by Andrew Lane
‘Von Webenau,’ Mycroft said smoothly, moving towards the man before Herr Holtzbrinck could. ‘I have heard so much about you. My name is Mycroft Holmes . . .’
Abandoned, Sherlock glanced at the food, but he was still not hungry. He thought briefly about engaging the German representative in conversation, but he was worried that he might accidentally say something of which Mycroft would disapprove, so he moved instead over to the doorway and out into the hall. There was nobody around, and he crossed over to the strange contraption of wooden pillars, wooden beams and rope. The ascending room was still up on the third floor, where Quintillan had left it.
Sherlock peered between the wooden beams, into the area that the ascending room would occupy when it returned to ground level. There was a hole in the floor, about five feet deep, and looking up at the underside of the ascending room Sherlock could see that as well as the thickness of the base there were various metal protuberances that would need to be accommodated so that the floor of the room would be level with the floor of the hall. The base of the hole looked as if it was made out of a sheet of wood, and Sherlock thought he could see hinges on one side. Maybe there was machinery beneath it.
Raising his gaze and looking around the wooden scaffolding, Sherlock noticed two slabs of metal, one on either side of the shaft. Ropes from them led upward, past the ascending room, into the roof. Thinking about it for a moment, Sherlock realized that they were counterweights for the weight of the room. Pulling the weight of the ascending room up three floors would take a lot of work, and would leave the room in a potentially dangerous situation, but if there was a similar weight on the other end of the rope then the two weights would balance each other, reducing the amount of work that needed to be done and increasing the safety of the whole thing. It was, he decided, quite clever, although he wasn’t sure that he would ever want to travel in it.
A lever was set into a slot on one of the pillars. Sherlock assumed that if he pulled it then the ascending room would return to the ground. He wondered whether he ought to try it out.
‘Scared?’ a voice said.
He turned. Behind him stood a girl of about his own age. Judging by the darkness of her skin, she was probably related to Sir Shadrach Quintillan. His daughter, perhaps? Her eyes were brown and filled with a lively curiosity; her hair was black and curly.
‘Fear is a natural reaction when confronted with something unknown or unexplained that might have the power to kill or injure you,’ he said. His voice sounded like he was lecturing, and internally he cursed. ‘In this case,’ he went on, still sounding to himself like he was reciting a lesson, ‘it’s just a simple system of counterbalanced weights. There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just simple mechanics.’
‘Try saying that when you’re in the ascending room, going upward, looking down on a hard stone floor that’s getting further and further away by the second, and you hear the rope holding the room up creak.’
‘Yes,’ he said drily, ‘I can imagine that would cause a little flutter of the heart.’
‘Are you one of the representatives?’
He nodded. ‘Well, I’m with one of the representatives, which probably means that, for all practical purposes, I get counted as a representative as well.’
‘From England?’
‘Yes.’ He stared at her for a long moment. ‘And you’re Sir Shadrach Quintillan’s daughter.’
‘You seem very sure of that.’ She put her head to one side, gazing at him speculatively. ‘You’re just guessing, aren’t you?’
‘I never guess. Your confidence indicates that you live here, rather than being a visitor, like the representatives, or a servant. The colour of your skin and the underlying bone structure of your face are similar to those of Sir Shadrach, while your age suggests that you’re either his daughter or his niece, rather than his sister or his wife. If you were his niece then that would suggest the existence of a brother or sister who haven’t been mentioned yet by anyone, so it’s simpler to assume that you are his daughter.’
‘Like I said: a guess.’
‘Are you his daughter?’
She gazed at him, smiling. ‘Yes,’ she conceded eventually, ‘I’m his daughter. My name is Niamh. It’s spelled N-i-a-m-h but pronounced “Neeve”. Niamh Quintillan.’
‘As I said: his daughter.’
‘Just because you’re right doesn’t make it any less of a guess.’
