“Yes,” Mycroft cut in, “but let us not forget, in the consumptive heart of the place, the master classes in pickpocketing that your boys will most likely attend.”
“They already reside in that ‘consumptive heart,’ as you put it. They already know how to pick pockets, if that is their intent. We shall seek those who want more, as I did, as many do. I hope to use the promise of apprenticeships as an enticement to learn mathematics, science and grammar, at the very least…”
“You are an autodidact, Douglas. Why can they not be as you are?”
“Not everyone has the dubious privilege of being aboard ship for months at a time with nothing to do but read!” he responded. “Still, even I am forced to admit that “the blackest tide of moral turpitude,” as Dickens had it, shall not be that simple to turn.”
“Most do-gooders are simply caught in the undertow and drowned,” Mycroft had concluded somberly. “I shall not be one of them.”
“Nor would I ask it of you.”
In spite of Mycroft’s misgivings, Douglas had followed his heart. After a month of searching, he had secured an edifice at the center of the district. It was a plain, rawboned old thing with not an ounce of charm. But it had been built with adequate material, passable lighting and ventilation, plus good drainage, its own water closet and—if one accepted barrenness and muck in lieu of a garden—an outdoor space big enough for adolescent boys to blow off steam. The rooms were large and airy or would become so, once a few walls were torn down and windows replaced.
Mycroft had paid for the structure and the renovations in cash. From his Regent Tobacco earnings, Douglas had provided for the charges and salaries for a staff of eight: a supervisor, a teacher, two housemaids, a scullery maid and a cook, and two advocates to investigate possible apprenticeships for the boys, who were aged eleven to fifteen.
Granted, he had not much to live on after that; but then again, he did not need much.
Douglas christened it Nickolus House, Nickolus being the middle name of his dead son. In the whole of the building, that nameplate beside the front door was the only link to Douglas at all, and then only if one knew his history, which none but Mycroft did. Each time before he entered, he would pause and run his fingers over the engraved letters, in the hope that his long-gone family—and especially his boy—were proud of him. As he reached the front door he did so now, pausing for a moment.
He was shaken from his reverie by a carriage pulling up behind him; a fine one, from the sounds of it, or perhaps more accurately from the lack of sounds: no squeaking wheels or grinding brakes. He looked back and saw a pristine vehicle with Huan in the box seat, and Mycroft alighting from within.
Douglas smiled to see Mycroft cajoling someone inside to disembark. A moment later, Sherlock emerged, looking like a condor that had just realized, to its offended chagrin, that its wings had been clipped.
Douglas’s smile disappeared. His patience was already wearing thin… and no one could rip away its remaining shreds more thoroughly than young Sherlock Holmes.
“Your newspapers?” he heard Mycroft ask, as Sherlock shut the carriage door behind him.
“I shall not be remaining long,” the latter sniffed, a hint of warning in his tone.
As Douglas held open the front door of Nickolus House and the two brothers hurried towards the building, Douglas turned just in time to see another fine carriage—a canary-yellow landaulet—not a hundred yards away. It halted abruptly, turned within the narrow confines of the street, and bolted off again in the opposite direction.
Douglas caught Huan’s eye: he’d noticed it too. Quite the coincidence, two fine carriages in a borough that often saw none at all.
Nevertheless, his visitors were already approaching, and if their demeanor had been any indication, they would need an arbiter or referee, perhaps even a jailer. Douglas put the landaulet out of his mind, wiped his feet on the mat, and walked inside.
7
AFTER DEPOSITING THEIR OUTERWEAR IN THE HALL, Douglas escorted Sherlock and Mycroft into a small drawing room while he went into the nearby kitchen to put the kettle on. He could hear Mycroft through the wall, trying to make the best of an awkward situation, his voice falsely cheerful.
“Generally, new boys await a ‘feeble old gentleman’ known to them only as Mr. Smythe,” Mycroft was explaining. “They are told that he shall most likely not make an appearance this day but shall send his Negro secretary, one Cyrus Douglas, to report on their enthusiasm and general aptitude.”
