by Andrew Lane
“Southern courtesy aside,” Balthassar snarled, “I will see my pets strip the flesh from your bones while you are still alive and screaming.” The smaller, black leeches on his face looked like holes through to the darkness of the night sky behind him. Balthassar looked past Sherlock. “And here they are,” he said, and barked three words in the guttural language that he used to communicate with the animals.
Expecting at any moment to feel the weight of a cougar on his back and the agony of its claws ripping through his flesh, Sherlock stepped forward, towards Balthassar.
The thin man wasn’t expecting that. He flinched backwards, still cradling his left arm, but Sherlock reached out with his throbbing left hand and ripped the red leech from behind Balthassar’s ear. It tore free with some resistance. Blood spattered on the shoulder of Balthassar’s white suit; black in the moonlight.
Balthassar screamed: a high, thin noise of distilled rage and shock.
The giant red leech was squishy and wet in Sherlock’s hand. Before Balthassar could do anything, before the cougars could spring, Sherlock bought his knife up and sliced it in half. It writhed and twisted, leaking Balthassar’s blood into his palm. He turned, each hand holding a part of the leech, and threw them at the two cougars that were advancing towards him.
Given their reaction earlier, on Balthassar’s veranda, he had thought they might turn and run in terror, but they surprised him. The cougars snapped the halves of the leech out of the air as if they were titbits thrown as treats and swallowed them whole.
They continued to advance on him.
No, not on him. Their eyes were fixed on Balthassar.
Sherlock moved slowly to one side. The cougars ignored him, and continued moving towards Balthassar.
It made a strange kind of sense. The man who had dominated them was injured, weakened, and the leech that they feared was gone. Whatever power Balthassar had over them appeared to have been broken. They had the power now. He couldn’t hurt them.
Balthassar backed away. The rocky edge was behind him. He said something in the language he used to control the cats with, but they ignored it.
Sherlock watched, his mouth dry and his heart pounding. Balthassar took another step back, hands raised to ward the cougars off, but his right foot ended up past the edge of the rocky overhang, over empty air, and he fell, screaming, into the darkness.
The cougars stood there for a moment, looking over the edge, and then, without looking at each other or at Sherlock, they padded away, into the hills.
Sherlock stood there for a while, getting his breath back and letting the pain in his shoulder subside. It didn’t seem broken. At least that was something.
The cougars didn’t come back.
Eventually he went over to where his horse was cowering and calmed it down, stroking its flanks until it stopped shivering. Then he pulled himself up into the saddle and continued his journey, down the slope that led to the grasslands.
At the bottom of the slope he found Balthassar’s body. It lay, twisted and broken, in a flattened area of grass. The leeches had vanished from his face. Presumably they had left to seek other prey the minute his blood had stopped pumping through his veins. Not necessarily a logical decision, but an instinctive one.
Sherlock must have fallen asleep on the ride back, because the next thing he knew the horse was trotting through the outskirts of town and there was a blue blush on the horizon. He left the horse tied up outside the stable and headed for the hotel. He could pick up his deposit later.
There was nobody in the dining room when he walked in. He headed up to his room. Nobody tried to stop him. He almost expected someone to leap out and attack him, or something to leap on to his shoulders when his back was turned, but there was nothing. Everything was peaceful and calm. He let himself into his room and slipped beneath the covers. It was as if nothing had happened. It was as if he’d not left the room since he’d first entered that morning, after the long trek across the grasslands from Balthassar’s house with Matty and Virginia.
He slept without dreaming, or if he dreamed then he did not remember the dreams when he woke up, and that was probably a good thing.
The sun was shining through his bedroom window when he awoke. He lay there for a while, cataloguing what had happened and consigning it to his memories. Then he got dressed and went downstairs.
Amyus Crowe was in the dining room, talking with two of the Pinkerton’s agents. He said something to them, then crossed over to Sherlock as they left.
