Young Sherlock: Night Break

by Andrew Lane

  They walked back to Victoria Station after they had finished their food, and somehow, despite the enormous undertaking that they were about to engage upon, the sun seemed warmer and the breeze coming down The Mall fresher than it had been before.

  It was late afternoon when they got back to Arundel. They retrieved their horses from the stables at the station and rode to James Phillimore’s house.

  The maid answered straight away, and didn’t seem to recognize them. Her eyes were watery, and she kept dabbing at them with a handkerchief. ‘The master . . . he can’t see anyone right now, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It is quite important,’ Sherlock insisted.

  ‘Even so – maybe you gentlemen could come back tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s about ’is bruvver,’ Matty said, stepping forward.

  The maid stared at him strangely. ‘Perhaps you’d better come in then,’ she said.

  She escorted them into the visitors’ room and left them there. From elsewhere in the house Sherlock could hear voices. Eventually James Phillimore appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Mr Holmes, Mr Arnatt. You catch me at a bad time.’

  ‘How so?’ Sherlock asked.

  ‘I have had a telegram from France, from the company that my brother has been employed by. They, in turn, have had a telegram from Egypt. Apparently my brother has gone missing.’

  Sherlock and Matty exchanged glances. ‘Then there is something we need to talk to you about,’ Sherlock said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It took until the afternoon of the next day for proper arrangements to be made. Sherlock had to return to Holmes Lodge and tell his aunt, and his sister, that he would be away for a while. Fortunately Rufus had already left for London by the time they returned, so they didn’t have to worry about telling him. Sherlock also had to pack. James Phillimore – who had surprised them both by telling them that he would be heading for Egypt as well, and would happily travel with them – had to organize his business arrangements and leave numerous sets of written instructions for his servants, as well as writing a long letter to Emma Holmes which he asked Sherlock to carry back to Holmes Lodge for him.

  Sherlock had asked him, at one stage while they were making plans, why he was so set on going to Egypt.

  ‘You tell me that my brother has asked me for help,’ he said seriously, ‘and so I shall help as much as I can.’ He glanced around, and shivered. ‘Besides, after my awful experiences in this house I feel I need some kind of break. I need to get away from here for a while. I have been unable to sleep in my own bedroom, knowing that at any moment someone might grab me, tie me up and hide me in a wall again.’

  There was a travel agency in Arundel that specialized in foreign travel. After some research they recommended a direct route from Southampton to Egypt. The company who would organize it was called the Peninsular and Oriental Company, and their steamships left Southampton frequently and called in at Gibraltar and Malta before continuing on to the port of Alexandria. The entire journey would take shortly over a week to accomplish. James Phillimore quite happily paid the £27 ticket cost for each of them, in cash. He seemed to have access to a great deal of money that he had earned during his career and never spent on anything, and he was beginning to see this journey as something between an adventure and an expedition to help repair his family. Sherlock was beginning to like the man – he might be officious, nit-picking and highly strung, but he was also honest and open.

  Fortunately there was also a tailor in Arundel who had some lightweight shoes, clothing and hats that would be suitable for a hot and sunny climate. Matty seemed to take this all in his stride. The only thing he had to say about it was: ‘At least this time I’ll be able to see the ocean. Last time I was tied up in a cabin most of the time.’ Again, it was Mr Phillimore who paid. Sherlock offered to access the resources of the Holmes family but Phillimore said: ‘No need, no need. Jonathan is my brother, after all.’

  They had two days until the ship left Southampton. The journey from Arundel to Southampton Docks would only take an hour or so on the train, and so there wasn’t much to do after they had all packed. Sherlock had to spend his time at Holmes Lodge talking to his sister and to his aunt. He tried to make sure that they could run things in his absence, but he realized after a while that the butler, the cook, the maids and the footmen had been effectively running the house themselves since his father had gone to India. His mother, after all, hadn’t been in any condition to take more than a slight interest in things. The staff ran the place like a well-oiled machine, only one that had no purpose apart from to keep going. It was a house without a proper family.

