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  He walked on, waiting for the burning in his mouth to subside. After a while he felt a prickle on the back of his neck. It felt like someone was watching him. He didn’t believe that there was some kind of sixth sense that meant he could tell he was being watched even though his back was turned, but he was prepared to believe that he might have caught a glimpse of a watcher out of the corner of his eye and that part of his brain was trying to alert him to something. He turned, letting his gaze roam across the crowd of sailors, Dutch and English settlers and locals.

  One man stood out. He was wearing a grubby linen suit and a straw hat, and his white shirt was creased and sweat-stained, but the most obvious, and strange, thing about him was that his face and hair were completely obscured by a black gauze veil, like the ones worn by beekeepers. The veil was tucked into a silk cravat which was tied loosely around his neck. The cravat was wilting in the heat and the humidity. He was leaning on a cane and seemed to be staring at Sherlock, although the black veil made it difficult to see anything more than the shape of his head.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Sherlock called, feeling a shiver run through him. He thought it was just the memories of being watched from afar by the agents of the Paradol Chamber that were making him edgy, but as the man started to walk across to where Sherlock was standing the feeling became more intense.

  The man stopped a few feet away. ‘Are you from the Gloria Scott?’ he asked. His voice was thin and reedy, like the sound of an oboe, or a high note from a church organ.

  Sherlock nodded.

  ‘My name is Arrhenius,’ he said. ‘Jacobus Arrhenius. I will be a passenger on your ship. Please to tell me where the Captain may be found.’

  ‘He . . . he is currently ashore, sorting out our next cargo,’ Sherlock said. ‘I think he intends to be back soon, if you could wait.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Arrhenius said. ‘I will wait in the shade by the gangway.’ He glanced up at the sky – or, at least, that was the direction his head turned in. The veil made it impossible to tell what he was actually looking at. ‘The sun and I do not get on well. Not at all.’ He turned away, then looked back so that he could see Sherlock again. ‘You know my name, but I do not know yours.’

  ‘Sherlock. My name is Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘I am pleased to meet you,’ Arrhenius said. He extended his right hand, which was encased in a black leather glove which ran up inside his sleeve so that no flesh was visible. Sherlock took the hand gingerly. Beneath the soft leather it felt strange – not like a normal hand.

  ‘I will see you again,’ Arrhenius said before moving off, and Sherlock wasn’t sure if that was a promise or a threat.

  He watched the veiled man’s retreating back, then, when Arrhenius had been swallowed up by the crowd, he moved on.

  After a while Sherlock got bored by the stalls. The heat and the humidity were weighing him down. He wondered whether to explore the town further, or to go back to the ship. Eventually he decided to go back: it wasn’t as if he was going to be living in Sabang for any length of time, and being back on board would allow him to continue with his violin practice, Cantonese lessons and T’ai chi ch’uan in peace for a while.

  When he reached the gangway he turned and looked around the bustling quay. He could feel the same tickle on his skin as he had earlier. Somewhere, Arrhenius was watching him again. Eventually he spotted the veiled man in the shadows beneath a palm tree. When he saw that he had been spotted, Arrhenius bowed slightly to Sherlock.

  A few minutes later Captain Tollaway and Mr Larchmont returned from their meetings in Sabang, and Sherlock watched from the deck as Mr Arrhenius stepped out of the shade to greet them. Sherlock couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, but neither of the two sailors seemed at all amazed by the black all-encompassing veil or the gloves. Either they had met him before, Sherlock reasoned, or they had been warned in advance.

  The three men came up the gangway and disappeared into the depths of the ship. Sherlock presumed they had gone to the Captain’s cabin. About half an hour later a cart arrived alongside the ship, pulled by some kind of big-horned cow. When Mr Arrhenius appeared at the side of the ship to watch the contents of the cart being loaded on board Sherlock concluded that it was his luggage.

  One box in particular seemed to concern the Dutchman. It was made of wood and had holes drilled in the top. Arrhenius came down the gangway and walked behind the local labourers as they carried it on to the ship. The wind changed direction briefly, blowing towards Sherlock, and he caught a whiff of a strange, musty odour. The box vanished down a hatch and presumably towards Arrhenius’s cabin, as did the rest of his luggage, and the strange smell vanished with it.