“Ain’t seen much of you since yesterday morning,” he said. “I’ve been busy with the Pinkertons, but Matty and Virginia said you never left your room. You must have needed your sleep.”
“I did,” Sherlock said.
“There’s scratches on your hands that I don’t recall from yesterday’
“I think they came up overnight,” Sherlock said.
“Maybe they did.” Crowe gazed at Sherlock levelly for a few moments.
“What’s been happening?” Sherlock asked. “What’s the news on Balthassar and the invasion of Canada?”
“The balloon attack on the Confederate Army was called off,” Crowe replied. “Someone set fire to the balloons. Probably one of Balthassar’s agents. That’s the general theory, anyway, and who am I to disagree?”
At least a massacre was avoided,” Sherlock pointed out.
“It was,” Crowe agreed. “The Secretary of War was all for a big confrontation between his troops and Balthassar’s, but his orders got held up somehow, an’ I took the opportunity to put a plan of my own into effect. We used John Wilkes Booth to tell Balthassar’s Army to disperse. He can be very persuasive, when he’s given the proper medication an’ when he’s offered an alternative to the gallows. I don’t think many of the troops had the stomach for a real fight. They were glad to be told to go home.”
“And John Wilkes Booth?”
“As far as history is concerned, he’s already dead. A man named John St Helen will be committed to a lunatic asylum in Baltimore. If he’s given the correct medication at the right dose, he should be manageable. Until his death, at least.”
“Incarceration,” Sherlock said.
“He’s an assassin, when all’s said an’ done. It’s better than he deserves.”
Sherlock nodded, not so much in agreement but more because he didn’t particularly want to argue. And what about us? What happens next?”
“Next,” Crowe said, “we return to New York and get tickets for England. That’ll probably take a day or two. I think we’ve spent more than enough time here. Much as I love the country of my birth, I do enjoy England. Overcooked vegetables and steamed puddings excepted.”
“You’re not... staying?” Sherlock asked tentatively.
Crowe shook his massive head. “Too much to do elsewhere,” he said. “There’s lots of us here, but only me in England. I got a job to do. An’ I promised your brother I’d teach you to think logically an’ use evidence, an’ I suspect I’ve not done as much on that front as I should’ve done.”
Later that day the four of them — Crowe, Virginia, Sherlock and Matty — took a train back to New York, and Crowe found them tickets on a ship leaving in a few days for England. They even managed to eat at the famed Niblo’s Garden on their last night — oysters, of course, an huge steaks — but Sherlock found himself distanced from it all, watching it go past with little emotion. It was as if he’d been through so much over the past few days that something had been burned out in him. He hoped it would come back some time soon. He didn’t like the feeling of being separate from the rest of the world.
Virginia was worried about him, he could tell. She kept glancing across at him while they were eating, and once or twice she would just rest her hand on his arm for a moment, then take it away when he didn’t react.
A few days later, on the ship, watching from the rail as New York harbour slipped away in the distance, Sherlock found himself shivering despite the warmth of the sun and the lack o
f wind. He felt ill, out of sorts, but he didn’t know how to make himself better.
“So,” a familiar voice said from beside him, “how was the great metropolis of New York? Did you do whatever it was that you needed to do?”
He turned his head. Rufus Stone, the Irish violinist he’d met on the journey out, was standing nearby, leaning on the rail. His violin case was slung across his back and his long black hair was loose across his collar.
“I thought you were staying in America?” Sherlock said, surprised.
Ah, about that,” Rufus said ruefully. “I may not have mentioned, but I was in a bit of trouble, back in the old country, and I was hoping that seeking the fabled pot of gold at this end of the rainbow would be a good move, but it turns out that people have been sending messages along that very same rainbow, and someone was waiting for me when I got here.” He sighed. “Who would have thought that the Irish would have the whole criminal underworld in New York sewn up like a corpse in a shroud?”
“So what happens now?” Sherlock asked. “Where do you go?”
“That depends,” Rufus said, gazing out across the water. “Do you know of anyone who is in desperate need of a violin tutor?”
