Young Sherlock: Night Break

by Andrew Lane

  ‘What about our sister?’ he asked suddenly. ‘How is she taking the news?’

  ‘Her mental state is fragile,’ Mycroft rumbled. He had eaten two cakes himself. ‘Sometimes she is aware of what is going on around her and sometimes she seems to be living in a world of her own. Whatever world she visits, I have a feeling it is more congenial than the world the rest of us live in.’ He paused momentarily. ‘I understand that she has a suitor – a man whose acquaintance she has made and who seems to have some kind of romantic feelings towards her. I intend meeting with this man and establishing what kind of person he is before we return.’

  ‘Emma – with a man?’ Sherlock thought back to the pale girl he remembered. She had always seemed to drift through the house like a ghost, not talking to anyone, immersed in her own thoughts. Younger than Mycroft but older than Sherlock, she had inherited their mother’s physical fragility and, apparently, their father’s mental fragility.

  ‘You are thinking about our father’s problems,’ Mycroft observed, ‘and how our sister appears to have inherited them.’

  Sherlock was amazed. He shouldn’t have been – he had seen his brother demonstrate his amazing deductive abilities before, but this time he was the subject. ‘How did you know that?’ he asked.

  ‘Was you really thinkin’ ’bout that?’ Matty asked, intrigued.

  ‘I was.’

  Matty looked darkly at Mycroft. ‘’E read your mind then. I always suspected ’e could do that. The Dark Arts – that’s what they’re called.’

  ‘That wasn’t mind-reading,’ Mycroft said, shaking his huge head. ‘That was merely observation. Do you see the serving girl at the counter? She is roughly the same age as our sister. When Sherlock mentioned Emma’s name his gaze shifted so that he was looking at the serving girl. Obviously he was thinking about Emma, and the girl was merely a mental stand-in, if you will. His gaze shifted to the plates and cups on the table, no doubt observing that the serving girl had got our order perfectly correct, whereas Emma would either have forgotten the order, served the wrong cakes, or spilt the tea. Sherlock’s glance then shifted to me, and then to his own reflection in the window of this tea shop. I deduced that his thoughts had similarly shifted to the differences between Emma and the two of us. In particular I noticed that he was unknowingly comparing my hand with his – we both have comparatively long fingers, which is a trait we share with our mother. She, by the way, was excellent at both playing the piano and needlework. Sherlock finished by glancing at the station guard outside, whose uniform would have reminded him of our father’s Army uniform, and then upward, to where the Christian Church tells us that heaven is located. It was a simple progression of thought to deduce that he had moved on to thinking about our parents, and how we had all inherited something different from them.’

  ‘Incredible,’ Matty breathed.

  ‘Commonplace,’ Mycroft said dismissively. ‘Even elementary.’

  ‘We’ve never really talked about Father’s problems,’ Sherlock said, looking at his brother. ‘You know that Uncle Sherrinford and Aunt Anna told me about them?’

  ‘Uncle Sherrinford wrote and told me that the conversation had occurred. I decided that if you needed to talk about it, then you would, and that there was no need for me to needlessly raise the subject.’ He glanced at Matty. ‘I also know that Master Arnatt was present during the conversation, and I trust him to keep any information he heard to himself.’

  Matty nodded seriously.

  ‘Father is a complicated man,’ Mycroft observed. ‘You were, perhaps, shielded from his mood swings, but I experienced them first hand. There were times when he would stay in his study for days, just staring into space, and other times when he would suddenly decide at three o’clock in the morning to change around all the paintings in the house. His time in the –’ he hesitated briefly – ‘sanatorium calmed him down, but he will always be eccentric. Fortunately he has taken one of the four career courses where eccentricity is tolerated and rewarded if it is combined with competence – the British Army. The others, of course, are the Church, the theatre and academia.’

  ‘Interesting that Uncle Sherrinford chose to write sermons for vicars around the country,’ Sherlock observed. ‘He didn’t actually join the Church, but he did the next best thing. I suspect his mind was closer to Father’s than he would ever have admitted.’