‘So, if he’s a “Sir” and you’re his daughter, does that make you a Lady? Or will it, in time?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m certainly no lady. It’s a non-hereditary title. That means it dies with father when he dies. I’m just a commoner, and always will be.’
Sherlock smiled, despite himself. ‘Believe me, there’s nothing common about you.’
She mock-curtsied. ‘You’re very charming.’
‘I have to be: I’m talking to a knight of the realm’s daughter. So how did your father come to be a “Sir” in the first place? The title must have been appointed by Queen Victoria.’
‘That’s what happened. We’re from Barbuda. My father—’
‘Barbuda?’ Sherlock interrupted. He’d never heard of the place before.
‘It’s an island in the Caribbean, near Antigua. It’s part of the British Empire. Can I go on?’
‘Please.’
‘The local people were treated as slaves until forty years ago. When he was freed, my father joined the Royal Navy. I don’t know if he was the first former slave to join, but he was certainly in the minority. He served on a ship called HMS Euryalus. Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, also served on the ship. There was some kind of accident while they were at sea, and my father saved Prince Alfred’s life. In recognition, and out of gratitude, the Prince persuaded Queen Victoria to give my father a knighthood.’ Her face clouded over, and she looked away from Sherlock. ‘That’s how my father came to be crippled. His back was broken in the accident. He decided he wanted to settle here in Ireland, near the country that he loved but not part of it, in a place where he could see the sea. He was gifted this castle by Prince Alfred.’
‘And your mother?’ Sherlock asked gently. He suspected that he already knew the answer.
‘Oh, she died.’ Niamh’s voice was very calm, very controlled. ‘Consumption. The climate here didn’t suit her. She never wanted to leave Barbuda in the first place. She had dreams that something bad was going to happen if she left, and she was right.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Thank you.’ She looked at him again, and Sherlock could see the unshed tears in her eyes. ‘What about you? Do you have family?’
Sherlock indicated the doorway to the dining room. ‘My brother is in there at the moment, filling in time between lunch and dinner by eating. Our father is in India with the British Army. Our mother is . . . ill.’ He looked away from Niamh, and then back again. ‘Nobody is saying what she is ill with, but I think it’s consumption as well. Pulmonary tuberculosis.’
‘Then I’m sorry.’ She shrugged. ‘It takes its time. It’s a waiting disease.’
There was something Sherlock wanted to ask but he wasn’t sure if he should. Sometimes, he had noticed, direct questions could cause people to become offended, or upset.
Niamh noticed that he was struggling to stop himself from saying something. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘You’re obviously bursting to ask a question.’
‘Your father’s interest in spiritualism – is it anything to do with the death of your mother?’
‘I think so. At least, he never showed much interest in the afterlife when she was alive.’ She caught herself. ‘We’re a Christian family, obviously, but heaven is something you don’t think too much about. It’s just a word you hear in sermons, or read in the Bible. But after mother died, father became . . . obsessed with the idea that he might be able to communicate with her again. He visited a lot of different psychics and mediums, but he wasn’t convinced by any of them. Then he met Mr Albano .
. .’
‘So Mr Albano managed to establish communication between your father and the spirit of your mother?’
‘So he said. So my father said.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not so sure. I’ve taken part in séances, but the messages that Mr Albano conveys from my mother are all so . . . generic. “It’s nice here, on the spirit plane.” “I miss you both and I’m watching over you.” That kind of thing.’
‘That’s one of the things that makes me hope that spiritualism isn’t true,’ Sherlock admitted. ‘The possibility that, if it is, we’re always being watched by hundreds of dead people. Everything we do is being observed. Everything.’
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that the spirits aren’t meant to concern themselves much with earthly things once they pass on.’
‘Yet they still turn up to séances, write messages on bits of slate and move tables around?’
‘Hey,’ she said, raising her hands defensively, ‘I’m not claiming to be an expert. I’m just relaying what I’ve heard.’ Her face suddenly became more serious. ‘Besides, if we’re talking about supernatural entities, there’s other things I’d worry about before I worry about the spirits of the dead.’
