When Sherlock woke up his head was aching. The pain seemed to be centred around his right temple, and it pulsed sickeningly in time with his heartbeat. It was like a massive soft, throbbing lump in the centre of his head that he couldn’t see past and couldn’t climb past. He lay in the dark for a while, not thinking, but just drifting back and forth with the pain, waiting for it to recede. Eventually, it did.
The last thing he remembered was being knocked unconscious on the meadow beneath Farnham Castle by the fairground fighter. And now he was in a comfortable bed, with his head supported by feather pillows. That meant he wasn’t still at the fairground, lying on the muddy grass ring or bundled into a tent to recover. Unless, of course, he was hallucinating, which was a distinct possibility given the fact that he’d suffered a head wound.
No, he told himself firmly: he had to work on the assumption that what he was feeling, hearing and seeing was true, and not just some fabrication of a bruised brain.
The diffuse light filtering through the curtained windows told him that it was still morning. He wasn’t in his own bed; that was for sure. His own bed was harder, and his pillows were lumpier. He must have been found by someone from Holmes Manor and brought back there, but left in a more comfortable bed: one that the doctor and the maids could get to more easily, perhaps. He strained, trying to hear movement outside the window, but there was nothing apart from what might have been distant birdsong.
How much trouble was he in? The thought brought an unplanned groan to his lips. He’d disobeyed his uncle’s clear instructions, and he suspected that any attempt to explain that he thought he was meeting Amyus Crowe would be dealt with harshly. Worse, he had become involved in a common fist fight. Worse than that, he had lost. That might not have concerned Sherrinford or Anna Holmes, but if Sherlock’s father ever got to hear about it he would be furious. One of his favourite sayings was: “A gentleman never starts a fight, but he always finishes it.”
If he was lucky, his uncle would confine him to his room for the next month, and restrict his meals to bread and water. If he was lucky. If he was unlucky... well, he wasn’t sure, but he suspected that the punishment would be dire. A thrashing, perhaps? A beating with a cane or a leather belt? His uncle would probably do it in sorrow rather than in anger, but wasn’t there some Biblical quotation about “spare the rod and spoil the child”?
This wasn’t going to be good.
Sherlock reached up to touch his head. His fingers encountered swelling, and when he pressed against it a spike of pain shot through him.
He sat up cautiously. Neither his head nor his stomach were happy at the movement, but they didn’t complain too much.
The room he was in was lined with wood panelling, and the bed was a four-poster with an embroidered canopy overhead. It wasn’t one he was familiar with, and the decoration looked out of step with what he remembered from Holmes Manor. He looked down at himself. He was still dressed, although his jacket had been removed. He glanced around, and found it hanging from a clothes hanger on the back of the door.
Throwing back the sheet that covered him, he pushed himself gradually upright. The world seemed to slosh back and forth for a few moments like water in a bucket before stabilizing. His shoes had been removed, but he saw that they were sitting together at the bottom of the bed. He lurched across to them and did his best to slip his feet into them without bending over. Bending over would be a bad idea, he thought.
He crossed to the window and drew back the curtain but the view that greeted his eyes was nothing at all like the landscape around Holmes Manor.
The ground outside was flat and barren, denuded of grass or plants. The earth was reddish brown and dry, and as far as the eye could see it was covered in wooden boxes on four sturdy legs. They were a bit like chicken coops but smaller, and each one had a small hole at the bottom, just before the point where a wooden base separated the box from its supports. The boxes were spaced apart in a regular grid. A quick multiplication in Sherlock’s mind told him that he was staring at something like five hundred boxes.
Smoke seemed to be curling above some of the boxes, but the wind must have been eddying in strange ways because the smoke from different boxes was moving in different directions. Some of the plumes were trailing upward, some to the left and some to the right, and some were just hanging around the entrance to the boxes as if trying to get in or out.
