by Andrew Lane
‘Come on,’ he said, the words catching in his dry throat, ‘let’s find a hotel and get something to eat. The telegraph office probably won’t open until later.’
‘Food,’ Matty said, his voice cracked. ‘Sleep.’
Virginia just nodded. Her face was chalk-white – the freckles standing out like spots of ink – and she looked like she was at the end of her tether.
The hotel was across the street from the station. The street was dry earth, and rutted by the wheels of countless carts, and strangely Sherlock found it harder going than the grasslands.
The swing doors weren’t locked, which felt like the first piece of good luck they’d had in a while.
And standing over a table in the centre of the open main room, looking down at a map spread out in front of him, was Amyus Crowe.
He glanced up at the sound of the three of them entering, and his face registered so many different emotions within the space of a second that Sherlock felt he was looking at several different men at the same time.
Virginia ran to her father and threw her arms around him. Matty just sank into a chair and closed his eyes.
‘You tracked us,’ Sherlock said. He couldn’t hear any emotion in his voice. Maybe the night-long walk had burned it out of him. He just felt very tired.
‘I talked to the newspaper boys,’ Crowe said. He was obviously struggling to keep his voice level. ‘There’s not much happens in the city that they don’t know about, and they manage to get by largely ignored by the rest of the population. They told me about you bein’ followed, an’ managin’ to reverse the process. Neat trick with the cap, the jacket an’ the papers, by the way. One of them saw you at the boardin’ house, an’ another saw the two of you at the station. I managed to piece the rest of it together myself.’ He took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I think I can work out what got you from there to here. If I thought you’d done it deliberately, son, I’d put you on the first boat back to England an’ make sure you an’ I were never on the same continent again, but I reckon what happened was a series of small accidents, at the end of which you were far away from where I was an’ where I could help.’
‘That,’ said Sherlock, ‘is about the size of it. Not intentional. Not in the slightest.’
‘It’s true,’ Virginia said, voice muffled by her father’s chest. ‘We were following the men who had Matty, and the train started to move before we could get off.’
‘But they did rescue me,’ Matty added, eyes still closed.
‘That they did,’ Crowe admitted. He glanced at the three of them. ‘I think you need food and drink and rest, but I think I need to find out what happened to you while you’re eatin’ an’ drinkin’.’ He turned his head towards the rear of the room, where a doorway led out. ‘Mrs Dimmock! Four breakfasts, with all the orange juice an’ coffee you can muster!’ He glanced at Sherlock and Matty. ‘Make that eight breakfasts,’ he shouted. ‘There’s hungry people here!’
The next hour was a blur. Food arrived while the three of them were telling Amyus Crowe everything that had happened to them, and they ended up talking while they were stuffing their faces with ham, fried potato, eggs of various sorts and juice.
‘He’s planning to invade Canada,’ Sherlock said to Crowe when they got to the end. ‘He’s got an army built up, and he’s planning to set up a new country within Canada and declare it as the New Confederacy’
‘That’s pretty much what the Pinkertons had already worked out,’ Crowe said, nodding. ‘They’ve had their eye on this Duke Balthassar for some time now. The fact that he’s usin’ John Wilkes Booth as a figurehead to give his troops some backbone an’ give this new nation some legitimacy in the eyes of the Southern States was news to them, but it served to explain what he was waitin’ for.’
‘So what are they going to do about it?’ Sherlock asked. ‘They can’t be letting it go ahead, surely? It’ll poison relationships between America and England for generations.’
Crowe shook his massive, craggy head. ‘They got a plan,’ he rumbled. ‘Can’t say I think much of it, but Secretary of War Stanton has personally endorsed it, so that’s about all a man can say’
‘They’re going to attack?’ Matty asked, mouth still full of fried potatoes.
‘The Army’s been mobilized, an’ they’re forming a cordon somewhere ’tween here and the border ,’ Crowe said. ‘But there’s somethin’ else afoot. The Government wants to resolve this without hand to hand fightin’, if at all possible.’ He sighed, and glanced away, towards the front door to the hotel. ‘Secretary of War Stanton was quite taken with the use of balloons for reconnaissance durin’ the War Between the States. He reckons that balloons are the future for warfare. He’s directed that the Army Corps of Engineers deploys with as many hot air balloons as it has. Come evening, he intends floatin’ the balloons over Balthassar’s encampment an’ droppin’ explosive devices on them.’
‘But—’ Sherlock started, then stopped, appalled. ‘But that would be a massacre! I know these men are about to invade another country, but to drop bombs on them! Can’t he at least give them a chance to surrender?’
Crowe shook his head. ‘It don’t work that way. Secretary of War Stanton wants to send a message. He wants everyone to know that the war is over an’ the Union won, an’ any attempt to revive Confederate fortunes will be met with overwhelmin’ force.’
‘But hundreds, maybe thousands of men will be killed!’ Sherlock protested. ‘And not even in a battle, where they might defend themselves. They’re going to die when fire rains down on them from above! That’s just wrong!’
