A Toss Of A Card
At Leinster Gardens, in His Last Vow, Sherlock beckons Mary Watson into his hiding place when she asks him if he owns the empty house.
"Hmn. I won it in a card game with The Clarence House Cannibal. Nearly cost me my kidneys. But fortunately I had a straight flush," Sherlock dismisses.
So not only was he on good terms with Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, he is also adept at poker: a sharply observant quip and non comic line that gives dialogue flow through the scene, and which this story picks up on.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
A Toss Of A Card
"I know this a boring question for you but I have to ask. Go on - tell me how you did that?"
Greg Lestrade hunched his shoulders, glared a bit then grinned a bit. And Sherlock Holmes twitched a dismissive shoulder in response, rammed his fists down into the pockets of the Belstaff and just said:
"No idea what you're talking about."
John Watson took his hands out of his own jacket pockets, flailed about in mock despair. Said:
"Just do it again. We're fascinated."
Sherlock Holmes sighed as if sorely put upon by lesser minds. And reached out for a beermat.
The three of them were standing in the now quiet saloon bar of The Hand In Glory public house, having just overpowered a bank robber with a sawn off shotgun and a determination not to be captured, even when cornered over at the dart board by two police constables and a very noisy police dog.
The two officers of the law backed away swiftly when they saw the gun, and that was when Sherlock Holmes brushed past them muttering something that sounded like:
"…Oh for God's sake, let's just get on with it…."
And stepped forward into the room closely followed by Lestrade and Watson.
"Give up, Montgomery. The odds are against you, and if you shoot any of us you'll go down for life instead of three to five."
The shotgun lifted, the robber snarled some reply - then fell backwards as if shot, dropping the gun and landing on the ground with blood pouring from his face. The two constables could not believe their luck and rushed forward, hauled Martin Montgomery to his feet and found he had a beer mat sticking out of his cheek.
While Sherlock Holmes was standing a little to one side looking more than usually nonchalant and smug.
"A beermat? As a lethal weapon? A beer mat!"
"Well, that is actually an urban myth; it has been scientifically proved that although a beer mat can effect injury, it really does not have the density or tensile strength to ki….."
"Just show us," Lestrade said in that familiar tired and oh-not-again voice, as he blocked the doorway and intimated that Sherlock Holmes was going to have to demonstrate a party trick before being allowed to escape the saloon bar.
The consulting detective shrugged, tutted and gave a little pout, but picked up the nearest beer mat, barely paid any attention to what he was doing - it appeared - then nonchalantly flicked his wrist - so the square of card flew through the air and embedded itself by one corner into the darts board.
"Very impressive," smirked Lestrade.
"Or just a fluke?" Watson challenged.
With one superior lift of an eyebrow Holmes glanced at Watson, picked up the other three beermats on the table and fired them rapidly and in turn at the darts board. The four pressed cardboard mats quivered on the board, all impaled by one corner into the cork within the space of two square inches.
"You sure that doesn't constitute handling a deadly weapon?" Lestrade queried mildly.
"Just a misbegotten youth," was the reply.
o0o0o0o
It had all started so very simply.
At any and every school some things remained true. And one was that all sports, hobbies, and activities all had their times and their fads across the school year. Marbles, elastic skipping, magic, tiddlywinks, football cards, hangman, sudoku.
At thirteen, the great game in all the common rooms for most of that particular year was poker. Sherlock Holmes did not like games. He thought them a waste of time and mental energy. More fun - much more fun - to analyze chemicals, learn another language, practise the violin, research the history of forensic medicine and how many innocent men had been falsely convicted on the so called infallible evidence of Sir Bernard Spilsbury.
And anyway, he hated having to be in the common rooms at all. Mixing with other people; his peers. Children!. Enduring their presence, their chatter; their attention eventually and always turning towards him to tease, criticise, annoy, nitpick, bully.
He preferred it when they just snubbed him. At least that left him in peace.
He had been unaware when the rage for poker had begun. Young teenage boys trying to be grown up and cool, and latching on to the very grown up and racy card game that smacked of wine, women and song, chilled anti heroes, stacks of chips on a green baize table in a smoky room. Cowboys and gangsters and detectives and molls. The aura of the game was irresistible. To all but Sherlock Holmes.
"Oh, come on, Holmes! Join in with something, won't you?" Carpenter had spotted him slide quietly into the room on the orders of the house master ('Mix with people, Holmes!') and called him across to the table of boys by the mullioned window. Sherlock drifted across out of something that was not quite politeness but a desperation to keep the peace, for once..