A figure moved from behind one of the boxes. It was clad in a loose one-piece overall that seemed to be made of canvas, and its head was covered in a mask made of muslin thin enough to see through, held away from its face by wooden hoops. The figure moved to another box and carefully lifted the lid. More smoke puffed outward and enveloped its head. It didn’t seem to mind. It bent closer, gazing into the box, then closed the lid again and pulled what looked like a wooden tray from underneath. The figure gazed at it for a few seconds, then walked a few steps and placed the tray on to a pile of similar ones.
His brain finally waking up properly, Sherlock realized what he was watching. The cloud he had seen leaving the body of the man in the woods around Holmes Manor, the smoke Matty had witnessed, the pollen he’d taken to Professor Winchcombe — it was finally making sense. This was not smoke but bees. Small black bees. And that meant the boxes were beehives and the man in the mask was a beekeeper.
But what kind of bees were they, and what were they for? Making honey? Defence? Or something else?
More importantly, where in heaven’s name was he?
Behind him, the door to the bedroom opened. He turned quickly. Two men were standing inside the doorway. They were dressed in immaculate black velvet clothes of an old-fashioned cut — breeches, stockings, waistcoats and short jackets — and their faces were covered with black velvet masks with slits cut in at eye-level for them to see through.
One of them gestured over his shoulder. His meaning was clear — Sherlock was to go with them. For a moment he rebelled — he’d never been good at following orders given with no explanation — but a moment’s thought suggested that if he didn’t do what they said then they would just pick him up and carry him. And they probably wouldn’t be careful either.
It also occurred to him that going with them was probably the only way to find out what was going on.
Heart pounding, but keeping a calm, even bored expression on his face, Sherlock walked over to the door. The two footmen backed away to let him through.
The hall outside the bedroom door was opulently decorated in rich reds and purples, with a distinctive coat of arms woven into the wallpaper and embroidered on the velvet curtains. One footman led Sherlock down a wide flight of white marble stairs, while the other one followed behind. Sherlock’s footsteps were the only noise: the footmen’s shoes were muffled, and barely produced a whisper on the treads.
At the bottom of the stairs the first footman led Sherlock towards a closed door beside a heavy teak cabinet. He pulled it towards him, and gestured Sherlock through. With only a moment’s hesitation, the boy complied.
The door shut behind him with a muffled but definitive thud.
The room inside the doorway was large, shadowy and cool. All the windows were covered with thick curtains. Only a few diagonal shafts of light penetrated the gloom, and in their meagre light Sherlock could just make out one end of a massive wooden table with a heavy chair set in front of it. All else was darkness apart from the glint of what might have been objects made of metal hanging on the stone walls.
It seemed obvious what was expected of him. Feeling nervous beads of sweat trickling down his back, he walked forward and sat in the chair.
For a long while there was silence, apart from the rapid beating of his heart. He strained his eyes against the darkness, but he couldn’t make out anything apart from the surface of the table immediately in front of him. And then, gradually, he began to distinguish a faint noise: a rhythmic creaking, like the rigging of a ship as it pitched and tossed on the waves of some phantom ocean. It seemed to come and go, almost as if a faint breeze was pushing intermittently against canvas, and pulling the wet ropes tight and then letting them hang loose again. He couldn’t work out what it was. Surely he couldn’t be on a ship? He’d seen ground outside the bedroom window, and the floor wasn’t rising and falling. So what was that noise?
“You were at the warehouse.” A man’s voice, barely more than a whisper, spoke from the darkness at the other end of the table. There seemed to be a trace of an accent there — the word “the’ came out more like “zee’ — but Sherlock couldn’t work out which country the speaker hailed from. “Why were you at the warehouse?”
“Who are you?” Sherlock said firmly, his voice underpinned by a bravado that he didn’t feel.
“Why were you at the warehouse?” the voice persisted. Sherlock had to strain to make out the words above the creaking.
“My uncle will be worried about me,” Sherlock blustered. “There will be search parties out, looking.” He didn’t know if that was true or not, but it seemed like a good thing to say. It might throw his mysterious interrogator off his stride.