After that cheery introduction: silence. There seemed to be nothing forthcoming from Sherlock.
Douglas called out with his own forced bonhomie: “The cook is not about, but if you are famished, perhaps some hot rolls, fresh from breakfast…”
“After he settles the carriage,” Mycroft called back, “Huan is free to indulge. But Sherlock and I are here on business.”
Douglas left the kettle on the stove and poked his head into the drawing room, hoping he had misheard. “I beg your pardon?”
“We shall accompany you to meet the new children,” Mycroft declared as if it were the most reasonable assumption in the world.
Douglas blanched. “For what reason, pray?” he asked.
“Sherlock is here to volunteer.”
“In your hat!”
That last came from Sherlock.
“It is high time you learn compassion!” Mycroft turned to his brother, half furious and half pleading.
“Compassion,” Sherlock countered icily, “is a useless emotion that goads people into doing good deeds for which they have no talent! Give me less compassionate workers and more efficient ones, if you please!”
“I confess I agree,” Douglas interjected. “Regardless, neither of you may accompany me, for I will not have the boys examined like specimens.”
“There is a classroom across from the supervisor’s office, is there not?” Mycroft asked in an innocent tone that grated on Douglas’s last nerve—for Mycroft well knew the building, as he had helped to choose it. “We shall wait there, if you would be kind enough to leave the door open so that we can see from across the corridor. Young boys are not keen to know what anonymous adults are about.”
“Oh, bosh!” Sherlock exclaimed. “You have not dragged me here for compassion, but because you have an engagement with the Queen!” When Mycroft made no move to contradict him, he went on: “During the ride here, you eyed your pocket watch three times, a thoroughly unnecessary move, for you know perfectly well how long it takes to get from Shoreditch High Street to the Devil’s Acre and can probably enumerate the number of times the wheels spun beneath our feet. You peered at a miniscule smudge of dirt on the tip of your shoe and flicked at it with your thumb, while nervously pressing the hem of your trousers with your fingertips, as if wielding an iron the size of a fruit fly. Your head was tilted forward and your eyes upraised, and you were staring into the middle distance, rehearsing what you intended to say.”
“Is that all?” Mycroft asked crisply.
“No. There is a missive peeking from out of your coat pocket made from a strong and expensive stock called White Linen that the Queen tends to favor.”
Douglas did his best not to laugh. Sherlock was certainly a handful, but it was rare to see Mycroft beaten at his own game. Douglas had to admit he was enjoying it just a little.
“And I am not an infant to be shuttled about then turned over into the waiting arms of an Ethiop nanny!” Sherlock concluded, snapping Douglas back to reality.
The impertinent ninny! Douglas thought. He fixed Sherlock with a searing look. “My arms are not ‘waiting’ in the least. And you are correct,” he added, turning to Mycroft, “perhaps he has been too long between Cambridge and St. John’s Wood and might do well to see how the other three-quarters live. Therefore, go. But do not permit him”—he indicated Sherlock again—“to utter one more word, or I shall personally escort him out, and I shall not be gentle about it.”
“As if there were anything of
remote interest to witness in a place like this,” Sherlock sniffed.
“A keen example,” Douglas added, “of the verbal vomitus to which I refer!”
Whereupon the two Holmes brothers (the determined older, and the unenthused younger) strode down the corridor while Douglas, with terrible misgivings, hurried back to the kitchen to turn off the kettle, and then went off to meet his new charges.
8
NO ONE STOOD WHEN DOUGLAS ENTERED THE SUPERVISOR’S office. Not the two boys squirming on stools; not the man seated behind his writing desk.
Harold Capps was a good-hearted fellow with black hair as coarse as a pig-bristle brush, which stood upright each time he removed his hat. Capps was aware that there was no such person as Smythe, that it was Douglas who paid the upkeep and salaries. But a white man of a certain age could not be seen rising to his feet when a colored man entered a room; it would create unnecessary confusion and perhaps even revolt among their charges. Therefore, the two had schemed from the start that Douglas would remain secretary to the never present, ever ailing Mr. Smythe.
