by Andrew Lane
Wandering through the woods, he eventually found himself emerging on to a road – whether it was the one that led to Holmes Manor or a different one he could not tell. It curved away from him in both directions, making it impossible to work out where he was. He sat down by the side of the road and waited. Eventually, he reasoned, a cart would pass by, and he could ask for a ride.
It was late afternoon. Where did he want to go – the Manor House or town? After a few seconds he decided that going back to the Manor House would just expose him to an afternoon of boredom. The town sounded more interesting.
The first ten or twelve carts that passed by were all heading in the same direction, and they were all stacked up with boxes, crates and canvas sacks. The faces of the drivers and their passengers were fearful. Sherlock wasn’t sure, but he had a feeling they had heard about the two deaths and were heading out of Farnham, getting as far away from the possible plague as they could. He didn’t even bother asking them for a ride: the looks on their faces suggested that they wouldn’t be favourable towards him. In the end it was perhaps half an hour later that he heard the rattling of a cart’s wheels on the hard dirt surface of the road in the opposite direction to the one the other carts had come from. He stood up and waited for it to round the bend.
‘Excuse me,’ he called to the grey-haired, thin-faced driver. ‘Which direction are you going?’
The driver nodded his head slightly, indicating the road ahead. He didn’t bother looking at Sherlock, although he did at least pull on the reins to slow the single horse down.
‘Which way is Holmes Manor?’ Sherlock called up.
The man tilted his head and indicated the road behind with a slight jerk.
‘Can you take me to town?’ he asked.
The man considered for a moment, then jerked his head towards the back of the cart. Taking this to be a ‘yes’, Sherlock climbed in. The cart sped up as he did so, almost causing him to fall off again. Instead, he tumbled forward into a mass of straw.
The driver didn’t talk at all during the journey, and Sherlock found he himself had nothing to say. He spent his time thinking alternately about the dead man, the mysterious rider and the bizarre but engaging figure of Amyus Crowe. For a place that had appeared at first to be a hellhole of boredom, Holmes Manor and its immediate locality were turning out to be anything but.
His thoughts drifted to the story that Matty had told him about the dead body that had been carried out of the house in Farnham, and the strange cloud that Matty said he had seen floating out of the window. Sherlock had dismissed the story at the time – at least, the bit about the cloud – but now he was having second thoughts. If Amyus Crowe was right about diseases being caused by ‘minute creatures’ which could be transferred from person to person then was that what he and Matty had seen – a cloud of these minute, disease-causing creatures?
It didn’t make sense. Nobody had ever mentioned seeing these clouds of creatures before. Surely Sherlock and Matty couldn’t have been the only people to come across them? Something else was going on.
It was only when the cart juddered to a halt that he realized they were in Farnham. The driver sat as still as a statue, waiting for Sherlock to clamber off, and then set off again without a backwards glance while Sherlock was still fumbling in his pockets in search of some loose change, expecting to have to pay the man something for his trouble.
Sherlock looked around. He recognized the street: it was the main one that ran through the centre of Farnham. Up ahead was a large, square red-brick building surrounded by arches that Matty had told him was a grain store. He glanced around; the market town was going about its normal business, with people walking along and across the street, stopping at shop windows or at stalls selling pastries, talking with each other or minding their own business. A greater contrast to the dark solitude of the woods it would be difficult to find.
It might have been his imagination, but small knots of people appeared to be forming on street corners and outside shops. Their heads seemed to be bowed together, as if they were talking in lowered voices, and they were glancing at every passer-by with suspicion in their eyes. Were they talking about the possibility of plague in the village? Were they scanning every passing face for signs of swollen buboes or the red flush of fever?
Sherlock quickly ticked off the list of places where Matty might be found. At this time the market stalls were still an hour or two from closing, so there was little chance that he was lurking around hoping for fruit or vegetables to be thrown away in his direction, and according to the railway timetable that Sherlock had carefully memorized, in case he couldn’t stand it at Holmes Manor any more, there weren’t any more trains until the evening. Matty might, he supposed, be lurking outside one of the local taverns, hoping for the odd penny thrown by one of the drunken customers.
