Rebel Fire

by Andrew Lane

  Something flickered at the edges of his vision. He turned his head quickly. A dark figure faded back into the shadow of a lifeboat. Sherlock took a couple of steps forward, but the figure had vanished. He shook his head. It was probably just one of the passengers.

  Moving further forward, Sherlock watched for a while as the coast slipped away on their right-hand side. The ship would undoubtedly hug the coast as it headed west, around Cornwall, and then strike out to the coast of Ireland. Once past there, it would head out into open waters, across the three thousand or so miles of ocean that lay between that coast and the harbour at New York for which they were bound.

  He was surprised how stable the ship felt. There was barely any swaying from side to side. Perhaps things would be different out in the Atlantic, but the ship’s size and weight seemed to protect it against the relatively small waves here along the English coast. Sherlock couldn’t help remembering the small boat in which he and Matty had sailed from Baron Maupertuis’s offshore Napoleonic fort to the coast near Portsmouth. That journey had been grim, and he had no intention of experiencing anything like that again.

  He suddenly felt very lonely. England, and everything that meant to him—his home, his family, even his school—was slowly falling away, and all that was ahead of him were surprises—a new world, a new set of people and customs. And danger. He didn’t know what the men who were keeping John Wilkes Booth captive wanted, but they obviously had a plan, and it was one that they were willing to kill to keep secret. And here he was, just a boy, getting involved with intrigues beyond the limits of his world.

  And Matty. What about Matty? Sherlock doubted that he was as comfortable as the three of them looked likely to be, here on the SS Scotia. Matty was probably tied up, or at least confined to a cabin somewhere. Maybe his captors had come to a deal with him—since they were all aboard a ship and he couldn’t escape, if he promised not to cause trouble they would let him roam free—but Matty could be stubborn, and he might have refused.

  That was assuming he was still alive. Amyus Crowe and Mycroft had both deduced that he was, but Sherlock was acutely aware that deductions were just projections into a sea of fantasy based on a few known facts. If the facts were wrong, or if the projection wasn’t done in the right direction, then the final destination would be wildly inaccurate. And Matty might be dead. The Americans might have decided they didn’t want the burden of a live captive throughout the journey, and just slit Matty’s throat and dumped him by the side of the road back in England. The message might just have been a hoax, a wild attempt to stop Amyus Crowe from interfering, but with nothing to back it up.

  Morosely Sherlock wandered back along the rails that lined the deck. He had to ask directions of a steward at one point: a thin man with an immaculate uniform and short blond hair beneath his cap. Having found out where he was going, he walked past groups of excited travellers, past the two funnels and the two huge, trunklike masts, past the long, low shape of the communal first-class saloon with its windows looking out onto the deck, and back to the stern of the boat. The white wake of their passage trailed behind them like the tail of a comet. Sea birds followed them, diving into the wake for disturbed and disoriented fish.

  At the back of the boat, a narrow stairway led down into the depths of the ship. Roughly dressed men hung around the top of the stairs smoking and casting glances forward at the better-dressed passengers. Sherlock guessed these were the steerage passengers, crammed into unsanitary and cramped conditions belowdecks, sleeping in rough hammocks or on benches, but paying much less for their tickets. People looking to start a new life in America, rather than travellers on business or pleasure as the first- and second-class passengers mainly appeared to be.

  He sensed a presence beside him. Before he turned, he knew that it was Virginia.

  “How’s your cabin?” he asked.

  “Better than I had on the way to England,” she replied. “Father will tell you that the food and the accommodations were better, but don’t let him fool you. We weren’t travelling steerage, but we weren’t first class either, and just because it was an American ship instead of a British ship don’t automatically make it better.”

  “What about your companion?”

  “She’s an elderly widow heading out to join her son, who moved to New York five years ago. She’s got a maid in the servants’ area, an’ she’s planning to start readin’ the Bible now an’ finishin’ when we get to New York. Good luck to her, I say.”

  “Do you want to take a walk around the deck?” he asked nervously.

  “Why not? Might as well make ourselves acquainted with the place. After all, we’re goin’ to be spending the next eight days here.”

  They wandered forward along the other side of the ship to the one Sherlock had come back along. When they got to the first-class saloon, Sherlock gestured to Virginia to stop.

  “I just want to take a look inside,” he said.

  The door opened outward and was on a stiff spring, presumably to stop it being pulled open by the wind on a regular basis. Sherlock tugged it open and glanced inside. The room was empty apart from two white-clad stewards laying silver cutlery on the single long table that dominated the room. Fifty or so chairs were set around the table—matching, presumably, the number of first-class passengers. The stewards glanced up at him, nodded, and continued on with their work.

  The saloon was panelled in dark wood, with mirrors set around it to increase the illusion of depth. Where there weren’t mirrors there were artistic murals set into the wooden panels. Oil lamps hung from the panels on sturdy supports.

  “So we all eat in here?” he said.

  Virginia nodded. “All in together,” she replied. “It was the same on the boat we came out on.”

  “Lords and ladies mixing with industrialists and theatrical impresarios,” he went on. “Very democratic. Nowhere for the hoi oligoi to escape from the hoi polloi.”

