Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [56]
When Sherlock woke up his head was aching. The pain seemed to be centred around his right temple, and it pulsed sickeningly in time with his heartbeat. It was like a massive soft, throbbing lump in the centre of his head that he couldn’t see past and couldn’t climb past. He lay in the dark for a while, not thinking, but just drifting back and forth with the pain, waiting for it to recede. Eventually, it did.
The last thing he remembered was being knocked unconscious on the meadow beneath Farnham Castle by the fairground fighter. And now he was in a comfortable bed, with his head supported by feather pillows. That meant he wasn’t still at the fairground, lying on the muddy grass ring or bundled into a tent to recover. Unless, of course, he was hallucinating, which was a distinct possibility given the fact that he’d suffered a head wound.
No, he told himself firmly: he had to work on the assumption that what he was feeling, hearing and seeing was true, and not just some fabrication of a bruised brain.
The diffuse light filtering through the curtained windows told him that it was still morning. He wasn’t in his own bed; that was for sure. His own bed was harder, and his pillows were lumpier. He must have been found by someone from Holmes Manor and brought back there, but left in a more comfortable bed: one that the doctor and the maids could get to more easily, perhaps. He strained, trying to hear movement outside the window, but there was nothing apart from what might have been distant birdsong.
How much trouble was he in? The thought brought an unplanned groan to his lips. He’d disobeyed his uncle’s clear instructions, and he suspected that any attempt to explain that he thought he was meeting Amyus Crowe would be dealt with harshly. Worse, he had become involved in a common fist fight. Worse than that, he had lost. That might not have concerned Sherrinford or Anna Holmes, but if Sherlock’s father ever got to hear about it he would be furious. One of his favourite sayings was: ‘A gentleman never starts a fight, but he always finishes it.’
If he was lucky, his uncle would confine him to his room for the next month, and restrict his meals to bread and water. If he was lucky. If he was unlucky . . . well, he wasn’t sure, but he suspected that the punishment would be dire. A thrashing, perhaps? A beating with a cane or a leather belt? His uncle would probably do it in sorrow rather than in anger, but wasn’t there some Biblical quotation about ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’?
This wasn’t going to be good.
Sherlock reached up to touch his head. His fingers encountered swelling, and when he pressed against it a spike of pain shot through him.
He sat up cautiously. Neither his head nor his stomach were happy at the movement, but they didn’t complain too much.
The room he was in was lined with wood panelling, and the bed was a four-poster with an embroidered canopy overhead. It wasn’t one he was familiar with, and the decoration looked out of step with what he remembered from Holmes Manor. He looked down at himself. He was still dressed, although his jacket had been removed. He glanced around, and found it hanging from a clothes hanger on the back of the door.
Throwing back the sheet that covered him, he pushed himself gradually upright. The world seemed to slosh back and forth for a few moments like water in a bucket before stabilizing. His shoes had been removed, but he saw that they were sitting together at the bottom of the bed. He lurched across to them and did his best to slip his feet into them without bending over. Bending over would be a bad idea, he thought.
He crossed to the window and drew back the curtain but the view that greeted his eyes was nothing at all like the landscape around Holmes Manor.
The ground outside was flat and barren, denuded of grass or plants. The earth was reddish brown and dry, and as far as the eye could see it was covered in wooden boxes on four sturdy legs. They were a bit like chicken coops but smaller, and each one had a small hole at the bottom, just before the point where