Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [61]
After a few minutes, he realized that he had been hearing a violin playing for some time without noticing. Rufus Stone? Probably – the chances of their being two violinists on board were fairly slim, and he thought he was beginning to be able to detect some elements of Stone’s style – the flourishes he threw in at the end of certain phrases, and the way the fingers of his left hand sometimes struggled with complicated arpeggios.
He went looking for the man, and found him in his usual spot near the bows of the ship. This time there was no crowd around him. Perhaps they’d all got bored.
‘I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided to abandon our lessons like a man throws away a threadbare handkerchief,’ Stone called, still playing.
‘I had . . . a busy afternoon,’ Sherlock responded. ‘But I’m here now.’
‘Then let’s start.’ Rufus stopped playing and lowered the violin. ‘Any questions before we see how much of your stance you remember from this morning?’
Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘What’s your favourite piece of music?’ he asked. ‘Is it the Bruch you were playing this morning?’
Rufus thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I have a sneaking fondness for the work of Henryk Wieniawski. He has written several violin concertos, of which I prefer the second, in D minor. And then there’s Giuseppe Tartini’s infamous violin Sonata in G minor. That is a true test of a violinist’s skill.’
‘Infamous?’ Sherlock asked.
‘It’s known as the Devil’s Trill Sonata. Tartini claimed that he’d had a dream of the Devil playing the violin. When he woke up he tried to write down the piece of music the Devil was playing, and this was the closest he could get. It’s so fiendishly difficult that some critics have suggested that Tartini had to have sold his own soul to the Devil in exchange for the skill to play it.’
‘That’s rubbish.’
‘Of course it is. But it makes for a good story, and it helps to swell an audience if they think there’s something spooky or bizarre about the music you’re going to play’ He held the violin out to Sherlock. ‘Now let’s see how much has stuck.’
For the rest of the afternoon, Sherlock held the violin under Rufus Stone’s critical eye and tried, one after the other, different ways of using the bow to elicit notes from the instrument without actually worrying about which note it was. At the moment it was the technique that Rufus wanted him to master. He started with simply bowing the string in long, smooth, flowing gestures – détaché, as Rufus described it – while just supporting the neck of the instrument with his left hand rather than actually holding down any strings. That in itself took hours until Rufus was satisfied, first on one string and then on the others, trying hard to attain an even tone to the note no matter how long it lasted.
And that was how the rest of the voyage went. After breakfast, Sherlock would join Rufus Stone on deck for two hours, then they would move to the saloon for lunch. Another two hours of practice and then Sherlock would head back to his cabin for a break to read some more of Plato’s Republic. Two more hours with Rufus Stone, and then dinner. Following that, Sherlock usually spent some time with Amyus Crowe in the library before heading to bed, but Crowe’s day was mostly taken up with seeing to Virginia, and he had little time to continue with Sherlock’s education. Little time, and little in the way of props or examples. Sherlock had already noted that Amyus Crowe’s preferred method of teaching was to take something that he saw or had found and then use it as the basis for a lesson. In the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight, there was precious little opportunity for him to do either.
Sherlock hardly saw Virginia during the entire journey. She stayed in her cabin, unwilling to come out on deck or talk to anyone. Sherlock saw her once or twice, her skin so pale and translucent compared with the red of her hair that he