Death Cloud

Chapter Fourteen

In his dreams Sherlock was wrestling with a huge serpent. Its body was as thick as a beer barrel, all muscle and ribs for as far as he could see, and its head was a flat triangle edged with saw-like teeth. They were fighting in water, but in his dream the water was as thick and as dark as treacle. The snake slowly coiled itself around him and squeezed, attempting to snap his ribs, but the water hampered its movements and Sherlock was able to prise its coils apart by pushing hard with his arms and legs. But then, as he tried to get away, his swimming was grotesquely slowed by the water and the serpent could once again slip its body around him and slowly tighten its grip. And so it went on, with him eternally struggling to escape and the serpent eternally struggling to hold on to him.

When he finally awoke, he had the feeling that a long time had passed. His mouth and throat were dry, and when he touched his tongue to the top of his mouth it stuck there. He was also very hungry.

After a while, he felt strong enough to sit up without being sick. And what he saw temporarily drove all thoughts of thirst, hunger and sickness from his mind.

He was lying in a four-poster bed with an embroidered canopy. The pillows were soft, filled with feathers, and the room beyond was panelled in oak. The floorboards were varnished and covered with exquisitely detailed rugs.

It was the same room in which he had woken up after being knocked out after the boxing match at the fair — the one just outside Farnham.

But how could that be? Baron Maupertuis had abandoned that manor house, leaving it empty. Surely he couldn’t have returned so quickly? Why would he?

Sherlock rolled off the bed and stood upright. He ran a hand across his face, and was surprised when it encountered something dry around his nose and mouth. He rubbed at the stuff, pulling it off his skin, then looked at his fingers. They were covered with strands of something black. He rubbed his fingers together, and was surprised to find that the strands were slightly sticky.

He remembered the cloth that had been clamped across his mouth. Some kind of chemical? A drug to make him sleep? It seemed likely.

And Virginia! A sudden flush of anger drove the last remnants of sleep and nausea from his blood. What had happened to Virginia? If anyone had harmed her, he would –

He would what? Kill them? He wasn’t exactly in the best position to do that at the moment.

He had to gather information. Find out what was going on, and why. Only then could he do something about it.

Sherlock stepped across to the curtains and pulled them back, expecting to see the dry red earth and the hundreds of beehives that had been outside last time he was in the room, but what he saw sent him reeling backwards in surprise.

A short distance from the house a beach of grey sand gave way to rolling spume-topped waves which extended all the way to a ruler-straight horizon. The sky was bright blue. Somewhere in the distance Sherlock could see sails.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and thought. Was he hallucinating? It was possible, he supposed, but the dream about the snake and the treacle-like water had been tainted with a bizarre, illogical sensation which, looking back, had meant that he somehow knew that he was dreaming, whereas this was sharp-edged and rational.

Was the picture outside the window just that — a perfectly executed painting that gave the impression of beach and sea and blue sky when it was just pigments on canvas or board? He opened his eyes again, and looked. Far away, circling above the peaks of the waves, were small white “w’ shapes, moving as he watched — seabirds riding the updraughts. That couldn’t be faked in a painting. Whatever was out there was real.

And as there was no ocean anywhere near Farnham, the logical conclusion was that he wasn’t near Farnham any more, and probably wasn’t even in England. The wharfmaster had said that the boat was bound for France. This must be France then. And the room? Something as prosaic as the fact that Baron Maupertuis was a creature of habit, and liked to have his surroundings as familiar as possible, wherever he was. Assuming that the manor house outside Farnham wasn’t his ancestral home, he had probably had it remodelled and redesigned to look like wherever it was that he called home. Which might well be this French... chateau? Was that what they called it?

Feeling obscurely pleased with himself for working out something that, he suspected, had been intended to confuse and destabilize him, he didn’t even turn when the lock clicked on the bedroom door and it swung inward. He already knew what he would see there — two footmen in black breeches, black stockings, black waistcoats and short black jackets wearing black velvet masks with eyeholes cut in them. Just like last time. He counted to ten in his mind, then turned. He was partly right — the two footmen standing just within the doorway were both dressed the way he remembered — but a third man stood in the centre of the doorway. In fact, he almost filled the doorway, he was so large. His arms were as thick as an ordinary man’s legs while his legs were like tree trunks. His hands were the size and shape of shovel blades, but it was his head that commanded attention above everything else. He was bald, but his scalp was so covered with winding brown scars that it looked, at first glance, as if he had a full head of hair. He wore a long brown leather coat over a baggy grey suit, and the cut of the coat, together with its sheer bulk, made him look even larger.

“The Baron wants to see you,” he said in a voice like the grinding of two millstones.