  ‘Interesting also that you play the violin and have shown a strong interest in the theatrical life,’ Mycroft said without missing a beat. ‘I am the exception, of course – I am not a don, or a lecturer.’

  ‘But Charles Dodgson told me that he thought you had the makings of a fine academic, and he was both saddened and surprised that you joined the Civil Service,’ Sherlock rejoined.

  ‘It strikes me,’ Matty suddenly piped up, ‘that I don’t even know where your family live.’

  ‘Sussex,’ Mycroft said. ‘A small town named Arundel. The Holmes family have a large house a few miles outside the town.’ He checked his watch. ‘The journey will take around three hours, and we will have to change trains several times. Oh, and that reminds me . . .’ He patted his pocket, then slid his hand inside and pulled out an envelope. ‘This arrived a few days ago. It is from Father, in India. I thought you might wish to read it.’

  Mycroft placed the envelope on the table between them. Sherlock stared at it – at the familiar writing on the front, at the strange Indian stamps that adorned it, and at the various creases and stains it had picked up during its travels. A terrible thought occurred to him.

  ‘Father doesn’t know,’ he whispered.

  ‘I have written a reply to his letter,’ Mycroft said, equally quietly, ‘in which I break the tragic news.’ He paused. ‘I have also written separately and privately to his commanding officer, notifying him of the family bereavement and asking him to keep an eye on Father to make sure that . . . that he deals with the news. I have no great faith that his mental state is stable, given his location so far from home, and the privations of the British Army in India.’

  My Dearest Sons,

  It is one of the responsibilities of a father to pass on to his scions the wisdom that he has learned during his time on Earth. Sadly, given that I am currently many thousands of miles away from you, and am likely to remain in this geographical location for some time to come, I am unable so to do. I have spent much of my spare time here racking my brains for little gems of philosophy that might be of service, but I have come up with nothing that you could not (and probably already) have found in Plato, Socrates and the pages of Punch magazine. All that I am able to do is to give you some flavour of the environment, the people and the events here in India – so different from dear England, the land that we all love and which I dream about every night.

  I recall that I have, in previous letters, written about the landscape of this strange country – the flat plains, the hills, the rivers and the towns. I remember also writing about the weather, which is either far too hot or far too hot and far too wet. I have also, I believe, given you some flavour of the various people who call this place their home. What I may not have done is to try to explain what my life is like day to day. You may have the impression that, being in the British Army, I am fighting all the time. You may even worry about me. I can reassure you that I spend considerably more time polishing my buttons, my belt and my boots than I do in combat, and that I am more at risk from disease and snakebite here than from a bullet or a knife.

  I should, I suppose, say a few words about the strict hierarchy of this society, by which I mean the society of English people living here in India, not the society of the Indians themselves (although we seem to have taken on some of their ideas). The highest of the high here are called the Brahmins – a word borrowed by the way from the Indians, who have had a very well established caste system for thousands of years. As with their castes, members of our own different levels stick to their own – nobody ever socializes outside their equals. If you try, then you are reported
and disciplined, and if you persist, then you may well be sent home in disgrace. The Brahmins are the members of the Indian Civil Service – the ones who actually govern and run this country. Beneath them are the semi-Brahmins – the members of the various other Government departments such as the Forest Service and the Police Service. Beneath them are the military forces, and that is where I fit in. Beneath the military are the businessmen – those who work in commerce – and beneath them are the traders – the shop workers and suchlike. Towards the bottom of the social order you find the menial workers, and at the absolute bottom are those English people whose families have, for whatever reason, chosen to settle here in India and make a life for themselves.

  It wasn’t, Sherlock thought, too far away from the various stratified levels of British society. Even in his former school – Deepdene School for Boys – there had been a very definite difference between the boys who came from the aristocracy, the boys whose fathers were in the Army, the boys whose fathers were in commerce and the boys whose fathers worked in trade.