“Ah, there you are, Douglas,” Capps said when he entered. “This arrived for you not ten minutes ago.”
Capps handed him a telegram. On the back was written one underlined word in Gerard Pennywhistle’s large, block-like lettering:
FOUND!
Douglas tucked the telegram into his trouser pocket.
“Might I inquire as to the welfare of our dear benefactor?” Capps asked.
“A touch of influenza,” Douglas replied, allowing his Trinidadian accent to surface a bit.
“Kindly give him our best. As sorry luck would have it, our teacher Mr. Undershaft has taken ill too, with enteritis. But you know something about mathematics!” he added as if it were a madcap notion. “Perhaps you will assist us?”
“I would be honored, Mr. Capps.”
“Good. Our new lodgers come to us from Beeton.”
Douglas was all too cognizant of Joseph Beeton. He owned a large chimney-sweeping business. It was the sort of business that Douglas would have gladly run out of England altogether. Chimney-sweep masters would take in the poorest, smallest lads, then feed them as little as possible so they could fit into coal flues, which were narrower than those that burned wood. Several boys at Nickolus House had been rescued from that sorry place and others like it.
“On your feet, young lads,” Mr. Capps commanded jovially, coming around his desk. “Douglas, may I present Charles Fowler, aged thirteen, and his brother George, eleven.”
Both boys were barefoot. But while the younger boy’s clothes were in tatters, and he had not one square inch of visible flesh that was not caked with dirt, Charles—the older—was more polished. The greater part of his sooty covering had been scrubbed away, and his trousers, shirt and jacket, though picked-through rags, were not so threadbare as his brother’s. But it was clear to Douglas that both boys’ backs were already twisted, ankles chronically swollen. Through the rips in his trousers, Douglas could see that the knees of the younger boy were as gnarled as ancient oaks, and he assumed the same of the older.
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” Douglas said, bending down so that he would not tower over them. Hunger and neglect had kept them both as small as eight-year-olds.
The younger boy, George, swallowed his greeting, scuffing a nervous toe back and forth across the floorboard with sidelong, slightly alarmed glances at Mr. Capps’ lofty hairdo, while Charles squinted up at Douglas and reached out a calloused hand.
“Pleased to make yours! Thinkin’ you a fair right speaker for a jimmy-grant, no offense…”
“None taken,” Douglas said.
“An’ so please tell yer lath-an’-plaster that me an’ me bruvver are tickled to be ’ere!”
“Master. Not lath-and-plaster,” Mr. Capps corrected, while George turned to Mr. Capps and added in a hoarse little voice:
“Does we get our new cloves nah, guv?”
“I am not ‘guv.’ I am Mr. Capps. And yes, this afternoon: a new set of clothes, along with a nightshirt for sleeping, and a good, solid pair of shoes. They shall be laid out for you after your bath.”
Charles’s little face scrunched in distaste. “A barf? Mus’ we, gents?” he asked.
“Afraid so,” Douglas said softly.
“But I’s already ’ad two!” George protested. “Once on Whitsuntide and one Christmas last!”
“Well then, this shall be your third of the twelve-month. So,” Douglas continued, “your former home was with Mr Beeton?”
Both boys nodded.
“We was put wiv ’im cuz we’re orphans,” Charles Fowler explained somberly. “Quite alone in the world, we are. Our da was a pigeon fancier who took a tumble off a roof.”
Douglas had heard that story before, from other urchins. There seemed a glut of pigeon-related deaths in the Devil’s Acre. In truth, the parents might have been run over by a dray, or died from disease, or been disposed of. Or perhaps one or both had beaten the boys from one side of the wall to the other, until the streets and servitude seemed a fairer bargain than the brutality at home.
“And were you decently treated by him?” Douglas went on.
George stared at his wiggling toes. Charles thought on it a moment, then said brightly: “I grant you, ’e come by ’is name ’onest-like! A right good smackin’ ’e could give! But I was beaten only twice, and li’l Georgie only once!”
George winced in remembrance. “Stung all the same…” he murmured.
