Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm (2 page)

Four strings! The violin only had four strings! How hard could it be?

‘The problem,’ Stone said suddenly, turning round and staring at Sherlock, ‘is that you are playing the notes, not the tune.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Sherlock responded defensively.

‘It makes perfect sense.’ Stone sighed. ‘The trees are not the forest. The forest is all of the trees, taken together, plus the undergrowth, the animals, the birds and even the air. Take all that away and you just have a load of wood – no feeling, no
atmosphere
.’

‘Then where does the
feeling
come from in music?’ Sherlock asked plaintively.

‘Not from the notes.’

‘But the notes are all that’s on the paper!’ Sherlock protested.

‘Then add something of your own. Add some emotion.’

‘But
how
?’

Stone shook his head. ‘It’s the small gaps you put in – the hesitations, the subtle emphases, the slight speedings up and slowings down.
That
’s where the feeling lives.’

Sherlock gestured at the music on the stand. ‘But that’s not written on there! If the composer wanted me to speed up or slow down then he would have written it on the music.’

‘He did,’ Stone pointed out, ‘in Italian. But that’s only a guide. You need to decide how
you
want to play the music.’ He sighed. ‘The problem is that you’re treating this like an exercise in mathematics, or grammar. You want all the evidence set out for you, and you think that your job is to put it all together. Music isn’t like that. Music requires interpretation. It requires you to put something of yourself in there.’ He hesitated, trying to find the right words. ‘Any performance is actually a duet between you and the composer. He’s given you the bulk, but you have to add the final ten per cent. It’s the difference between reading out a story and
acting
out a story.’ Seeing the forlorn expression on Sherlock’s face, he went on: ‘Look, have you ever seen the writer Charles Dickens reading one of his own stories to an audience? Try it sometime – it’s well worth the cost of a ticket. He does different voices for different characters, he throws himself around the stage, he speeds up at the exciting bits and he reads it as if he’s never seen it before and he’s just as keen as the audience to find out what happens.
That
is how you should play music – as if you’ve never heard it before.’ He paused and winced. ‘In a good way, I mean. The trouble is that you play music as if you’ve never heard it before and you’re trying to work it out as you’re going along.’

That was pretty much the way it was, Sherlock thought.

‘Should I give up?’ he asked.

‘Never give up,’ Stone rejoined fiercely. ‘
Never
. Not in
anything
.’ He ran a hand through his long hair again. ‘Perhaps I’ve been going at this the wrong way. Let’s take a different tack. All right, you approach music as if it’s a problem in mathematics – well, let’s look for musicians who write mathematics into their music.’

‘Are there any?’ Sherlock asked dubiously.

Stone considered for a moment. ‘Let’s think. Johann Sebastian Bach was well known for putting mathematical tricks and codes into his tunes. If you look at his
Musical Offering
there’s pieces in there which are mirror images of themselves. The first note and the last note are the same; the second note and the second from last note are the same; and so on, right to the middle of the piece.’

‘Wow.’ Sherlock was amazed at the audacity of the idea. ‘And it still works as music?’

‘Oh yes. Bach was a consummate composer. His mathematical tricks don’t detract from the music – they add to it.’ Stone smiled, realizing that he’d finally snagged Sherlock’s attention. ‘I’m not an expert on Bach by any means, but I understand there’s another piece by him which is built around some kind of mathematical sequence, where one number leads on to the next using some rule. It’s got an Italian name. Now, let’s try that Mozart again, but this time, as you’re playing it, I want you to bring back those feelings.
Remember
them, and let them guide your fingers.’

Sherlock raised the violin to his shoulder again, tucking it into the gap between his neck and his chin. He let the fingers of his left hand find the strings at the end of the neck. He could feel how hard his fingertips had become under Stone’s relentless tutelage. He brought the bow up and held it poised above the strings.

‘Begin!’ Stone said.

