by Anna Elliott
The rain had followed them through Nice, Genoa, Bologna, Ancona … and now the pale yellow stone buildings of Brindisi were wet and streaming, the cobblestone streets awash.
It was somehow ironic. She had been pursued from Milan, kidnapped from London, and brought here, straight back to Italy. Although Zoe had never been to the southern coastal city of Brindisi before. Another time, she might have been interested in the ancient churches and the Roman pillar—once one of a pair that had marked the end of the Appian Way.
And what are you going to do now? Sherlock Holmes—or her imagined version of him—commented inside her mind.
She had taken to silently conversing with Sherlock a good deal these past two weeks. It was one of the few things that had kept her from giving way to fear or blind panic throughout the long, solitary hours of their journey.
She had made the discovery that fear and tedium weren’t, as she would have supposed, incompatible. It was possible to be utterly terrified and excruciatingly bored at the same time. And a very unpleasant combination the two emotions made, too.
She released a breath, answering Sherlock.
That’s easy for you to say.
She stopped herself before she could add, You’re not the one who’s here, being carted all across Europe like a bundle of luggage.
Sherlock—her imagined Sherlock—would only make the same reply that the real Sherlock Holmes would probably have made, if he had been present in the room with her: that of course he wasn’t here. He would have been far too intelligent to get himself taken prisoner in the first place.
Instead, Zoe looked out through the small window of the inn where they were to stay the night. The room was chilly, despite the fire that burned in the fireplace, and a gust of wind flung a spatter of water droplets against the pane of glass.
She didn’t know where their journey would next take them. Her captors had been careful not to inform her of any details, even the location where they were bound.
If she knew that, she might be able to make plans, formulate some means of escape.
Zoe supposed it was flattering that they credited her with that much intelligence and capability, given that she felt as trapped as a butterfly skewered to a lepidopterist’s specimen card. Even if she knew their destination, she didn’t see any way—
The sound of the door opening made her break off that depressing train of thought.
She’d assumed that it would be Mrs. Orles returning, but instead it was the maidservant: a pretty, rosy-cheeked Italian girl, who curtsied and said, “The gentleman wishes to see you. Downstairs.”
The gentleman. Sonnebourne.
Zoe’s heart kicked hard against her ribs, but it wasn’t as though she could refuse.
On the bed behind her, Safiya moaned and tossed her head restlessly on the pillow. She would be waking soon, or as close to waking as she ever came.
The bones of her face looked too sharp beneath the skin, and her breathing had an unhealthy rasp to it that Zoe didn’t at all like. How long could even a healthy young girl be kept semi-starved and drugged? At the very least, all the opium Safiya had been given would be wreaking havoc on her constitution.
If they ever got out of this alive, Zoe thought grimly, Sherlock might well have to give the girl advice on recovering from the effects of a drug addiction.
But for that to happen, she needed a way to ensure that Sherlock found both of them.
And for now, Safiya’s presence—and vulnerability—were a vivid reminder of exactly why Zoe had to trot meekly to obey Lord Sonnebourne’s summons.
For now.
Unless she could think of some way out of here.
She made herself nod and smile at the serving girl and say, “Of course. I’ll come straight away.”
Fear gave your enemy power over you. She couldn’t remember whether it was from Sherlock she’d heard that saying. No, on second thought, it couldn’t have been him; to speak of fear would have been to admit that he was vulnerable to the human frailty of being afraid.
It was true, though. In every other regard, she was currently in Lord Sonnebourne’s power. She could at least refuse to live in terror of him.
Her heart was still beating sickeningly in her ears, though, as she opened the door to the small sitting room downstairs, which Lord Sonnebourne had taken over for the duration of their stay.
He was standing at the window with his back to her, looking out to the nearby harbour, where through the rain and the sea mist, Zoe could just barely make out the outline of a steamer ship at anchor.
She was certain that he’d heard her come in, but he didn’t move or acknowledge her presence. She counted off eight, then nine beats of her own heart before he swung around and said,
“Sherlock Holmes is dead.”
