A child is a burden, after a mile.
After two miles in the cold sea air, stumbling through the night up the side of a hill and down again, becoming all too aware of previously unnoticed burns and bruises, and having already put on eight miles that night-half of it carrying a man on a stretcher-even a small, drowsy three-and-a-half-year-old becomes a strain.
At three miles, aching all over, wincing at the crunch of gravel underfoot, spine tingling with the certain knowledge of a madman’s stealthy pursuit, a loud snort broke the silence, so close I could feel it. My nerves screamed as I struggled to draw the revolver without dropping the child.
Then the meaning of the snort penetrated the adrenaline blasting my nerves: A mad killer was not about to make that wet noise before attacking.
I went still. Over my pounding heart came a lesser version of the sound; the rush of relief made me stumble forward to drop my armful atop the low stone wall, just visible in the creeping dawn. The cow jerked back, then ambled towards us in curiosity until the child was patting its sloppy nose. I bent my head over her, letting reaction ebb.
Estelle Adler was the lovely, bright, half-Chinese child of my husband’s long-lost son: Sherlock Holmes’ granddaughter. I had made her acquaintance little more than two hours before, and known of her existence for less than three weeks, but if the maniac who had tried to sacrifice her father-and who had apparently intended to take the child for his own-had appeared from the night, I would not hesitate to give my life for hers.
She had been drugged by said maniac the night before, which no doubt contributed to her drowsiness, but now she studied the cow with an almost academic curiosity, leaning against my arms to examine its white-splashed nose. Which meant that the light was growing too strong to linger. I settled the straps of my rucksack, lumpy with her possessions, and reached to collect this precious and troublesome burden.
“Are you-” she began, in full voice.
“Shh!” I interrupted. “We need to whisper, Estelle.”
“Are you tired?” she tried again, in a voice that, although far from a whisper, at least was not as carrying.
“My arms are,” I breathed in her ear, “but I’m fine.”
“I could ride pickaback,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“I do with Papa.”
Well, if she could cling to the back of that tall young man, she could probably hang on to me. I shifted the rucksack around and let her climb onto my back, her little hands gripping my collar. I bent, tucking my arms under her legs, and set off again.
Much better.
It was a good thing Estelle knew what to do, because I was probably the most incompetent nurse-maid ever to be put in charge of a child. I knew precisely nothing about children; the only one I had been around for any length of time was an Indian street urchin three times this one’s age and with more maturity than many English adults. I had much to learn about small children. Such as the ability to ride pickaback, and the inability to whisper.
The child’s suggestion allowed me to move faster down the rutted track. We were in the Orkneys, a scatter of islands past the north of Scotland, coming down from the hill that divided the main island’s two parts. Every step took us farther away from my husband; from Estelle’s father, Damian; and from the bloody, fire-stained prehistoric altar-stone where Thomas Brothers had nearly killed both of them.
Why not bring in the police, one might ask. They can be useful, and after all, Brothers had killed at least three others. However, things were complicated-not that complicated wasn’t a frequent state of affairs in the vicinity of Sherlock Holmes, but in this case the complication took the form of warrants posted for my husband, his son, and me. Estelle was the only family member not being actively hunted by Scotland Yard.
Including, apparently and incredibly, Holmes’ brother. For forty-odd years, Mycroft Holmes had strolled each morning to a grey office in Whitehall and settled in to a grey job of accounting-even his longtime personal secretary was a grey man, an ageless, sexless individual with the leaking-balloon name of Sosa. Prime Ministers came and went, Victoria gave way to Edward and Edward to George, budgets were slashed and expanded, wars were fought, decades of bureaucrats flourished and died, while Mycroft walked each morning to his office and settled to his account books.
Except that Mycroft’s grey job was that of éminence grise of the British Empire. He inhabited the shadowy world of Intelligence, but he belonged neither to the domestic Secret Service nor to the international Secret Intelligence Service. Instead, he had shaped his own department within the walls of Treasury, one that ran parallel to both the domestic branch and the SIS. After forty years, his power was formidable.
If I stopped to think about it, such unchecked authority in one individual’s hands would scare me witless, even though I had made use of it more than once. But if Mycroft Holmes was occasionally cold and always enigmatic, he was also sea-green incorruptible, the fixed point in my universe, the ultimate source of assistance, shelter, information, and knowledge.
He was also untouchable, or so I had thought.
The day before, a telegram had managed to find me, with a report of Mycroft being questioned by Scotland Yard, and his home raided. It was hard to credit-picturing Mycroft’s wrath raining down on Chief Inspector Lestrade came near to making me smile-but until I could disprove it, I could not call on Mycroft’s assistance. I was on my own.
Were it not for the child on my back, I might have simply presented myself to the police station in Kirkwall and used the time behind bars to catch up on sleep. I was certain that the warrants had only been issued because of Chief Inspector John Lestrade’s pique-even at the best of times, Lestrade disapproved of civilians like us interfering in an official investigation. Once his point was made and his temper faded, we would be freed.
Then again, were it not for the child, I would not be on this side of the island at all. I would have stayed at the Stones, where even now my training and instincts were shouting that I belonged, hunting down Brothers before he could sail off and start his dangerous religion anew in some other place.
This concept of women and children fleeing danger was a thing I did not at all care for.
But as I said, children are a burden, whether three years old or thirty. My only hope of sorting this out peacefully, without inflicting further trauma on the child or locking her disastrously claustrophobic and seriously wounded father behind bars, was to avoid the police, both here and in the British mainland. And my only hope of avoiding the Orcadian police was a flimsy, sputtering, freezing cold aeroplane. The same machine in which I had arrived on Orkney the previous afternoon, and sworn never to enter again.
The aeroplane’s pilot was an American ex-RAF flyer named Javitz, who had brought me on a literally whirlwind trip from London and left me in a field south of Orkney’s main town. Or rather, I had left him. I thought he would stay there until I reappeared.
I hoped he would.
The wind was not as powerful as it had been the day before, crossing from Thurso, but it rose with the sun, and the seas rose with it. By full light, all the fittings in the Fifie’s cabin were rattling wildly, and although Damian’s arm was bound to his side, half an hour out of Orkney the toss and fret of the fifty-foot-long boat was making him hiss with pain. When the heap of blankets and spare clothing keeping him warm was pulled away, the dressings showed scarlet.
Sherlock Holmes rearranged the insulation around his son and tossed another scoop of coal onto the stove before climbing the open companionway to the deck. The young captain looked as if he was clinging to the wheel as much as he was controlling it. Holmes raised his voice against the wind.
“Mr Gordon, is there nothing we can do to calm the boat?”
The young man took his eyes from the sails long enough to confirm the unexpected note of concern in the older man’s voice, then studied the waves and the rigging overhead. “Only thing we could do is change course. To sail with the wind, y’see?”
Holmes saw. Coming out of Scapa Flow, they had aimed for Strathy, farther west along the coast of northern Scotland -in truth, any village but Thurso would do, so long as it had some kind of medical facility.
But going west meant battling wind and sea: Even unladen, the boat had waves breaking across her bow, and the dip and rise of her fifty-foot length was troubling even to the unwounded on board.
Thurso was close and it would have a doctor; however, he and Russell had both passed through that town the day before, and although the unkempt Englishman who hired a fishing boat to sail into a storm might have escaped official notice, rumour of a young woman in an aeroplane would have spread. He hoped Russell would instruct her American pilot to avoid Thurso, but if not-well, the worst she could expect was an inconvenient arrest. He, on the other hand, dared not risk sailing into constabulary arms.
“Very well,” he said. “Change course.”
“Thurso, good.” Gordon sounded relieved.
“No. Wick.” A fishing town, big enough to have a doctor-perhaps even a rudimentary hospital. Police, too, of course, but warrants or not, what village constable would take note of one fishing boat in a harbour full of them?
“Wick? Oh, but I don’t know anyone there. My cousin in Strathy-”
“The lad will be dead by Strathy.”
“Wick’s farther.”
“But calmer.”
Gordon thought for a moment, then nodded. “Take that line. Be ready when I say.”
The change of tack quieted the boat’s wallow considerably. When Holmes descended again to the cabin, the stillness made him take two quick steps to the bunk-but it was merely sleep.
The madman’s bullet had circled along Damian’s ribs, cracking at least one, before burying itself in the musculature around the shoulder blade-too deep for amateur excavation. Had it been the left arm, Holmes might have risked it, but Damian was an artist, a right-handed artist, an artist whose technique required precise motions with the most delicate control. Digging through muscle and nerve for a piece of lead could turn the lad into a former artist.
Were Watson here, Holmes would permit his old friend to take out his scalpel, even considering the faint hand tremor he’d seen the last time they had met. But Watson was on his way home from Australia -Holmes suspected a new lady friend-and was at the moment somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
He could only hope that Wick’s medical man had steady hands and didn’t drink. If they were not so fortunate, he should have to face the distressing option of coming to the surface to summon a real surgeon.
Which would Damian hate more: the loss of his skill, or the loss of his freedom?
It was not really a question. Even now, Holmes knew that if he were to remove the wedge holding the cabin’s hatch open, in minutes Damian would be sweating with horror and struggling to rise, to breathe, to flee.
No: A painter robbed of his technique could form another life for himself; a man driven insane by confinement could not. If they found no help in Wick, he might have to turn surgeon.
The thought made his gut run cold. Not the surgery itself-he’d done worse-but the idea of Damian’s expression when he tried to control a brush, and could not.
Imagine: Sherlock Holmes dodging responsibility.
Standing over his son’s form, he became aware of the most peculiar sensation, disturbingly primitive and almost entirely foreign.
Reverend Thomas Brothers (or James Harmony Hayden or Henry Smythe or whatever names he had claimed) lay dead among the standing stone circle. But had the corpse been to hand, Sherlock Holmes would have ripped out the mad bastard’s heart and savagely kicked his remains across the deck and into the sea.
The man with several names edged into awareness. It was dark. The air smelt of sea and smoke. Fresh smoke. Memory was… elusive. Transformation? Yes, that was it-long plotted, sacrifices made, years of effort, but…
He’d expected physical reaction, but not this pain, not that smoke-filled darkness. Could what he felt be the birth pangs of the Transformed? Blood and pain are companions of birth; he himself had written it. If the right blood had been loosed-but no. The wrong blood had been spilt on the altar stone.
His own.
Certainly the pain was his. He groaned, and became aware of a woman’s hands, then a man speaking, and the sudden bright of an opening door followed by more voices. After a time came the suffocation of a rag soaked in ether, and with a sharp vision of the sun black as sackcloth and the moon stained with blood, everything went away.
It was broad daylight outside the hovel when he woke. The woman lifted his head to trickle in a jolt of some powerful drink. The nausea of the ether receded. His chest was aflame, and his head was flooded with the memory of fire and gunshot, but the whisky helped settle his thoughts as well as his stomach.
“What time is it?” he croaked.
“What’s that?” the woman said.
“Time. What time is it?”
“Oh, dearie, let me see. It’s near noon. Saturday, that is.”
Mid-day Saturday. To the north, over the pure, cold sea, the sun would be edging back from its darkness, the eclipse fading-and with it, opportunity. All his work, long months of meditation and planning, gathering the reins of Authority, feeling the power rise up within him (oh, exquisite power, exquisite sensations-peeling away a goose quill with the Tool, the sweet dip of nib into spilt crimson, concentrating to get the words on the page before the ink clotted: perfection), power that welled up like a giant wave from that vast sea, carrying him across the world to this exact place at this exact time, to midnight at an altar surrounded by standing stones with the perfect sacrifice, the one who mattered, lying helpless and expectant with his throat bared…
Snatched from him, at the very peak of the Preparation. The sacrifice had turned and summoned fire-the lamp, that was it. Damian had managed to fling out his arm and smashed the lamp. But what followed was unclear: noise and confusion and hot billows of flame, and… others? The impression of others-two of them?-and then a boom and a giant’s fist smashing his chest, and nothing until he had wakened to the smell of sea and smoke.
Who could they have been? Enemies? Demons? Figments of his imagination? Not that it mattered: They had robbed him of Transformation. The Great Work lay shattered. A waste of years. His hand twitched with the urge to strangle someone.
And the child? She who was to have been his acolyte, his student, the daughter of his soul? Had the two demons stolen her? Or was she still in that burnt-out place where he had taken refuge?
Mid-day: She would be awake. Sooner or later, she would find her way out, and be seen. He had to get away before they came looking for him.
“Gunderson?” he whispered.
“He’ll be here tomorrow morning.” This was a man’s gravelly voice.
“MacAuliffe.”
“That’s right, Reverend Brothers. You know what happened to you?”
With an effort, Brothers got his eyes open, squinting into the smokey light. “Shot?”
“Aye.” The man grinned and reached down to whittle a slice from the sausage on the table, popping it between his yellow teeth and chewing, open-mouthed. “Only thing that kept you from the pearly gates was that book in your chest pocket. Weren’t for that, the lead would’ve gone straight into your heart. As it is, we dug the thing out of your shoulder. Can you move your fingers?”
The wounded man looked down and saw a hand arranged atop a thick gauze pad covering his chest. The fingers slowly closed, then opened.
“There you go,” MacAuliffe said, whittling off another slab of meat. “You’ll be right as rain in no time.”
“Is that my knife?”
The hired man held up the curved blade. “This yours? Wicked thing, nearly cut my thumb off with it.”
“Give it!” The command came out weak, but MacAuliffe obeyed, wiping the grease on his trousers, then turning it so his sometime employer could take the ivory haft.
“I found it on the ground next to that altar thing, nearly stepped on it before I saw the handle. Didn’t know for sure it was yours, but I didn’t want to leave it behind.”
Brothers’ good hand slipped around the familiar object, his thumb smoothing its blade, the cool metal that had been given him on the very hour of his birth. He felt a pulse of temptation, to plunge the Tool into MacAuliffe’s hateful belly, but he was not strong enough to do without assistance. Not yet. Not until he could summon The Friend.
Instead, he tucked the knife under his weak hand, as if the Tool’s strength might transfer to flesh. “I need you to send a telegram to London.”
When we reached the coastal track and turned towards Kirkwall, the light strengthened with every step. Earlier, I had been forced to choose between the dangers of blind speed and the threat of being seen. Now I hitched the child up on my hips and leant forward into a near-jog. Her light body rocked against mine, and her own arms had to be getting tired, but she did not complain.
Half a mile down the road, I spotted a farmer coming out of a shed, to climb onto a high-sided cart. A tangle of shrubs marked where the farmyard lane entered the road; I let Estelle slip to the ground behind them, stifling a groan as my shoulders returned to their proper angle. I hunkered beside her (my knees, too, having aged a couple of decades in the past hours) and said in a low voice, “We have to wait until this man has gone by, and I don’t want him to notice us. We need to be very quiet, all right?”
