by Andrew Lane
Virginia joined them, looking over her shoulder worriedly. “I’m not sure we have much of a choice,” she pointed out.
Matty kicked against the grille. It barely moved under the force of his foot.
Sherlock’s mind was a whirl of conflicting thoughts. Two choices: shoot the reptiles, and leave one still alive, or shoot the padlock and probably waste two bullets. Which choice should he make?
A small voice in the storm of his thoughts asked: “What would Mycroft say? What would Amyus Crowe say?” And, just like back on the train, a voice answered: “When you’ve only got two choices, and you don’t like either of them, make a third choice.”
His gaze wandered across the pool that the three of them had jumped into, and he suddenly remembered the stairs that had led downward, next to the steps that had led up to the balcony. They hadn’t been leading to the grille, because that opened out on to flat ground. They had to lead somewhere else. The pool was on that side of the enclosure, and Balthassar had spoken of watching the reptiles storing their food beneath stones under water. Maybe the steps led to an underground viewing gallery; a subterranean room with a thick glass window looking out into the depths of the pool, so that Balthassar and his guests could watch the reptiles swimming.
But how to break through the glass — if there was glass? It would be thick, to withstand the pressure of the water.
So what he had to do was cause more pressure than the window could stand.
He snatched the Derringer from Matty’s hand. Two triggers, of course, which made sense with two barrels. You’d want to be able to fire them separately. He stared down the barrels. “You used to have one of these,” he said to Virginia. “How did you load it?”
“You pour some black powder down the barrel, then you ram a patched lead ball down on to the powder,” she explained, “being careful not to leave any air gaps between the patched ball and the powder. You then put a percussion cap on the other end of the barrel. Then the gun is loaded and ready to fire.”
“Patched lead ball?” he asked, staring more closely down the barrels. “Ah, yes, the ball is wrapped in paper. That must form a seal.”
“Waxed paper. Why is that important?”
“Because it means it’s airtight,” he said. “At least, for a short time. And if it’s airtight, it’s watertight.”
Before Virginia could say anything, Sherlock turned and ran towards the pond, cocking the twin hammers at the back end of the Derringer as he did so. When he got to the edge he dived, hands held out in front of him, Derringer held in his right hand. The water closed over his head: warm and filled with floating motes of dust and vegetation. Sound was suddenly muffled. He kicked with his feet to take him towards the far wall, beneath the balcony.
And there, where he knew it had to be, where deduction had told him it was, was a glass window set into a metal frame. Before any water could leak into the Derringer he placed it flat against the glass.
And pulled both triggers at once.
Somewhere in the back of his mind was the fact, read once and never forgotten, that water was incompressible. No matter how much you squeeze it, water never gets any denser. All that happens is that the pressure you exert gets transferred elsewhere. Such as to whatever the water is touching.
And so when the hammers at the base of the barrels hit the two percussion caps, the fulminate of mercury inside ignited. This caused the sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate in the black powder to burn rapidly, producing a huge volume of hot gas. The gas pushed the lead balls along the barrels, burning the paper patches away as it did so. The bullets pushed against the water in the barrels, and the water pushed against the window.
Which cracked and shattered.
The entire contents of the pond poured into the underground room, taking Sherlock with it. He struck out blindly for the corner of the room where the stairs had to be, hoping desperately that Virginia and Matty would realize what he’d done and follow him. Should he have warned them in advance? It hadn’t occurred to him. He’d just followed through on his deductions without realizing that the other two might not understand.
His lungs were burning with the effort of holding his breath, and his heart was thudding within the cage of his ribs. He pulled himself through the murky water with desperate movements of his arms. Suddenly he felt his knuckles brush against the stone edge of a step. He aimed upward and swam as hard as he could.
When his head emerged from the water, level with the bottom of the doorway that led outside, into the sunlight, he took huge gulps of breath one after the other, waiting for his racing heart to slow.
Matty’s head popped out of the water beside him. Virginia was moments behind.
“You,” Matty said, breathing hard, “are some kind of genius. I don’t know what you did, but you saved us.”
“Not quite,” Virginia pointed out breathlessly.
“What do you mean?” Matty asked.
“Sherlock said those things were amphibious.”
The three of them looked at each other for a long moment, then scrambled rapidly out of the water.
The steps to the underground observation room and to the balcony were out of sight of the house. The three of them sat down for a moment to catch their breaths.
“What now?” Matty asked. “What do we do?”
“Only thing I can think is that we follow the train tracks back to the last town,” Sherlock replied. “There’ll be a telegraph office there. We can send a message to Virginia’s father. We have to tell him about Balthassar’s Army, and the invasion of Canada.”
“Ah,” Matty said, “walking.”
“We could try stealing horses,” Sherlock pointed out, “but we’ll probably be caught. I suspect these people look after their horses, especially if they’re planning an invasion.”
Matty sighed. All right,” he said, “let’s go. We can dry out while we’re walking.”
