Stone Cold

by Andrew Lane

  Even when he was supposed to be at an evening’s entertainment, Sherlock reflected, his brother still appeared to be working. Sherlock turned away, shaking his head. He loved his brother, but he was increasingly becoming annoyed by him. Sherlock was growing up, but Mycroft still treated him like a child.

  The second half of the concert was, if anything, more technically and artistically amazing than the first, but Sherlock didn’t enjoy it as much. His thoughts kept turning to what his brother had said, and to his own particular future. He had no great love for Farnham – it was a pleasant town, with pleasant people, but he had never considered it as anything more than a temporary waypoint in his life, a stopping station, like those places horse-drawn carriages used to break their journeys across country so that the passengers could eat a meal and sleep before continuing their travels. London, on the other hand, had captivated him during his short time there. The city was almost like a person – it had its own character, its own moods, and it could change in a moment. He loved it, and he wanted to live the rest of his life there, if he could.

  But first, Oxford. There seemed to be no way to avoid it. The trouble was that it was all built up like a row of dominos in Mycroft’s mind – two years living in Oxford, being tutored by this Charles Dodgson, leading to entrance into the University and full-time studies, leading to a degree in some useless subject, leading to a dull job in government or in a bank, leading to . . . what? Retirement somewhere by the sea? That was not the kind of life he had planned out for himself.

  Of course, he didn’t actually have a plan for his life. At the moment he was just drifting, testing the waters, seeing where the currents would take him. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the vague thought that he might turn his logical thoughts and his ability to see through complex problems to the simple truths that lay within them into a full-time career – but as what? Some kind of policeman? A secret agent, maybe, like the ones that obviously reported to his brother?

  He sighed. Life appeared to get more and more complicated the older he got.

  That thought led on naturally to thoughts of Virginia Crowe. He had, in the past, assumed that she and he would have some kind of life together, although he had never dared wonder at the nature of that life. It had just seemed that she would always be there for him, and him for her. But she was in America now, engaged to be married to someone else, and her father – the man who had taught Sherlock more in two years than he had learned in his entire life up to that point – was probably teaching someone else’s son. Life, it would appear, had other plans for Sherlock.

  It would be nice, he reflected bitterly, if life could actually let him know what those plans were.

  The concert came to an end. The violinist took several curtain calls as the applause kept on coming. Stone was on his feet, clapping wildly. Sherlock joined in, but his heart wasn’t in it. Thoughts of Oxford, and degrees, and banks, kept intruding.

  The two of them made their way out of the theatre, along with the rest of the audience. On the pavement, Stone turned to Sherlock and extended a hand. ‘Good night, Sherlock,’ he said, and then added, ‘Don’t let your brother’s words discourage you. He may have his plans, but it’s your life to live. Go with your heart.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Sherlock replied, shaking Stone’s hand. ‘But wherever I end up, I hope you will seek me out there. I haven’t made many friends in my life, but I count you as one of them.’

  Stone nodded. ‘And I you.’ He smiled. ‘I have friends in the Oxford area – well, to be completely honest, I have friends pretty much everywhere. Farnham was always just somewhere to live while I carried out a job – a job that became something much more, I should point out. I could just as well live in Oxford as in Farnham – and, I have to say, the chance to listen to, and play, good music is much better there. Do not be surprised if you bump into me sometime soon.’ He raised a hand to his head in a sketchy salute. ‘I will see you again, Sherlock. Until then, be careful, and take care of yourself.’

  Stone vanished into the crowd, Sherlock turned away. He had only taken two steps when a voice beside him said, ‘What was all that about then?’

  It was Matty – Matthew Arnatt. Sherlock knew the voice without having to look.

  ‘It looked pretty serious,’ he went on. ‘It looked like a “goodbye and fare thee well”. You’re not off to China again, are you?’ Matty’s tone was casual, but Sherlock could detect an undercurrent of unease in his friend’s voice. Matty had once told Sherlock that he had spent his life watching friends and family leave him. He had resigned himself to being lonely all his days.