  “No cabin service,” Virginia agreed. “People eat here or they don’t eat at all.”

  One of the stewards began to set out place cards around the table. Sherlock wondered where Mycroft’s bribe had placed them. Now they were at sea, all bets were off. Despite the payment, they could be seated at the far end of the table, away from the captain and the doors, and over the engines, and they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it apart from complain. Sherlock presumed they were at the mercy of the purser, a man who had already demonstrated that he could be bribed.

  Sherlock stepped back and let the door swing shut. Something moved in the corner of his eye. He glanced sideways, towards where the first-class saloon ended at an alley running between it and the nearest funnel. A figure was just ducking back into the alley. He didn’t recognize it—sailor or passenger, he couldn’t be sure. The only thing he caught was the sun hitting a flash of iridescent blue around the figure’s wrist as it withdrew into the shadows. A blue shirt cuff, maybe? He wasn’t sure.

  He ran quickly down to the end of the saloon and glanced around the corner, but the alley was clear. A hatch halfway along led down into the depths of the ship. Whoever had been watching them was gone, but Sherlock knew that it wouldn’t be left at that. This was the second time he’d spotted someone watching him from the shadows. Someone on this ship was interested in them, and that could mean only one thing.

  The Americans who had kidnapped Matty had someone on the ship.

  EIGHT

  The daily routine of the voyage to New York was established within the first eighteen hours, as far as Sherlock could tell. Despite the huge size of the ship, the areas where the passengers could go were pretty restricted. Once a person had walked the deck, taken a meal, checked out the smoking room and the library, and had a couple of conversations with other passengers about the unusually calm weather, all the options had been exhausted. Between meals most people seemed to spend their time either alone on deck, reading a book in a comfortable chair, or gathered in small groups at tables in the smoking room or the bar,
playing bridge or whist. When the sun went down the stewards went around the ship turning the oil lamps on, but setting them as low as possible, and everyone headed for their cabins to sleep.

  Sherlock had spent the first few hours watching his home country recede from him until it was just a dark line on the horizon. He missed the moment when it actually vanished. He must have blinked, or turned to watch something else, but one moment England was there and the next the ship was alone on an endless ocean, heading towards the sunset, with the white wake that stretched away behind them the only thing to indicate they were moving.

  He and Amyus Crowe and Virginia had joined the rest of the passengers for dinner, but while Amyus Crowe talked easily with everyone around him, Sherlock found that he had nothing to say. He ate his food and watched everyone else, wondering who they were, where they had come from, and where they were going. Amyus Crowe had already taught him some of the ways one could tell a person’s occupation—the stains on their sleeves, the patterns of wear on their jackets, the calluses on their hands—and he was pretty sure that he’d already pegged one man as an accountant and two others as horse trainers.

  Captain Charles Henry Evans Judkins was a tall man with an impressive set of white whiskers adorning his cheeks. His uniform was black, spotless, and perfectly pressed; decorated with bright gold braid; and he carried himself with an upright, military bearing. He was a hit with the ladies, who had all dressed in their finest clothes for the occasion, and he told many strange stories of his time working for the Cunard Line. The ones that impressed his audience the most concerned creatures such as whales and giant squid that were sometimes seen in the distance, and great storms that sometimes appeared on the horizon like black walls and which tossed ships about on the waves so much that at times the deck appeared to be as vertical as a cliff face. Judkins told these stories with a showman’s flair, pulling his attentive audience in with his words and giving the impression that sea travel was a dangerous activity which they would be lucky to survive, but Sherlock could tell that he was acting a part and providing a form of entertainment that would tinge the way the passengers saw the rest of the voyage. After all, if he told them it was as boring as a walk in the park, then what stories would they have to tell to their friends when they disembarked?

  One story in particular that he told caught Sherlock’s attention. Judkins had been talking about the various attempts to lay a cable across the Atlantic, from Ireland to Newfoundland, in order to allow the sending of telegraphic communications. If that could be done, then rather than a message taking well over a week to make it across from one country to the other in mail bags in the hold of a ship, information could be passed almost instantaneously via electrical pulses. The idea of telegraphic communication fascinated Sherlock. He could already see, after what had happened back in Amyus Crowe’s cottage, that the letters of the message would have to be replaced by easily transmitted codes—long and short pulses, maybe, or just a simple “on” and “off” arrangement—but the idea of laying a cable some three thousand miles long, from one coast to another, across the bottom of the sea without it breaking under the strain, made Sherlock’s mind boggle. Was there nothing that the mind of man could not accomplish, once it set itself to the task? The original method, according to Judkins, had two ships starting out in the middle of the Atlantic and laying their cables in different directions until they both hit land, but that had immediately run into problems when the crews tried to splice the cables together in the middle of a storm. The next attempts had taken place with ships setting out from Ireland and heading for Newfoundland, laying out the cables as they went, but the cables often broke and had to be dredged back up so that the crews could repair the breaks and keep going.