Staying out of sight of the house, the three of them made their way through Balthassar’s collection of animal pens and cages. Many of them were empty, but Sherlock saw some things in the occupied ones that he would remember for the rest of his life — animals he had only ever seen in illustrations, which in the flesh looked like the creatures of dreams or nightmares. Animals with elongated legs and elongated necks whose skin was covered in large brown patches; a massive creature with a square head that hung low in front of it, two horns on top, between its eyes, and a skin as thick as armour; and things that looked like pigs but which were covered with wiry hair and had tusks sticking out of their jaws. A bestiary of fabulous animals.
When they got to the edge of the enclosures and cages, Sherlock looked around carefully. The grass-covered ground ahead of them was clear, and far away, over to their right, he could see Balthassar’s house. The orientation of the house indicated where the train line had to run, although it was hidden by the high grass. Somewhere out there was the boundary fence, and past that, along the rail lines, was the town called Perseverance. Across at least one wooden bridge that spanned a deep ravine, as far as he remembered.
Not that they had a choice.
“Come on,” he said wearily. “Let’s get this over with.”
And so they set out, walking across the grasslands. It only took ten minutes to find the twin metal rails of the train line, laid across parallel rows of wooden sleepers, and another half-hour to get to the boundary fence, and the point where their train had diverted off the main line towards Balthassar’s house. Once they discovered the train line, Matty had spent a few minutes walking between the rails, stepping from sleeper to sleeper, but the gap was slightly larger than his stride and his legs started aching quickly, so he joined Sherlock and Virginia walking alongside the rails.
Within another half-hour the fence and the house had vanished into a heat haze that made the horizon shimmer. All that was left was the rails, leading away from them in either direction, and the grasslands. Off in the distance to his left Sherlock thought he could see th
e dim shapes of mountains, but the haze made it difficult to judge.
Birds circled above them. Matty thought they might be vultures, but Virginia said they were chickenhawks. Sherlock reserved his judgement. He didn’t know what either a vulture or a chickenhawk looked like, so he wasn’t prepared to speculate.
While they walked, he found himself turning over and over in his mind the plans that Duke Balthassar had explained to them. It all sounded so preposterous — a revived Confederate Army seeking to invade a neighbouring British colony in order to set up a new nation where they would be allowed to run things the way they wanted, rather than the way that the winning Unionists wanted. Sherlock didn’t approve of slavery, but he wasn’t sure that he approved of one group of people using force to tell another group how to live their lives. But what was the alternative? Should everyone just be allowed to live according to their own moral codes? And if that was the case, what happened if your neighbour believed that theft was allowed, but you didn’t, and he stole your pigs, or your sheep, or your horses? But the alternative was allowing someone to impose a moral code on you that you didn’t yourself believe in, but had to follow.
Strangely, all this led Sherlock’s thoughts back to the copy of Plato’s Republic that Mycroft had given him before he left Southampton. Plato had anticipated all of these questions, over two thousand years ago. And in the intervening time, nobody had managed to create a society that everybody could agree on and which actually worked properly.
Was that what Mycroft himself, in his quiet way, was trying to do — make Great Britain into a society that worked about as well as it could?
Sherlock found that he was developing a stronger and stronger respect for his brother as he got older.
The sun slipped inexorably closer to the horizon behind them as they walked, casting giant shadows ahead of them across the undulating grassland. For a while Sherlock thought he could see a dark slash against the sunset-tinged grass, and as time went on and the sun slid closer and closer to vanishing, the slash turned out to be the ravine that the train had crossed earlier, on its way to Balthassar’s house. The dying rays illuminated the bridge from a strange angle, making it look more like a child’s model than something real.
“We’ve got to cross that?” Matty asked in a hushed voice as the three of them stopped at the edge of the ravine and gazed at the bridge.
Sherlock indicated the depths of the ravine with a wave of his hand. “I don’t think we’re in a position to climb down, cross and then climb up again.”
“I think,” Virginia said, “that he means “We’ve got to cross that tonight?” and I think I agree with him.”
“We can’t afford to stop and sleep,” Sherlock pointed out. “For a start, we don’t know what’s out here. Cougars, bears...”
“Raccoons,” Virginia murmured.
“There could be anything,” he continued. “And we need food. Apart from orange juice and a bread roll, I’ve not had anything since this morning.”
“Food...” Matty moaned. “I’m starving. Do you think there’s anything out here we could, you know, hunt?”
“More likely to be the other way around,” Sherlock pointed out. He took a deep breath, and started out over the ravine, stepping from sleeper to sleeper.
“What happens if a train comes along?” Matty called.
“They don’t run at night,” Virginia said. “Too much chance of hitting a buffalo, or a landslide, or something else. They stop in the nearest town and let people off. There’s hotels for people to stay at until the train leaves, next morning.”
“Oh,” said Matty. He sounded as if he’d been hoping for a reason not to cross.
Sherlock found, like Matty before him, that stepping from sleeper to sleeper was exhausting. Although he had long legs he still had to stretch for each step. He could see down between the sleepers, but because the last rays of the sun were shining horizontally across the landscape, the ravine was in darkness, and all he could see between his feet was an empty void. If he stared too hard then he started to lose track of where his feet were. Twice he stumbled, and almost lost his footing. Eventually he decided that he just had to look ahead, and trust his instincts to let him find the sleepers. Each one was the same distance apart, and he found that if he didn’t look then he could still work it out.
