by Andrew Lane
Sherlock glanced down at his plate. He had eaten enough kedgeree to keep him going for a while, and he wanted to go back to Farnham and see whether Matty was around. ‘May I be excused, sir?’ he asked. His uncle nodded, saying, ‘Amyus Crowe asked me to tell you that he will be back at lunchtime to continue your studies. Make sure you are here.’ His aunt might have worked an answer into her continuing monologue – it was difficult to tell. Sherlock stood and headed for the door, but a sudden thought held him back.
‘Aunt Anna?’ he said. His aunt looked up. ‘Did you say that the man who died had previously worked for an Earl or a Viscount?’
‘That’s right, dear,’ she said. ‘In fact, I recall that—’
‘Could it have been a Baron?’
She paused for a moment, thinking. ‘I believe you are right,’ she said. ‘It was a Baron. I have the letter somewhere. It was only—’
‘Do you remember his name?’
‘Maupertuis,’ said Aunt Anna. ‘His name was Baron Maupertuis. Such a funny name, I thought. French, obviously. Or possibly Belgian. He didn’t write the references himself, of course; they were written by—’
‘Thank you,’ Sherlock said, and left while she was still talking.
He shivered as he walked into the hall. Surely this couldn’t be a coincidence? Two men dead, both apparently killed in the same way, one of them associated with a gang of thugs working in a warehouse in Farnham which was owned by a mysterious ‘Baron’ and the other having recently left the employment of a ‘Baron Maupertuis’. There couldn’t be two Barons associated with this business, could there? The owner of the warehouse, the strange man who Sherlock and Matty had seen leaving in the carriage, that had to be Baron Maupertuis. And if the man whose dead body Sherlock and Amyus Crowe had discovered in the woods had previously worked for Baron Maupertuis in a clothes-making factory, was that factory based at the warehouse in Farnham? And did that mean that the things that the now-dead Wint had supposedly stolen from the warehouse – the things that Clem and Denny had talked about – were clothes?
It felt to Sherlock as though lots of jigsaw pieces that had been floating around in his mind had suddenly connected together. The picture wasn’t clear yet – there were still some pieces missing – but it was all beginning to make a strange sort of sense.
Knowing about the factory, the clothes, the Baron and the dead men, Sherlock could make some deductions based on the information he had. It wasn’t quite guesswork, but he could come up with some likely theories. For instance, two men associated with a clothes factory had died, apparently of smallpox or plague. Did that mean the clothes themselves were somehow contaminated? Sherlock had a feeling, picked up by things he had read in his father’s newspapers, that most cloth was manufactured in the mill towns of northern England, Scotland and Ireland, but some, he knew, was imported from abroad – China, if it was silk, and usually India for muslin or cotton. Perhaps a batch arriving at a British port from one of these foreign countries had been contaminated by disease, or was infested with insects that might carry the disease, and the workers at the factory had become infected. It was a possible explanation, and Sherlock felt a pressure, an urgency to tell someone. His immediate thought was that he could tell his uncle, but he dismissed that idea straight away. Sherrinford Holmes might be an adult, but he wasn’t very worldly and he would probably dismiss Sherlock’s theory instantly. Sherlock’s heart fell momentarily. Who else was there?
And then he remembered Mycroft. He could write everything in a letter and send it to his brother. Mycroft worked for the British government. He would know what to do.
He could feel the knot of worry in his chest loosen slightly at the thought of the reliable, dependable Mycroft, but then it occurred to him to wonder what exactly Mycroft was going to do. Abandon his work and rush down to Farnham to take charge of an investigation? Send in the Army? More likely he would just send a telegram to Uncle Sherrinford, which took Sherlock back to square one again.
Sherlock walked out of the house and into the morning light, pausing for a moment to savour the air. He could smell woodsmoke, and new-mown hay, and the faint musty odour of the brewery in Farnham. The sun was just rising above the tops of the trees, catching the leaves and haloing them with gold, casting their long shadows across the lawn towards him like outstretched fingers.
There was another shadow there – a moving one. He traced it back across the lawn to the wall that separated the house and its lands from the road. There, on the other side of the wall, was a figure on a horse. It appeared to be watching him. As he held his hand up to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun, the rider spurred the horse on. It trotted away along the road, vanishing behind a high hedge.
Sherlock walked towards the main gates. The rider and the horse were gone, but if he was lucky there might be a hoof print, or something that the rider had dropped, that might enable him to identify them.
There was no hoof print and no dropped item, but Sherlock did find Matty Arnatt sitting by the gates. He had two bicycles with him.
‘Where did you get those from?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Found ’em. Thought you might want to take a ride. It’s easier than walking, and we can go to more places.’
Sherlock gazed at him for a moment. ‘Why?’
Matty shrugged. ‘Got nothing else to do.’ He paused, and looked away. ‘Thought about casting off, taking the barge down the canal a-ways, but that just means starting again in a new town – working out where to get food and stuff. At least here I know people. I know you.’
‘All right. I could do with some exercise. My muscles are stiff after yesterday.’
‘What happened yesterday?’