“Can we ask him for a ride?” she said in her loud, hoarse, child’s whisper.
“No, we can’t,” I said. “Now, not a word, all right?”
I felt her nod, and put my arm around her tiny body.
The metallic sounds from the cart indicated milk canisters, and as I’d feared, it was headed towards town: We should have to wait until he was some distance down the road before we followed. This was clearly a daily ritual, since the reins were nearly slack and the cart was controlled less by the farmer than by his nag. Who was in no hurry-its pace was no faster than our own, and the high sides… I stared, then pushed aside the branches to see.
The cart was a purpose-built creation with a flat-bedded base on which had been fastened a large crate, some five feet on a side, tipped with the open top facing backwards. The dairyman sat in front, feet dangling, back leaning against what would originally have been the crate’s bottom.
The only way he could see inside the cart would be if he were to walk around and look inside. Better yet, he had no dog.
I snatched up the child, warning her again to silence, and trotted forward, grateful now for the blustering gusts that concealed my footsteps. Aiming at the rattling cans and hoping for the best, I tossed the child into the shadows and hopped in beside her. As the noise had suggested, the cans came nowhere near to filling the space, and there was room for us to creep around behind them. The road was rough enough that the driver took no note of the shift our boarding caused, and if the horse noticed our weight, he did not complain.
Estelle snuggled against me. The milk cans rattled; the waking island scrolled past the rear of our transport. We dozed.
The cart slowed, and stopped. I wrapped my arms more securely around the child, placing my finger across her lips. The farmer’s boots crunched to the road, the cart jerking as his weight left it. I followed the sound of his footsteps, braced for sudden flight, but the steps continued away from us a few feet, paused, then returned, moving more slowly and with a hitch in their gait. A figure suddenly loomed at the back of the cart, and another canister of milk swung inside. He added a second, then climbed back onto his seat and chirruped the horse into motion.
He repeated the milk pickup half a mile down the road. Once we were moving, I worked my way towards the back, to ease the heavy canisters to one side. The road was smoother here, which meant that our sudden exit would be difficult to conceal. I waited for a rough patch, but before one came, I caught a faint odour of distillery, and knew we had run out of time.
I gathered the child in my arms and more or less rolled off the back to the road. The horse reacted, but by the time the startled driver had controlled the animal and reined it to a halt, Estelle and I were squatting behind a wall.
The man would have seen us, had he got down and walked back, but to him the jerk of the cart must have felt like a result of the horse’s shy, not the cause of it. After a moment, I heard him repeat the noise between his teeth, and the music of milk cans retreated down the road.
I rose to get my bearings, and found that we were a scarce half-mile from where Captain Javitz had set us down.
“Can you walk for a bit, Estelle? We’re nearly there.”
In answer, she slipped her hand into mine and we set off up the road. It took two tries to find the correct lane, but to my relief, the ’plane was there, in a long field surrounded by walls and a hedgerow. Lights shone from the adjoining house, and I led my charge in that direction.
I stopped outside the gate to tell the child, “My friend Captain Javitz, who drives the aeroplane, may be here. There’s also a nice lady and her son. But, we don’t want to talk to them too much. We’ll only be here for a few minutes.”
“And then we’ll go in the aeroplane? Into the air?”
“That’s right,” I said, adding under my breath, “God help us.”
I knocked on the door.
It opened, to a man pointing a gun at my heart.
At noon, the air began to stink of herring. Soon they came to Wick, dropping anchor inside the crowded harbour. Damian was pale, but the dressings remained brown.
Holmes picked a woollen Guernsey, much-mended and reeking of fish, from the pile atop Damian, pulling it on in place of his overcoat. He added a cap in similar condition, then took the glass from the oil lamp and ran a finger over the inside, washing his hands and face with a thin layer of lamp-black.
When he glanced down at Damian, the lad’s eyes were watching him, and the bearded face twitched in a weak smile. “You look the part.”
“Aye,” Holmes said. “I’m rowing into the town to find a medical person who can pull that bullet out of you. Best if we do it here, rather than toss you in and out of a dinghy.” His voice had taken on the flavour of the north, not a full Scots but on the edge.
“Still think you should’ve done it yourself.”
“I might yet have to. Gordon will stay here with you.”
“I’d kill for a swallow of tea.”
“I’ll let him know. Lie still, now.” He turned to go.
“Er, Father?”
“Yes, son?” They had known each other less than three weeks: Both men still tasted the unfamiliar words on their tongues.
“Do you think-”
“Your daughter is safe. Without question. Russell will guard the child like a mother wildcat.”
“And my…” He was unable to say the word.
“Your wife? Yolanda died, yes. I saw her body. No question.”
“You are certain it was Hayden? Back at the Stones?”
“Yes.” This was not the first time he’d answered the question.
Damian swallowed, as if to force down the information. “If I’m here, then… Her funeral?”
“Mycroft will take care of it.” Which Holmes hoped was true-surely his brother’s inexplicable tangle with Scotland Yard would be a temporary state of affairs?
“Would you,” Damian said, his left arm working under the cloth mound. “-my pocket?”
Holmes pulled away the covers and felt Damian’s pockets, coming out with a leather note-case.
“There’s a picture,” Damian explained.
Not a photograph, but an ink drawing he had done of his wife and small daughter, intricate as the shadings of a lithograph. There were headless nails in the rough wall near Damian’s head; Holmes impaled the small page on one that lay in Damian’s line of sight. A woman with Oriental features and a cap of black hair sat with a not-so-Oriental child with equally black hair: Damian had captured a look of wicked mischief on both faces.
Holmes stood.
“I’m sorry,” Damian said. “About… everything.”
The apology covered a far wider span than the preceeding three weeks, but Holmes kept his response light. “Hardly your doing. It’s a nuisance, having the police after us, but it’s not the first time. Once we patch you up, I’ll deal with it.”
“Hope so.”
“Rest easy,” Holmes said, and went up the ladder.
Twelve minutes later, a final hard pull on the oars ran the dinghy up on a sandy patch at the edge of the harbour. Holmes tied the painter to a time-softened tree trunk above the reach of the tide, then tugged at his cap and set off for the town, walking with the gait of the sailors around him. When he saw a police constable strolling in his direction, he raised his pipe and a cloud of concealing smoke, giving the PC a brief nod as he passed.
At the first chemist’s shop, a bell tinkled when Holmes stepped inside, but the customers took little notice: Stray fishermen were a commonplace. On reaching the counter, Holmes asked for sticking plasters, a box of throat lozenges, and a tube of ointment for Persistent Rashes and Skin Conditions. Picking the coins from his palm, he then said, “M’lad on the boat picked up a baddish slice, mebbe should have a coupla’ stitches. There a doctor in the town?”
“There was, he took ill. Got a locum, though. His cousin.”
“He’ll do,” Holmes grunted, and asked for directions. The chemist grinned as he gave them, but it wasn’t until the door to the surgery opened that Holmes realised why. The doctor’s locum tenans was a she: a short woman in her late twenties with hair the red of new copper and the colouration that went with it: pale and freckled, with eyes halfway between green and blue set into features that might have been pretty had they not been pinched with the anticipation of his response.
“Yes,” she said tiredly, “I’m a girl, but yes, I’m a qualified doctor, and no, my cousin won’t return for two weeks or more, so unless you want to take your problem to Golspie or Inverness, I’m your man.” Her accent was Scots, but not local. St Andrews, he decided, or Kirkcaldy-although she’d spent time in London and much of her youth in… Nottingham?
The analysis ran through his mind in the time it took him to draw breath. “Can you stitch a cut?”
She cocked her head at him, considering his matter-of-fact tone. “I said I was a doctor, didn’t I? Of course I can stitch a cut. And deliver a bairn or set a leg or remove an appendix, for that matter.”
“Well, I dinna require obstetrical care or major surgery, but I’ve a lad needing attention, if you’d like to bring your bag.”
Her surprise made him wonder how many times she’d watched would-be patients turn away. “Amazing,” she said. “And he hasn’t been bleeding quietly for a week before you decided I’d have to do?”
“Just since midnight.”
She shook her head, donned her hat, picked up her bag, and followed him out onto the street.
“Where is the cut?” she asked, half-trotting to compensate for his longer stride.
“Over the ribs.”
“How did he come by it?”
“Oh, I think you’ll see when you get there.”
“And where is ‘there’?”
“Fishing boat. Moving him starts up the bleeding, I thought it best to have you look at it where he lies.”
“If there’s much motion, we’ll have to bring him to shore.”
“We’ll face that if we have to. Come, the dinghy’s along there.”
“Can’t you bring the boat up to the docks?”
“Not worth hauling anchor, it’s nobbut two minutes out.”
He led the doctor down an alleyway, around the back of a herring shed, and through mountains of precisely stacked whisky barrels, which was hardly a direct route but he’d spotted the PC down the lane, and didn’t want to risk a second encounter. By the time they hit the small beach, the doctor was scurrying to keep up, and Holmes had become aware of a helmeted presence behind them.
He strode ahead of the diminutive doctor and had the boat untied and floating free before she caught him up. “Are we-” she started to say, but he seized her shoulders to lift her bodily in over the last bit of mucky sand, letting go before she was fully balanced. She plopped onto the seat with a squeak of protest; he stepped one foot inside and shoved off with the other, nearly toppling her backwards as the small craft shot away from the land and rotated 160 degrees. Two quick pulls of the oars completed the turn-about, and they were soon beyond shouting distance, leaving a puzzled PC on the shore, scratching the head beneath his helmet.
The doctor, with her back to the town, noticed nothing apart from her escort’s haste. She straightened her hat, tucked her black bag underneath the seat, and scowled at the man working the oars. “As I was about to ask, are we in a hurry?”
“Tide’s about to turn. I didn’t want to risk losing the dinghy, but we’re all right now. I hope you’ll be having a scalpel in that bag of yours?”
“Of course. But why should I require a scalpel to stitch a cut?”
“Ah, about that. There is a hole in the lad’s epidermis, all right. Unfortunately, there’s a small lump of lead as well.”
“A lump of-do you mean a bullet?”
“That’s right.”
“What have you dragged me into?” At last, she sounded uneasy. High time, thought Holmes sourly, and allowed the Scots to leave his diction.
“In fact, you’re walking on the side of the angels, although I’d recommend in the future that a person who barely clears five feet might do well to ask a few more questions before she goes off with a strange man. Our situation here is… complicated, but all I need is for you to cut out the bullet and patch up the entrance hole, and we’ll set you back safe and sound on firm land.” Although I fear, he added to himself, some distance from where you began.
She gaped at him, then turned about as if to see how far she might have to swim to reach safety. The constable was still visible, but his back was turned, and she’d have needed a megaphone against the sharp breeze. When she faced Holmes again, she was angry beyond measure, and the flush in her fair skin made her eyes blaze blue.
“I don’t know what you’re about, but kidnapping is a felony.”
“You’re merely making a house call. Or, boat call,” he amended. “I intend to pay you, generously. I swear to you, neither I nor the wounded man have done anything remotely illegal.” Yet.
She studied his face, and the anger in her own subsided with her fear. “If you’ve done nothing illegal and yet he’s been shot, why not go to the police?”
“As I said, the situation is delicate at present. A misunderstanding. And being far from home, difficult to clear up.”
“Where is home?”
“ Manchester,” he said promptly, and then they were at the boat, and Gordon was reaching down to help the doctor aboard.
“Captain,” Holmes said before the fisherman could speak, “this is Doctor Henning. However, I think it may be best for everyone if we leave our names out of this. If she does not know our names, she need not worry about the consequences of speaking freely.”
Gordon stared at the petite figure at the other end of his arm. “This is a doctor?”
The Reverend Thomas Brothers, seated before the peat fire in the Orkney cottage, smiled freely at the wording of the telegram MacAuliffe had brought him:
IF HEALTH PERMITS MEET ME TUESDAY ST ALBANS GUNDERSON HAS DETAILS.
Health did not permit, not really. But with Gunderson at his side, he might be able to make it-and the chance to actually meet The Friend after all this time made it worth the effort. Besides which, as any leader knew, it was never a good idea to reveal weakness to one’s lessers, not if one might need them for whatever the future held.
Three days, to make his way down the length of the country; three days to reconsider what failure meant.
If failure it was. One thing Brothers knew was that the Fates took a mysterious hand in all human acts. If his long and laboriously constructed Great Work had fallen apart, if the blood on the Stenness altar stone had failed to unite with the timing of the solar eclipse, if an accumulation of blood and Energies had spilt out for naught, then either the Fates were cruel, or he had not understood the demands of the Work.
He wished he had someone to talk this over with. MacAuliffe had as much sense as one of the sheep bleating outside the door, and Gunderson was little more than a useful tool. Yolanda would be the ideal ear, willing, if uncomprehending, but his one-time wife was dead now, in what he had thought would be a key element of his Work.
Which brought him in a circle again: What had happened?
Brothers shifted in the chair in front of the smoke-blackened stones, wincing as the sharp pain grabbed at his breast. The powerful homebrew in the glass helped take the edge off it, but the prospect of travel was not a happy one.
Gunderson would help. With all kinds of problems.
The clever young man stood at the wide window with a glass in his hand, looking through his reflection at midnight London. Standing as he was, his head’s shadow engulfed most of the houses of Parliament, the white streak over his temple overlaid the face of its famous clock, his chest engulfed Westminster Bridge and the hungry, flat, greasy River Thames, while his raised right elbow rested on the palace of the archbishop.
God of all he surveyed.
His presence in this place was a quirk, an anomaly that would have surprised all who knew him, were they ever to be invited here. Grey and invisible minions of government did not live among the warehouses of London ’s South Bank, no more than did men whose ambitions encompassed government as his reflection encompassed Whitehall. Not that any of his colleagues knew of his ambitions, any more than they knew of his home.
The building had belonged to his grandfather, who had lost it-or, from whom it had been stolen-along with the rest of the family inheritance. The grandson was on medical leave in 1917, following the bullet that left him with a streak of white in his hair, when his restless wanderings brought him here, to an empty and derelict warehouse, part of its roof taken off by a zeppelin attack. He had made a surreptitious and scandalously low offer for it-a steal, one might say-and in his first deliberate act of self-concealment, become its owner. After the Paris talks he had returned to London and a new position, and now he stood at the big north-facing window in the modern flat raised up from the top floor, his outline a frame over the powers of the empire.
