Rebel Fire (33 page)

Virginia was worried about him, he could tell. She kept glancing across at him while they were eating, and once or twice she would just rest her hand on his arm for a moment, then take it away when he didn't react.

The next day, on the ship, watching from the rail as New York harbour slipped away in the distance, Sherlock found himself shivering despite the warmth of the sun and the lack of wind. He felt ill, out of sorts, but he didn't know how to make himself better.

“So,” a familiar voice said from beside him, “how was the great metropolis of New York? Did you do whatever it was that you needed to do?”

He turned his head. Rufus Stone, the violinist he'd met on the journey out, was standing nearby, leaning on the rail. His violin case was slung across his back and his long black hair was loose across his collar.

“I thought you were staying in America,” Sherlock said, surprised.

“Ah, about that,” Rufus said ruefully. “I may not have mentioned, but I was in a bit of trouble back in the old country, and I was hoping that seeking the fabled pot of gold at this end of the rainbow would be a good move, but it turns out that people have been sending messages along that very same rainbow, and someone was waiting for me when I got here.” He sighed. “Who would have thought that the Irish would have the whole criminal underworld in New York sewn up like a corpse in a shroud?”

“So what happens now?” Sherlock asked. “Where do you go?”

“That depends,” Rufus said, gazing out across the water. “Do you know of anyone who is in desperate need of a violin tutor?”

“Funnily enough,” said Sherlock, “I think I do.”

 

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

And so here we are, at the end of teenage Sherlock Holmes's second adventure. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

In the first book Sherlock had started to pick up his logical way of thinking and his eye for evidence from the genial but rather mysterious Amyus Crowe. I also showed him starting to become interested in bees and in boxing, setting the scene for the skills and interests he later displays in the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (in “The Sign of Four,” for instance, a bare-knuckle fighter compliments Sherlock by saying, “You're one that has wasted your gifts. You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy”—“the fancy” being a slang term for the boxing fraternity).

In this book I have tried to imagine how and where Sherlock first learned to play the violin, as well as the events that provoked him to take an interest in tattoos (again, in the Conan Doyle stories, he can work out where a tattoo was done just by the pigments in the ink). In a more general sense I've laid some of the groundwork for the sympathy that Sherlock later shows towards America and Americans (Sherlock says in one of Conan Doyle's stories that he expects there to be a day when people in Great Britain and America will be “citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes”).

I've tried to make sure that the things that happen in this book are as historically accurate as possible. The SS
Scotia
did indeed go back and forth across the Atlantic, for instance, taking passengers from Liverpool to New York, as did the SS
Great Eastern
. I'm not sure whether it ever sailed from Southampton, but for the purposes of this book I'm assuming that it did at least once. The
Scotia
made its first voyage as a passenger ship in 1862 under Captain Judkins and its last in 1875, and for a while it held the record for the fastest transatlantic crossing, but its consumption of coal made it uneconomical and it did not make the Cunard Company, who built it, the profits they expected. After spending some years laying undersea cables for transatlantic telegraph messages, the
Scotia
ended up sinking off the island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean in 1904. For details on the SS
Scotia
, and other ships that plied the Atlantic passenger trade, I am indebted to the following books:

Transatlantic Paddle Steamers
by H. Philip Spratt. Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1951.

Transatlantic—Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships
by Stephen Fox. HarperCollins, 2003.

The story told aboard the SS
Scotia
by Captain Judkins, the one about the strange earwig-like creature found holding on to the undersea telegraph cable when it was brought up from the depths of the ocean, is a fabrication of mine, but such creatures do actually exist. Scary, but true. Check out the following Web site if you don't believe me:

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/1034874/monster-bug-attaches-itself-to-submarine

On the other hand, the giant red leech of Borneo that is known to science is not actually a bloodsucker, but instead eats the giant Borneo earthworm. The leech that Duke Balthassar uses for medical purposes here is, I suggest, a currently unknown species, but given the number of previously unknown species of animals discovered every year, from insects up to mammals, it's entirely possible that there
is
a giant red bloodsucking leech out there somewhere. The substance secreted in leech saliva to suppress the clotting of blood is factual: the substance is called hirudin, and leeches are increasingly being used in hospitals to stop potentially dangerous blood clots from forming in surgery patients. You can't yet get them on prescription, though.

The large reptiles that chase Sherlock, Matty, and Virginia in Duke Balthassar's animal enclosure are monitor lizards. Monitor lizards can grow up to several metres in length, have a high metabolic rate compared with most other reptiles, and can be as intelligent as a small dog (experiments have shown that monitor lizards can count up to six, although no scientist has yet shown what use this is to them).

