“You are allowing your nerves to get the better of you,” Holmes said, and he smiled. “Though I grant you this journey has not been terribly peaceful thus far—”
“Your cut is bleeding, Holmes,” Douglas interrupted, proffering his handkerchief. Holmes took it with a gruff “thank you,” and then pulled the jar of salve out of his pocket.
“If a bit is good, a great deal more is best,” he said wryly.
“I am not certain it works that way,” Douglas responded. “But if it makes you feel better…”
“A bit of normalcy would make me feel better, but that seems to be in short supply at present,” Holmes said, shrugging.
* * *
Just as they reached the door to the grand saloon, the weather rewarded them with a temporary lull. Even so, there were plenty of seats to be had at the long table. Usually, passengers who were tardy had nowhere to sit, but on this night most everyone had elected to remain in their rooms.
Douglas counted. Fewer than fifty were present. Nevertheless, that meant one hundred eyes, all critical of a tall, somber black man in his middle years, who—though he might be staring humbly at the floor—seemed too self-possessed to be a servant. Especially since he stood next to a young man of no more than three-and-twenty, with a fresh and ugly gash upon his cheek.
Bound to attract attention, Douglas mused, subtly scanning the room. But it seemed the passengers were concentrating entirely on their meals, as if by focus alone the soup would remain in its bowl where it belonged.
They had crossed into international waters, so Douglas would be permitted to sit next to Holmes at dinner. Indeed, one of the advantages of ship life was that people were forced to share the same small space with others from many different parts of the world, including persons of darker hue.
“Quite fascinating, really,” Douglas opined. “What might at home be considered inappropriate is here accepted as exotic.”
Holmes raised an eyebrow.
“You would be exotic, then?” he asked, eliciting a raised eyebrow in return, along with a nearly imperceptible smile.
“Only in comparison to you, Holmes.”
The attendants brought them the first course, a hearty clam and oyster stew, and then poured what looked to be a rather anemic white wine into a crystal decanter.
Holmes tasted it and grimaced.
“A pox on phylloxera!” he muttered to Douglas, referring to an aphid that for twelve long years had been ravaging the great French vineyards, particularly Languedoc. Owners of formidable wineries whose origins dated back hundreds of years had been left devastated. They were now forced to graft hardy American vines onto their native plants. The results so far were promising, though French pride had taken a beating.
“Poor France,” Holmes said. “First their wine, and now a war.”
“It’s not a war—not yet,” Douglas countered.
“No, but it shall be. Good thing you doubled up on Armagnac and Cognac shipments. Those, at least, shall be spared.”
Douglas kept on eating, enjoying the lull, however brief it might be.
“I wish I could have done the same with human beings,” he muttered. “Saved a few. Especially the children. They suffer most in times of war…”
Holmes stared into his soup and said nothing, and Douglas did not like the look of him. Perhaps his discomfort would be eased by an after-dinner brandy, which he hoped would not be too second-rate, and a fine cigar.
He had barely harbored the thought when, as if on cue, the Sultana’s respite ended. She began to lurch about. More and more diners went green at the gills and succumbed, excusing themselves. But Holmes was determined to remain steady. Peering around the room, he raised his eyebrows in a way that played on Douglas’s last nerve.
“You look as if you were Temperance herself, caught in the presence of drunkards,” he grumbled. “Do you consider seasickness a moral lapse?”
Holmes seemed stung by the reproach.
“You misread me,” he said. “My frown was not brought on by passengers who are present, but by those who are not.”
Douglas took another sip of wine.
“You are speaking of Georgiana, then?”
“Georgiana, yes,” Holmes confessed with a shrug. “But also those government officials who earlier seemed uncannily intent on avoiding one another. I was calculating the odds that they would all be taken ill at once, and they are long odds indeed. I am quite put out that they are not here, as they were my most likely suspects.”
“Though you have absolutely no reason to think so…” Douglas began when Holmes continued.
“As to ‘moral lapse,’” he said, “I think nothing of the sort. There’s nothing ‘moral’ about an unruly stomach. No, what these passengers are experiencing is a perfectly normal biologic function, brought about when the brain repeatedly loses its equilibrium, and then recovers it.
“This effort leaves the mind bewildered and fatigued,” he continued. “The digestive organs—most especially the liver—begin to be affected, bringing on nausea. People then attempt to cure this orally, say with milk of magnesia. Yet as the nausea is only symptomatic, and not the root cause, such remedies must inevitably fail.”
“You missed your calling,” Douglas said with a laugh, “for surely you should have been a physician.”
“Ah, what a dreary, dull life that would be,” Holmes replied, “to spend one’s days palpating human beings and cataloguing their ills. No, Douglas, I would have made a perfectly wretched physician, in that patients would have made a perfect wretch out of me.” He paused to take a tentative spoonful of soup, and did not care for the taste.
“As for seasickness,” he said, pushing away the bowl, “the only cure is to have perfect control over the origin of the difficulty, and that is the brain. It’s really quite simple, you see. You must focus, with great control, on objects in sight that are fixed and stable…”
“That’s quite the challenge,” Douglas interjected, “as everything that is seemingly ‘fixed’ is on the boat, and therefore rocking alongside you.”
