Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [7]
Mrs Holmes – or Aunt Anna – was a small, bird-like woman who seemed to be in a state of perpetual motion. Even when she was sitting down her hands constantly fluttered around, never settling for more than a moment anywhere. She talked all the time, but not really to anyone, as far as Sherlock could tell. She just seemed to enjoy conducting a perpetual monologue, and didn’t seem to expect anyone to join in or to answer any of her largely rhetorical questions.
The food, at least, was passable – better than the meals at Deepdene School. Mostly it was vegetables – carrots, potatoes and cauliflower that he guessed had been grown in the grounds of the Manor House – but every meal had some kind of meat, and unlike the grey, gristly and usually unidentifiable stuff that he had been used to at school this was well flavoured and tasty: ham hocks, chicken thighs, fillets of what he had been told was salmon and, on one occasion, big flakes carved from a glutinous shoulder of lamb that had been placed in the centre of the table. If he wasn’t careful he would put on so much weight that he would start to look like Mycroft.
His room was up in the eaves of the house, not quite in the servants’ quarters but not down with the family either. The ceiling sloped from door to window to match the roof above, meaning that he had to stoop while moving around, while the floor was plain wooden boards covered with a rug of dubious vintage. His bed was just as hard as the one at Deepdene School. For the first two nights the silence had kept him awake for hours. He was so used to hearing thirty other boys snoring, talking in their sleep or sobbing quietly to themselves that he found the sudden absence of noise unnerving, but then he had opened his window in order to get some air and discovered that the night was not silent at all, just filled with a subtler kind of noise. From then on he had been lulled to sleep by the screech of owls, the screaming of foxes and the sudden flurries of wings as something spooked the chickens at the back of the house.
Despite his brother’s advice, he had been unable to get into the library and settle down with a book. Sherrinford Holmes spent most of his time in there, researching his religious pamphlets and sermons, and Sherlock was scared of disturbing him. Instead he had taken to wandering in ever-increasing circles around the house, starting with the grounds at the front and back, the walled garden, the chicken coop and the vegetable plot, then climbing the stone walls that surrounded the house and moving to the road outside, and finally expanding outward into the ancient woods that nestled up against the rear of the house. He had been used to walking, exploring the forests back home, either alone or with his sister, but the woods here seemed older and more mysterious than the ones he was used to.
‘For a townie you really can sit still, can’t you?’
‘So can you,’ Sherlock responded to the voice behind him. ‘You’ve been watching me for half an hour.’
‘How did you know?’ Sherlock heard a soft thud, as if someone had just jumped down from the lower branches of a tree on to the ferns that covered the ground.
‘There are birds perching in all the trees except for one – the one you’re sitting in. They’re obviously frightened of you.’
‘I won’t hurt them, just like I won’t hurt you.’
Sherlock turned his head slowly. The voice belonged to a boy of about his own age, only smaller and stockier than Sherlock’s lanky frame. His hair was long enough to reach his shoulders. ‘I’m not sure you could,’ he said as calmly as possible under the circumstances.
‘I can fight dirty,’ the boy said. ‘And I got a knife.’
‘Yes, but I’ve been watching the boxing matches at school, and