  ‘It’s Mycroft,’ Sherlock admitted without turning. ‘He’s got plans for me. He wants me to go to Oxford.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Sherlock didn’t dare look at Matty’s face. He and the boy had spent a lot of time together over the past few years, but that had been broken by his unplanned visit to China. Although the two of them had grown close again since they had met up in Ireland, the more so after a few weeks in London, he wasn’t sure that Matty would want to be uprooted again.

  He was surprised.

  ‘Oxford’s nice,’ Matty said. ‘You can get there by boat, all the way up the Thames, pretty much. Been there before, I have, an’ it’s very pleasant. Lots of toffs leaving half-eaten food lying around on the grass by the river after they’ve ’ad a picnic, an’ lots of absent-minded lecturers doin’ the same. Rich pickings, for someone like me. Even the swans there eat better than some of the people ’ere in London.’

  ‘You would come with me?’ Sherlock asked, finally turning to look into Matty’s face.

  The boy was smiling. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘This city’s too big for me, an’ the market stallholders are too fly. It’s difficult to get a decent meal without them chasin’ after me twice a day. When are we off?’

  ‘Soon, I think,’ Sherlock said.

  ‘Fair enough. I’ve got everything I need on the barge, an’ Harold’s been itching for a move. ’E’s not like my old ’orse, Albert. ’E just wanted to stand in one spot an’ eat grass an’ ’ay forever. ’Arold likes to move around.’

  ‘Can you get the barge along the Thames?’ Sherlock asked. ‘After all, it’s a river, rather than a canal.’

  Matty nodded. ‘It’s possible, but the width makes it tricky – not so much when you’re movin’ along the river, but more when you need to come off it on to the Oxford Canal. Thinkin’ ’bout it, might be better if we went straight up the Grand Junction Canal, then came off on to the Oxford Canal at the top rather than the bottom an’ get to Oxford from the north, rather than the south.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’ Sherlock caught the boy’s eye. ‘Look, are you sure you want to come? Don’t do it just because you think I need looking after.’

  Matty nodded. ‘Yeah.’ He seemed as if he was about to go on, then he looked away, suddenly embarrassed. ‘That is, if you want me to. I mean, if you’d rather be on your own . . .’

  ‘No,’ Sherlock said firmly. ‘There might be times when I like being alone, but there are definitely times I need to be with friends – and I haven’t got that many of them.’

  ‘Suppose I’ll ’ave to do then,’ Matty said with a lopsided smile.

  ‘Suppose you will,’ Sherlock echoed.

  ‘Besides . . .’ Matty said, and trailed off.

  ‘Besides what?’

  ‘Well, I don’t like to say. It’s not very nice.’

  ‘Force yourself.’

  ‘Well, I s’pose we’ll be seeing less of your brother in Oxford.’

  Sherlock thought for a moment. It was getting harder and harder to get Mycroft out of London. In fact, it was getting harder and harder to get Mycroft out of the Diogenes Club. There was a distinct correlation between his reluctance to travel and his size. ‘I doubt,’ Sherlock replied, ‘that Mycroft would spend as much time with us as he does here, in London.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Matty glanced sideways at Sherlock. ‘It’s not th
at I don’t like ’im – it’s that he don’t like me. An’ besides, he keeps tryin’ to teach me stuff, like readin’ an’ writin’. I don’t need that stuff.’

  Sherlock thought back to his argument with his brother only an hour or so before, when he had told Mycroft that he didn’t need to learn about dead languages or old books. Wasn’t that more or less a refined version of what Matty had just said? Perhaps he should be less picky about the facts he allowed into his brain.

  He shook himself to get rid of the uncomfortable thought.

  ‘Now, let’s get some food,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Where do you recommend?’

  ‘Borough Market’ll be closin’ down now. There’ll be plenty of pies an’ apples goin’ spare.’