The words struck like a slap. Zoe felt as though she were falling, as though the floor had just opened up below her. Only the knowledge that Sonnebourne was watching her closely, expecting a reaction to the blunt statement, enabled her to keep her expression neutral.
“You must be happy to hear it.”
Sonnebourne was a big man, somewhere in his middle forties, tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong-boned, handsome face and light blond hair. He leaned forward a little.
“You are not distressed by the news?”
“Were you expecting that I would be?”
Sonnebourne didn’t answer. Instead his eyes, startlingly blue in his tanned, leonine face, continued to bore into Zoe’s.
Even now, with her pulse skipping and sickness rising in her, Zoe was conscious of the magnetic pull of his personality, the way his intense blue gaze focused on her as though she were at that moment the most important thing in his world.
A wasted effort, since she was not only his prisoner, but also knew him to be a cold-blooded murderer many times over. But she had, at that moment, been able to understand why for several years Lord Sonnebourne had been the successful leader of a cult of gullible and extremely wealthy sun worshipers. Powerful and charismatic, he looked on all the world with the intent, hypnotic gaze of a snake charmer bending his animal charge to his will.
“Or perhaps you do not believe it is true?” he asked. His voice was almost gentle.
Zoe shrugged. “If you wish to appear a trustworthy source of information, my lord, I would recommend not beginning a relationship with kidnapping and extortion. You must admit that you have so far given me no reason to believe a word that you say is true.”
Deliberately provoking a homicidal lunatic might be considered a dubious strategy for survival, Holmes commented in Zoe’s mind.
I’m doing the best I can.
Sonnebourne smiled—a wolfish smile, baring eye teeth—“None whatsoever, my dear Miss Rosario. However, I had a telegram this evening from my agent in London.” He indicated the form on a nearby table. “Sherlock Holmes was knocked down in the street by a runaway carriage and pronounced dead on the scene.”
“I see.”
Zoe was still trying to let nothing of her thoughts show. But Sonnebourne, whatever his faults, was not unobservant.
“You are relieved to hear that. You suspect—as I suspect—that so mundane a death hardly fits so extraordinary a man. Therefore, one is forced to the conclusion that the accident was a fake—a trick to make me believe that the great Sherlock Holmes was no more.”
He would know if she tried to lie.
Zoe said, choosing her words carefully, “It wouldn’t be the first time that Sherlock falsified reports of his death.”
She still remembered the cold, hollow agony that had filled her when she had read Dr. Watson’s account of The Final Problem.
She hadn’t, at that time, seen Sherlock in years, or allowed herself any communication with him, beyond reading Dr. Watson’s stories in the newspapers. And yet the world had somehow seemed a much lonelier, emptier place without him in it.
Sonnebourne was still smiling—the only warning Zoe had for what he was about to say. “Nevertheless, I would have ex
pected you to show more concern. Given that he is the father of your daughter.”
If her heart had skipped before, it now jolted as though she had been kicked in the chest. She should have foreseen that Sonnebourne would have learned the secret of Lucy’s identity. But she also knew—had known from the instant that she laid eyes on Lucy’s tiny newborn face all those years ago—that she would do anything, anything at all, to protect the small, utterly perfect life that she and Sherlock had managed to produce. Even if it meant ripping her own heart to shreds in the process.
Lucy was grown up, strong and beautiful and able to defend herself, now. Zoe knew it. But in this moment, she still wanted to launch herself at Sonnebourne, tear the smug, cruel smile off his face, threaten to kill him with her bare hands if he tried to harm a single hair on Lucy’s head.
Instead, she waited for her heart to stop hammering.
How much did Sonnebourne actually know, and how much was he guessing? That was the important question, the one that Sherlock would tell her to ask herself if he were here.
Unless he really was dead.
No. She couldn’t think that way. Sherlock was alive, Lucy was safe, and she, Zoe, was going to keep herself alive so that she could see both of them again.
