Mycroft Holmes (23 page)

He felt the tendrils tighten around his chest, continuing their inexorable advance toward his throat.

“She had always planned on leaving me, Douglas!” he said suddenly. “Your confiding in me frightened her, put her plan into motion sooner than she had intended.”

“You cannot know that for a fact,” Douglas said. “Besides, we still have no notion of conspiracy, other than the acronym ‘Aaron Burr’—”

Suddenly, the contraption in which they were riding lurched to a halt, cutting him off and sending Douglas and Holmes skittering forward. They gripped the sides harder to keep from being pitched to the ground.

Nico had stopped of his own accord. He was braying indignantly at an obstruction in the road some four hundred meters away.

Peering out from where they sat, the three men discovered the cause.

It was a body, lying face down in the dirt.

* * *

The lad was stretched out on his stomach, forehead pressed to the ground in a most unnatural pose. Holmes leapt out first, and recognized the clothing immediately.

“Duffer!” he said. The young pickpocket.

Cart and horse tracks led to the body, then cart and horse tracks doubled back. Whoever had done this had ridden away, depositing him there.

Douglas knelt by the boy’s side and gently turned him over. He was as gray as the dust he lay on. His eyes were staring. His shirt had been torn open. Blood was pooling at his stomach.

There were perpendicular slices in the soft flesh of his abdomen.

Huan reared back.

“
Lougarou!
” he cried.

The moment Nico heard his master’s cry, he bared his big yellow teeth and brayed even louder. Holmes looked up, sheltered his eyes from the sun, and frowned at them.

“Nonsense!” he said. “Come here this instant and have a proper look. Nico! Be quiet!”

Nico obeyed.

Huan crept forward, looking askance at the corpse.

“Closer,” Holmes commanded with an exasperated sigh.

Huan moved a few more inches.

“To begin with,” Holmes said, pointing at the boy, “
lougarou
are vampire
mosquitos
, are they not?”

Huan nodded, his head still keening to one side.

“Then they would have a very large proboscis—a
nose
—and the cut would look like a puncture wound, would it not?” His tone demanded a reply.

Huan nodded again.

“These”—Holmes indicated the lines on the boy’s stomach—“are not puncture wounds at all. They are uniform slices. In two sets of four. No, this was clearly the work of a scarificator.”

“Who is that?” Huan asked in a quavering voice, glancing here and there as if it might descend upon him any moment.

Douglas laid his fingers against the boy’s eyes, pressed his lids shut and answered quietly.

“It’s not a who,” he said, “it’s a what. A medical instrument used for bloodletting. I have never actually
seen
one—”

“Carries eight lancets in two sets of four,” Holmes interrupted. “Spring loaded. Each set of the four blades is parallel one to the other. Quite handy for small bloodletting, but, because the incisions are rather superficial, they are not usually deadly in and of themselves. So first they cut open the boy’s aorta, you see there?” He indicated a large gash just below Duffer’s breastbone.

Huan peered down through squinted eyes.

“Now that was done with an ordinary kitchen knife, one meant for cutting steak. That is, of course, what killed him. His murderers allowed blood to drain from the aorta into his abdomen—which it did fairly quickly, eight minutes or so, as I recall from my time with Dr. Bell. After that they simply sliced the abdomen with the scarificator, turned him over, and let him bleed out—again, a matter of minutes.”

Huan turned to Douglas.

“It is not a
lougarou?
” he asked, stating the obvious.

“No,” Douglas said. “It is only unnatural in the sense that there are human beings who can do this sort of thing to other human beings.”

Huan breathed a sigh of relief, and Holmes appraised him.

“I confess I do not know you well,” he said, “but you do not seem the fearful type. It is the supernatural, then, that causes you unease?”

Huan shrugged. “I do not like what I cannot fight. You are certain…?” he asked.

“Yes. As Douglas said, unnatural. Not supernatural.”

* * *

Douglas enjoyed hearing the imperious tone in Holmes’s voice. It was as if his friend was coming back into himself, and he was glad of it—until Holmes brushed the dust off his knees and climbed into the back of the cart again.

“What are you doing?” Douglas asked.

“What we should be doing,” Holmes said. “Getting on with it.”

Such a degree of coldness seemed unusual, even for him.

He is still in shock
, Douglas mused, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“We cannot simply leave him, Holmes,” Douglas protested, pointing to the boy. “We must take him back to town.”

“Back to
town
?” Holmes repeated. “So that while we wait for burial documents and sigils and stamps, whoever wishes to murder us might do a proper job of it? This is what they expect us to do! Even now, there’s a welcoming party for us at the coroner’s office. And what a very convenient place to do us in, wouldn’t you say?”

Douglas stared at Holmes, incredulous.

“So fear should keep us from—”

“He is
deceased
!” Holmes shouted. “On our account, on
my
account! Because I was on that ship, I disrupted whatever plan Georgiana and these…
gentlemen
had concocted. The boy knew too much, the boy broke under pressure, the boy was murdered by people so heartless that they would draw all the blood from his body and abandon him in the roadway like an old cur!”

Douglas rose to his feet. A few long strides, and he was inches from Holmes.

“He had breath in him once,” he declared. “He is to be treated with respect, no matter the cost.”

“Now is not the time for empty ritual,” Holmes thundered.

“Now is
precisely
the time!” Douglas thundered back. “When we ourselves are empty, it is the
ritual
that turns us human again.”

Holmes looked as if he’d been struck.

“That boy,” he said with difficulty, “will be tossed into a pauper’s grave. And we shall be ambushed and murdered.” He held back sobs. “Know this, Douglas—I believe fervently in an afterlife, and I am not afraid to die. Nevertheless, I find great confidence in facts, in the rational mind—most particularly in
my
rational mind. And no matter how I try, I cannot make…
sense
… of any of this!”