“Mind, Georgie din’t snivel one bit,” his brother stated proudly, “but stood there an’ took it like a man!”
“Now, boys,” interjected Mr. Capps. “Tell Mr. Douglas what you wish to accomplish with your time on earth.”
George’s eyes darted about as if the Angel of Death were winging its way from Oblivion to drag him away, but the older one understood Capps’ meaning and had an answer at the ready. With his stick-thin arms behind his back, he recited: “I wants to be a knocker-upper, Mr. Capps, cuz I already knows how to count to twelve. All I needs is to get me a fine used ticker, not nicked but purchased proper like, an’ I’ll make me a penny a month for every windah I knocks up! I’d be doin’ workin’ people a good turn, gettin ’em to their jobs on time.”
“Well,” Douglas said, “while knocker-upper is certainly a fine ambition, perhaps we can do even better for you, eh?”
Charles eyed his brother and made a quick and subtle circle with his finger: he thought Douglas irredeemably daft.
Douglas grimaced. Now the boys looked upon him not merely as a “jimmy-grant”—an immigrant—but as someone whose sanity was in question. Nevertheless, he was determined to give them a decent future, one his own son had never had.
* * *
In the classroom opposite, Mycroft watched Sherlock become more and more entangled in the scene unfolding before them. He was leaning forward in his chair, the thumb and index fingers of his left hand stroking his chin. When Sherlock was intent on something, the involuntary reflex of blinking ceased completely, nor did he swallow. It was a wonder his heart still beat—although Mycroft debated if it was too much to hope that something in the woebegone little beings talking to Douglas had moved his brother.
As the boys followed Capps out, first for the dreaded bath and then for the undreamt-of set of clothes and shoes, plus a nightshirt, Sherlock sat back with a satisfied sigh.
“You seemed more interested than I expected,” Mycroft began.
“Quite,” Sherlock declared, rising to his feet and stretching. “The younger boy? Useless. But the older one, Charles, he is of note.”
“Oh?” Mycroft looked at him hopefully. “In what way?”
“Why, he is an intravenous drug user!”
“Intravenous? Nonsense, Sherlock. If he does take opium, he smokes it, just like anyone of his caliber.”
“I tell you I saw the mark of the needle on him. Now that, I should like to know more about, for he did not perform all th
ose injections on himself. Someone is using him as an experimental subject. But why, and to what end? Rather intriguing, wouldn’t you say?”
Mycroft leapt impatiently out of his seat. “Those agony columns have poisoned your brain! You cannot possibly see that he is an intravenous drug user. Even if you could, how does a boy like that afford injectable drugs? Or, let us say he can do so: then surely he could be injected by fellow users! His small stature is most likely due to hard labor and near-starvation—”
“But that is my point, Mycroft,” Sherlock declared. “A needle? At his age and station? With injections in unusual parts of his body? You shall find three punctures on his right foot, between the first and second digits, four on his right talus, three on the left clavicle, one between the index and middle finger of his left hand…”
As he walked in, Douglas queried: “And you saw it all underneath the dirt?”
Sherlock eyed Douglas with barely restrained disdain. “You have read Bernard Palissy?” he asked. “Olivier de Serres? As it so happens, I have begun a study of pedology and hydrology. My starting point was Palissy, and then de Serres for his quite adequate cataloguing of soil formations. Dirt, like nature, abhors a vacuum and will fill in each little rivulet and crack it finds. Now holes made by the hypodermic syringe are particular in that—unlike cuts or piercings with nails—they are perfectly cylindrical.”
“Because of course you have done a study of hypodermic marks,” Douglas posited, while Mycroft stared at his younger brother with increasing rage, mingled with fading hope.
“Not as thoroughly as I have dirt,” Sherlock replied. “Dirt is omnipresent: on footwear, on clothing, under fingernails…”
“Spare us a list!” Mycroft exclaimed. “Yes, I suppose in retrospect the boy had signs of drug use, but then again, many do. And, again, the notion that he could purchase a syringe is absurd at its core.”
Mycroft and Sherlock Page 4