In the end, Sherlock realized that he didn’t have enough evidence to work out where Matty might be. As Mycroft had said: ‘Theorizing without evidence is a capital mistake, Sherlock.’ Instead, he made his way through the streets until he came to the place that Matty had pointed out to him – the house where the first man had died, and the cloud of death had crawled out of the window, up the wall and across the roof.
The building seemed abandoned. Doors and windows were tightly shut, and someone appeared to have nailed a sign to the door. Sherlock assumed that it was a warning that someone had died from a fever within. He felt conflicting emotions within himself: part of him wanted to go inside and take a look around, see if there were any traces of the yellow powder in there, but another part, a more primitive part, was scared. Despite the brandy-soaked handkerchief that he still had balled up in his pocket, he didn’t want to expose himself to possible contagion.
The door of the house opened a crack, and Sherlock moved back into the shadows of a doorway across the road. Who was in there? Was someone risking cleaning it up, or had someone moved in, or back in, regardless of the risk? For a few moments the door didn’t open any further, and Sherlock felt, rather than saw, a figure in the darkness beyond, watching. He pushed himself further back into the shadows, heart pounding although he didn’t know why.
Eventually the door opened further, just enough for a man to slip through. He was dressed in various shades of grey, and he glanced both ways along the street before slipping out. He carried a sack in one hand.
And the hand that held the neck of the sack was covered in a fine yellow powder.
Intrigued by the powder and by the man’s attitude, which indicated that he didn’t want to be noticed leaving the house, Sherlock watched as he followed the road around to where it joined a larger street. The man turned left. Sherlock waited a few moments, then went after him. He didn’t know what was going on, but he intended to find out.
There was something strangely familiar about the man. Sherlock had seen him somewhere before. He had a narrow, weasel-like face and prominent teeth that had been stained yellow with tobacco. And then Sherlock remembered – the man had been at Farnham station when he and Matty had been there. He had been loading crates of ice on to a cart.
The man’s path took him from one side of Farnham to the other. Sherlock stayed behind him all the way, ducking into doorways or behind other people if he thought the man was going to turn round. Eventually the stranger turned into a side road that Sherlock recognized. It was the one that he and Matty had been in earlier that day, where they had almost been run down by the carriage containing the strange pink-eyed man.
The man sidled along a high plastered wall, up to the wooden gates from which the carriage had emerged, and knocked – a complicated rhythm that slipped out of Sherlock’s mind even as he tried to memorize it. The gates creaked open and the man slipped inside. The gates closed again before Sherlock had a chance to see what was inside.
He looked around, frustrated. He really wanted to get a look over the walls to see what was inside, but he couldn’t see how. It was all connected together somehow – the two deaths, the mov
ing clouds, the yellow powder – but he couldn’t see the threads that made up that connection. The answers that he wanted could be behind that wall, but they might as well have been in China.
The sun was low and red in the sky. It wouldn’t be long before Sherlock needed to be back at Holmes Manor, getting cleaned up ready for dinner. He didn’t have long. Desperately, he looked around. Behind him, where the wall turned the corner, much of the plaster had crumbled away, battered over the years by passing carts and barrows and further eroded by rain. The rough brick exposed by the missing plaster might just be enough to give Sherlock a foothold, boosting him up on to the wall.
It was worth a try.
Without giving himself time to think, Sherlock slid along to the corner and looked around. Nobody was watching. He reached as high as he could, letting his fingers find a niche between two bricks, then scrabbled with his right foot to find an equivalent purchase. When he thought he was ready, he boosted himself up. The muscles in his legs flared with the sudden activity, but he wasn’t going to give up now. He threw his left hand up as high as it would go, and felt it catch the top of the wall. Holding on as tightly as he could, he brought his left foot up and then dragged it down the wall until it caught on something. He shifted his weight from his right foot to his left, hoping that the brickwork wouldn’t crumble away. It held, and he simultaneously pulled with his left hand and pushed with his left foot. His body scraped up the wall, and then miraculously he found himself lying flat out on the top of the wall, teetering on the edge of falling inside the yard that was revealed beneath him.
