Young Sherlock Holmes: Bedlam (Short Reads) (3 page)

‘I understand,’ Sherlock said.

‘Good lad. I don’t think you’re goin’ to be any trouble at all, are you? I got a sense about these things. Be good and the years will just fly past.’

He was still laughing as he got to the grille at the end of the gallery.

Sherlock gazed around. There were six other inmates in the gallery. Two of them were walking up and down like mechanical toys, three were playing dice and the sixth was sitting against the wall,
arms around his knees, rocking to and fro. The man who had been toasting the mouse earlier had vanished back into his cell, presumably to eat his feast in comfort. There were also two attendants:
one at each end of the gallery. They were standing in a position where they could get a clear line of sight all the way down, but they looked bored. As long as a fight didn’t break out,
Sherlock didn’t think they would be interested.

Casually, he wandered back into his room. His
cell
. The moment he was out of sight of the attendants he slipped his jacket off. He ran his hands along the sleeves until he located a tear.
It had probably been caused by whatever fracas he had got into just before he had been taken away to Bedlam.

Carefully he pulled at a thread until it came loose. He followed the thread along the sleeve, pulling at it all the time, until he found the other end. A quick tug and it was away: a section of
thread about a foot long. The material of the jacket sleeve was wrinkled now, pulled out of shape, but that didn’t bother him too much. Working rapidly but carefully, he managed to get
another five threads loose. Once he had them all in his hand he put the jacket down and tied the threads together so that he had two long strands. Cautiously he tugged at them. The knots held
firm.

It was a start, at least.

If there was one thing Sherlock was sure about, it was that he wasn’t going to spend the next few years in the Bethlehem Hospital. One way or the other, he was getting out.

Sherlock ambled out of his straw-matted, brick-lined room, the threads from his jacket held bundled in his hand. He leaned against the door frame, as if watching what was going on in the
corridor, but he was waiting for something. He was waiting for a distraction, and given that he was in a lunatic asylum he was fairly sure that a distraction was going to come along soon.

It took nearly half an hour, but, just as he was about to give up, one of the dice players suddenly stood bolt upright. His hand was groping inside his jacket pocket.

‘My watch,’ he snarled. ‘It’s gone!’ He glowered at the man nearest him. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You fell against me a few minutes ago. You
must’ve taken it then! You black dog!’

A fight broke out, both men rolling on the flagstones of the gallery, trying to claw each other’s eyes out, while the gallery quickly filled up with shouting observers lured out of their
rooms by the noise. The attendants rushed from opposite ends of the gallery, brandishing their clubs, hitting out to the left and to the right to clear a way through the growing crowd.

Sherlock slipped to the other side of his door: the outside. The large metal bolt was at head height. Taking one thread he tied it around the handle of the bolt and then trailed it up the door
and over the top, pressing it into a gap between two planks. The loose end now hung down on the inside of the door. When the door was closed and locked, it would be on Sherlock’s side.

The second thread he also tied around the handle of the bolt, but this time he trailed it horizontally, towards the hinges. He passed the thread through the gap between the door and the frame,
letting it rest on one of the hinges so that it didn’t fall. Again, he passed it through to the inside of the door, catching it on one of the rivets that held the door together so that it
didn’t slip down.

He checked over his shoulder. Nobody was watching. The attendants were laying into the fight now, splitting people up and cracking heads.

Sherlock bent down and rubbed his hands on the flagstones, picking up as much dirt and dust as he could. Quickly he rubbed his hands along the two threads, blackening them and making them less
visible. He imagined the attendants sliding the bolt across, flicking the handle down and locking him in for the night. If he was lucky they would do it automatically –
slide, across,
down
– and the threads would be intact and unnoticed. And maybe – maybe – that would be the start of his escape.

Finished for the time being, he moved out into the gallery to watch the fight being broken up. There was blood on heads, on the clubs and on the floor.

‘In your cells, all of you!’ one of the attendants called. ‘Now!’

‘What about food!’ someone yelled.

‘No food tonight. You’ve lost that privilege. Nothing till breakfast for you animals, and you’ll like it or lump it!’

