Young Sherlock Holmes: Death Cloud

by Andrew Lane

  After a while there were more houses lining the road and soon they were heading through a large town, the horses’ hoofs clattering on cobbles. Leaning out of the carriage window, Sherlock saw what looked like a guildhall – a three-storey building, all white plaster and black beams, with a large clock hanging from a bracket outside the double doors.

  ‘Farnham?’ he guessed.

  ‘Guildford,’ Mycroft answered. ‘Farnham is not too far away now.’

  The road out of Guildford led along a ridge from which the land fell away on both sides, fields and woods scattered about like toys, with patches of yellow flowers spreading across them.

  ‘This ridge is called the Hog’s Back,’ Mycroft remarked. ‘There’s a semaphore station along here, on Pewley Hill, part of a chain that stretches from the Admiralty Building in London all the way to Portsmouth Harbour. Have they taught you about semaphores at school?’

  Sherlock shook his head.

  ‘Typical,’ Mycroft murmured. ‘All the Latin a boy can cram into his skull, but nothing of any practical use.’ He sighed heavily. ‘A semaphore is a method for passing messages quickly and over long distance that would take days by horse. Semaphore stations have boards on their roofs which can be seen from a distance, and which have six large holes in them which can be opened or closed by shutters. Depending on which holes are open or closed the board spells out different letters. A man at each semaphore station keeps watch on both the previous one in the chain and the next one with a telescope. If he sees a message being spelled out he writes it down and then repeats it via his own semaphore board, and so the message travels. This particular chain starts at the Admiralty, then goes via Chelsea and Kingston upon Thames to here, then all the way to Portsmouth Dockyard. There’s another chain leading down to Chatham Dockyards, and others to Deal, Sheerness, Great Yarmouth and Plymouth. They were constructed so that the Admiralty could pass messages quickly to the Navy in the event of a French invasion of the country. Now, tell me, if there are six holes, and each hole can be either open or closed, how many different combinations are there which could signify letters, numbers or other symbols?’

  Fighting the urge to tell his brother that school was over, Sherlock closed his eyes and calculated for a moment. One hole could take two states: open or closed. Two holes could take four states: open-open; open-closed; closed-open; closed-closed. Three holes . . . He quickly worked through the calculation in his mind, and then saw a pattern emerging. ‘Sixty-four,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Well done.’ Mycroft nodded. ‘I’m glad to see that your mathematics, at least, is up to scratch.’ He glanced out of the window to his right. ‘Ah, Aldershot. Interesting place. Fourteen years ago it was named by Queen Victoria as the home of the British Army. Before that it was a small hamlet with a population of less than a thousand. Now it is sixteen thousand and still growing.’

  Sherlock craned his neck to look over his brother at what lay outside the other window, but from this angle he could only see a scattering of houses and what might have been a railway line running parallel to the road at the bottom of the slope. He settled back into his seat and closed his eyes, trying not to think about what lay ahead.

  After a while he felt the brougham heading downhill, and shortly after that they made a series of turns, and the sound of the ground beneath the horses’ hoofs changed from stone to hard-packed earth. He screwed his eyes more tightly shut, trying to put off the moment when he would have to accept what was happening.

  The carriage stopped on gravel. The sound of birdsong and the wind blowing through trees filled the carriage. Sherlock could hear footsteps crunching towards them.

  ‘Sherlock,’ Mycroft said gently. ‘Time for reality.’

  He opened his eyes.

  The brougham had stopped outside the entrance to a large house. Constructed from red brick, it towered above them: three storeys plus what looked like a set of rooms in the attic judging by the small windows set into the grey tiles. A footman was just about to open Mycroft’s door. Sherlock slid across and followed his brother out.

  A woman was standing in the deep shadows at the top of three wide stone steps that led up to the portico in front of the main entrance. She was dressed entirely in black. Her face was thin and pinched, her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed, as if someone had substituted vinegar for her cup of tea that morning. ‘Welcome to Holmes Manor; I am Mrs Eglantine,’ she said in a dry, papery voice. ‘I am the housekeeper here.’ She glanced at Mycroft. ‘Mr Holmes will see you in the library, whenever you are ready.’ Her gaze slid to Sherlock. ‘And the footman will transfer your . . . luggage . . . to your room, Master Holmes. Afternoon tea will be served at three o’clock. Please be so good as to stay in your room until then.’