  More carts began to turn up with crates – bigger ones this time. Rather than being carried on board, the crates were attached to the ropes hanging down from the two nearest bamboo cranes and then hoisted up into the air. Mr Larchmont had mentioned coffee beans earlier, and Sherlock assumed that was what these were.

  It took the rest of that day and a significant portion of the next for the crates to be lifted on board the Gloria Scott and lowered into the hold through the deck hatches. Sherlock watched during the breaks in his violin, T’ai chi ch’uan and Cantonese classes. With few sailors on board, and the Captain and Mr Larchmont eating with the local Dutch townsfolk most of the time, Wu Chung was short of things to do, and so he enthusiastically took Sherlock under his wing.

  Sailors began to drift back to the ship in ones and twos at midday on the third day. Sherlock assumed that some kind of message had gone out. There were some that Sherlock didn’t recognize – it looked as if Mr Larchmont and the Captain had recruited some Dutchmen and Englishmen left there by a previous ship as replacements for the men who had died in the storm. By mid-afternoon they were fully crewed again, and after Mr Larchmont had signed off some paperwork on the quayside the Gloria Scott cast off the lines that were holding her against the dock and began to manoeuvre out into the clear waters of the harbour.

  Next stop Shanghai, Sherlock thought.

  There was a different feeling on board the ship on the last leg of their voyage from Sabang to Shanghai. The sailors seemed more eager, happier. They knew that they were close to their destination, which meant they were close to the point when the ship would turn around and head back to England, where most of them had families. The presence of the new sailors was a factor in this different feeling, of course, but they quickly integrated into the crew, as Sherlock had done.

  And there was Mr Arrhenius, of course. He seemed to spend a lot of time on deck, staring at the distant horizon. Once or twice, when Sherlock passed him by, he nodded in greeting. The other sailors obviously avoided him, and Sherlock heard mutterings in the evening singalongs that he was not human but some kind of demon beneath the veil. The nervousness of the crew got to such a pitch that Mr Larchmont had to call a meeting of all the sailors and reassure them – in his usual gruff tones – that Mr Arrhenius was as human as the rest of them, and he merely suffered from a disease that had disfigured his skin.

  Mr Arrhenius always had his meals in his cabin. Wu Chung took him a tray twice a day – usually something better than whatever the crew were having. The crew saw this as another thing to mutter about, but it seemed only fitting to Sherlock – after all, the man was a paying passenger.

  Three days after leaving Sumatra, Wu Chung asked Sherlock to take some food to Mr Arrhenius’s cabin. The tray had two plates on it, one of chicken stew and one of raw fish. Puzzled, Sherlock manoeuvred his way along the ship’s corridors until he reached the cabin near the front where Arrhenius spent his time. He knocked with one hand, balancing the tray with the other, and waited until Arrhenius opened the door.

  Sherlock’s arrival appeared to have taken Arrhenius by surprise. He wasn’t wearing his hat, or his veil. Sherlock saw that his face and scalp were hairless, but that wasn’t the most disconcerting thing about him. No, the most disconcerting thing about him was the colour of his skin. It was
a silvery-blue, and as the light from the oil lamps in the corridor shone on the man Sherlock saw that the whites of his eyes were also the same colour. It was as if he was a metal statue come to life, and Sherlock found himself taking an inadvertent step backwards.

  ‘Yes?’ His voice was as high and as piping as Sherlock remembered.

  ‘I have some food for you, sir.’

  Arrhenius just stared at him. ‘You are the boy from the docks, yes?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The cook, the Chinaman, usually brings my food.’

  ‘He’s busy, sir. He asked me to bring it.’

  ‘Very well.’ Arrhenius seemed annoyed, although Sherlock couldn’t work out why. The Dutchman reached for the tray.

  ‘Would you like me to put it on a table for you?’ Sherlock asked.

  ‘No – just give it to me.’

  Sherlock handed the tray through the doorway. He turned to leave, but as he did so he saw something moving out of the corner of my eye – a shape, about the size of a dog, rapidly slipping out of sight in the shadows behind Arrhenius’s back. As the thing moved Sherlock could hear a clicking noise. He glanced at Arrhenius to ask him what it was, but the Dutchman was staring at him with an expression that clearly indicated that he wanted Sherlock to leave. Confused, Sherlock backed away. The door closed in his face.

