Unsure of how to take his apt description of me, I asked, “But what has that to do with ashes?”
“Oh, Poppy, use your brain - it’s slightly less ordinary than the average person’s! It’s about observation! One can identify the kind of cigar by the ash or butt left behind. For example, do you know what the ash of a bird’s eye looks like?”
“I don’t know what a bird’s eye is, Sherlock.”
He sighed. “Of course, you don’t. Because you have a limited knowledge of the habits of men. Victor did not smoke, did he?”
I winced at the reference to Victor Trevor. That was still - and I feared always would be - a wedge between us. Sherlock would always feel that he had betrayed Victor, his only friend, by caring for me, and I think he also felt he could not trust me because I had once been very close to Victor but turned my affection to Sherlock almost the instant I met him. No matter how many times I explained that Victor and I were not betrothed, that he had not asked my father for my hand, and there was no marriage contract, Sherlock felt he had come between us.
“No,” I said. “Victor does not smoke. Well, he may now that he is in India. I don’t know.”
“So, well, bird’s eye,” Sherlock continued, “is a tobacco in which the mid-rib, which is slightly woody, is fermented along with the lamina, whereas in most tobaccos the mid-rib is removed before fermentation. When you smoke it, it produces a pattern of circular dots and its ash is like a white fluff.”
He showed me another ash. “This one is called honeydew.”
“Surely it is not made from honey.”
“No, but honey, like rum or whiskey, can be added to tobacco after it is cured. Perhaps in my twilight years, I shall oversee a tobacco farm and raise bees and experiment with adding fresh honey to various tobaccos.” His eyes were a vacant stare, as if at the age of twenty-four, he was actually pondering retirement.
“Honeydew. Sherlock you were saying-”
“Oh, yes, quite. Honey gives tobacco a different flavor and prevents it from drying out. Now, our friend Oscar was kind enough to give me this opium ash,” he said, pointing to one of the coloured plates. “I also have some opium for smoking in a water pipe. It looks like chopped spinach. And this is a true opium pipe,” he added, taking some odd-looking implements from beneath the counter. “It is designed for vaporization and inhalation. In other words, it allows the opium to be vaporized while being heated over a special oil lamp. Like this one,” he said, pointing.
I picked up the pipe. It had a long stem, a ceramic bowl and a metal fitting called, Sherlock told me, a ‘saddle’ through which the pipe bowl plugs into the pipe stem.
“Why is the bowl detached from the stem?”
“One must scrape the insides clean of opium ash after several smoking episodes.”
“Is it made of bamboo, the stem?”
“Good eye, Dr. Stamford. Yes, it is. But they often come in ivory, silver and jade. Generally, however, bowls are fashioned by combining yixing clay and blue and white porcelain.”
“Yixing?”
“A type of clay found only in certain areas of China. Mr. Brown has an interest in Chinese artefacts and I’ve seen him smoking a pipe very similar to this one.”
I was slightly acquainted with Mr. Brown, one of St. Bart’s apothecaries, because he was often deep in conversation with my uncle when I visited Uncle Ormond at the hospital. He was an odd little man who kept an array of trinkets in his little pharmaceutical area. He had completed medical school, but he had never passed his examinations. He seemed more interested in studying birds than in mixing medicines, and Uncle often said he was surprised the man hadn’t been sacked.
I put the pipe down. “I do not like to think of poppies this way,” I said. “I like flowers, particularly those given to me on special occasions.”
Our eyes met, both of us remembering the early morning hours after we’d spent the night together; Sherlock had gathered wildflowers and left them for me to wake up to the scent and the dizzying colours.
“And I don’t like my nickname linked to a drug.”
“It’s a harmless substance, Poppy.”
“I disagree.”
“It simply opens the mind a bit and lets one escape from the dull routine of living,” he insisted.
“That’s not how you felt that time when we went looking for Oscar in that opium den, Sherlock. And living isn’t dull. It needn’t be.”
He thought a moment. “You are too harsh. After all, opium, cocaine, morphine, laudanum... they are all legal.”
“They have side effects. We have seen them. People use them as a panacea for everything from toothaches to labour pains, I know, but it can lead to a kind of drug mania, a narcotic addiction. Promise me you will not indulge.”
“I am a practical man, Poppy. I would indulge in nothing that would interfere with my work or cloud by judgment. Nothing,” he said again for emphasis.
“Now, here,” he said, stepping to the end of the counter. “We have a collection of pipes.”
“You will have quite the abundance of choices when you encounter a three-pipe problem, won’t you?”
“Quite so. This one is rather old. A clay pipe. Here is one made of brier and this one is made of cherry wood. The type of pipe that one smokes has some effect on the remaining ash, I believe.”
That lesson in ashes and pipes continued for most of the afternoon, but still, I could not tear myself away from him. I never could.
7
I put memories of that lesson in ashes and thoughts of Sherlock aside as I entered the Café Restaurant Nicols, later known as the Café Royal, on Regent Street. This was a favourite of Oscar