"Yes, come on, play with the big boys!" jeered Redding.
"Too adult for you, is it?" posited Hendry.
"No. Just not interested," Sherlock drawled. "Betting in any form is for mugs, and I deplore games."
"Too common for you, eh? " asked Joubert, bored and dismissive. The two had never got on. If Holmes could be said to actually get on with anyone.
"Not at all. Just strikes me as a waste of time. Better things to do."
"How the ignorant scoff at what they cannot comprehend," Redding commented as he dealt the cards. The other players smirked.
"Read that in a book, did you?" Sherlock asked quietly, and watched his class mates ears go red. "Oh do continue, chaps," he added. "I'm happy to just watch."
He leant a hip against a bookcase and crossed his arms. But his still and silent attention seemed to disturb the players, because they kept shooting him swift sideways glances.
Eventually his concentration and keen observation revealed that Redding was dealing his cards oddly. And from the bottom.
"I say: I know it looks awfully clever. But is it the done thing to deal from underneath the pack rather than the top?"
It had been asked in all innocence, but it caused a fracas, gained Sherlock Holmes a black eye, a black mark against his house, and detention. Not that he minded detention, for it meant he could be on his own doing extra study. With no-one hassling him about it.
But it did not make him any more popular with his schoolmates. It just gave them another thing to beat him over the head with. So he was glad when term ended and he was able to get some peace, just forget school, and be best ignored by almost everyone for eight weeks.
o0o0o0o
He took the problem to his elder brother the following week, when he joined Sherlock at home from Oxford; just for a couple of weeks before taking up a brief study visit to Venice. Mediaeval armour and armaments, fourteen days field trip. To be followed by a whirlwind visit to six great Italian museums and an intensive language study course.
Sherlock was not impressed at the idea, but Mycroft was always off doing something unusual in the holidays, and he was used to it.
However, the brothers came together then for two harmonious weeks, playing music together, walking the estate, and Mycroft found himself deeply amused to be teaching Sherlock the basics of playing poker. And Hazard and Chemin de Fer. Because he could already play gin rummy and patience, and these new ones were more adult and socially acceptable card games for a young man.
"Growing up if you are playing poker, little brother," Mycroft reflected.
"I don't want to, really," Sherlock protested. He thought the game a bit silly and obvious, but the mathematics were impressive, and the rules were simple at heart, yet challenging when played with intent. "It's just one of those boring social niceties things."
"Like social etiquette, recognising a hock glass from a claret, being able to tie a Windsor knot…." hummed Mycroft, teaching the most elegant way to deal cards.
"I still don't see the appeal," Sherlock hummed.
"Neither do I, really," Mycroft confided. "But you can make a lot of money playing poker. And it is an interesting skill for establishing social standing."
"But why?"
Mycroft shrugged, unable to explain the unexplainable.
It just is," he said. And went off to pack for Marco Polo Airport and Venice.
o0o0o0o
Neil Grady was bored. He had read his newspaper from cover to cover, had forgotten to bring a book and the meeting between his boss and Mr Holmes was going on much longer than originally expected. He would definitely remember a book tomorrow. But sitting around and just waiting was the lot of the private chauffeur. So he waited.
He was sitting on the little used doorstep of the butler's rooms of the Surrey country house, smoking a cigarette and enjoying the sunshine and the solitude.
The noises of the bustle in the house were nothing to do with him, so he was able to rifle three empty beer cans from the dustbin and do a little desultory target practise.
The sound of hooves approaching did not interrupt him either, but indicated the boy was coming back. Neil didn't have any time for posh rich kids, and the tall slim boy who had squeezed past him on his way out of the house dressed in regular old fashioned poncey riding gear did not impress him much either: all gangly limbs, wild dark hair, cheekbones and prominent Adam's apple. The boy didn't speak either, just ducked past.
So when he returned, and got off with an impressive and old fashioned army dismount that involved swinging forward over the horse's shoulder, legs up and back, clicking the heels together behind him on the way down and landing light as a feather by the side of the black horse, Neil could tell it was not a manoeuvre done to impress him, just the way the boy often did it out of the pleasure of the thing.
Then he took the horse into a stable, closed the door. There was the rhythmic swinging sound of the horse being groomed, and the boy put the saddle and bridle on a rack by the stable door before fetching food and water.
And all the time Neil concentrated on knocking over the beer cans. Picking them up, knocking them over again. Well, it passed the time.
He eventually realised the boy was watching him, quietly but with concentration.
"Hiya," murmured Neil with a nod, not pausing.