So appropriate, that dim outline. Nothing overt, no splashes of the politician’s mark or estate magnate’s hammer. Merely a shadow, colouring all it overlay.
He’d found it every bit as easy to construct a hidden life as it was to construct a charismatic façade or the reputation for front-line fortitude. Men liked him, women, too, and beguiled by the wit and easy charm, none of them noticed that they knew nothing about the man underneath.
Even Whitehall scarcely knew he was here. Few so much as suspected a presence among the anonymous halls.
Mycroft Holmes was one. He thought that, in recent months, Holmes had caught a faint trace of someone at his heels: Why slim down and take up with a lady, unless in a pointless drive to reclaim youth? However, he’d been looking over Holmes’ shoulder since 1921 without giving himself away-how else would he have known about the letter from Shanghai?
The few in this vast hive below who could put his face and a name to an act were all career criminals, who mattered less than nothing. Criminals could be bought or disposed of; as for Mr Holmes, well, it was all in the works now.
His current situation reminded him of a Vaudeville act he’d once gone to see at the urging of, oddly enough, Churchill. On the stage, a dapper gent juggled an increasing number of ever more disparate objects-a cricket ball, a roast leg of goose, a lit candle, a yelping puppy. The key element of the act had been the insouciance, even boredom, with which the fellow had caught each additional oddity thrown his way, incorporating it casually into his motions. The whole was intended to be madly humorous, as indeed the low-brow audience found it, but he thought it more effective as a paradigm: One’s raw material matters less than one’s confidence.
Take the telegram from the primitive reaches of the British Isles. Brothers had been-predictably-shocked at his failure to achieve the immortality of Divine Transformation up in Orkney, yet he overlooked the real question: How could a man, armed with knife, gun, and heavy narcotics, not only fail at murder, but manage to get himself wounded as well?
Another ill-matched object to keep up in the air.
Ah, well. That was what one got from depending on elaborate plots with many moving parts. It had all been far too beautiful, too gorgeously complex and inexorable-until an artist had inexplicably failed to die, and dropped a spanner into the clockworks.
Still, it wasn’t a total loss. Parts of the machine were still turning nicely, and since they were dependent only on his own actions, they would continue to run. From here on out, he would abandon the complex, and keep things simple, and brutal.
The clock across the way told him it was time for sleep: He had a seven o’clock appointment, a full day of meetings, and a trip to St Albans to arrange. He drained his glass and went to bed, where he slept without dreams.
The grey-haired man in the dusty stockings stood in his London prison and studied the equation on the wall. The odd dreaminess of his imprisonment made it an effort to direct his mind to the formula and what it represented; still, it was what Buddhists called a koan, a focal point for the mind, a conundrum with a puzzle at its core.
a ÷ (b+c+d)
Ironic, to use schoolboy maths-beaten into him when Victoria still wore colour-to develop a theorem for the most complex and dangerous political manoeuvring of his career.
As ironic as the entire situation being based on a simple truth of governmental bookkeeping: A department immune to budget cuts is the most powerful department in the government.
a ÷ (b+c+d)
The a in the formula was his position in His Majesty’s Government, a job his brother Sherlock had once whimsically described as “auditing the books in some of the Government departments.” It was an apt description, in both the meanings of auditor: one who examines the accounts, and one who listens.
He had listened to a lot of secrets, in his career.
In his first draughts of this formula, a had represented himself, but he had revised that and replaced the person with the position; b was the age of the present incumbent. Not that he felt old, but he had to admit, the looking-glass in his bathroom startled him at times. c stood for the Labour Government, new, fragile, and perceived by many as a vile Bolshevik threat. And d, of course, was his own heart attack last December, the subsequent convalescence, and the lingering sense of vulnerability and impermanence.
He pinched the nail between his fingers, and paused.
His e was to be he, himself, the sum of nearly half a century of auditing the books of the empire. But on which side did that fifth element go: debit, or credit?
Once, that old man in the glass had been strong and flexible in mind and body. Now, he lived in an age where youth was all, where flightiness was virtue, where a man of a mere seventy years was made to feel outdated. Where Intelligence had become a Feudal stronghold, with peasants clamouring at the gates.
Once, he’d lived in a world where one could tell a man’s profession and history by a glance at his hands and the turn of his collar, but now every other man spent his days in an anonymous office, and even shopkeepers wore bespoke suits.
Perhaps his time was past…
But, no; e was himself and the rest was mere doubt: He added an upright to the horizontal line he’d scratched, and the equation read:
a ÷ (b+c+d) + e
e, after all, was Mycroft Holmes. Lock him in a dank attic, withhold his meals, force him to use his neck-tie as a belt and a slip of metal for a pencil, starve him of information and agents and human tools, ultimately there was no doubt: He would walk away. Sooner or later, his mind would cut through solid wall, build a ladder out of information, weave wings out of words and clues and perceived motions.
He found that he was sitting on the floor; the angle of light through the translucent overhead window had shifted. Odd. When had that happened? For a moment, a brief moment, he entertained the possibility that lack of adequate sustenance was making him light-headed.
But surely the past eight months of denying the body’s surprisingly strong urges, shedding 4 stone 10 in the process, would have hardened him to thin rations?
No, he thought. It was merely the disorientation that comes with a prolonged lack of stimulation. Still, he could not help wishing that he had been gifted with his younger brother’s knack of using hunger to stoke the mental processes. Under present circumstances, Sherlock’s mental processes would be fired to a white-hot pitch that would melt the walls.
Personally, Mycroft found a growling stomach a distraction.
The business end of a gun is remarkably distracting. It dominates the world. So it wasn’t until the weapon fell away that I looked past it to see the familiar scarred features of my pilot, who swore and reached for my arm. “There you are! I’ve known some troublesome girls in my time, but sweetheart, you take the-oh, hey there, honey, come on in,” he added in a very different voice, and the hand at his side shifted to hide the gun completely. He peeled back the door to encourage us to enter, standing almost behind it so as not to frighten the child at my side.
“I didn’t see you there, little Miss,” he said. His voice was soft with easy friendship, and it occurred to me that he might have had a family, back in America before the War and the ’plane crash that left his face and hand shiny with scar tissue. “Do come in, it’s chilly out there and Mrs Ross would be happy to set some breakfast in front of you. That’s right, in you come, and pay no attention to the big ugly man who met you with a growl.”
Estelle glued herself to my side. When the door was shut, she peered around me at Javitz. I looked down and said, “Estelle, this is the man with the aeroplane. He didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“What’s on your face?” she asked him.
He gave no indication of the distress it must have caused, this first reaction from any new acquaintance. “I got burnt, a long time ago. Looks funny but it doesn’t hurt.”
“Did it hurt then?”
“Er, yes. It did.”
“I’m sorry.”
After a minute, he tore his gaze away from her to look at me. “Where have you been?”
“Probably best you don’t know, just yet. Why the, er, armament?”
“Someone tried to jigger with the machine last night. I happened to be outside and heard them, so I stood guard to make sure they didn’t get another chance. The lad took over at daybreak. I was about to set out and look for you.”
“Well, I’m here. Is the ’plane ready? Can we go before the wind gets too strong?”
“What, both of you?”
“Estelle can sit on my lap.”
“Where are her-” He caught himself, and looked from me to her.
“Her parents asked me to look after her for a couple of days. We’ll meet them up later.”
“My Papa’s hurt,” she piped up, contributing information I had given her some hours earlier. “His Papa is taking him to a doctor.”
Javitz raised an eyebrow at me. I shook my head, warning him off any more questions, and asked, “Estelle, I’d bet you would like a quick bite of breakfast, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, please,” she said emphatically. Javitz laughed-a good laugh, full and content, which I had not heard before-and led us towards the odours of bacon and toast.
The kitchen was warm and smelt like heaven. Javitz strolled in as if the room were his, and asked his hostess if she’d mind stirring up a few more eggs. I had met Mrs Ross briefly in another lifetime-the previous afternoon-as well as the lad currently out guarding the aeroplane, but there was still no sign of a husband. I decided not to ask.
The mistress of the house was a bit surprised at my reappearance with a child in tow-particularly a child with such exotic looks-but she greeted us cheerily enough, and stretched out a hand for the bowl of eggs. I stayed until she had set two laden plates on the table, then tipped my head at Javitz. He followed me into the hallway.
“Who do you think was trying to get at the machine?” I asked.
“All I saw was a big fellow who ran away when he heard me coming.”
Which indicated it wasn’t the police, I thought: That would have made things sticky. “Well, as soon as Estelle has eaten, let’s be away. How much petrol have we?”
“She’s full. I didn’t know if you’d want to go beyond Thurso, but there was nothing for me to do here except fetch tins of petrol.”
“Yes, sorry. Is the lad big enough to turn the prop for us?”
“Should be, yes.”
“Good. I’d like you to take us back to Thurso-perhaps this time we can find a field closer to the town? Estelle and I will catch a train from there, if you don’t mind making your own way back to London.” It was all very well to risk my own neck bouncing about in mid-air and alternately roasting and freezing in the glass-covered compartment, but I felt that the sooner I could return my young charge to terra firma, the better. Thurso might carry a risk of arrest, but at least I would get her away from Brothers. And with luck, Javitz could land and quickly take off again, all eyes on him while Estelle and I slipped into town and away: There might be a warrant out for Mary Russell, but I thought it unlikely that any rural constable, seeing a woman with a child getting onto a train, would call that warrant to mind.
Javitz looked as if he would object to the plan, but considering the trouble we’d had on the way up here, he could hardly insist that the air was the safest option.
I wiped Estelle’s face (Mrs Ross tactfully suggested a visit to the cloakroom for the child, a nicety I’d have overlooked) and led her out through the garden to the walled field. There it sat, this idol of the modern age, gleaming deceptively in the morning light. It had tried its hardest to kill me on the way up from London; I was now giving it another chance-with the child thrown into the bargain. I muttered a Hebrew prayer for travellers under my breath and climbed inside. Javitz passed Estelle up to me, and as he climbed into his cockpit before us, I let down the glass cover.
In the end, Mrs Ross herself pulled the prop for us, yanking it into life while her son oversaw operations from the top of the stone wall. Estelle’s nose was pressed to the glass that covered our passenger compartment, watching the ground travel past, first slowly, then more rapidly. She shot me a grin as the prop’s speed pushed us back into our seats; I grinned right back at her, and pushed away thoughts of Icarus and his wings.
Then we tipped up, took a hop, and were airborne. Estelle squealed with excitement when the wind caught us. She exclaimed at the houses that turned into sheds and then doll-houses, the horses receding to the size of dogs and then figurines, a motorcar becoming a toy, and a man on a bicycle who became little more than a crawling beetle. We rode the wind up and up over the town, then Javitz pulled us into a wide circle and aimed back the way we had come, roaring lower and lower. The houses, animals, and figures grew again as he prepared to buzz over the Ross rooftop-and then I glimpsed the man on the bicycle, only he was not simply a man, he was a man with a constabulary helmet, and he was standing on the Ross walkway craning up at us.
Five minutes later and he’d have caught us on the ground.
Estelle kept her face glued to the glass, her bony knees balanced on my thighs. I tucked most of the fur coat around her, and tried to ignore the frigid air brushing my neck and taking possession of my toes. It was less than forty miles to Thurso as the crow flew-although slightly longer for a Bristol Tourer that kept over land for much of the time. In any event, under less than an hour we would be trading our hubristic mode of transportation for the safety of a train, to begin our earth-bound way southward, towards civilisation and the assistance of my brother-in-law. Who would surely have reasserted his authority by then.
We approached Thurso as we had left it, over the coast-line between the town and Scotland’s end at John o’ Groats. The wind was powerful, but nowhere near as rough as it had been when we fought our way north. From time to time, Javitz half-rose in his cockpit to peer at the ground past the high nose of the ’plane, making minor corrections each time.
Unbidden, a thought crept into my mind: Would it be irresponsible of me to turn over the duties of nurse-maid to Javitz-just for the day-while I returned to the islands to see what could be done about Brothers? Clearly, the pilot had friends in the area. And he seemed to know better than I how to communicate with children. Yes, I had promised Estelle’s father that I would watch over her; but surely removing the threat of Brothers would offer a more complete protection? Or was this merely what I wanted to do, and not what I should do?
We had shed altitude as we followed the coast-line south. Before the town began, Javitz throttled back, correcting his course a fraction each time he stood to examine the terrain. We were perhaps a hundred feet from the ground, and even I in my seat could glimpse the approaching harbour, when a sinister chain of noises cut through the ceaseless racket: a slap, a gasp, and an immediate, high-pitched whistle.
Javitz had been half-standing, but he dropped hard into his seat and wrenched at the controls, slamming the aeroplane to the side and making its mighty Siddeley Puma engines build to a bone-shaking thunder.
Estelle shrieked as her head cracked against the window. I grabbed for her, pulling her to my chest as her cries of fear mingled with the engine noise and the untoward whistle of air. Then in seconds, the sideways fall changed and everything went very heavy and terribly confusing. I was dimly aware of something raining down on my arm and shoulder as-I finally realised what the motion meant-we corkscrewed our way upwards. Glass, I thought dimly, falling from a shattered window. I pulled the protective fur coat up around the cowering child and shouted words of reassurance, inaudible even to my own ears.
In the blink of an eye, the world disappeared, and we were bundled into a grey and featureless nothing. Following one last tight circuit of the corkscrew, our wings tilted the other way and we grew level. I could feel Estelle sobbing, although I could scarcely hear her against the wind that battered through the broken pane. I rocked the armful of fur as my eyes darted around the little compartment, trying to see where all that glass had gone.
But what drew my gaze was not the jagged glass: It was the neat hole punched through the front wall of the passenger compartment.
Javitz spent a moment settling the controls, then gingerly swivelled in his seat to see if we were still intact. As his eyes came around, they found the hole: From his position there would be two-one in the partition between us, and one through the bottom of his seat. Had he been seated, the round would have passed straight through him. We looked through the glass at each other, and I watched his eyes travel to the smashed window, then to the child in my arms. I saw his mouth move, and although I couldn’t have heard if he’d shouted, I could read their meaning.
I lifted the coat until my lips were inches from the child’s head. “Estelle, are you all right? Estelle, child, I know you’re scared, but I need to know if you’re hurt at all.”
The head stayed tucked against me, but it shook back and forth in answer. I smoothed the coat back around her and mouthed to Javitz, “We’re fine. What happened?”
In answer, he raised his right hand and made a gun out of it. Yes, I thought-although it had to have been a rifle, not a revolver. Before I could say anything, he turned around again and set about getting us below the clouds.
