Rebel Fire (20 page)

“I'll see you later,” he said.

“It is a small ship,” the Count replied, “and there are only so many of us on board. We are bound to bump into each other again.”

Leaving the Count behind, Sherlock walked towards Virginia.

“I was afraid you were going to spend the entire voyage in your cabin,” he said awkwardly.

“So was I,” she replied. “I hate bein' cooped up in a small room, but I don't see as I had much choice.” She blushed, the colour suddenly flooding into her pale cheeks, and she looked away. “I guess … I guess my pa told you that this voyage reminded me too much of the last voyage we took together, when my ma died.”

“He did,” Sherlock confirmed.

“And, to make it worse, I get seasick. You wouldn't believe that someone who rides a horse could get seasick, but I've been as sick as a dog.”

He couldn't help smiling. That complete honesty was one of the things he liked most about Virginia. No English girl would have dreamed of discussing matters of the stomach like that.

“How are you feeling now?” he asked.

“The lady I'm sharing a cabin with made me some herbal tea. This is the first day I've managed to keep any down, but I think it's helping.”

“I'm sorry about your mother,” he said awkwardly. “And I'm sorry this trip reminds you of her. I think being in England keeps on reminding you of her.”

“It does.” She paused. “I don't know if she was ill when she boarded, or whether she caught somethin' on board, but she was mightily sick for a whole week. She got thinner an' thinner, and whiter an' whiter, an' then she just slipped away.” A tear slid from her eye and began a slow trickle down her cheek. “They buried her at sea. The captain said he couldn't keep her body on board, not for the rest of the voyage, so they wrapped her in a canvas sheet an' said some pretty words an' then just tipped her over the side. That's the worst thing. I haven't even got a grave I can visit.” She gestured with her open palm at the expanse of ocean. “Just this.”

Sherlock was silent for a moment, then he said: “My mother's ill.” He didn't know he was going to say that; the words just spilled out of him.

“What's the matter?” Virginia asked.

“Nobody will talk about it.” He paused. “I think it's consumption.”

“Consumption?”

“Tuberculosis. She's pale and thin, and she's tired all the time. And I sometimes see blood in her handkerchief when she coughs, but I know my brother and my father try to stop me from seeing it.” He couldn't seem to stop himself from talking, now that he had started. “So I went into my father's library and I looked in as many books as I could until I found those symptoms. She's got tuberculosis, and she's going to die. There's no cure. It just makes people waste away, bit by bit.”

Virginia moved close and rested her head against his shoulder for a moment before moving away. “At least my ma was taken away quickly,” she said, gazing up at him. “I'd never thought about it before, but I guess that was a blessing. Seeing her slippin' away over weeks, months, years … that must be terrible.”

Sherlock turned away so she couldn't see the gleam of the tears that he felt pricking in his eyes.

“Are we really goin' to find him?” she whispered.

“Find who?”

“Matty.”

Sherlock felt his breath catch in his chest. He'd been asking himself the same question, and he was still no closer to an answer.

“We'll find him,” he said. “And he'll be all right. The men who kidnapped him have every reason in the world to keep him alive.”

“That's not a real answer,” she said softly, “and you know it.”

“Have you seen the ship?” he asked, deliberately changing the subject.

“Not that much of it. I've been asleep most of the time.”

“Then let me show you.”

He escorted her around the deck, showing her everything from the bows to the stern, including the pen where the animals were kept—now somewhat depleted in number after five days of the voyage. In the bows of the boat, she put her hand on his arm.

“Pa said you'd got into a fight,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“I'm always getting into fights,” he replied.

“You should learn to fight better.”

“Hey, I've managed so far. I've survived.”

“What happened? Tell me!”

So he told her everything that had happened with Grivens, the steward, and unlike the time when he'd told the story to Amyus Crowe he found himself getting emotional and having to stop a couple of times in order to get his feelings in check. Somehow, telling Virginia the story made it more real. It wasn't just a collection of facts anymore.

When he'd finished, she squeezed his arm. “Are you all right?”

“I will be, I suppose.”

“It's a shock, isn't it?”

He glanced at her, puzzled. “What?”

“Being responsible for the death of a human being. And knowing that it might have been you.”

He shrugged awkwardly. “I guess it is. I just … don't know how to react to it. I don't know what's appropriate.”

“I remember,” she said, “when we were livin' in Albuquerque, an' when Pa used to come back from his trips, he'd just slump into a chair an' want to drink whisky. We'd try to talk to him, but he wouldn't respond. I didn't know then what he did, or where he'd been. I only found out later that he'd been trackin' some killer, or a traitor, an' that sometimes it didn't end well.” She paused for a moment. “I guess what I'm tryin' to say is that when it starts to not matter, when you find you don't have a reaction, that's when you need to worry, 'cause that's the point where you ain't quite human anymore.”

She leaned up and kissed him briefly on the cheek: a touch of warmth in the cold air. “I'm goin' to go an' lie down for a while. I'll prob'ly see you at dinner.”

She walked off. He could still feel the warm trace left by her lips on his cheek.

*   *   *

The last three days of the voyage were filled with anticipation, and with a strange betting fever that swept over the passengers as they wagered on everything from the exact day, hour, and minute that they would see land to the first name of the pilot who would come aboard to guide them into New York harbour. Sherlock kept himself away from it, throwing himself with equal feverishness into his violin lessons with Rufus Stone. He practised the shapes of notes and chords with his left hand until the pads of his fingers were blistered. Only on the last day did Stone actually allow him to combine what he had learned about his stance, about his use of the bow, and about how his left hand should grasp the neck of the violin, and actually play for real.

It was one of his proudest accomplishments.