As the attendants began pushing people into their cells and bolting the doors, starting at the far end of the gallery, Sherlock glanced sideways. A man was standing in the doorway of the next
cell along. His clothes were threadbare: so dusty that although they had started off different colours they were all now approaching the same shade of grey. His beard and hair were grey. Even his
skin was grey.

He glanced over at Sherlock. His eyes weren’t grey: they were a faded, watery blue.

‘Do I detect a new arrival?’

‘That’s right. I’m Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes.’

‘My name is Richard Dadd. I am exceptionally pleased to meet you.’ He extended a hand towards Sherlock. As Sherlock shook it, he noticed that Dadd’s hand was coloured in
various shades of green and blue.

Dadd noticed the direction of his gaze. ‘They allow me to paint,’ he explained. ‘They provide me with canvas and oils and turpentine. It makes the days pass quicker. The
endless days.’

Sherlock gazed at Dadd. ‘You seem . . . normal.’

Dadd smiled. ‘You mean sane?’ He shrugged. ‘I believe that I am. Doctor Williams believes that I am not. We have a difference of opinion. Unfortunately, his opinion counts for
more than mine does in this establishment.’

The attendants had moved to about halfway between the end of the gallery and Sherlock’s cell now. Every few seconds another door would thud closed, and the bolt would be shot across,
locking it. Within a few moments he would be locked away as well. Alone. Desperate for human conversation, if only with a lunatic, he asked: ‘What . . . what happened . . . to get you locked
up here?’

‘It’s very simple, and very sad. My father was possessed by the very Devil himself. I killed him in Cobham Park. I stabbed him to death.’

Sherlock felt as if someone had doused him in cold water. ‘And that’s why you are here?’ he heard himself saying.

‘That,’ Dadd admitted, ‘and the fact that I was apprehended on my way to murder the Austrian Emperor. It’s all a tragic misunderstanding, but Doctor Williams refuses to
see it as such.’

The attendants would be with them in a few moments. The gallery was becoming quieter and quieter as the inmates were locked away, one by one.

‘Take my advice,’ Dadd said urgently.

‘What’s that?’ Sherlock asked.

‘Beware the Lady who walks in the night.’

‘The Lady?’ Sherlock asked, confused.

‘She walks the galleries late into the night on noiseless feet,’ Dadd confided, leaning towards Sherlock with a serious expression on his face. ‘They say she was a serving girl
who fell in love with the son of the man in whose house she worked. When this son left home he gave her a guinea coin – pressed it into her hand as a gift. He got into his coach and drove
away, but the next thing the family knew she was chasing after the coach, screaming. The family ran after her, but the shock of the son leaving had driven her senses from her. She was committed
here, to Bedlam, and spent several years here, and all that time she clutched that guinea in her fist and would not let it go, whatever the proffered compensation. She died with it still in her
hand, they say, and her last request was that she be buried with the coin, but the story goes that a heartless attendant prised it from her cold, dead fingers. And so her spirit roams the corridors
of this ghastly place every night since, forever searching for that lost coin, that gift from the man she loved and who loved her not. Her fingers clutch our trinkets in place of what she has
lost.’

‘That’s rubbish,’ Sherlock said, but he could hear the uncertainty in his own voice. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but there was something about Dadd’s serious
expression, and the conviction in his voice, that gave Sherlock pause.

‘Perhaps so,’ Dadd said. ‘Perhaps so, but be watchful nevertheless. There
are
strange things that walk these galleries at night. Believe me. The boy who was in that room
before you – he disappeared. Vanished suddenly and noiselessly. My suspicion is that the Lady came looking for her coin, and he saw her, so she took him instead.’

The attendants had reached Dadd by now. He nodded his head to them courteously, and backed into his room. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said as he went. ‘Goodnight to you.’

Next it was Sherlock’s turn. He backed into his room before they got to him. The thud of the door closing, and the metallic rattle of the bolt sliding shut, were the two most terrible
sounds he had ever heard.