“Granted, that may cause a difficulty or two,” Holmes admitted. “One must keep one’s gaze on the horizon,” he added, “and perhaps assume a prone position.”
He paused again, and frowned.
“By doing so…” he said, “you will diminish the… the…”
Rather than finish his thought, he doubled over. His stomach began to heave—not quietly and politely, but loudly, like an orphaned baby seal. It was only Douglas’s swift reflexes that kept Holmes from regurgitating his clam and oyster stew all over his shoes.
With apologies to those seated beside them, he quickly helped Holmes to his feet, and back to their room. As they went, Holmes managed a few more words.
“I wish to die,” he muttered. “Kindly let me die.”
* * *
Holmes at last lay in his berth, in between his moans and explosions of vomitus. Douglas did his best to wipe up the mess on the floor. But even in the throes of illness, Holmes could not abide having his friend and traveling companion cleaning as though he were a scullery maid.
“There will be none of that,” he said, lurching out of bed. “I shall not allow you to… aaaaahhh!”
Douglas turned from his mop in time to see Holmes slip on his own effluence and land on his backside, legs akimbo. He hurried over to pick him up. As they made their unsteady way back to the cabin, Holmes looked up at him with a weak smile.
“Pride goeth before destruction,” he quoted, “and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
“You may indeed have been cursed, Holmes,” Douglas said wryly. He helped Holmes out of his soiled clothes, situated him back on the bed, and then finished cleaning up both the floor and himself. Thankfully, it seemed as if his friend had nothing left to expel.
Crawling into his own bunk, he put out the gas light—although he ended up staring at the dark ceiling for a good long while. The tiredness was overwhelming, yet sleep would not come.
Here I am, he thought, in the exact situation I said I would not abide—dragging a white man about…
In truth, he enjoyed Holmes’s company. But he had never quite known what to make of this good-looking, brilliant young man, so very British in bearing, pedigree, and character, who somehow found pleasure in the friendship of a forty-year-old native of Trinidad. He supposed there must be a purpose to it, this fate that brought them together.
Certainly, over the course of a year, Holmes had proved a dear if somewhat exasperating companion. And, because he was so inordinately intelligent, it was difficult at times to remember that he had been out of his teens a mere four years, that he had gotten into few scrapes outside the boxing ring, and that he had never before traveled outside of England.
I must endeavor to be more patient.
At midnight, he heard the wail of the steam whistle on deck, which meant that the blackness and the mist were now so thick that the sound was all that stood in the way of their colliding with whatever else happened by. But as he had traversed this particular waterway many times before, he knew that the one true danger for a ship this size was an iceberg.
And that icebergs were particularly impervious to steam whistles.
* * *
Holmes, too, was not asleep—at least not in the healthiest definition of the term. Rather, he was very nearly comatose.
And hallucinating.
“Moral insanity.” That was what Sherlock had spoken of—the idea that some humans were devoid of the common thread of human decency. The words wove in and out of his consciousness, along with the mutes who’d been standing guard over the house of the dead, and that false sailor spitting out the wrong side of his mouth.
Moral insanity.
That particular form of madness, Holmes knew, consisted of a morbid perversion of natural feelings. It was a manie sans délire—a mania, without delirium—that deprived the subject of the sorts of ethics most people would consider constant. It was a state in which intellectual faculties remained unaffected, while emotions were so profoundly damaged that patients were carried away by “some furious instinct.”
An instinct so fierce that the destruction it wreaks is incalculable.
This bleak thought was followed by images—lougarou sucking children’s blood, mutes laughing soundlessly as they stood watch over the dead, their teeth blackened, their mouths opening up like a grave, threatening to swallow up Holmes and all he held dear.
14
THAT FIRST NIGHT OF THEIR VOYAGE WAS AN IMPOSSIBLY LONG one for Douglas. His instincts for survival, given everything he had endured in his life, were quite strong, as was his nose for small problems that could easily turn deadly.
That nose had been twitching since they’d first come aboard.
What in the world are we in the midst of? he wondered, and not for the first time.
“The key to my heart…” he heard Holmes mutter in his sleep.
He is dreaming of her, Douglas realized as he stretched his long body on the cot to try to get comfortable.
He had met Georgiana a handful of times. Each time she’d struck him as the sort of girl whose prettiness masked a fierce intelligence, and an equally fierce determination. Their first meeting had been at the London wharf.
Douglas had just returned from a harrowing voyage, much like the one they were enduring at present, with storm upon storm granting no reprieve to passenger and sailor alike. He was tired and filthy and in a hurry to unload the latest shipment when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a well-heeled young man and a rather stunning blond hurrying toward him. She was so slight and so pretty that she looked as if someone had painted her, and then set her as a lark in the incongruity of those drab and dreary docks.
Having no reason whatsoever to speak with them, he returned to his labor until the young man stood in front of him so that he could no longer be avoided, and pointed to a crate of Cuban cigars.