"How do you do that?" asked the boy, watching the cans being knocked down simply by the touch of a playing card flying past it. "It appears to be more skilful than it looks."
Neil looked up, and properly at the boy for the first time. He wasn't being sarcastic, or dismissive. There was a little frown crinkled over the nose, and intense concentration in the pale grey green eyes.
"It's just a knack," Neil explained. And could not resist adding: "But well spotted. Want me to show you?"
"Yes, please," said the boy and stepped forward.
So the two sat on the stone step and Neil Grady showed Sherlock Holmes how to throw cards. The exercises to strengthen his wrists to master the deft flick that could drive a card 100 yards, snap pencils in half, travel up five stories of a building, or impale a card into a book or a wall or a person. How to knock down items with cards -such as empty beer cans, to start with, but then bigger and heavier objects like bottles and boxes.
"It's all knack and physics," Neil explained. And the boy - who was a scientist by inclination, and an enquiring mind by nature - was absorbed.
Neil discovered that the boy's bony wrists were already strong, from riding horses, playing the violin. So he took to card throwing like a natural.
He learnt more than how to make cards fly and sing that day. He learnt the skill that went into the smallest movements, the strength and finesse of the tiniest release of muscle power, the great force that can be released with practise and concentration, from calm relaxation into an explosion of power simply through physical tension. That less can be more.
"See, Sherlock, card tricks are fun in themselves, but even better for the good old PD."
"What's PD?"
Neil Grady grinned.
"Are you popular at school, Sherlock? Daresay not, with a name like that."
"No. But it has nothing to do with my name."
"Yeah, thought so. Bit of a clever dick, are you?"
"Unfortunately so."
"Never apologise for being clever. Or being different," Neil ordered, wagging a stern finger.
And Sherlock nodded. And smiled a little. Because no-one had ever said anything like that to him before. And it made him feel a little bit special, for once. And not just different and unlikeable, as usual. But special. For a change.
"PD stands for Psychological Domination. And that, my son, means the world. It means the advantage you get for yourself over other people by doing absolutely nothing."
"How?" the boy breathed.
"Body language, the way you stand, the way you walk into a room. You do these things as if you have a right, as if ordained. You do nothing at all, yet you will have people in the palm of your hand before you even say a word. And that, I can tell you, is the greatest advantage of all."
Sherlock Holmes smiled a slow and winning and understanding smile.
"How do you know this?" he asked, voice breathy, eyes fascinated.
"My dad was a vicar," Neil Grady said simply. "I would watch him be all meek and mild six days of the week, then on Sunday transform into a giant when he got into the pulpit and shook the world. And I loved to see my dad do that. I learnt that lesson early, and all the better because he had no idea he blossomed in that way.
"When I left school I went into the army. Learnt to be the voice of authority, even when I was terrified myself. Which is where I learnt about PD and cards. Went on to be an actor - that's what I do when I get the chance. When I'm not driving a car for a living.
"So I know how to convince people. Reassure them, impress them, use themselves against themselves. But for good, not for evil. Remember that. Using those skills for good will do more to change you and the world than anything else."
The boy nodded and unconsciously began flexing his wrist muscles in the way he had just been taught, but absently, as if he was thinking.
"I understand. I like to observe things. People. Get into trouble for it sometimes."
He flashed a look at Neil Grady. But saw nothing in the man's face except a rueful sort of understanding. So told him about the poker problem at school. And about not knowing how to deal with it.
"My brother has just taught me to play poker. So I know the basics. But I still don't see the attraction."
The chauffeur laughed. Gathered up the deck of cards he had been throwing at the cans and formed them into a pack. As he did that he began manipulating the cards. Shuffling and shaping them, riffling them, making them into long flowing cascades that danced between his hands and held Sherlock mesmerised.
And as he performed what he told Sherlock was cardistry, he talked.
"Poker is the ultimate card game, Sherlock. Because it is life. When you play poker you don't play the cards, you play the person. Because in poker you can win the game with the weakest hand of cards. Because it is not the cards themselves that are the winning thing - but what you do with them. "
He shuffled the cards. Chose a card and showed it to Sherlock. Said "Nine of diamonds." With every shuffle the nine of diamonds disappeared back into the pack. But however many times the cards whirled and reformed himself, Neil Grady could always say: "Nine of Diamonds" and produce that card from it's place; from the place where he knew he had put it.
Sherlock watched with fascination; and was all ears.
"Poker is war - players only pretend it is a game. If you are playing poker and you can't tell who has the weakest hand, panic, because that means it's you. Poker takes a day to learn and a lifetime to master. You can't change the cards you are dealt, but you can change the cards that you play. Not just cards. Life lessons, Sherlock."
