Mycroft Holmes (21 page)

Here it is
, Holmes thought.
The crucible.

He removed his wallet from his pants pocket. Inside was a slip of paper upon which were written the words
Sutton Plantation
, along with a local address. He handed it to Huan.

“Do you know of it?” he asked.

“No,” Huan admitted.

“A large plantation such as this?” Holmes pressed.

Huan shrugged. “Port of Spain is one plantation followed by another.” He flashed a grin. “We will find it.”

“Good. And as quickly as possible,” Holmes urged.

Douglas shook his head no.

“It’ll have to wait ’til morning, Holmes,” he said. “There are no lights in the outlying areas.”

“We cannot tarry…” Holmes began, but Huan seconded Douglas.

“Nico has many fine qualities,” he said, indicating his mule, “but not the eyes of a cat!”

“Nevertheless, we are not safe until we unravel this mystery,” Holmes insisted. “For your sake, Douglas, if not for mine…”

He looked away, his expression completing the thought.

For what happens to me no longer matters.

Huan misunderstood entirely.

“Ah, if it is safety you are after,” he chimed in, “I know just the place!” With that, he lowered the trap on the wagon and motioned them aboard with a welcoming hand.

“Where are we going?” Holmes asked, though if it wasn’t toward the Sutton plantation, he didn’t much care.

“You said safety? Safety is where we go!” Huan announced.

Then he smiled his brilliant smile.

This time, it had no effect on Holmes whatsoever.

* * *

They hastened to a section of the city that seemed darker than the rest. The crepuscular blue of the sky, which could linger for hours on islands like this, was not present here. There were no torches to light the way, no gas lamps.

From what Holmes could make out, it was a labyrinth of shanties more or less covered by shade trees and corrugated roofs. In spite of the gloom, it seemed the busiest of all the areas they had passed thus far. Hundreds of souls—rag pickers, from the looks of them, street vendors, and hawkers of all kinds—scurried from here to there, with their bounties atop their heads, or stuffed into buckets strapped to yokes laid across their shoulders. In all that scurrying about, they never entangled themselves in others’ comings and goings, but sidestepped one another like dancers on a busy stage, or ants on an anthill.

Yet it was all strangely quiet. The only sound was the slapping of sandals on the hard ground. The humidity no longer smelled to Holmes of spices and meat, but of something else, something sour yet nearly sticky in its sweetness. And the eerie, low-lying haze that enveloped the place carried with it the acrid odor of shag tobacco.

Sherlock would be at home here
, Holmes thought.

“
Ting ting
, Nico,
ting ting!
” Huan commanded.

The mule halted in front of what looked like an outdoor bar under an enormous silk cotton tree. It rose some eighty feet high, while its branches had the width and the breadth of a small-town plaza. A hunched little man wearing a
saipan
on his head was busily lighting colored lanterns. Other men were raising them by rope and pulley to their designated spots high in the air, until dozens were glowing like pinpoints underneath the branches, and illuminating what was beneath.

The panorama became clearer, but—in Holmes’s estimation—not a whit more comforting. He and Douglas climbed out of the cart and drew closer.

Dozens of Chinese men of indeterminate age were finding spots on two long wooden benches, placed on either side of a long wooden table that held only chopsticks and pewter mugs. Most of the men were clean-shaven, though a few had thin mustaches that fell to their jawlines. They wore what Holmes recognized as traditional Chinese outfits known as
changshan
—printed silks in the shape of skirts that covered them from waist to ankle, while loose-sleeved shirts or shirt jackets, held in place by cloth buttons and knots, did the job from waist to neck. As for their feet, they were either slippered or bare.

To a man, they lacked Huan’s gift for putting others at ease. They neither spoke nor looked around, but almost rhythmically alternated between drinking out of those pewter mugs and smoking the thin, reed-like pipes they held between their fingers, which accounted for the tobacco scent.

The hunched little man appeared again with a tray covered in dumplings. It seemed larger than he was. He reminded Holmes of a tiny leafcutter ant that somehow managed to drag an acorn five times its size back to the nest.

It’s a question of balance
, he thought.
Something the West has long forgotten.

The men picked up the chopsticks and helped themselves without uttering a word.

“Hungry?” Huan asked, watching Holmes’s eyes as he stood to the side and observed the goings-on. For the first time since his recovery, Holmes could genuinely say that he was anything but. His appetite had disappeared the moment he’d set foot outside the jail. Even the sight of food made him queasy.

“Sleepy?” Huan inquired again.

Holmes nodded, which was all he could muster.

“Sleep then!” Huan announced with a smile and a hearty slap to Holmes’s back that threatened to send him stumbling over a bench and into the table.

Douglas, whose hunger had not abated, excused himself to take a seat among the men. Without acknowledging him in the least, they scooted aside so that he might join them. One pushed chopsticks his way, which Douglas took but did not acknowledge with so much as a nod of thanks.

This left Holmes no choice but to follow a gesticulating, grinning Huan down a dank little alleyway. Though he’d left his bag in the cart, he had brought Sherlock’s walking stick, more to ensure that he’d remain solidly on his feet than for any protection it might provide. As they wandered about in the dark, having it as support seemed like the only sound decision he had made in a while.

“Where are we going?” Holmes asked dully, though more by rote than out of curiosity.

“Hotel. Safe hotel!”

They turned down an alleyway that was quiet except for the sound of their own shoes on the shale road, along with the gurgle of what looked like a thin river of green effluence that ran right in the middle of the street and seemed to be spreading slightly as they went. Above them were windows covered in cloths. Holmes could see dim lights behind one or two.