  Given that each level of English society here in India socializes exclusively with its own, I do not get to speak to the Brahmin, the semi-Brahmin or the mercantile class unless on business. I spend a great deal of time here on the cantonment, which is what we call the military base where my regiment is stationed. Here life is driven by the various parades, and becomes not only very predictable but very boring as well. For instance, a month or so back one of the soldiers was carrying a plate of food from the mess to his barracks when a hawk swooped down from the sky, snatched the meat off the plate and flew off with it. We are still talking about it, even now. That is how bored we are.

  The highlight of our lives here in the cantonment are the formal dinners. The food is certainly not much to write home about, which is why I have not previously done so. Because of the extreme heat and the prevalence of disease, any animal that is butchered must be eaten straight away or the meat will spoil. The meat itself is always tough – tough chicken, tough mutton and sometimes (although it angers the natives) tough beef – the natives who follow the Hindu religion worship cows, and get very offended if we eat them. The meat is usually ‘curried’, which means it is cooked with strong spices, and that helps to make it digestible.

  The formal military dinners consist of seven or eight courses, and we do, of course, dress up for them – tail coat, boiled shirt with stiff collar and cuffs and a white waistcoat. These conventions are preserved even on patrol outside the cantonment, and I have seen people arrive for dinner out in the wilds on camels, but still wearing their formal dress. In the cantonment the strict rule is that nobody is allowed to leave the table until the Colonel in charge of the regiment leaves, which means in practice that if several bottles of wine have been drunk in the bar beforehand, then there are a lot of increasingly uncomfortable men around the table as the dinner wears on!

  It is Sunday here, as I write this letter, although the sun which shines down so heavily on us now has yet to shine on you in England, and by the time it does shine on you it will be dark here. I attended the church service this morning, as we all do every Sunday. The church is exactly the same as it would be back in England, and sometimes, while we are all gathered there singing hymns or praying, it is possible to imagine that we aren’t in India at all, but are back home, in Aldershot perhaps. At least, it would be possible if it weren’t for the heat radiating from the stones, the insects buzzing around our heads and the fact that the pews have notches cut out of them for us to rest our guns in. Yes, we take our guns into church with us. I wonder what Jesus, with his feelings against moneylenders in the grounds of the temple, would have made of that.

  I mentioned earlier the weather, which is either far too hot or far too hot and far too wet. We dream of cold, and of snow. The excessive heat here leads to many problems, two of which are the diseases and the insects. As far as diseases go, I could write a book about them by now, but suffice it to say as an example that there is something called ‘prickly heat’, which sounds very civilized but in actuality means that your skin is covered so thickly with itching pimples that you cannot slide a needle between them. I have seen a man start off dinner scratching himself lightly and finish by tearing his fingernails down the skin of his chin and neck so hard that he drew blood. As far as the insects are concerned, they go in cycles. One week there will be stink bugs everywhere – in your bedding, in your soup, in your ink pots. They are innocuous unless you crush them, in which eventuality they give out the most appalling smell. The next week the stink bugs will be gone but in their place will be jute moths which, if you absent-mindedly brush them off when they land on your hand, leave behind some chemical secretion that burns you.

  They call this place ‘the land of sudden death’, but there are times when I wonder if death would be preferable to living in constant discomfort, pain, boredom and torment.

  I must cease writing now, or I will say things that perhaps I should be keeping to myself. Please write back to me – it is your letters, along with the letters from your mother and your sister, that keep me sane.

  Yours sincerely,

  Your loving father,

  Siger Holmes

  Sherlock finished the letter and folded it up very carefully. He handed it back to Mycroft without saying anything. Neither of them had to. It was clear from his words that their father’s mental state was deteriorating out there in India. Discovering that his wife, their mother, had died in his absence – as painful as that was to Sherlock, what would it do to his father?