He picked a dandelion head from a tiny weed growing in a crack. Spit on it, stuck it to his forehead. The boy watched, amused and transfixed. And the man laughed.
"Don't watch what I do. Watch what I don't do. There is a saying between lady poker players - 'you watch my tits, I'll take your chips.' See?"
All the cards Neil Grady now placed in front of Sherlock Holmes had all changed from the ones he had first seen; and yet the boy had not noticed.
"I wasn't paying attention," he breathed. "I was looking in the wrong place. You distracted me."
"You got it," the chauffeur laughed. "Never allow yourself to be distracted - see? Poker teaches self reliance, self respect, a way of looking. But I think you already have that way of looking. I think you were born with it."
Sherlock Holmes looked up at Neil Grady as if his eyes were full of sunshine.
"I've just learnt so much," he said.
"Not yet," was the brief reply. "You have a lifetime to learn it all. It's just a state of mind."
"My state of mind."
"Yes."
After the meeting ended, and the visitor and the limousine was gone, Sherlock Holmes crept into the games room and found himself the newest pack of cards in the cupboard and took them to his room.
At quiet times and at the end of the day he practised tricks, and throws, and strengthening his wrist. He had never entertained himself so much and so fruitfully on his own without a violin or a chemistry set.
The skills he was introduced to that day opened a door to his heart and changed his life.
Cards were everywhere - almost everyone had a pack; borrowed from a pub, they could earn him a meal or a handful of silver when he was living on the streets. Could earn him a living in clubs and dark corners as a young man, before detection became his vocation.
He made contacts and skills playing cards. Neil Grady had been right - poker was life and card sharping was the skill and the finesse and the manipulation of it. Abilities that bled into real life.
And he won at poker. He won the house at Lauriston Gardens that became his first bolthole and his refuge,
He won other things too. Other places. (But they remain no-one else's knowledge or business. So you will just have to take my word on that) A racehorse once. And Silver Blaze turned out to be quite a winner.
Once, being able to fling cards into a gunman's face had saved his life. Another time flicking a credit card into another man's wrist had stopped a hand grenade being thrown. A cascade of cards that came out of nowhere broke up a life threatening stand off. And flicking a beer mat into the face of Martin Montgomery had saved himself, Watson, Lestrade, two coppers and a police dog.
And if anyone ever complained of what they might describe as his poker face, his impassivity, his skill at schooling his features into unrevealing blankness, he gave himself an inward little smile.
And he remembered that hazy summer afternoon of school holidays and considered how much that had changed his life.
For he had returned to school happier and with more confidence the following term. He had resisted the challenge to play poker for two whole weeks. So that when he did, everyone thought they knew what would happen: that Sherlock Holmes would be shamed into finally playing a hand of poker, and would lose all his pocket money for the entire term.
Instead, he finally sat down to play, and calmly accepted the poor hand he was intentionally dealt from the bottom of the pack. Looked at al the boys he hated, who hated him, and who planned to wipe the floor with him and take all his money.
Watched Redding deal from the bottom of the pack - just as before - yet did not challenge it this time. Played around the dealer. Using his observational skills and impassive face. Using the skills and the tricks Neil Grady had taught him. And had developed further with his own innate skills of observation.
Steadily and stealthily he turned his poor hand into a winning hand. Remained gently smiling, quiet and calm and unruffled, and turned the fifty pence coins in front of him from three into a reasonable pile.
Watched his tormentors torment themselves and lose.
At the end of the game he turned over his winning hand and scooped the pot. Because he had won the game by the old PD and a poker face, not from his weak hand. He had endured while the other around him folded. And the tiny smile they played at the corners of his mouth turned for just a few seconds into a serious grin. For once, he felt, it was allowed.
Gathered the cards together then and riffled the pack with understated professional skill. Demonstrated one hand shuffles and waterfalls almost as if doing something absentminded,
The boys around the table whose pocket money had disappeared watched in stunned silence….and the silence spread around the room as all the other boys looked up from their books and their conversations, and watched too. But not a word was said.
Finally he stacked and then spun the deck under his thumb to fan them out, and flung the entire deck into the waste paper basket at the other side of room - one by one - with a series of fast and accurate flicks that reduced the silence in the room to a state of suspended breathing.
Which was when he discovered not only the power of the cards, but the full force and power of his own personality.
And after that, nothing was ever quite the same.
But only then did he stand up and put his winnings into his blazer pockets, where they bulged and weighed him down.
