Young Sherlock: Night Break Page 4

  ‘Longer for some of us than for others,’ Sherlock murmured, glancing at his brother’s expansive stomach, which was pressed up against the edge of the desk.

  ‘Even those of us who have had the foresight to lay down substantial reserves cannot live forever on them,’ Mycroft pointed out. ‘The problem is, with Father in India it is difficult to do anything official. Any documents for signature would have to be sent to him, which means substantial delay and the risk that they might get lost somewhere along the way.’

  ‘The solution,’ Mr Lydecker said, ‘is for your brother to be given temporary Power of Attorney, until such time as your father returns.’

  Sherlock shrugged. ‘You have my approval, if you need it,’ he said. ‘Do whatever needs to be done. I trust you to make the right decisions.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mycroft said simply. He turned to Mr Lydecker. ‘Please draw up the necessary documents for signature.’

  Mr Lydecker nodded. He turned to go, then turned back. His gaze went from Mycroft to Sherlock, and back again. ‘There is, of course, the difficult matter of your sister to consider,’ he said cautiously. ‘I understand that she is . . . courting. Should she marry, then her husband will arguably have a legal claim on whatever proportion of the estate devolves to her. You need to be sure that he is a decent, honourable man, and not the kind of person who would exploit the situation for profit. Forgive me for saying so, but your sister is not exactly the kind of catch that a handsome man with a job and good prospects would normally consider. She is attractive, I admit, but her character is . . .’

  ‘Sometimes there and sometimes not,’ Mycroft interrupted. ‘You raise a difficult subject, Mr Lydecker, but you raise it with tact and at the right time, when it is not too late to do something about the situation.’ He thought for a moment, then glanced over at Sherlock. ‘I would welcome your opinions on this situation, Sherlock.’

  ‘Me?’ Sherlock was amazed. ‘What can I possibly tell you about the future prospects of emotional relationships, or the suitability of suitors?’

  ‘Firstly, I trust your fine mind, and secondly, you have had an emotional bond with a woman, which is more than I have done.’ At Sherlock’s obviously puzzled expression he added, ‘Have you forgotten Virginia Crowe so soon? You were certainly strongly attracted to her, and she to you. And then there was Niamh Quintillan, in Galway. I thought I detected some mutual attraction there as well. Frankly – and this makes me rather sad – you have a better success rate with the opposite sex than I do.’

  Sherlock could feel himself blushing. ‘I wouldn’t have put it quite like that . . .’

  ‘Of course not, but the facts remain. I suggest that we talk to Emma ourselves, and then talk with this man, James Phillimore, whom she has apparently taken up with. We need to find out what kind of a man he is. In Father’s absence, I need to determine Mr Phillimore’s intentions with respect to our sister.’

  ‘That will be . . . interesting,’ Sherlock murmured.

  Mr Lydecker nodded. ‘Then it is settled. I will return tomorrow with the documents for signature.’ He shook Mycroft’s hand, then Sherlock’s hand, and left.

  ‘Welcome to the world of adult decisions,’ Mycroft said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Leaving the library, Sherlock crossed the hall towards the stairs, intending to head upstairs and check that Matty was all right. He was halfway across the tiled floor when he noticed that the front door was open. It had been closed earlier on, and he knew that the servants wouldn’t have left it like that, so Mr Lydecker must have failed to close it properly when he left. Sherlock walked over to the door to push it shut, but through the gap he saw a familiar dark-haired figure walking away from the house, towards the nearest trees. It was his sister, Emma.

  On impulse, Sherlock started walking after her. As he walked he tried to analyse his motives. Obviously he wanted to say hello to her – he hadn’t seen her in almost two years – but also he was intrigued to see what she was doing. His sister’s mind had always seemed to flit from one thing to another like a butterfly moving from flower to flower, and Sherlock had often been intrigued by the strange leaps it made.

  He thought about calling out to her, but he decided immediately not to. Emma had always been of a delicate disposition; sudden noises and shocks could panic her, and it took hours to calm her down. Instead he just followed – not secretly, but not noisily – hoping to find some place where he could make her aware of his presence calmly.

  Emma headed into the woods that bounded Holmes Lodge on three sides. She stuck to a well-worn path that Sherlock remembered from his childhood. It led to a nearby river, to a point where the river diverted from its fairly straight line and wound through the trees in a near circle, following some depression or crease in the ground, before finding its way back to a point a few tens of feet from where it had wandered off its path. From there it went straight again, continuing on until it left the estate. There were fish in the stream, Sherlock remembered, and otters could sometimes been seen slipping into the water from the banks and hunting them. There was also a deep area just where the river diverted from its straight course, and Sherlock could recall his father, his mother and his brother all warning him, at various times, to keep an eye on Emma if she went near the water at that point. He had never been entirely sure whether they were worried that she might slip in by accident, distracted by the flittering of her thoughts from subject to subject, or that she might deliberately cast herself in while in the grip of some mental weakness. Perhaps both.

