Rebel Fire (19 page)

After a while he decided that lying in bed wasn't going to accomplish anything. He got up and went outside.

The sun was shining strongly on the deck of the SS
Scotia
. All around them the horizon was a flat line. It was as if they were at the centre of an upturned blue china bowl. There was no sign that they were moving at all; even the sea birds hung motionless in the air.

After a few minutes, he realized that he had been hearing a violin playing for some time without noticing. Rufus Stone? Probably. The chances of there being two violinists on board were fairly slim, and he thought he was beginning to be able to detect some elements of Stone's style—the flourishes he threw in at the end of certain phrases, and the way the fingers of his left hand sometimes struggled with complicated arpeggios.

He went looking for the man and found him in his usual spot near the bows of the ship. This time there was no crowd around him. Perhaps they'd all got bored.

“I was beginning to wonder if you'd decided to abandon our lessons like a man throws away a threadbare handkerchief,” Stone called, still playing.

“I had … a busy afternoon,” Sherlock responded. “But I'm here now.”

“Then let's start.” Rufus stopped playing and lowered the violin. “Any questions before we see how much of your stance you remember from this morning?”

Sherlock thought for a moment. “What's your favourite piece of music?” he asked. “Is it the Bruch you were playing this morning?”

Rufus considered. “No,” he said eventually. “I have a sneaking fondness for the work of Henryk Wieniawski. He has written several violin concertos, of which I prefer the second, in D minor. And then there's Giuseppe Tartini's famously difficult violin Sonata in G minor. That is a true test of a violinist's skill.”

“Difficult?” Sherlock asked.

“It's known as the Devil's Trill Sonata. Tartini claimed that he'd had a dream of the Devil playing the violin. When he woke up he tried to write down the piece of music the Devil was playing, and this was the closest he could get. It's so fiendishly difficult that some critics have suggested that Tartini had to have sold his own soul to the Devil in exchange for the skill to play it.”

“That's rubbish.”

“Of course it is. But it makes for a good story, and it helps to swell an audience if they think there's something spooky or bizarre about the music you're going to play.” He held the violin out to Sherlock. “Now let's see how much has stuck.”

For the rest of the afternoon, Sherlock held the violin under Rufus Stone's critical eye and tried, one after the other, different ways of using the bow to elicit notes from the instrument without actually worrying about which note it was. At the moment it was the technique that Rufus wanted him to master. He started with simply bowing the string in long, smooth, flowing gestures—
détaché
, as Rufus described it—while just supporting the neck of the instrument with his left hand rather than actually holding down any strings. That in itself took hours until Rufus was satisfied, first on one string and then on the others, as Sherlock tried hard to attain an even tone to the note no matter how long it lasted.

And that was how the rest of the voyage went. After breakfast, Sherlock would join Rufus Stone on deck for two hours, then they would move to the saloon for lunch. Another two hours of practice and then Sherlock would head back to his cabin for a break to read some more of Plato's
Republic
. Two more hours with Rufus Stone, and then dinner. Following that, Sherlock usually spent some time with Amyus Crowe in the library before heading to bed, but Crowe's day was mostly taken up with seeing to Virginia, and he had little time to continue with Sherlock's education. Little time, and little in the way of props or examples. Sherlock had already noted that Amyus Crowe's preferred method of teaching was to take something that he saw or had found and use it as the basis for a lesson. In the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight, there was precious little opportunity for him to do either.

Virginia stayed in her cabin, unwilling to come out on deck or talk to anyone. Sherlock saw her only once or twice during the entire journey. Her skin was so pale and translucent compared with the red of her hair that he worried she might not survive the voyage, but Amyus Crowe told him that she was going to be all right. She was just reliving the original journey over from New York to Liverpool, during which her mother had died. “A mental disturbance,” Crowe said one night in the library, “aggravated by the monotony of the journey and the fact that she misses Sandia terribly. Ginny's an outdoor girl, as you have probably realized by now. She hates to be cooped up anywhere. Once we disembark she'll be back to normal.”

The weather was surprisingly stable during the whole journey. Apart from one day of dark skies and squalling showers, during which Rufus Stone and Sherlock had to retreat to Sherlock's cabin to practise, the skies were blue and the sea was calm. Or, at least, the waves were small enough compared to the size of the hull that the
Scotia
could just carve its way through them.

Once, on the fourth day, there was some excitement when the captain announced that they had sighted another ship. Passengers took turns with a telescope to look at the distant speck on the horizon. Amyus Crowe did use this as the basis for a lesson, asking Sherlock to calculate the likelihood of two ships being within line of sight of each other, given the vastness of the ocean and the relatively small number of ships, but Sherlock had already realized that although the Atlantic Ocean was large and the distance between Southampton and New York was long, most ships tended to follow the same narrow corridor across, and there were tens, perhaps hundreds, of ships afloat at any one time. Given that, the chance was actually quite high.

Both Sherlock and Amyus noticed an exchange of flashing lights between the ships as night fell. Sherlock watched the crew on the
Scotia
sending their message using a lantern with a shutter across the front that could be opened or closed. Part of him worried about secret messages being sent to and from conspirators on both ships concerning him and Amyus and Virginia Crowe, but that would mean most of the crew would have to be part of the conspiracy, and that wasn't likely. And besides, there had been no other attempts to search the cabin or to do anything to the three of them, either before the other ship was sighted or afterwards. It seemed as though Grivens was the only person on the
Scotia
who had been recruited by the conspiracy.

The disappearance of the steward caused a small amount of consternation among the crew, and less among the passengers. The captain didn't try to turn the ship around and search in case he had fallen overboard. Sherlock could only assume that shreds of Grivens's clothes had been found among the machinery in the engine room, and that the captain had deduced that he'd fallen into the engine while drunk.

