Rebel Fire (8 page)

“Shall we?” Mycroft asked.

Within a few moments they had been joined by Sherrinford and Anna Holmes. Mycroft spent most of dinner discussing the accuracy of the Latin translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic books of the Old Testament. Aunt Anna spent most of the time talking to Sherrinford and Mycroft, oblivious of the fact that they were already talking to each other, although from some sense of gallantry Mycroft would turn around every so often and answer one of the questions that passed by in her continuous monologue. Sherlock spent his time eating, and avoiding the stare of Mrs. Eglantine, who glared at him from a position by the windows.

After dinner, Sherrinford and Anna escorted Mycroft to the front steps to say goodbye.

“Your Greek is fluent, and your Latin is particularly well constructed,” Sherrinford said, apparently the highest praise he could think of. “And I have enjoyed our discourse. Your knowledge of the Old Testament is lacking, but you have made some surprising deductions already, based on what I have told you. I will need to think long and hard about what you have suggested concerning the early days of the Church. Please visit us again soon.”

Aunt Anna surprised everyone by stepping forward and placing a hand on Mycroft's arm. “You are always welcome here,” she said. “I … regret … the animosity that has split the family. I wish it could be otherwise.”

“Your kindness is a force that could overcome all adversities,” Mycroft replied gently. “And the charity you have shown by looking after young Sherlock is a humbling example to us all. Consider the rift more than repaired, but eradicated.” He cast a glance into the shadows of the hall, where Sherlock thought he could just make out a figure, dressed in black, watching them. Mycroft lowered his voice. “But while a particular person still has influence within this house, I suspect I will never feel quite as accepted as you would wish me to feel.”

Anna looked away. Sherlock thought he could see the gleam of tears in her eyes. “We are where we are,” she said cryptically. “And we do what we do.”

Mycroft stepped back. “I will take my leave of you,” he said, “with many thanks. Might I presume upon your good natures one last time, and ask that Sherlock accompany me to the station? The carriage can bring him back afterwards.”

“Of course,” Sherrinford said, waving a hand airily.

As the carriage took them out of the grounds of the manor and onto the road, Sherlock looked back. There were three figures on the steps now—his aunt, his uncle, and Mrs. Eglantine. And either by accident or design, Mrs. Eglantine was standing on the highest step, towering over her employers.

“You still want to talk about what happened today,” Sherlock guessed as the carriage bounced over potholes and stones.

“Of course. We will be stopping at Mr. Crowe's cottage. There is still much to discuss.”

The carriage rattled through the landscape.

Sherlock could still feel an ache in his scalp where the scarred lunatic had grabbed him by the hair and dragged him into the house. He reached up and surreptitiously tugged at a lock, just to check that it wasn't going to come out. The sudden pain made tears spring out in his eyes, but the hair stayed where it was. Thank God.

Within ten minutes the carriage was slowing down, and Sherlock could see the loaflike shape of a thatched roof rising above a clump of bushes.

“Come,” said Mycroft as the carriage stopped outside a gate in a dry stone wall. “Mr. Crowe is expecting us.”

The cottage door was open. Mycroft knocked and then entered without waiting for an answer.

Amyus Crowe was sitting in a chair by the hearth, his massive form dwarfing the wooden frame. He was smoking a cigar. “Mr. Holmes,” he said equably, nodding.

“Mr. Crowe,” Mycroft responded. “Thank you for seeing us.”

“Please, sit yourselves down.”

Mycroft chose the only other comfortable chair in the room. Sherlock sat on a stool near the cold, empty fireplace and looked around. Amyus Crowe's cottage was as untidy as he remembered. A pile of letters was fastened to the wooden mantelpiece with a knife, and a lone slipper on the floor beside the fireplace contained a bunch of cigars, sticking upward in various directions. And there was a map of the local area attached to a wall with drawing pins. Circles and lines had been drawn on it in some apparently random pattern. Some of the lines continued off onto the plaster of the wall.