I studied his back, seeing the motion of his head and shoulders as he consulted the instruments and worked the control stick between his knees. The grey pressing around us thinned, retreated, and eventually became a ceiling.
Javitz craned over the side at the ground, made a correction on the stick, then hunched forward for a minute before turning to press a note-pad to the glass between us. On it was written:
NOT THURSO, THEN. WHERE?
All I could do was shrug and tell him, “South.”
He looked from the window to the lump in my arms, then wrote again.
SHALL I LAND SO WE CAN FIX THAT WINDOW?
I shook my head vigorously. If he could survive in the unprotected front of the ’plane, we two with our fur wrapping could hold out until we had reached safety.
Wherever that might be.
We flew on through the grey, light rain occasionally streaking back against the glass. I had hoped the warm furs and steady course might reassure the child, but she remained where she was, a taut quivering ball.
Could I remember being three and a half years old? Not really, but my childhood had been a comfortable place until I was fourteen and my family died. This soft creature in my arms was too young to have a sense of history, too new to understand that terror passes, that love returns. In the past month-for her, an eternity-her mother had disappeared (died, although I was not going to be the one to tell her) and left her with a strange man (who had, in fact, been the one who killed Mother) until Papa came and joined the man for a furtive series of trains and boats to a cold, empty, smelly house, where she had wakened to find herself in the possession of a strange woman. A woman who had then hauled her through the night and pushed her into a noisy machine that was fun for ten minutes before it turned very scary.
My hand stroked the child’s back, counting the faint vertebrae and the shape of her shoulder-blades. What must it be like, to be so without control that one would submit to a stranger’s comforting?
But my hand kept moving, and after a minute, I bent to speak to the scrap of black hair and pink ear that emerged from the fur. “Shall I tell you a story, Estelle?”
There was no response, but I kept stroking, and started talking.
“Once upon a time there was a lady from America. She was a singer, a beautiful singer, who-sorry, did you say something?”
She turned her head slightly, and the faint murmur became words: “My Grandmama was a singer.”
“I know, and this is a story about her.”
I constructed a tale about the woman, a sort of midrash based on the little I knew about her, depending more on the drawings Damian had done of his childhood home than actual fact. The story was about opera, and her grandmother’s cleverness, and the French countryside, and it was a distraction as much to me as it was to her. Slowly, the child in my arms grew more solid as a sleepless night and the ebb of terror did their work. Eventually, she shuddered and went limp.
I finished the story, and wrapped my arms around the warm little body. For the first time in hours, I had nothing to do but sit quietly and fret. Instantly, a wave of thoughts rose up and crashed over me.
A sniper, in Thurso? Brothers might have got away from the Stones alive, but he’d been in no condition to place a rifle to his shoulder-although he’d had assistance on Orkney before, and after the War, firing a rifle was hardly an unusual skill. How difficult was it, to hit a low-flying aeroplane? As difficult as hitting a deer, or a soldier on the other side of no-man’s-land?
I did not even consider the possibility of an accidental discharge-if we’d been peppered with stray birdshot, perhaps, but this had been a single round. Someone had wanted to bring us down.
Not the police. Even if they had been unaware of the child on board, my crimes hardly justified a deadly assault.
It had to be Brothers or one of his men-and yet he’d wanted the child: Back in the hotel, I’d found a forged British passport for him and Estelle. Had he decided that if he couldn’t have her, no one should? Had he given the order, not knowing I had her? If not Brothers and his local assistance, then who?
My thoughts went around and around, considering the possibilities of what had happened, what it meant, what came next. I blame that preoccupation, along with the distraction of fear and the weight of responsibility, for missing the obvious. Of course, there was little I could have done even if I had known-ours was not an aeroplane with dual controls in the passenger compartment. Still, it took a shamefully long time for me to make note of the placement of the holes, to calculate the trajectory between the back of Javitz’s seat and the overhead windowpane, then compare it to the actual position of my pilot when the round passed through.
When I had done so, I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the blast of air. I loosed an arm from the coat and stretched out to rap against the glass. Javitz slowly turned: The hesitation of his movements told me all I needed to know.
“How bad?” I mouthed.
He pretended not to understand. I grimaced, and began to trace the letters of my question, backwards against the glass.
HOW BAD IS YOUR LEG?
I could see him waver on the edge of denial, but my glare changed his mind. He wrote on his pad, and held it up:
BLEEDING, BUT USABLE. I PUT A TOURNIQUET ON IT.
In reply, I traced:
PUT DOWN AS SOON AS YOU CAN FIND A PLACE.
He shook his head, so decisively I could tell there was little arguing with him, so I changed it to:
GIVE IT AN HOUR? TO PUT US WELL CLEAR OF BEING FOLLOWED.
He started to turn back when he saw my gesture and waited for me to add:
LOOSEN THE TOURNIQUET EVERY TEN MINUTES OR YOU’LL LOSE THE LEG.
He nodded, and showed me the back of his head. We flew on through the morning, a trapped woman, a sleeping child, and a pilot slowly bleeding to death at the controls.
He’s bleeding to death,” Sherlock Holmes said with forced patience. It was good he’d had so much practice with stubborn females. Why couldn’t this one be more like Watson, who at least placed medical needs before debate? Although Watson had never been shanghaied by having an anchor raised while he was below decks. Come to think of it, perhaps he should be grateful Dr Henning hadn’t turned her scalpel on him.
“He’ll lose it all the faster if my scalpel jerks. I’ll not cut until this boat is still.”
Holmes ran his hand over his hair, staring down at his half-conscious son. Without a word, he climbed up to have a word with Gordon.
“We need to keep the boat on a steady keel again for a while.”
“How long?”
“Half an hour, perhaps longer.”
“I did say we should stay in t’harbour.”
“I couldn’t risk it.”
“Well, if you’re thinking to anchor in a nice quiet bay, you picked the wrong coast of Scotland.”
“Short of a bay, can you give us calm?”
“If I keep heading before the wind.”
“Do that, then.”
“You do know the farther out I go, the harder it will be to beat our way back?”
“Can’t be helped.”
“You’ll buy me half a boat by the time you’re finished,” Gordon grumbled.
“I’ll buy you the whole boat if you get us out of this in one piece.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Holmes helped Gordon adjust the sails, then lingered on deck as the boat settled into its new course. He rested his eyes on the Scottish coast-line, directly astern now and fast retreating. If Russell-
No. He turned his back on the land and on problems beyond his control. Brothers was dead, Russell was in no danger, and the rest was travail and vexation of spirit.
With the change in direction, the boat’s troubled passage was replaced by an easy roll. Down below, he raised an eyebrow at his captive. “Will that be sufficient?”
“What if I say no?”
“Then you’ll have to stand by and watch me do my best with your scalpel.”
She bent her head for a moment, judging the motions of the hull, then asked abruptly, “How did you know my name?”
“Your diploma is behind the desk in your surgery.”
“You have good eyes, if you saw the print from across the room.”
“I don’t miss much,” he agreed.
“And this is your son, and you don’t wish to come into contact with the police, yet you swear you have done nothing wrong.”
“Correct. On all three counts.”
The whole time, her concentration had been on the boat’s rhythm, and now her head dipped once in grudging approval. “I can manage, if it doesn’t get worse. Boil a kettle. And I’ll need clean towels, a better light, and a bowl. A well-scrubbed bowl.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and moved the kettle onto the stove, tossing more coal into its already glowing interior.
Her hands were small, but when Holmes watched them ease away the dried and clotted dressings, he found their strength and precision reassuring. Her fingertips marched a slow exploration of the patient’s side, lifting as Damian’s breath caught, then going on. When she sat back, Holmes spoke.
“Those two ribs are the reason I didn’t want to move him before the bullet was out.”
“A punctured lung is not a pretty thing,” she agreed. “However, I think they’re only cracked, not fully broken. Help me turn him so I can get at his back-I want to take care not to twist the ribs further.”
The bullet had ricocheted off stone before hitting flesh. Had it hit a few inches higher, it would have reached the heart or lungs, and Damian would be the one lying dead on the standing stones’ altar, not Brothers. Had it retained more of its initial energy, it would have smashed through the ribs into the heart or lungs, and they would have a three-and-a-half-year-old orphan on their hands. Instead, the bullet had burrowed a track between bone and skin until it was stopped by the powerful muscles attached to the shoulder-blade.
Dr Henning’s fingers delicately probed the clammy skin. “My hands are like ice,” she complained. “Could you slide the hatch shut, please?”
“Your patient is pathologically claustrophobic,” Holmes told her.
She looked down at the face that lay inches from her knees, then up to the hatch atop the companionway ladder, held open on the deck as it had been since leaving Orkney. “I don’t carry chloroform in my bag.”
“Not needed,” Damian replied, his voice gritty but firm.
“Very well, we’ll make do with morphia.”
“No!” both men said in the same instant. Her eyes went wide as she looked from Damian to Holmes.
“Drugs are not a good idea,” Holmes explained, in bland understatement.
“I see. So, no sedation, and I work with cold hands. Any other problems you’d like to tell me about? Haemophilia? Hydrophobia? St Vitus’ Dance?”
“Just the bullet,” he assured her. She shook her head, and went back to her examination.
At long last, the doctor was satisfied that she had all the evidence her fingers could give her. She arranged pillows and bed-clothes around her patient, shifting his limbs as impersonally as she would the settings on a tea-tray. Holmes went to check on the kettle.
“Have you studied the sorts of wounds received in war?” he asked over his shoulder. He knew that she had spent time nursing wounds, but not where.
“This is from a revolver, not a rifle or bayonet.”
Which response probably answered his question. “I was referring to the dangers of infection following a wound with a fragment of clothing in it.”
“This will be my first private case of a bullet wound,” she said, “but I worked as a VAD during the War. I have seen gas gangrene, yes.”
“You must have been fifteen years old.”
“Nineteen,” she said.
When the water had boiled and the bowls and implements were clean, Holmes carried them over to the impromptu operating theatre. Dr Henning scrubbed her hands, leaving them in the bowl to warm while Holmes climbed onto the bunk, arranging his legs on either side of his son’s torso. When he nodded his readiness, the deft hands dried themselves on a clean cloth and took up the scalpel, suspending it over the lump beneath Damian’s skin. The boat tipped and swayed, riding out a swell, and at the instant of equilibrium, the fingers flicked down to make a precise cut in the flesh. Damian bit back a whine, but the cut was made, and in moments she was easing the bullet out as Holmes locked the young man’s arching body into immobility. The fingers staunched the blood, then reached delicately down to retrieve a clot of threads that had ridden the bullet through the body. They looked at each other over the bloody scrap, and smiled.
Ten stitches, and four more to close the entrance wound in the front, then she was wrapping a length of gauze tight around Damian’s ribs. When they eased him flat again, he cautiously drew breath, and his mouth twitched with relief. He met her eyes. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” she said.
I may have wrapped my arms more tightly around the child, following the realisation of our pilot’s condition. I know I prayed.
We had been flying for a quarter hour or so when I became conscious that my lips were moving, and that the words they shaped were Hebrew: Yehi ratzon mil’fanecha, the prayer of the traveller begins. If it be Thy will, to lead us towards peace, to guide our footsteps in the way of peace, to have us reach our destination of peace. The repetition of shalom, meaning both peace and health, is said to calm the nerves. Mine could certainly use some calming.
But how had Brothers followed us? The man was a religious charlatan, not some master criminal with a platoon of armed men at his beck and call. Yes, he had Marcus Gunderson, but I’d questioned Gunderson myself, at the point of a knife, and there had been no indication that he was one of a platoon of Thugees.
Brothers’ mumbo-jumbo was the spiritual equivalent of eating an enemy’s heart. He believed that by spilling blood at carefully chosen places and times-lunar eclipse, summer solstice, meteor shower, today’s eclipse of the sun-he would absorb the loosed psychic energies of his victims. However, he appeared to have kept this aspect of his teaching to himself: I had seen no evidence that he used any of his Inner Circle in his quest to become a god; only Gunderson.
With Brothers in my thoughts and the Hebrew on my lips, my mind turned to the nature of gods. The Hebrew Bible does not say that the gods do not exist, merely that we are not to worship them. For a Christian, doubt is a shameful secret, a failure of faith, but the rabbis have long embraced doubt as an opportunity for vigorous argument. For the rabbis, the existence of God is no more of a question than the existence of air: Doubt is how we converse with Him.
Small-g gods might be considered a sort of concentrated essence: Loki the impulsive, Shiva the destroyer, Wayland the craftsman. The local gods were why Brothers had come to Britain, a country littered with Norse and Roman deities. The Holmes brothers were a bit god-like: generous and well meaning towards lesser mankind, but capricious and sometimes frightening in their omniscience. What, I wondered sleepily, would Brothers have embodied, had he succeeded in becoming a god? For that matter, what god would carry the attributes of flying machines? Which deity would be represented by the rifle?
As I sat in the deafening, cramped and frigid compartment, behind a dying pilot, holding a child for whom I could do nothing, incredibly, imperceptibly, I drifted into sleep.
The grey scraps of cloud outside, tossed like leaves in a fitful breeze, shifted, becoming wind-tossed foliage. I was sitting not in a fragile device of metal and wood, but on a hillside, warm and secure in an ancient land. The foliage remained, a hedgerow bordering a field of summer wheat. The grain rippled with the breeze, the green wall danced, until in the midst of the leaves-or the scraps of cloud-I became aware of a Presence among the moving scraps of green or grey: a pair of eyes that were there and then gone, that met mine and were hidden again. Green, grey; there, gone; comfort, threat.
I must have made a noise, because the child in my arms stirred, pushing away the heavy coat to rub her eyes and look around her.
“What did you say?” she asked me.
“I didn’t say anything, honey.”
“Yes, you did,” she insisted.
“I fell asleep, and was dreaming. It must have been something about that.”
“I’m cold,” she complained.
“It won’t be much longer,” I said. She gave me a look that declared her lack of reassurance at the statement. “Here, snuggle back under the coat,” I suggested.
This must be what it felt like to be an Elizabethan noblewoman before a roaring fire, I thought: toasty warm in front, frigid in back.
“What was your dream about?” Estelle asked.
“Only a silly dream. A face peeping out from leaves.”
“My Papa made a painting like that.”
“Did he? Oh yes, I remember.” I’d seen it in a London gallery-heavens, only two weeks before? The Green Man, Damian had called it, a Surrealist rendering of the ancient pagan spirit of the British Isles, the surge of life in this green land. The figure was carved into church ceilings and pews, painted on the signs of public houses, leading processions. He was often shown as a face with branches bursting from his mouth and nostrils and twining about his head in the exuberance of life: a divine creature, speaking in leaves.