He struck his temples with the palms of his hands.

“Holmes. Holmes,” Douglas said, catching his friend’s hands in his. “You are brilliant. You can deduce
anything
, given hints or facts or even conjectures. But you are also twenty-three years of age. You have never even traveled outside of England proper, never mind to the depths of human depravity.”

Holmes plucked his hands from Douglas’s grasp.

“You are calling me naïve?” he said, sounding offended.

Douglas shook his head.

“You have an enormous arsenal of tools at your disposal, and you certainly know how to use them. But you have never encountered true evil, and in order to comprehend evil, you have to learn to think as evil does. Once you do that… you are never the same.” He paused and added, “We cannot sink to evil’s level.”

Holmes considered this.

Finally, he nodded.

“Very well. Then we bury him here,” he said tersely, climbing out of the cart.

* * *

Douglas procured an old shovel from the boiling house. He and Holmes found a spot underneath a row of wild sugar cane and took turns digging. The hole had to be deep enough that wild creatures would not unearth the boy’s remains.

But the ground was tough and full of shale, and the day growing hotter and more humid. As Holmes and Douglas were still sore and undernourished, the work proved arduous and slow.

“What a fool I was,” Holmes berated himself as he took his turn. “Blinded by love. It is as you said, Douglas. The small evils I encountered here and there in my life are nothing to the utter depravity I have now witnessed. I was unprepared. I swear on all that is holy that it shall never happen again.”

Douglas nodded.

He was surprised at how morose he felt, how out of sorts. It was more than the sorrow one might experience when a dear friend is betrayed. It seemed to him that he was taking Holmes’s heartbreak personally.

Perhaps Holmes’s contentment with his life had given him a glimmer of hope that happiness was not a mirage but was, in fact, possible.

There is no fool like an old fool
, Douglas quoted to himself.

Holmes shook his head.

“So much better to be as you are, Douglas,” he said. “A bachelor. Keen-eyed and keen-hearted.”

When Douglas did not respond, Huan—who was standing guard nearby—grew suddenly curious.

“You have never been in love?” he asked Douglas.

Douglas paused.

“Yes,” he said softly.

Holmes looked over, slightly resentful.

“It seems you are full of secrets,” he muttered.

Douglas shrugged noncommittally.

Holmes shoveled a few more spades of dirt and then added quietly, “I would surely like to know, if you don’t mind telling.”

Both the request and the plaintive tone surprised Douglas. He took the shovel from Holmes’s hands and began to dig.

“I was married once,” he said.

HE HAD MET HER TEN YEARS BEFORE, IN
1860,
TRAVELING TO
the United States from Trinidad to build his tobacco business.

“Annie was twenty-two, from Memphis, Tennessee,” Douglas recalled. “I was thirty, and in love for the first time in my life. We married in Memphis, among her people. I brought her back to Port of Spain and introduced her to my family. They fell in love with her, too, as I knew they would. She had that way with people.”

He rubbed his nose, leaving a trace of dirt across it, and then redoubled his efforts with the shovel.

“Of course then the American War Between the States began,” he went on, breathing harder from the exertion, “and travel back and forth proved prohibitive. So I expanded into England. In the meantime, we had a son. I never much cared for the name ‘Cyrus,’ but she insisted. And so he was baptized Cyrus Nickolus Douglas the Second. My mother used to call him
El rey del Puerto de España
, the king of Port of Spain,” he added with a wistful smile.

“Four years ago, mid-April, with the war finally over and my business prospering, Annie asked if she could go home to her family. Only for a month or so, to show off our boy. I wasn’t mad for the idea, and I could not yet leave work for such a long stretch of time, but I knew how much it meant to her.”

The hole had grown deep enough. He and Holmes gathered branches to form a sort of bier at the bottom.

“My parents had never been abroad, so I convinced them to serve as escorts. They docked at New York and from there took a train to Memphis. Cy was four by then. Good-looking, sweet, like his mama, learning both English and Portuguese.”

Douglas stopped. He looked around for a moment, as if he had misplaced something, then he began again.

“What Annie and my parents did not know—could not know—is that there had been a skirmish back in Memphis, between Negro Union soldiers and police. They had only been in the city two nights when white mobs appeared. Protected by the police, the mobs attacked anyone they could find—men, women, children. By morning, forty-six people lay dead. My wife and child, my mother and father among them…”

His voice trailed off.

He’d been laying leaves over branches at the bottom of the hole. Now he finally looked over at Holmes and Huan. But their faces were so grieved that he could not bear it.

He looked down again and resumed the work at hand.

“Two years ago,” he said as he tamped the leaves down onto the branches, “the United States passed the 14th Amendment to their Constitution—‘equal protection under the law.’ The same police officers who had supervised while Negroes were indiscriminately killed that night, in their own beds, were now sworn to defend them. Not quite soon enough for my family, I’m afraid,” he concluded.

* * *

Holmes wished he could say something that would lessen his friend’s pain. But if such words had been invented, surely he had never heard them uttered aloud.

It did explain, he thought, the melancholia that Douglas wore lightly, almost like a second skin—in spite of being one of the gentlest, most easygoing souls whom he had ever known. He recalled what Douglas had said when referring to the murder of their young pickpocket.

“It is only unnatural in the sense that there are human beings who can do this sort of thing to other human beings.”

In silence, the three men lifted the boy and laid him into his final resting place. As Holmes and Douglas began the chore of replacing the dirt they had displaced, then tamping it down and laying rocks on top, Huan twisted a little cross out of sugar cane.