• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 498 0

uniform was spotless, black, and perfectly pressed; decorated with bright gold braid; and he carried himself with an upright, military bearing. He was a hit with the ladies, who had all dressed in their finest clothes for the occasion, and he told many strange stories of his time working for the Cunard Line. The ones that impressed his audience the most were the ones concerning creatures such as whales and giant squid that were sometimes seen in the distance, and about the great storms that sometimes appeared on the horizon like black walls and which tossed ships about on the waves so much that at times the deck appeared to be as vertical as a cliff face. Judkins told these stories with a showman’s flair, pulling his attentive audience in with his words and giving the impression that sea travel was a dangerous activity which they would be lucky to survive, but Sherlock could tell that he was acting the part and providing a form of entertainment that would tinge the way the passengers saw the rest of the voyage. After all, if he told them it was as boring as a walk in the park then what stories would they have to tell to their friends when they disembarked?

One story in particular that he told caught Sherlock’s attention. Judkins had been talking about the various attempts to lay a cable across the Atlantic, from Ireland to Newfoundland, in order to allow the passage of telegraphic communication. If that could be done, then rather than a message taking well over a week to make it across from one country to the other in mail bags in the hold of a ship, information could be passed almost instantaneously via electrical pulses. The idea of telegraphic communication fascinated Sherlock – he could already see, after what had happened back in Amyus Crowe’s cottage, that the letters of the message would have to be replaced by codes that could easily be passed via pulses of electricity – long and short pulses, maybe, or just a simple ‘on’ and ‘off arrangement, but the idea of laying a cable some three thousand miles long, from one coast to another, across the bottom of the sea, without it breaking under the strain, made Sherlock’s mind boggle. Was there nothing that the mind of man could not accomplish, once it set itself to the task? The original method, according to Judkins, had two ships starting out in the middle of the Atlantic and laying their cables in different directions until they both hit land, but that had immediately run into problems when the crews tried to splice the cables together in the middle of a storm. The next attempts had taken place with ships setting out from Ireland and heading for Newfoundland, playing out the cables as they went, but the cables often broke and had to be dredged back up so that the crews could repair the breaks and keep going.

‘I recall one occasion,’ Judkins said in a low, deep voice, ‘when a broken cable was dredged up from the abyssal depths of the ocean, and there was a creature holding on to it!’ He glanced around the table, his eyes bright beneath bushy brows, while the various passengers who were hanging on his every word gasped. ‘A godless creature like a marine earwig, if you would credit it; white in colour, but fully two feet long and with a set of fourteen clawed legs that gripped hard on to the cable and would not let go. It was still alive when they dragged the cable on to the deck, but it soon died, being removed from its natural habitat amongst the murk of the ocean floor.’

One woman let out an inadvertent shriek.

‘I understand from the men who were there,’ Judkins continued, ‘that the creature tasted something like lobster, when cooked.’

His audience dissolved into relieved laughter. Sherlock caught Amyus Crowe’s eye. Crowe was smiling too.

‘I’ve heard similar stories,’ Crowe murmured, just loud enough for Sherlock to hear. ‘The things are called “isopods”. They’re something like prawns, but the conditions at the bottom of the ocean allow them to grow to prodigious size.’

The steward who was serving Sherlock’s part of the table – up near the Captain, as Mycroft had