Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [98]
There was nobody around when they staggered on to the raised station platform. Even the telegraph office was locked up. Sherlock banged on the door, in case anyone was sleeping inside, but nobody answered. The whole town seemed to be still asleep, despite the daylight blue that was spreading across the sky.
‘Come on,’ he said, the words catching in his dry throat, ‘let’s find a hotel and get something to eat. The telegraph office probably won’t open until later.’
‘Food,’ Matty said, his voice cracked. ‘Sleep.’
Virginia just nodded. Her face was chalk-white – the freckles standing out like spots of ink – and she looked like she was at the end of her tether.
The hotel was across the street from the station. The street was dry earth, and rutted by the wheels of countless carts, and strangely Sherlock found it harder going than the grasslands.
The swing doors weren’t locked, which felt like the first piece of good luck they’d had in a while.
And standing over a table in the centre of the open main room, looking down at a map spread out in front of him, was Amyus Crowe.
He glanced up at the sound of the three of them entering, and his face registered so many different emotions within the space of a second that Sherlock felt he was looking at several different men at the same time.
Virginia ran to her father and threw her arms around him. Matty just sank into a chair and closed his eyes.
‘You tracked us,’ Sherlock said. He couldn’t hear any emotion in his voice. Maybe the night-long walk had burned it out of him. He just felt very tired.
‘I talked to the newspaper boys,’ Crowe said. He was obviously struggling to keep his voice level. ‘There’s not much happens in the city that they don’t know about, and they manage to get by largely ignored by the rest of the population. They told me about you bein’ followed, an’ managin’ to reverse the process. Neat trick with the cap, the jacket an’ the papers, by the way. One of them saw you at the boardin’ house, an’ another saw the two of you at the station. I managed to piece the rest of it together myself.’ He took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I think I can work out what got you from there to here. If I thought you’d done it deliberately, son, I’d put you on the first boat back to England an’ make sure you an’ I were never on the same continent again, but I reckon what happened was a series of small accidents, at the end of which you were far away from where I was an’ where I could help.’
‘That,’ said Sherlock, ‘is about the size of it. Not intentional. Not in the slightest.’
‘It’s true,’ Virginia said, voice muffled by her father’s chest. ‘We were following the men who had Matty, and the train started to move before we could get off.’
‘But they did rescue me,’ Matty added, eyes still closed.
‘That they did,’ Crowe admitted. He glanced at the three of them. ‘I think you need food and drink and rest, but I think I need to find out what happened to you while you’re eatin’ an’ drinkin’.’ He turned his head towards the rear of the room, where a doorway led out. ‘Mrs Dimmock! Four breakfasts, with all the orange juice an’ coffee you can muster!’ He glanced at Sherlock and Matty. ‘Make that eight breakfasts,’ he shouted. ‘There’s hungry people here!’
The next hour was a blur. Food arrived while the three of them were telling Amyus Crowe everything that had happened to them, and they ended up talking while they were stuffing their faces with ham, fried potato, eggs of various sorts and juice.
‘He’s planning to invade Canada,’ Sherlock said to Crowe when they got to the end. ‘He’s got an army built up, and he’s planning to set up a new country within Canada and declare it as the New Confederacy’
‘That’s pretty much what the Pinkertons had already worked out,’ Crowe said, nodding. ‘They’ve had their eye on this Duke Balthassar for some time now. The fact that he’s usin’ John Wilkes Booth as a figurehead to give his troops some backbone an’ give this new nation some legitimacy in the eyes of the Southern