Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm (34 page)

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been away for a few days.’

‘So the master said. He mentioned that he was expecting you back soon.’ She smiled. ‘My name is Mrs Mulhill, and I am the new housekeeper. I started yesterday.’

‘Welcome to Holmes Manor.’

‘Thank you. I am looking forward to working here very much indeed.’ She glanced at his bag. ‘I’m sure you have laundry that I can take. If you want to make yourself comfortable somewhere, I will bring you a tray of tea and some biscuits. The master and the mistress are out at the moment, but they will be back for dinner.’

‘Tea and biscuits,’ he said, ‘would be wonderful.’

Leaving his bag in her care, he went across to the library. In his uncle’s absence it was the place where he felt most at home. The front room was for receiving visitors, and the dining room was for eating, and he didn’t feel like going up to his bedroom.

He settled down into his uncle’s leather chair, soothed by the smell of the books and the manuscripts that surrounded him. On the desk he could see the pile of sermons, letters and suchlike that his uncle had asked him to sort through, before Josh Harkness, Gahan Macfarlane and Bryce Scobell had infiltrated his life. It all seemed so long ago.

The sermon in front of him was one he had already looked at – an attack by a vicar somewhere up in the Midlands on various heresies and schisms within the Church. Sherlock’s gaze caught on the phrase ‘Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ halfway down the page, and it was as if a light had suddenly gone on in his brain.

Gold plates. Mrs Eglantine had been looking for gold plates, because she had overheard Sherlock’s Uncle Sherrinford talking about them. She had been obsessed with the idea that somewhere in the house was hidden a stash of gold plates – a treasure of some kind – but she had never found them.

There was a treasure, but it wasn’t the kind she had been anticipating.

Sherlock called to mind what he had read about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – or the Mormons, as they were also known – while he was in his uncle’s library. The movement had begun in America about forty years before, led by a man named Joseph Smith Jr. He had claimed that he had in his possession a sacred text called the Book of Mormon, which he told people was a supplement to the Bible. When asked where this sacred book had come from, Smith claimed that when he was seventeen years old an angel named Moroni told him that a collection of ancient writings, engraved on golden plates by ancient prophets, was buried under a hill near New York. The writings told of a tribe of Jews who had been led by God from Jerusalem to America six hundred years before Jesus was born.

Golden plates.

Sherlock felt a laugh bubbling up in his chest. Mrs Eglantine must have overheard Sherrinford Holmes talking to Aunt Anna about the golden plates of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Had he mentioned the word ‘treasure’ as well? Had he said to her something like, ‘I shall treasure this letter, my dear, as it gives me everything I need to argue that the golden plates of the Mormons never existed,’ and had Mrs Eglantine overheard the words ‘treasure’ and ‘golden plates’ and drawn a completely erroneous conclusion? Without asking her, Sherlock would never know, and he devoutly hoped that he would never meet her again, but it seemed likely. The treasure she had so diligently searched for was a chimera. A complete illusion.

Sherlock laughed again. He would tell his uncle, of course, as soon as he returned, but he didn’t think Sherrinford would be too distressed by the news that there was no treasure. He wasn’t a man who cared much for worldly goods.

In the midst of laughing, Sherlock smelled something sweet. It was a familiar smell, vaguely medicinal. He knew it from somewhere, but he couldn’t quite place it. For a moment he thought that Mrs Mulhill had returned with the tray of biscuits she had promised, but the room was empty apart from him.

He tried to stand up, but his vision began to blur. He put a hand on the desk to steady himself, but he missed. He fell forward, head impacting on the blotter, but he didn’t feel the impact. He didn’t feel anything apart from a delicious lassitude. A warm mist closed in around him, and he slept.

Vague visions, like a collage of pictures, filled his mind. A black carriage. Ropes. A pad that smelled sweet and cloying placed across his mouth. The sky. A face, red-bearded and wild-eyed, that he recognized but could not put a name to . . .

When he woke up, everything was different.

He was buried in the midst of a pile of thick, tarry ropes in a small room. The walls, the floor and the ceiling were made of rough wooden planks. His head was pounding, and his stomach was lurching. The floor seemed to be moving beneath him, but it was only when he tried to push the ropes away and get to his feet that he realized that the problem was with the room, not with his sense of balance. It really
was
moving.

He pulled the door open and stepped through, still holding the frame for support.

He was looking out on the deck of a ship. Beyond the rails was a choppy grey sea flecked with white spume. There was no land in sight.

A sailor came around the corner and stopped dead at the sight of Sherlock. He sighed heavily and turned to look behind him.

‘Get Mr Larchmont,’ he yelled. ‘We got ourselves a stowaway!’ Turning back to Sherlock he shook his head. ‘You chose the wrong ship to stow away on, boy.

‘Why?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Where are we going?’

‘This ain’t a pleasure cruise to the Mediterranean,’ the sailor said. He smiled, revealing a handful of tobacco-stained teeth. ‘This is the
Gloria Scott
, and we’re sailing all the way to China!’

HISTORICAL NOTES

You might think that researching a book set on the same land mass as the one where I live would be easier than researching one set in, oh, say, America or Russia.
I
certainly thought that before I started work. The strange thing is that it didn’t turn out that way.