  The letter supposedly from Mycroft but actually written by Rufus Stone was waiting in the hall for Sherlock to read. He just left it there. He already knew what was in it, so apart from the intellectual interest of seeing how well Rufus could mimic Mycroft’s handwriting there was nothing there for him.

  He did, however, write a letter back to Mycroft, telling him that the prisoners had escaped – knowing full well that Mycroft had set the scene to look that way – and that he was returning to Oxford. That, he hoped, would assuage Mycroft’s suspicions for a while, and prevent him from finding out that Sherlock had actually gone to Egypt.

  Emma took the news of James Phillimore’s planned trip to Egypt better than Sherlock had expected. It seemed to him that she liked the idea of having a fiancé more than the reality. He thought that she could quite happily go on for years talking about the planned wedding without actually getting any closer to it. Perhaps James Phillimore was the same.

  It was Aunt Anna who nailed Sherlock’s feelings precisely. ‘It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive,’ she told him. ‘That is an old saying, but it is a true one.’

  ‘You are sure you will stay, while I am gone?’ he asked her.

  ‘Of course I will. Emma and I have fun together – sewing, gardening and playing the piano. We will be fine, Sherlock. You go off and do whatever it is that you are going to do.’

  Sherlock’s big fear was that either Mycroft or Rufus would turn up at the house again, and that he would have to pretend that he wasn’t going to head off to Egypt to stop some kind of huge conspiracy. Either that or he would have to try and explain himself, and he was fairly sure that his brother would have done whatever he could to stop Sherlock from interfering. Knowing about the disappearance of the three burglars, Sherlock was worried that Mycroft might take it into his head to spirit Sherlock away to the same place. Fortunately Mycroft himself wrote, explaining that he was tied up in London with official business, and would not be able to visit Holmes Lodge until the coming weekend – several days away. By then, Sherlock hoped, they would all be well on their way.

  On the evening before the journey started, Sherlock found himself outside Holmes Lodge, wandering around the grounds aimlessly. Thoughts kept flickering through his head. Were they doing the right thing? Was he putting Matty’s life at risk? Did they have any reasonable chance of making a difference? After a while he found himself sitting on the plinth around the small pyramidal folly near which he had fought the three burglars a few days before. He rested his head in his hands, worries flitting around his mind like moths around a flame. What did he think he was doing?

  After a while he realized that there were two separate issues here that he was muddling together – the disappearance of Jonathan Phillimore and the possible threat directed against the canal. They were linked, but he needed to separate them, if only for his own peace of mind. If he and Matty accompanied Mr Phillimore to Egypt with the express intention of finding Mr Phillimore’s brother, and while they were there spent some time trying to get to see someone in authority in the Suez Canal Company, that was something he could accept, and his heart stopped racing so fast. If, when they found Jonathan Phillimore, they could help him to blow the whistle on the suspected sabotage: well, that was something else. Thinking about it this way, he found, made him feel a lot better.

  It struck hi
m, as he was walking, that perhaps one of the reasons he was so set on going straight to Egypt to try and find Jonathan Phillimore was that Sherlock’s own father was somewhere unknown and out of touch in India, and he had been informed in much the same way as James Phillimore had – by a message arriving from abroad. Perhaps his decision to help find Jonathan Phillimore was at least in part because he couldn’t go and find his own father.

  Back inside the house, he raided his father’s library for books about Egypt. There were a few – a couple of histories of the country and a few books written by travellers – and he took them away and put them in his baggage. He would have time to read them on the voyage, familiarizing himself with what was ahead.

  He slept well, and the next day a carriage containing James Phillimore turned up just after breakfast. The footmen loaded their suitcases on top, and they set off – into the unknown.

  Sherlock had been to Southampton before. A couple of years ago, he and Amyus Crowe and Virginia had sailed from there to America. The process of getting on to the ship bound for Alexandria was straightforward: merely a process of presenting their tickets and their passports to the officials on the dockside. Their bags were taken away, to be carried to their cabins, and they were free to climb the gangplank to the impressively large steam ship – the SS Princess Helena, according to the sign on her bows – that would carry them all the way.