Sherlock was intrigued. ‘And what’s on top of the list?’
‘How about the Dark Beast?’ she said.
He smiled uncertainly. ‘What’s the Dark Beast?’
‘It’s some kind of sea creature that can come up on to the land and carry off sheep and cattle. Sometimes it even kills people. The smugglers who used to smuggle contraband up and down this coast, many years ago, were terrified of it – more terrified than they were of the revenue men.’
‘Oh really?’
She just stared back at him with no trace of a smile. ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘I’ve seen it.’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘You are serious, aren’t you?’ Sherlock asked Niamh. ‘About the Beast, I mean.’
It was two hours later, and they were sitting next to one another at dinner. Just after Niamh had mentioned the Dark Beast, Mrs Silman had appeared in the hall and declared that she would take Sherlock and Mycroft to their rooms. Sherlock had smiled at Niamh, and shrugged, then gone to fetch his brother.
Their rooms were on the second floor of the Castle, and they had used the ascending room to get there. As Sherlock was pressed into a corner of the ascending room by his brother’s bulk he noticed that there was a wooden panel beside the door with five buttons on it. His mind quickly made connections – five buttons, but only four floors – the ground floor and three upper floors. Four of the buttons were marked ‘G’, ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’. The fifth button was unmarked.
‘What’s the fifth button for?’ he asked Mrs Silman, who was operating the ascending room. ‘Is there an extra floor at the top of the castle?’
‘No,’ she said, pressing the button marked ‘2’. ‘It’s an alarm button, in the unlikely event that there is a mechanical malfunction and anyone finds themselves trapped.’
‘Wouldn’t it be wiser to mark the button “Alarm”?’ he asked.
‘We wouldn’t want anyone to be worried by the possibility of a malfunction.’
The ascending room had shuddered into life, and sedately began to raise them up the inside of the hall. Sherlock looked out and down, and saw Niamh Quintillan staring up after him. She waved, and he waved back.
Their rooms were only a little way from the hall, and there was a connecting door between them. Sherlock’s luggage – only bought that afternoon – had already been unpacked, and a bath had been drawn for him. While he waited for it to cool, he walked over to the window and opened it. A warm breeze blew in. Based admittedly on a small sample of evidence, the weather in Ireland seemed very changeable, Sherlock observed. He made a mental note to keep an eye on it. The sun had gone down, but there was a nearly full moon in the sky, and by its light he could see past the edge of the cliff and out to the ocean. The breeze bore the crash of surf breaking on rocks to his ears. Moonlight glinted off the waves, turning it into a magical scene. It had been a long time since he had been able to look down on waves from this height – for the past year or two he had been much closer.
Eventually he pulled the curtain closed, undressed and slid into the bath. The water was still hot, and he found that he was disconcerted by it. Given that he had spent well over a year surrounded by water that had ranged between cold and warm, the idea of hot water was . . . odd.
After getting out of the bath he had dressed in his new evening wear, and had discovered to his surprise that he still remembered how to tie a bow tie. A gong had rung just as he was finishing off the bow, and he had left his room to find Mycroft standing in the corridor.
‘Yes,’ his brother had said, gazing critically at him. ‘You will do. Come on, then.’
The dining room had been cleared of the snacks from earlier, and the table set for a formal dinner. Sir Shadrach Quintillan was at the head of the table, with Mycroft Holmes to his right and Count Shuvalov to his left. Sherlock had recognized the Count straight away – he still wore an ornate military uniform, his grey hair was still cropped close to his skull, and his moustache still turned up at the ends. He acknowledged Sherlock’s presence with a slight nod. Another man in military uniform – a burly man with close-cropped hair and a dark shadow on his cheeks and chin where he needed to shave – was presumably the manservant that Sir Shadrach had referred to. He stood behind Shuvalov, staring at the far wall, ready in case his master wanted anything.