Jack-in-the-Green, Will of the Wisp, Wild Woodsman: The figure represents not just life, but the cycle of birth and death and birth anew. His authority and mystery stand behind such diverse characters as Robin Hood and Puck. Damian’s painting began as a study in green, a canvas entirely covered with leaves so precise, they might have been the colour photograph of a hedge. Only after examining the wall of greenery for some time, searching for meaning in the shades and shadows, did the viewer become aware that two off-centre points of light were not drops of water on leaves, but reflections from a pair of green eyes. Unlike the foliate heads carved into the stones of churches, nothing could be seen of the features-or rather, the skin seemed made of leaves instead of flesh-but the sense of watching was powerful. Not threatening, necessarily, just… eerie. Disturbing.
At the time, my thought had been, Next time I walk in the woods, the back of my neck will crawl.
Now I pulled my arms more snugly around the artist’s child, and raised my eyes to what I could see of Javitz. He had stayed reassuringly upright; there was no indication that he was about to faint away and send us spinning to earth. Still, I wanted to get down as soon as we could. The hour I had given him was less than half over, but the man urgently required medical attention.
I stretched out an arm to knock on the dividing glass. I could tell he heard me from the tilt of his head, but it took a minute for him to turn.
When he had done so, I held out my hand and slowly lowered it, palm down, to indicate that I wanted us to descend. He put up a finger, telling me to wait, then bent over his pad for a minute. He held up the message:
I’M FINE. BLEEDING STOPPED. NO REASON NOT TO MAKE INVERNESS OR FORT WILLIAM.
Inverness was some eighty-five miles from Thurso, or less than an hour with the wind at our back as it was. Fort William was nearly twice that. I shook my head firmly, mouthing, “Inverness, not Fort William.”
He shrugged, which I would have taken for capitulation except that I had a feeling that those scars were hiding an expression of stubbornness. He started to turn back, but I rapped hard on the glass, and spelt out in front of his eyes:
KEEP LOOSENING THE TOURNIQUET.
Not bleeding: Right, I thought. So why are you surreptitiously reaching down now to work the tie loose on your upper leg?
The first thing I’d learned about this aeroplane was that its 230 horsepower engine would take it 500 miles on a tank of petrol. On the trip up here, we had failed to come anywhere near that, but-so far-it appeared that our curse of mechanical problems was in abeyance. Theoretically, 500 miles would take us near enough to London to smell the smoke-although if Javitz’s hands were no longer on the controls, it could as easily land us in Ireland, France, or the middle of the North Sea.
How to force a man to your will when you could not reach him-could not even communicate if he chose not to turn his head? It was maddening, and his masculine pride was putting this child in danger.
I might have to break the pane of glass that separated us, even if it meant Estelle and I were in the full blast of air. The butt of the revolver would do as a hammer-but as I was reaching for it, I saw that Javitz had turned again, and was holding to the glass a longer message:
I KNOW YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT THE LITTLE GIRL, BUT HONEST, IF I FEEL MYSELF GOING THE LEAST BIT WOOZY, I’LL TAKE THE CRATE DOWN, NO HESITATION. I’VE BEEN WOUNDED BEFORE, I KNOW HOW IT FEELS TO BE SLIPPING AWAY, AND I WON’T TAKE ANY RISK WITH THE TWO OF YOU.
BUT I CAN’T HELP THINKING ABOUT A MAN WITH A RIFLE IN THURSO, AND WONDERING HOW MANY MORE OF THEM MIGHT BE SCATTERED AROUND SCOTLAND. THE FARTHER SOUTH WE GET, THE GREATER THE CHANCE WE LOSE THEM. WHOEVER THEY ARE.
IF YOU REALLY INSIST, AND YOU DON’T THINK THEY’LL BE WAITING FOR YOU THERE, I’LL TAKE US DOWN IN INVERNESS.
UNLESS THERE’S A WHOLE ARMY OF THEM, THEY WON’T HAVE A MAN WAITING IN FORT WILLIAM. OR GLASGOW.
YOUR CALL.
The farther you go, the harder it will be to catch Brothers, said a voice in my mind. I looked down at the burden in my arms, and pushed the thought away.
Javitz and I studied each other through the cloudy glass, me searching for a sign that his injury was worse than he was admitting, he waiting for my decision. Estelle stirred, and his eyes went to her, then came back to mine. His expression had not changed, and I could see neither doubt nor truculence there.
I mouthed, “Fort William.”
He turned back to his controls; the noise from the engine picked up a notch.
Chief Inspector Lestrade picked up the latest report from Scotland, then threw it down in disgust. It said the same thing all the other reports had said: no sign of them.
Lestrade was not a man much prone to self-doubt, not when it came to his job, but in the eight days since he’d posted the arrest warrants for Sherlock Holmes and his wife, he’d begun to wonder if he might not have been rash. Granted, their outright refusal to appear and be interviewed had left him with little choice in the matter, but even then, a part of him had refused to believe that the man had anything to do with the death of that artist’s wife down in Sussex.
Yet, he was involved somehow. The name Adler could be no coincidence-the artist had to be related to Irene Adler, even if French records had been too thin to show precisely how.
Still, even if Damian Adler was a blood relation to the woman, what right did Holmes have to take matters into his own hands? An amateur investigator was a danger to society, and the man’s attitude towards the police was outmoded, self-important, and frankly offensive. It happened every time Holmes appeared on the borders of a police investigation. It hadn’t taken much urging for Lestrade to agree that it was high time to let Holmes know that a Twentieth-Century Scotland Yard would no longer tolerate his meddling and deceptions.
No matter how often the man had solved a crime the police could not.
No matter the respect Lestrade’s father had held for the man.
No matter the reverence with which politicians and royals alike spoke of him.
Time to bring the old man down a peg, him and that upstart wife of his.
(If he could only lay hands on them.)
Except that now the man’s brother had vanished as well.
He’d had Mycroft Holmes in two days before, and-surprise-the man had answered not one of his questions to his satisfaction. He’d been even more irritated when, half an hour after the man left, an envelope with his name on it was brought up-left by Mycroft Holmes at the front as he went out. Having spent two hours in Lestrade’s office, he was now suggesting a meeting later that afternoon.
Lestrade had thrown the note into the waste-bin and got down to the day’s work, but at five o’clock, he’d found himself going not home, but in the direction of the suggested meeting place.
But the man didn’t show. Lestrade stood in the crowded halls amongst the children and the tourists, feeling more like an idiot every minute. He went home angry.
His anger had become slightly uneasy when the man’s housekeeper telephoned bright and early the next morning to say that when she’d let herself into the Holmes flat that morning, her employer had been missing, and what was Scotland Yard going to do about it?
In fact, he’d been uneasy enough that he’d telephoned to the offices Mycroft Holmes kept in Whitehall. And when the secretary said that his employer hadn’t come in that morning, and yes it was highly unusual, Lestrade had rung the caretaker at Mycroft Holmes’ flat on Pall Mall: Mr Holmes had left Thursday morning, and not returned.
Not that there was much Lestrade could do about it yet. Mycroft Holmes was a grown man, and although he had not been seen since walking out the doors of Scotland Yard Thursday afternoon, there could be any number of reasons why he might have done so, and it was too early to assume foul play. The man had vanished on the same puff of smoke as his brother Sherlock, along with Mary Russell, Damian Adler, and Adler’s small daughter. To say nothing of Reverend Brothers and his henchman Gunderson.
Nary a sign of any of them.
An hour south of Thurso, I was relieved when the clouds at least grew light enough to suggest where the sun lay. However, its location also was a sign that we were not headed towards Fort William. Instead, Javitz was either aiming us at the other goal he had mentioned, Glasgow, or at Edinburgh to its east. Both cities were approximately two hundred miles from the island where we had started the day: two and a half hours at cruising speed, a little less with the push he had on now.
Estelle fell asleep again. The weak morning sunlight took some of the bitterness from the cabin’s chill. Or perhaps I was fading into hypothermia. If so, I couldn’t rouse myself to object.
Two hours south of Thurso, the big engine showed no sign of slowing, and I could perceive no change in our altitude. Javitz remained upright, and his head continued to swivel as he studied the instruments before him, so I hunkered down in the furs and tried to emulate my granddaughter.
Our decision was made for us by the machine itself. I jerked awake at a change in the noise around me, registered briefly that we’d come a lot farther than Glasgow, then realised that what woke me was something drastic happening below. Javitz responded instantly by cutting our speed and nudging the flaps to take us lower.
A moment’s thought, and I knew what the problem was: The hole in our hull had given way, and was threatening to peel the metal skin down to the bones.
Land now, or crash.
For the first time in hours, we dropped below the clouds, although it took a moment before my eyes could make sense of the evidence before them: Somehow as I slept we had passed over all of Scotland, and were now in the Lake District-that could be the only explanation of those distinctive fells, that stretch of water in the distance. But on one of the aeroplane’s sideways lunges, I saw that below us lay not nice bare hillside, or even water, but trees.
Green, stretching out in all directions, unbroken and reaching up to pull us to pieces.
Oh, dear.
Javitz was no doubt thinking the same thing, only with profanity. I could see his jaws moving as he cursed the timing of our forced descent, then he pulled himself all the way upright and I caught my first glimpse of his injury: The clothing over the left side of his body, waist to knee, was stained with blood; the white silk scarf he had used as a tourniquet on his upper thigh ranged from dark brown to fresh red.
The flapping noise grew louder, while Javitz struggled to counteract the effects of an increasingly large metallic sail under our feet.
A giant hand laid hold of us and tugged, and the very framework around us began to twist: In moments, the aeroplane would be ripped to pieces.
Javitz turned and shouted, loud enough for me to hear, “Brace yourself!”
There was little bracing I could do, rattling around in my miniature glass house as I was. I threw my arms and body around Estelle, and told her in a voice that I hoped was firm and comforting that we were going to land but it would be a big bump so she was to stay curled up and not be frightened-but my words were cut short as the giant hand jerked us with a crack felt in the bones. Javitz cut the fuel. For a moment, it was silent enough to hear my voice reciting Hebrew. Then the world exploded in a racket of tearing metal and crackling trees, the screams of three human voices, and an unbelievable confusion of sound and pain and turmoil as we tumbled end over end and fell crying into the dark.
A crying seagull woke Damian. His eyes flared open, then squeezed shut against the pain. When he had himself under control, he looked first at his father, who had sat all night on a stool between the bunks, then towards the lump of bed-clothes opposite that was the kidnapped doctor.
Damian licked his dry lips; instantly, Holmes was holding a mug of water for him to drink. When his father had lowered his head to the pillow, the young man murmured, “Where are we?”
“Halfway to Holland, more or less.”
“Holland? Why on earth-?”
“It would appear that is where the wind and waves care to take us.”
“But we can’t go to Holland. What about this poor woman?”
“She, in fact, cast the deciding vote. Having treated you, she was loath to watch her work go for naught by permitting the toss of the boat to reopen your wounds.” What the doctor had said was, As the people in Wick seem disinclined to offer me employment, I may as well stay with the one patient who will have me. A sentiment that Holmes not only appreciated as a benefit to the lad in the bunk, but agreed with. Dr Henning had proved a surprisingly robust personality; he wondered what Russell would make of her.
Damian closed his eyes again, this time in despair rather than pain. “First a boat, then a doctor. I should have stayed in Orkney and let myself be arrested.”
An infinitesimal twitch from the bed-clothes betrayed the doctor’s reaction to that last word.
“If we are both in gaol,” Holmes said in a firm voice, “there will be no-one to prove your innocence. As soon as I assemble the evidence, we shall present it, and ourselves, to the police. Until then, subjecting you to incarceration will serve no end. And I believe we now must bring Dr Henning into our confidence.”
Without the slightest chagrin, the woman threw off the covers and sat up, blinking at the two men. “I’d like a cup of tea before we launch into explanations,” she said to Holmes, and to Damian, “How are you feeling?”
Holmes moved over to the stove while the other two concerned themselves with the sensations beneath the gauze. The doctor decided, as Holmes had earlier, that healing was under way, and no infection had begun.
He distributed the mugs, then pulled on a pair of stinking oilskins and a coat, stirred several spoons of sugar into a third mug of tea, and managed to get up the companionway without pouring it over himself.
The young fisherman’s face was gaunt with fatigue and his fingers were clumsy as they stripped off their gloves and wrapped around the mug. Holmes laid a hand on the wheel and, as the beverage scalded a path down the fisherman’s throat, said, “Your sense of responsibility is admirable, but you have been on deck for twenty-four hours, and you would better serve us all if you had some sleep. I am perfectly competent to keep us on a straight course for two or three hours.”
Gordon said nothing, just savoured the hot, sweet drink while studying Holmes’ hands, the sails, the sea. When the cup was empty, he said, “If anything changes-anything at all-you’ll wake me?”
“I imagine any slight change will rouse you before I can call, but yes. If so much as a bird lands on the deck, I’ll shout you up.”
Without another word, Gordon walked across to the hatch, looking half-asleep already as his feet hit the companionway. When his head had disappeared, Holmes felt as if he were drawing breath for the first time in thirty-six hours.
It was, in truth, precisely the sort of undemanding distraction he required at this point: his eyes occupied with the shapes and heading of other vessels on the North Sea water while his mind took the Brothers case from the shelf to examine it. He even managed to get a pipe going, to assist his meditations.
The need to spirit Damian away had taken priority-although the urgency of an investigation did tend to lag when its main actor died-but he hoped that Russell had lingered in the burnt-out hotel where Brothers had gone to ground long enough to unearth its secrets.
Not that she would have stayed until daylight: The police were sure to arrive there, and Russell would choose the child’s safety and freedom over any gathering of evidence. She would have done the best search she could by candle-light, then slipped away-removing or destroying first anything that might lead back to Damian.
But competent as Russell was, it remained a frustration to walk away from a case before its conclusion. True, they’d had no sign that Brothers’ acolytes had either participated in or were poised to resume their master’s crimes, but there was an itch at the back of his mind, the feeling that some piece of pattern did not quite match the others. Although even now, with the first leisure he’d had in days, he could not decide where that ill-fitting piece lay.
Perhaps, Holmes suggested to the machine in his mind that chewed up information and spat out hypotheses, the sensation of an ill fit was due not to something missing, but to the very nature of the man at its centre? Everything about Brothers-ideas, appetites, impulses, reason-was unbalanced; why should that not taint the case itself? Plus, there was no doubt that the speed of events over recent days made it impossible for data to catch him up. That alone made the case seem incomplete.
It was vexing, being unable to reach Russell, not even knowing how long it would be before he could reach her. Or Mycroft, for that matter.