  CHAPTER TWO

  The journey to the seat of the Holmes family for generations past took several hours. It wasn’t so much the distance – Arundel, where Sherlock had been born and brought up, was, as the crow flew, not that far from Oxford – but it did require several changes of train and a deal of sitting around in small tea shops waiting for the next train to arrive. Matty was as chirpy as ever, and managed to put away a slice of cake in every tea shop, but Mycroft seemed to be in no mood to talk, and Sherlock felt the same. This was not the kind of family reunion he had been dreaming of.

  The weather was fine, and when they were on a train Sherlock stared out of the window at the passing landscape. He had become fascinated at the sheer number and variety of people and places that existed in England. Everywhere he looked out of the train window there were people cutting and binding crops in fields, or picking apples or pears in orchards, or driving carts piled high with hay. Every station they passed through, whether they stopped or not, seemed to be crowded with travellers or with people meeting travellers. There were businessmen in suits and hats, labourers in rough clothes, old ladies with baskets or young ladies with extensive skirts and tiny jackets, and everywhere there were dogs, large and small, running around and chasing each other. All human life was there, and Sherlock found himself trying to read the stories of the various travellers from the slight marks on their hands or their clothes. One man they shared a compartment with for a while was a former soldier, judging by the shine on his shoes, the shortness of his hair and the way he sat stiffly upright. A lady who sat down for a few minutes, fussed with the window, and then moved to a different compartment with an audible huff of annoyance, was not as well-off as her clothes suggested, based on the fact that her shoes had been re-soled several times and her jacket repaired by a reasonably competent haberdasher. A vicar engaged them in conversation for a while, but Sherlock was fairly certain that he wasn’t a vicar at all. Certainly his knowledge of the Bible was patchy, when Sherlock questioned him, and he kept trying to change the subject to something more general. Sherlock caught Mycroft’s eye, and was amused to see his brother suppressing a smile. When the vicar finally left their carriage they both burst into laughter, much to the surprise of Matty.

  ‘Should we call the police?’ Sherlock asked, through giggles.

  ‘Impersonating a vicar is not a crime, as far as I am aware,’ Mycroft replied, his heavy frame shaking with suppressed mirth.
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br />   ‘But he may be an escaped prisoner in disguise, or a confidence trickster aiming to fleece a congregation of their offerings in church.’

  ‘Or he might be a sad individual who gets some perverse pleasure from dressing up as a cleric. We have no way of knowing, and no reason to interfere with his deception apart from curiosity. Let it go, Sherlock. Some questions will never be answered – at least, not while we are around, at any rate.’

  As they got closer to their goal, Sherlock began to recognize aspects of the landscape. The sights made him feel nostalgic. He had good memories of Arundel – both the town and the large cathedral. Arundel was near the town of Chichester, and so the houses were large and the families well-off. The Holmes family were descended from a line of local squires, and although they had little or no actual power or influence locally, they were well regarded and so invited to all the events, galas, dinners and parties. Sherlock’s childhood had been filled with long walks by himself in the countryside, many hours spent in the family library, reading his way voraciously through the classics alongside his brother – each sitting in his own armchair and not talking for hours on end, but enjoying the silence – or hiding things like frogs and caterpillars in his brother’s bag when Mycroft went off to university each term. His memories of his mother and father were less clear – they had been caring, but quite remote, leaving the two brothers to get on with their own lives. Sherlock remembered his father mainly as a big man with a large moustache and a booming laugh, but he also remembered that there had been another side to his father as well – a man who would lock himself in the library with a bottle of brandy, and not come out until it was finished, or who would not speak to anyone in the house for days on end. Sherlock had accepted, as children do, that his father had mood swings, but it was only later, talking with his Aunt Anna and Uncle Sherrinford, that he had realized his father’s problems went deeper than that. His mother had been a distant presence for a while – unlike his father, whose mood swings were abrupt and difficult, her condition had deteriorated slowly and gradually until she was little more than a ghost moving around the house. There had been a lot of coughing as well, more so later than earlier, and the occasional sight of blood on a handkerchief. Somehow Sherlock had incorporated those things into his memories without questioning them, but it was obvious to him now, looking backwards, that both of his parents had been ill for a long time, but in very different ways.