Mycroft Holmes (19 page)

“I can only thank the heavens, then, that he wasn’t aboard ship,” Holmes said in all seriousness. “Was that his boy?” he inquired. “The one with the pies?”

“Probably,” Douglas replied. “But he never uses the same helpmeet twice. Most likely he provided both food and tray, along with a goodly payment for the young charge. Three-Fingered Eddie prides himself on being a generous, if only a one-time employer.”

“Would he have poisoned those men out of a personal vendetta?”

Douglas shook his head no, then stopped and looked thoughtful.

“To this juncture, at least, it has never been personal with Eddie,” he amended. “It is simply business. He hails from my own neighborhood in San Fernando—”

“So, it is as we suspected,” Holmes interrupted. “Our swagmen were purchased aboard ship to torment us. That done, they became expendable. Someone here has deep pockets, Douglas. Forgive my brusqueness in Three-Fingered Eddie’s regard, but I doubt if it is worth our while to try to find him.”

Douglas nodded. “Even if we find him and demand to know who hired him, one does not survive as long as Eddie has unless one is tight-lipped, and with more hiding places than a gutter rat.”

“We could try to guess who hired him,” Holmes added, “but I think it would be best now to concern ourselves with why…”

He paused mid-thought.

Before they had even reached the plaza, he could smell the food. It was a heady mix of aromas—Indian, Creole, African, Spanish, Chinese—fused with sea salt, seeming to cling to the humid air. Holmes felt his knees go weak with desire. At the plaza, he scanned the crowds until he spied the vendors. As his olfactory sense had promised, they were selling what appeared to be a cornucopia of tasty concoctions.

However, there were queues of hungry patrons, and they were long. Holmes calculated the shortest line—with an approximate wait time of two minutes and four seconds per each of sixteen bodies…

“Perhaps we had best get to our destination first,” Douglas suggested.

For once, Holmes wished his emotions could best his logic. But he grunted his consent. Douglas tore his gaze from the vendors and their food carts and focused instead on the rigs for hire, spotting the one he’d retained.

The owner was a local of Chinese extraction. He was leaning against a two-wheeled gig, arms folded before him, eyes downcast to signal to prospective passengers that he was otherwise engaged. His face was as round as a penny, and of approximately the same hue. He looked up, almost as if a magnet had drawn him, and saw Holmes and Douglas. He stood up straight, clapped his hands like a child, and smiled so brightly that even Holmes exhaled with relief.

Douglas looked amused. “Huan has that effect on people.”

Huan hurried over to them, clapping all the while.

“You had me worrying,” he said to Douglas, looking as if he had never worried a day in his life. “Nico, too!” he added, pointing back to the mule harnessed to the gig. “The boat, she come ashore as she is bound to. We wait, as we are bound to. But no Cyrus Douglas.” He stopped, and his smile faded.

“Ah! But what has happened to your face, old friend?” he added the moment he got a good look at him.

“Ah,” Douglas said, his tone easily falling into the cadences of his homeland. “A bit of business to care for, is all!”

Huan nodded as if Douglas’s explanation were entirely sufficient.

“May I introduce my dear friend, Mycroft Holmes?” Douglas continued. “Holmes, my good friend Huan.”

The two shook hands.

“You have hair like the sun, my friend!” Huan commented. “And eyes like the ocean in a storm!”

Holmes was left speechless, for once.

They stored the bags, then Huan pulled down the back of the gig. Holmes and Douglas climbed in. Nico the mule stepped gingerly through the plaza, then quickened his step the moment they reached the packed-dirt streets. Pillows at the back made the journey only slightly less jarring.

And so it continues
, thought Holmes as he held onto the sides of the contraption for dear life.

* * *

Port of Spain was nestled between low-lying green hills, with palm and mangrove and cacao trees in full fruit. One-story wooden shanties gave way to old mud-plastered Spanish
ajoupas
, some of which had seemingly crumbled into convenient dust to make room for a large, impressive Catholic church here, an elaborate Indian temple there.

As they traversed the city, Holmes marveled at the whirlwind of civilizations, of conquerors alongside the vanquished. The sun was sinking into a fireball that streaked the sky crimson and mauve. He had to admit he had never seen a sunset to match it.

From having perused the maps, he knew that the city proper was composed of eleven major streets in a straight grid that pushed from the foot of the Laventille Hills to the area that culminated in the Saint Ann’s River. But like a waterway with endless tributaries, the streets split off into alleys and courts and cutaways and everything in between, as if the very nature of the place would not allow for conformity but somehow had to unshackle itself from the grid. The people themselves ebbed and flowed, making no allowances for vehicles at all, but simply walking where they pleased.

Huan turned in his seat and looked back at his passengers. “Everything here is done in the road,” he laughed as if it were a game. “Walking in the road, eating in the road, dancing in the road. Trinidad, she likes to play!”

Even so, he seemed to know precisely which tributary to navigate so they might proceed with a minimum of fuss. In truth, he appeared to be as intimate with his own city as Holmes was with the London grid. And Nico was a bright-eyed young mule with soft, chocolate-colored fur. He needed next to no prodding, but seemed to discern what his master wanted even before Huan was fully aware of it.

It made Holmes ache for Abie.

I do hope Parfitt is taking proper care of him
, he thought, though he had no reason to doubt it.

His musings were interrupted when one particular building caught his eye. It was the color of a freshly plucked mandarin orange, with a courtyard and lovely fountain that reminded him of paintings he had seen of Madrid.

He gestured toward it, but when he turned to Douglas to ask about it, he saw that his friend’s amber eyes had darkened. His skin looked sallow. He was glancing about, Holmes thought, as if unnaturally nervous.