And if she managed in the process to bring about Sonnebourne’s unpleasant end, then so much the better.
“Sherlock abandoned me years ago, when he learned I was going to have a child,” she said aloud.
Sonnebourne’s eyebrows went up. “Indeed.”
“Yes.” She spoke the lie without blinking, silently apologising to Sherlock in her own mind as she said it. He would have married her, if he had known of Lucy’s existence.
Sherlock might be maddening, arrogant, and as incapable of settling down to ordinary domestic life as a shark was of turning strictly vegetarian. But he was an honourable man. The choice to end their brief relationship—and not to tell him about the baby she was expecting—had been Zoe’s. Because he was by nature incapable of being a husband or a family man, and Zoe had known that attempting it would only make him miserable, and herself miserable in turn.
Aloud she went on, “If you imagine that I feel any personal loyalty to him or affection for him, you are quite mistaken.”
“And yet when you were threatened in Milan, you went straight to him,” Sonnebourne said.
He sounded skeptical. But he hadn’t contradicted anything she’d said. She was right. He might guess, but he didn’t know.
Small wonder. Professor James Moriarty had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that no one would know the specific details surrounding Lucy’s parentage and birth.
Zoe raised her eyebrows. “Do you fall in love with a hammer, simply because it is the right tool for the job when you wish to pound in a nail? I have sought Sherlock’s assistance in the past because he is uniquely suited to deal with criminal matters. But that is all.”
“And he feels nothing for you?” Sonnebourne asked. “That is hard to believe of so charming a lady.”
He was smiling as he said it, but all the same, ice crawled across Zoe’s skin and the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
She had seen lions, frustrated and angry, pacing behind the bars of their cages in the zoo. Lord Sonnebourne’s eyes had precisely that look of chained, barely contained violence. He kept the violence under tight control, but she didn’t doubt for a moment that he would thoroughly enjoy any opportunity she gave him to let the merciless, savage streak in his nature run free.
“Only Sherlock knows what he feels—if indeed he feels anything at all,” she said. She allowed a note of bitterness to creep into her tone. It wasn’t in fact difficult.
She was trying to persuade Sonnebourne that she was angry with Sherlock, resentful of him for being what he was. Fortunately, she had a good deal of experience with feeling both of those emotions.
What had Sherlock said to her in greeting back in London, after more than a year apart, and not a single letter or communication from him during all of that time? Regrets are illogical.
Her one tiny source of satisfaction was, oddly, the very blankness of his expression as he had said it. Surely he would not have been working quite so hard to betray no private feelings if he had not felt something at seeing her again.
“He abhors emotion and holds reason and logic above all else.”
“So I have heard.” Sonnebourne studied her a moment, eyes half closed, and then his teeth flashed in another wolfish grin. “If what you tell me is true, then you have no value as a hostage. I should release you—or perhaps simply kill you now?”
He was testing her—although Zoe didn’t doubt that if the whim struck him, he would kill her, without any more thought or regret than he would give to squashing an insect.
Above the hammering of her heart, she said, “Not necessarily. Sherlock may not feel anything for me, personally, but I must at least credit him with a strongly altruistic streak to his nature. That is in part why he pursues his chosen profession of detective. He might decide that my death would be undesirable because of the pain it would cause Lucy. And besides, there are other ways I might be useful to you.”
“Such as?”
“I know Sherlock Holmes,” Zoe said. “If you are correct in your suspicions that he is still alive, then you must assume that he will be coming after you. You would be better prepared to face that danger if I can tell you how he thinks, and what course of action he is likely to choose.”
“You would betray him?”
Zoe drew a breath, ordering herself to go carefully. She felt as though she were walking a tightrope, or a sword’s edge.
She couldn’t expect Sonnebourne to believe that she was ready to fall in with him or his plans so easily. Whatever those plans were that had brought them halfway around the globe.
