by Andrew Lane
Something grabbed at his ankle and pulled. Sherlock fell to the walkway, feeling his leg being tugged over the edge. He grabbed hold of the barrier to stop himself being pulled over. Grivens’s face was pressed up against the metal grille of the walkway. It was his hand that had grabbed Sherlock’s ankle.
“You’re really going to make me earn this money, aren’t you?” he hissed. “Just for that, I’m going to make the Yank and his daughter suffer. Just think about that as you’re bleeding to death here.”
Sherlock’s only response was to kick out with his other foot, scraping the sole of his boot down his leg until it hit Grivens’s fingers. Grivens grunted in pain and released his grip. Sherlock rolled away and pulled himself to his feet.
Grivens’s face appeared at the top of the ladder, followed by the rest of him. His teeth were exposed by the grimace of hatred on his face.
“This isn’t about money anymore,” he hissed. “This is personal.”
Sherlock backed away slowly. The steward reached the top of the ladder and moved on to the walkway. His shoulders were hunched, his fingers curled into claws. His previously immaculate white uniform was now grey and streaked.
Sherlock felt something hard pressing into the small of his back. He glanced down quickly. He’d reached the end of the walkway. He was pressed into one of the wheels that controlled the flow of steam through the pipes. Alongside him, the massive cylindrical axle rotated endlessly around on its bearings. He’d reached the area where the offset cams transferred the linear motion of the pistons into rotary motion, driving the axle. There were several of them, and they looked like grease-smeared metal horses’ heads bobbing up and down in a complicated rhythm. For a second Sherlock found himself appreciating the sheer brilliance of the engineering at work in the ship. How could people just assume these things worked without wanting to know how?
Not that he would be getting the chance to ever learn anything again. Grivens was still stalking towards him, closing the gap. He reached out for Sherlock’s throat with both hands.
“I should get a bonus for this,” the steward whispered. His fingers closed around Sherlock’s throat and he squeezed tight. Sherlock felt his eyes bulge with the pressure. His chest wanted to suck air in, but no air was getting through. Frantically he clutched at Grivens’s wrists, trying to pull them away, but the steward’s muscles were locked tight, hard as iron. Sherlock shifted his grip to the man’s fingers. Maybe he could pry them away from his throat. His vision had turned red and blurred, and black dots were beginning to swim around in front of him, obscuring Grivens’s face. His chest burned in agony.
Desperately he twisted his body with his last ounce of strength. Caught off balance, Grivens half fell onto the barrier running along the side of the walkway, but his grip on Sherlock’s throat did not slacken. The cams were pumping up and down beside them now: chunks of metal pounding the air just inches from their faces. Grivens’s expression was feral, his eyes pinpricks of black hatred.
Sherlock let his body drop, as if he’d run out of energy. Grivens, taken off guard, let him drop. Instead of falling to his knees, Sherlock shifted his hands from the steward’s fingers to his leather belt. Grabbing the belt, he straightened up again, pushing as hard with his legs and pulling as hard with his arms as he could. Grivens’s feet left the walkway as Sherlock lifted him up by his belt. Already twisted around as he was, the weight of Grivens’s body carried him sideways to the edge of the barrier. Sherlock expected him to let go then, scrabbling for purchase on the barrier, but he kept his grip on Sherlock’s throat, pulling him over as well.
Until his sleeve caught in one of the pounding cams. It caught the material and pulled. Grivens screamed—a short, despairing cry of fear and rage—as his body was jerked off the walkway and into the machinery. Sherlock let go of the man’s belt and brought his arms up, knocking the steward’s hands away from his throat and allowing him a lifesaving breath as the steward’s body was pulled away, wrapping around the rotating axle and catching in the cams as they hammered up and down.
The engine didn’t even falter, but Sherlock had to turn away before he had seen more than a fraction of what happened to Grivens’s body as it was pulled into the rotating metal.
