Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [62]
The weather was surprisingly stable during the whole journey. Apart from one day of dark skies and squalling showers, during which Rufus Stone and Sherlock had to retreat to Sherlock’s cabin to practise, the skies were blue and the sea was calm. Or, at least, the waves were small enough compared to the size of the hull that the Scotia could just carve its way through them.
Once, on the fourth day, there was some excitement when the Captain announced that they had sighted another ship. Passengers took turns with a telescope to look at the distant speck on the horizon. Amyus Crowe did use this as the basis for a lesson, asking Sherlock to calculate the likelihood of two ships being within line of sight of each other, given the vastness of the ocean and the relatively small number of ships, but Sherlock had already realized that although the Atlantic Ocean was large and the distance between Southampton and New York was long, most ships tended to follow the same narrow corridor across, and there were tens, perhaps hundreds, of ships afloat at any one time. Given that knowledge, the chance was actually quite high.
Both Sherlock and Amyus noticed an exchange of flashing lights between the ships as night fell. Sherlock watched the crew on the Scotia sending their message using a lantern with a shutter across the front that could be opened or closed. Part of him worried about secret messages being sent to and from conspirators on both ships concerning him and Amyus and Virginia Crowe, but that would mean most of the crew would have to be part of the conspiracy, and that wasn’t likely. And besides, there had been no other attempts to search the cabin or to do anything to the three of them, either before the other ship was sighted or afterwards. It seemed as though Grivens was the only person on the Scotia who had been recruited by the conspiracy.
The disappearance of the steward caused a small amount of consternation among the crew, and less among the passengers. The Captain didn’t try to turn the ship around and search in case he had fallen overboard. Sherlock could only assume that shreds of Grivens’s clothes had been found among the machinery in the engine room, and that the Captain had deduced that he’d fallen into the engine while drunk.
As time went on, Sherlock learned the main styles of bowing – legato, collé, martelé, staccato, spiccato and sautillé – and he’d just started to use the fingers of his left hand to hold down the four strings in various ways to form notes and chords. He still hadn’t played anything more musical than long, sustained tones. Rufus Stone was fanatical about building up technique and ability before letting a student loose on actual music, but Sherlock could appreciate Rufus’s approach. It was logical. It made sense.
‘What happens when we land?’ Sherlock asked one day, late in the voyage, in a pause during a lesson.
‘What happens is that I wander off into a new and glittering world of opportunity, looking to establish myself as a music teacher first and then, if I’m lucky, find some suitable orchestra that will pay me to play. You, on the other hand, will join the estimable Mr Crowe and his mysteriously absent daughter and do whatever it is that you’ve come to do in New York.’
During the fifth day of the voyage, during a break from his almost incessant violin practice, Sherlock spent some time at the bows of the ship, leaning on the rail and staring ahead at the distant blue line of the horizon.
He was not alone. Several other passengers were also in the bows of the boat, watching the wind