The Line Between

He left me the recipe for salt wine, too. I burned it. I'd wanted to buy up the stock and pour every bottle into the sea — giving it back to the merrows, you could say — but the family wouldn't sell, not to me. Heard they sold it to a German dealer, right after I left Goa, and he took it all home to Berlin with him. Couldn't say, meself.

I seen her a time or two since. Once off the Hebrides — leastways, I'm near about sure it was her — and once in the Bay of Biscay. That time she came right up to the ship, calling to me by name, quiet–like. She hung about most of the night, calling, but I never went to the rail, 'acos I couldn't think of nothing to say.

it it it

Mr. Sigerson

I'm very proud of this storywritten for Michael Kirland's anthology Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Tearsbecause it's my first mystery tale, and so far the only one.

I love reading mysteries, all sorts, and envy their authors almost as much as I envy musicians. I'd give a great deal to have the special mindset that creates a good mystery plot, and then peoples it with characters whom the reader feels don't draw their existence only from the plot. I'm no Holmes expert (though I've known the stories from childhood, and read them all aloud to my children); but I felt I knew the man well enough to chance presenting him through the eyes of a narrator who not only doesn't worship his brilliance but doesn't particularly like him. As much as anything I've done recently, I truly enjoyed being that crotchety, sardonic concertmaster, who admires Sherlock Holmes solely for his musical gifts, and to hell with the rest of the performance.

My name is Floresh Takesti. I am concertmaster of the Greater Bornitz Municipal Orchestra in the town of St. Radomir, in the Duchy of Bornitz in the country of Selmira. I state this only because, firstly, there is a centuries–old dispute between our ducal family and the neighboring principality of Gradja over boundaries, bribed surveyors, and exactly who some people think they are; and, secondly, because Bornitz, greater or lesser, is quite a small holding, and has very little that can honestly be said to be its own. Our national language is a kind of untidy Low German, cluttered further by Romanian irregular verbs; our history appears to be largely accidental, and our literature consists primarily of drinking songs (some of them quite energetic). Our farmers grow barley and turnips, and a peculiarly nasty green thing that we tell strangers is kale. Our currency is anything that does not crumble when bitten; our fare is depressingly Slovakian, and our native dress, in all candor, vaguely suggests Swiss bell–ringers costumed by gleefully maniacal Turks. However, our folk music, as I can testify better than most, is entirely indigenous, since no other people would ever claim it. We are the property of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, or else we belong to the Ottomans; opinions vary, and no one on either side seems really to be interested. As I say, I tell you all this so that you will be under no possible misapprehension concerning our significance in this great turbulence of Europe. We have none.

Even my own standing as concertmaster here poses a peculiar but legitimate question. Traditionally, as elsewhere, an orchestra's first violinist is named concertmaster, and serves the conductor as assistant and counselor, and, when necessary, as a sort of intermediary between him and the other musicians. We did have a conductor once, many years ago, but he left us following a particularly upsetting incident, involving a policeman and a goat — and the Town Council has never been able since to locate a suitable replacement. Consequently, for good or ill, I have been conductor de facto for some dozen years, and our orchestra seems none the worse for it, on the whole. Granted, we have always lacked the proper — shall I say crispness ? — to do justice to the Baroque composers, and we generally know far better than to attempt Beethoven at all; but I will assert that we perform Liszt, Saint–Saens, and some Mendelssohn quite passably, not to mention lighter works by assorted Strausses and even Rossini. And our Gilbert & Sullivan closing medley

almost never fails to provoke a standing ovation, when our audience is sober enough to rise. We may not be the Vienna Schauspielhaus, but we do our best. We have our pride.