Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [18]
‘Whatever killed him?’ Sherlock asked, puzzled. ‘Surely it was a disease of some kind. Look at his face!’
Crowe’s bright blue eyes fixed on Sherlock’s face. He gazed at the boy with interest for a few moments, still holding the handkerchief. ‘Do you believe that illness is just something that happens – that diseases just develop in a body with no help?’
‘I suppose so,’ Sherlock admitted. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’
‘But you know that diseases can move from one person to another, if you touch them or are close to them.’
‘Yes . . .’ Sherlock said cautiously, wondering where this was going.
‘Then doesn’t it make sense that somethin’ moves from the ill person to the well person and makes them ill in their turn?’
Sherlock remained silent. He knew that this was going to turn into another lesson, no matter what he said.
‘I was in Vienna a few years ago,’ Crowe said. ‘I met a man named Ignaz Semmelweis. He was a Hungarian, working with women who were about to give birth. He noticed that the women who were attended by doctors or medical students had more chance of dyin’ from puer-peral fever than the ones who were attended by midwives. Intelligent man, Semmelweis. Many other doctors would have left it there, but he realized that these physicians had often come to the births directly from autopsies. He made the doctors wash their hands with water and lime before examinin’ pregnant women, and the rate of mortality from puerperal fever plummeted in his hospital. Obviously the lime was killing or destroyin’ somethin’ on the doctors’ hands that otherwise would have transferred from the corpses to the women.’ He held the handkerchief up. ‘Hence the brandy. Has a similar effect.’
‘What kind of something’?’ Sherlock asked.
Crowe smiled. ‘The Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro wrote ‘. . . there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.’ Not the kind of classics you studied at school, I guess. People have been talking about these minute creatures for centuries, but the medical profession just ain’t taken it seriously.’
‘But couldn’t we just leave the body here and tell someone?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Wouldn’t that be safer – for us?’
Crowe looked around at the trees and bushes. ‘Too much chance of a fox or a badger comin’ upon it and eatin’ its fill. I never met this fellow, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, alive or dead. No, he’ll have to be removed from the woods at some stage for burial, so now’s as fine a time as any. We’ll be safe as long as we don’t touch him, and wear these face masks.’
Crowe tied the handkerchief gingerly around his face. The fumes from the brandy made his eyes water. He laughed, the deep lines round his eyes creasing like linen. ‘I never said it was good brandy,’ he said. ‘Mind you don’t get a taste for it. Now, run off and fetch a wheelbarrow from the gardens. Bring it back here, sharp.’
Leaving Crowe bent over the body, and shoving the handkerchief in his pocket for later, Sherlock retraced his steps rapidly through the woods, back towards the house. He navigated his way using the various trees, bushes and fungi that Amyus Crowe had pointed out along the way, racing through the underbrush and feeling the grasses whipping at his ankles as he ran. The scent of dry bracken and of lavender mingled in his nostrils. He could feel the sweat springing out on his forehead and between his shoulder blades, trickling down his cheeks and his spine.
Bursting out of the woods and into the stretch of open ground that separated them from the house, he paused for a moment to catch his breath and cool down. The afternoon sun blinded him momentarily, as physical as a blow to the head. He bent over, hands on his knees, taking gulps of the warm air. Sounds that had been muffled to silence by the trees – the chopping of wood, the distant grunting of pigs,