Which raised a further source of aggravation: Mycroft. If the gaps in the Brothers case made for a mental itch, what he knew of Mycroft’s situation brought on the hives: Mycroft Holmes, taken in for questioning by Scotland Yard? Lestrade might as easily interrogate the king.
He had just knocked out his second pipe-load into the sea when a head of tousled copper hair appeared from the open hatch. The quizzical expression on the doctor’s face indicated that she and Damian had been talking, and that his son had kept little back.
“Sherlock Holmes?” The rising tone was not quite incredulity, but made it clear that she was questioning her patient’s clarity of mind, if not his outright sanity.
“Madam,” Holmes replied with a tip of the head, and resumed his study of the eastern horizon.
“I’m supposed to believe that?”
“A lady physician might be inclined towards belief in many impossible things.”
“That’s scarcely on the same level.”
He sighed. “You wish me to prove myself. I might show you identification, but papers can be forged. And I might recite the details of my professional life, but you would protest that I had merely read Dr Doyle’s fanciful tales in the Strand. Shall I then put on a demonstration, trot out my own patented brand of common sense? Shall I tell you that I know from your voice that you were born in Kirkcaldy and educated in Nottingham? That your father was a doctor who has either died or become incapacitated for work, freeing you to adopt his bag when you qualified? That the books and equipment you added to the somewhat antiquated surgery in Wick assured me that your skills were both considerable and up-to-date? That I knew you also had nursing experience because of the distinctive scarring on your fingers, which one sees on a person who has been in continuous proximity to infected wounds? That your shoes and your haircut are approximately the same age, which tells me you have been in Wick less than four weeks? That you wore a ring on your left hand for some years, and took it off around the time you started medical school? That-”
“All right! Stop!” She studied her left hand for a minute, comparing it to her right, then thrust both into her pockets. “You are often doubted, as to your identity?”
“One tends to use pseudonyms.”
“And… your son. Although his name is Adler.”
“His mother thought it best.”
She pulled her coat more tightly around her, and considered the decking. “My father died in the 1919 epidemic. And it was an engagement ring-the one I took off. When my fiancé died, it was all I had of him. I wore it until 1922.”
Holmes said nothing.
“Mr Adler’s wife was very pretty. To judge by his drawing of her, that is.”
“So I understand,” Holmes agreed, although she’d not been particularly lovely when he saw her in the mortuary, the plucky little idiot whose infatuation with a lunatic had landed them all in their current predicament-but that was neither charitable nor pertinent.
“He tells me she was murdered.”
“Two weeks ago. Damian only learnt of it yesterday. Her name was Yolanda, a Chinese woman from Shanghai. I never met her in life, but her first husband, from whom she had parted before she met Damian, turned out to be a madman convinced that human sacrifice performed at key places and auspicious times would transfer the psychic energies of his victims into him. He killed Yolanda and at least three other innocents. It was his bullet you retrieved.”
“‘Psychic energies’?” He felt her gaze boring against the side of his head. “You’re joking.”
“Would that I were.”
“He planned to make himself into…”
“A sort of Gnostic Übermensch, I suppose.”
Either she understood the reference to Nietzsche, or she was too distracted to hear it. “And the police find this difficult to believe?”
He glanced at her, surprised not by sarcasm, but by the lack of it. Most people of his acquaintance would cavil at the reasoning of the mad: Dr Henning spurned the distraction to grasp the essentials. Admirable woman.
“They may reach the same conclusion eventually; however, I was disinclined to hand Damian over to them until they did so. As I said, his reaction to being enclosed is extreme.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“Were the wind less assertive, I’d have put in along the coast of England, found a safe haven for Damian, and made my way to London. Now, I shall have to shelter him in Europe and make a more circuitous way home.”
She spotted a sturdy basket that had come to rest beside the capstan, and upended it, sitting with her face turned towards the long-vanished Scotland. “He says he’s only known you a short while.”
“We met briefly in the summer of 1919. After that, he went to Shanghai. I lost sight of him until he appeared on my terrace in Sussex, nineteen days ago.”
“And in that time his wife died at the hands of a crackpot, and you solved the case, then uncovered several other deaths, and eventually tracked the murderer to far distant Orkney, where Mr Adler was wounded. And this mad religious leader was killed.”
“An adequate précis, yes.”
“You killed the man?”
“A gun went off; he died.”
“And yet you say that you have committed no crime.”
“Homicide in defence of self or family is not a crime. My son saved my life.”
She blinked, not having expected that her patient was the man with the gun. After a minute, she asked, “The man was about to kill you?”
“Damian was his intended sacrifice, to coincide with yesterday’s solar eclipse over the sixty-fifth latitude. I intervened; there was a struggle.”
“Well,” she said. “You’ve certainly had a busy three weeks.”
“My wife did much of the work.”
“Your wife.” The flat syllables indicated that Damian had neglected this part of the tale.
“She read theology at Oxford.”
“Of course she did.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing. How do you intend to get the police to listen to you? Or will Mr Adler be forever in hiding?”
“That would not do at all. I have resources, and they will listen. However, I need to reach them first, without attracting police attention.”
“Hmm. And may I ask, where is Mr Adler’s daughter? He’d got as far as the confrontation on Friday night before exhaustion took him.”
“The child is with my wife.”
“Where?”
“Orkney, when last I saw them.”
“Mrs Holmes was on Orkney as well?”
“She goes by the name Russell, but yes, she was there. Damian’s memories of the incident at the Stones may be uncertain, but she and I were both present. However, with Damian injured, we could not risk having the child to slow us down. So we split up, and Russell and Estelle remained behind.”
“You left your wife and a child to explain to the police about a dead madman?”
“I should be astonished if Russell was still there when the police arrived.”
“She, too, is evading the police?”
“Dr Henning, you heard me say that all three of us have warrants out for our arrest, from before this. And all three of those warrants are unjustified. I say again, you will come to no harm, apart from the inconvenience of this voyage. For which I sincerely apologise.”
He met her gaze then, grey eyes locking on green, and in a moment, she surprised him. Her eyes began to dance, and her mouth twitched, and then she was laughing, with full acceptance and good humour and not a trace of the hysteria one might expect of a woman in her situation. She laughed so hard, the basket jumped out from underneath her and left the doctor sitting on the grubby deck.
“Oh, my,” she said, fishing out a handkerchief. “My, my, my. And to think that mere minutes before you arrived in my surgery, I was making an inventory of supplies that I’d counted ten times already and wondering if it was too late to take a position of public-school nurse that I’d been offered in Edinburgh.”
“Yes, well,” Holmes said, “my wife does not tend to complain of boredom.”
“I can see that.” She stretched her legs out straight and clasped her hands on her skirts, a gesture of decision. “Very well. I should tell you that I happen to have a relative on the Dutch coast. Would you consider that ‘safe haven’ for your son?”
I coasted through the darkness on silent wings for a time, and then snapped back into a confusion of pain and terror and the stench of petrol. Some furious creature was struggling against me, a knife was buried into my kidneys, and my head felt like a football: kicked about and swollen with air.
Directed less by thought than by animal instinct aimed at making the noise and pain go away, I patted at the furious struggling creature. After a while its noises and struggles diminished somewhat. Nothing I could do about the vacant pounding inside my skull, but, continuing the patting motion, I eased the creature off my belly, which reduced the stabbing of the knife.
I had no idea where I was, but I emphatically did not want to be there: topsy-turvy with walls pressing in on me, the crackle of broken glass accompanying my every motion, noises of distress beating at me. And not only noises-the enclosure was jumping in time to a pounding from outside.
My unoccupied hand came up of its own will and looped my dangling spectacles back onto my ears. With clarity came awareness: The panel in front of my nose had a hole in it. A bullet hole?
Suddenly the heavy reek of petrol was intolerable, and my entire body was seized by the need to be away-away! Whatever this enclosure was, it moved alarmingly with every blow from that person on the other side. My mouth formed some words-Stay there, perhaps?-and my body convulsed with the effort of turning the right way around.
On my knees was better than on my back. And my hands could grasp the lower (upper?) edge of the enclosure and tug: heavy, but it moved. The pounding and noise cut off abruptly, and I tugged again, but it was impossible to brace myself, crowded into this tiny space with another.
I would have more room to move if the small creature were not pressing against me-but what to do with it? I returned my grip to the lower edge of my cage, and said, “Get out when I lift this.”
And I lifted, straining with all my might and biting down on a scream of pain. The gap between hands and ground grew: two inches, then five, and now on a level with my hips. Quivering with effort, my skull near to explosion, I gasped, “Out!” and felt the creature squirm past me, beneath the dangerous weight of this structure, wailing in protest but obeying. A tiny pair of shoes gave a final kick against my knees, and then I was alone in the trap. I let the impossible weight settle down around me and collapsed against the side, panting and near to blacking out again.
The pounding started up again, with renewed urgency. A few of the accompanying words began to register: Petrol was chief among them, then fire.
A child’s voice from without joined the chorus, twining around the fire-person’s masculine bellows. My head-oh, my head! If they would only be quiet for a moment.
Estelle, that was the small creature’s name. And with her gone I could-just-manoeuvre myself into a half-standing, hunched-over position, my back against what was, in fact, the upturned floor of the enclosure. Which did me no good, since I couldn’t very well lift the weight and crawl out at the same time, but perhaps-
“Estelle? Estelle!” Shouting sent a bolt of agony through my head; it took me a moment to notice that she was no longer wailing and the man no longer shouting.
“’Stella, I need you to find something to prop under the back of the ’plane”-yes, there was an aeroplane in the equation-“when I lift it up. Can you find a big, heavy stick, about as tall as you are?” Could she? She was a mere child; I had no idea what she could do.
I heard her voice, although I couldn’t make out her words. She seemed to be moving towards my right, which indicated some kind of response to my command. The voice stopped, then started up again. It did this two or three times. A conversation? Did small children hallucinate? Or was it normal to converse with imaginary friends at times of stress?
“Estelle, can you find a stick, please? It’s really important, honey.”
“No, I-”
But her protest was cut off by a shudder in the enclosure, and without stopping to reflect on the unlikeliness of a child of forty months (even if she was Holmes’ granddaughter) understanding the fulcrum principle, I responded by pushing upwards with all my strength against the floorboards.
The machine rose, tail-end first, leaving the heavy engine off to my left. Tentatively, I let my knees sag a fraction; when the load remained up, I dropped to the ground and dove out from under the remains of the ’plane.
“Good work, Estelle,” I started to say, but then I saw her, thumb in mouth, staring towards the tail end of the machine. I took three steps forward, and saw the person responsible for lifting the burden.
I say person, but my concussed brain knew full well that it was indulging in a few hallucinations of its own, and that I had conjured up the creature of my recent thoughts and mythic dream. The being on whose shoulders our tail assembly was resting might have been spawned by the trees all around us: a wiry figure, all beard and hair, clothed in dark brown corduroy trousers, a lighter brown tweed jacket with an orange patch on one sleeve, a once-red shirt, a lavender tweed waistcoat, and a cap the green of the branches behind him. The cap had a feather in it. I glanced down, half-expecting hooves or fur where his trousers stopped, but he wore boots, their leather the colour of the soil.
I met a fool in the forest, a motley fool, my mind recited idiotically.
I became aware that he had said something. This creature of the woods had made speech. I blinked at him, and he repeated it, more loudly, but I was distracted by a presence at my side. A small child-Estelle. Estelle had both arms wrapped around my leg, as if clinging to a rooted tree in a hurricane. My hand smoothed the back of her head; I was dimly aware that she was sobbing, and only the woodman’s urgency forced a key word from his thrice-repeated warning into my awareness.
“Petrol!”
Petrol. Fire. Javitz-and the poor devil already bore the scars of flame.
Some dim awareness of a long-ago situation that had involved a child in need of distraction penetrated my mind, causing my hand to reach for an object that I didn’t know was there until I drew it out: a delicate porcelain dollies’ tea-cup, slipped into my pocket days before. I pressed it-miraculously unbroken-into the child’s hand. She looked at the familiar toy and unwrapped her arms from my leg, making sounds of exclamation while allowing me to usher her away (away! from the fire!) and settle her on the ground. I then moved with alacrity back to the remains of the machine.
The wreck was little more than a cigar-shaped tube-both wings had shredded, the propeller was gone, and the whole thing had flipped over. I squatted to look underneath, and blinked at the sight of Javitz’s head and shoulders, upside-down on the earth while his legs disappeared upwards. He worked to turn his head around.
“My foot’s caught,” he gasped. “Get out of here. The petrol will go up any moment.”
It was already dripping down the control-stick and across the pilot’s clothing.
“What can I do?” I asked him.
“Let me have your revolver, and then run.”
My thinking processes, far from clear, failed to connect the weapon with a means of freeing a caught foot. However, I could think of another weapon that might do it.
I dropped my jacket and the gun on the ground, then called to our hirsute rescuer, “Can you keep the machine absolutely still? If it shifts and makes a spark, we’ll both be trapped.”
“I can,” came the reply.
Javitz protested furiously all the while I was inching my way in beside him.
His right boot was caught on something invisible in the broken belly of the aeroplane. Ignoring his furious commands, I slid the knife out of my boot and walked both hands up a trouser leg sodden with petrol: knee; calf; ankle. When I reached his boot, my fingertips found the bit of metal snagging the laces. He had fallen silent, rigid with dread; I needed only whisper my warning: “Brace yourself.”
The knife point slid under the laces and the tough cord parted. He grunted as his full weight settled onto his bent neck. I held his foot away from the metal snag, waiting for him to pull away.
The only direction he could move was out, under the hanging body of the aeroplane, both of us praying that the buttons and ties of his clothing did not create any friction. Head, shoulders, torso, legs, and finally his feet-one booted, one bare-were pulled past my own feet and disappeared from view. My face was mere inches from his toes as I followed, fast as my legs could scrabble.
Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the fur coat and rucksack, spilt from the compartment. As I rose to my feet, I stretched out a hand to snatch them up: The pack came without hindrance; the fur caught briefly on something before coming free.
As it did so, a faint clang came from the depths of the machine. I took three panicked leaps, halfway to Estelle, and then the Whomp! of igniting petrol shoved at me and I caught her up in a somersault that ended in a tangle of legs, leaves, and fur among the trees.
If the petrol tank had not been down to its last quarter, the explosion would have incinerated us all. Still, there was plenty of fuel to set the machine instantly ablaze.