Sherlock wondered where Crowe's daughter, Virginia, was. There was no sign of her in the cottage, and given her headstrong attitude he wouldn't expect her to stay in her room meekly while the men talked. Maybe she was out riding around the countryside, as she seemed to do a lot of the time. He hadn't seen her horse, Sandia, outside the cottage.

He smiled. Virginia hated being inside. In some ways she was more like an animal than a person.

“Might I offer you a glass of sherry?” Crowe asked. “Can't stand the stuff myself—tastes like something's crawled into the barrel an' died—but I keep a bottle for visitors.”

“Thank you, but no,” Mycroft replied smoothly. “Sherlock does not drink, and I prefer a brandy at this time of day.” He glanced over at Sherlock. “America has still not managed to develop a national drink,” he said. “The French have wine and brandy, the Italians
grappa
, the Germans wheat beer, the Scots whisky, and the English ale, but our transatlantic cousins are still in the process of working out their own identity.”

It sounded to Sherlock as if Mycroft wasn't really talking about drinks at all, but trying to make some other, much more subtle point, but for the life of him he couldn't work out what it was.

“The Mexicans have a drink they distil from a cactus,” Crowe said good-humouredly. “Tequila, they call it. Maybe we could adopt that.”

“What's a cactus?” Sherlock asked.

“It's a fleshy plant with a thick skin an' covered with spikes,” Crowe responded. “It grows in the heat an' the sand of the hot, arid lands in Texas an' New Mexico an' California. The thick skin keeps the water from evaporatin' away, an' the spikes stop cows an' horses an' suchlike from eatin' it for the water content. Either the cactus is evidence of a Designer who makes things differently for different environments, so they can best survive, or it's evidence that there's some force that pushes livin' organisms to change and develop so as to best survive in whatever place they find themselves, as Mr. Charles Darwin contends. You pay your money and you make your choice.”

“Back to the subject at hand, what have you been able to discover?” Mycroft asked.

Crowe shrugged. “I found the house. It's empty. Looks like the occupants cleared out in a hurry. I talked to a farmworker along the road who saw them leave. He said there were four of them. One looked like he was asleep, one had his head all bandaged up, an' the other two were scowlin' like they'd got a long an' unpleasant journey ahead of them.”

“The birds have flown.” Mycroft considered for a moment. “Is there any more evidence that the sleeping man was John Wilkes Booth?”

Crowe shrugged. “Save what your brother told us, nothin'. It's instructive that his face was scarred by an old fire. The last thing that was heard of John Wilkes Booth was when he was involved in a shootout in a barn in Virginia with the Army. They'd tracked him down an' ordered him to surrender, but he opened fire. The Army fired back, an' somewhere along the line the barn caught fire. Prob'ly an oil lamp got knocked over. Anyhow, when the fire had died down the Army recovered a body from the wreckage. It was so badly burned they couldn't identify it properly, but they assumed it was Booth. Looks now like Booth escaped but some accomplice got caught in the fire an' couldn't get out in time.” He paused. “Booth was always highly strung. Seems now that the enormity of what he did an' the subsequent escape an' the fire have caused his mind to snap. What's interestin' to me is that he's obviously under the care an' protection of an organization of some kind, an' they obviously have a need for him. He ain't goin' to lead anyone anymore, not from what the lad here has said, so what else can he do for them?”

“He's a figurehead,” Mycroft pointed out. “Probably the most famous Confederate apart from General Lee and Jefferson Davis. If there's even a stub of Confederate supporters left in America, and if they have even the slightest flicker of interest in overturning the new presidency and installing one more sympathetic to their own beliefs, then John Wilkes Booth would be an ideal man for them to use as a rallying point. All they have to do is wheel him out at a few secret rallies and make a point about how he had the courage to try to bring down the Union with a few well-aimed bullets, and they could whip up a crowd into a frenzy.”

“That's what I was afraid of,” Crowe said, nodding. “Don't matter if he's of unsound mind—they just have to dope him up enough so he can stand still on a stage, an' they can make all kinds of speeches around him.” He paused for a moment. “What's the position of the British government on all of this?”

