“I see. And did you speak to Sherlock?”
“I most certainly did! He denied any knowledge and, I might add, in quite the grandiloquent way! I am a fairly well-educated man, Mr. Douglas, but I barely understood a word he said. But this I know: there is something very, very wrong with him!”
“Yes, I—I understand. Thank you, Mr. Capps.”
Douglas left the hall and, cursing his grumbling stomach, took the back stairs two at a time. On the second floor, he followed the sound of the vielle to Sherlock’s quarters, a small guestroom opposite the commodious dormitory.
Doing his best to repress burgeoning homicidal urges, Douglas knocked at the door and let himself in.
He noted that his current guest, unlike those who had come before him, seemed to prize neither air nor light. The curtains were drawn, in spite of a window that faced west. On the dresser beside the bed, three candles remained unlit. Over the room lay the smoky canopy of shag tobacco smoke.
Sherlock was sitting on the bed, facing away from the door. And though he must have heard it open above the squeal of catgut strings, he did not glance around to see who it could be, but continued to saw away mercilessly.
“Sherlock!” Douglas said.
The boy completed whatever measure was in his head, placed his vielle by his side, then turned and looked calmly at Douglas. “It is considered polite to knock,” he said. “I shall, however, waive that nicety in exchange for clear and immediate reprieve, and I shall be on my way, for I have much to do.”
When Douglas said nothing, Sherlock expounded: “Let me rephrase. May I assume that your presence means that I am absolved of my chores? Dismissed? Might I collect me tuppence and go now, sir?”
Douglas narrowed his eyes and glared at Sherlock in a way that would have made most men shudder but that did not alter the other’s countenance one whit. “You are lucky I do not throttle you to within an inch of your life,” he growled.
Sherlock feigned surprise. “You wish to do me violence? I did only as you asked! I kept the little beggars amused, and I schooled them into the bargain.”
“You beat them!” Douglas exclaimed, towering over him.
“In no manner!” Sherlock declared, offended. “I instructed them in geometry—a word they’d never heard, by the way. We covered trajectory, the arc of a weapon, where it lands and why, momentum—another word they’d never heard—and relative distance. We also conducted experiments in chemistry; basic, I must admit, but pertinent to their lives. They were taught as I would’ve liked to have been taught, had I been so fortunate as to have had myself for a—”
“Children!” Douglas spat out. “These are children, eleven to fifteen years of age! Here as our charges, we have a sacred duty to keep them safe!”
Sherlock looked up at him, nonplussed. “You of all people,” he said, “prattling on about safety? From the endless stories that I’ve heard from my brother, is it not true that on the streets of Port of Spain you fought a band of Chinese ruffians and a boy half your age?”
“Yes! A boy trained in the Eastern arts from the time he could barely toddle—not to mention that he was nineteen and not eleven!”
“Ah! And how young should one be when one learns to box?” Sherlock countered. “And when a blow lands, should one not feel it? And if one does not feel it, how can one be expected to learn to avoid it the next time?”
“They were not there for a boxing lesson, Sherlock!”
“No!” Sherlock declared, rising to his feet. “They were there to learn a thing or two about geometry and chemistry, which they did! Besides, your Mr. Capps was so busy blabbing to you about a welt or two that he quite forgot to mention, or perhaps is not even aware, that your new charge, young Charles Fowler, departed yesterday afternoon and has not been heard from since!”
Douglas felt all the air go out of him. He pushed the vielle aside and sat hard on the bed. He closed his weary eyes for a moment, trying to summon up the strength to speak.
“If he is gone,” he said at last, “I must go after him…”
With his eyes closed and head bowed, Douglas heard Sherlock say, with uncommon enthusiasm: “That is the single most cogent phrase you have uttered since you first barged in here. For it is what I have been desiring all along!”
Douglas opened his eyes. “What are you going on about?” he asked wearily.
Sherlock had slipped shoes onto his stockinged feet and was measuring shag into his travel pouch. “I am coming with you, of course!”
“Thank you, no,” Douglas replied.
