last met.
Your loving brother,
Mycroft.
‘Anything interestin’?’ Amyus Crowe asked.
‘We’re going to London,’ Sherlock replied, grinning.
CHAPTER TWO
Sherlock rode into Farnham that afternoon, through a light rain that left puddles on the roads and trickled down the back of his neck no matter how much he turned his collar up or tucked it in. He was riding the horse he had ‘liberated’ from Baron Maupertuis – the horse he still had to find a name for, if he ever did.
He just couldn’t understand why people gave names to animals. The animals didn’t care if they had names, or numbers, or nothing, and it implied a level of empathy and equality that shouldn’t exist. Animals were animals and humans were humans.
As his horse splashed its way towards the market town, Sherlock found himself thinking about the strange difference between pets and animals. If you could eat a cow, in the form of beef, then why couldn’t you eat a horse? There seemed to be no logical reason why not – as far as he knew, horse flesh wasn’t poisonous or anything. Alternatively, if cats and dogs were off the menu then why weren’t rabbits safe from being put in the stewpot? It didn’t make any sense. Someone had drawn an arbitrary line through the animal kingdom, saying, ‘All right, the ones over here you can eat to your heart’s content, but the ones over there you take for walks, and stroke, and care for, and bury when they die.’
He wondered, as the water found its way through every gap in his clothes, whether other countries had the same illogical rules. Were there countries somewhere where the inhabitants ate horses and dogs, but maybe considered cows sacred? If there were, it indicated that the whole thing was just subjective, if not random, but if all countries made the same distinctions then maybe there was something about humans that meant they all considered cows as food and horses as friends.
He absently patted the neck of the horse he was riding. Could he ever eat it? Could he sit down to a juicy steak, knowing that a few hours earlier he’d been riding the animal it had come from? Logically, he didn’t see why not, but in practice he could detect a little squeamishness in his mind. Maybe if he was starving. Maybe if the two of them were caught in a blizzard, and the only way to survive was for him to cook and eat his horse. That would make sense.
As the horse clopped through the outskirts of Farnham, a disturbing thought occurred to Sherlock. If he was willing, in principle, to eat his horse, then why not his friends? If he and Matty were caught in a blizzard…
Even the thought made him feel sick, and he quickly squashed it, but a lingering doubt remained. Logically, there was a sliding scale between, say, insects and humans in terms of intelligence and general development. Fish and frogs were closer to the insects, arguably, and dogs and cats were closer to humans. Wasn’t that what Mister Charles Darwin had recently written in his book On the Origins of Species – a book he’d heard his Uncle Sherrinford complaining about over the dinner table some weeks before? Humans were just another type of animal, according to Darwin, with nothing special or God-given about them. But if you factored religion out of the discussion, if you accepted that humans were just animals who could make tools and talk, then why weren’t you allowed to eat people the way you were allowed to eat cows?
Too many questions, and logic did not seem to be any help. Logic was telling him that if this was all right then that was all right as well, but instinctively he knew that there was a difference. There were limits. The trouble was, he didn’t know where they had come from or how to think about them properly.
And all this because he hadn’t given his horse a name.
‘I’ll call you Philadelphia,’ he murmured, patting its neck again.
He smiled. As names went, it had a whole lot of meaning attached to it. Virginia – Amyus Crowe’s daughter – had named her horse Sandia after a range of mountains in America, after all, so he should be able to name his horse after an American city. The train that he, Virginia and Matty had been trapped on months ago, after Matty had been kidnapped by the agents of Duke Balthassar, had belonged to the Philadelphia Line, and the name would always remind him of what they had been through. And the short form of Philadelphia was Philly and ‘filly’ was another name for a young female horse, so it was also a kind of joke. It worked on all kinds of levels.
‘Philadelphia it is,’ he said. The horse made a whickering noise, as if it understood and approved. That, of course, really was just his imagination.
They were in the centre of town by now, and Sherlock left his horse – left Philadelphia – tied up next to the grain market and walked along under the brick colonnades, looking for Matty. He knew Matty’s habits by now – where to find him at any time of day or night. The boy seemed to have fallen into a routine. Rather than move on in his narrowboat, looking for new towns and new opportunities, he had settled in Farnham, at least for a while. Sherlock secretly hoped it was because of him – because of their friendship. He liked Matty, and he would miss him when – if – he left.
Matty was sitting by the river, apparently watching nothing in particular, although Sherlock knew he was waiting for a barge to show up that usually delivered boxes of fish from the coast, laid out on crushed ice. Matty had found that if one of the boxes was dropped and smashed then he could steal a fish or two from the wreckage before anyone stopped him. Sherlock sometimes wondered if Matty occasionally got in the way of the men unloading the boat, making them slip and drop the boxes they were carrying, but he never asked. Best not to know.
‘Hi,’ Matty said. ‘I was wondering if you were going to show up.’
‘I’m going to London tomorrow,’ Sherlock responded. He had meant to make conversation first, find out where Matty had been and what he had done recently, but he couldn’t help himself. He wasn’t good with conversation. ‘I’ve got to go to the station and get the tickets.’
‘Good luck with that,’ Matty muttered.
‘You could come,’ Sherlock said, defensively, but he wasn’t sure whether the invitation from Mycroft extended that far.
‘To the station? Thanks, but I’ve already seen it.’
‘To London!’ Sherlock said in exasperation.
‘You won’t get me back up in the Smoke.’ Matty shook his head. ‘I still remember what happened last time. After you an’ Ginnie were kidnapped by that Baron Maupertuis bloke, I had to travel all the way back here to Farnham with her father. He tried to teach me to read!’ His voice rose aggrievedly. ‘I told him I didn’t want to read, but he kept trying to tell me about “a before e except after c” and stuff. An’ then we had to sail to France to try and find the two of you, an’ he just kept at it. Wouldn’t stop.’
‘I think he just likes to teach,’ Sherlock said. ‘And you were the only audience.’
‘Well, I’m not making that mistake again.’
‘Have you seen Virginia?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Not for a few days now.’
‘You want to go and look for her?’
Matty shook his head, eyes still fixed on the canal. ‘No, I’d rather eat.’
‘I could buy you a pork pie,’ Sherlock offered.
Matty looked tempted, but he shook his head. ‘You won’t always be around,’ he said. ‘I can’t rely on anyone else to feed me. I got to do it myself, an’ that means I got to keep my skills sharp. I got to make sure I can snaffle a cauliflower or a ham hock without anyone noticing.’
‘It’s all right,’ Sherlock said quietly. ‘It’s not charity, it’s friendship.’
‘Feels like charity,’ Matty mumbled. ‘And I don’t accept charity. Not ever.’
Sherlock nodded. ‘I understand.’ He looked around. ‘I’m going to head across to the station. See you later?’
‘Depends on when lunch turns up,’ Matty said gloomily.
Sherlock walked off, not sure where exactly he was going. He felt edgy. He wanted to be on his way to London, but he knew that he had to wait until the next day for that. Mycroft had been very specific.
