Becoming Holmes (2 page)

But much more than the sudden and shocking death of the age’s greatest novelist, the soul of England, haunts young Holmes today. He is deep in one of his black periods. They have descended upon him in short stretches since birth and grown more frequent since his mother’s death (which he believes he caused). But he has always thrown them off. When his prodigious brain has been excited by a truly challenging problem or, better still, by the scent of the solution to a crime that no one else can solve, he has always risen to
heights of almost erotic energy, like an opium addict with the juice of the poppy plant freshly rushing into his veins.

But the blackness has been with him for too long this time. He cannot shake it. Death and disappointment are all around him, and they are not going away. He is desperate to climb up from the depths. He needs a thrill. He thinks of the dangerous crimes he has solved, recalls the heart-pumping sensation of being near murder, and wonders, for a fleeting second, if he, Sherlock Holmes, about to become a man, should kill someone, someone evil.

He lifts his head slightly and looks at the alkaloids and poisons in his master’s cabinets: strychnine, cocaine, tubo-curarine, nicotine, morphine, and more.
They do so much for our patients! Would they help me too?

It is four o’clock in the morning.

To the east in London, at this very hour, a boy of about eighteen, plump, with a narrow brush mustache above his thin lips and blonde hair that is parted too close to the middle and falls limply over his forehead, walks across London Bridge carrying a bag that seems to be breathing. It pulses beneath his grip.

“Settle, pretty things,” he says in a high-pitched whine.

There is human blood on his hands. But he won’t wash it off, not for hours. He has looked into the face of death again and been fascinated. He is thinking about that, adrenaline still coursing through him.

“Give me more to do, boss, more to do; give me Sherlock Holmes.”

A graveyard awaits him.

Back in the dim apothecary shop, Sherlock is startled by another high-pitched but much more friendly voice. “My boy!” cries Sigerson Bell. The old apothecary, bent in the shape of a question mark, comes sliding down the railing of his spiral staircase upon his bum like a child, wearing his nightgown. His long, thin, white hair sails out from under his nightcap; the gown billows up revealing his nearly naked self beneath … coming straight at the boy! He appears to be achieving almost terminal velocity and, when he reaches the base, goes flying out across the lab, tucking himself into a ball and rolling right up to the boy’s feet. He has placed a huge, goose-down pillow on the floor, set in just the right spot to cushion such falls.

But Sherlock’s master isn’t fooling him. He has slid down the railing because walking the stairs has become painful. Yesterday, Holmes found the old man’s handkerchief shoved under a mattress, spotted with red spit and phlegm. Over the last six months, Bell’s cough has become frightening, the sound in his chest like a death rattle. But he never speaks of it, never shows the least bit of concern.

“Why are you up at this hour, my young knight?” he inquires, sitting below Sherlock on the floor. The boy reaches down, takes his old, thin hand, and helps raise him to his feet.

“No reason, sir.”

“That is not what I taught you to –”

“There is always a reason,” sighs Sherlock.

“Yes. There is. One must search for it, encounter it, and grapple with it!”

“I cannot grapple with anything anymore, sir.”

Sigerson Bell’s shining eyes barely hide the worry underneath. Ever since he met the boy, he has been able to pull him up from his depressions. A violent joust of Bellitsu, during which they nearly break each other’s bones, a dangerous chemical experiment punctuated with an explosion or two, or a violin lesson in the more obscure movements of the great Paganini have always done the trick. But nothing has worked for six months. The old man knows exactly why.

Worst of all was the death of Wilberforce Holmes, not long before Christmas. That, however, was just one blow, just the hardest punch in a series of assaults upon the boy’s well-being. His hero, Benjamin Disraeli, the miraculous Jewish Prime Minister of the Empire, was defeated in the country’s last election; Irene Doyle, the love of his life, has been in America now for nine months, abandoning him for stage and voice training in New York City, her once-daily letters slowed to a trickle; and Beatrice Leckie, the poor hatter’s daughter with the sparkling black eyes and genuine concern for him, appears to have found someone else to give her the attention she once sought from him. More dangerous than all, he has been trying, once again, to keep out of criminal investigations. He is just a boy, he reasons, he needs
to grow, to arm himself better. But this inaction is killing him from the inside out.

“Shall we eat, my boy? Headcheese? Blood pudding? Stewed turnips?”

Even those delectable meals can’t stir him. He sits facing straight ahead, his gray eyes looking all pupil and nearly black.

To the north, only a few blocks away, a small young man sits on the floor of his gloomy bedroom, weeping. He is dark haired and dark eyed, his age difficult to distinguish; he hasn’t grown in years. He hates many people, but Sherlock Holmes is his most despised.

“He doesn’t know what I ’ave endured,” he whimpers. “The boss doesn’t
really
know either. I should kill them both, I should. I deserves more.”

He had been left at a workhouse doorstep as a baby and raised inside its black stone walls, eating its gruel twice a day, taking rudimentary reading classes at a Ragged School, smarter somehow than the others, but torn away from the workhouse at the age of ten and put into the streets. He cost too much to keep.

“I were clever in schooling!” he cries. He sniffles and stops his sobbing with a great effort of will. Then he shouts, “I ’ave an opportunity, NOW, I does!”

His house has no furniture but his bed. He only ever has one visitor. He looks at the clothes that have been
purchased for him, lying in a pile nearby: respectable suits, cravats, and waistcoats; black leather gloves, a bowler hat, and an umbrella. In the morning, he will comb his hair as he has been taught, clean his face, put on the boots he has been told to polish.

“The boss is ’iding something from me! I will find what it is. I will ’ave more than just this job ’e is making me do!”

He has fought Sherlock Holmes many times, sometimes in desperate combats down on the cobblestones, instructed by his leader. He remembers those struggles, how he had wanted to do something terrible to the half-Jew. If he’d been allowed a knife, he would have driven it deep into Holmes’s breastbone and through his heart. He remembers the good boy panting beneath him, squirming, and treasures the memory of that fear. But Holmes is not such easy prey anymore. He has been taught how to fight, has lethal skills a strange apothecary has shown him.

It would be best to not fight fair with him, thinks the little man. That is
always
best.

“Someday soon, I will finish ’im!”

Sherlock takes a long time to respond to Sigerson Bell’s invitation to eat. His mind is far away. He is thinking about Malefactor. Holmes could use the excitement of a confrontation with that blackguard now. In fact, he needs it. But Malefactor has become a shadow too, scheming somewhere, planning even bigger things. A year ago, the crook had said
that he was turning respectable. Sherlock knew what that meant. Greater evil was coming. His villainous lieutenants, Grimsby and Crew, have vanished with him.

To the west, in a beautiful home, a wealthy man lies awake. He sees two monsters when he closes his eyes, monsters he loves. But someone
knows
. Some fiend, some shadow he cannot lay his hand upon, told him by letter what would be done if “arrangements” were not made. And so, he had used his influence to put a worthless human being with perhaps evil intent into a place he does not belong, into a position of power. And the villain who engineered this is still plotting.

That enemy is far away in a respectable place, a spider spinning a web. At least once a day, he says to himself with a snarl, “Stay out of this, Sherlock Holmes.”