He waited until the attendants had moved on, and he had heard the door and bolt on the next room thudding home, before he checked the threads. They were both intact. He tugged experimentally on
both of them, taking up the slack. They seemed to be all right. Maybe, just maybe, his plan would work.

But he had to wait until well after midnight to try it out.

Aware that his stomach was empty and that he wasn’t going to get anything for at least another twelve hours, he sat on the straw-covered floor and rested his back against the cold, dank
bricks. How did people survive here, night after night? How did they manage to keep . . . sane? The moment the word popped into his mind he found himself laughing. Of course. Most of them
weren’t sane.
Most
of them. But Sherlock was, and he suspected that at least a handful of other people imprisoned in Bedlam were sane as well. Maybe they were eccentric, maybe they had
opinions that were abhorrent to politicians or Church leaders, but that didn’t make them mad.

He must have fallen asleep while he was thinking, because the next thing he knew, the only light coming in through the slitted window was the pale, white light of the moon. He watched as the
distorted rectangle it cast slid down the wall, like a piece of paper stuck to the bricks with treacle.

The next thing he knew, the rectangle of light was on the floor. He must have slept again for a while. His shoulders ached from the cold of the wall, and the muscles of his legs felt weak and
tingly.

And someone was watching him through the wooden hatch in the door.

He could see light silhouetting a head, and he could sense eyes, malicious eyes, staring at him intently. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. Eventually, with a soft squeak, the hatch
closed again.

It wasn’t one of the attendants: that much he was sure of. They wouldn’t have bothered being quiet. They would have just slammed the hatch open, taken a look and then slammed it
closed again. Whoever had been watching Sherlock through the hatch hadn’t wanted him to know about it.

The sensible thing would have been to have waited for a while before making his move, but he was burning with curiosity now. He wanted to know who it was that had been interested in him.

Silently he climbed to his feet and crossed to the door. He cautiously felt for the two threads that he’d left there earlier, trailing from the handle of the bolt. They were fragile, thin,
and he was worried that they might have been disturbed by the opening of the hatch, but after a few moments of groping around he found first one, and then the other.

He had to do the next bit very carefully. There was no room for error: he would only get one chance.

The way the bolt was designed, it had to be rotated through a quarter-turn before the handle could slide past the brackets. One of the threads – the one that trailed over the door –
he could use to rotate the bolt. If he was lucky. The other one he could use to pull the bolt back, out of its catch.

Experimentally, he pulled on the thread that ran up and over the door. It gradually pulled taut. He tugged on it. Nothing. He felt a growing frustration churning in his chest. He wanted to pull
hard, but if he did that then the thread might snap, or the knots might give. Maybe it was snagged on a rivet, or a splinter, or something. It might even have become caught up between the door and
the frame when the door closed. Forcing himself to focus, Sherlock felt the tight band around his chest ease slightly. He pulled again on the thread. This time he felt something give, and from the
other side of the door he heard a grating noise. In his mind he could see the thread pulling on the handle of the bolt, but with the brackets stopping it from moving and with the handle offset, the
only freedom of movement it had was for the bolt to rotate around its own longitudinal axis. So, reluctantly, it did.

Sherlock had to judge the amount of rotation very carefully. If it rotated the bolt too much – if he ended up with the handle pointing directly upward – then it would not open. The
only clear path the handle had was when it was pointed outward at ninety degrees to the door. If he pulled too far then there was no way to get the bolt down again. This was a one-time-only
opportunity for freedom.

Sherlock stopped pulling while there was still some play in the thread. He wanted to pull further, but he knew he shouldn’t. Time to try the other thread now, and pray that it worked.

Keeping the tension on the first thread, he pulled on the second one, which ran horizontally around the edge of the door. If he’d worked things out correctly then this one should pull the
bolt back along the door, out of the catch.
If
he had worked things out correctly.

There was some resistance, but the thread moved, and he could feel an increase in tension in the first thread, the vertical one. On the other side of the door he could hear the grating of metal
against metal as the bolt slid back. Elation filled him. He stopped breathing, in case the movement of his chest disturbed the delicate balance of the threads.