  Two hours later, after all the passengers were aboard, the ship’s steam whistle sounded, the gangplank was removed, and the Princess Helena was slowly towed by three tugs away from the dock. The sea was blue, dappled with light and dark shadows cast by the clouds overhead. Gradually they built up speed, and eventually, as they passed the Isle of Wight, the tugs abandoned them, the ship’s engines built up steam, and the great wheels on either side of the ship started to turn, churning the water. They were on their way.

  Watching as the Isle of Wight receded into the distance until it was lost in the haze, Sherlock found his emotions were mixed. On the one hand he loved travelling, and seeing new lands. On the other hand he remembered how much his life, and he, had changed between leaving England on his last journey, to China, and returning. How much might change this time?

  Would Mycroft even acknowledge his existence when he returned?

  For the rest of that first day, Sherlock spent some time on deck in a deckchair, reading the books about Egypt that he had found in his father’s library, and also talking to other travellers who had been to the country in order to extract their impressions and knowledge. Mr Phillimore turned out to be allergic to the sun, and so spent a lot of time in his cabin where, he claimed, he was writing to Emma every day, telling her what had been happening to him. As Matty pointed out, nothing was happening to him, not in his cabin, so what was he writing so much about? Matty himself had fallen in with a group of other boys the same age as him, and was busy teaching them the skills of pickpocketing and general thievery that he had picked up in his life. They seemed entranced, and in turn they were teaching Matty about how to hold a knife and fork properly when eating, how to speak without attracting attention because of his accent, and the difference between the ways one addressed a Duchess or a Countess.

  Sherlock remembered all too well the way that shipboard life could fall into sheer boredom, if one wasn’t careful. He had his father’s books about Egypt to read, of course, but there was only so much reading that a person could do every day without going mad or wanting to throw the book overboard. He could pace the decks, watching the horizon for the faint sign of another ship, or land, but he’d seen too many people on his last trip walking round and round obsessively like lions in a cage. Some passengers spent the majority of their time in the Princess Helena’s restaurant or the ship’s bar, but that didn’t remotely appeal to Sherlock. As far as he was concerned, eating and drinking were just ways of providing the body with fuel. One could choose how good the fuel was, of course – just like some kinds of coal burned better and produced less smoke, some kinds of food were tastier than others – but there was as little point in overloading oneself with food as there was overloading a fireplace with coal. And then there were the games – the upper rear deck of the ship had been painted green, and could be used as a croquet pitch, while there were several rooms set aside for card games such as bridge and baccarat. Croquet didn’t appeal to Sherlock in the slightest – when a person had knocked a ball through a hoop successfully once, what was the challenge in doing it again? Card games he did find appealing, given that they involved using logic and memory to take advantage of the hand that had been dealt by luck. He had also learned quite a few ways of manipulating and marking cards a few months before by Ambrose Albano in Cloon Ard Castle, in Galway, and so he was pretty sure he could make a decent profit if he played for long enough. The trouble was that the card rooms were so filled with cigar smoke that every time one of their doors opened it was impossible to see anything inside apart from a misty white wall, and he hated smoking with a passion.

  Despite his misgivings about obsessive behaviour, he spent quite a lot of the second day at sea alone at the railings, staring out into the deep blueness of the Atlantic Ocean, hoping to see a whale, or a dolphin, or something, and trying not to think about Virginia Crowe. After a few hours he gave up and decided to return to his cabin to research Egypt some more. Turning away from the railings he made his way to where a narrow walkway between two bulkheads would take him back to where he was staying. The walkway was blocked off with ropes, however – some minor repair that had to be made by the crew, he presumed – so he diverted along the deck and down a walkway that he had never had to use before.

  He was halfway down when noises from an open doorway attracted his attention. He could hear feet scuffing on the wooden deck, and the sounds of physical exertion. It almost seemed as if a fight was going on, except that he couldn’t hear any expressions of pain.

  He moved quietly up to the open door and peered around the doorframe.

  A man was inside, dressed in a white shirt, open at the neck, white trousers and rope-soled espadrilles. He was middle-aged, quite stocky, with salt-and-pepper hair cropped quite close to his scalp. He was standing on a padded cotton mat which nearly, but not quite, fitted the size of the room.

