Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

Sherlock, watching appalled from the shadows, could see the indentations she caused in his cheeks. ‘You sit here, day after day, writing meaningless words for equally pathetic and deluded fools around the country to repeat like parrots, and you think – you actually think – that you are doing something worthy of praise. It means nothing, old man. I should bring it all crashing down around you, just to show you how little the world would care if it all stopped. I could, you know. With what I know, I could ruin this family.’

‘Then why do you hesitate?’ Sherrinford asked, voice muffled by the fingers that were clenched across his face.

Mrs Eglantine paused and opened her mouth, but no answer came out.

‘You cannot,’ Sherrinford Holmes continued. ‘If you were to reveal what you know then yes, my family would be ruined, but you would lose access to this house, and then where would you be? You have spent a year or more searching it, from top to bottom and side to side. I do not know what you are searching for, but I know how important it must be for you, and I know that you will never do anything that might imperil your search.’

‘I think you do know what I am searching for,’ she said scornfully, releasing him. ‘And I think it’s here, in this library. That’s why you sit here, day after day, like some old hen brooding over a batch of eggs that will never hatch. But I’ve searched everywhere else, and I know it has to be here, in this room.’

‘Get out,’ Sherrinford said, ‘or I will dismiss you, and God protect me from the consequences. I will dismiss you, just to end this nightmare, and to know that I have prevented you from finding whatever pathetic treasure you think might be here.’

Mrs Eglantine stalked past him, heading for the door. As she got to the end of the row, she turned to face him. Twin spots of bright colour burned like coals in the otherwise glacially white surface of her face. ‘You cannot get rid of me without consequences,’ she hissed. ‘And I cannot dispose of you without consequences. The question is, who fears those consequences the most?’ She turned to go, but then turned back. ‘I require you to get rid of that pathetic nephew of yours,’ she added. ‘Get rid of him. Send him away.’

‘Does he scare you?’ Sherrinford asked. ‘Are you worried that he will uncover your true position in this house and do something about it?’

‘What can he do? He is only a boy. Worse than that, he is only a Holmes.’ With that she turned and left. A few moments later Sherlock heard the door to the library open and shut.

‘She is scared of you,’ Sherrinford said quietly. It took a moment before Sherlock realized that his uncle was speaking to him. Somehow he knew that Sherlock was there.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, emerging into the aisle and the light.

‘There is no reason why you should.’ His uncle shook his head as if it had suddenly become very heavy. ‘Forget what you have seen. Forget what you have heard. Put it from your mind. Pretend, as I will, that there is no trouble in this house and that everything is calm and serene in the sight of God. Pretend that the serpent that is Satan has not slithered into our midst.’

‘But Uncle . . .’

Sherrinford frowned and held up a thin hand. ‘No,’ he said with finality, ‘I will discuss this no longer. It will never be discussed again.’ He sighed. ‘I would ask you how far you have got with the cataloguing of sermons, but I find myself tired. I will rest for a while, here in the peace of my sanctum sanctorum.’ He gazed at the disarrayed books on the shelves and on the floor. ‘Later I will do some tidying up. I would normally ask a housekeeper to do that, but under the circumstances . . .’

Quietly Sherlock retreated from the library. He could hear his uncle murmuring to himself as he closed the door behind him.

Mrs Eglantine was in the hall, and he stayed in the shadows, watching her. She was speaking to one of the maids.

‘Tell Cook that I will be joining her shortly. The menus for the meals this week are totally unsuitable. They will need to be changed. Tell her that I will not be happy until they are completely revised.’

As the maid scurried off, and Mrs Eglantine stood motionless for a moment, lost in thought, Sherlock found his thoughts pulled in an audacious direction. Mrs Eglantine apparently felt free to search the entire house, looking for something. What if he was to search her room while she was occupied? Maybe he could find some clue as to what she was looking for. If he could find that, and then locate the hidden object before she did, then there would be no reason for her to stay at the house any longer. Even if he couldn’t find out what she was looking for, he might be able to work out what power she had over his aunt and uncle. If he could free them from that, then he would have paid them back for all their hospitality.

Mrs Eglantine moved towards the back of the house, presumably to what was going to be a rather fraught meeting with Cook. Sherlock felt a twinge of sympathy. He liked Cook; she always had a slice of bread and jam or a scone and cream for him if he passed through the kitchen. She was the only one of the servants who could stand up to Mrs Eglantine.

With his uncle in the library and his aunt presumably in the sitting room sewing, as she normally did in the afternoons, Sherlock knew that he was unlikely to be disturbed by his immediate family. He also knew that the servants’ schedule meant they would be cleaning out the fireplaces in the main bedrooms at that hour. Nobody would be up on the top floor, where the staff quarters and Sherlock’s own bedroom were located.

He reached the top floor without seeing anybody. His bedroom was the first one leading off the landing. Next to that was an empty room that would normally be occupied by a butler, if the family could afford one. Around the corner was Mrs Eglantine’s room and those occupied by the various maids and the lads who worked in the stables and the gardens, as well as the back staircase, which they used to move through the house without being seen. Only Sherlock and Mrs Eglantine were allowed to use the main stairs.

He turned the corner. The rest of the landing was empty, of course. Mrs Eglantine’s door was closed, but not locked. That would have been a terrible breach of the unwritten contract between employee and employer. In theory the servants’ rooms could be entered by Sherlock’s aunt and uncle at any time, for any reason, and even though that right theoretically extended to Sherlock he still felt his heart accelerate and his palms become moist as he reached out for the doorknob.

He turned it quietly, pushed the door open and entered the room, closing the door quickly behind him.

The room smelled of lavender and talcum powder, and faintly of some heavier floral scent that brought to mind decaying orchids. A threadbare rug was set in the centre of the otherwise bare floorboards. The bed was neatly made, and any clothes had been hung in the narrow wardrobe or folded in the chest of drawers. Apart from a hairbrush on the windowsill, a framed print of a landscape hanging on the wall and a Bible on a shelf by the bed, the room was bare of ornamentation.

There was something so impersonal about the room that it was difficult to believe that anyone actually lived there, slept there, on a daily basis. Given Mrs Eglantine’s aloofness, her almost inhuman stillness, Sherlock could imagine her walking into the room late at night, at the end of her working day, and just standing there, like a statue, unmoving until the sun rose and it was time to start working again. Switching off her fake humanity until she had to pretend again.

He shrugged the thought off. She wasn’t a supernatural creature. She was as human as he was – just a lot nastier.

Sherlock pressed his back against the door. The thought crossed his mind that Mrs Eglantine might have stood just like this in his room before searching it, and it made him angry. If she’d searched the house, as she had said, then she must have searched his room. Damn the woman! What was it she was searching for, and what was it that made her invulnerable?

He quickly memorized the positions of everything he could see – the hairbrush, the Bible, even the way the framed print was hanging at a slight angle and the distance between the top sheet on the bed and the pillows. Given Mrs Eglantine’s eye for detail, Sherlock had a feeling that she would notice if anything was disturbed. He had to make sure that everything was returned to its original position before he left.

He started with the chest of drawers, quickly sorting through the clothes in each drawer. He quelled the sense of guilt he felt by telling himself that Mrs Eglantine had almost certainly done the same to his clothes. When he found nothing, he ran his hand across the floorboards beneath the chest, just in case something had been slid underneath. Still nothing.

He turned away, and then turned back as a sudden thought struck him. Quickly he pulled each drawer completely out and felt underneath it for bits of paper or envelopes that might have been attached there, then