Vanishing Girl (13 page)

“Sherlock, I’m …”

He picks up his pace and leaves her behind. A tear streaks down her cheek as he walks away from her.

“About my acquaintance with Victoria … I …” she says to herself.

He has failed; failed miserably. There can be no doubt. Lestrade has once again put the bullet into
him
.

He wonders for a moment if the police are lying about where they found her. But it wouldn’t matter if they were.
They have her
. And why would they lie anyway? He thinks of his “evidence,” considers it coolly and rationally for the first time, and it all begins to seem ridiculous. It shatters like that bust dropped on the hard floor at Grimwood Hall.

Old Muddle had merely said he
believed
the residents of the manor house purchased the stationery – and he was deaf and barely of sound mind. Even if they did purchase it, what did that really prove? And the locked door upstairs at Grimwood? He remembers now that he didn’t locate the bolt. It was almost certainly locked from the
inside
… which means no one was keeping that girl captive – he had made absolutely unfounded deductions. She had obviously locked herself in and was crying about something else, maybe an argument with the other three. No one in their
right mind should have assumed that
she
was the Rathbone heiress. He had been far too rash. The girl was barely visible in the dimness through that crack in the door and was sitting at the far end of a room. She likely didn’t have the color of hair he thought or the dress or anything – he had
wanted
her to be his catch. Whomever he saw at St. Neots wasn’t who he assumed she was.

Perhaps he saw a ghost in that haunted house … because he had just observed Victoria Rathbone in London. She was standing there in full public view, in the flesh, right beside her own father and a gloating Inspector Lestrade.

PART TWO
ROBBERY

F
eeling ashamed and weak, Sherlock wants to go home. All his plans seem pie-in-the-sky now, far too adult for a boy his age. A detective? Sherlock Holmes? What he really needs, as Penny Hunt said, is his family. But where is home now? Is it the apothecary shop from which he has been away without permission for nearly two days? Will Sigerson Bell take him back? His dear mother is dead, his little sister too, his much older brother employed and distant, and his father … could Sherlock go south to the Crystal Palace and talk to Wilberforce Holmes? He needs his wisdom and love. But it is difficult for his father to even look at him now. Wilber will always be reminded of the death of his wife when he sees his son. Sherlock doesn’t want to put his father through that. The boy knows he has done all of this to himself: this is where his selfish pursuit of glory, his pride, has taken him.

He holds back his tears as he trudges toward Denmark Street. He can’t see Irene, he’s wary of Malefactor and his gang … he is all alone.

Or is he?

The apothecary has been like a father to him before. Perhaps, if he is contrite, the old man will accept his apology. Baring his soul, telling Bell exactly what happened would be difficult, but maybe it is what he has to do. He approaches the latticed bow windows of the little shop with his mind made up.

There’s an awful sound coming from the laboratory at the back when he arrives. But it isn’t one of those terrible explosions he has often heard, the result of Bell’s inventive and reckless mixing and heating of chemicals, that have variously: shaken the building, left slime on the walls, shattered glass, and singed the septuagenarian’s bushy white eyebrows clean off. Neither is it a gunshot, which the boy has occasionally heard in the shop too…. The alchemist sometimes empties his firearms indoors, picking off various ribs or even the eye sockets of his hanging skeletons.

No, it is music … or so Bell thinks.

He is sitting in his favorite basket chair holding his old Stradivarius violin in that awkward, gypsy-styled manner of his: low on a knee. His face is red, sweat pours down his substantial dome onto his forehead, and he is humming at the top of his lungs. Every now and then he stops playing and conducts, flailing his bow through the air. It isn’t that the music is being played so badly: Bell is as strangely gifted a violinist as he is at many other eccentric pursuits. But his sense of invention on the instrument, which goads him into experimenting with all sorts of pieces, new and old, results
in admixtures of music at least as bizarre as his dangerous chemical concoctions. It is an alchemy of sounds, resulting in a jarring alloy.

Sherlock doesn’t mind. This is his mother’s favorite instrument.

Sigerson Bell doesn’t hear the boy enter, so when he looks up and sees him, he is so startled that he flings the bow across the room.

“Excuse me, Master Holmes,” he apologizes, scurrying, bent-over in his question-mark shape, to retrieve the implement from the porcelain sink where it has landed.

Then he stops in his tracks.

“
YOU
!” he says loudly, pivoting with stunning quickness and pointing a crooked finger at the boy, “You are two days late for your work! Where have you been?”

He has never sounded so angry. Has the ancient apothecary run out of patience after all? Is the apprentice about to be sent back to the streets? While Sherlock was away, he had barely given a thought to the fact that he hadn’t told his old friend where he’d gone and that he’d missed school. All he had considered were his own goals.