Sherlock bent over, hands on his knees, trying to pull as much of the hot air into his lungs as possible. For a few moments he thought he was going to suffocate as his body demanded more oxygen than he could give it, but gradually his gasping subsided. When his vision wasn’t red and blurred anymore, and when he could breathe without his chest hurting, he straightened up and looked around.
There was no sign of Grivens. The black grease on the axle and the cams looked redder and shinier than it had before, but that was all.
Eventually Sherlock climbed down the ladder and crossed the engine room, looking for a way out. He wasn’t sure if the door he found was the one he’d entered through or another one, but it didn’t matter. Outside, it was cool and the air was fresh. It was like leaving Hell and entering Heaven.
People stared at him when he emerged on deck, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to get back to his cabin, wash the grime and the grease off his body, and change his clothes. He would put the ones he was wearing in the laundry. Maybe the laundresses on board could clean them, maybe they couldn’t. In the end, he just didn’t care anymore.
Amyus Crowe was in their cabin when Sherlock pushed the door open. “I think someone’s been in here, searchin’,” he said, then turned and saw the state of Sherlock’s face and clothes. “My God, what happened?”
“The people we’re following to New York—they spread some money around the port,” Sherlock replied wearily. “There’s probably one man on every ship leaving this week who’s been promised money if he kills the three of us.”
“At least one,” Crowe said. “But we can worry ’bout that later. Who was it?”
“One of the stewards.”
“An’ where is he now?”
“Let’s just say they’re going to be down one member of staff at dinner,” Sherlock said.
He told Crowe the story while he washed off and changed clothes. The big man listened silently the whole time. When Sherlock started repeating himself, Crowe raised his hand.
“I think I understand the full story,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“Tired, dehydrated, and sore.”
“That’s understandable, but how do you feel?”
Sherlock glanced at him in puzzlement. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a man’s died, an’ you were the cause. I’ve seen men spiral into a morass of guilt an’ sadness after an event like that.”
Sherlock thought for a minute. Yes, a man had died, and Sherlock was responsible, but it wasn’t the first. Baron Maupertuis’s thug Clem had almost certainly drowned when he fell off Matthew Arnatt’s boat, but that had happened because Matty had hit him on the back of the head with a metal boathook. Maupertuis’s right-hand man, Mr. Surd, had been stung to death by bees, but that could arguably have been classed as an accident—he’d fallen backwards into the hive. And there were the people who’d been on the Napoleonic fort when it had exploded in flames—they may have burned to death or drowned when they jumped into the sea, but their fates seemed several steps away from anything Sherlock had directly done. Was Crowe right? Was this the first death he’d directly and unequivocally caused?
“I’m not what you’d call religious,” he said eventually. “I don’t believe there’s a God-given instruction that ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but I suppose I believe that society functions better when there are laws and when people can’t just go around killing other people. That’s part of what Plato argues in The Republic, which my brother gave me to read. But the steward was trying to kill me, and if I hadn’t done the same to him then he wouldn’t have stopped. I didn’t choose to kill him. He picked the fight, not me.”
Crowe nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.
“Was that the right answer?”
“There is no right answer, son; least, not as far as I can make out. It’s a dilemma—society works because people follow rules an’ don’t go round murdering each other, but if people choose to live outside those rules, what do you do? Let them get away with their behaviour, or fight them with the same weapons they use to fight you? If you follow the former course, they get to take over society, ’cause they’re always prepared to fight harder and dirtier than you are. If you follow the latter course, then how do you stop yourself becomin’ as bad as them?” He shook his head. “In the end, the only advice I can offer is—if you get to the stage where a man’s life don’t matter to you, then you’ve gone too far. As long as death bothers you, as long as you understand it’s your last resort, not your first, then you’re probably on the right side of the line.”
“Do you think Mycroft knew something like this would happen?” Sherlock asked. “Do you think that’s why he gave me the book?”
