fourth line.
'Israel.'
'What?'
'Palestine. Israel, Zion, the Holy Land. I desire to walk through Jerusalem.'
Holmes nodded slowly, bemused. 'I think I can honestly say, that particular destination should not have been my first choice. Greece, yes. Morocco, perhaps. Even Egypt, but Palestine? Very well, the choice is yours, and I am certain our foe will never guess that as my destination. To Palestine it is.'
By midnight we were off the coast of France and, with no signs of anyone in our wake and strict radio silence maintained, the tight knot that had held me since Tuesday evening was beginning to loosen. Captain Jones came in to our cabin, a barrel-shaped and lugubrious individual with thinning, once-red hair, distinguishable from the four crew members under his command by the state of his fingernails, which were slightly blacker than theirs, and the straight spined, confident air of one who caters to royalty. The boy was a smaller version of his father, and all, including the child, had been chosen by Mycroft from wherever he was holed up with Watson. 'Good evening, Jones,' said Holmes. 'Brandy? Or whisky?'
'No thank you, sir. I don't drink when I'm out to sea. Asking for problems, it is, sir. I just came down to ask if you'd decided yet on our course.'
'Palestine, Jones.'
'Palestine, sir?'
'Palestine. You know — Israel, Zion, the Holy Land. It is on your charts, I assume?'
'Of course, sir. It's just that, well, if you've not been there recently, you'll not find it the easiest place to move around in, so to speak. There has been a war on, you know,' he offered in a mild understatement. 'I am aware of that, Jones. London will have to be notified, and they shall make all the necessary arrange' ments.'
'Very good, sir. Shall I set course tonight, then?'
'The morning is just as well, Jones, there is no hurry.Is there, Russell?'
I opened my eyes. 'None at all,' I confirmed, and closed them again.
'In the morning it is, then, sir, Miss.' His footsteps faded up the stairs.
Holmes stood silently, and I felt his gaze on me.
'Russell?'
'Mmm.'
'There's nothing more that needs doing tonight. Go to bed. Or shall I cover you with a blanket again?'
'No, no, I shall go. Good night, Holmes.'
'Good night, Russell.'
I awoke when the engines changed their sounds in the early grey light of dawn. Passing through the cabin for a glass of water I saw the silhouette of Holmes, curled in a chair staring out at the sea, knees to chin, pipe in hand. I said nothing as I went back to bed, and I do not think he noticed me. I slept all that day, and when I awoke it was a summer's evening.
It was not actually summer, of course, and we were to have rain during the weeks that followed, but we had sun enough that Holmes and I could spend hours darkening our skins up on the deck. To think of London huddled under its blanket of sleet and thick yellow fogs as we sweated and dozed was like imagining another world, and I often found myself hoping fervently that our attempted murderer was caught in the worst of it, with bronchitis. And chilblains.
The days passed quickly. To my surprise Holmes did not seem to chafe under the enforced rest but appeared relaxed and cheerful. We spent hours devising complex mind games, and he taught me the subtleties of codes and ciphers. We took apart and rebuilt the ship's spare radio, and began an experiment on the point at which various heated substances will self-ignite, but as it made the captain exceedingly nervous, we moved on to picking pockets.
Christmas came and went, with flaming pudding and crackers with paper crowns and carols about iron-hard ground and snowy footprints, and after dinner Holmes came onto the upper deck with a chess set.
We had not played more than a handful of games since I had gone up to Oxford, and we quickly set to rediscovering the other's gambits and style. I had improved in the last eighteen months, and he no longer had to spot me a piece, which pleased us both. We played regularly, though first a black bishop and then the white king rolled overboard and we had to improvise substitutes (a salt cellar and a large greasy nut and bolt, respectively).
Holmes won most of the games but not all. He was a good player, ruthless and imaginative, but an erratic one, for he tended to glory in bizarre gambits and impossible saves rather than the methodical building of defence and thoroughly supported offence. Chess for him was an exercise, boring at times and always a poor substitute for the real game — rather like scales compared to the public performance of a concerto.
One hot afternoon off the island of Crete he came to the board with a greater focus than was his wont and a nervous intensity that I found disturbing. We played three half-games, scrapped each time when he was satisfied with the direction each opening gambit had established. The fourth game, though, began with a peculiarly gleeful attitude and opening moves along the very edge of the queen's side of the board. I braced myself for a wild game.
Holmes had drawn white, and he came out, whirling his knights across the board like a berserker with his chain mace, sixteen squares of shifting destruction and disruption that had me slapping together hasty defences at half a dozen spots across the board, summoning and abandoning bishops and rooks, spraying pawns ahead of the fray and leaving them in odd niches as the action stumbled away across the board. One after another he swatted aside my defences, until in desperation I separated my royalty, moving my queen away from the vulnerable king to draw my opponent's fire. For a time I succeeded, but eventually he trapped her with a knight, and I lost her.
'What's the matter with you, Russell?' he complained. 'Your mind's not on the game.'
'It is, you know, Holmes,' I said mildly, and reached forward to move a pawn, and with that move the entire haphazard disarray fell into a neat and deadly trap that depended on two pawns and a bishop. In three moves I had him mated.
I wanted to whoop and leap into the air and kiss Captain Jones on his bristly cheek for the sheer joy of seeing Holmes' consternation and amazement, but instead I just sat and grinned at him like a dog.
He stared at the board like a conjuror's audience, and the expression on his face was one of the biggest prizes I have ever won. Then it broke, and he slapped his knee with a short bark of delighted laughter and rearranged the pieces to replay the last six moves. At the end of it he wagged his head in appreciation.
'Well done, Russell. Deucedly clever, that. More devious than I'd have given you credit for. My children have bested me,' he quoted, somewhat irreverently.
'I wish I could claim credit for it, but the move came up in a game with my maths tutor a few months ago. I've been waiting for the opportunity to use it on you.'
'I'd not have thought that I could be tricked into overlooking a pawn,' he admitted. 'That's quite a gambit.'
'Yes. I fell for it too. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a queen in order to save the game.'
He looked up at me, startled, and then back to the board, and his face changed. A tightness crept slowly into his features until he looked pinched and pale beneath the brown of his skin's surface, as someone does who is stricken by a gnawing pain in the vital organs.
'Holmes? Holmes, are you all right?'
'Hm? Oh, yes, Russell, I am fine. Never better. Thank you, Russell, for such an interesting game. You have given me much food for thought.' His hard visage relaxed into the gentlest of smiles. 'Thank you, my dear Russell.'
He reached out, but his fingers did not quite touch my cheek before he pulled them back, stood, and turned to go below. I sat on the sun-drenched deck and watched his back disappear, the victory turned to ashes in my mouth, and wondered what I had done.
I did not see him again until we arrived at Jaffa.