I stuck up my head, taking a census. Estelle sat, wide-eyed, covered in leaves, shocked speechless. I threw aside the fur and went to pick her up, although on closer examination, she seemed less terrified than amazed. Javitz, on the other hand, had come to a halt with his back against a tree and was staring white-faced and shuddering at the flames. Our rescuer-our rescuer was nowhere to be seen.
I set the child down next to Javitz, thinking that comforting her might at least distract him for a moment, then scrambled in a wide circle around the pulse of flames. I expected to find our Good Samaritan either aflame or impaled-but the dirt-coloured boots came into view, waving from the shrubbery beneath a slab of propeller quivering from a tree-trunk. The boots sank, and a head took their place. He stared open-mouthed at the propeller, the fire, and at me. His eyes, I noticed with the peculiar clarity of the concussed, were the very shade of Damian’s Green Man.
Then he laughed. “Ha!” he shouted, a bark of pure joy at the ridiculousness of life. “Ha ha!”
His head disappeared into the shrubbery, which convulsed madly until he emerged from their back side, brushing half a bushel of dried leaves from his clothing. He retrieved his cap from a branch, slapping it against his leg before pulling it onto his hair, then climbed onto the dirt track to stand, hands on hips, grinning at the dying flames. He looked like a village lad at a Guy Fawkes bonfire; I half-expected him to gather some branches to toss on.
“Ha!” he barked again.
Then his head turned to find the three of us and the beard parted in a wide grin, which seemed remarkably full of very white teeth. “Who knew this day would hold such drama?” he said cheerfully.
My brains were so thoroughly scrambled, I could only grin back at him. We watched the flames for a while-they were, in fact, remarkably interesting-until I reluctantly woke to my responsibilities and looked around me.
Estelle was patting our blood-soaked, terror-stricken pilot on the head, comforting him instead of the other way around as I had intended. His eyes were tightly shut as he struggled for control, and I kept my distance while this strong man pasted on a deathly smile, dismissing her services when what he wanted was to curl over and howl with terror. I gave him time, and when he was restored, I approached.
Estelle had sat down on the bedraggled fur. She was holding the tea-cup in one hand and an acorn-cap about the same size in the other, scowling between the two. I shook my head in wonder: I’d been in charge of this small life less than twelve hours, and I could already feel an ulcer coming on. How did parents survive?
I dropped to my knees beside Javitz. His face was contained, his left hand clamped around his upper thigh. Fresh blood oozed around the fingers. The once-white scarf had all but torn free, but I did not think this patch of roadway was the best place in which to examine his injuries.
A pair of dirt-coloured boots came into the corner of my vision, and I said, “He needs a doctor. Is there a town nearby?”
“No!” Javitz protested. “If there’s a town, there’ll be police.”
I glanced upwards to see what impression this statement had on the bearded man-expecting, perhaps, that a man who reacted to flames with childish glee would be childish in all things-but his raised eyebrows spoke of a mind quick enough to put together the situation. Although he did not seem alarmed.
“Three master criminals fleeing the law in an aeroplane,” he reflected. “I have fallen into a Boy’s Own adventure.”
His voice. I peered more closely at him, trying to see beneath the herbage. He might look like a resident of the wilderness-a charcoal-burner, perhaps, or a rat-catcher-but he sounded like an Oxford don.
I opened my mouth to pursue this oddity, but a small groan brought me back. Focus, I told myself: Your brains have been knocked about and all the world looks odd. “His injuries want attention,” I repeated.
The hairy man dropped into an easy squat, and a pair of surprisingly clean hands gently pushed aside the larger man’s blood-stained fingers. He looked into the pilot’s eyes and asked, “The bone’s not broken?”
“No,” Javitz answered through clenched jaws.
“This didn’t happen here.”
“I was shot.”
The green eyes travelled from Javitz to me and over my shoulder to Estelle, who had turned her back, literally, on the adults and was laying out a tea-party, supplementing the porcelain cup with acorn-caps and leaf-plates. He frowned, then jumped up and walked around to face her. She raised her head, and the green eyes went wide.
I found I had got to my feet and taken a step towards him, but he did not notice. Slowly, he lowered himself to his haunches. I watched, uncertain, as the two of them studied each other for the longest time. I could see his face clearly, but I could not begin to guess what he was thinking. He studied her face as if its features contained a message coded just for him.
Eventually, his gaze shifted, and he turned to scrabble at the leaf-mould, a small noise that startled my ears into noticing that the incessant engine noise was gone, that the noise of the flames was dying, that the ringing in my ears had given way to silence, blessed and profound.
He found what he was looking for, and held it out for Estelle’s approval: an acorn cup. After she had accepted it and added it to the others, he broke the stillness with a question. “Would you like to come to my house?”
“Yes, please,” she answered, without hesitation.
“Put those in your pocket, then. We’ll make some tea to go in them.”
“Thank you, Mr…”
“Goodman,” he supplied, and held out a hand to her. “But you can call me Robert.”
“My name is Estelle Adler,” she announced, and gave his hand two solemn shakes.
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Adler,” he said, and helped her to her feet.
Then he came back to us, with Estelle trailing after. He told Javitz, “If it’s not broken, there’s no point in a splint. Grit your teeth, friend.” And without so much as a grunt of effort, the small man slid his hands under the big American and lifted him like a child.
Goodman took half a dozen steps and vanished among the trees. I retrieved the fur coat, helped Estelle stash the last of the acorn cups in her pockets, and led her to the place where the men had disappeared. The narrow path between the trees would have gone unnoticed unless one had seen them go in. I glanced back at the now-smouldering wreck and took Estelle’s hand.
Three steps inside the green, she dug in her heels. With an ill-stifled groan, I bent to pick her up. She was not, in fact, heavy, and my tired arms forgot their bruises to welcome her.
Perhaps that was the answer to my earlier question, of how parents survived.
“It will be all right, Estelle,” I said. “I’m here.”
“But,” she piped in a worried voice, “shouldn’t we leave crumbs, so we can find our way out again?”
So it hadn’t been just my concussion: It would seem that we were actually setting forth into a fairy-tale.
The fairy-tale impression only grew stronger as we followed our rescuer, whom my abused brain insisted on calling Mr Green. I had not known that England still possessed areas of ancient woodland such as this. The light, here in what could only be called a forest, was so dim that I followed him more by sound than by the occasional glimpses I caught of his back. Once, when the child in my arms grew heavy with sleep, I stopped to wrap the fur more securely around her; when I stood again, the noise ahead of me resumed.
It began to rain lightly, more a background susurration than actual drips through the leaves. We travelled through the green nowhere, never seeing more than a few feet to either side, following the rhythm of firm footsteps. The journey was timeless, the landscape featureless, my companions noisy ghosts.
Then the noise ceased. In moments, I stepped into a clearing, and glanced involuntarily upwards to check the sky: yes, still cloudy, which meant it was the real England. And despite the heavy grey, I thought no more than an hour had passed since the crash.
Goodman’s home confirmed the sensation that Hansel and Gretel could not be far away-or perhaps Titania and Oberon. The structure-hard to think of it as a house-stood off-centre in a lush meadow encircled by forest and punctuated by one magnificent oak tree. Once upon a time, the dwelling may have been a woodman’s hut, but was now a gallimaufry of elements: A yellow-brick shed leant against a lichen-blotched stone hut butting up against a red-brick shack that was in turn held upright by a wooden lean-to that might have been built yesterday, the whole variously roofed with old moss-covered tile and slick new black slate and two sheets of rusted corrugated iron. The water tank perched on top looked like a joke, or a nesting-place for herons. The huge oak rose up thirty feet from the door, and might have been the home of fairies. At a slight remove stood another shed, this one wooden and apparently windowless, with a wired chicken-coop leaning to its side.
The faint aroma of wood-smoke in the air was the most real thing about it.
He had left the front door open, and I looked through into an unexpectedly light room of colour and wood. As I stepped in, I caught sight of Javitz’s legs, stretched out on a neatly made bed through an inner doorway. The Green Man-no, he had a name: Goodman-was in the act of spreading a thick duvet on the floor beside it. I followed him, going down on one knee to ease my sleeping burden onto the down pad; she made a faint protest in the back of her throat, then curled onto her side and was still. I left the fur around her and stood, kneading my upper arms and wondering why mothers didn’t resemble stevedores.
From the outside, the building had suggested an uncomfortable series of cramped spaces, but on the inside there were only two rooms. The bedroom was scarcely twice the size of the narrow bed it held, but the main room was spacious-or would be for a single inhabitant. It had a fireplace faced by two highly civilised soft chairs, a window with a long, padded window-seat at its base, a simple but sturdy wooden table, and a small kitchen consisting of a sink with a tap, a tiled work-surface, and a small wood-burning cook-stove.
As a whole, it resembled a windowed cave furnished by a jackdaw-or a child. One wall, floor to ceiling, was a collage of bright paper and small shiny objects, many of which looked as if they had been dug up in the woods: blue medicine bottles, bright labels from food tins, cut-out colour illustrations from ladies’ magazines, coins so old the features were worn away, bits of broken mirror glass, two mismatched hair-combs. In the centre was a spray of half a dozen feathers; around the wall, a wide arc of horseshoes from pony to draught-horse traced a path through the jumble. The rest of the room was similar: a Japanese tea-pot without a spout held a handful of wildflowers; none of the curtains matched; the original upholstery of the chairs was hidden beneath a length of brilliant orange-flowered curtain and a blue and green Paisley, respectively. Still, it was surprisingly clean and smelt sweet, as if the floor had been strewn with rushes until an instant before we walked in.
Our host had tossed sticks onto the fire and set a kettle over the heat, and was now divesting himself of his outer garments. When hat and coat were on their hooks-a randomly arranged nest of sawed-off antlers-he finally turned to me, a short, slim man showing no effects of having carried over thirteen stone of man through the woods for three quarters of an hour.
It was difficult to know how old he was. Even without all that disguising hair, he had the kind of skin that conceals a man’s age until he turns eighty overnight. He moved like a man of thirty but spoke like someone twice that; when his face was still, he had the ancient gaze of a trench soldier; when he grinned, his teeth were uneven and slightly oversized, like an adolescent who had yet to grow into his mouth.
“Thank you for coming to our rescue,” I told him. “I’m Mary Russell. That man you’ve been carrying is my pilot, Cash Javitz. He’s an American. The child is my husband’s granddaughter, Estelle.”
“Robert Goodman,” he said.
It was on the point of my tongue to say, Not Robin Goodfellow? but that was the concussion speaking.
Oddly, a twinkle in his emerald eyes suggested that he guessed the fanciful direction of my thoughts. I shook off the idea: stick to facts. “We started this morning in Orkney. I think Mr Javitz had hoped to make it to Manchester, but the machine rather came to pieces around us.”
“So I saw. Something to eat, then?”
“I think-”
But he had already snatched two large onions and a handful of carrots from a basket under the work-table, and set them beside a small knife and a heavy iron pan. “Chop these while I see to your pilot.”
I eyed the proceedings dubiously-I am no cook-and instead followed Goodfellow to the bedroom. There he gently removed the half-conscious man’s remaining boot before pulling a long, well-honed knife from somewhere about his person and, with one deft motion, slit the blood-soaked remnants of the trousers from cuff to belt.
He looked over the leg without touching it, then picked up a flowered bowl and bar of soap and pushed past me to spill water into it from the heating kettle. I was encouraged to see him scrub his hands. He even poured that water into the sink and refilled the bowl before bathing Javitz’s wound.
It was messy, a ten-inch furrow up the outside of his thigh. Because of the circumstances, it had bled a lot, but bar infection, I thought it would heal without permanent effect.
“Would stitches help?” I asked my host.
He shook his head. “They’d pull.”
I watched him work, cleaning the wound and examining the portions that were still bleeding, but those stubby hands knew what they were doing. “You’ve done this sort of thing before,” I remarked.
“He… A friend…” He stopped to concentrate on the wound. “I was an ambulance driver in the War. Lent a hand in the dressing stations when I was needed. One picks things up.”
It was a peculiar idea, Ariel strolling through the fourth act of Henry V-then I pushed the thought away, hard: Clearly, it would take a while for my brain to settle.
I left our unlikely medic to his repairs, and went to address the problem of the onions and carrots, about which I will say only that I succeeded in not giving my host another major wound to dress.
The remainder of Saturday passed in snippets of memory, cut from whole cloth and rearranged by the blow my head had taken:
After we ate, I lay dozing on a surprisingly comfortable if much-repaired deck chair beneath the big oak tree. The late-afternoon sun had broken through; someone had put a warm wrap over me.
Estelle and Goodman were sitting on a pair of upended firewood rounds, a third round between them as a table. On it the child had arranged an impromptu tea-service. The participants were Estelle, Goodman, and a bedraggled once-purple stuffed rabbit lifted from his sitting room wall, with a fourth setting for the fawn he had told her might come by. The plates were mismatched saucers from Goodman’s kitchen, the cups were two acorns, a small tea-cup, and her treasured porcelain dollies’ cup. The tea-pot was a creamer lacking a handle, decorated with the Brighton Pier and a generous stripe of gilt. A silver salt bowl and spoon made for a scaled-down sugar bowl. A clean khaki-coloured handkerchief was the tablecloth.
Goodman solemnly stirred a spoonful of nonexistent sugar into the dollies’ cup, which was scarcely larger than the salt spoon. He raised it to his lips and sipped noisily, then held it out to admire.
“This is very pretty,” he remarked.
“I have the others, at home,” she informed him. “That’s in London.”
“You only brought the one?”
“Mary brought it. She found it where I’d left it, at a friend of my Mama’s.”
“That was thoughtful of Mary.”
“Papa bought it for me in Shanghai, before we left. He gave it to me so I would have a reason to remember how beautiful the city was. But I don’t, really.”
“Still, it was a nice thought.”
“Mr Robert, do you think the baby deer will come out? Or should we give his serving to the bunny?”
Later that afternoon: I was now on a settee before the fireplace, while Estelle helped prepare supper, scrubbing potatoes while our host kneaded bread on a board.
“There’s a lot of potatoes,” she said in mild complaint.
“You can stop if you’re tired.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Sometimes when I’m doing a tedious job, I keep myself busy by singing.”
“I like to sing.”
“I thought you might. Do you want to sing something for me?”
She happily launched into a merry song with Chinese words. Despite the foreign tonality of the melody, her voice was pure and precise, skipping up the half tones without missing a one. At the end, Goodman clapped in an explosion of flour. I joined him, although the impact reverberated through my skull.
“Ha!” he laughed. “That was very fine. You must teach it to me one day.”
“You sing now,” she ordered.
Perhaps the task at hand or the demands of the kneading rhythm brought the song to mind: Goodman threw back his head and, in a rich and unexpected baritone, began to sing.
