“I have, then, a limited number of options. Considering the gravity of this particular case, I feel I should be justified in removing you from the firing line as I did Watson, until I can clear it up. No, do not interrupt. Much to my displeasure, I find I cannot bring myself to attempt that. For one thing, the logistics of keeping you under control are too daunting.
“It has been on my mind since Wales that an apprentice kept from her journeyman’s papers will spoil. Faced with this, what for lack of a better term I shall call a case, I have two choices: I can maintain your ‘apprenticeship’ (as you yourself called it), or I can grant you your Mastery. Having never been one for half-measures, I see no point in delaying the inevitable. Therefore…” He stopped, took his pipe from his mouth, looked into the bowl, put it back into his mouth, reached for the pouch in his pocket, and I very nearly screamed at him with the tension of being torn between “Thank God, here it comes, at last!” and “Oh, God, here it comes, he’s sending me away.”
He opened the tobacco pouch and dug from it a small, much-folded scrap of onionskin, dropped it in front of me, went to the ashtray clipped to the table, and began to scrape the dottle from his pipe while I unfolded the paper. On it, in five lines of minute, cramped, antique, and graphologically cryptic script, were written:
Egypt—Alexandria—Sayeed Abu Bahadr
Greece—Thessaloníki—Thomas Catalepo
Italy—Ravenna—Fr. Domenico
Palestine—Jaffa—Ali & Mahmoud Hazr
Morocco—Rabat—Peter Thomas
Each of the personal names was followed by a series of numbers that looked like a radio frequency. I looked up, but Holmes was at the window again, his unrevealing back to me.
“I have said before this time that I regard it as stupidity rather than courage to overlook a danger that presses as close as this one has. Even my critics will not accuse me of stupidity, else I should not have reached my present age after a lifetime of the rough-and-tumble. I remember vividly, as if it were last week rather than two and a half decades ago, sitting in Watson’s chair and admitting to him that London was too hot for my safety. The current state of affairs is…remarkably similar.
“The admission then caused me some shame. But, that was half a lifetime ago, and since then I have learnt, slowly, and painfully, that time and distance can prove a powerful weapon. It is not one that comes naturally to my hand, I admit. I much prefer direct attack, complete immersion, and a quick finish. However, there is much to be said for the occasional, judicious, prodigious expenditure of time.”
“What sort of time are you thinking of here, Holmes?” I asked warily. His most famous hiatus had lasted three years; that would certainly drive a cart and horses through my University degree.
“Not terribly long. Enough to instill doubts in our opponent—Was she wrong after all? Did I just choose to vanish? Where on earth am I?—and to allow Mycroft and the elephantine Scotland Yard to sweep up the data and begin to sift it over. By the time we return” (we! I snatched at) “the momentum will have been taken from her. She will be furious, and careless, with the knowledge that we have removed ourselves from her rules, that we have opted out of the traditional and expected program of threat, challenge, response, and counterattack.
“For better or for worse, you are in this case.” My brief surge of triumph was quickly submerged in a backwash of conflicting questions and feelings: Was he fleeing because he was saddled with me? And what on earth did he have in mind? Tibet? “What is more, you are in it as, God help us, my partner, or as near to such a creature as I am ever likely to see. Given the circumstances, I have no choice: I have to trust you.”
I could think of no sensible response to this, so I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.
“What should you have done if I had walked through my lodgings door the other night?”
“Hmmm. I wonder. Perhaps unfortunately, that question does not pertain. Here we stand; I can no other. And as a means of noting the fact of your accession to the lofty rights and privileges of partnership, I shall grant you a boon: I shall allow you to make the next decision. Where shall we go to keep from harm’s way for a bit? Do you know, Russell,” he said in a voice that verged on playful, “I don’t believe I’ve had a holiday in twenty-five years.”
In the past seventy-two hours I had seen a bomb on my door and the results of another on Holmes’ back, spent thirteen hard, tense hours slogging towards London, waved a gun at Holmes, seen my first major attempt at high fashion reduced to shreds, been ill-fed, under-slept, half-frozen, and shot at, witnessed Holmes in more perturbation than ever before, and now this wild swing from matter-of-fact confidences to near-teasing merriment. It was all a bit much.
