Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [94]
Crowe nodded, smiled, then stuck out his huge, calloused hand and shook Sherlock’s hand. ‘We’ll meet again,’ he said.
‘I’m counting on it,’ Sherlock replied.
Sherlock and Matty slipped into a rowing boat and rowed hard and fast towards the location of the fort. A rowing boat could get in close without being seen, whereas a fishing boat, no matter how inconspicuous, would be noticed. As they had agreed, Crowe and Virginia carried on towards the English coast, where they could send a message alerting the government.
Virginia stood on the side of the Mrs Eglantine as it drew away from the rowing boat, staring at Sherlock. He gazed back, wondering if he would ever see her again.
The sea was grey-green and choppy as the two boys pulled on the oars. The fort was a dark blob on the horizon that never seemed to get any closer, no matter how hard they rowed. Sherlock could taste salt on his lips. He wondered how he had ever managed to get himself tangled up in this strange adventure.
After a while, he looked up to find the fort was just a few hundred feet away: a mass of wet, seaweed-encrusted stone that seemed to erupt from the waters of the English Channel. Somehow, they had managed to close in on it without noticing. It seemed empty, deserted. He scanned the crenellated rim, where only a few decades ago British forces would have been watching the sea for approaching French warships. He could see nobody. Nobody at all.
The rowing boat coasted the last few feet to the black bulk of the fort. It ended up at the base of a set of water-slicked stone steps that led upward.
Quickly, Matty tied the rope to a rusted iron bar that had been cemented into a gap between the stones. The two boys scrambled up the steps. Sherlock nearly lost his footing, and Matty had to grab him to stop him toppling into the water.
‘How do we know it’s not too late?’ Matty asked.
‘It’s night. Bees are dormant at night. The Baron’s servant hasn’t had much more time to get here than we have. The bees will be released in the morning.’
When they got to the top, they knelt behind a low stone wall that ran around the outer edge of the fort. The gaps between the stones were infested with moss.
Sherlock scanned the top level – he supposed it was technically the deck, although this particular ‘vessel’ wasn’t going anywhere – but the flagstones were empty of anything except coils of rope, tufts of sea grass and the occasional splintered crate.
Across the other side of the fort he saw the sudden flare of a match illuminate a bearded face with a scar running across it. Whoever was running this fort had posted guards. He and Matty needed to be careful.
The guard was moving away from them, and Sherlock spotted him passing an opening in the stone deck which had a wooden rail running around three sides of it. Probably a stairway into the depths of the fort. As the man moved on, Sherlock tugged at Matty’s shirt and pulled him over.
He was right. A set of stone steps led down into darkness. The smell of dankness and decay rose up to greet them.
‘Come on,’ Sherlock hissed. ‘Let’s go.’
The two of them scuttled down the steps into the depths of the fort. At first it seemed as black as the depths of Hell in there, but after a few moments Sherlock’s eyes adjusted and he could make out oil lanterns fastened to the wall at regular intervals. They were in a short corridor that seemed to open up into a larger, darker room which the orange wash of light from the lamps barely illuminated.
Sherlock and Matty crept along the corridor to where the walls suddenly opened up. The circular space revealed probably occupied most of the level they were on. Stone pillars every few yards supported the roof overhead, but what made Sherlock’s breath quicken was the beehives, lined up in a regular pattern across the flagstones. There were hundreds of them. With tens of thousands of bees in each hive, that meant something like a million aggressive bees were located just a few feet away from him. He felt