He glanced back over his shoulder every now and then, to see Virginia and Matty silhouetted by the red disc of the sun following them. They seemed to be managing all right. There was, he told himself, nothing he could do to help them. Each of them was in a universe of their own on that long walk over the ravine.
He heard a sound behind him. He stopped, and glanced over his shoulder. Virginia was sprawled across the tracks. She looked exhausted. She raised her head and gazed at him with weary eyes. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I tripped.” “I can’t come back to help,” Sherlock said desperately. “I can’t turn round without risking a fall, and if I bend down to help you up I might fall anyway!"
“I know,” she said quietly. “I know.”
From behind her, Matty called, “Virginia, you’ve got to get up!"
“Oh, yeah, thanks,” she hissed, pushing herself up. “I would never have thought of that!"
They started off again, one after the other. Time seemed to melt away, each second, each minute blending into the next, so that when Sherlock realized that there was solid ground between the tracks they were already a hundred yards or so past the edge of the ravine.
“Let’s take a break,” he said. “Just ten minutes.”
Matty groaned. “I need to sleep.”
“My brother says that a man can go without sleep for days on end, if what he’s doing is important and interesting enough.”
“Walking to the nearest town might be important,” Matty pointed out, “but it’s certainly not interesting.”
Sherlock allowed them what seemed like ten minutes, but might have been anywhere from thirty seconds to an hour judging by the way time was stretching and blurring, before he got them to their feet and started them walking again. They continued to walk in silence along the side of the tracks. Twice, in the distance, Sherlock heard a howling noise. For a terrified moment he thought that Balthassar had spotted their absence and had sent his cougars after them, but Virginia just said quietly, “Coyotes.”
“What’s a coyote?” Matty called from the back.
“It’s like a wolf,” Virginia replied.
“Oh.” A pause. “I wonder what they taste like.”
“Funnily enough,” Virginia said, “that howl probably means they’re wonderin’ the same about you.”
The moon rose above the horizon: a bloated white disc, seemingly much larger than Sherlock remembered from England. Surely America wasn’t any nearer the moon? The world was round, after all. Every point on its surface had to be the same distance from the moon. The only explanation he could come up with was that there was something about the atmosphere, some trick of the heated air, that magnified the image and made the moon look larger.
After a while he realized Matty was talking to himself. Sherlock had assumed that he was talking to Virginia, but Matty was leaving gaps and Virginia wasn’t filling them. It was as if Matty could hear a voice that nobody else could. A hallucination? Maybe the tiredness and the lack of food was getting to him. He’d had a stressful couple of weeks, after all.
Even though he was thinking about Matty hallucinating, it didn’t seem odd to Sherlock that Mrs Eglantine, the housekeeper from his aunt and uncle’s house, was walking alongside him for some of the journey. She didn’t say anything to him. She just looked at him with disapproving eyes, her mouth pursed into a tight little bud, her head shaking from side to side. He didn’t know when she had appeared and he didn’t know when she vanished. All he knew is that for at least part of the journey, she had been there, a silent companion keeping pace with him. Odd, he thought — of all the people he might have imagined walking beside him, why her? Why not Mycroft, or Amyus Cro
we? Come to that, if his mind was disturbed, why not any of the people whose lives he had been responsible for — Mr Surd, Gilfillan, Ives or Grivens? Even Plato would have been a better travelling companion than Mrs Eglantine.
If Virginia saw anyone who wasn’t there then she never said anything about it, either then or later.
By the light of the moon, Sherlock saw the occasional barn or farmhouse silhouetted on the horizon. He thought about diverting off their path and stopping to ask for help, or at least food and drink, but something kept him going along the line of the tracks. Explanations would take time, and might just land them in more trouble. And besides, the one thing they needed was a telegraph office, and that would only be found at a train station in a town.
After a while the few scattered barns and farmhouses turned into a handful, and then what looked like a scattered community. They were on the outskirts of something. If they were lucky, it would be the town. Sherlock didn’t remember the train passing through any other large collections of buildings after leaving the station at Perseverance, but he hadn’t been looking out of the window all the time. Other things had been happening to distract his attention. It was possible this was a different town, one without a station or a telegraph office, in which case he decided that they would stop, if only for a short while. Maybe they could pay someone to drive them to Perseverance.
A flush of rose-hued colour spread across the horizon as they walked. The sun was coming up. Had they really been walking all night? Judging by the stiffness of his muscles and the dryness of his throat, Sherlock suspected they had.
Or was it just another hallucination, like Mrs Eglantine?
After hours of travelling in a straight line across the landscape, the train lines curved now, leading into the centre of the town. And finally, there ahead of them, was the cluster of buildings that Sherlock remembered from when the three of them had briefly got off the train — the station, and the outhouses. They had arrived. Against the odds, they had arrived.
A train was drawn up in the sidings beside the station. It was shorter than Sherlock remembered from the day before. It was also deserted and dark.