  ‘I will not be staying for tea,’ Mycroft said smoothly. ‘Sadly, I need to return to London.’ He turned towards Sherlock, and there was a look in his eyes that was part sympathy, part brotherly love and part warning. ‘Take care, Sherlock,’ he said. ‘I will certainly be back to return you to school at the end of the holidays, and if I can I will visit in the meantime. Be good, and take the opportunity to explore the local area. I believe that Uncle Sherrinford has an exceptional library. Ask him if you can take advantage of the accumulated wisdom it contains. I will leave my contact details with Mrs Eglantine – if you need me, send me a telegram or write a letter.’ He reached out and put a comforting hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. ‘These are good people,’ he said, quietly enough that Mrs Eglantine couldn’t hear him, ‘but, like everyone in the Holmes family, they have their eccentricities. Be aware, and take care not to upset them. Write to me when you get a moment. And remember – this is not the rest of your life. This is just for a couple of months. Be brave.’ He squeezed Sherlock’s shoulder.

  Sherlock felt a bubble of anger and frustration forcing its way up his throat and choked it back. He didn’t want Mycroft to see him react, and he didn’t want to start his time at Holmes Manor badly. Whatever he did over the next few minutes would set the tone for the rest of his stay.

  He stuck out his hand. Mycroft moved his own hand off Sherlock’s shoulder and took it, smiling warmly.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Sherlock said in as level a tone as he could manage. ‘Give my love to Mother, and to Charlotte. And if you hear anything of Father, let me know.’

  Mycroft turned and started up the stairs towards the entrance. Mrs Eglantine met Sherlock’s gaze for a moment, expressionless, then turned and led Mycroft into the house.

  Looking back, Sherlock saw the footman struggling to hoist the trunk on to his shoulders. When it was safely balanced he staggered up the stairs, past Sherlock, who followed disconsolately.

  The hall was tiled in black and white, lined with mahogany, with an ornate marble staircase flowing down from the upper floors like a frozen waterfall with several paintings of religious scenes, landscapes and animals on the walls. Mycroft was just passing through a doorway to the left of the staircase into a room that, from the brief glance Sherlock caught, was lined with sets of books bound in green leather. A thin, elderly man in an old-fashioned black suit was rising from a chair that had been upholstered in a shade of leather that perfectly matched the colour of the books behind it. His face was bearded, lined and pale, his scalp mottled with liver spots.

  The door closed on them as they were shaking hands. The footman headed across the tiles to the bottom of the stairs, still balancing the trunk on his shoulders. Sherlock followed.

  Mrs Eglantine was standing at the bottom of the stairs, outside the library. She was staring over the top of Sherlock’s head, towards the door.

  ‘Child, be aware that you are not welcome here,’ she hissed as he passed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sitting in the woods outside Farnham, Sherlock could see the ground fall away from him towards a dirt track that snaked away through the underbrush, like a dry riverbed, until it vanished from sight. Over on the other side of the town, on the slope of a hill, a small castle ne
stled in the trees. There was nobody else around. He had been sitting so still for so long that the animals had grown used to him. Every so often there would be a rustling in the long grass as a mouse or a vole moved past, while hawks circled lazily in the blue sky above, waiting for any small animals stupid enough to emerge into an area of clear ground.

  The wind rustled the leaves of the trees behind him. He let his mind wander, trying not to think about the past or the future, just living in the moment for as long as he could. The past ached like a bruise, and the immediate future was not something that he wanted to arrive in a hurry. The only way to keep going was not to think about it, just drift on the breeze and let the animals move around him.

  He had been living at Holmes Manor for three days now, and things had not got any better than his first experience. The worst thing was Mrs Eglantine. The housekeeper was an ever-present spectre lurking in the deep recesses of the house. Whenever he turned round he seemed to find her there, standing in the shadows, watching him with her crinkled-up eyes. She had barely exchanged three sentences with him since he had arrived. He was, as far as he could tell, expected to turn up for breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner, say nothing, eat as quietly as possible and then vanish until the next meal; and that was going to be the shape of his life until the holidays were over and Mycroft came to release him from his sentence.