‘I’ll tell you while we cycle.’ Sherlock looked down the road that led past the gates. ‘Did you see someone on a horse ride past here and stop for a while?’
‘Yeah. They went past me and stopped down there.’ He nodded his head towards the point where Sherlock had seen the rider. ‘Seemed like they were looking at something, then they rode away.’
‘Did you recognize them?’
‘I weren’t really paying attention. Does it matter?’
Sherlock shook his head. ‘Probably not.’
They rode together down the road towards Farnham, in the opposite direction to the one that the rider had taken. It had been a while since Sherlock had ridden a bicycle, and he found himself wobbling a lot as he followed Matty, but it only took a few minutes before he got the hang of it and caught up. As they rode, side by side, along shadowed roads where trees bent together to form an arch above their heads and past fields full of bright yellow flowers, he told Matty about what had happened the day before – the man he’d followed away from the house where Matty had seen the strange cloud, the warehouse, the cart stacked with boxes and the fire. Matty kept asking questions, and Sherlock found that he kept going back and telling bits of the story again, going off at a tangent to explain other things and generally not getting to the point. He wasn’t a natural storyteller, and for a moment wished that he had someone who could take the facts in his head and set them out in a way that made sense.
‘You were lucky to get out alive,’ Matty said when Sherlock had finished. ‘I had a job at a bakery, few months back. Burned down. I were lucky to get out alive.’
‘What happened?’ Sherlock asked.
Matty shook his head. ‘The baker, he was a fool. He lit a match for ’is pipe, right when we was openin’ the sacks of flour.’
‘What did that have to do with a fire?’
Matty looked at him strangely. ‘I thought everyone knew that flour, hanging around in the air, is like an explosive. If one grain of flour catches fire then it spreads to the rest within a second, like a spark leaping from one to another.’ He shook his head. ‘The whole bakery was blown to rubble. I was lucky: I was behind a table at the time. Even so, it took a month for my hair to grow back proper.’ Glancing up at Sherlock, he said: ‘Anyway, what are you goin’ to d
o now?’
‘We should tell the local constable,’ Sherlock said. Even as the words emerged from his mouth they sounded wrong. Two dead bodies, a strange cloud of death, a mysterious yellow powder and a group of thugs setting fire to a warehouse – it was too much like a child’s fantasy game. Even if half of the story could be verified by facts – two men had died, and the blackened, smoking remains of the warehouse would be evident for some time to come – the rest of it was too much like a mass of wild guesses and fantastic assumptions that had been strung together to bridge the gaps.
A look at Matty’s face told him that the boy was thinking exactly the same thing. He felt his mouth twist in frustration. He didn’t know anybody in the area that could help, and the people he knew who might help weren’t in the area. It was a paradox.
And then he remembered the imposing figure of Amyus Crowe, and a feeling of relief swept over him, flushing away the cloud of uncertainty that had gathered around him like cold water scouring dirt and mud from a stone. Crowe seemed like he could talk to young people as if they were adults, and his mind worked logically, using evidence as stepping stones to come to conclusions rather than jumping right to the end of the path. He was the only person who might actually believe them.
‘We’ll tell Amyus Crowe,’ he said.
Matty looked dubious. ‘The big bloke with the funny voice and the white hair?’ he asked. ‘You sure?’
Sherlock nodded decisively. ‘I’m sure.’ Then he felt his face fall and his body deflate. ‘But I don’t know where he lives. We’d have to wait until he turns up at my uncle’s house. Or ask my uncle where he is.’
Matty shook his head. ‘He rents a house at the edge of town,’ he said. ‘Used to be a gamekeeper’s cottage. We can probably cycle there in half an hour.’ At Sherlock’s surprised expression, he added, ‘What? I know where everyone lives, pretty much. It’s part of knowing where I can likely get food at any time of the day. I need to know how a place like this works – where people live, where they work, where the market is, where the grain is stored, where the constable is likely to be morning, noon and night and which orchards are guarded and which ones aren’t. It’s a matter of survival.’
Observation, Sherlock thought, remembering what Amyus Crowe had told him. It all came down to observation in the end. If you had enough facts, you could work almost anything out.
And that was the problem with the two dead bodies and the cloud of death – they just didn’t have enough facts.
The two of them cycled through the town, avoiding the main thoroughfares where lots of people milled around. The journey was almost over before it was begun, and yet Sherlock’s mind was still simmering with a rich stew of facts, suppositions and hypotheses when they pulled up at the stone-walled cottage where Amyus Crowe apparently lived.
Movement to one side attracted Sherlock’s attention. He glanced across, and noticed a stallion cropping grass in a field. A black stallion with a flash of brown across its neck.
The same stallion he had seen twice now, each time with a mysterious figure sitting astride it, watching him.
He felt a chill run through his arms and chest, causing goosebumps to rise beneath his skin. What was going on?
Matty held back, waiting at the gate as Sherlock walked across the front garden. Sherlock turned to glance at him questioningly. The boy’s face was twisted into a scowl. ‘I’ll stay out here,’ he said.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know this cove. He might not like me.’
‘I’ll tell him you’re all right. That you can be trusted. I’ll tell him that you’re my friend.’