“What if I don’t want to see the Baron?” Sherlock said in a level voice. The two footmen exchanged glances, but the scarred man just shook his head slightly. “What the Baron wants, the Baron gets. No other opinions count but his.”

“What if I refuse to go with you?”

“Then we pick you up and carry you.”

Sherlock knew he was being childish, but he wanted to establish in their minds that he wasn’t just a passive prisoner — that he had opinions of his own. “What if I hold on to the door frame and refuse to let go?”

“Then we break your fingers and take you anyway.” The man smiled, but there was no mirth in the expression. It was just a baring of the teeth, like a tiger preparing to strike. “All the Baron needs is enough of you to answer questions. That means your head, so your brain can think and your mouth can move, and your chest so your lungs can breathe and keep you alive. Everything else is optional. Your choice.”

Sherlock held on for a moment, just to prove that he knew he had a choice and was exercising it, and then moved towards the doorway. The scarred man didn’t move until Sherlock was about to bump into his chest, then he turned to one side, just enough so that Sherlock could pass through the doorway.

“My name is Mr Surd,” he said as he and the footmen followed Sherlock down the hall. “I am the Baron’s manservant and factotum. Whatever he wants done, I do. If he wants a glass of Madeira, it’s my job to pour it. If he wants your head on a plate, it’s my job to cut it off and deliver it. Not a pleasure, not an onerous task. Just a job. Do you understand me?”

“I understand,” said Sherlock. “It was you holding the whip last time I met the Baron, wasn’t it? In the shadows.”

“Just a job,” the scarred man repeated. “But I do take pleasure in a job well done.”

The upper hall was just as he remembered it in the house at Farnham, as were the stairs leading down to the main hall. Sherlock had to stop himself from looking for hoof prints from when he and Matty made their escape. It wasn’t this house. It was another house that just happened to look like this one.

Virginia was standing outside the room in which, Sherlock remembered, Baron Maupertuis would be waiting for them. Two masked footmen stood beside her, next to a large teak cabinet.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Strange dreams,” she said. “I was riding Sandia, but she was wild and I couldn’t control her. We just rode on and on through this landscape that kept melting away whenever I looked at it.” She shook herself to get rid of the memory. “What about you?”

“Snakes,” he said succinctly.

“What was that stuff they drugged us with? My head’s still muzzy.”

“I think it was laudanum — morphine dissolved in alcohol. My mother and father used to give it to my sister. I recognize the smell. It’s made out of poppies.”

“Poppies?” She laughed. “I never liked poppies. They’re a very macabre flower.”

Mr Surd pushed past them and pulled open the door into the room where the Baron waited. He gestured for them to go in.

The room was in darkness, as before. Two chairs were set at one end of a massive table whose other end was shrouded in shadow. Heavy black drapes hung at the windows, preventing sunlight from entering the room, and the few areas of exposed wall that Sherlock could see were covered with swords and shields. Against one wall, Sherlock noticed a full suit of armour holding a sword that had been arranged as if there was a knight inside.

Mr Surd indicated that they should sit. Sherlock considered refusing, but then saw something in Mr Surd’s eyes that suggested the manservant expected him to refuse, and even wanted him to, just so he could do something painful and permanent to ensure that Sherlock complied. So he sat down, with Virginia beside him. Mr Surd and the four footmen walked off into the darkness at the other end of the room.

The room was quiet for a while, apart from the faint creaking of ropes and wood under stress that Sherlock had heard last time.

Then a whispery voice, like dry leaves rustling in the wind: “You persist in interfering in my plans, and yet you are just a child. I was forced to abandon one of my houses because of you.”

“You seem to like to have your houses designed and decorated identically,” Sherlock said. “Why? Do you prefer things to be the same?”

There was silence for a while, and Sherlock expected any moment to feel the tip of a whip striking from the darkness, flaying his flesh open, but instead the voice replied.

“Once I find something I like,” it said, “I see no reason to suffer anything else. The layout and furnishings of a house, a system of government... once I discover something that works, I want it replicated so that things are the same wherever I go. I find it... comforting.”

“And that’s why you have your footmen dressed in black masks — because that way you can believe them to be the same footmen, wherever you happen to be.”

“Very perspicacious.”

“And we’re in, what, France at the moment?”

“You recognized the landscape? Yes, this house is in France. You were both kept asleep on the boat that brought you here, and then on the carriage that rushed you to this place.”

“But what about Mr Surd?” Sherlock asked. “There’s only one of him.”

“Mr Surd is irreplaceable. Where I go, he goes.”

“You are Baron Maupertuis, aren’t you?”

“Again, you surprise me. I did not believe that my name was widely known.”

“I... pieced it together from evidence.”

“Very clever. Very clever indeed. I compliment you on your deductive skills. And what else did you piece together?”