  Emma kept to the path through the trees. She was carrying something – was it a book? Sherlock couldn’t tell at that distance; the sun was blocked by the leaves, and everything was cast in shadow. Sherlock could hear small animals running away from them beneath the leaves and twigs on the ground, and birds falling silent as the two of them grew near, and then starting up their song again after they had passed.

  How often had he walked or run through these woods? Sherlock wondered. How many generations of birds and animals had he outlasted? If his footprints could somehow be coloured and preserved for posterity, would there be a single piece of ground around there that was uncoloured?

  Eventually the trees thinned out into a large clearing, and Emma emerged into the open air. The river was in front of her – coming in from the trees on the right and going out through the trees to the left, but making a big looping detour in the middle. She sat down on a fallen tree, tucking her dress carefully underneath her.

  Sherlock stopped in the treeline and watched her for a while. The book that he thought she had been carrying turned out to be a pad of paper. She kept it open on her lap while she used a piece of charcoal from her pocket to sketch something that Sherlock couldn’t see.

  He wondered whether it was something she could see, or whether she was just sketching something from her imagination. Abruptly he dismissed the thought. He didn’t know what she was sketching, and without evidence he wasn’t going to let his thoughts be guided by the preconceptions of others.

  He coughed deliberately, and started to walk towards where Emma was sitting, making no effort to hide the sound of his feet brushing through the grass or crushing twigs and pine cones underfoot. She didn’t seem to be aware of his approach, focused as she was on her drawing. Even when he got to her shoulder she didn’t react.

  ‘Hello,’ he said gently.

  She looked up, smiling. Her face was older than he remembered: the puppy-fat of childhood gone now from her cheeks and jaw and replaced with an angular sharpness. Her eyebrows, he noticed, were thick and well-defined. She wasn’t beautiful, by any stretch of the imagination, but she was striking.

  ‘Sherlock! There you are! I’ve been looking for you!’

  It was as if she had only seen him a few hours before, rather than years.

  ‘Emma,’ he said, and smiled back. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I went away to school,’ he said,
trying to work out from her expression whether this was news to her, or whether she remembered. ‘Then I went to stay with Uncle Sherrinford and Aunt Anna, and then I went to Oxford. Oh, and I went to France, America, Russia, China, and Japan as well.’

  ‘Aunt Anna is in the house,’ she said, still smiling.

  ‘I know – I saw her.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Mycroft is there as well.’

  Her smile widened. ‘Mycroft! It seems like ages since I saw him.’

  Sherlock wondered whether to mention Matty, but decided to keep that information to himself for a while longer. There was no point in overburdening her with new information. He remembered, from his childhood years, that Emma could only process so many new facts at any one time before getting confused. Instead he asked: ‘What are you drawing?’

  She turned the sketchbook so that he could see the picture. She had blocked out the sweep of the river with broad strokes of the charcoal and was filling in the trees on the other side. She had obviously inherited the artistic abilities of the Vernets – the French family that the Holmeses had married into a few generations back and which had produced several well-known painters.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said honestly. ‘You have a real eye for art. I wish I did.’

  ‘There are beavers,’ she replied.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Beavers – in the river. They’re building a dam out of twigs and branches and earth so that they can catch fish. They’re building it just here.’ She indicated on the sketch the point where the river started to curve around in a loop. ‘I think that when they’ve finished, the water of the river will rise over the banks and go across the ground to where the loop straightens out again. After a while, I think the river will go straight across, and this loop will become a circular lake. I don’t know what the beavers will do then. Build another dam, perhaps. I try to draw them sometimes, when I am here, but they’re quite shy. I think they’re getting used to me, though.’ She paused, looking past Sherlock and then back at him again. ‘I wanted to draw the river the way it is now, so that I can remember it when it has changed.’

  Sherlock stared at her, amazed. Her words indicated that she had a good grasp of what was going on. Perhaps she was getting better, getting over whatever it was that had been causing her to be so unfocused.

  ‘What else have you been sketching?’ he asked.

  ‘All kinds of things. Butterfly wings, birds, deer . . . oh, and James!’

  ‘James?’ Sherlock asked, but she was already riffling through the pages of the sketchbook, looking for the right one. ‘James! My fiancé!’

  ‘Mycroft told me that you had a fiancé,’ Sherlock said carefully. ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘I’m allowed to go into town sometimes, with Mother,’ she said, still concentrating on the sketchbook. At the mention of their mother, Sherlock felt a sting of grief suddenly run through him. Did Emma know what had happened? Or had she been told, and then forgotten, the way she did sometimes?

  ‘Do you know why Mycroft and I are here?’ he asked.

  She looked up for a moment. ‘I think so,’ she replied. A cloud seemed to pass across her features. ‘Something happened to Mother, didn’t it? She’s gone away and she won’t be coming back.’

  ‘Mother died,’ he said simply.

