Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [109]
He turned his head. Rufus Stone, the Irish violinist he’d met on the journey out, was standing nearby, leaning on the rail. His violin case was slung across his back and his long black hair was loose across his collar.
‘I thought you were staying in America?’ Sherlock said, surprised.
Ah, about that,’ Rufus said ruefully. ‘I may not have mentioned, but I was in a bit of trouble, back in the old country, and I was hoping that seeking the fabled pot of gold at this end of the rainbow would be a good move, but it turns out that people have been sending messages along that very same rainbow, and someone was waiting for me when I got here.’ He sighed. ‘Who would have thought that the Irish would have the whole criminal underworld in New York sewn up like a corpse in a shroud?’
‘So what happens now?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Where do you go?’
‘That depends,’ Rufus said, gazing out across the water. ‘Do you know of anyone who is in desperate need of a violin tutor?’
‘Funnily enough,’ said Sherlock, ‘I think I do.’
AUTHOR’S NOTES
And so here we are, at the end of young Sherlock Holmes’s second adventure. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
In the first book, Sherlock had started to pick up his logical way of thinking and his eye for evidence from the genial but rather mysterious Amyus Crowe. I also showed him starting to become interested in bees and in boxing, setting the scene for the skills and interests he later displays in the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (in The Sign of the Four, for instance, a bare-knuckle fighter compliments Sherlock by saying, ‘You’re one that has wasted your gifts. You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy’ – ‘the fancy’ being a slang term for the boxing fraternity).
In this book I have tried to imagine how and where Sherlock first learned to play the violin, as well as the events which provoked him to take an interest in tattoos (again, in the Conan Doyle stories, he can work out where a tattoo was done just by the pigments in the ink). In a more general sense I’ve laid some of the groundwork for the sympathy that Sherlock later shows towards America and Americans (Sherlock says in one of Conan Doyle’s stories that he expects there to be a day when people in Great Britain and American will some day be ‘citizens of the same worldwide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes’).
I’ve tried to make sure that the things that happen in this book are as historically accurate as possible. The SS Scotia did indeed go back and forth across the Atlantic, for instance, taking passengers from Liverpool to New York, as did the SS Great Eastern. I’m not sure whether it ever sailed from Southampton or not, but for the purposes of this book I’m assuming that it did at least once. The Scotia made its first voyage as a passenger ship in 1862 under Captain Judkins and its last in 1875, and for a while it held the record for the fastest transatlantic crossing, but its consumption of coal made it uneconomic and it did not make the Cunard Company, who built it, the profits they expected. After spending some years laying undersea cables for transatlantic telegraph messages the Scotia ended up sinking off the island of Guam in the Indian Ocean in 1904. For details on the SS Scotia, and other ships that plied the Atlantic passenger trade, I am indebted to the following books:
Transatlantic Paddle Steamers by H. Philip Spratt (Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1951)
Transatlantic – Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships by Stephen Fox (HarperCollins, 2003)
The story told aboard the SS Scotia by Captain Judkins, the one about the strange earwig-like creature found holding on to the undersea telegraph cable when it was brought up from the depths of the ocean, is a fabrication of mine, but such creatures do actually exist. Scary, But true. Check out the following website if you don’t believe me:
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/1034874/monster-bug-attaches-itself-to-submarine