There were three men came from the west their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die.
I stirred and tried to catch his eye, but he was well launched into the song and beat his bread dough with gusto. I subsided; surely the child was too young to understand the words?
It is a rousing tune, to be sure, and he did skip over the more adult verses-it is a very old song, and whether it is a paean to fertility sacrifice, an evocation of Christian Transubstantiation, or simply a drinking song, John Barleycorn is put through the wringer-hacked, beaten, ploughed, sowed, and buried-before he is reborn as beer, and finally sprouts up anew. Goodman sang and thumped his bread, raising a fine mist of flour in the room.
To my relief, when the song ended, Estelle did not enquire into the significance of the words. She merely demanded another. Goodman started “Frère Jacques.” Instantly, she joined him. In French to his English, the high child’s voice and the man’s baritone wound around each other, creating sweet harmony from an unlikely cottage in a Lake District clearing.
During the afternoon, he juggled for her, four round oak galls, then threw himself into a game of hide-and-seek that had us both grinning with Estelle’s infectious giggles. Later, they went out to fetch the day’s eggs from the hen-house, stopping on the way to examine a flower of some kind.
“Let Nature be your teacher,” Goodman said-or rather, pronounced.
“I don’t go to school yet,” Estelle told him.
“It is never too early to have a teacher. Or too late,” he said, with a note of surprise.
“How is Nature a teacher? Does she stand in front of a classroom with a stick?”
“I believe Mr Wordsworth merely meant that we can learn much from the world around us.”
“Is Mr Wordsworth a friend of yours?”
“We have many friends in common, Mr Wordsworth and I. Such as the hedgehog you shall see this evening.”
Their voices trailed off then, in the direction of the hen-house.
Dusk. The mouth-watering odour of baking wheat permeated the universe, and although I had been up and around, I was again on the settee in front of the fire. Estelle and Goodman were seated side by side in the open doorway, waiting for a hedgehog to emerge after a saucer of milk. Every so often he reared back his head to look at her; he seemed fascinated by the shape of her eyes.
“There it is!” Estelle squeaked.
“Shh, don’t frighten him. Not to worry, he’ll come back in a minute. See, there’s his nose, sniffing to make certain the world is safe.”
“We won’t hurt it.”
“Hedgehogs are shy.”
“What does shy mean?”
“Shy is when a person is frightened of many things.”
“I’m shy.”
“Ha! I don’t think that’s so.”
“I’m frightened of aeroplanes.”
“That only makes you sensible.”
“I’m afraid of our neighbour’s dog. It’s big.”
“That’s probably sensible, too.”
“Are you scared of anything, Mr Robert?”
“Look, he’s finished the milk and is looking around for more. Greedy thing.”
“Shall we give him more?”
“No, we don’t want him to forget how to find his own food. Milk is a treat, not dinner.”
“What do hedgehogs eat?”
“Roots. Grubs.”
“Ew.”
“Carrots are roots. You ate those.”
“Because Mama says I have to be polite and eat what I’m given.”
“You don’t like carrots? Then I won’t serve them again.”
“But I don’t eat grubs.”
“True. But a hedgehog likes them. He would probably say ew if you offered him a chocolate biscuit.”
“Let’s try!”
“Ah, the scientific approach. No, I don’t wish to introduce him to the taste of chocolate. What if I’m wrong and he likes it, and that one morsel condemns the poor creature to spend the rest of his life in unrequited longing for the taste of chocolate?”
“You talk funny, Mr Robert.”
“People before you have told me that.”
“So, are you frightened of anything?”
“Logic and persistence-I fear you will go far in this world, Estelle Adler.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
He sighed. “Fear,” he said, and turned to look down at the child by his side. “I am afraid of fear.”
Then he jumped to his feet. “If you can say the word pipistrelle, I will take you to watch the bats come out.”
Evening, and I might have curled up to sleep fully clothed except it had occurred to me that children required putting to bed. Estelle and Goodman were in front of the fire, he on the floor with Damian’s sketch-book on his knee, she stretched with her belly across the tree-round he used for a foot-stool, narrating the drawings for him. I had found the book in my rucksack, astonished that it had survived this far, and leafed through its pages before I gave it to her, making sure it contained none of his detailed nudes or violent battle scenes. Some of the drawings I had found mildly troubling, but doubted a small child would notice.
“That’s Papa,” she said. “His face doesn’t look like that, much.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Goodman replied, and I had to smile: Damian’s self-portrait might have been an interspecies breeding experiment, his face oddly canine down to the suggestion of fur.
“And that’s Mama,” she said.
“She’s very pretty.” I must tell him about Estelle’s mother, I thought. Tomorrow.
“Papa says I have her hair.”
“Doesn’t she miss it?” he asked.
It took her a second to understand the joke. Then she giggled and called him silly, explaining that her Mama had her own hair, of course!
A vivid picture of that heavy black hair spilling over a cold slab flashed before my eyes; I shuddered.
The sound of a page turning, and then silence. I knew what sketch they were looking at, since I had lingered over it myself.
Estelle, yet not Estelle. In this portrait, Damian was looking forward through time to put an adult shape on his small daughter’s face. One might have thought it was Yolanda, from the clear Chinese cast to the features, but no one who knew Holmes could possibly mistake the imperious gaze from those grey eyes.
“I think that’s Mama,” the child said, sounding none too certain.
“No, it’s you,” Goodman said.
“I don’t look like that.”
“You will. Your Papa thinks you will.”
She leant forward, her nose near to touching the page.
“He loves you very much,” Goodman said.
“I love him, too. Mr Robert, is Papa all right?”
“Yes.” Goodman’s voice was absolutely certain, and my fingers twitched with the impulse to make a gesture against the evil eye.
Estelle did not respond, not immediately. Instead, a minute later I heard her feet cross the room, and opened my eyes to find her standing beside me, the sketch-book in her hand. “Can you take this out for me?” she asked.
I pushed myself upright, taking the book. She pointed to the drawing of her older self and ordered, “Take it out.”
I only hesitated for a moment before deciding, with the complete lack of logic that had permeated the last two days, that if Damian had wanted the drawing, he shouldn’t have let himself be duped by the charlatan who had murdered his wife. I reached down to my boot top for the knife I kept there, ran its razor-sharp point along the edge of the page, and handed it to her.
I thought Goodman was not going to accept it. He swallowed, shaken by the gift, before reaching out and taking it by the edges. After a moment, he stood and took it to the decorated wall. “Where should I put it?” he asked her.
She pointed at a handsbreadth of bare wood. Instead, he removed the bundle of feathers that marked the wall’s focal point, and mounted the drawing in its place.
She watched solemnly, then asked, “Is that the kind of feather that’s in your hat?”
“The very same,” he said, and began to work one of them free.
“Why do you wear a feather in your hat?”
“Ich habe einen Vogel,” he replied.
I choked, and he cast me a twinkle of his green eye.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means I have a bird. Or at least, one feather of a bird. And now so do you. This is for you,” he said to her. “It’s from the owl who lives in the big tree. She sometimes gives me one of her feathers, to thank me for sharing my mice with her.”
She fetched her hat and brought it to me, demanding that I work the feather into the hat’s crown.
I did so, trying not to laugh all the while: The colloquial English for the German Ich habe einen Vogel is I have bats in my belfry.
When the feather was installed, I suggested it was time for bed. Rather to my surprise, she accepted the command, although when she was tucked into the makeshift bed, the hat and its feather stood on the floor beside her head.
She wished us both good-night, and curled up with her face towards the wall, banishing my own thready memories of prolonged stories and prayers and glasses of water.
At long last, I was free to take to my own bed. I removed my shoes and sat on the window-seat I had been assigned, then realised that Goodman was still in the bedroom doorway, his eyes on the sleeping child. He felt my gaze, and turned to look at me. His eyes were liquid with tears. “‘A simple child,’” he said, “‘that lightly draws its breath/And feels its life in every limb…’”
Then turned and walked out of the house into the night.
Slowly, I arranged the wraps over my legs.
My paternal grandmother had been much taken by the poems of Wordsworth, the bard of the Lake District, and had read and recited them, over and over, when I was at her house in Boston. Thus, my mind could now supply the line about the child that Goodman had left off:
What should it know of death?
On Tuesday at half past five, Reverend Thomas Brothers’ taxi stopped in front of a house in St Albans. His left arm was in a sling, his overcoat rested on his shoulders, but he was in better condition than he’d anticipated, after the long journey south. The town itself pleased him, built as it was on the blood-sacrifice of a Roman: The site was propitious. “This town was known as Verulamium,” he told Gunderson, who had closed the taxi door and was now paying the driver. “It was the most important Roman town in the south of England. Named after an executed soldier, martyred as a Christian in the year 304.”
“Yes, sir,” the man replied.
Gunderson had never been the most responsive of employees. Still, he’d been surprisingly efficient, during these past months. Perhaps it was time to give him a small rise in salary.
Gunderson picked up their valises and followed Brothers up the steps, waiting as the door-bell clanged inside. The door came open, and Brothers stepped up, his right hand already out.
“We meet at last,” he said, for the man could not possibly be a servant, not in that suit. “Thank you, sir, for your longtime assistance to the cause.”
The man with the white streak in his hair replied, “Reverend Brothers, how do you do?” He took Brothers’ hand, although he still had his gloves on against the chill of the house. “Gunderson, you can leave those bags here. Come to the back, Mr Brothers, I have the fire going.”
Gunderson took the coat from his employer’s shoulders, and accepted Brothers’ hat and scarf.
When Gunderson came into the garden room, where the curtains were drawn and the air was cool despite the glowing gas fire, Brothers was well launched in his explanation of what had taken place over the past two weeks. He had claimed the chair nearest the heat, and allowed the other man to hand him coffee, accepting it as he might have from a servant. It was clear that Brothers considered himself the important person in this room, the other two mere worshippers at the altar of Thomas Brothers.
He poured out his heart to his two acolytes, blissfully unaware that heresy was in the offing.
Then he paused, and gave an embarrassed little laugh. “I have a confession to make, sir. I have to admit that I do not recall your name. I’m sure you told me, but I meet so many people, and our communications have been of the sort that names were not used.”
The man with the white streak in his hair had not, in fact, ever given Brothers his name. Nor had he shown himself to Brothers, although he’d gone to the man’s church once, early on, just to be sure that Brothers did not rave too outrageously in public. “Peter James West,” he said, putting out his still-gloved hand for another, ceremonial clasp.
“I am so glad to get this chance to talk with you, Mr West. You and Gunderson have been my faithful friends, my helpmeets, as it were, ever since I arrived in November. So I hope that you can help me find my way to understanding the events of this past week. I know we expected considerable results from the events of Friday, and I was at first deeply puzzled, even dispirited, at what appeared to be the failure of my sacrifice. However, as Testimony says, ‘The greater the sacrifice, the greater the energies loosed.’ I have had some days to meditate on it, and I should like to put before you my thoughts, to see if you are in agreement with my understanding. And also to get your thoughts about where I might go, since England looks to be a bit hot for me at the moment. I was thinking perhaps America, where they-”
“Brothers, I’m sure Gunderson is as tired of this nonsense as I am.”
Brothers gaped at him. “What was that you said?”
“You heard me. I put up with your claptrap because it made you such a useful tool. I brought you from Shanghai because of it.”
“You brought-for heaven’s sake, West, don’t be absurd!”
“Your name came to my attention last August, when I was searching for potential weak spots in a colleague. Your former wife provided a link-she’d married an artist in Shanghai, who I discovered was my colleague’s nephew. That made you useful.”
“Do you mean Damian Adler? The man has no family, he told me so himself.”
“Then he lied. However, we all know that you are in the habit of hearing only what you wish to hear, which makes your companionship, at times, most trying. So instead of your filling the air with verbiage, let me tell you a story.
“Certain government agencies keep themselves in the shadows. Some men regard this as an opportunity, others a responsibility. I work in such an agency, but I have an associate possessed by an overly grand and unfortunately archaic sense of his own importance. His presence is obstructive, for those of us concerned with this country’s ability to move into the Twentieth Century, but he is as thoroughly entrenched as Buckingham Palace itself.
“Three years ago, I discovered his flaw. Ironically enough, its very existence kept me from doing a thing about it. Then thirteen months ago, I found a wedge beneath his massive façade: I happened to see a letter he had received from Shanghai, addressing him as ‘uncle’ and referring to a service rendered years before. The nephew was writing to ask for my colleague’s assistance in establishing British citizenship, for himself and his new family.
“I immediately set into action a full investigation of this man and his wife. Which led me to you, with your small congregation of gullible spinsters and other neurasthenics. You received a letter in August from Sicily, suggesting that England was a rich but untapped bed of theological synthesis? You thought it came from Aleister Crowley, but it was, in fact, from me. I was prepared to offer further incentives, including a situation that would drive you from Shanghai under threat of arrest, but in the end, you readily seized on the idea of transplanting your harebrained theories to the land of your fathers, and were here before the Adlers arrived.
“I paved the way for you. I suggested where you could find an assistant such as Mr Gunderson here. I helped him arrange for your change of identity, your house, and hiring a church hall. And I stood by as your delusions took you over, and you began to slaughter various useless people in search of-whatever it was you imagined you would find.”
“I don’t-” Brothers said. “What do you… I mean to say, Why?”
“My… colleague has always appeared absolutely righteous, untouchably ethical, unquestionably moral. A god among lesser mortals. I’d thought at first I might use the bohemian morality of his nephew-a drugs party, perhaps, or an orgy-to lift the edges of that mask. All I needed was an event linked to my colleague that might plant a seed of doubt among his even more self-righteous superiors. One small doubt was all I needed, but you-good Lord, you gave me a harvest of them! I have to hand it to you, Brothers, I’d never expected to have it so easy-a few minor adjustments to the evidence, and the nephew became the chief suspect for Yolanda’s death. I owe you and your mad theories considerable thanks.”
“Mad! But, the Transformative-”
“Oh, for pity’s sake. Let me see your knife.”
“My-you mean the Tool?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Mr Brothers, let me see it for a moment, please?”
The voice was so reasonable that Brothers automatically reached for his collar, to loosen his clothing and retrieve the holy object he wore always near his skin. He withdrew it from its soft, thick leather scabbard, dark with decades of his body’s sweat, and contemplated the wicked object. “I don’t know that you should touch it,” he told West. “It is an object of considerable power, and your hands are not-oh!”
West took a quick step back.
The three men gazed at the ivory hilt protruding from Thomas Brothers’ shirt-front.
In no time at all, the energies of Thomas Brothers were freed to explore the Truths of the life beyond.