CHAPTER FIVE
From his position lying on top of the wall, Sherlock could see the entire yard spread out before him. There was nobody in sight. A single-storey windowless wooden building – more of a barn than anything else – dominated the ground, and the area around it had been left to dirt and weeds. Multiple wheel ruts linked the huge wooden doors at the front of the building to the gates in the wall. Some of them were barely more than scratches in the earth while others were deep and still filled with water from recent rain. Sherlock decided that carts or wagons were arriving at the barn lightly laden, making the shallow ruts, and leaving containing something heavy, causing them to sink deeper into the soft ground. But what was being stored or made in the barn, and was it somehow linked to the death of the man that Matty had seen, and to the yellow powder?
Sherlock swung a leg over the wall, preparing to lower himself to the ground, but a sudden scuffling made him pull back rapidly. Something dark and fast raced out of the shadows around the building on a blur of legs. Sherlock could see a large, heavily muscled head with tiny ears that were laid back along the skull and a small body covered with bristles. The dog didn’t bark at him, but growled instead – a deep, rasping sound like a saw biting into hard wood. Spittle dripped from its exposed teeth. It skidded to a halt just beneath the spot where Sherlock was lying and proceeded to watch him intently, shuffling from side to side on its stumpy little legs, tail held low.
He had to get into that barn. There was a puzzle here, and Sherlock hated unsolved puzzles. But the dog looked hungry and trained for aggression.
He looked back over the other side of the wall, where he had climbed up. Was there another way in? Improbable, and the dog would just follow him round, now it had his scent. Could he make friends with it? Not likely, certainly not without getting down from the wall, and the penalty for failure was too terrible to contemplate. He could find a loose brick or a large stone and drop it on top of the animal, but that seemed unnecessarily brutal. Could he drug it somehow? He supposed he could run back to Farnham Market and buy a chunk of meat with what little money he had, but then what?
He scanned the ground on both sides of the wall, looking for something that might help. In the corner where the wall met the ground, close to the gates, he spotted something like an abandoned fur hat. It was the dead badger that he’d seen earlier. Quickly he half-jumped and half-fell back down the wall and ran the few steps to where the badger’s body lay curled up. He picked it up. The fur was dry and dusty, and the body weighed almost nothing, as if whatever vital spark had fled when it died had actually had a mass. He could smell something rancid and disgusting. With a muttered apology he bent slightly, extended his arm and pitched the badger over the wall. Its stiff limbs splayed out as it flew, pinwheeling around. It vanished behind the bricks, and Sherlock heard a thump as it hit the ground. Seconds later came the sound he’d been hoping for: the rush of paws on dry earth and snarling as the dog got its teeth into the dead body. Sherlock quickly scrambled up the wall again and glanced over. The dog was holding the badger down with its front paws and was wrestling its body back and forth with its strong jaws, tearing chunks out of it. As he dropped down on to the ground the dog stopped abruptly, glanced suspiciously over at him, and then kept on pulling at the dead creature. Either it had decided Sherlock was its friend for giving it such a great toy to play with, or it was just saving him for later. Sherlock fervently hoped the former explanation was correct.
Quickly, before the dog tore the badger into fragments too small to be of interest, he sprinted across the yard and up to the barn. There was a side door set in one of the walls, and he opened it a crack. Silence and darkness. He pushed the door further open and slipped inside, closing it behind him.