“I will only ask you once more, and then there will be consequences. Why were you at the warehouse?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Something came flashing out of the darkness, thin and black and uncurling like a striking snake. It caught his right cheek before withdrawing into the dark. He flinched, feeling blood trickling down his skin a moment before the pain blossomed through his flesh.
“Why were you at the warehouse?” the voice insisted.
Sherlock touched his hand to his burning cheek, then took it away and looked at it. Blood stained the lines on his palm. “You hurt me,” he said, not quite believing it.
The whip flicked out of the darkness again. This time he caught sight of the tip just as it whistled past his face. There was a knot in the thin leather lace. The crack of the knot hitting its full extent and pulling back coincided with the agony of it slicing through the top of his right ear. He cried out, clapping a hand to the side of his head. This time he could feel blood pooling in his palm and trickling down his wrist.
“Why—"
“I followed a man from a house in Farnham!" Sherlock yelled. “He went to the warehouse!"
The voice was silent for a moment, thinking. Then:
“Why were you following the man from the house?”
Blood from Sherlock’s ear was wet and warm against his neck now. The whole right side of his face throbbed sickeningly. “Someone died in that house. I wanted to find out how.”
“They died from the plague, surely?” the voice whispered. “That’s what people are saying,”
Sherlock bit his tongue before he could say anything about the bee stings, but the whip lashed out of the darkness again and bit into his forehead above his left eye. His head jerked back against the chair, sending waves of agony crashing through his skull. When he tried to open his eye he found it was glued shut by blood dripping down from the cut that had been laid open.
If he kept on like this his head would be slashed to ribbons.
“He died of bee stings,” he shouted. “Hundreds of bee stings.”
Silence. The pain from the three slashes in Sherlock’s skin flowed together into one red-hot centre of agony that throbbed with the rapid beating of his heart.
“Who else knows about the bees?”
“Just me!" he lied.
Again the whip cracked out of the shadows like a striking serpent, hitting just to the side of his left eye, a hair’s breadth from cutting into the soft jelly of the eyeball itself. Blood flecked his eyelashes: black globules hanging in his field of vision.
“The next time my whip-master strikes, he will blind you in your left eye,” the voice said. “The time after that he will remove your right ear. Answer my questions fully, and do not lie to me.”
My whip-master? Sherlock thought. That meant whoever was asking the questions and whoever was handling the whip were two different people. How many more were hidden there, in the darkness, watching and listening?
“I already know some of the answers to the questions that I ask you,” the whispering voice went on, “and if your answers are different then you will suffer, both now and for the rest of your life. Who else knows about the bees?”
“Professor Winchcombe in Guildford and Amyus Crowe in Farnham.” Sherlock’s voice was trembling with the effort of keeping the pain under control. “My uncle Sherrinford. Amyus Crowe told the local doctor. I don’t know who else.” Deliberately, Sherlock left Matthew Ar-natt’s name off the list, hoping that the man in the shadows didn’t know about him, or was discounting him as anyone important.
“Too many,” the voice said. Sherlock got the impression that it was talking to itself rather than him. Or perhaps to someone else, someone who was remaining silent. “We must accelerate the operation.” A pause, as if the man behind the voice was thinking, and then: “Take the boy away and kill him. Make it look like an accident. Run him over with a horse and cart. Make sure the wheels crush his neck.”
Sherlock had a sudden horrific vision of the dead badger he had seen outside the warehouse — the one whose midriff had been flattened by a passing cart. And now the same thing was going to happen to him.
Hands grabbed his shoulders and hauled him out of the chair. He stumbled across to the door, pushed by the two footmen who had been standing silently behind him all this time. His mind flashed through a kaleidoscope of ideas for how to escape, but all of them depended on the first step of getting away from those clutching, pushing hands. Light suddenly spilt across the three of them as the door opened outward, pushed by one of the footmen who had momentarily released Sherlock’s shoulder. Sherlock turned, lashing out with a foot, hoping to hurt the other one enough that he would let him go, but his shoe just connected with the side of a leather boot and bounced off. A fist lashed out and cuffed the side of his head. Galaxies of light pinwheeled across his vision.