I looked down at the paper in my hand, two inches of nearly transparent onionskin and its five lines of writing.
“Are these our only options?” I asked.
“By no means. Captain Jones is quite willing to steam around in circles if we ask him, or to head for South America or to the northern lights. There are few limits, although if you wish to try breaking the bank at Monte Carlo I shall have to arrange a discreet transfer of funds. Just avoid the United Kingdom or New York for six or eight weeks.”
“Two months! Holmes, I can’t be away for two months, I’ll be sent down if I miss that much time. And my aunt will have the army out. And Mrs. Hudson, and Watson…”
“Mrs. Hudson will embark tomorrow on a cruise.”
“A cruise! Mrs. Hudson?”
“To visit her family in Australia, I believe. And you need not concern yourself with Dr. Watson, either; his greatest danger will be gout from high living, where Mycroft has him secreted. Your college and tutors will grant you an exeat, while you attend to your urgent family business. Your aunt will be told that you are away.”
“Good Lord. If Mycroft can tame her, he’s a valuable ally indeed.” I could feel my objections beginning to waver.
“Well?”
“Who are these people?” I asked. Holmes plucked the paper from my hand.
“This is Mycroft’s writing,” he said by way of explanation.
“And Mycroft has…tasks that need doing in these places?”
“Precisely. His words were, if we choose to remove ourselves from the field of combat whilst the scouts assess the enemy’s position, we may as well be of some use to His Majesty, and might care for a change of scenery under auspices.” Holmes’ eyes were filled with mischief and amusement, and I could see that he had already laid our case to one side. He waved the paper gently in front of my nose. “It has been my experience,” he added, “that Mycroft’s assignments tend to offer quite extraordinary amounts of entertainment.”
I acquiesced, took the paper from his fingers, spread it out on the table in front of me, and pointed to the fourth line.
“Yisroel.”
“What?”
“Palestine, Israel, Zion, the Holy Land. I desire to walk through Jerusalem.”
Holmes nodded slowly, bemused. “I think I can honestly say, that particular destination should not have been my first choice. Greece, yes. Morocco, perhaps. Even Egypt, but Palestine? Very well, the choice is yours, and I am certain our foe will never guess that as my destination. To Palestine it is.”
BY MIDNIGHT WE were off the coast of France and, with no signs of anyone in our wake and strict radio silence maintained, the tight knot that had held me since Tuesday evening was beginning to loosen. Captain Jones came into our cabin, a barrel-shaped and lugubrious individual with thinning, once-red hair, distinguishable from the four crew members under his command by the state of his fingernails, which were slightly blacker than theirs, and the straight-spined, confident air of one who caters to royalty. The boy was a smaller version of his father, and all, including the child, had been chosen by Mycroft from wherever he was holed up with Watson.
“Good evening, Jones,” said Holmes. “Brandy? Or whisky?”
“No thank you, sir. I don’t drink when I’m out
to sea. Asking for problems, it is, sir. I just came down to ask if you’d decided on our course.”
“Palestine, Jones.”
“Palestine, sir?”
“Palestine. You know—Israel, Zion, the Holy Land. It is on your charts, I assume?”
“Of course, sir. It’s just that, well, if you’ve not been there recently, you’ll not find it the easiest place to move around in, so to speak. There has been a war on, you know,” he offered in a mild understatement.
“I am aware of that, Jones. London will have to be notified, and they shall make all the necessary arrangements.”
“Very good, sir. Shall I set course tonight, then?”
“The morning is just as well, Jones, there is no hurry. Is there, Russell?”
I opened my eyes. “None at all,” I confirmed, and closed them again.
“In the morning it is, then, sir, Miss.” His footsteps faded up the stairs.
Holmes stood silently, and I felt his gaze on me.
“Russell?”
“Mmm.”
“There’s nothing more that needs doing tonight. Go to bed. Or shall I cover you with a blanket again?”
“No, no, I shall go. Good night, Holmes.”
“Good night, Russell.”
