Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [82]
Mr Surd indicated that they should sit. Sherlock considered refusing, but then saw something in Mr Surd’s eyes that suggested the manservant expected him to refuse, and even wanted him to, just so he could do something painful and permanent to ensure that Sherlock complied. So he sat down, with Virginia beside him. Mr Surd and the four footmen walked off into the darkness at the other end of the room.
The room was quiet for a while, apart from the faint creaking of ropes and wood under stress that Sherlock had heard last time.
Then a whispery voice, like dry leaves rustling in the wind: ‘You persist in interfering in my plans, and yet you are just a child. I was forced to abandon one of my houses because of you.’
‘You seem to like to have your houses designed and decorated identically,’ Sherlock said. ‘Why? Do you prefer things to be the same?’
There was silence for a while, and Sherlock expected any moment to feel the tip of a whip striking from the darkness, flaying his flesh open, but instead the voice replied.
‘Once I find something I like,’ it said, ‘I see no reason to suffer anything else. The layout and furnishings of a house, a system of government . . . once I discover something that works, I want it replicated so that things are the same wherever I go. I find it . . . comforting.’
‘And that’s why you have your footmen dressed in black masks – because that way you can believe them to be the same footmen, wherever you happen to be.’
‘Very perspicacious.’
‘And we’re in, what, France at the moment?’
‘You recognized the landscape? Yes, this house is in France. You were both kept asleep on the boat that brought you here, and then on the carriage that rushed you to this place.’
‘But what about Mr Surd?’ Sherlock asked. ‘There’s only one of him.’
‘Mr Surd is irreplaceable. Where I go, he goes.’
‘You are Baron Maupertuis, aren’t you?’
‘Again, you surprise me. I did not believe that my name was widely known.’
‘I . . . pieced it together from evidence.’
‘Very clever. Very clever indeed. I compliment you on your deductive skills. And what else did you piece together?’
Virginia placed a warning hand over his, but Sherlock felt a blossoming pride at the investigations he had made, the facts that he had discovered, the plot that he was beginning to put together. And, he told himself, it was important that Maupertuis know that his plans were no longer secret. ‘I know you’ve been keeping bees, and I know they are a foreign species that’s more aggressive than any European bees. That means you’re not keeping them to make honey, but because of their stings. You want them to hurt or kill people.’ His brain was racing now, moving the facts around to form patterns that he had only barely suspected before. Amyus Crowe wanted to teach him, train him, but Baron Maupertuis was taking him seriously. The Baron listened to Sherlock’s deductions as though they actually meant something, rather than just being theoretical answers to invented problems, like rabbits and foxes. ‘You’ve also been running a factory to produce clothes – Army uniforms, I think.’ He paused for a second. There was something just beyond his reach, a momentous logical destination to which he had all the steps but the last, which required an intuitive leap. ‘Your man – Wint, I think his name was – stole some of the clothes and stored them in his house. He was attacked by bees. Another man who worked on my uncle’s estate as a gardener had previously been making clothes in Farnham – for you, I assume. He was killed by bees as well. Had he kept some of the clothes for his own use? Stolen them from you?’ The mental fog that shrouded the final logical destination from him was clearing now, and he continued triumphantly: ‘So there’s something