“You need to get yourself a violin,” Rufus told him. “A good one, not something made out of boxwood and held together with horse glue.” He scowled at Sherlock. “You have a certain natural talent, my friend, and your fingers are as long, as thin, and as flexible as pipe cleaners. You could go far. I'm not saying you could be a great concert violinist—I'd have needed to start teaching you at the age of five for that to happen—but I reckon if you keep practising you could earn your living in a theatre orchestra, for sure.”

They were interrupted by a commotion among the passengers at the front of the ship. Land had been sighted!

Sherlock rushed to look. The trip had been long enough that he'd almost forgotten what it was like to walk on a surface that didn't move under his feet.

America was a dark shape on the horizon that, over the course of several hours, resolved itself into a craggy line of hills and cliffs topped with trees. Strangely, it didn't look much different from the landscape of southern England, but there was something in the air, some indefinable scent, that suggested they were indeed somewhere else.

The ship turned so that it was heading down towards New York with the coastline on its starboard side. Despite the fact that there were still several hours to go before reaching port, some of the passengers rushed off to pack their bags.

The last meal before they arrived was a party, with special courses and a celebration cake along with crates of champagne. Sherlock ate sparingly and left as soon as he could in order to get some sleep before arrival. He had a feeling he was going to need it.

And then they were arriving in New York harbour. Despite his intentions, Sherlock stood out on deck with everyone else, watching the various small islands slide past them. The ship moved carefully, cautiously, under the control of the pilot—the local expert seaman who had joined the ship from a small boat that had come up alongside it.

“Complex area,” Amyus Crowe said from beside Sherlock. “One of the most intricate harbours in the world. There's three separate bodies of water that meet here—the Atlantic Ocean, the Hudson River, and the Long Island Sound. Add that to the fifty-odd islands in the vicinity, along with the thirty-odd rivers, creeks, an' streams apart from the Hudson that empty out here, an' you get a very complicated system of tides an' currents.”

“What do we do now?” Sherlock asked.

“First thing I got to do is make contact with the authorities. We're goin' to need help in this business, an' I owe it to them to tell them I'm back. There's men around this city that owe me some favours, an' I intend callin' in those favours, see if anyone remembers seeing young Matty and his captors, for a start. Your brother should have already telegraphed them to let them know we're comin', so I'm expectin' to be met at the dockside. And then we find out when the SS
Great Eastern
docked, assumin' it already has. If not, we wait for it. If it's already here then we track down where three men, one of them a mental invalid, along with a child, went. We can find them, I'm sure of it.” There was something hard in his voice, and when Sherlock glanced up it was as if Crowe's face were carved out of some heavy stone. “An' when we do find them, they will wish they had never been born.”

 

E
LEVEN

Disembarkation at New York was a chaotic affair. Everyone was trying to get down the gangplank at the same time with their luggage, and the number of passengers seemed to have doubled, with everyone from steerage suddenly appearing on deck and blinking at the bright sunlight. Eventually, however, all the passengers ended up in a large warehouse-type building, where lines formed and people were called forward to a row of desks where immigration officials in uniforms and with serious, humourless faces checked everyone's documents. Sherlock could make out hundreds of voices talking in as many different accents, and mentions of final destinations like Chicago, Pennsylvania, Boston, Virginia, and Baltimore.

Sherlock caught sight of Rufus Stone in a different queue. The violinist had his case slung over his shoulder. Apart from that he seemed to have precious little in the way of luggage. He turned and caught sight of Sherlock and winked. Sherlock smiled back.

The German—Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin—was also in another queue. His stiff back and his frown suggested that he wasn't used to waiting, or to mixing with people of such a different social class. He didn't look around at all. Instead he just stared straight ahead, apparently wishing he was anywhere else but there.

The ship had docked alongside many other ships belonging to different shipping lines, all set along the extensive harbour area. Most of them were iron- or wood-hulled with two huge paddle wheels on the sides, but Sherlock noticed a smattering of smaller wooden ships that still used sails, and some more modern iron ones that appeared to have a set of metal blades on an axle at the back.

The weather was hot and stifling. It reminded Sherlock of the engine room of the SS
Scotia
, but with an additional smell of sewage added on top. He tried to breathe as little as possible, standing with Virginia behind Amyus Crowe as the big American dealt with a particularly dour immigration official, then following Crowe outside into the open air of America.

America! He was in a different country! Excitedly, Sherlock looked around, trying to catalogue the differences between England and America. The sky was the same blue, of course, and the people looked identical to the ones he'd left behind, but there was something indefinably different. Maybe it was the cut of the clothes, or the architectural style of the buildings, or something he couldn't even put his finger on, but America was
different
from England.

Crowe managed to secure a cab—one of hundreds that were queuing up for the disembarking passengers—and they set off through the amazingly wide streets of New York. Most of the buildings were made either of wood or of a brown stone that must have been quarried locally. The wooden buildings were typically only one or two storeys tall, but the brownstone ones could be four or five storeys, and many of them had a basement level accessible via steps. A large number of the buildings nearest the harbour were either hotels, boardinghouses, restaurants, or bars, but as the cab headed into the city Sherlock spotted more and more shops and offices, as well as large tenement buildings where hundreds of people lived together but in their own separate sets of rooms. Now
that
was something you didn't see very often in England, except possibly in the dangerous Rookery areas of London.

And there were boys on every street corner selling newspapers, four or six sheets of small-print text that they waved over their heads while they called out the juicier headlines—bodies found without their hands, robberies carried out at gunpoint, politicians found to have taken bribes. All human life appeared to be there—well, the seamier side of human life, at least—and each boy seemed to be selling a different newspaper, the
Sun
, the
Chronicle
, the
Eagle
, the
Star
 … an endless parade of names.