As time went on, Sherlock learned the main styles of bowing—
legato
,
collé
,
martelé
,
staccato
,
spiccato
, and
sautillé
—and he'd just started to use the fingers of his left hand to hold down the four strings in various ways to form notes and chords. He still hadn't played anything more musical than long, sustained tones. Rufus Stone was fanatical about building up technique and ability before letting a student loose on actual music, but Sherlock could appreciate Rufus's approach. It was logical. It made sense.

“What happens when we land?” Sherlock asked one day, late in the voyage, in a pause during a lesson.

“What happens is that I wander off into a new and glittering world of opportunity, looking to establish myself as a music teacher first, and then, if I'm lucky, find some suitable orchestra that will pay me to play. You, on the other hand, will join the estimable Mr. Crowe and his mysteriously absent daughter and do whatever it is that you've come to do in New York.”

During the fifth day of the voyage, during a break from his almost incessant violin practice, Sherlock spent some time at the bows of the ship, leaning on the rail and staring ahead at the distant blue line of the horizon.

He was not alone. Several other passengers were also in the bows of the boat, watching the wind and the waves and the clouds. Perhaps even watching for land, although it was far too early for that. Maybe the captain's stories about great storms and monstrous sea creatures had fired their imaginations and they were watching for the first sight of something out of the ordinary. As far as Sherlock was concerned they were more likely to see a drifting iceberg.

One man, wrapped in an overcoat against the cold wind, attracted Sherlock's attention. He had a trim black beard that curled out at the edges and a moustache that had been waxed so that it curled up at the ends. Instead of staring out across the ocean ahead, he had his back to it and was scribbling lines in a notebook with a pencil.

In fact, as he watched, Sherlock realized that the man was not scribbling lines but sketching something. Sherlock shifted his position, trying to see what the man was drawing, but all he could see on the paper of the man's notebook was a cylindrical object with pointed ends, something like a fat cigar. It seemed to be separated into sections by some internal walls, or barriers.

“You are interested in my drawing, yes?” the man said, glancing up. His voice had a strong accent: German, Sherlock thought.

“Sorry,” Sherlock said, blushing. “I just wondered why you weren't looking ahead, like everyone else.”

“I
am
looking ahead,” the man said. “A long way ahead, to a time when journeys such as ours are conducted not by boats, which are subject to storms and waves, but by balloon.”

“Balloon?”
Sherlock echoed. He nodded towards the sketch in the notebook. “Is that what that is?”

The man stared at Sherlock critically. “I think you are unlikely to be an industrial or a military spy,” he said. “Too young. And your face tells me that you have an open mind and a keen intellect, which is not my experience of spies.” He laughed, although it was more of a snort than a laugh. “I have been … criticized … in my own country for my ideas. I am hoping that in America things will be different.”

“I'm Sherlock Holmes.” Sherlock extended his right hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“And I am Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin,” the man said, bowing stiffly, then extending his hand to shake Sherlock's hand. “In your country, I would be referred to as Count Zeppelin. You may just refer to me as Count.” He turned his notebook around so that Sherlock could see it. “Now, tell me—can you conceive of a gigantic balloon made of varnished silk braced with hoops of some kind, a rigid airship, if you will, filled with a gas that is lighter than air and flying across the ocean at a height such that below the balloon you see clouds, not waves?”

“What gas would you use?” Sherlock asked.

The Count nodded. “An excellent question. The French have been using hot air for smaller balloons, although I cannot see that working for larger ones, and the American army have had good results with coke gas, which is derived from burning coal. I would favour hydrogen, if it could be purified enough.”

“And how would you move the balloon?” Sherlock was fascinated by this strange man's ideas. “Surely balloons would just float off?”

“This ship on which we find ourselves does not just float. It moves. It has engines. It has paddles. If paddles can move a ship through the water then they could move a balloon through the air.”

Sherlock looked at him dubiously. “Are you sure that would work?”

Von Zeppelin smiled coldly. “I have conducted an extensive study of lighter-than-air flight. Four years ago I was in America, acting as an observer for the Northern Potomac army in their war against the Confederate States. While I was there I made my first ascent in a tethered reconnaissance balloon. I also met Professor Thaddeus Lowe, who is probably the world's greatest expert on lighter-than-air flight.” Von Zeppelin's rather rigid face seemed to light up when he talked about balloons. It was obvious to Sherlock that the subject enthused him. “Professor Lowe had previously built a balloon intended for transatlantic flight, just like this ship, which he named the
Great Western
. It was 103 feet in diameter and could lift twelve tons. Before the war, he used it to make a successful flight from Philadelphia to New Jersey, but his first attempt to cross the Atlantic was halted when its skin was ripped open by a wind.” He shrugged. “The start of the war meant that Professor Lowe's plans were halted. He formed the Union Army Balloon Corps at the express request of President Lincoln. Wars are strange things. On the one hand they drag men of intellect away from their pursuit of progress, but on the other hand they also accelerate the need for progress, Without the War Between the States, would the president have been interested in the possibilities of balloons?”

“Sherlock!”

The voice was female, and young. It was Virginia. Sherlock turned to see her standing a little way off, in the lee of a lifeboat. She was still looking pale, but she was smiling.

“Excuse me,” he said to the Count. “I need to go.”

The Count bowed stiffly again. “Of course. The fair sex takes precedence over everything.”

“Are you married?” Sherlock asked.

“I am engaged to be married,” Zeppelin said. His stern face lit up as he smiled. “Her name is Isabella Freiin von Wolff, from the house of Alt-Schwanenburg, and she is the most beautiful woman in the world.” He glanced towards Virginia, then back to Sherlock. “Although you would not think so, I think.”

Sherlock smiled at him. He quite liked the German count.