Becoming Holmes (3 page)

Holmes became an orphan suddenly, in his mind, though he should not have thought that. Kind Beatrice had pushed him to renew his relationship with his father, and they had set aside their grief and Sherlock’s guilt about his mother’s murder and had begun seeing each other. His father had been growing thinner with every visit, but the boy had chosen to ignore it. When Beatrice’s frantic thumping sounded on the apothecary’s entrance on a cold December night, he knew what had happened. He opened the door
and saw her standing in a snowstorm, the jingle of carriages behind her, a gaslight glowing down on her as though she were an angel, but her black eyes filled with tears. Word had been sent to the hatter’s shop: a paralytic stroke had taken his father from him.

The funeral, at a respectable church in Sydenham and paid for by the old man’s Crystal Palace employer, brought few mourners. Sherlock sat between Beatrice and Bell, down a pew from his older brother – Mycroft was seven years his senior and had left home long ago. They had seldom seen each other since.

Holmes had wept uncontrollably and was horribly embarrassed. Beatrice had attempted to take his arm but he had pulled away, trying to stiffen his upper lip. Bell knew not to interfere. The boy had risen from his place and moved nearer Mycroft, and that, for some reason, had helped him stifle his emotions. As the service went on, he drew comfort from his older brother’s presence, though they never once looked at each other. Mycroft didn’t shed a tear, but as they were leaving, he noticed the redness in his younger brother’s eyes.

“Well, Sherlock, it has been a pleasure to see you. If it is orphans we are to be, then orphans we are. Oliver Twist made out all right.” Then he paused. “Uh, you may come to see me, if you please, at the office. It would be a … pleasure. Send your card first.” And with that, he was off.

Mycroft Holmes has no
real
interest in seeing his brother at this time in his life. Perhaps in the future, when the pain of their childhood, the stain of their “half-breed”
origins, and the trauma of their parents’ deaths have faded, they could become friends. Had the boy ever appeared near Mycroft’s tiny office at Her Majesty’s Treasury, that ominous stone structure where the nation’s money is controlled, the older brother would have nearly fainted from the sight.

But as Sherlock sits at the lab table, he desperately needs friendship. There are pains in his chest, and he feels a shortness of breath. It is as if he were slowly being squeezed to death.

To the south that morning, a ship unloads its cargo on the smelly docks of the River Thames. It has come from South America. A red-haired man awaits its most precious passenger. But it isn’t human. The man smiles when he sees it. He has just emerged from a prison himself. A strange thought flickers through his mind, a magical one.

“What if I unleashed this thing?” It makes him smile, and then his smile broadens. “What if I set it upon Sherlock Holmes?”

“Sir, I don’t feel much like eating,” says Sherlock to Sigerson Bell. As he does, his eyes rest on the newspapers with their black headlines. “I cannot believe that!”

“Yes, well, you know, Dickens was not God.”

“Probably not.”

“Though he wrote like Him, told us about life, real life. He was a little like Mercury.”

“A messenger?”

“Indeed, but a very human one for someone with an Olympian ear, a flawed chap, I hear. Had a mistress and a temper and could be rather cold.”

“We are all flawed, deeply flawed. There is so much evil –”

“You are such a sunny chap, my boy. Might you say something,
anything
, that is not sad, just once!”

Sigerson Bell’s voice is rising, his face turning red. But then he begins to cough and cannot stop. It rumbles in his lungs and growls in his larynx and something comes up his throat. He reaches for a handkerchief and catches it, wrapping the cloth close to his mouth, but not close enough to hide the red liquid that escapes.

“And now
this
!” cries Sherlock, staring at the handkerchief.

The old man stops coughing instantly. He glares at his ward. “I have had enough of you, Sherlock Holmes, you and your concern for yourself! The world changes, my boy. People die and others are born. The only constant is change! We must face it like men! Do you think that Charles Dickens groaned about in his chair all day, bemoaning his fate? No, he got on with it! He worked! If you do not stop this, you shall expire before you are a help to anyone! If you keep up these black moods, they shall plague you all your life!”

“What would you have me do?” says the boy, and for
the first time in his life he speaks to Sigerson Bell with sarcasm dripping from his words.

“I would have you get up off your arse!”

“My arse?”

“Before I kick it from here to Buckingham Palace!”

“You … you are right, sir. I have things to do here today.”

“No! You do not!”

“I do not?”

“You are going out that door! Leave me! Now!”

With that, the old man actually seizes the boy by his collar, raises him to his feet, and kicks him in the arse. Sherlock almost runs to the door and out. As he stands under a gaslight on the foot pavement on Denmark Street, a few working-class folk rushing past in the still-dark morning, he can’t reach down and summon any courage. He still feels sorry for himself. His master has literally kicked him out. Will he ever welcome him back? Sherlock feels dead inside – absolutely alone and unloved.

So, he makes up his mind to do something he never dreamed he would. Unable to return to the shop, he decides to go to Whitehall to Her Majesty’s Treasury, the Office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to see the only living person who shares his very blood, who might care for him.

Back in the apothecary shop, Sigerson Bell begins to cough again. This time, the red sputum almost fills his handkerchief.

Sherlock slouches down Denmark Street toward central London and the river, passing those imaginary black mourning ribbons on shops, early folk on their way to workplaces, and newsboys scurrying toward their accustomed spots with bundles of papers in their arms, ready to shout the news of Dickens’s funeral arrangements to the masses.

Holmes is six feet tall now, and his voice has dropped an octave since January.
Next year, I will be seventeen years old, and the following season, by hook or by crook, studying at a university. Then, I can pursue my calling
. But as he walks, a chilling feeling descends upon him. He wonders if he will ever achieve his dreams.
Death is not just nearby
, he thinks,
it is fast approaching me
. He
knows
it. It is like a message from God.

To the east, north, west, and south, Sherlock Holmes’s enemies are awake and plotting.

Everything is about to change, forever
.

2
THE NEW MAN AT THE TREASURY

S
herlock Holmes has made the trip from the shop to Whitehall Street many times. It takes him south down modest Crown Street past a granite workhouse, into bustling Trafalgar Square, and then along the river to that famous wide street with its government buildings. But he usually stops before he gets to the offices that line it, all tall and imposing, mostly white and stone, the Prime Minister’s residence and Westminster Palace nearby. His destination is usually where sprawling Scotland Yard sits tucked back from the thoroughfare, and he often approaches from the north side to be inconspicuous. Inspector Lestrade likes to have him chased away. But as Sherlock looks across at police headquarters today, he actually smiles. His opponent has recently retired, making room for a place at the bottom of the detective pole for his ambitious son.

The boy contemplates young Lestrade for a moment.
Is he the one?
Would he be that one male companion that Sherlock needs in life, helping him fight crime? He dismisses the idea. Lestrade will be a conventional detective, his methods those of his father and the unimaginative Force.
I must be an irregular, independent, my ways new and daring; illegal, if need be
.

At this very minute, the little man in the barren house to the north, the villain with the murderous thoughts, is putting on his strange clothing for the day. He too will soon walk south toward Whitehall. He has no mirror with which to examine his adjusted appearance. But he doesn’t care. He knows he is ugly, even in these respectable clothes. Any joy he gets from life never comes from his appearance but from what he can do to others, what he can gain by cunning and brutality. But this morning an awful feeling is overwhelming him. When he looks through his windows, he also sees the imaginary dark ribbons on the buildings outside. He worries about what the boss has asked him to do, and feels his days are numbered. Death is all around him too.