“No,” Crowe replied, “but your brother is a wise man. I think he knew that at some stage you’d be askin’ yourself these questions, an’ he wanted to make sure you had the tools to answer them with.”
TEN
He slept for a while, even though it was only mid-afternoon: a disturbed sleep, full of images of Matty, tied up and helpless in the dark, crying to himself, wondering where his friends were. When Sherlock awoke he found his cheeks were wet with sympathetic tears, and it took him a few moments to remember where he was and what had happened.
His muscles ached and his lungs burned, and he could feel the bruises on his throat from where Grivens had clutched at it. He tried to find some trace of horror inside him over what he’d done, but there wasn’t anything that strong. Regret, yes. He regretted the fact that a man was dead, but that was about as far as it went.
Lying awake and thinking about Grivens, to distract himself from worrying about Matty, Sherlock found himself thinking about the iridescent blue tattoo on the man’s wrist, the one that had first made Sherlock realize that the man had been watching him. If he’d thought of tattoos at all, then he’d thought of them as something decorative, but there was obviously more to them than that. They were a means of recognition, of identification. In this case, they’d led him to identify a man who might be watching him on behalf of the fleeing Americans. And, based on what the steward had said, you could recognize a tattooist by his style, just like you could recognize a painting by Vermeer or Rubens. Or, Sherlock thought, remembering the paintings in the hall at Holmes Manor, by Vernet. His mind was filled with the idea of an encyclopedia of tattoos, cross-referenced back to the places they were done and the artists who did them. Would such a thing even be possible?
After a while he decided that lying in bed wasn’t going to accomplish anything. He got up and went outside.
The sun was shining strongly on the deck of the SS Scotia. All around them the horizon was a flat line. It was as if they were at the centre of an upturned blue china bowl. There was no sign that they were moving at all; even the sea birds hung motionless in the air.
After a few minutes, he realized that he had been hearing a violin playing for some time without noticing. Rufus Stone? Probably. The chances of there being two violinists on board were fairly slim, and he thought he was beginning to be able to detect some elements of Stone’s style—the flourishes he threw in at the end of certain phrases, and the way the fingers of his left hand sometimes struggled with complicated arpeggios.
He went looking for the man and found him in his usual spot near the bows of the ship. This time there was no crowd around him. Perhaps they’d all got bored.
“I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided to abandon our lessons like a man throws away a threadbare handkerchief,” Stone called, still playing.
“I had … a busy afternoon,” Sherlock responded. “But I’m here now.”
“Then let’s start.” Rufus stopped playing and lowered the violin. “Any questions before we see how much of your stance you remember from this morning?”
Sherlock thought for a moment. “What’s your favourite piece of music?” he asked. “Is it the Bruch you were playing this morning?”
Rufus considered. “No,” he said eventually. “I have a sneaking fondness for the work of Henryk Wieniawski. He has written several violin concertos, of which I prefer the second, in D minor. And then there’s Giuseppe Tartini’s famously difficult violin Sonata in G minor. That is a true test of a violinist’s skill.”
“Difficult?” Sherlock asked.
“It’s known as the Devil’s Trill Sonata. Tartini claimed that he’d had a dream of the Devil playing the violin. When he woke up he tried to write down the piece of music the Devil was playing, and this was the closest he could get. It’s so fiendishly difficult that some critics have suggested that Tartini had to have sold his own soul to the Devil in exchange for the skill to play it.”
“That’s rubbish.”
“Of course it is. But it makes for a good story, and it helps to swell an audience if they think there’s something spooky or bizarre about the music you’re going to play.” He held the violin out to Sherlock. “Now let’s see how much has stuck.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Sherlock held the violin under Rufus Stone’s critical eye and tried, one after the other, different ways of using the bow to elicit notes from the instrument without actually worrying about which note it was. At the moment it was the technique that Rufus wanted him to master. He started with simply bowing the string in long, smooth, flowing gestures—détaché, as Rufus described it—while just supporting the neck of the instrument with his left hand rather than actually holding down any strings. That in itself took hours until Rufus was satisfied, first on one string and then on the others, as Sherlock tried hard to attain an even tone to the note no matter how long it lasted.