“Funnily enough,” said Sherlock, “I think I do.”
Acknowledgments
I’ve consulted a number of books in order to get the history of the time and the area about right. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the following works:
London’s Lost Route to Basingstoke: The Story of the Basingstoke Canal, by P. A. L. Vine, published by Allan Sutton Publishing, 1968 (revised and expanded in 1994) — great material about the local waterways and canals in the Farnham area.
The Tongham Railway by Peter A. Harding, self-published 1994 — obviously the product of one man’s obsession, but immensely useful.
Bygone Farnham by Jean Parratt, published by Phillimore & Co. Ltd, 1985. Useful if only for the exhaustive list of pubs and taverns it contains, which suggests that every second house in Farnham sold beer.
London Under London — A Subterranean Guide by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman, published by John Murray (the original publisher of the Sherlock Holmes stories in book form), 1984. The classic guide to London’s underground rivers and tunnels.
Subterranean City — Beneath the Streets of London by Antony Clayton, published by Historical Publications, 2000. Covers much the same ground (as it were) as Trench and Hillman’s book, but benefits from material more recently discovered. Or perhaps “unearthed” would be a better word.
The London of Sherlock Holmes by Michael Harrison, published by David & Charles, 1972. An invaluable and immaculately researched investigation of what London would have looked like to the eyes of Sherlock Holmes.
Author’s Notes
And so here we are, at the end of young Sherlock Holmes’s second adventure. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
In the first book, Sherlock had started to pick up his logical way of thinking and his eye for evidence from the genial but rather mysterious Amyus Crowe. I also showed him starting to become interested in bees and in boxing, setting the scene for the skills and interests he later displays in the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (in The Sign of the Four, for instance, a bare-knuckle fighter compliments Sherlock by saying, “You’re one that has wasted your gifts. You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy” — “the fancy” being a slang term for the boxing fraternity).
In this book I have tried to imagine how and where Sherlock first learned to play the violin, as well as the events which provoked him to take an interest in tattoos (again, in the Conan Doyle stories, he can work out where a tattoo was done just by the pigments in the ink). In a more general sense I’ve laid some of the groundwork for the sympathy that Sherlock later shows towards America and Americans (Sherlock says in one of Conan Doyle’s stories that he expects there to be a day when people in Great Britain and American will some day be “citizens of the same worldwide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes’).
I’ve tried to make sure that the things that happen in this book are as historically accurate as possible. The SS Scotia did indeed go back and forth across the Atlantic, for instance, taking passengers from Liverpool to New York, as did the SS Great Eastern. I’m not sure whether it ever sailed from Southampton or not, but for the purposes of this book I’m assuming that it did at least once. The Scotia made its first voyage as a passenger ship in 1862 under Captain Judkins and its last in 1875, and for a while it held the record for the fastest transatlantic crossing, but its consumption of coal made it uneconomic and it did not make the Cunard Company, who built it, the profits they expected. After spending some years laying undersea cables for transatlantic telegraph messages the Scotia ended up sinking off the island of Guam in the Indian Ocean in 1904. For details on the SS Scotia, and other ships that plied the Atlantic passenger trade, I am indebted to the following books:
Transatlantic Paddle Steamers by H. Philip Spratt (Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1951)
Transatlantic — Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships by Stephen Fox (HarperCollins, 2003)
The story told aboard the SS Scotia by Captain Judkins, the one about the strange earwig-like creature found holding on to the undersea telegraph cable when it was brought up from the depths of the ocean, is a fabrication of mine, but such creatures do actually exist. Scary, But true. Check out the following website if you don’t believe me:
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/1034874/monster-bug-attaches-itself-to-submarine
On the other hand, the giant red leech of Borneo that is known to science is not actually a bloodsucker, but instead eats the giant Borneo earthworm. The leech that Duke Balthassar uses for medical purposes here is, I suggest, a currently unknown species, but given the number of previously unknown species of animal discovered every year, from insects up to mammals, it’s entirely possible that there is a giant red bloodsucking leech out there somewhere. The substance secreted in leech saliva to suppress the clotting of blood is factual: the substance is called hirudin, and leeches are increasingly being used in hospitals to stop potentially dangerous blood clots forming in surgery patients. You still can’t get them on prescription, though.
