Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [99]
‘Tuck in,’ Crowe said. ‘You deserve it.’
Sherlock paused for a moment. Everything around him seemed simultaneously overly sharp and yet slightly distanced.
‘You OK?’ Crowe said.
‘I’m not sure,’ Sherlock replied.
‘You’ve been through a lot. You were knocked out, and you were drugged with laudanum, not to mention several fights and a long stretch of rowing. That’s all bound to have an effect on your system.’
Laudanum. Remembering the strange dreams that he’d had after he had been drugged, while he was being taken to France, Sherlock felt a twinge of – what? Melancholy, perhaps. Wistfulness. Surely not . . . longing? Whatever the feeling was, he pushed it away. He’d heard stories about people becoming dependent on the effects produced by laudanum, and he had no desire to go down that route. None at all.
‘How’s Virginia?’ he asked to break the mood.
‘Annoyed that she missed all the fun. And missing her horse, of course. She wants to look around the town, but I said she can’t go alone. I guess she’ll be glad you’re awake.’
Sherlock gazed out at the sea. ‘I can’t believe it’s all over,’ he said.
‘It’s not,’ Crowe said. ‘It’s part of your life now, and your life keeps on goin’. You can’t separate these events out as a story with a beginnin’ and an end. You’re a different person because of them, and that means the story will never really finish. But as your tutor, the question I have is, what did you learn from it all?’
Sherlock thought for a minute. ‘I learned,’ he said eventually, ‘that bees are fascinating and sorely neglected creatures. I think I want to know more about them. Perhaps even try to change people’s opinions of them.’ He grimaced. ‘I probably owe them that, having killed so many.’ He glanced over at Matty Arnatt. ‘What about you, Matty? What did you learn?’
Matty looked up from his breakfast. ‘I learned,’ he said, ‘that you need someone to look after you, otherwise your logical ideas are going to get you killed.’
‘Are you volunteering for the position?’ Amyus Crowe asked, eyes crinkling with good humour.
‘Dunno,’ Matty replied. ‘What’s the pay like?’
As Amyus laughed, and as Matty protested that he was serious, Sherlock gazed out at the constant, timeless sea, wondering what would happen next in his life. He felt as if he had been diverted on to a road that he hadn’t known existed. What would he find at the end of it?
Something moved to one side of his vision, attracting his attention. He glanced past the tavern, to where the road led away in two directions. A carriage was approaching – a black carriage drawn by two black horses. For a moment he thought that Mycroft had arrived, and he started to get up.
And then with a chill he saw a bone-white face and pink eyes glaring at him through the glass before a gloved hand firmly pulled down the blind as the carriage passed by, and he knew that he was right: things never would be the same again. Baron Maupertuis and the Paradol Chamber were still out there, and they would never rest.
Which meant that he could never rest either.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’ve consulted a number of books in order to get the history of the time and the area about right. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the following works:
London’s Lost Route to Basingstoke: The Story of the Basingstoke Canal, by P. A. L. Vine, published by Allan Sutton Publishing, 1968 (revised and expanded in 1994) – great material about the local waterways and canals in the Farnham area.
The Tongham Railway by Peter A. Harding, self-published 1994 – obviously the product of one man’s obsession, but immensely useful.
Bygone Farnham by Jean Parratt, published by Phillimore & Co. Ltd, 1985. Useful if only for the exhaustive list of pubs and taverns it contains, which suggests that every second house in Farnham sold beer.
London Under London – A Subterranean Guide by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman, published by John Murray (the original publisher of the Sherlock Holmes stories in book form), 1984. The classic guide to London’s underground rivers and tunnels.