And that was how the rest of the voyage went. After breakfast, Sherlock would join Rufus Stone on deck for two hours, then they would move to the saloon for lunch. Another two hours of practice and then Sherlock would head back to his cabin for a break to read some more of Plato’s Republic. Two more hours with Rufus Stone, and then dinner. Following that, Sherlock usually spent some time with Amyus Crowe in the library before heading to bed, but Crowe’s day was mostly taken up with seeing to Virginia, and he had little time to continue with Sherlock’s education. Little time, and little in the way of props or examples. Sherlock had already noted that Amyus Crowe’s preferred method of teaching was to take something that he saw or had found and use it as the basis for a lesson. In the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight, there was precious little opportunity for him to do either.
Virginia stayed in her cabin, unwilling to come out on deck or talk to anyone. Sherlock saw her only once or twice during the entire journey. Her skin was so pale and translucent compared with the red of her hair that he worried she might not survive the voyage, but Amyus Crowe told him that she was going to be all right. She was just reliving the original journey over from New York to Liverpool, during which her mother had died. “A mental disturbance,” Crowe said one night in the library, “aggravated by the monotony of the journey and the fact that she misses Sandia terribly. Ginny’s an outdoor girl, as you have probably realized by now. She hates to be cooped up anywhere. Once we disembark she’ll be back to normal.”
The weather was surprisingly stable during the whole journey. Apart from one day of dark skies and squalling showers, during which Rufus Stone and Sherlock had to retreat to Sherlock’s cabin to practise, the skies were blue and the sea was calm. Or, at least, the waves were small enough compared to the size of the hull that the Scotia could just carve its way through them.
Once, on the fourth day, there was some excitement when the captain announced that they had sighted another ship. Passengers took turns with a telescope to look at the distant speck on the horizon. Amyus Crowe did use this as the basis for a lesson, asking Sherlock to calculate the likelihood of two ships being within line of sight of each ot
her, given the vastness of the ocean and the relatively small number of ships, but Sherlock had already realized that although the Atlantic Ocean was large and the distance between Southampton and New York was long, most ships tended to follow the same narrow corridor across, and there were tens, perhaps hundreds, of ships afloat at any one time. Given that, the chance was actually quite high.
Both Sherlock and Amyus noticed an exchange of flashing lights between the ships as night fell. Sherlock watched the crew on the Scotia sending their message using a lantern with a shutter across the front that could be opened or closed. Part of him worried about secret messages being sent to and from conspirators on both ships concerning him and Amyus and Virginia Crowe, but that would mean most of the crew would have to be part of the conspiracy, and that wasn’t likely. And besides, there had been no other attempts to search the cabin or to do anything to the three of them, either before the other ship was sighted or afterwards. It seemed as though Grivens was the only person on the Scotia who had been recruited by the conspiracy.
The disappearance of the steward caused a small amount of consternation among the crew, and less among the passengers. The captain didn’t try to turn the ship around and search in case he had fallen overboard. Sherlock could only assume that shreds of Grivens’s clothes had been found among the machinery in the engine room, and that the captain had deduced that he’d fallen into the engine while drunk.
As time went on, Sherlock learned the main styles of bowing—legato, collé, martelé, staccato, spiccato, and sautillé—and he’d just started to use the fingers of his left hand to hold down the four strings in various ways to form notes and chords. He still hadn’t played anything more musical than long, sustained tones. Rufus Stone was fanatical about building up technique and ability before letting a student loose on actual music, but Sherlock could appreciate Rufus’s approach. It was logical. It made sense.
“What happens when we land?” Sherlock asked one day, late in the voyage, in a pause during a lesson.