“Mr. Douglas. You are fatigued and lack proper nourishment. You have also abused your tendons and muscles most unmercifully. And I can glean from how you sit that your lower back and right hip are in some distress. Not to mention that your left cornea has been scratched by sand—”
“Does this soliloquy have a point?” Douglas interrupted, inadvertently rubbing his injured left eye while hating himself for proving the smug little sot correct.
Sherlock said nothing but wrapped his scarf about his throat with a jaunty twirl, and was at the door, waiting for Douglas to follow.
“No,” Douglas said, his voice hoarse. “You care for the boys not at all, or merely for your own conjecture…”
“And you care for them a great deal. Yet they do not even deign to speak to you. And why should they? They do not know you pay the accounts. They see you only as the Negro lackey of a rich and ailing man they have never met. Your kindness seems to them the condescension of one who should be beneath them, and yet has improbably achieved something they could never dream of. You fit into no category they can discern, which makes you despised.”
Douglas winced.
“Whereas they have befriended me lock, stock, and rather wormy barrel,” Sherlock went on. “As for my feelings, you cannot presume to know them. But we agreed beforehand, did we not, that compassion is overrated? Like it or not, Mr. Douglas, you need me,” Sherlock concluded.
Douglas took a moment. Then he sprang from the bed towards Sherlock. He saw Sherlock flinch, as if in fear that, rather than do his bidding, Douglas had decided to pummel him after all.
He is somewhat human, at least, Douglas thought.
“Do not forget your overcoat,” he said to Sherlock.
“I have none,” the latter responded gaily as he stepped across the threshold. “Might I perhaps borrow one of yours…?”
Douglas sighed. What was that Latin phrase? Auribus teneo lupum. He had a wolf by the ears. Whether he held on or let go—either choice could be equally injurious to his health.
13
GEORGE’S SOMBER LITTLE FACE WAS AS WRINKLED AS A partially made bed, his brow coated with sweat. For it seemed he was beginning to comprehend that the two men standing before him depended on his knowledge of the environs to find his runaway brother, and to allow them both to remain within Nickolus House. And so, he did his utmost to explain, though his directions relied less on bellwethers of the road and more on local personages of note: “You goes past the old crone wot stuffs dog turds in ’er bucket fer the tan’ry, ain’t no missin’ ’er stink. Then you looks fer Mr. Boil—I dunno as that’s ’is name, but that’s wot we calls ’im, an’ ’e begs fer alms on the same street as the copperpot man, an’ they bicker like two cocks on the same hen…”
With these and other vivid directions, little George instructed them out of Nickolus House and along the roadways, going from human marker to human marker.
An hour after twilight, the Devil’s Acre was already sealed in an exhausted darkness. Worn-out costermongers were returning to their hovels, hauling baskets of eels and pigs’ knuckles too far gone for anyone to purchase, even for a pittance.
Muck in the streets could no longer be sidestepped even via sense of smell, for the senses had been pummeled into submission by pungent, rancid, sour and putrefying odors of such variety that they would have made the greatest perfumer in Paris weep aloud.
Douglas knew the quarter well enough that th
ey were not likely to run into a wall or an inconveniently parked cart. Still, the cobblestones were chipped and broken; one blundering step could pitch a pedestrian ankle-deep into a steaming mound of dung or a pile of rags, with the owner of said rags curled up inside, drunk, sick, or slumbering.
And somewhere in this unrelenting blackness was the charming but unwise Charles Fowler drawing unaccustomed notice in his new clothes and shoes: a titmouse dropped headfirst into a bevy of snakes.
Wind stung Douglas’s exposed face. It felt like miniscule shards of glass as he and Sherlock trudged along in the dark. While Sherlock was swaddled—or perhaps swallowed—in Douglas’s overcoat, he himself was making do with a jacket. It did not matter. It seemed that his nerves had finally given up and gone to sleep, waiting for the rest of him to join them.
Painfully aware of his own limitations, he laid his hand over his breast pocket, which held a pistol: his old Smith & Wesson, top break, single action Model 3. He could not imagine having to use it, but he could also not imagine traveling in the dark without it, tempting fate.