The large reptiles that chase Sherlock, Matty and Virginia in Duke Balthassar’s animal enclosure are monitor lizards. Monitor lizards can grow up to several metres in length, have a high metabolic rate compared with most other reptiles and can be as intelligent as a small dog (experiments have shown that monitor lizards can count up to six, although no scientist has yet shown what use this is to them).
The laying of the first undersea cables between Ireland and America is one of the nineteenth century’s most incredible stories. I can recommend the following book as a great explanation:
A Thread Across the Ocean — The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon (Simon and Schuster, 2002)
Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin, who meets with Sherlock on the SS Scotia and then again later, took leave from the German Army in 1863 and travelled to America, where he acted as an observer for the Northern Potomac Army in the American Civil War against the Confederates. Crucially, while there he also met Professor Thaddeus Lowe, who was using tethered balloons as reconnaissance platforms in the Civil War, observing Confederate troop movements on behalf of the Union. All balloon rides had been made off limits to civilians, so instead Professor Lowe sent von Zeppelin to visit his German assistant John Steiner, who could talk to von Zeppelin in German, rather than using von Zeppelin’s halting English. Von Zeppelin made his first ascent with Steiner’s tethered balloon. Fascinated with the possibilities of balloons, von Zeppelin returned to America in the 1870s to talk to Lowe again (although I have moved the date of this trip slightly to make it fit in with the timeline of this book). Later, back in Germany, he would design the rigid balloon — the Zeppelin — that would make him famous.
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Detail on New York, and the rest of America, in the 1860s, was provided by:
Transatlantic Crossing — American Visitors to Britain and British Visitors to America in the Nineteenth Century selected and edited by Walter Allen (William Heinemann, 1971)
The Sun and the Moon — The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York, by Matthew Goodman (Basic Books, 2008)
Material on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the historical aftermath was gleaned from:
“They Have Killed Papa Dead!" — The Road to Ford’s Theatre, Abraham Lincoln’s Murder, and the Rage for Vengeance by Anthony S. Pitch (Steerforth Press, 2008)
It proved strangely difficult to find out very much about American railroads in the 1860s. A map would have been nice, or at the very least a timetable to show me how many changes of train a man would need to make to get from New York to Pennsylvania, but if such books exist then I couldn’t find them. What little detail I did glean came from:
The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890 by George Rogers Taylor and Irene D. Neu (University of Illinois Press, 2003)
Guidebook for Tourists and Travellers over the Valley Railway From Cleveland to Canton (facsimile of the 1880 edition) by John S. Reese (The Kent State Press, 2002)
Bizarrely, there have been several plans by Americans, some associated with the US Government and some not, to take parts of Canada off Great Britain’s hands by force of arms over the years. In 1864, during the American Civil War (or the War Between the States as it was known at the time), a group of Confederate soldiers went through Quebec to get to the US state of Vermont, which was in Union hands. In 1866, two years before this book is set, a group of Irish Americans advocated invading Quebec and Ontario in order to use them as a base from which to strike against Britain in retaliation for what they saw as the British occupation of Ireland. Three times they sent an armed force into Canada — on the second and third attempts they had about a thousand men — but the first attempt just fizzled out and the later two were beaten back by force of arms. Years later, in 1896, Secretary of the Navy H. A. Herbert ordered the US military to construct a plan to seize control of the Great Lakes and St Lawrence when it looked as if a border dispute between Venezuela and the British territory of British Guiana might escalate into war between the USA and Great Britain. Tensions fortunately subsided. Among other sources, I consulted The Straight Dope (www.straightdope.com) for the above information.