“Where in heaven’s name did you find those?” He spoke the words with such wonder that he might as well have been referring to the Holy Grail. “They are Principe de Gales, are they not?” the fellow added in a tone that was very nearly accusatory.
“They are indeed,” Douglas said with a smile and a slight bow of the head.
The young man was about to say something else when he was cut off by his companion’s delighted laugh.
“Port of Spain!” she said, just as eagerly. “Is that where you are from?”
Douglas confessed that it was so.
She held out her hand for him to shake, an action Douglas found both unusual and endearing, as she was ignoring both the color of his skin and the dirt that covered it. That was when he noticed the jumbie beads bracelet that she wore under the sleeve of her ruffled white blouse.
The young woman caught him staring, but she just laughed again—the easy, bright laugh of the young and carefree. It made him melancholy—not for her, but for something he had lost…
“I’ve had it since I was a child,” she said, interrupting his thoughts, “and am loathe to give it up.”
Douglas nodded.
“Had one too,” he confessed. “Wish I had it still, for they remind me of home.”
The young man introduced himself as Mycroft Holmes, and the young woman as Georgiana Sutton. They chatted for a short while longer, and Douglas gave the young man the address of his little tobacco store. He suggested that Holmes stop by, and he would put a few Principes aside just for him, whereupon Holmes looked as delighted as a child at Christmas.
They left, and Douglas went back to work.
From that point on, Holmes had visited at least thrice weekly, taking in all the knowledge Douglas had about cigars. Now that Douglas thought about it, Holmes could recall every word that was said, down to the smallest jot and tittle. He had absorbed in a handful of weeks what it had taken Douglas years to glean and digest.
Some three months later, Holmes brought Georgiana into the shop to announce their engagement.
“Douglas would have been my best man, were it not for… a certain luck of the draw,” Holmes had told his fiancée. Then he’d added, rather mournfully, “As it is, I suppose I shall have to make do with Sherlock.”
* * *
“Georgiana!”
He heard Holmes toss in his berth and call out her name.
Holmes was so very tender with her, treating her as if she were made of the finest crystal and liable to shatter at any moment. To Douglas’s mind, however, she didn’t seem inclined to do any such thing. She seemed equally careful with Holmes, however—squeezing his hand, being the first to laugh when he said something witty, or listening intently when he waxed eloquent—sometimes at great length.
She seemed blissfully unaware of his tendency toward superciliousness, yet she was no shrinking violet. She spoke her mind both well and forcefully. She was the sort, Douglas mused, who believed the entire world could be saved, if one only went about it with intent and resolve.
She and Douglas frequently spoke of Trinidad—something they held in common, though Georgiana came from wealthy planter stock and Douglas’s family, while literate, was poor as dirt. Over a glass of brandy or two, Douglas had given her and Holmes a few morsels about his upbringing.
“It was only my putting out to sea at the age of twelve, learning by hook and by crook to make a living, that allowed my family to survive at all, and even, eventually, to thrive,” he’d explained.
“We are not so different, Mr. Douglas,” she had replied—and what she’d said next had remained with him ever since. “You come from slaves. Well, so do I. My great-great-great-grandfather and his bride migrated from Britain to Trinidad in 1640. Though they were white, they became indentured servants, doing hard labor for five long years. She did not survive it, and he did.
“For his troubles, my ancestor was given ‘freedom dues.’ Ten British pounds, plus ten acres to farm. It forms a portion of the land that we still own to this day. It was from those humble begin
nings that my family built its fortune.”
Douglas had nodded.
“Yes,” he said, and he frowned. “Similar to the forty acres promised to American slaves, some five years ago.”
“Well, that doesn’t seem to be going as promised,” Holmes commented. He looked ready to say more when Georgiana interrupted him.
“Surely the intent is there,” she had said. “I loathe the idea that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ What do we have, after all, but what we intend?” She paused, looking thoughtful. “Then too, most of what we value—from the Great Pyramids onward—was built on the backs of the poor and the vanquished. I do wonder what society would be like without the blood, sweat, and tears of those forebears…”
* * *
Now, lying in a too-small berth across from his very sick friend, Douglas felt an unpleasant tingle at the pit of his stomach. He wondered just where Georgiana was. Had she taken an assumed name? Could she be hiding aboard the ship?
And if so, whatever for?
I am too exhausted to ponder it now, Douglas decided with a yawn. It shall have to wait ’til morning.
He finally drifted off to sleep to the sound of Holmes’s fitful snoring.
* * *
When Douglas awoke the following morning, the first thing he did was to check on his friend.
Holmes was still asleep, but not pleasantly so. He was tossing and sweating, though the room was far from warm. He opened his eyes only long enough to ask for the carbolic acid, which Douglas mixed with a bit of water and brought him. Holmes slathered it on his cheek with little finesse, as if his hand were a mitt.
“Be careful,” Douglas said, taking back the dish, “or you’ll use it all up.”
Holmes began to mumble.
“Can’t feel my extremities at all…” he said.
Then he promptly fell asleep again.
* * *
For four full days, Holmes remained thus, wanting nothing but a sip or two of water, and the carbolic acid. When asleep, he continued to agonize in his dreams about Georgiana.
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