Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [87]
‘It’s only logical if you’re the only person who acts that way,’ she pointed out quietly. ‘If everyone in the world acts that logically, then everyone fights everyone else, civilization falls apart, chaos ensues and only the strong survive.’
They walked on in silence for a while. Sherlock could feel Virginia staring at him, but he didn’t have anything to say.
A sudden movement and a burst of noise startled them both, but it was just a bird launching itself from cover and flying away.
By now they were nearly at the stone wall that they had seen earlier. Sherlock looked over his shoulder once more, expecting to see the same empty landscape he had seen every other time, but there were people moving down by the chapel. At that distance he couldn’t tell whether they were locals or Scobell’s men, but he wasn’t willing to take a chance. Before he could do anything, Virginia grabbed him by the arm and pulled him towards the wall. It was only waist high, and she jumped over it lithely and vanished from sight. He vaulted the wall and dropped down beside her.
Sherlock got to his knees and peered over the top of the wall, looking down the slope. There were still people around the chapel.
‘Come on,’ Virginia urged. ‘We need to keep moving. We need to get to my pa.’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘but carefully. Stay out of sight.’
Together they scurried along in the wall’s shadow, keeping low so that the stones shielded them from anyone looking in their direction.
Sherlock peered ahead. In the distance, across an undulating stretch of ground, was a wooded area.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We need to get to cover before nightfall.’
Despite being rife with tension the walk towards the trees was quiet and even boring. Sherlock was exhausted after all that he’d suffered that day, and he found that just putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again, was one of the most tedious things he’d ever had to do. Every now and then he would stumble over a stone, or put his foot in a pothole, and he would nearly fall over – much to Virginia’s amusement.
He kept alert for movement that might mean they had been spotted, but apart from the birds that circled in the sky and the occasional rabbit the only thing that Sherlock saw was a majestic stag standing on a rise in the ground. Its antlers spread like small trees stripped of their leaves. It stared impassively at them, head turned to one side. When it was certain they were not a threat it lowered its head to the ground and began to eat the heather.
The sky dimmed from blue to indigo and from indigo to black as they walked. Stars began to twinkle: first one or two, and then, within a few minutes, too many to count.
Remembering the stag, and how it had casually dismissed them from its mind to chomp at the vegetation, Sherlock realized that he was hungry. No, he was starving. Apart from the oatcakes at Amyus Crowe’s cottage, he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
Virginia was biting her lip. She looked hungry too.
What were his options? Try to chase a rabbit down the next time one broke from cover? Unlikely that he would succeed. Throw Matty’s knife – which was still in his pocket – and hope to hit a rabbit? He didn’t know much about throwing knives, although he’d seen it done at fairgrounds, but he suspected that the knives had to be carefully balanced so that they spun smoothly, end over end. Matty’s knife had a handle that was much bulkier than the blade. He wouldn’t be able to aim it properly.
He remembered the first ever lesson that Amyus Crowe had given him, back in Hampshire in the woods that surrounded Holmes Manor. Crowe had taught Sherlock which fungi were safe to eat and which were poisonous. If he could find some mushrooms, then they could eat. He glanced around. There wasn’t much chance of finding them in open moorland, but perhaps when they got into the trees he could find some growing on rotten logs in piles of leaf mould.
He looked up to see how far they were from the