Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [6]
Mycroft turned and started up the stairs towards the entrance. Mrs Eglantine met Sherlock’s gaze for a moment, expressionless, then turned and led Mycroft into the house.
Looking back, Sherlock saw the footman struggling to hoist the trunk on to his shoulders. When it was safely balanced he staggered up the stairs, past Sherlock, who followed disconsolately.
The hall was tiled in black and white, lined with mahogany, with an ornate marble staircase flowing down from the upper floors like a frozen waterfall with several paintings of religious scenes, landscapes and animals on the walls. Mycroft was just passing through a doorway to the left of the staircase into a room that, from the brief glance Sherlock caught, was lined with sets of books bound in green leather. A thin, elderly man in an old-fashioned black suit was rising from a chair that had been upholstered in a shade of leather that perfectly matched the colour of the books behind it. His face was bearded, lined and pale, his scalp mottled with liver spots.
The door closed on them as they were shaking hands. The footman headed across the tiles to the bottom of the stairs, still balancing the trunk on his shoulders. Sherlock followed.
Mrs Eglantine was standing at the bottom of the stairs, outside the library. She was staring over the top of Sherlock’s head, towards the door.
‘Child, be aware that you are not welcome here,’ she hissed as he passed.
CHAPTER TWO
Sitting in the woods outside Farnham, Sherlock could see the ground fall away from him towards a dirt track that snaked away through the underbrush, like a dry riverbed, until it vanished from sight. Over on the other side of the town, on the slope of a hill, a small castle nestled in the trees. There was nobody else around. He had been sitting so still for so long that the animals had grown used to him. Every so often there would be a rustling in the long grass as a mouse or a vole moved past, while hawks circled lazily in the blue sky above, waiting for any small animals stupid enough to emerge into an area of clear ground.
The wind rustled the leaves of the trees behind him. He let his mind wander, trying not to think about the past or the future, just living in the moment for as long as he could. The past ached like a bruise, and the immediate future was not something that he wanted to arrive in a hurry. The only way to keep going was not to think about it, just drift on the breeze and let the animals move around him.
He had been living at Holmes Manor for three days now, and things had not got any better than his first experience. The worst thing was Mrs Eglantine. The housekeeper was an ever-present spectre lurking in the deep recesses of the house. Whenever he turned round he seemed to find her there, standing in the shadows, watching him with her crinkled-up eyes. She had barely exchanged three sentences with him since he had arrived. He was, as far as he could tell, expected to turn up for breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner, say nothing, eat as quietly as possible and then vanish until the next meal; and that was going to be the shape of his life until the holidays were over and Mycroft came to release him from his sentence.
Sherrinford and Anna Holmes – his aunt and uncle – were usually present at breakfast and dinner. Sherrinford was a dominating presence: as tall as his brother but much thinner, cheekbones prominent, forehead domed in front and sunken at the sides, bushy white beard descending to his chest but the hair on his head so sparse that it looked to Sherlock as if each individual strand had been painted on to the skin of his scalp and then a coat of varnish applied. Between meals he vanished into his study or to the library where, from what Sherlock could tell from scraps of conversation, he wrote religious pamphlets and sermons for vicars across the country. The only thing of any substance that he had said to Sherlock in the past three days had been when he had fixed Sherlock with an ominous eye over lunch and said: ‘What is the state of your soul,