  Fiddler was walking past as Sherlock stood there, thinking. Sherlock caught him by the sleeve. ‘Does our passenger have a pet of any kind?’ he asked.

  Fiddler scowled. ‘What, that devil-creature?’ He shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge,’ he said. ‘But if he does then it’ll be some kind of familiar from the depths of hell!’

  ‘Thanks,’ Sherlock said. ‘Very helpful.’

  As he moved away his foot caught something and he accidentally kicked it towards the bulkhead. It made a rattling noise. Curious, Sherlock bent down to see what it was. For a moment he thought it was a tooth, fallen out of someone’s mouth – a common thing with sailors, he had found – but it glinted silver, like Mr Arrhenius’s skin. He picked it up. It was a pointed cone, slightly curved, and it appeared to have a hole running through it. He didn’t have a clue what it might be, so he slipped it into his pocket in order to examine it later. If someone had lost it, maybe he could give it back to them – and find out what it was into the bargain.

  It was later that day when one of the crew spotted something on the horizon, and called an urgent warning out to Mr Larchmont.

  ‘Sails!’ he yelled from his position in the rigging. ‘Sails on the horizon!’

  Sherlock was working alongside Gittens at the time, pulling frayed ropes apart into fragments that they would then plug between the planks of the ship to help keep them watertight. He glanced over at the dark-faced lad. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked. ‘There’re all kinds of ships sailing across the ocean. We’ve never had a warning before.’

  ‘We’re in the South China Seas,’ Gittens said grimly. ‘There’re Chinese pirates all across these waters. They plunder any ship they find, and they ransom the passengers if they look important.’

  ‘What if they don’t look important?’

  ‘I heard a story, once,’ Gittens confided. ‘Old sailor. He’d been on a ship that got boarded by Chinese pirates. They were ransacking the place and they believed the captain had hidden some jewels from them, so they tied him between the masts, a rope tied tight around his right thumb and a rope tied tight around his right toe, and they hauled him up between the foremast and the mizzenmast. Then they took turns riding on him like he was a swing.’

  ‘Ah,’ Sherlock said simply, but inside he was sickened at the casual brutality that Gittens had described.

  Gittens grinned, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. ‘They normally start with the youngest,’ he said. ‘That’ll be you, then.’

  ‘And you next,’ Sherlock pointed out.

  He glanced over to where Mr Larchmont was standing by the rail, telescope to his eye. Larchmont turned, and his expression was as black as the storm they had only recently escaped.

  ‘Sails on the horizon,’ he confirmed. ‘It’s pirates, lads, and we’re in for a fight!’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Larchmont passed by and clicked his fingers at Sherlock and Gittens. ‘You two,’ he snapped. ‘Look lively now, and break out the weapons from the armoury. Spread them among the crew.’ He slipped a rusty key from around his neck, where it was hanging from a cord, and handed it to Gittens. ‘Get on now – quickly. I’ll send sailors down to collect them. When you run out of weapons, start issuing belaying pins. When you run out of belaying pins, issue hooks and chains.’

  ‘Armoury?’ Sherlock questioned as Larchmont stalked away to shout at another sailor. ‘I didn’t even know we had an armoury.’

  Gittens laughed bitterly. ‘Don’t start getting ideas,’ he said. ‘It’s not like this is a Naval warship. The armoury is just a cupboard near the Captain’s cabin, and the weapons are things that’ve been collected on various voyages over the past couple of years. There’re some swords, some knives, and a couple of muskets and rifles so rusted they’ll probably explode in a man’s hands as soon as the trigger is pulled. There’re also the axes that we use to chop timber up an’ splice ropes, and there’re rumours that the Captain has an Army revolver that he picked up in a bazaar somewhere which he keeps under his pillow in case of mutiny.’ He laughed again, but there was no humour in the sound. ‘Oh, and I suppose we can count Wu Chung’s cooking knives as well. Let’s hope he’s been sharpening them regular-like.’

  ‘It’s not a lot to fight off pirates,’ Sherlock said anxiously. ‘Don’t we have any cannon, or anything like that?’