Sherlock gazed at the notes on the page, but rather than trying to
understand
them he let his gaze slide
through
them, looking at the page as a whole rather than each note as something individual. Looking at the wood, not the trees. He remembered from a few minutes before what the notes were, then took a deep breath and started to play.

The next few moments seemed to go past in a blur. His fingers moved from one string to the next, pressing them down to make the right notes, fractionally before his brain could send his fingers a signal to
tell
them what the right notes were. It was as if his body already knew what to do, freeing his mind to float above the music, looking for its meaning. He tried to think of the piece as if someone was singing it, and let his violin become the voice, hesitating on some notes, coming down heavily on others as if to emphasize their importance.

He got to the end of the page without even realizing.

‘Bravo!’ Stone cried. ‘Not perfect, but better. You actually persuaded me that you were feeling the music, not just playing it.’ He gazed over at the slanted rays of sunlight that penetrated the loft. ‘Let’s stop it there: on a high note, as it were. Keep practising your scales, but also I want you to practise individual notes. Play a sustained note in different ways – with sadness, with happiness, with anger. Let the emotion seep through into the music, and see how it changes the note.’

‘I’m . . . not good with emotion,’ Sherlock admitted in a quiet voice.

‘I am,’ Stone said quietly. ‘Which means I can help.’ He placed a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder for a moment and squeezed, then took it away. ‘Now be off with you. Go and find that American girl and spend some time with her.’

‘Virginia?’ His heart quickened at the thought, but he wasn’t sure if it was happiness or terror that made it speed up. ‘But—’

‘No buts. Just go and see her.’

‘All right,’ Sherlock said. ‘Same time tomorrow?’

‘Same time tomorrow.’

He threw the violin into its case and half climbed, half slid down the ladder to the upper landing, then thudded down the stairs to the ground floor. Stone’s landlady – a woman of about Stone’s own age, with black hair and green eyes – came out of the kitchen to say something as he ran past, but he didn’t catch what it was. Within seconds he was out in the crisp, cold sunlight.

Farnham was as busy as it ever was: its cobbled or muddy streets filled with people heading every which way on various errands. Sherlock paused for a moment, taking in the scene – the clothes, the postures, the various packages, boxes and bags that people were carrying – and tried to make sense of it. That man over there – the one with the red rash across his forehead. He was clutching a piece of paper in his hand as if his life depended on it. Sherlock knew that there was a doctor’s surgery a few minutes’ walk behind him, and a pharmacy just ahead. He was almost certainly heading to pick up some medicine after his consultation. The man on the other side of the road – good clothes, but unshaven and bleary-eyed, and his shoes were scuffed and muddy. A tramp wearing a suit donated by a church parishioner, perhaps? And what of the woman who passed by right in front of him, hand held up to push the hair from her eyes? Her hands looked older than she did – white and wrinkled, as if they had spent a long time in water. A washerwoman, obviously.

Was this what Rufus Stone had meant about seeing the wood instead of the trees? He wasn’t looking at the people as people, but seeing their histories and their possible futures all in one go.

For a moment Sherlock felt dizzy with the scale of what he was staring at, and then the moment was gone and the scene collapsed into a crowd of people heading in all directions.

‘You all right?’ a voice asked. ‘I thought you were goin’ to pass out there for a moment.’

Sherlock turned to find Matthew Arnatt – Matty – standing beside him. The boy was smaller than Sherlock, and a year or two younger, but for a second Sherlock didn’t see him as a boy, as his friend, but as a collection of signs and indications. Just for a second, and then he was Matty again – solid, dependable Matty.

‘Albert isn’t well then,’ he said, referring to the horse that Matty owned, and which pulled the narrowboat he lived on whenever he decided to change towns.

‘What makes you think that?’ Matty asked.

‘There’s hay in your sleeve,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘You’ve been feeding him by hand. Usually you just let him crop the grass wherever he happens to be tied up. You wouldn’t feed a horse by hand unless you were worried he wasn’t eating properly.’