The door to the darkened room closed behind them, revealing Matty Arnatt standing there, holding a studded metal club. It looked like something an old-fashioned knight would have used on the field of battle.
He whacked it down on the head of the nearest footman. The man fell with all the grace of a sack of coal flung into a cellar. The other footman let go of Sherlock and took a step towards Matty, scowling, his burly hand reaching for Matty’s head. Sherlock stepped around him and punched him hard in the groin. The man folded, gasping for breath.
“This way,” Matty hissed, gesturing to Sherlock to follow him.
The two of them raced through the corridors of an unfamiliar house, all dark oak panels and black velvet curtains and startlingly white alabaster statues of naked Greek nymphs.
“Where did you get that mace?” Sherlock yelled as they ran. He could hear sounds of pursuit behind them.
“There’s suits of armour and stuff all over the house,” Matty called back over his shoulder. “I just took it.”
“And what are you doing here?”
“I was at the fair. I saw how you got suckered into that fight. I went to help, but you were being dragged off by two big coves. They threw you into the back of a cart and drove you here. I hung on to the back of the cart where they couldn’t see me, and then hopped off when it turned into this place. I’ve been looking for you ever since.”
“Right,” Sherlock gasped. “Where are we?”
“’Bout three miles from Farnham. Other side from Holmes Manor.” Matty led the way through an unremarkable door into what was probably the servants’ area, and from there to a bare brick corridor that led to a door into the garden. They emerged into blessedly fresh air and bright sunlight.
“And you didn’t bring the bicycles?”
“How could I?” Matty shouted, affronted. “I was hanging off the back of a cart! I could hardly carry them, could I?”
“Good point!" Sherlock glanced around as they ran. They were at the back of the house. Instead of a garden, past a wide paved veranda and a short wall was the field full of beehives that he had seen earlier. “So how are we going to get out?”
“I found a stable, didn’t I,” Matty said, still aggrieved. “There’s ’orses!"
“I can’t ride!"
Behind them, three men wearing black masks and black clothes erupted from an open set of glazed doors that probably led into a drawing room. They scattered in different directions. One of them saw Sherlock and Matty, and let out a yell.
Matty scowled at Sherlock. “Well, you ain’t got much time to learn, mate!" he said.
Matty led the way round the corner of the house. A large barn lay ahead of them. The two boys raced across the open ground, hearing the rapid thump thump thump of running footsteps from behind them. They got to the barn and sprinted in through the open doors.
Inside, the barn was in shadow, and Sherlock’s eyes took a moment to adjust. Matty, who had been there before, immediately moved across to where two horses had been tied to wooden pillars outside their stalls. Both were already saddled.
“Get on,” Matty said. “Use the side of the stalls as a step.”
The pounding footsteps outside were getting closer. As Matty grabbed the saddle of the smaller horse, placed his foot in a stirrup and hoisted himself up, Sherlock half-climbed up the wooden side of the stalls with his right foot, slipped his left foot into the stirrup and tried to copy Matty’s smooth action on the other horse, a large chestnut mare. He ended up sitting in the saddle more through luck than judgement. The horse looked back at him calmly. It seemed unfazed by having a stranger suddenly jumping on its back.
“Let’s go!" Matty called. He’d taken the reins in one hand and was untying his horse with the other. Sherlock grabbed at his own reins and tried to remember what Virginia had told him about riding horses. Guide with your knees, not the reins. Use the reins for slowing the horse down.
Without glancing backwards, Matty urged his horse out of the barn doors. He seemed to assume that Sherlock would just follow. Sherlock shook loose the rope that kept his own horse from wandering off. A sudden wave of panic swept over him as he realized that Virginia had told him how to steer and how to stop, but not how to start. Tentatively, he pressed both knees into the horse’s sides. Obediently, the horse began to walk. Sherlock leaned forward in the saddle to compensate for the swaying movement. He pressed harder with his knees and gave the reins an experimental shake. The horse broke into a trot, then a canter. Why did people make out that riding was so hard? It was just a series of signals and actions!