  ‘Spare?’ Sherlock questioned.

  ‘Well, if the stall-owner’s back is turned. The way I see it, we’re doin’ them a favour. If we didn’t take the food then, they’d only ’ave to carry it ’ome again, then back to the market next day, an’ the chances are that it might have gone off overnight an’ someone’ll get stomach ache from eatin’ it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Sherlock said. ‘We’re actually providing a public service.’ He clapped Matty on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go, and on the way you can tell me more about Oxford.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  They left five days later, after Mycroft had written to, and received a reply from, his friend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He showed the reply to Sherlock over lunch one day. It said:

  My dear Mycroft,

  Thank you for your letter, which finds me in a state of extraordinary good health and good fortune. I trust that the same can be said of you. Although I never see your name in the newspapers, I am sure that you have made yourself into a success in whatever field it is that you have chosen to enter. I have nothing but fond memories of our time together here at Oxford, although you at least made it out into the wider world. I, as you may have heard, travel to other worlds, but only in my imagination. Some of these worlds are mathematical, and some fantastical, but all of them I find preferable to the dull solidity of supposedly ‘real’ life.

  I would, of course, be more than happy to tutor your brother Sherlock in the logical arts. I recall how I used to envy you for having just the one sibling, considering that I have ten, all of whose birthdays I have to remember. I also remember how you used to speak of Sherlock when you were here. It was usually with some mixture of pride and exasperation, most notably when he hid a live toad in your trunk just before you left home to travel here for the summer term, and when he redrafted an essay you had written over the holidays in a perfect copy of your handwriting but with conclusions that would make sense only to a lunatic. How well I recall your reading that essay aloud in one of my tutorials, and with increasing panic as you realized that it was diverging further and further from what you remembered having written! How we laughed! I cannot, of course, guarantee Sherlock’s acceptance into Christ Church, or any other of the colleges here – that will depend upon his abilities and demeanour – but with the Holmes family name behind him and a character recommendation from me he should be in with a good chance.

  I have taken the liberty of securing him lodgings with a local landlady of good character – a Mrs McCrery of 36 Edmonton Crescent, just around the corner from this college. He will be on terms of room and full board – that is, breakfast and dinner – for the sum of one shilling a week. I trust this will be acceptable. I have lodged with her myself in the past, and found her standards of cleanliness to be unimpeachable, her peach cobbler to be a clean winner in the pudding stakes and her steak pudding to be perfection itself.

  I look forward to young Sherlock presenting himself at my rooms in college at some time in the near future. I also look forward to you visiting him regularly so that we may renew our acquaintance.

  Yours, ever,

  Charles

  Mycroft’s only response as he took the letter back from Sherlock was, ‘I had forgotten about the toad.’

  ‘What happened to it?’ Sherlock asked innocently.

  ‘It became something of a college mascot,’ his brother replied, ‘that is, until an unfortunate incident with a senior master’s dog.’

  ‘It was eaten?’ Sherlock was aghast. He hadn’t intended any harm to come to the creature.

  ‘No – the dog tried to eat it, but choked. The master pulled it out of the dog’s throat and threw it into the river in a fit of rage. Misplaced rage, of course, as the toad was perfectly happy in the water – happier, I suspect, than it had ever been at college. Certainly happier than the dog, who would never eat anything after that without carefully inspecting it and turning it over several times first.’

  Mycroft had offered to pay for Sherlock to take the train to Oxford, but, remembering his conversation with Matty, Sherlock had declined. He had rather taken to the idea of a slow journey by barge, experiencing the landscape as they went – two friends, together. When he explained this, Mycroft had made a ‘harrumph’ noise, and muttered, ‘How uncivilized. How uncomfortable.’

  Sherlock spent the last day before they left London revisiting his favourite places – the bridges over the Thames, the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road, the London Zoo and the hustle and bustle of Paddington Station. He would miss London. He would miss it terribly, and he vowed, as he walked up Baker Street away from the station, to come back and live there one day.