Von Webenau and Herr Holtzbrinck were seated next to Mycroft and Shuvalov respectively. Castle servants stood behind them, ready to serve as required. Sherlock was next to von Webenau, although the Austrian ignored him, spending his time turned towards Quintillan. The seat opposite Sherlock was empty, reserved presumably for the missing American delegate, and Niamh Quintillan sat at the opposite end of the table from her father.
‘I’m very serious,’ she replied to Sherlock’s question as the footwomen served soup to everyone. ‘There is a monster.’
‘And you have seen it?’
‘I have.’
‘For real – not in a dream or in a vision?’
‘For real,’ she confirmed.
Sherlock took a sip of his soup. It looked and tasted like a thick, rich gravy. ‘What kind of soup is this?’ he asked.
‘Turtle,’ Niamh said simply, and took a sip herself.
‘Oh. Right.’ He took another sip. It was actually very pleasant. ‘Real turtle?’
‘Oh yes. Snapping turtle, if you want to be precise. Father has them imported.’
‘How very cosmopolitan.’ He paused. ‘So, tell me about the Dark Beast.’
She glanced at him. ‘You’re not going to think I’m stupid, are you? For believing in a monster?’
‘I know you’re not stupid, but I have a hard time believing in monsters.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Well, inhuman ones, anyway. Where did you see this thing?’
‘Down by the beach. I go there a lot.’
‘By yourself?’
‘Of course.’ She stared at him challengingly. ‘Who else is there to go with?’
‘I don’t know. I’m a stranger here myself. Is there a path down to the beach?’
‘Not one you can walk down easily. There are sections where you have to scramble down some steep areas of rock, and if you lose your footing you’ll fall all the way down. There’s one right by the castle. I climb like a mountain goat.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘What about you?’
Sherlock remembered the endless number of times that he’d had to climb the rigging of the Gloria Scott to the top of one of the masts. ‘I can manage,’ he said.
‘I was down there one evening. I’d sneaked out of the castle. I just wanted to see the sea by moonlight. I used to do that a lot back on Barbuda – sit on the sand watching the waves coming in. Anyway, I’d been there for a while when I heard something moving. I thought it might be a wild boar, or something, so I turned my head and looked behind
me, towards the cliff.’ She looked down at the tablecloth, but her eyes were unfocused and Sherlock knew that she was staring backwards in time, seeing again what she had seen then. ‘There are a lot of caves in the cliffs, worn by the waves. The smugglers used to use them to hide things. Coming out of one of the caves I saw . . . a thing. It was as big as a bear, but . . .’ Her gaze flicked up at Sherlock for a moment, gauging his reaction, and then back to the tablecloth again. ‘But it had more arms and legs than a bear.’
‘How many arms and legs did it have?’ Sherlock asked in a low voice.
‘It was difficult to tell in the darkness. The moon was low in the sky, behind the cliffs, and the monster was walking in shadows.’
‘Where did it go?’
‘It lumbered along the beach for a while, and then went into another cave. I just sat there, motionless, hoping that it thought I was just a piece of driftwood or something.’
‘Very wise.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You know how that story sounds, don’t you?’
‘It sounds like a dream, but I wasn’t dreaming. Look, I can prove it!’
‘How?’
‘Because the people in the town talk about the Beast as well. The fishermen all know about it. Any time one of their nets gets ripped, they say that it’s the Dark Beast. I talked to one of the servants here in the castle who said she saw it once, at night, walking around the outside of the moat.’
‘That’s hardly proof,’ Sherlock pointed out.
‘But it means I’m not the only person who has seen it.’
‘How far back do these stories go?’
She thought for a moment. ‘Apparently there have been stories of the Dark Beast for hundreds of years, but there have been a lot more sightings recently. Maybe it’s been asleep for a while. Or maybe something happened to make it leave its natural habitat.’
‘Or maybe everyone is just imagining it, and talking about it makes it more likely that someone will see a shadow moving and make it into a monster.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me,’ she snapped, and turned her attention back to the soup.