Matty raised an eyebrow. ‘Just because I sometimes likes to give ’im ’is grub,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to make a song an’ dance about it. Albert’s the closest thing to family I got.’ He shrugged, embarrassed. ‘So I likes to treat ’im sometimes wiv somethin’ special.’

‘Oh.’ Sherlock filed that away for later consideration. ‘How did you know I was here?’ he asked eventually.

‘I could hear you playing,’ Matty replied laconically. ‘The whole town could hear you playing. I think that’s why Albert’s off his food.’

‘Funny,’ Sherlock observed.

‘You want to go get some lunch? There’s plenty of stuff goin’ spare in the market.’

Sherlock thought for a moment. Should he spend some time with Matty, or go and see Virginia?

‘Can’t,’ he said, suddenly remembering. ‘My uncle said he wanted me back for lunch. Something about getting me to catalogue and index a collection of old sermons he recently obtained at an auction.’

‘Oh joy,’ Matty said. ‘Have fun with that.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe
I
could go and see Virginia instead.’

‘And maybe I could hang you upside down from a bridge with your head under water up to your nose,’ Sherlock replied.

Matty just gazed at him. ‘I was only jokin’,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t.’

Sherlock noticed that Matty’s gaze kept sliding away, down the road towards the market. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go and pick up some bruised fruit and broken pies. I might see you later. Or tomorrow.’

Matty flashed a quick smile of thanks and scooted away, ducking and diving through the crowd until he was lost from sight.

Sherlock walked for a while along the road that led out of Farnham and towards his aunt and uncle’s house. Every time a cart came past he turned to look at the driver, but most of them avoided his gaze. He didn’t take it personally – he’d been doing this for long enough that he knew the success rate was around one in twenty carts. Eventually one of the drivers looked over at him and called: ‘Where you going, sonny?’

‘Holmes Manor,’ he shouted back.

‘They don’t take on casual labour.’

‘I know. I’m . . . visiting someone.’

‘Climb aboard then. I’m going past the main gates.’

As Sherlock threw his violin up the side of the still-moving cart and clambered up after it, falling into a deep mass of hay, he wondered why it was that he still didn’t like admitting where he lived. Perhaps he was worried that people might change their attitude if they knew that his family were part of the local land-owning gentry. It was so stupid, he thought, that something as simple as inheriting land and a house from your parents could set you apart from other people. When he grew up he would make sure that he never made social distinctions between people like that.

The cart clattered along the road for twenty minutes or so before Sherlock jumped off, calling a cheerful ‘Thanks!’ over his shoulder. He checked his watch. He had half an hour before luncheon: just enough time to wash and perhaps change his shirt.

Luncheon was, as usual, a quiet affair. Sherlock’s uncle – Sherrinford Holmes – spent his time balancing eating with reading a book and trying to move his beard out of the way of both his food and the text, while his aunt – Anna – spoke in a continuous monologue that covered her plans for the garden, how pleased she was that the two sides of the Holmes family appeared to be on speaking terms again, various items of gossip about local landowners and her hope that the weather in the coming year would be better than the one that had just passed. Once or twice she asked Sherlock a question about what he was doing or how he was feeling, but when he tried to answer he found that she had just kept on talking regardless of what he might say. As usual.

He did notice that Mrs Eglantine – the manor’s darkly glowering housekeeper – was conspicuous by her absence. The maids served the food with their customary quiet deference, but the black-clad presence who usually stood over by the window, half hidden by the light that streamed through, was missing. He wondered briefly where she was, and then realized with a flash of pleasure that he just didn’t care.

Sherlock finished his food faster than his aunt and uncle and asked if he could be excused.

‘Indeed you may,’ his uncle said without looking up from his book. ‘I have left a pile of old sermons on the desk in my library. I would be obliged, young man, if you could sort them into piles depending on their author, and then arrange the individual piles by date. I am attempting,’ he said, raising his eyes momentarily and gazing at Sherlock from beneath bushy brows, ‘to catalogue the growth and development of schisms within the Christian church, with particular reference to the recent creation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in America. These sermons should prove very useful in that respect.’