“My deepest apologies, sir,” says the boy. And he means it.

Sigerson Bell has a heart as soft as a marshmallow. It is especially squishy when it comes to Sherlock Holmes. He admires the boy’s brains and integrity, though he worries about his inwardness and the sadness he doesn’t seem able to shake.

“Solipsistic, that’s you,” says the apothecary, clearing his high-pitched voice. “Look up that word in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary some day, my boy.
Solipsistic!
”

“Mr. Bell, I will understand if you –”

“Well, well,” declares the old man, “no need to wallow in past disappointments, get right down into the mud, the … cow dung of regrets … are you well, young man?”

“I have something to tell you.”

Bell smiles in spite of himself. He motions for Sherlock to take a stool at the long lab table and sits on one by his side. He is “all ears” at this moment, bending one of his elephantine lugs in the boy’s direction.

Sherlock tells him almost everything. He includes the way he feels: how, against his better judgment, he tried to investigate the Rathbone kidnapping, what Inspector Lestrade said about him in public, and how desperately he wanted to defeat and shame him; how he hoped to blunt the plans of the devious criminals who did this, members of a class of humanity he hates. He doesn’t mention what Mr. Doyle might have done for him because that dream is gone, and he forgets about the little boy in the workhouse.

“Well, first of all, one must pursue things for the right reasons,” says the old man after a lengthy pause. “And secondly … you know, you know very well, that I am an alchemist as well as an apothecary. That doesn’t simply mean that I embrace the ancient dark arts of the sciences, that I believe I shall one day make gold from another substance. It also means that I am a disciple of the philosophy
of the alchemist, which is to say that I believe one can turn
life
into gold.”

Sherlock smiles.

“I embrace, I veritably hug and cuddle, the concept of optimism. It is at the core of my approach to my existence. I shall give you an example. Fetch me my stick.”

Sherlock retrieves the Swiss fighting stick, a long, thick pole with the belting power of a stallion’s kick, one of two leaning against a wall beside the water closet, resting where it was left after Bell’s last lesson in clubbing an opponent.

“Strike me!!”

Sherlock doesn’t hesitate. The apothecary has taught him the importance of the tactic of surprise: get off a blow when least expected. He has also taught him to never hold back. The boy expects Bell to show him some sort of unanticipated defensive move, something that will act as a metaphor for his ideas about optimism.

But the old man just stands there and Sherlock’s strike, delivered smartly, makes a cracking sound like a pistol going off as the stick connects with Bell’s forehead. It echoes all the way out to the shop’s front room … and likely into the street. The ancient apothecary goes down like he has been axed.

For an instant, Sherlock can’t see Sigerson Bell. Then he hears a weak voice on the floor.

“I shall be better shortly.”

Though it takes the boy several hours to truly bring the old man around (a shot of laudanum is found to be most
helpful), he is, indeed, eventually better. “One can rise from any blow,” he finally squeaks. That, in short, was his message, built upon a sacrifice he offered up for his apprentice.

With the old man moaning in his room upstairs, Sherlock goes to his little bed in the laboratory wardrobe thinking about this lesson in the school of hard knocks. The boy knows that Bell has more to say to him and looks forward to the encouragement he will offer. He hopes it is enough.

Holmes has come to understand that his is a moody disposition. The occasions when he drops into terrible bouts of sadness – recalling his mother and how he caused her death, or thinking about everyday activities and wondering where stimulation will come from next – seem to be increasing in frequency. For some reason, much of life bores him. Most of it is what he remembers the writer Shakespeare calling
diurnal
, just day-to-day, humdrum existence. Sherlock can’t abide that, never could. His big brain, his big ambition, needs constant excitement. Life must either be filled with challenges and thrills or … he doesn’t want to participate at all.

But tonight, a glorious dream comes to him. At least it is wonderful when it begins.

He is twenty-seven years old. He has found a way to achieve his plans. He is a detective unlike any the world has ever known, and everyone is aware of it. He is impeccably dressed, well groomed, and brilliant; a black-and-white
pea cock that London admires. The city is at his feet, Lestrade Junior his devoted supporter, the police are his begrudging acolytes. No problem is beyond his considerable gifts of deduction and he thirsts every day for more; his methods are unique and irregular. Criminals fear his very name; justice results from his intercessions; Malefactor has been vanquished; Irene is … barely visible. She appears every now and then, looking beautiful, but much different. He can never see her clearly. He realizes too, with a start, that he is still unhappy, and wakes in a sweat.