Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [22]
Sherlock rubbed the tips of his fingers together. They were greasy. Whatever that yellow powder was, it didn’t feel like anything else he could think of. He panicked for a moment, heart beating fast, as it occurred to him that the yellow powder might have caused the man’s illness, but a few moments’ thought persuaded him that diseases didn’t come from patches of powder. They were transmitted, person to person. Poison was another possibility, but what poisons caused a man’s face and hands to erupt in boils?
Thinking fast, Sherlock took from his pocket the envelope containing the letter he had received that morning from Mycroft. He removed the letter and placed it back in his pocket, then held the envelope by its edges so that it gaped open like a tiny mouth and scooped it along the grass. Some of the yellow dust transferred itself into the envelope. Quickly he closed it again and stowed it in a different pocket. He didn’t know if it was important, but Amyus Crowe might recognize the dust.
Wandering through the woods, he eventually found himself emerging on to a road – whether it was the one that led to Holmes Manor or a different one he could not tell. It curved away from him in both directions, making it impossible to work out where he was. He sat down by the side of the road and waited. Eventually, he reasoned, a cart would pass by, and he could ask for a ride.
It was late afternoon. Where did he want to go – the Manor House or town? After a few seconds he decided that going back to the Manor House would just expose him to an afternoon of boredom. The town sounded more interesting.
The first ten or twelve carts that passed by were all heading in the same direction, and they were all stacked up with boxes, crates and canvas sacks. The faces of the drivers and their passengers were fearful. Sherlock wasn’t sure, but he had a feeling they had heard about the two deaths and were heading out of Farnham, getting as far away from the possible plague as they could. He didn’t even bother asking them for a ride: the looks on their faces suggested that they wouldn’t be favourable towards him. In the end it was perhaps half an hour later that he heard the rattling of a cart’s wheels on the hard dirt surface of the road in the opposite direction to the one the other carts had come from. He stood up and waited for it to round the bend.
‘Excuse me,’ he called to the grey-haired, thin-faced driver. ‘Which direction are you going?’
The driver nodded his head slightly, indicating the road ahead. He didn’t bother looking at Sherlock, although he did at least pull on the reins to slow the single horse down.
‘Which way is Holmes Manor?’ Sherlock called up.
The man tilted his head and indicated the road behind with a slight jerk.
‘Can you take me to town?’ he asked.
The man considered for a moment, then jerked his head towards the back of the cart. Taking this to be a ‘yes’, Sherlock climbed in. The cart sped up as he did so, almost causing him to fall off again. Instead, he tumbled forward into a mass of straw.
The driver didn’t talk at all during the journey, and Sherlock found he himself had nothing to say. He spent his time thinking alternately about the dead man, the mysterious rider and the bizarre but engaging figure of Amyus Crowe. For a place that had appeared at first to be a hellhole of boredom, Holmes Manor and its immediate locality were turning out to be anything but.
His thoughts drifted to the story that Matty had told him about the dead body that had been carried out of the house in Farnham, and the strange cloud that Matty said he had seen floating out of the window. Sherlock had dismissed the story at the time – at least, the bit about the cloud – but now he was having