The Empress of India Read Free

adventures together. If it wasn’t for Holmes my life would have been—what?—an endless series of sore throats, upset stomachs, and broken bones, with the occasional incurable disease thrown in to remind me of how little we doctors actually know. My wife taught me to love, and Holmes gave me relief from boredom and tried to teach me how to think; it is not for me to say how well he succeeded. There is much I owe both of them.
    Perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes after Holmes had disappeared down the hole, there was a rushing sound, and a torrent of water passed in the tunnel beneath me. It was only brief moments later when I heard the shrill blast of a police whistle reverberating below. Holmes was in trouble! I immediately blew on my own whistle and, when a constable came running up, explained the situation to him as best I could, urged him to get help, and plunged down into the tunnel below.
    I was soon joined by several uniformed constables and then by Inspector Giles Lestrade of Scotland Yard and several of his men. We searched well into the night, but found nothing, no trace of Holmes’s presence, no hint of what might have happened to him, except that after several hours one of the constables found, on a ledge some distance down a side tunnel, a police whistle attached to a short silver chain.
     
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    There has been no further sign of him, no word from him, and no hint of what might have happened to him until yesterday, when a constable noticed a beggar wearing an inverness coat several sizes too large for him. On inspection, it was shown to be Holmes’s own coat, and the sack coat and trousers the man had on beneath the Inverness were those Holmes had been wearing when we left the house that day. The man claimed he had found the garments this past Saturday in a dustbin on Newgate Street, some considerable distance away from the spot where Holmes disappeared.
    So Holmes did not drown in that underground torrent. Which is on one hand a relief, and on the other a great mystery. Why did he not return home? Who removed his clothes, and why? If one of his enemies caught up with him and did away with him, where is his body? If he is still alive, where is he being held, and again why?
    I have been unable to sleep pondering these questions. It is now six in the morning of Monday, the tenth of February, and I am about to dress and await the arrival of Holmes’s brother Mycroft, who sent me a message yesterday that he would come by this morning with two Scotland Yard detectives.
    I try to be hopeful. I can only hope that time will provide an answer, and I can only pray that the time is brief.

CALCUTTA
     
    A thousand tymes have I herd men telle
That ther ys joy in hevene and peyne in helle,
And I acorde wel that it ys so;

But, natheless, yet wot I wel also
That ther nis noon dwellyng in this contree,
That eyther hath in hevene or helle ybe . . .

—Geoffrey Chaucer
     
    E ast is East, strange and mysterious and slow to change, and West is most definitely West, and during the closing years of the nineteenth century there was little chance of their meeting. Bumping shoulders, crossing swords, shouting epithets, ruling and submitting, perhaps, but they made no pretense of understanding each other, and they seldom sat down anywhere as equals. Yet they mixed and mingled in almost unseemly intimacy throughout the vast, febrile reaches of the Indian subcontinent; mainly in the great cities, where the British Raj ruled, administered, taught, and imposed its will on Her Majesty’s teeming multitude of Hindu, Muhammadan, Jainist, Christian,Buddhist, Parsi, Animist, Zoroastrian, and other assorted subjects. And the greatest of these cities was Calcutta. Some visitors found it the richest city they had ever seen, and wrote glowingly of its riches, its magnificence, and its multifarious wonders. Some found it the poorest place on earth, and wrote angrily of overcrowding, poverty, filth, and ignorance.
    And both were