I first started thinking about setting a book in Edinburgh when I was staying there for a few days. I was doing a talk at the Edinburgh Festival, and then visiting a couple of schools and talking to the pupils about Sherlock Holmes, and me, and why I wanted to write these books. I was staying in a small hotel in the centre of Edinburgh – just off Princes Street, in fact – and every day, when I left the hotel, I looked to my right and saw the massive volcanic plug of Castle Rock, with Edinburgh Castle sitting on top of it like a solid grey cloud hanging above the city. It all looked so stunning that I couldn’t help but start to picture Sherlock Holmes clambering up Castle Rock, risking his life to save someone. Probably Virginia.

What I should have done, of course, was go to the nearest bookshop and buy as many books on the history of Edinburgh as I could. But I had a lot of stuff in my suitcase, and at the time I was busy writing the previous Young Sherlock Holmes mystery,
Black Ice
, so I didn’t have time to think about the
next
book. I filed the images and scenes away in a little locked box in my mind for later. Much later.

Much later comes around faster than you expect. By the time I started to write
Fire Storm
I was back in Dorset, nearly as far from Edinburgh as it’s possible to get without falling into the sea. Looking around for inspiration, I could only find Michael Fry’s
Edinburgh – A History of the City
(published by Macmillan – who also publish the Young Sherlock books – in 2009, which means I probably could have got them to send me a free copy rather than buying my own). That book did, however, give me a good sense of how the city had developed and the kinds of people who lived there.

The story of the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare, which Matty tells Sherlock when they are in the tavern off Princes Street, is entirely true. Edinburgh was famed for its medical school, and there was indeed a shortage of bodies. Burke and Hare found the perfect solution to the problem – provide fresh bodies to order, by killing people. Burke was indeed hanged, and then dissected in the very place where so many of his victims had ended up, while Hare did vanish, never to be seen again.

The other story that Matty tells Sherlock – later, when they are coming out of the tenements where they have been questioned by Bryce Scobell – is not true, although it is widely believed.

The tenement in question is called Mary King’s Close (a ‘close’ being the local name for the alleyway between two tenement blocks). It’s been built on, over the years, to the point where what were alleys are now underground tunnels. You can visit the place today, and hear the stories about the people who were walled up there to starve, and about the ghosts that still appear in the rooms at night, but the truth is rather more prosaic. People falling ill with the plague often voluntarily quarantined themselves in their own houses to avoid passing the disease on, indicating their status by placing white flags in the windows. Friends and neighbours passed food and supplies to them until they either got better (unlikely) or died (much more likely). There were even special places set up outside the city where plague victims could go to be segregated from everyone else.

Interestingly (or perhaps not) Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and studied medicine there from 1876 to 1881. One of his teachers was a man named Joseph Bell, and it is widely accepted that Doyle based the character of Sherlock Holmes on Bell (who, it was said, could diagnose not only a patient’s illness but also their occupation merely by looking at them). I did briefly consider including an appearance by Joseph Bell in this book, but I quickly decided not to. It would have been too much like an in-joke, and there was no real reason for him to be there.

It would be wrong of me not to mention, by the way, the Sherlock Holmes novel written by American author Caleb Carr entitled
The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes
(Little, Brown, 2005). It takes place largely around Edinburgh. Carr is an excellent writer, and his version of Sherlock Holmes is perhaps as close to Arthur Conan Doyle’s as anyone has managed since Doyle’s death in 1931.

The story that Amyus Crowe tells about Colonel John Chivington and the appalling attack he mounted on the Native American tribe led by Chief Black Kettle is, tragically, true. I grew up watching Western movies in which the Native Americans (or Red Indians as they were known then) were the bad guys and the noble white soldiers were the good guys. Those movies were lies, and I still feel a sense of betrayal that Hollywood convinced so many people otherwise. There is, of course, no record of Chivington having a second in command named Bryce Scobell, but there is no record that he didn’t either.

The bizarre fact that rabbits are immune to the poisons contained in the stalk and leaves of the foxglove is something I first discovered in
The Wordsworth Guide to Poisons and Antidotes
by Carol Turkington (Wordsworth Editions, 1997). Having done some checking around I have since found that opinion is divided on the subject. Maybe they are; maybe they aren’t. At any rate, Sherlock Holmes believes it to be true.

Bear-baiting was a well-known ‘sport’ in England for hundreds of years, until it was made illegal in 1835. It usually took the form of a bear being tied to a stake and dogs set on it. Either the bear would kill the dogs or the dogs would kill the bear. It was rare that a bear and a man were set to fight, although not unknown. For some reason (possibly a surplus of bears) Russia was better known for its bear-versus-man contests. I had originally intended to have Amyus Crowe face off against a bear in
Black Ice
, but I couldn’t find a place where it made sense to slot that scene in. For some reason it made more sense in this one – probably because Crowe didn’t have a lot to do in
Black Ice
, but in
Fire Storm
he pretty much finds himself pushed to the limit.

The material concerning the Mormon Church’s belief that the word of God was handed down to their prophet Joseph Smith Jr in 1823 on golden plates is also true (by which I mean that the story as I describe it is more or less what the Mormon Church claim – not that the story is actually
true
. That’s not for me to say).

So, Sherlock has finally confronted the evil Mrs Eglantine and had her banished from the Holmes household. He has also grown up now to the point where he can stand on his own two feet and rescue his brother and his surrogate fathers (Amyus Crowe and Rufus Stone) from trouble, rather than rely on them to rescue
him
. What next for Sherlock? Well, according to Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the original fifty-six short stories and four novels about a grown-up Sherlock Holmes, his character was an expert at martial arts. Where, I wondered, would he
learn
those martial arts? China perhaps, or Japan. Time, and the prevailing winds and currents, will tell.