The published compendium of the many adventures that I undertook in the company of Mr. Sherlock Holmes contains only a few of those occasions on which we entered a variety of service that no loyal subject of this realm may refuse. I refer to cases in which the calls to action were delivered by various government ministries or agents, but in which our true employer was none other than that Great Personage whose name has come to define an age herself, or her son, who has already displayed some of his mother's capacity for imprinting his name and character upon his era. To be plain, I refer to the Crown, and when I do, it must surely become more apparent why the greater portion of my accounts of such cases has come to rest - perhaps never to be removed or revealed - in the tin dispatch box that I long ago entrusted to the vaults of Cox's Bank in Charing Cross.
- From The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr
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