As for Sherlock, Douglas had expected him to complain, but he had done nothing of the kind. It was he, in fact, though not quite so tall as Douglas, who had set the pace from the first and kept on relentlessly, and with nary a word. There was no meandering through the labyrinthine streets. Sherlock would find a marker, then move on to the next like a hound on the hunt. For although visibility was almost nil, George’s directions thus far had been remarkably on point. And there was but one left. Douglas recalled the boy’s words: “I’m finkin’ if it’s early enuff, there’s a rag-and-bone man, right full of ’isself cuz ’e owns an ’orse—’alf an ’orse,” George had amended. “His bruvver-in-loss owns the uvver ’alf an’ uses it fer uvver work. You’ll hear ’im snorin’ somethin’ fierce. He’ll have ’is cart out an’ be sleepin’ afore the door.”
“So you are saying this man parks his cart in front of a door?” Douglas had repeated. “And then sleeps against it while his brother has use of the animal?”
George had nodded, eyeing Sherlock with pity for having to put up with the poor dim Negro at his side. When Douglas had dared to inquire, “Which door?” George had stared at him as if realizing that trusting this half-wit meant that all his labors had been in vain.
“The door where Charles is!” he’d blurted out impatiently.
“Yes, but where does it lead?” Douglas had insisted.
“Why, it don’t lead to no place!” The boy had said as if this were the most logical response in the world. “An old storrige room’s wot it was,” he’d said, turning to Sherlock, “naught but rats in it now. But we makes two beds of rags an’ paper, cuz our soot blankets we ’as to leave wiv Mr. Beeton, cuz they’s ’is. But Charles an’ me, we were warm enuff!” Georgie declared as if daring anyone to say different, until his tone became suddenly plaintive, eyes pleading. “Douglas? You will tell Mr. Smythe I was of aid? Charles shouldn’t ’ave took off, but we wants to be ’ere more than anyfing…”
When Douglas assured him that Mr. Smythe would be informed of George’s honesty and helpfulness, one big tear squeezed out of the boy’s eye before he could prevent it. He roughly wiped it away, planted his feet more firmly on the ground, and scowled up at Douglas as if to say no one alive had better feel sorry for him, or they’d learn what’s what.
* * *
“There he is!”
Sherlock had managed to spot the rag-and-bone man on the other side of the street, which made Douglas wonder if he could see in the dark, like a cat.
The man was just as George had described him: wrapped in a greatcoat and leaning against his now-horseless cart, snoring. And though all they could see behind him was a crumbling building the color of pitch, George had been unerring to this juncture, so they quickly crossed the road to the old storehouse door.
But Charles was not sequestered behind it, as they’d been assured he would be. Instead, they heard a terrified cry—“’Elp, guv’nor! ’Elp!”
Down an alley, a lad who looked very much like Charles was struggling to wrench himself free from three grown men in threadbare clothing.
14
SHERLOCK COULD NOT ASCERTAIN WHETHER IT WAS Charles. It could be any boy, crying out for assistance so that his chums could then assail the Samaritan, stripping him of goods and his pride. He turned to glance at Douglas to gauge his thoughts—only to see Douglas’s hands planted flat on the empty horse cart, using it as a springboard to hoist himself aloft, then flying feet first into the man tugging the unseen boy by the arm and landing a blow squarely on the kidnapper’s head.
The man crumpled to the ground, and his two startled friends attempted to strike the tall black shadow that had improbably materialized before them. But Douglas was no underweight lad with a twisted spine whom they could haul about. As the two lunged at him, he struck again. His right forearm protected his face and his right leg was braced behind him, while his large left hand darted out of the mist and wrapped itself around one man’s throat so quickly that it seemed easier to witness in retrospect.
As that same hand dropped to the ground for balance, Douglas’s right leg was already lifting into the air, the foot like a cudgel smacking the third ne’er-do-well between his jaw and ear, sending him sprawling.
In the tumult, the captive boy took off down the alley, with Douglas right behind him.