  ‘This is a trading ship. We carry cargo. Cannon are heavy, and they take up space that could be used for stacking crates or sacks. No, our best chance is to pile on full sail, and hope we can outrun them.’

  Sherlock frowned. ‘But the hold is full of cargo. That’s going to slow us down.’ He looked around. ‘Mr Larchmont needs to order the crew to throw the crates overboard! We need to be as light as possible – that’s the only way we can get up enough speed!’

  He made to move off towards where Larchmont was shouting at the sailors to unfurl all the sails and tighten all the ropes, but Gittens caught at his arm.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he hissed. ‘We didn’t sail halfway around the world so we could dump our cargo at the first sign of trouble. That’s where the Captain makes his money. He’d rather order half the crew to jump in the sea than throw the cargo overboard. Sailors are ten a farthing. They can be picked up at any port. Losing cargo means losing money.’ He glanced out towards the sea. ‘An’ based on what I’ve heard about Chinese pirates, I’d be first in line to jump. I’d rather take my chances with the sharks, I surely would.’

  Gittens pulled Sherlock with him towards the nearest hatch. They made their way rapidly down into the inside of the ship, and Gittens led the way to an anonymous padlocked door halfway along a corridor. Sailors pushed past them, expressions of alarm on their faces. Some of them started forming a queue beside the armoury – presumably on Larchmont’s orders. As Gittens managed to unlock the stiff padlock the sailors suddenly squeezed themselves to the sides of the corridor, and Sherlock saw Captain Tollaway striding down the centre. The expression on his face was thunderous, but Sherlock thought he could detect a grey tinge of concern beneath the dark gaze.

  His revolver was swinging in his hand.

  ‘Take courage, boys,’ he said to nobody in particular as he passed. ‘We’re not going to let these barbarous savages get their hands on our cargo! We’ll fight to the last man rather than let that happen! A shilling to any man who kills one of the pirates!’

  The queue of sailors let out a ragged cheer as he passed, but Sherlock suspected they were all wondering who the last man was going to be.

  Gittens pulled the cupboard door open. Inside Sherlock saw swords and knives hanging from hooks. Some of them were rusty. Gitten
s gestured to Sherlock to pull them out and start handing them to the sailors in the queue. Gittens himself pulled bundles of oiled cloth out from the back of the cupboard and unwrapped them to reveal some long and antiquated guns. Sherlock had seen the farmers in Farnham use more modern weapons to scare off birds.

  This was not looking good. He could feel a knot of apprehension coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. Surely, having survived the storm, he couldn’t now die here, in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from everything he held dear? There were things he needed to do back home. What about Virginia?

  After the weapons had been distributed, Gittens closed and locked the cupboard. He had kept two knives for himself, and he tucked them into his belt. One of them was short and chunky, with a leather-wrapped handle. The other had a curved blade and an edge that was shaped like a wave – it wasn’t an English knife, that was for sure.

  Gittens made as if to head back to the ladder, then hesitated. He pulled the first knife from his belt and handed it to Sherlock.

  ‘Here,’ he said roughly. ‘Keep this. It might help. If anything helps, apart from prayer.’

  Before Sherlock could say anything, Gittens was racing off.

  Up on deck the tension was so thick that it seemed to hang like a veil of smoke above the crew. Half the men were either up in the rigging or pulling at ropes on deck; the other half were armed and clustered along the side of the ship off which the sails had been seen. Sherlock moved across to join them, worming his way through the press of bodies until he was up against the rail.

  The ship was cutting rapidly though the waves, and spray drifted back into Sherlock’s face. Their pursuers might have been sails on the horizon twenty minutes before, but now they were appreciably closer. Sherlock craned his neck to get a look.

  The pursuing vessel was unlike anything Sherlock had seen before. Its hull was curved so that the bows and the stern were projecting upwards, raised above the sea, and the middle section rode low in the waves. The sails were a reddish brown in colour, and corrugated like fans, and rather than being flat across the top, like the sails Sherlock was used to, they came to points. It was difficult to see the stern of the ship, but from what little Sherlock could tell the rudder was much bigger than the one on the Gloria Scott, and it took three or four men to move it. Whatever principles of design the designers of the ship had followed, they were different to those used in England.