The laying of the first undersea cables between Ireland and America is one of the nineteenth century's most incredible stories. I can recommend the following book as a great account:

A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable
by John Steele Gordon. Simon and Schuster, 2002.

Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin, who meets with Sherlock on the SS
Scotia
, took leave from the German army in 1863 and travelled to America, where he acted as an observer for the Northern Potomac army in the American Civil War against the Confederates. Crucially, while there he also met Professor Thaddeus Lowe, who was using tethered balloons as reconnaissance platforms in the Civil War, observing Confederate troop movements on behalf of the Union. All balloon rides had been made off-limits to civilians, so instead Professor Lowe sent Zeppelin to visit his German assistant John Steiner, who could talk to Zeppelin in German, rather than using Zeppelin's halting English. Zeppelin made his first ascent with Steiner's tethered balloon. Fascinated with the possibilities of balloons, Zeppelin returned to America in the 1870s to talk to Lowe again (although I have moved the date of this trip slightly to make it fit in with the time line of this book). Later, back in Germany, he would design the rigid balloon—the Zeppelin—that would make him famous.

Detail on New York, and the rest of America, in the 1860s was provided by:

Transatlantic Crossing: American Visitors to Britain and British Visitors to America in the Nineteenth Century
selected and edited by Walter Allen. William Heinemann, 1971.

The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York
by Matthew Goodman. Basic Books, 2008.

Material on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the historical aftermath was gleaned from:

“They Have Killed Papa Dead!”: The Road to Ford's Theatre, Abraham Lincoln's Murder, and the Rage for Vengeance
by Anthony S. Pitch. Steerforth Press, 2008.

It proved strangely difficult to find out very much about American railroads in the 1860s. A map would have been nice, or at the very least a timetable to show me how many changes of train a man would need to make to get from New York to Pennsylvania, but if such books exist I couldn't find them. What little detail I did glean came from:

The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890
by George Rogers Taylor and Irene D. Neu. University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Guide Book for Tourists and Travellers over the Valley Railway from Cleveland to Canton
(facsimile of the 1880 edition) by John S. Reese. The Kent State Press, 2002.

Bizarrely, there have been several plans by Americans, some associated with the U.S. government and some not, to take parts of Canada off Great Britain's hands by force of arms over the years. In 1864, during the American Civil War (or the War Between the States as it was known at the time), a group of Confederate soldiers went through Quebec to get to the U.S. state of Vermont, which was in Union hands. In 1866, two years before this book is set, a group of Irish Americans advocated invading Quebec and Ontario in order to use them as a base from which to strike against Britain in retaliation for what they saw as the British occupation of Ireland. Three times they sent an armed force into Canada—on the second and third attempts they had about a thousand men—but the first attempt just fizzled out and the later two were beaten back by force of arms. Years later, in 1896, Secretary of the Navy H. A. Herbert ordered the U.S. military to construct a plan to seize control of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence when it looked as if a border dispute between Venezuela and the British territory of British Guiana might escalate into war between the United States and Great Britain. Tensions fortunately subsided. Amongst other sources, I consulted the Straight Dope (
www.straightdope.com
) for the above information.

As before, I am indebted both to the descendants of Arthur Conan Doyle for giving their permission for me to write these books and to my agent and my editor, Rob Kirby and Rebecca McNally respectively, for giving me the space to do so.

By the time you read these words I should have finished writing the third Young Sherlock Holmes novel. I'm not going to reveal anything about it here, except the fact that it may well take Sherlock and his brother, Mycroft, to the depths of Siberia. Or it might involve the mysterious Giant Rat of Sumatra (a tale, Conan Doyle later tells us, for which the world is unprepared). Or both. I haven't decided yet. Keep reading, and you'll find out.

 

By Andrew Lane

Sherlock Holmes: The Legend Begins

Death Cloud

Rebel Fire

 

Copyright © 2011 by Andrew Lane

All rights reserved

First hardcover edition, 2012

eBook edition, April 2012

eISBN 978-1-4299-6171-4

macteenbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lane, Andrew.

    [Red leech]

    Rebel fire / Andrew Lane. — 1st American ed.

        p.    cm. — (Sherlock Holmes. The legend begins)

    Summary: In 1868, teenaged Sherlock Holmes discovers that his American tutor is hunting a notorious killer who was supposedly killed by the United States government, but who is apparently alive and well in Surrey, England.

    Includes bibliographical references.

    ISBN: 978-0-374-38768-6

    [1.  Mystery and detective stories.   2.  Great Britain—History—Victoria, 1837–1901—Fiction.]   I.  Title.

PZ7.L231758Re 2011

[Fic]—dc22

2011000124