The scene outside burst upon Sherlock in a blaze of colour and action as they left the barn. Matty was racing off, with a group of masked servants chasing him on foot and falling behind. Two masked men were standing in front of Sherlock, trying to block his path. One of them was waving a revolver. He fired in Sherlock’s direction, and Sherlock felt something hot brush past his hair. He urged his horse into a gallop. The horse ploughed straight through the middle of the two men, knocking them to the ground. Using his knees, he pushed his horse into speeding up. It seemed as if they were flying across the ground, catching up with Matty.
Within moments they were approaching the boundary wall of the estate. It must have been ten feet high. The two boys guided their horses into a curve, towards the main gates. The two horses pounded across the ground, the sound of their hoofs changing as they went from soft earth to the stones of the drive. Sherlock’s heart sank as he saw that the main gates of the estate were being pushed closed. Two masked servants with shotguns were standing in front of them, aiming at the horses. At the same moment, Sherlock and Matty hauled back on their reins. With a spray of stones, the horses skidded to a halt.
One of the men fired his shotgun. The blast echoed across the grounds. Sherlock glimpsed the buckshot flying past them in an expanding cloud, like an explosion of midges.
Using his knees to guide the horse, and instinctively tugging on the left side of the reins for emphasis, Sherlock pulled the animal around. Matty did likewise. The boys urged their horses forward into a gallop again. The house loomed before them, dark and forbidding.
Glancing to left and right, Sherlock saw masked men coming round both sides of the house, armed with a collection of revolvers, shotguns, fowling pieces and pitchforks. The only direction was straight on, towards the main doors of the house.
Matty began to slow. He glanced round uncertainly.
Sherlock galloped past his friend, yelling: “Follow me!" Left and right were blocked, as was behind. He could almost hear his brother Mycroft’s voice saying: “When all other options are impossible, Sherlock, embrace the one that’s left, however improbable it might be.”
His horse, sensing his intentions, jumped the few steps up to the portico in front of the house and headed unerringly for the wide front doors.
Sherlock ducked as his horse galloped through the open doors and into the entrance hall, feeling the lintel of the doorway brush his hair. The horse’s hoofs skidded and clattered on the tiled flooring, nearly unseating Sherlock before the animal could get its footing again. The darkness of the hall confused him for a moment, but his eyes adjusted within seconds and he urged the horse forward, past the marble stairs and towards the back of the house. Masked servants ran out of doorways and then fell back, terrified by the two horses that almost filled the space. Rather than head for the servants’ areas, Sherlock guided the horse sharply right, pushing open a door into what he suspected — based on its placement and comparing it with Holmes Manor — was a drawing room. He was right.
The room was spacious and bright, with large glazed double doors leading out on to a veranda. And, as Sherlock remembered from the escape earlier, the doors were open!
Within seconds, he and the horse were galloping through the drawing room and out on to the veranda. He heard a commotion as Matty’s horse knocked aside furniture in the room behind him, and then the clatter of hoofs on the flagstones of the veranda.
Ahead, across the field of beehives, he caught sight of a smaller back gate, through which provisions and supplies were probably delivered. It looked unguarded. He raced for it, the horse’s mane whipping against his face and the breeze rushing past his ears. The boxy shapes of the beehives formed a geometrical grid through which the horse galloped in a straight line. Clouds of bees took flight behind them, but the horse was too fast for them and they just milled and roiled in confusion.
The back gate was locked, but it only took a moment for Sherlock to dismount and throw the bolt back. He turned and looked across the grounds of the house as Matty cantered up beside him. Masked men, armed, were massing on the other side of the field of beehives. They obviously didn’t want to risk entering the area. One or two of them were already batting at the air as the angry bees attacked the first thing that came to hand.
“I thought that went well,” said Matty. “Shall we stay and watch?”
“Let’s not,” said Sherlock.