“The Cabildo,” Douglas said in response to Holmes’s gesture. “Former seat of the Spanish colonial government, before the British set up their own government.” Then he leaned forward and called out to Huan. “Why so few people in the streets, my friend? On such a lovely spring evening as this?”

Huan shrugged and glanced back.

“The
douen
, my friend,” he said loudly enough to be heard. “They have arrived, and they have set up house. They call to the children to come play,” he added for Holmes’s benefit. “And then the
lougarou
, they finish the deed. Twelve children found dead, their blood sucked from their little bodies!”

“Twelve?” Douglas repeated in alarm. “I was told three.”

Huan nodded. “Nine in the last week alone. The
douen
and the
lougarou
, they have been busy of late.”

“Huan?” Holmes interjected. “You said the
douen
have been seen about. But seen by whom?”

“Ah, I did not say they had been seen,” Huan responded. “You do not see them, only footprints in the sand. Made by little feet that move forward but face back.”

“On sand…” Holmes repeated. “And are there other prints around those? Human feet, perhaps? Lines? Markings of any kind?”

Huan shook his head. “Little backward-facing feet, is all…!”

As they jostled along, Holmes rummaged inside his jacket pocket and pulled out the little clay feet. He opened his palm and pressed them into the soft part of his skin, “walking” them from pinky to thumb and back again—then he stared down quizzically at his hand.

* * *

The governor’s office wasn’t grand, but it had a certain charm. There were no interior hallways—each door simply opened up onto an arcaded front. And the second story, with its own arcaded walkways and backend balconies, provided shade for the offices below.

Shade was a necessity. Even as the sun descended, and though it was April, the heat was impressive. By nightfall, as the streets were cooling down, the buildings would have absorbed all the day’s sun. Sitting inside would grow quickly so oppressive that the only businesses that stayed open past sunset were eating and drinking establishments, gambling houses, and houses of ill repute.

But the governor’s office had been alerted that the secretary to the Secretary of State for War would be arriving on the
Sultana
on that specific day, and so—though they were past the point of their usual closure, the doors were still open to welcome Holmes in.

SIR ARTHUR CHARLES HAMILTON-GORDON, ALSO KNOWN AS LORD
Stanmore, was tall, with wispy gray hair, a long, slightly crooked nose in an equally long, slightly crooked face, and a good-natured, hearty disposition.

The son of a former British prime minister, he was too well bred to mention their battered faces. For that, Holmes was grateful, as it meant he had no need to explain. He and the governor simply greeted one another as though the obvious did not exist, and when Holmes introduced Douglas as his aide-de-camp—a lofty title, given that Holmes himself was little more than that to Cardwell—Hamilton-Gordon did not twitch so much as an eyebrow.

There was a slight, black-haired man in his thirties—Holmes assumed he was the governor’s own aide-de-camp—who was not so charitable. He looked askance at Douglas, and when the governor requested a platter of biscuits and three cups of rum, the aide could not hold his tongue.

“Three, your Lordship?” he asked, his tone making it clear that he did not approve of Negroes imbibing with their betters.

The baron frowned, and turned to Holmes.

“Has your aide other duties to execute at this late hour?” he inquired. When Holmes assured him that Douglas was at liberty, the governor smiled.

“There you have it, Beauchamp,” he declared. “Three glasses. Gentlemen! Make yourselves at home.” He indicated two plush leather armchairs on the other side of his desk.

Douglas and Holmes did as instructed, sinking into them with gratitude.

* * *

As they waited for the biscuits and rum, Douglas dearly wished Holmes would get to the reason for their visit—which was, after all, of some urgency. But Holmes and the baron had first to observe the niceties of their class—talk of the weather back in England, the state of the British pound, even the health of the Queen.

If their toes were on fire
, Douglas thought,
they would still spend a quarter of an hour on polite chatter before reaching for the extinguisher.
He sank deeper into the armchair, stared out at the enormous five-fingered tree that grew up and over the back balcony, and let it all evolve as it would.

For the next few moments, Holmes and the governor spoke of Cambridge, their alma mater. The baron recounted that he had spent six years as Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick before his 1866 transfer to Trinidad.

“The differences between this place and Canada are monumental,” the governor confided, “and I do not simply mean the weather. It seems that Port of Spain runs on graft. It is to be expected, I suppose. When a country is poor, anything can be bought.”

“Yes, we experienced a taste of that ourselves on the
Sultana
,” Holmes said cryptically. “We also hear tell of… supernatural occurrences.”

“They are a superstitious lot, Mr. Holmes,” the baron exclaimed. “If we were to chase down every bogeyman that… aha, but here we are!”

* * *

His aide arrived with the tray of sustenance. The three men took their biscuits and rum, and toasted to Trinidad. The rum warmed Holmes’s belly, but it was the biscuits he craved. He ate one, then another almost immediately. Only sheer willpower kept him from making a complete spectacle of himself with the third.

Douglas, he noted, was more circumspect.

Both his age and his coloring have taught him patience
, Holmes mused, watching the restraint with which his friend ate and drank—even though Holmes knew full well that they were equally famished.

“Mr. Holmes?” Hamilton-Gordon was staring at him curiously. “The note I received from Mr. Cardwell mentioned that you wish to visit the French Creole section of the city.”

“Yes, but, uhm…” Holmes managed to choke down his third biscuit. Then he pulled out the envelope that Captain Miles had given him.

“Forgive me,” he said to Hamilton-Gordon. “Before we discuss my plans, this was entrusted to us with some urgency. We were asked not to open it until we reached you. Do I now have your permission to reveal its contents?”

The baron looked at it quizzically.

Then he turned to his young aide.

“That will do, Beauchamp,” he said.

The three waited until Beauchamp walked out, shutting the door behind him. Then Holmes tore open the envelope. Inside was one sheet of paper, and on that sheet were hand-written eight names.