‘It may be wrong,’ Crowe said quietly, ‘but it’s goin’ to happen that way. Welcome to the world of what the Germans call Realpolitik, Sherlock.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sherlock’s dreams were full of fire, falling from the sky, and the screaming of charred and stick-thin figures running around in chaos. He woke up after a few hours, still tired but unable to sleep any more.
The bedroom was one of three spare ones the hotel manager had found for them to sleep in. Sherlock had wondered if the empty train in the station had meant that the hotel would be full of travellers, but in fact the train had been hired as a special by Amyus Crowe and a small group of Pinkerton’s agents who were monitoring the situation.
As he lay there, his mind kept coming back to what was going to happen in a few hours. It wasn’t as if the men in Balthassar’s Army were necessarily evil – they just had a different idea on how they wanted to be governed. Invading another country was wrong, obviously, but did that mean they deserved to be wiped out like ants?
Mycroft would have found a way to stop it. Sherlock was sure about that. Mycroft was a cog in the machinery of the British Government, of course, but he had beliefs, and morals, and convictions. The same beliefs, morals and convictions that had been inculcated into Sherlock by their father, Major Siger Holmes of the King’s Dragoons. They were both Siger’s sons, and they had inherited his values in the same way that they had inherited his blue eyes.
He had to do something. But what? What could he do to stop the Army Corps of Engineers?
Maybe he could send a telegraph message to Mycroft, in England. He didn’t know how much that might cost, although he suspected it would be expensive, but he still had some money left from earlier. Mycroft could call in the American Ambassador, or something, and get it stopped.
Or could he? Would he? And, more to the point, did Mycroft have enough time? He was several thousand miles away, after all, and perhaps his superiors in the Foreign Office would be more concerned with preventing an invasion of a British territory than in saving the lives of men they had never even met.
Sherlock knew that he needed to get out there, to see Balthassar’s Army and the Army Corps of Engineers balloon force. Maybe he couldn’t do anything, but he certainly wouldn’t be able to here at the hotel. There, out in the grasslands, maybe something would occur to him.
But how to get there?
He could rent a horse here in town, he guessed. He could ride out to where the balloons were being launched from. He’d seen the location, marked on the map that Amyus Crowe had been consulting a few hours before. He hadn’t consciously memorized it but, like so many things that he read, it had just lodged in his brain.
Should he take Virginia and Matty? Their presence would be comforting, but he had a feeling that this was his battle. They cared about it less than he did, and he had no right to drag them into it.
He got up and got dressed in fresh clothes that Amyus Crowe had managed to find somewhere in town. They were still new and made him itch, but the thought of putting on the same clothes he’d been wearing for the past couple of days filled him with horror.
Crowe was in the dining room, talking with two other men in suits. They had guns slung on low belts at their waists. Sherlock assumed they were from the Pinkerton Agency. He slipped past them while they were distracted and headed out into the open air.
The boardwalks along the edges of the street were filled with people wandering back and forth or just standing and talking. Sherlock walked along with the flow until he saw something that looked like a stables. He went inside.
‘Can I help you, son?’ a voice said. Sherlock looked around. An elderly man came out of the darkness – bald apart from a fringe of white hair around the back of his head, and a bushy white moustache.
‘I need a horse, just for the day,’ Sherlock said.
‘That’s convenient,’ the man said. ‘I got a horse that ain’t had any exercise for a while. Looks like we got ourselves a perfect match.’
‘How much?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Let’s call it a ten-dollar deposit, an’ nine dollars back when you return.’
Sherlock passed the money across, and the man led him to a stall where a brown mare patiently stood. She eyed him speculatively as the elderly man saddled her.
Sherlock glanced around the stables. Apart from the general tack – saddles, reins, stirrups – that was hanging from hooks, there was also a whole load of stuff that Sherlock didn’t recognize. They looked like weapons -bows, spears, axes – but they were decorated with feathers, and leather thongs.
‘Mementoes of the fights we had with the natives over the years,’ the man said, noticing the direction of Sherlock’s gaze. ‘The Pamunkey and Mattaponi tribes gave us a lot of trouble when we was building this town. They collected our scalps; my grandpa and my pa collected their tomahawks, spears, knives and bows.’
Sherlock thought about what he was heading into – a hostile army, an attacking force and a wilderness where coyotes prowled. He didn’t want to take a gun, and he was pretty sure nobody would give him one, but some kind of weapon might be a good thing. ‘For another dollar,’ he said, ‘could I borrow a bow, a quiver of arrows and a knife?’
‘No,’ the man said. He cocked his head to one side. ‘But five dollars would do it.’
Ten minutes later, Sherlock was riding out of the stables with a knife in his belt, a quiver full of arrows on his back and a bow strapped to his saddle. He thought he saw Matty and Virginia outside the hotel as he rode past, but they flashed by too quickly to tell for sure, and he wasn’t going to stop.
Remembering Amyus Crowe’s map, Sherlock struck out across country, at an angle to the train line. The landscape he was heading into was more hilly than the plains that the train line had been built across. He cantered along the edge of the foothills that emerged from the grasslands, rising up to a series of low, rounded peaks.