  “I recall one occasion,” Judkins said in a low, deep voice, “when a broken cable was dredged up from the abyssal depths of the ocean, and there was a creature holding onto it!” He glanced around the table, his eyes bright beneath bushy brows, while the various passengers who were hanging on his every word gasped. “A godless creature like a marine earwig, if you would credit it; white in colour, but fully two feet long and with a set of fourteen clawed legs that gripped hard onto the cable and would not let go. It was still alive when they dragged the cable onto the deck, but it soon died, being removed from its natural habitat amongst the murk of the ocean floor.”

  One woman let out an inadvertent shriek.

  “I understand from the men who were there,” Judkins continued, “that the creature tasted something like lobster, when cooked.”

  His audience dissolved into relieved laughter. Sherlock caught Amyus Crowe’s eye. Crowe was smiling too.

  “I’ve heard similar stories,” Crowe murmured, just loud enough for Sherlock to hear. “The things are called ‘isopods.’ They’re something like prawns, but the conditions at the bottom of the ocean allow them to grow to prodigious size.”

  The steward who was serving Sherlock’s part of the table—up near the captain, as Mycroft had promised—was the thin man with short blond hair who had helped Sherlock with directions earlier. He nodded at Sherlock as he reached out to place a dish of soup in front of the man sitting opposite.

  There was no lobster, which was probably a blessing.

  After dinner Sherlock had headed for bed, leaving Amyus Crowe in the bar, and if Crowe had come to bed at all then Sherlock had been asleep in his bunk when he had done so. When Sherlock woke up and got ready for breakfast, Crowe had already left the cabin. He seemed to be able to survive on small amounts of sleep.

  Despite the fact that it was being cooked at sea in a cramped galley, the food was excellent. Each meal had something different in it, and waiting to see what would arrive on the plate at breakfast, lunch, or dinner was one of the highlights of the day. Everything was prepared fresh, of course—it would be difficult to store anything for very long—but even though the numbers of animals on the foredeck would diminish during the voyage there was no obvious sign of their being slaughtered—no washes of blood across the deck, no piteous bleats as the animals were taken away to their final end. The crew clearly had their own routine, which they had been following for years.

  The skies on that first day were clear and blue, and the waves were small enough in comparison to the size of the ship that they just slapped across its sides without making it pitch and toss at all. Sherlock had read about storms at sea, and he overheard a couple of the passengers who were scaring the rest by telling stories of horrendous previous passages across the Atlantic where vast waves had hung above the ship before crashing down and sweeping animals overboard. But so far the ocean had been calm enough that some people were actually playing bowls in a clear area on deck.

  The steerage passengers had their own fenced-off area of deck for walking and for washing their clothes. It was at the top of the stairs that led down to the dark areas of the ship where their hammocks were slung. The smell that sometimes wafted up was an eye-watering mix of bodily odours. Presumably, down there where there was no breeze and nobody could see the sky and the horizon, seasickness was a constant companion. When they came on deck they either watched the first-class passengers with subdued malice in their eyes or stared at the deck in weary depression. Every time Sherlock passed them by he thanked God that Mycroft had paid for them to travel first class. He wasn’t sure he could have survived steerage. He didn’t know how anyone could.

  The massive paddle wheels on each side of the ship were in constant motion, driven by the steam engines whose rumbling could be felt whenever one touched a wooden surface. The paddles that were spaced around their circumference pushed against the sea as they rotated, propelling the ship forward. The captain had ordered the sails to be unfurled shortly after Southampton dropped out of sight beneath the horizon, but the way they hung limply suggested to Sherlock that there wasn’t enough breeze to keep the ship moving very fast.

  Surprisingly, for much of that first day after breakfast he hadn’t seen much of Amyus and Virginia
Crowe. She had seemed subdued and had taken to her cabin, and her father seemed to be spending his time alternately checking that she was all right and brooding in the cabin that he shared with Sherlock. Something was bothering her. Casting his mind back, Sherlock tried to remember whether Virginia had mentioned anything about the trip from America to England that she and her father had taken apart from the fact that they hadn’t travelled first class but weren’t in steerage either. He had a feeling that she had said something important when they first met, but he couldn’t remember what.

  Somewhere towards the back of the ship Sherlock could hear music playing. He turned from his position staring out at the waves, trying to trace its source. The music floated overhead, as light as the seagulls that followed in the wake of the ship and hung in the air, barely moving their wings. It sounded like a violin playing a melody that swept up before pausing at the topmost note and then crashing down again.

  Leaving his place at the rail, Sherlock walked back towards the stern, looking for the source of the music. There was precious little entertainment on the ship as it was: anything that broke up the monotony of the day should be investigated and treasured.

  Past the long single storey of the saloon, in a clear area of deck, a man stood playing the violin. It was the man he had seen the day before when they had been leaving Southampton—the man with long black hair and green eyes. He was still wearing the same corduroy jacket and trousers, although he appeared to have changed his shirt. The violin was pressed into his neck and his head was tilted, chin holding the body of the instrument steady while his left hand fingered the neck and his right hand sawed the horsehair bow across the strings. His eyes were closed and his face bore an expression of intense concentration. Sherlock had never heard a piece of music like that before: it was wild, romantic, and turbulent, not ordered and mathematical, like the pieces by Bach and Mozart that he was used to hearing in the occasional recitals at Deepdene School for Boys.