  On the appointed day, Sherlock took what few possessions he had – some clothes, his violin and a few books – and joined Matty on his barge in Camden Lock. They set off in silence, with Matty very aware of his friend’s mixed feelings about leaving. Matty, by contrast, was happier than Sherlock had seen him in a while. Matty was, in so many ways, the exact opposite of Mycroft Holmes. He was thin where Mycroft was fat, intuitive where Mycroft was logical and, critically, restless and active where Mycroft was settled and lazy. The only point of similarity they had was their fondness for food.

  Harold, Matty’s horse, walked steadily along the towpath, pulling the barge slowly and sedately along the Grand Junction Canal. Matty stood at the back, steering with the rudder to ensure that they neither ploughed bow-first into the bank nor drifted out into the centre of the canal, pulling Harold into the shallow water. Sherlock sat cross-legged at the front, watching out for obstacles and tunnels, and letting his mind drift. They passed fields and forests, roads and rivers. Whenever they passed a barge travelling in the opposite direction, usually laden with coal or wood or metal pipes, Sherlock would raise a finger to his forehead, and the man on the other barge would do likewise. Whenever they came to a lock – one of the gated enclosures that allowed the water level of the canal to rise and fall in line with the landscape – Sherlock would leap out and guide Harold to a stop, throw his weight into closing the first set of massive wooden gates behind the barge while Matty carefully steered, then he would open the water sluices set into the equally massive second set of gates to let the water on the other side pour into the enclosure, raising the level of the water inside and therefore the barge until the second set of gates could be opened. Even as he was rushing around, opening and closing gates and winding metal pump handles, Sherlock marvelled at the inventiveness of the mechanisms. How incredible that human ingenuity had come up with something so complicated, so useful and so clever!

  The two of them ate when they were hungry – buying food from farms or taverns that they passed – and slept when it was too dark to keep moving safely. Rather than measuring their journey by the towns and villages they encountered, as he would have done if travelling by road or rail, Sherlock found himself tracking their progress by the names of the various locks they travelled through and the rivers that either passed under them or joined with them. The ones that stuck in his memory were Black Jack’s Lock, Iron Bridge Lock and Lady Chapel Lock, the River Musbourne, the River Bulbourne and the River Chess. About the only major population centre that he was aware of was the market town of Aylesbury, where the two of them
stopped for a day to look around and to buy cheese and pies.

  They came off the Grand Junction Canal eventually, on to the Oxford Canal.

  ‘It runs between Oxford an’ Cambridge,’ Matty yelled from the rear of the barge as they made their laboured turn into the offshoot, ‘prob’ly for all them students that get thrown out of the one an’ fancy their chances at the other. You might need to know that one day!’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Sherlock said laconically.

  As they got closer to Oxford, Sherlock began to see signs of increasing wealth – bigger houses, set in their own grounds, and buildings made of cut stone transported from distant quarries rather than rough stones cut locally. The clothes that people were wearing were better quality as well, with straw boaters increasingly replacing flat caps.

  One house, which they passed at dusk one day, particularly caught his attention. It was illuminated by the setting sun, making it shine with a macabre crimson light. The various sharp decorations along the edge of the roof looked like teeth raking at the darkening sky. There was something about the structure of the building – the way the wings joined on to the main body, and the way the lines of differently coloured stone that marked the divisions between the floors ran across the frontage, that made him feel uneasy, even faintly nauseous. No two lines seemed to be exactly parallel, and no angles summed to exactly ninety degrees, giving the house a strange, lopsided feel. It didn’t appear to be falling down however. It seemed more as if it had been deliberately built that way – constructed using a geometry that wasn’t based on the rules that Sherlock had been taught at school. There was something about the way the windows gaped, black and empty, which made him think of many eyes all staring down at him pitilessly, measuring him up and finding him wanting.