  ‘That’s what I meant. And Father went away, but he will be coming back.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Ah – here it is!’ She opened the sketchbook at a particular picture. It showed the head and shoulders of a thin-faced young man wearing a stiff collar, tie and bowler hat. He had an extravagantly large moustache and bushy sideburns. Sherlock wasn’t sure whether his eyes were too close together or whether Emma’s sketch of him was a little off in its proportions. ‘He looks very . . . serious,’ he said.

  Emma nodded. ‘He is. He has a job in . . . Arundel, I think.’ She thought for a moment. ‘He asked me something, but I can’t remember what it was.’ A moment, then: ‘Oh yes! He wanted to know who to ask if we can get married, if Father isn’t here. I told him that he should ask Mycroft.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sherlock said. ‘Mycroft is looking after the family now.’

  ‘That’s good.’ She nodded seriously. ‘If Father is away, and Mother is . . . dead . . . then James will need to look after me.’ She looked away, across the river. ‘I don’t think I’m very good at looking after myself,’ she said quietly. ‘Sometimes I forget to eat for a whole day.’

  ‘Mycroft will want to meet him,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘And I think I should as well.’

  ‘Everyone should meet him, if he is going to become one of the family.’

  ‘Indeed. What does he do?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘How does he make his money?’

  ‘Oh.’ Her mind seemed to suddenly jump back to a previous point in the conversation. ‘It was in the cathedral!’ she said brightly. ‘I was sketching some of the tombs, and he was there, looking at the stained-glass windows. He asked if he could see my drawings, and we got talking, and he asked Mother if he could take lunch with us!’

  ‘That was very –’

  ‘How did Mother die?’ she asked suddenly, her face serious. ‘Had she been ill?’

  ‘Yes, she had. She was ill for a while.’

  ‘I thought she was. She spent a lot of time in bed, and even when she wasn’t in bed she was tired a lot of the time. I wondered whether the men had taken her away.’

  ‘The men?’ Sherlock asked.

  ‘The faceless men. I see them outside the house sometimes, at night. They hide in the bushes, but I can see them. I wondered if they had come for her.’

  Sherlock felt a strange feeling run through him. Emma was seeing things. Did that mean she was getting worse, or had she always seen faceless men, and other things, and just never talked about them?

  ‘Did I tell you about the beavers?’ she asked brightly, as if the subject of faceless men had never arisen.

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘They’re very industrious. It’s like they’ve got a plan, and they have to stick to it. Did she . . . suffer?’

  Sherlock felt a mental jolt as the conversation turned back on itself yet again. ‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly. ‘I wasn’t here. But if Mother died of tuberculosis, then I don’t think she was in much pain, until right at the end. She just got more and more tired until she just . . . gave up.’

  ‘Oh.’ The silence lengthened between them, then she continued in a small voice: ‘Will there be a funeral, or has it already happened and I forgot about it?’

  ‘The funeral is tomorrow.’

  ‘Can I go?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘That’s good.’ She looked up at him, and for once her gaze intersected with his, and he could see his sister’s personality in her eyes. ‘I get confused,’ she said. ‘Sometimes days or weeks slip past without me realizing.’

  ‘I know.’ He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘But you’re still my sister, and I love you. Mycroft loves you too – he just won’t ever say that. And the only thing that either of us want is for you to be happy.’

  ‘I am happy,’ she said, putting her free hand on top of his. ‘I’m happy most of the time, and marrying James will make me even happier. Can I sketch you?’

  Sherlock smiled. ‘Really? Sketch me now?’

  ‘The light here is very good.’ She indicated a tree a little way away whose trunk diverted sideways after emerging from the ground before straightening up and heading for the sky. ‘Sit on that tree trunk, and don’t move.’

  Sherlock sat there for a while, looking out across the river as the sun moved in the sky and the shadows lengthened on the ground. Emma applied her charcoal stick to the paper industriously, working with her head bent and her tongue sticking out from the corner of her mouth. She seemed so happy, so self-absorbed. Seeing her like that, it was entirely possible for Sherlock to believe she was absolutely fine, and that it was the rest of th
e world that was at fault.

  Eventually she leaned back and looked at the paper critically, then at him, then back at the paper. ‘I think that’s it,’ she said.

  ‘May I see?’

  ‘Of course.’ She held the paper out. He crossed the ground between them and took it, not knowing what to expect.

  The portrait was excellent. It caught him in profile, his hair pushed back by the breeze and the sunlight catching his forehead and cheeks. He seemed to be searching for something, looking out into an infinity of time and space. He looked older than he remembered the last time he had caught sight of himself in a mirror. It was as if he was looking at some future version of himself.

  ‘This is amazing,’ he said.

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yes, honestly.’

  ‘Then I shall have it framed and put it on the wall of the house that James and I live in, so that I can remember you when you aren’t there. I already have drawings of Father before he went away and Mother before . . . before she went away as well.’

  ‘You’ll need to do a drawing of Mycroft as well,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I’ll need a much larger piece of paper,’ she said seriously.

  ‘It’s nearly dinner-time. Shall we go back?’

  ‘I’ll stay here for a little while longer. The beavers sometimes come out late in the afternoon, and I like watching them.’