passed the telegram over to me, and I read the words, “WISH TO RETAIN YOUR SERVICES ON BIZARRE MATTER. TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES IF MISHANDLED. ALFRED DARLINGTON.”

  “The use of the term ‘bizarre’ within a telegraphic communication is in itself somewhat bizarre, I feel,” I commented. “What was your answer?”

  He smiled. “How could I resist such an appeal? Naturally, I accepted. The reply was addressed to his club, so I would expect to see him here in person in a very short space of time.”

  “Have you no ideas regarding this?”

  “None,” he replied simply. “The Earl is one of the most respected members of the House of Lords. He has served with distinction in several Cabinets, and I can recall no breath of scandal or anything that could reflect adversely on him, other than that unfortunate affair some years ago, where I was able to exonerate his distant cousin, who had been accused of some peculation involving the funds of a company of which he was director. That was too commonplace to be termed bizarre, and I would hardly foresee tragic consequences arising from it. Have you any knowledge of his family or his background?” Holmes asked me. “I know that you follow these society matters closer than do I.”