Sherlock’s hands are shaking so badly that he puts them in his threadbare pockets. He sweeps the scene again, observing the twisted, fallen man as closely as possible, the other three circus stars staring down from their perches in horror, and the trapeze ropes dangling from the ceiling. But the crowd is quickly blocking his view. He backs away, retreating through the mass.
He is bumped and jostled, and in seconds is at the rear of the horrified swarm. He turns and walks past excited stragglers racing to the scene, their footfalls echoing in the grand performance area under the cathedral ceiling in the central transept. Before long he is at the front doors, then down the big, white-stone steps and onto the giant, fountain-filled lawn on the Palace grounds. A hot sun is still high in the sky.
He pulls those quivering, long, fingers out of his pockets, holds them against his temples, and closes his eyes. He sees the peculiar marks on the wooden trapeze bar again, and hears the man’s last words. But there’s something else: though Monsieur Mercure had gone as stone-cold unconscious as a corpse and the top of his skull looked broken in, this daring man, known to the world as
Sherlock hadn’t been looking for such a scene. He had come to the Crystal Palace that day to see his father. But there had been a surprise. His friend, Irene Doyle, was there too, waiting to speak with him. It’s been a month and a half since Sherlock last saw her: on the night he shoved her aside as she climbed the rickety, wooden stairs to the Holmes’ little flat over the hatter’s shop in grimy Southwark south of the River Thames in London. It was the day his mother died. He had just held her in his arms and observed the poison on her lips. Moments later he had raced over London Bridge and into the East End where he’d stolen a butcher’s knife and flown to a Mayfair mansion to slay her killer, the man responsible for the unsolvable Whitechapel murder. Somehow, he’d held himself back from doing evil; instead, he had seized evidence of the man’s guilt and given it to the police. But they, and especially Inspector Lestrade, had taken all the credit for themselves.
The last six weeks have seemed like years. Sherlock has grown much older. He stands up straight when he walks. There is little emotion on his face. His eyes are rarely cast down. He knows who he is and what he will be. His second case stands before him.
It is the first of July 1867, and this London summer is boiling hot.
In mid-May he had been a broken, weeping thirteen-year-old boy, lying in a rain-soaked alley inside a dark city rookery called The Seven Dials. When his mother had died he had momentarily convinced himself that he could go on. But then he had collapsed. For three days, he had been without food or drink, getting little sleep, immobile on hard cobblestones, smelling the overflowing sewers and the rotting offal around him.
But on the fourth day he had risen.
With her dying breath, Rose Holmes had told him that he had much to do in life. He knew she was right. It had taken those three days to truly believe her.
There was a reason to go on living and he started at that moment. He had the brains, the street connections, and the desire to help bring justice to the world around him. If he began immediately, worked every day without pause, he might, by the time he was an adult, be rebuilt into a crime-solving machine. He would be a new sort of London detective, the scourge of every villain: not just to the one who had taken Rose’s life and swung from a rope outside Newgate Prison last week, his neck snapped solely due to evidence Sherlock’s own daring had produced. The boy’s involvement in the Whitechapel murder had drawn his mother into the killer’s lair and the evil inside the villain’s heart had slain her. He would never forgive or forget.
But several times over the last month he has broken down and descended into black depressions. He misses his mother terribly and wishes he had his father back. How can he, half-breed, poverty-stricken Sherlock Holmes, aspire to the heights he harbors in his mind? Involving himself in this trapeze incident would be a mistake, just as sticking his big nose into the Whitechapel case had been. Some day he will be capable of such endeavors, but it doesn’t make sense now – it is far too dangerous. He had better just tell the police what he knows, let them take the credit if they must.
And yet … an opportunity is before him.
He thinks of his mother again. He made her an unbreakable vow.
THE STRANGE MAN IN THE LABORATORY
Old Sigerson Bell isn’t really waiting for Sherlock. At least he’d never admit it. But he’s grown fond of the boy. He has given him the afternoon off and misses him terribly. He polishes his three statues of Hermes, fusses with his two gaslights, pulls his pocket watch out of his worn silk smoking jacket, and glances toward his door. It has been a month since the lad first rapped the knocker against his big, wooden entrance in the night, smelling even worse than the miasmatic London air. He was soaking wet from the pouring rain of a crashing thunderstorm and was dressed in the most tattered frock coat, waistcoat, and necktie Bell had ever seen – all arranged as neatly as the boy could manage. Had it not been so pitiable, it would have made one smile. Sherlock’s gray eyes were intense below his black hair, and his hawk-like nose almost seemed to sniff the aging apothecary and his dwelling, looking for answers. In his hands was a drenched piece of paper: the old man’s notice, which had fallen off the outside of the arched, shop door in the violent downpour.
It had taken Bell some time to respond to the knock, and when he arrived he didn’t unbolt the door, but simply drew back its sliding peep-hole with a snap.
“Speak!” he demanded.
“It says on this notice that you are looking for an apprentice?”
Only the old man’s big, bulb-tipped nose was visible through the opening. The lad’s eyes were almost even with his.
“No, it does not.” The peep-hole slammed shut again.
The boy kept pounding. Bell finally returned in a huff
“If you don’t clear off, I’ll …”
“I
The old man examined the intruder this time, noticed his teeth chattering and saw him wipe the rain from his prominent brow. His words were enunciated clearly, like someone of breeding, and there was a remarkable earnestness in his voice. And yet, he was dressed in such rags.
“If you observe closely, reading from top to bottom and left to right, as one does in the western hemisphere, you shall see that I require a ‘partner/investor’ foremost, then, in small print at the bottom of the page, an ‘apprentice,’ the position to which you refer. One is contingent upon acquiring the other. Good day.”
“I shall work for free!” barked Sherlock.
The peep-hole had stopped in mid-slam.
Sigerson Trismegistus Bell smiles in recollection. He doesn’t really need an apprentice. He is too aged for that. The number of patients he sees is dwindling. He mostly gives advice now to the few who will have him. He’s always had what others consider crazy ideas about health anyway: that colds and influenza, typhoid and tuberculosis, do not come from bad air, but from things like microscopic bugs – germs and bacteria, carried in London’s putrid river water and in the human body. He has known that for many years, but others don’t believe him – even now, when men like the Frenchman Pasteur and the queen’s physician, John Snow, are writing about it.
Along with his advice, Bell dispenses medicines to his patients: herbs, tonics, carbolic acid mixtures for infections, pinches of arsenic and other alloys of poisons and chemicals. But he’s more than a medical man. He’s a scientist, an alchemist: a wizard in search of magical solutions and gold. As he grows older, he seems to grow stranger.
He lives in the middle of foggy, dun-colored central London, on Denmark Street near where the rookeries of