As the word ‘friend’ emerged past his lips, Sherlock felt a sudden flush of surprise. He supposed Matty was a friend, but the thought confused him. He’d never really had any friends before – not at school, certainly, and not even back at the family house – the place he thought of as home. The kids there had tended to avoid the house, belonging as it did to the people they thought of as their social superiors, ‘the landed gentry’, and Sherlock had spent most of his time alone. Even Mycroft hadn’t been much more than a reassuring presence sitting in their father’s library working his way through the vast collection of books that the family had amassed over several generations. Sometimes Sherlock would leave Mycroft there after breakfast and find him still there at dinner time, his position unchanged, the only difference in his surroundings being that the pile of unread books was smaller and the pile of finished books had grown.
‘All the same,’ Matty said, ‘I’ll stay outside.’
A thought occurred to Sherlock. ‘Outside,’ he repeated. ‘You like being out in the open, don’t you? I’ve not seen you inside since I met you.’
Matty’s scowl deepened, and he looked away, not meeting Sherlock’s gaze. ‘Don’t like walls,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t like having nowhere to run but through a doorway when I don’t know who’s on the other side.’
Sherlock nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be. Maybe I’ll see you when I come out.’ He glanced back at the door. ‘Assuming anyone is at home to begin with.’ Looking briefly over at the black stallion, which kept on pulling up clumps of grass and chewing them, he knocked firmly on the door.
When he turned his head, Matty had disappeared, along with his bicycle.
The door opened after a few moments. Sherlock was looking slightly upward, expecting Amyus Crowe to be standing inside the doorway, and for a moment he was confused by the empty space. His gaze dropped, and he felt his heart stutter as it came to rest on the face of a girl at the same level as his own. Her clothes were dark, and in the shadows of the hall her face seemed to be floating in mid-air.
‘I – I was looking for Mr Crowe,’ he said, feeling himself blush at the unevenness of his voice. He desperately wished that he could sound as confident and as uninterested as Mycroft effortlessly seemed to manage.
‘My father is out,’ the girl said. Her voice had the same twang that Amyus Crowe’s had – an American accent? – making the sentence sound more like mah father is aowt. Whatever it was, it gave her an exotic appeal. ‘Can I tell him who called?’
Sherlock found that he couldn’t pull his gaze away from her face. She was about the same age as him. Her hair was long and reddish-gold, cascading and curling around her shoulders like a copper waterfall hitting rocks and splashing upward. Her eyes were a shade of violet that Sherlock had only ever seen before on wild flowers, and her skin was brown and freckled, as if she spent a lot of time outdoors.
‘I’m Sherlock,’ he said. ‘Sherlock Holmes.’
‘You’re the kid he’s tutoring.’
‘I’m not a kid; I’m just as old as you,’ he said with as much bravado as he could summon up.
She stepped forward into the sunlight, and Sherlock could see that she was wearing tight brown riding breeches, more appropriate for a boy than a girl, and a linen shirt that emphasized the shape of her chest.
‘I’ll tell Father you were here,’ she said as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘I think he went over to your uncle’s house to look for you. He was expecting to see you today.’
‘I got distracted,’ Sherlock found himself explaining. A thought occurred to him, prompted by her riding breeches and the horse in the nearby paddock. ‘You’ve been watching me!’ he blurted out without thinking, feeling a sudden flush of embarrassment and vulnerability.
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ she said. ‘I saw you a couple of times while I was out riding, is all.’
‘Where were you riding to? There’s nothing past the manor house except open countryside.’
‘Then that’s where I was riding.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you ride?’
Sherlock shook his head.
‘You should learn. It’s fun.’
Remembering the figure that he’d seen in the distance, he said: ‘You ride like a man.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When I’ve seen wome
n riding they turn sideways on the saddle, with both legs on one side of the horse. Sidesaddle, they call it. You ride like a man, with one leg on each side of the horse.’
‘That’s the way I was taught.’ She sounded angry. ‘People here laugh at me for riding that way, but if I rode the way they wanted then I’d fall off if I went any faster than a trot. This country is strange. It’s not like home.’ She pushed past him, the door swinging shut behind her, and strode away from him, towards the paddock. He watched her retreating back.
‘What’s your name?’ Sherlock called.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘So I don’t have to keep thinking of you as “Amyus Crowe’s daughter”.’
She stopped and spoke without turning. ‘Virginia,’ she said. ‘It’s a place in America. A state on the Eastern Seaboard, near Washington DC.’
‘I’ve heard of it. Is that near Albuquerque?’
She turned, and her expression was somewhere between contempt and amusement. ‘Nowhere near. Thousands of miles away. Virginia is mostly forests and mountains, but Albuquerque is in the middle of a desert. Although there are mountains there as well.’
‘But you come from Albuquerque.’
She nodded.
‘Why did you leave?’
Virginia didn’t answer. Instead, she turned away and continued walking on towards the paddock. Sherlock followed, feeling strangely like a puppet being jerked around by its strings, unable to follow his own desires. He glanced around, hoping that Matty wasn’t there to witness what was going on, but the boy and his bicycle were absent.