Sherlock looked down at Douglas’s vanquished opponents. The man kicked in the face was not moving; nor was the second with the crushed windpipe. But the third—thinning hair, scarred, mid-twenties—staggered to his feet. He stared at Sherlock, then came at him with the toe-heel alignment, relaxed torso and slightly bent knees of a pugilist bent on revenge.
Sherlock, who until this juncture had only sparred with Mycroft or the Quince twins, wrenched his short staff from the interior pocket of Douglas’s coat. As the man came at him, he let go a decent left jab that came primarily out of sudden fear.
Blood spurted from a freshly made gash on his opponent’s forehead that sent him stumbling backwards into the cart. It shuddered with the weight of him, and elicited an indignant roar of outrage from the owner whose slumbers had been cut short.
The owner reached for the interloper but missed and snagged Sherlock’s coat instead, holding him long enough that his assailant was able to deliver a businesslike punch to Sherlock’s gut, making him double over. The owner—confused but out to punish somebody—kept his vice-like hold. Sherlock was forced to drop his elbow and jab it into the man’s ribs until he let go.
As his nemesis came for him again, Sherlock delivered a well-placed knee to his groin that sent him crumpling to the ground near his two friends.
He tried to regain his spent breath. Now what?
“Sherlock!”
It was Douglas, bellowing out of the darkness.
He shook off his reverie and ran towards the sound, catching up with Douglas just as the latter managed to lay a hand on the fleeing boy, who tried to take one more step, only to collapse onto the street. As Douglas scooped him up in his arms like a rag doll, Charles vomited a viscous substance of indeterminate color across Douglas’s shoulder but did not return to consciousness.
“What of the men?” Sherlock asked, looking behind him.
“Forget them, they are of no consequence,” Douglas said.
Sherlock listened for the sound of footsteps coming towards them, but all was quiet. “Should we not discern why they were after him?”
“Hush.” Douglas felt Charles’s chest and mouth for a heartbeat and breath. “Feeble but present,” he said. “We must get him home.”
“Yes, by all means,” Sherlock agreed, following somberly behind. “He cannot die, not when there is so much to discover!”
* * *
Charles’s brother George, hiccupping back tears, was allowed to ascertain for himself that Charles was still, however tenuously, amongst the living. Then he was shunted back to the dormitory for whatever night’s sleep he c
ould muster.
He took offhis clothes most reluctantly, hiding them under his very own pillow, another unheard-of luxury, lest anyone should ferret them away while his eyes were closed.
As for the nightshirt, he eyed it with misgivings. He confessed to Douglas that he did not recognize it as any proper clothing for a male of the species. He suspected it only fit for kings and the like. But because the cotton was finer than any he’d ever felt, Douglas watched him smooth it ever so carefully underneath him so that it would not crease as he slipped under the bedcovers.
* * *
Upstairs in the attic, Charles Fowler lay in his new nightshirt, in the little cot that Douglas had dragged up there for that very purpose. It would allow him to rest free of the prying eyes of his fellow residents.
As they waited by the light of a hissing gas lamp for the doctor to arrive, Douglas and Sherlock inspected the numerous bruises and cuts on the boy’s body. The lad had the sign of the whip across his thin shoulder blades. There were at least ten scars, though none were fresh.
“I am disturbed by these,” Sherlock said.
“You ought to be. The fact that employers can beat their charges with impunity—”
“No,” Sherlock said impatiently. “I meant that Beeton appears to have ceased ‘disciplining’ the boy. Whatever for? He and George still worked as sweeps until a few days ago—why the reprieve? And it seemed to me that the stripes on George’s back are as old as his brother’s. I am no physician—”
“No, you are not,” Douglas underscored.
“—but even so, every one of the gashes had scarred over.” Sherlock scratched the tip of his long, sharp nose and stared into the middle distance. “How’d they come to you?” he asked. “The brothers?”
“Through do-gooders, as Mycroft would call them,” Douglas replied. “Sometimes they see a child that is more intelligent, more skilled, or simply needier than the rest. They alert Nickolus House, and we pay the parents, or the master, to take him off their hands. A wealthy patroness by the name of Adele de Matalin ferreted out these two.”
Mycroft and Sherlock Page 7