“I can't speak for the British government,” Mycroft said judiciously, “but I am aware that the Foreign Office is in favour of the current regime, and would not like to see the Confederacy resurgent. Slavery is an abhorrent practice, and it needs to be stamped out. The first thing a Confederate president would do is to reverse the advances made by President Lincoln and his successor. That will not do.”

Crowe sighed. “They're goin' to head back to the United States, aren't they?”

Mycroft nodded.

“Then I have to follow 'em.”

“We could send a telegram,” Mycroft offered. “It would beat them across the Atlantic.”

Crowe shook his head. “We don't know which ship they'll be on.”

“We can check the manifests,” Mycroft said. “Granted they'll be travelling under false names, but we can look for four men travelling together, one of whom is obviously sick.”

“They won't be travelling together.” Crowe sounded certain. “They'll book tickets separately, and possibly engage the services of a nurse to look after Booth. No, we'll be tryin' to track down four individuals whose descriptions are vague an' whose names are unknown.” He suddenly hit the arm of his chair with a balled fist, making Sherlock jump. “I'm a tracker. I have to track 'em. Simple as that. I'll assume they're headin' for New York an' start there.”

“I could help,” Sherlock said, surprising himself. “I'm the only one who's seen them. I could go to the docks and see who boards the ships.”

“We don't know where they're embarkin' from,” Crowe pointed out.

“It could be Southampton, or Liverpool, or even Queenstown,” Mycroft added gently. “One boy can't cover three ports, no matter how clever he is.”

“But…” Sherlock started to say, and then trailed off. What he wanted to say was that Crowe couldn't leave England, because Sherlock was only just beginning to understand the lessons that Crowe was teaching him, and if he
was
going to leave then he couldn't take his daughter, Virginia, with him. Sherlock was developing feelings for her that he didn't quite understand and he wanted to see where those feelings were going to lead him, even though they scared him. But he knew that neither of those arguments would hold any water when set against some vague but obviously important conspiracy directed against the government of an entire country.

But it looked as though his life was about to be turned upside down.

Again.

 

F
IVE

Mycroft and Crowe started discussing ship timetables and ports of embarkation and disembarkation. Sherlock got bored very quickly. His mind kept attacking the problem, trying to find something that would mean Amyus and Virginia Crowe wouldn't have to leave England.

“You still don't know what the men look like,” he pointed out after a few minutes. “You can track them, but how will you know when you've found them? As long as they keep the man with the burn scars out of sight, they'll just be three men. There's nothing particularly distinctive about them, apart from their accents, and I'm assuming that once you get to a dock with a ship heading for America there's going to be a lot of American accents around.”

“You can tell me the details of what they look like,” Crowe responded. “I've already trained you in lookin' for the small details that distinguish one face from another—the outline of the ears, the hairline, an' the shape of the eyes. We might even be able to come up with a couple of sketches based on your descriptions. Virginia's a dab hand with a pencil.”

“I'm not sure that will be enough,” Mycroft mused. “The recollections of one witness, even one as observant as my brother, can often be mistaken, and affected by stress. It's something I have long been interested in—the way the human mind can invent details and convince itself that they are true. I suspect there are many innocent men incarcerated in British prisons based on the uncertain recollections of one person. Once you have been told that you are looking for a man with a beard, suddenly all you can see is men with beards. No, whatever Sherlock remembers needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.”

Sherlock was about to protest that he had a perfect recollection of all four men, but something held him back. He sensed that the argument was beginning to swing back in his favour, with Mycroft and Crowe realizing that the problem was bigger than they had thought, and he didn't want to do anything to disrupt them.

But at the same time that his heart was trying to stop Amyus and Virginia Crowe from leaving, his head was telling him that this was important. Both Mycroft and Crowe were looking as serious as he had ever seen them. He wasn't sure that he completely understood the potential ramifications of what was going on—how could four men, one of them certifiably insane, affect the politics of an entire nation?—but he could tell that what was at stake here dwarfed his petty problems. If he could help, he should, regardless of the cost to himself.