"As I told you last term," he said with unarguable finality. "I don't play poker. It is a waste of time. Gambling is for mugs and I have better things to do. So don't ask me again."
They didn't. And he was as glad as he was relieved.
The winnings bought him a new bow for the violin. But he never told Mycroft about learning how to really play poker, and what it meant. Not until years afterwards.
That was after he had accidentally seen Neil Grady on television while flicking through channels one evening. Playing a magician in a successful television series that was apparently hugely popular and had made the chauffeur he had known into a TV star. .
"I know that man," he told Mycroft. Who slanted a dubious eyebrow his way.
So Sherlock told his brother what he had been learning at home all those years ago while Mycroft was learning about art in Venice.
Mycroft was relaxing in what they still thought of as John Watson's old overstuffed Victorian armchair, glass of brandy elegantly held in curved long fingers. Sherlock was curled in his grey Bauhaus chair, hands arched and folded under his chin in a characteristic pose.
"I believe there is a saying that a poker player shows his greatness by the hands he folds, not just the hands he plays." Mycroft looked and commented. And he gazed very pointedly at his brother,
Sherlock chuckled a little.
"We are both so terribly good at poker, brother mine."
"Indeed so," responded Mycroft. "In our different ways."
"What's that old poker saying about when you are thrown to the wolves you come back to lead the pack?"
"Quite so," agreed Mycroft. "And we have both proved that point, I think."
They retreated back into companionable silence and returned to the challenge of who could build the highest house of cards on the coffee table.
"Simple pleasures," declared the winner.
Which was just before John Watson breezed in with a brown carrier bag of take-away Chinese meals for three and brought the delicate houses of cards down in his wake.
"Big kids!" he chided as he hunted for plates and cutlery and the brothers gathered up the cards from the floor and divided them back into their two packs.
And as he did so he threw over his shoulder:
"Hey, you know that trick you did throwing beermats in that pub yesterday? When the guy with the sawn off shot gun was arrested? Well; Lestrade is in the pub with the rest of his team teaching them all to do it now. 'Cos he says you never know when such a skill may save a life…."
The brothers exchanged rueful glances.
"I should never have gone to Venice that summer," Mycroft Holmes remarked in no direction in particular. "More useful skills can be learnt closer to home."
"Indeed. And no skill learnt is ever wasted. Did I ever tell you how I learnt to sex tortoises?" enquired the younger brother helpfully.
"No. Nor do I want to know," his elder brother replied tartly. "Some things are best by remaining a mystery."
"I can skim prawn crackers. If that skill is any help?" John Watson asked. And demonstrated. His audience was not impressed.
"That was a lie then," reflected Sherlock Holmes. "Obvious in view of the random puffiness and shape of a cracker depending upon it's response to heat in the cooking process."
"Oh, you are both such cards," Mycroft exclaimed. Almost helpfully.
They all grinned like small boys at each other at such an obvious quip and finally relaxed after a hectic day solving crime and running the country.
Sherlock Holmes looked heavenwards, muttered something about 'life in Baker Street is so exciting' and just for once concentrated on his number twenty seven with rice.
END
Authors notes:
Second only to a Royal Flush, a Straight Flush is almost the highest winning hand in poker. It consists of five cards of the same suit, all in sequence, eg four, five, six, seven, eight and nine of hearts.
The art of throwing and flying cards - and other aspects of cardistry - can be found on YouTube.
To see cardistry at it's best, watch the movies Now You See It and Now You See It 2 starring Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman. Relevant excerpts from both are also on YouTube.
The Hand Of Glory is an ancient public house name derived from the folk belief that the then pickled left hand (the sinister one) taken from a hanged man will not only render a burglar invisible, but also open all doors - especially if tallow fat rendered down from the rest of the body is used to make candles to be held by the hand of glory's fingers. A real hand of glory can be seen in Whitby Museum. North Yorkshire, England. A hand of glory is mentioned in Harry Potter and The Ingoldsby Legends, and by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877- 1947) was the father of forensic science. He had a remarkable reputation, and was pathologist in some of the most famous murder cases of the C20th, including Crippen and The Brides In The Bath. His dominant personality made him appear invincible, and yet for 20 years before his death some experts were questioning his methods and conclusions. and therefore whether or not the right man hung. But he did invent 'the murder bag' and performed thousands of autopsies. He committed suicide in his laboratory at University College, London. And, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, his mistress and assistant was named Molly Cooper - That's a 'C; not an 'H'!
Reflections on psychological domination courtesy of the great Willie Garvin.