I AWOKE WHEN the engines changed their sounds in the early grey light of dawn. Passing through the cabin for a glass of water I saw the silhouette of Holmes, curled in a chair staring out at the sea, knees to chin, pipe in hand. I said nothing as I went back to bed, and I do not think he noticed me. I slept all that day, and when I awoke it was a summer’s evening.
It was not actually summer, of course, and we were to have rain during the weeks that followed, but we had sun enough that Holmes and I could spend hours darkening our skins up on the deck. To think of London huddled under its blanket of sleet and thick yellow fogs as we sweated and dozed was like imagining another world, and I often found myself hoping fervently that our attempted murderer was caught in the worst of it, with bronchitis. And chilblains.
The days passed quickly. To my surprise Holmes did not seem to chafe under the enforced rest but appeared relaxed and cheerful. We spent hours devising complex mind games, and he taught me the subtleties of codes and ciphers. We took apart and rebuilt the ship’s spare radio, and began an experiment on the point at which various heated substances will self-ignite, but as it made the captain exceedingly nervous, we moved on to picking pockets. Christmas came and went, with flaming pudding and crackers with paper crowns and carols about iron-hard ground and snowy footprints, and after dinner Holmes came onto the upper deck with a chess set.
We had not played more than a handful of games since I had gone up to Oxford, and we quickly set to rediscovering the other’s gambits and style. I had improved in the last eighteen months, and he no longer had to spot me a piece, which pleased us both. We played regularly, though first a black bishop and then the white king rolled overboard and we had to improvise substitutes (a salt cellar and a large greasy nut and bolt, respectively).
Holmes won most of the games, but not all. He was a good player, ruthless and imaginative, but an erratic one, for he tended to glory in bizarre gambits and impossible saves rather than the methodical building of defence and thoroughly supported offence. Chess for him was an exercise, boring at times and always a poor substitute for the real game—rather like scales compared to the public performance of a concerto.
One hot afternoon off the island of Crete he came to board with a greater focus than was his wont and a nervous intensity that I found disturbing. We played three half-games, scrapped each time when he was satisfied with the direction each opening gambit had established. The fourth game, though, began with a peculiarly gleeful attitude and opening moves along the very edge of the queen’s side of the board. I braced myself for a wild game.
Holmes had drawn white, and he came out, whirling his knights across the board like a berserker with his chain mace, sixteen squares of shifting destruction and disruption that had me slapping together hasty defences at half a dozen spots across the board, summoning and abandoning bishops and rooks, spraying pawns ahead of the fray and leaving them in odd niches as the action stumbled away across the board. One after another he swatted aside my defences, until in desperation I separated my royalty, moving my queen away from the vulnerable king to draw my opponent’s fire. For a time I succeeded, but eventually he trapped her with a knight, and I lost her.
“What’s the matter with you, Russell?” he complained. “Your mind’s not on the game.”
“It is, you know, Holmes,” I said mildly, and reached forward to move a pawn, and with that move the entire haphazard disarray fell into a neat and deadly trap that depended on two pawns and a bishop. In three moves I had him mated.
I wanted to whoop and leap into the air and kiss Captain Jones on his bristly cheek for the sheer joy of seeing Holmes’ consternation and amazement, but instead I just sat and grinned at him like a dog.
He stared at the board like a conjuror’s audience, and the expression on his face was one of the biggest prizes I have ever won. Then it broke, and he slapped his knee with a short bark of delighted laughter and rearranged the pieces to replay the last six moves. At the end of it he wagged his head in appreciation.
“Well done, Russell. Deucedly clever, that. More devious than I’d have given you credit for. My children have bested me,” he quoted, somewhat irreverently.
“I wish I could claim credit for it, but the move came up in a game with my maths tutor a few months ago. I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to use it on you.”
“I’d not have thought that I could be tricked into overlooking a pawn,” he admitted. “That’s quite a gambit.”
“Yes. I fell for it too. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a queen in order to save the game.”
He looked up at me, startled, and then back to the board, and his face changed. A tightness crept slowly into his features until he looked pinched and pale beneath the brown of his skin’s surface, as someone does who is stricken by a gnawing pain in the vital organs.