  Sherrinford and Anna Holmes – his aunt and uncle – were usually present at breakfast and dinner. Sherrinford was a dominating presence: as tall as his brother but much thinner, cheekbones prominent, forehead domed in front and sunken at the sides, bushy white beard descending to his chest but the hair on his head so sparse that it looked to Sherlock as if each individual strand had been painted on to the skin of his scalp and then a coat of varnish applied. Between meals he vanished into his study or to the library where, from what Sherlock could tell from scraps of conversation, he wrote religious pamphlets and sermons for vicars across the country. The only thing of any substance that he had said to Sherlock in the past three days had been when he had fixed Sherlock with an ominous eye over lunch and said: ‘What is the state of your soul, boy?’ Sherlock had blinked, fork raised to his mouth. Remembering Mr Tulley, the Latin Master at Deepdene, he said: ‘Extra ecclesiam nulla salus,’ which he was pretty sure meant: ‘Outside the Church there is no salvation.’ It seemed to work: Sherrinford Holmes had nodded, murmured: ‘Ah, Saint Cyprian of Carthage, of course,’ and turned back to his plate.

  Mrs Holmes – or Aunt Anna – was a small, bird-like woman who seemed to be in a state of perpetual motion. Even when she was sitting down her hands constantly fluttered around, never settling for more than a moment anywhere. She talked all the time, but not really to anyone, as far as Sherlock could tell. She just seemed to enjoy conducting a perpetual monologue, and didn’t seem to expect anyone to join in or to answer any of her largely rhetorical questions.

  The food, at least, was passable – better than the meals at Deepdene School. Mostly it was vegetables – carrots, potatoes and cauliflower that he guessed had been grown in the grounds of the Manor House – but every meal had some kind of meat, and unlike the grey, gristly and usually unidentifiable stuff that he had been used to at school this was well flavoured and tasty: ham hocks, chicken thighs, fillets of what he had been told was salmon and, on one occasion, big flakes carved from a glutinous shoulder of lamb that had been placed in the centre of the table. If he wasn’t careful he would put on so much weight that he would start to look like Mycroft.

  His room was up in the eaves of the house, not quite in the servants’ quarters but not down with the family either. The ceiling sloped from door to window to match the roof above, meaning that he had to stoop while moving around, while the floor was plain wooden boards covered with a rug of dubious vintage. His bed was just as hard as the one at Deepdene School. For the first two nights the silence had kept him awake for hours. He was so used to hearing thirty other boys snoring, talking in their sleep or sobbing quietly to themselves that he found the sudden absence of noise unnerving, but then he had opened his window in order to get some air and discovered that the night was not silent at all, just filled with a subtler kind of noise. From then on he had been lulled to sleep by the screech of owls, the screaming of foxes and the sudden flurries of wings as something spooked the chickens at the back of the house.

  Despite his brother’s advice, he had been unable to get into the library and settle down with a book. Sherrinford Holmes spent most of his time in there, researching his religious pamphlets and sermons, and Sherlock was scared of disturbing him. Instead he had taken to wandering in ever-increasing circles around the house, starting with the grounds at the front and back, the walled garden, the chicken coop and the vegetable plot, then climbing the stone walls that surrounded the house and moving to the road outside, and finally expanding outward into the ancient woods that nestled up against the rear of the house. He had been used to walking, exploring the forests back home, either alone or with his sister, but the woods here seemed older and more mysterious than the ones he was used to.

  ‘For a townie you really can sit still, can’t you?’

  ‘So can you,’ Sherlock responded to the voice behind him. ‘You’ve been watching me for half an hour.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Sherlock heard a soft thud, as if someone had just jumped down from the lower branches of a tree on to the ferns that covered the ground.

  ‘There are birds perching in all the trees except for one – the one you’re sitting in. They’re obviously frightened of you.’

  ‘I won’t hurt them, just like I won’t hurt you.’