After an hour of riding through a landscape of bushes and small copses of trees he crossed a wide, shallow stream that flowed like a blue, sparkling ribbon from up in the hills. As his horse’s hoofs splashed the water and kicked up small pebbles he wondered if somewhere downstream the water had managed to cut its way through the soft rock to form the ravine that he, Matty and Virginia had crossed over the night before. The terrain in America was very different from what he was used to back in England: younger and more raw.
He had thought to pick up a leather water bottle from the stables before he left, and he stopped briefly to refill it and to let his horse drink its fill.
Judging by the sun it was now mid-afternoon, and judging by the map in his mind he was getting close to where the Army Corps of Engineers was setting up its camp. They would almost certainly post sentries, and he didn’t want to run into any of them. Chances were they would shoot first and ask questions afterwards.
Rather than keep skirting the foothills, Sherlock pulled his horse’s head around and headed up into the hills. If he was right, if he was where he thought he was, then he could get a good view down on to the camp from somewhere up there.
It took him another couple of hours of climbing up shallow slopes and crossing rocky patches before his horse came around the edge of a steeper section of hillside and Sherlock found himself gazing down on what it was he had come looking for.
Leaving his horse out of sight he crept forward, moving on hands and knees, until he could lie in the shelter of a large rock and stare down on the plain below.
The sun was dipping towards the horizon now, and the scene was partly illuminated by its red rays and partly by scattered campfires. By that mixed light he could see the Army Corps of Engineers’ camp spread out beneath him: a series of tents grouped in the centre surrounded by a cleared area of ground. Perhaps a hundred men were moving purposefully back and forth. On one side of the camp the horses had been corralled together in a makeshift stockade. On the other were the balloons.
The sight took Sherlock’s breath away. There were perhaps ten or twelve of the things spread across an area the size of a rugby pitch. Some of them looked like massive versions of the kind of baggy jellyfish that Sherlock remembered seeing from trips to the coast when he was younger, while others had been fully inflated into glossy spheres which gleamed in the waning light of the sun. Ropes and swathes of the same material – varnished silk, Sherlock recalled from his meeting with the Graf von Zeppelin on the SS Scotia – attached them to baskets beneath, and they were being inflated by pipes that led away from them to carts filled with gleaming copper tanks. The tanks were producing hydrogen, Sherlock remembered, from a combination of sulphuric acid and iron filings.
Thinking of the Graf von Zeppelin, Sherlock scanned the camp looking for his upright, Germanic figure. He had come across to America to talk about the military applications of balloons. It would be unusual if he wasn’t here.
The figures moving around were too small for Sherlock to make out faces, but he thought he saw a bearded man in a different uniform from the rest standing near the balloons, watching with fascination as they were being filled.
The campfires were being kept well away from the balloons, Sherlock noticed. That was a good idea – hydrogen was highly inflammable, he remembered from school. On the other hand, hundreds of metal spheres that looked like cannonballs but were almost certainly explosive devices were piled up near them. And in an hour or two, if the wind was still in the right direction, the balloons would be released, each with its own aeronaut, and they would drift silently across the desolate landscape towards the place where Duke Balthassar’s Army was encamped. And then there would be death and devastation on a scale that made Sherlock feel sick.
He had to stop it. He had to. He’d seen too much death in his life already. If he could stop people from dying then he would.
Hydrogen. Inflammable. The answer was there, but how was he going to do anything about it? If he tried to sneak down and set fire to the balloons then he would be caught and probably shot as a Confederate spy. There were guards placed in a circle around the balloons.
But there were no guards around the campfires on the other side of the camp, and from where he lay he could see that most of the tents had oil lamps in front of them, hanging from poles that had been thrust into the ground.
His mind raced as he began seeing connections between things that he’d previously seen as being
separate. The solution was there in front of him. He had some of the things he needed, and the rest were down there, in the camp.
And the sooner he started, the sooner he would finish.
He made sure that the end of his horse’s reins were secure beneath a rock, and began the slow descent down to the plain. There was only a thin sliver of sun above the horizon now, and the shadows cast by the scattered rocks were long and black. He found he could keep quite effectively to them, only scooting across open ground when he had to.
By the time he got down to the plain the sun had vanished below the horizon and the sky was the colour of a fresh bruise. Most of the balloons were fully inflated, and there was increased activity around them.
Sherlock moved away from the balloons, towards the area where the campfires were clustered. Most of the Army Engineers in the camp were over near the balloons, standing just the other side of the cordon of guards, watching and waiting for the launch. Sherlock crept through the tents until he was looking out on to the campfires. Meat was roasting, stews were simmering, and nobody was looking his way. He looked around, straightened himself up, brushed the dirt from his clothes and then walked over to an unattended tent and unhooked an oil lamp from the pole outside. Then, for good measure, he took a second one from a pole nearby. Not from the tent next door – that would probably be noticed – but from one a little way away. Nobody called out to stop him, or ask what he was doing. His heart was beating twice as fast as normal, but he kept his face impassive and, when he turned to walk back, he walked slowly, keeping the oil lamps upright but wrapped in his jacket so nobody would see the lights moving.
Once in the safety of the tents he speeded up, heading back to the base of the hills. He glanced over towards the balloons as he went. They were all fully inflated now, and he could see activity as the Army aeronauts checked their maps and made their final preparations.