“Holmes? Holmes, are you all right?”
“Hm? Oh, yes, Russell, I am fine. Never better. Thank you, Russell, for such an interesting game. You have given me much food for thought.” His hard visage relaxed into the gentlest of smiles. “Thank you, my dear Russell.” He reached out, but his fingers did not quite touch my cheek before he pulled them back, stood, and turned to go below. I sat on the sun-drenched deck and watched his back disappear, the victory turned to ashes in my mouth, and wondered what I had done.
I did not see him again until we arrived at Jaffa.
Excursus
A Gathering of Strength
13
Umbilicus Mundi
…it will serve a useful purpose by restoring our courage and stimulating research in a new direction.
I HAD NOT realised how greatly I desired Palestine until one of its towns leapt out at me from the list of places offered us, and the name was on my lips. I had no doubt that some day (next year) I should make my pilgrimage to the birthplace of my people, but a pilgrimage is a planned and contemplated event of the mind and, perhaps, the heart, which this most emphatically was not. When I was beset by fear and confusion, when no ground was sure beneath my feet and familiar places threatened, this foreign land reached out to me, called me to her, and I went, and found comfort, and shelter, and counsel. I, who had neither family nor home, found both there.
Palestine, Israel, that most troubled of lands; robbed, raped, ravaged, revered for most of four millennia; beaten and colonised by Sargon’s Akkadians in the third millennium B.C.E. and by Allenby’s England in the Common Era’s second millennium; holy to half the world, a narrow strip of marginally fertile soil whose every inch has felt the feet of conquering soldiers, a barren land whose only wealth lies in the children she had borne. Palestine.
At dusk we were making way casually south, parallel to the far-off shore, but when night had ful
ly fallen the captain changed to due east and, engines fast and quiet, we made for land. Holmes appeared, with a nearly flat knapsack and a preoccupied air, and at one in the morning we were bundled onto a ship’s boat with muffled rowlocks, and taken ashore. Our landing site was just south of Jaffa, or Yafo, a town whose Jewish population had been forced to flee from Arab violence during the war. Imagine my pleasure, then, when we were summarily shoved into the burnoosed arms of a pair of Arab cutthroats and abandoned. Before the boat had disappeared into the night we had sunk unseen into the war-ravaged land.
They were not cutthroats, or perhaps I should say they were not merely cutthroats. They were not even Arabs. We called them, at their invitation, Ali and Mahmoud, but in a cooler climate they would have been Albert and Matthew, and certain diphthongs in their English exuded public school and Oxbridge. Holmes said they were from Clapham. He also said that although they looked like the brothers they claimed to be, and acted like twins, they were at best distant cousins. I did not enquire further but contented myself with watching the pair of them, hand in hand in the fashion of Arab men, as they strolled the dusty roads, chattering interminably in colloquial Arabic and gesticulating wildly with their free hands while we followed in their wake.
If our two guides were not what they appeared, neither was anything else in the weeks that followed: The drab boat that had brought us from England was experimental, an outgrowth of war’s technology; its crew were not simply sailors, despite the presence of the child; even the two of us were not as we seemed, a father and son of dark-skinned, light-eyed nomads. Our very presence in the land had a heavy touch of the unreal about it: For the first two weeks we wandered with no apparent aim, performing a variety of tasks that again seemed aimless. We retrieved a document from a locked house; we reunited two old friends; we made detailed maps of two yawningly unimportant sites. During this dreamy time I had the feeling that we were being observed, if not judged, though I could never decide if someone was testing our abilities, or waiting for a job to appear that we were suited for. In either case, perhaps even coincidentally, a case abruptly appeared to immerse us and shore up our sagging self-confidence with the sharp exhilaration of danger and the demands of an uncomfortable way of life. I soon discovered in myself a decided taste for that way of life, as the sense of daring that the tamer liberty of Wales had given me flowered into a pure, hot passion for freedom. If Mycroft’s hidden purpose was to provide us with an exotic form of holiday, it certainly succeeded.
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