So she merely said, making her voice calm, “What is there to betray? We have no relationship, as I have been telling you. I am a realist, Lord Sonnebourne, and I would prefer not to die in the immediate future. When Sherlock abandoned me and our daughter years ago, I was forced to learn to take care of myself. That is what I am doing now, by choosing a path that I feel will best ensure my survival.”
Sonnebourne studied her for what seemed an endless moment, his eyes half-lidded, his face as inscrutable as Holmes’s. Zoe tried not to hold her breath. But before he could answer, the door to the parlor opened, and Mr. Morgan bustled in.
He barely acknowledged Zoe’s presence with a glance before focusing on his employer. “I must speak to you. At once!”
Sonnebourne’s lips compressed with annoyance at the peremptory tone. He was undoubtedly a man who liked giving orders, not taking them, and from the looks he had cast in Mr. Morgan’s direction, Zoe imagined that Lord Sonnebourne viewed the barrister as roughly the equal of an insect squashed on the bottom of his shoe: bothersome, but barely worth contempt.
He ignored the barrister and turned to Zoe with another slow smile.
“Miss Zoe Rosario.” His voice seemed to taste the name as much as say it. “We will have to continue our most interesting discussion at another time. I must say that I find you a surprising woman, and not at all what I had expected.”
CHAPTER 3: FLYNN
Flynn looked up at the small window high above his head. Too far up to jump for it. He’d have to find a box or a packing crate or something strong enough to climb on. He started to look around the alley, which wasn’t easy with all the fog drifting about. He’d been following the man who’d tried to examine Mr. Holmes—Farooq, Mr. Holmes had called him—all the way from the scene of Mr. Holmes’s supposed accident. They’d fetched up here, at a small building just off the end of the Cannon Row Wharf, near Westminster Bridge.
Farooq had gone straight in through the front door—after unlocking a big, shiny lock that made Flynn question how bright this Farooq chap could be. Put a lock like that one on your front door and you might as well take out a notice in the Times, announcing that you had s
omething worth stealing inside.
He’d watched the door awhile, but Farooq hadn’t come out again. He was still in there, unless he’d climbed out a side window. And so Flynn and slipped around the back to see if he could find another way in, or at least get a look at what Farooq was hiding in there that was so valuable.
This close to the Thames, the fog was even thicker than it was in the rest of the city, like having a soggy blanket pressed against your face. Yellow green mist was all over the towers on the Houses of Parliament, which were just down the river from here. Fog hung in the rigging of the big ships that were moored at the wharf, and Flynn could only just make out the barges and small boats that were sailing upriver and down. How the captains of the ships managed not to crash into each other was anyone’s guess.
Flynn kicked at a metal bucket with the bottom gone rusty, trying to decide if it would be strong enough to hold his weight, then jumped as someone stepped towards him out of the misty shadows at the head of the alley.
“Have you found a way in yet?” Becky asked.
Flynn tried to swallow down his heart, which felt like it should have knocked up against his back teeth. Not that he should have been surprised that Becky had found him.
“I thought you were staying in Baker Street and letting Mrs. Hudson teach you how to mend socks or some such,” he told her.
Mrs. Hudson had started giving Becky lessons in sewing. Flynn would have run a mile in tight boots to avoid having to learn anything of the sort, but Becky didn’t mind. She said it gave her practice for when she was a doctor and had to stitch up people.
“I was,” Becky said. “I mended three stockings, too. But then Mrs. Hudson fell asleep in her chair by the fire, and I didn’t want to wake her. Not when she’s so tired out with worrying about Mr. Holmes.”
They were all worried about Mr. Holmes, and about Miss Zoe, too. But Flynn would have been willing to bet the price of a hot baked potato from a street vendor’s stall that Becky hadn’t thought very hard about whether or not to wake Mrs. Hudson.
“So I came out and went to Piccadilly Circus to help you follow Farooq,” Becky said. “I just didn’t want to get too close until now, in case Farooq looked back and saw us. Two people are always more noticeable than just one.” She tilted her head back to look up at the window. “Is this the only way in?”