It took a few moments for Sherlock’s eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they had he saw that the space inside the barn was illuminated by skylights. Sunlight shone in through the dirty glass, making diagonal pillars of light that appeared to hold the roof up in an illusory scaffold. The place smelt of old, dry earth and sweat, but underneath those smells was another one – something sweet and flowery. There were piles of boxes and crates in various places around the building, and across on the far side several men were loading them on to a cart. The man he had followed through Farnham was one of them. The canvas sack he’d been carrying had been thrown roughly to the ground nearby. A horse had been attached to the shafts of the cart, and was quietly eating hay from a nosebag that had been strapped to its head. A second cart was parked over to one side of the barn, its shafts pointing down and resting on the ground.
A pile of empty wooden crates lay in a rough stack nearby, and Sherlock moved silently over to hide behind them. He watched intently as the men stacked up the cart with what looked like the final load. They were cursing and jostling each other as they picked the boxes up and moved them one by one on to the cart. Judging by the dirt on their clothes and the sweat on their faces, they had been working like that for a while.
The man who Sherlock had followed through Farnham helped with the last box, then brushed his hands together and wiped them down his waistcoat as if he’d been working there all day. His hands left yellow stains behind as the dust – whatever it was – transferred to the coarse material. One of the other men – a big bruiser with a shaven head, tattoos that covered his arms down to the wrists like sleeves and a lit oil lamp hanging from a strap on his belt – glanced scornfully at him.
‘Enjoy your little excursion?’ he asked with mock interest.
‘Hey, I was workin’ too,’ the first man replied.
‘What’s the story with Wint’s gaff?’
The new arrival shook his head. ‘The Baron was right – ’e were taking stuff from us on the sly and tryin’ to sell it on. There was jackets and trousers all piled up beside ’is bed.’
‘Anyone see you?’
‘Nobody. I was like a rat.’
‘You got it all?’
The man nodded towards the canvas sack. ‘I collected it all together and put it in there.’
‘All right – throw that on the cart as well.’
As the newcomer went over to pick up the sack, his burly co-worker called after him: ‘Did you burn Wint’s gaff?’
The newcomer shook his head. ‘Didn’t see the need.’
The burly man shrugged. ‘You can explain that to the Baron when you see him.’
‘Hey, Clem – we’re not gonna use the other one,’ a man shouted, jerking his head towards the spare cart.
The burly man half-turned towards the gang of workers. ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Chances were we weren’t going to need it anyway, but the Baron don’t like to take chances. A cautious man, is the Baron.’ He turned back to the newcomer and pointed at the powdery yellow stains on the man’s waistcoat. ‘You got some of their stuff on you. Wint’s gaff’ll be contaminated too. The Baron’ll want it burned, just like he does this place. Get rid of any evidence.’
The newcomer looked down at his waistcoat. ‘What is this stuff?’ he asked.
His co-worker laughed with a sound that was a cross between a snort and a cough. ‘Best not to know,’ he said.
The newcomer looked at his hands. He glanced back at the burly man, and his face was suddenly pinched and white. ‘Hey, Clem, does this mean what happened to Wint’ll happen to me?’
Clem shook his head. ‘Not if you wash it off properly, like the Baron told us.’ He turned towards the other men, who were standing around talking now that the boxes had been loaded on to the cart. ‘All right, you lot – time to go. Martin and Joe – you’re with the cart. You know where to take it. Stouffer and Flynn – you head off after the Baron.’ He turned to the newcomer. ‘Denny, you and me’ll sort this place out. Burn it down. Place is so big that there’s no knowing what we might have left behind.’
The newcomer – Denny – looked around at the barn. ‘Do we have to?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Just think what we could do wiv this place once the Baron’s finished wiv it. Set up a business, maybe, or turn it into the biggest tavern in the area. We could have girls singin’, and dancin’, an’ everything. Seems a shame jus’ burnin’ it.’
Clem’s face contracted into a thunderous scowl. ‘You want to go and explain your little scheme to the Baron, you be my guest. Me, I’m gonna follow the instructions I was given.’