  He was also holding a sabre, with which he was chopping and cutting at the air.

  Sherlock glanced further into the room. There was nobody else there. The man was fighting with himself, it appeared.

  Sherlock was about to move on, leaving the swordsman to his solitary exercise, when the man made a final lunge at nothing, held it for a few seconds, and then straightened up. He glanced at the door without any surprise, as if he had already registered the fact that Sherlock was there.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. His voice was cultured, with the faintest trace of a Hampshire accent.

  ‘Good morning,’ Sherlock responded.

  ‘No doubt you are wondering what I am doing,’ the man said. His eyes were pale green, and keen, like those of a cat.

  ‘You appear to be practising sword-fighting moves in the absence of an opponent,’ Sherlock observed. ‘I presume you are on a journey and wish to keep your expertise up, but you have nobody to practise with.’

  ‘Indeed,’ the man said. ‘The Captain had very kindly given me the use of this room for my exercises. K. James Marius Reilly at your service, formerly of the Service Corps, but recently retired Fencing Master to Her Majesty’s Naval Officer Cadets at Portsmouth.’ He almost, but not quite, saluted.

  ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ Sherlock responded.

  Reilly glanced at him shrewdly. ‘Have you ever fenced, Mr Holmes?’

  Sherlock found himself remembering his desperate fight with Baron Maupertuis in his French chateau, a few years ago now. Sherlock’s clumsiness with a blade would have killed him if it hadn’t been matched by Maupertuis’s own problems in manipulating his.

  ‘Once or twice,’ he answered. ‘I’ve never been trained, though.’

  �
��Would you care to have some training here? No charge – I’m tired of fighting against my own shadow, and I could do with a decent sparring partner, even if I have to train him up myself. Are you going all the way to Alexandria?’

  ‘I am,’ Sherlock said, intrigued. ‘Have you taught before?’

  Reilly nodded. ‘In the Army. I use the Angelo system, but with references back to Diego de Valera’s fifteenth-century work, The Treatise on Arms. You’ll pick it up in no time.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m suitably dressed . . .’ Sherlock protested.

  ‘As long as you have something reasonably loose-fitting, you’ll be all right.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you say? It will not only pass the time entertainingly for us both, but it will also provide you with some skills that may come in useful one day.’

  ‘Do you have any spare blades?’

  ‘I’m going to Egypt to set myself up as a Maestro di Scherma. The creation of the Suez Canal will make Alexandria and Port Said very cosmopolitan places. I want to be one of the first people to set up a fighting school there. I shall make a fortune!’ He smiled self-consciously. ‘I apologize – I am desperately trying to convince myself that I have made the right move in uprooting myself and moving to another country to teach something that they might not want to know. But yes – I have numerous blades with me, on the basis that I was unsure of the quality of the weapons I will find in Alexandria and its environs.’

  ‘I think you’ll find they have been making swords for longer than we have,’ Sherlock observed. He found himself smiling at Reilly’s naive enthusiasm. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I shall take you up on your kind offer. Please – teach me to sword-fight.’

  The rest of the day and the whole of the next passed in a whirl. Sherlock had expected to at least have been allowed to hold a sword fairly quickly, but after he had changed into appropriate clothing, Reilly took him through a series of exercises designed to expand his chest, raise his head, throw his shoulders back and strengthen his back. For several hours, with breaks for water, he found himself conducting various repeated exercises: holding his hands straight in front of himself, fingertips touching, and then raising them above his head in a circular motion; holding his hands straight in front of himself and then bringing them back so that they were held out to either side; and bending to touch his toes while keeping his back perfectly straight. He didn’t mind: he could see the point of having his muscles stretched and his joints made more flexible. After those initial exercises he was encouraged to spend time holding his arms behind his back, with his left hand grasping his right arm just above the elbow and turning his body left, and then right, until it wouldn’t go any further. There were also balancing exercises: taking his weight on the toes of his left and right feet, and holding himself straight for as long as possible. At each stage, while he was holding positions, Reilly would move close and, holding his shoulders, or his arms, or his wrists, attempt to force him further back so that his muscles stretched and protested.