  Sherlock turned his head slowly. The voice belonged to a boy of about his own age, only smaller and stockier than Sherlock’s lanky frame. His hair was long enough to reach his shoulders. ‘I’m not sure you could,’ he said as calmly as possible under the circumstances.

  ‘I can fight dirty,’ the boy said. ‘And I got a knife.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve been watching the boxing matches at school, and I’ve got a long reach.’ Sherlock eyed the boy critically. His clothes were dusty, made of rough cloth and patched in places, and his face, hands and fingernails were dirty.

  ‘School?’ the boy said. ‘They teach boxing at school?’

  ‘They do at my school. They say it toughens us up.’

  The boy sat himself down beside Sherlock. ‘It’s life that toughens you up,’ he muttered, then added: ‘My name’s Matty. Matty Arnatt.’

  ‘Matty as in Matthew?’

  ‘I suppose so. You live up at the big house down the road, don’t you?’

  Sherlock nodded. ‘Just moved in for the summer. With my aunt and uncle. My name’s Sherlock – Sherlock Holmes.’

  Matty glanced critically at Sherlock. ‘That’s not a proper name.’

  ‘What, Sherlock?’ He thought for a moment. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Do you know any other Sherlocks?’

  Sherlock shrugged. ‘No.’

  ‘What’s your dad’s name, then?’

  Sherlock frowned. ‘Siger.’

  ‘And your uncle? The one you’re staying with?’

  ‘Sherrinford.’

  ‘Got any brothers?’

  ‘Yes, one.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Mycroft.’

  Matty shook his head in exasperation. ‘Sherlock, Siger, Sherrinford and Mycroft. What a bunch! Why not go for something traditional, like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?’

  ‘They’re family names,’ Sherlock explained. ‘And they are traditional. All the males in our family have names like that.’ He paused. ‘My father told me once that one branch of the family originally came to England from Scandinavia, and that’s where those names come from. Or something like that. “Siger” could be Scandinavian, I suppose, but the others actually sound to me more like place names in old English. Although where “Sherlock” comes from is a complete mystery. Maybe there’s a Sher Lock or a Sh
eer Lock on a canal somewhere.’

  ‘You know a lot of stuff,’ Matty said, ‘but you don’t know much about canals. There’s no Sher Lock or Sheer Lock that I’ve ever come across. So what about sisters? Any silly names there?’

  Sherlock winced, and looked away. ‘So, do you live around here?’

  Matty glanced at him for a moment, then seemed to accept the fact that Sherlock wanted to change the subject. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘for the moment. I’m kind of travelling.’

  Sherlock’s interest perked up. ‘Travelling? You mean you’re a Gypsy? Or you’re with a circus?’

  Matty sniffed derisively. ‘If anybody calls me a ’Gyp-tian I usually punch them. And I don’t belong to no circus, either. I’m honest.’

  Sherlock’s brain suddenly flashed on something that Matty had said a few moments earlier. ‘You mentioned that you didn’t know any Sher Lock or Sheer Lock. Do you live on the canals? Does your family have a barge?’

  ‘I’ve got a narrowboat, but I ain’t got a family. It’s just me. Me and Albert.’

  ‘Grandfather?’ Sherlock guessed.

  ‘Horse,’ Matty corrected. ‘Albert pulls the boat.’

  Sherlock waited for a moment to see whether Matty would go on. When he didn’t, Sherlock asked: ‘What about your family? What happened to them?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s one way to find things out.’

  Matty shrugged. ‘My dad was in the Navy. Went off on a ship and never came back. I don’t know if he sank, or stayed in a port somewhere around the world, or returned to England and didn’t bother with the final few miles. My mum died a few years back. Consumption, it was.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘They wouldn’t let me see her,’ Matty went on as if he hadn’t heard, staring ahead into the distance. ‘She just wasted away. Got thinner and paler, like she was dying by inches. Coughing up blood every night. I knew they’d be coming to put me in the poorhouse when she died, so I ran away. No way I’d go into the Spike. Most people who go in there don’t come out again, or if they do they don’t come out right in the body or in the head. I took to the canals rather than walk cos I could get further away in a shorter time.’