A moment later, Huan stopped. “Here we are!” he announced, followed by a hand gesture so extravagant that it would have been suitable to introduce the palace at Versailles. But this was no Versailles. This was a lean-to—a series of boards that had been nailed to the side of a shanty to form a right triangle.

Huan parted the burlap curtain that served as a doorway, and Holmes looked inside. There was a bed made of straw, with several moth-eaten blankets atop it. Beside the bed, a shipment container with a stamp in red that read
CIGARILLOS
served as an end table. A cheap and lavishly dripping candle in a dirty brass holder was the only source of light. Near the candle was placed the oldest, dustiest, most crumbling edition of the King James Bible that he had ever seen.

“Goodnight, Mycroft Holmes!” Huan said.

And he began to walk off.

“Wait!” Holmes cried after him. “What of the… the… facilities?”

“Facilities?” Huan repeated, as if the word were incomprehensible.

Then he grinned.

“Of course, no problem. Facilities!” he said. “Right outside the door. There!” And he pointed to the greenish effluence that meandered past.

To his own surprise, Holmes felt neither revulsion nor desperation at the thought of relieving himself in that filth. In truth, he would have welcomed either emotion as a reprieve to the numbness that enshrouded him.

Once Huan had gone, and with no better notion of what to do, he took off his topcoat and hat, kept the cane close at hand, unhooked the burlap door, and then lay down fully clothed on the hard straw mattress.

Deeply out of sorts, he picked up the Bible and flipped idly to one of the few verses therein that hadn’t been torn, crumpled or soiled.

It was a passage from the book of Jeremiah:

Stand ye in the ways, and see,
and ask for the old paths,
where is the good way, and walk therein,
and ye shall find rest for your souls.

The verse, though not particularly comforting, was certainly curious. What were “the old paths”? What was “the good way”? He felt as if the words had nothing to do with him, and yet had everything to do with him.

He thought he had found a good way, once.

And a path carved specifically to bring rest to his soul.

Now it was gone.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, HOLMES AND DOUGLAS WERE ONCE
again in the back of their rented gig, with Huan at the reins. The hollow feeling in Holmes’s stomach was still very much present, though his hunger had been sated. Douglas, ever thoughtful, had arrived at the lean-to with biscuits and fresh tea. Holmes, who had awoken ravenous, was so grateful that he did not think of inquiring from whence they came—or even to wonder where his friend had slept, if he had.

As they passed cocoa fields and sugar plantations—miles and miles of them—and as the day grew hotter, Holmes whistled to mitigate the dull anxiety in his head. He noticed that Douglas glanced at him occasionally, arching an eyebrow. Since he said nothing, Holmes continued whistling, and it eased his inner torment somewhat. Until Huan turned his head and looked squarely at him.

“Woman troubles?” the latter inquired.

“I beg… your pardon?” Holmes stammered.

At which point Douglas leaned in to explain.

“You have been whistling ‘La Donna è Mobile’ for the last quarter of an hour,” he said. “You end the verse and the chorus, then go back to the beginning.”

Holmes could not believe he was so fragile-minded as all that. It reminded him of the time he had quoted Dickens aloud in that London carriage. Was it possible that he was going mad? It certainly wasn’t out of the question, as there were seeds of madness in the family, specifically his mother…

In any case, he would not whistle, hum or sing “La Donna è Mobile” again. But it was too late.

Huan had begun to hum the popular operatic tune. He kept humming it, much to Holmes’s chagrin, until they reached their destination.

* * *

The Sutton plantation was comprised of acres and acres of wild sugar cane reaching upward of thirteen feet and more. It was lovely to look at, green and lush, but not at all what they were expecting.

“That cane has not seen a machete for at least a decade,” Douglas said as they rode past. He pointed out the tracks of the cane carts. “They are there, you see? Barely visible. The
Saccharum
has reclaimed all available space.”

The boiling house, when they passed it, was half torn down. Through the holes in the slats Douglas could see the brick furnaces, along with a succession of copper kettles of diminishing size, even the large cooling trough. Rats by the dozen skittered from the largest kettles to the trough as though it had been left especially for their amusement.

In a few more moments, the plantation house came into view, just beyond a dilapidated old barn.

It was a gracious affair in the American Southern tradition, with stately pillars and a sprawling wraparound porch, but it was so run down that Huan said he was sure it was abandoned. Holmes and Douglas had to encourage him to keep going.

As they passed the barn, Douglas was the first to notice an ancient nag inside, eating her fresh allotment of hay.

“Something resides here after all,” he said.

The men dismounted and peeked around the barn door, which was creaking on one broken hinge. Beyond the horse stall and the lone horse stood a carriage that had once been, if not grand, then certainly respectable. And from the tracks of the wheels, it appeared that it had been used fairly recently.

“Something resides here all right,” Holmes repeated, “but
how
?”

Huan put Nico and the gig in a shaded area outside the building, and the three of them made their way toward the main house.

* * *

They climbed the stairs to the crumbling porch, taking care not to place a foot on splintered planks or rot. Holmes knocked upon the worn front door.

Nothing.

He knocked again.

Before he could knock a third time, the door opened a crack, and a woman appeared.

This cannot be Georgiana’s mother
, Holmes thought.
It must be a servant.

She had told him that her mother was born in 1830, which would make her no more than forty years of age, yet this woman looked to be in her sixties, perhaps older. Her face, which may once have been lovely, was crisscrossed with lines, as if both weather and sorrow had left their mark. Her hair, which was pulled up in a thin and untidy bun, was a dull, yellowish gray. Her eyes were filmy with cataracts.

“Yes?” she inquired curiously. Holmes noticed a slight American Southern accent in her speech.