Virginia placed a warning hand over his, but Sherlock felt a blossoming pride at the investigations he had made, the facts that he had discovered, the plot that he was beginning to put together. And, he told himself, it was important that Maupertuis know that his plans were no longer secret. “I know you’ve been keeping bees, and I know they are a foreign species that’s more aggressive than any European bees. That means you’re not keeping them to make honey, but because of their stings. You want them to hurt or kill people.” His brain was racing now, moving the facts around to form patterns that he had only barely suspected before. Amyus Crowe wanted to teach him, train him, but Baron Maupertuis was taking him seriously. The Baron listened to Sherlock’s deductions as though they actually meant something, rather than just being theoretical answers to invented problems, like rabbits and foxes. “You’ve also been running a factory to produce clothes — Army uniforms, I think.” He paused for a second. There was something just beyond his reach, a momentous logical destination to which he had all the steps but the last, which required an intuitive leap. “Your man — Wint, I think his name was — stole some of the clothes and stored them in his house. He was attacked by bees. Another man who worked on my uncle’s estate as a gardener had previously been making clothes in Farnham — for you, I assume. He was killed by bees as well. Had he kept some of the clothes for his own use? Stolen them from you?” The mental fog that shrouded the final logical destination from him was clearing now, and he continued triumphantly: “So there’s something about the clothes that causes the bees to attack them. In their boxes or crates they’re safe, but when people wear them... the bees are attracted to them, and sting whoever’s wearing them.”

Virginia’s hand was clamped hard over his now, but Sherlock ignored her.

“Those men who were at the warehouse in Rotherhithe — they were talking about shipping the boxes out to Ripon, Colchester and Aldershot. Those are all Army bases. So if the clothes are all being shipped to Army bases then they’re probably uniforms. What did you do — get some kind of government contract to supply uniforms to the British Army? The soldiers wear their new uniforms, probably as they prepare to ship out to India, and then...” Sherlock’s thoughts had been racing ahead of him, but suddenly the two snapped back into synchronization. His father. Aldershot. India. Uniforms. “And then you release the bees, and they attack every single private, subaltern and officer in the British Army,” he whispered, appalled at the place to which logic had taken him.

“Thousands of deaths, all occurring mysteriously and unavoidably,” the Baron whispered from the darkness at the end of the table. “A demoralizing blow directed at the heart of the British Empire, and delivered by the humble bee — provider of honey for a thousand Sunday afternoon tea parties. The irony is... appealing.”

“But why?” Sherlock’s thoughts were filled with visions of his father, face swollen and covered with boils, falling and choking as the bees stung him again and again.

“Why?” The Baron’s voice wasn’t any louder, but it was suddenly laden with a viciousness that had been absent before. “Why? Because your pathetic little country has delusions of grandeur that has led it to conquer half the world. It would be hard to find a country smaller than England. You’re barely a pinprick on the map. On any globe of the world the cartographers cannot write the word “England’ within the boundaries of the island, it’s so small. And yet you have the arrogance, the temerity, the sheer self-delusion to believe that the world was set out for your benevolent rule. And the world has just rolled over and let you do it! Astounding. But there are men in the world, military men, who will not let your rampant and predatory instincts go any further. The boundaries of the British Empire have to be pushed back, if only so that other countries can get some breathing space, some room to live. I... represent... a group of these men. German, French, American, Russian — they have come together to curb your territorial ambitions. You will not rest until the red of the British Empire has spilt across the map; we will not rest until it has been erased apart from your own puny island.” He paused. “And possibly British Honduras, in South America. You can keep British Honduras.”

“So you plan to destroy the British Army at a single stroke.”

“Not so much a single stroke as a progressive disease, striking at soldiers but nobody else. The bees, as you are aware, are unusually aggressive and territorial. They have been bred for aggression — and my, they breed quickly. The contaminant that we have soaked the uniforms in will be absorbed into the soldiers’ bodies, and will be sweated out through their skin. The bees, if they smell it, will immediately attack. Once the bees are released from their new homes they will make their way across Britain over the course of several months, stinging all the soldiers to death as they go. We will breed more in secret locations throughout Europe for the next stage of the attack. The terror, the fear, the sheer panic will be our most effective allies. A mysterious plague afflicting soldiers. And Britain will be relegated to the position it deserves: as a third-rate nation.”

“But what about the two men who died — your man and my uncle’s gardener? They weren’t part of your plot, were they?”

A rustle and a creaking noise from the darkness, as if Baron Maupertuis was shrugging. Or being made to shrug. “I knew that some of the workers were stealing pieces of the uniforms, but I let it go. That was my mistake. One of the hives was knocked over by a horse, and the bees escaped. They became feral, wild, and when they smelt the contaminant on the stolen uniforms they attacked. Mr Surd had to recover the queen and lure the surviving bees back. A very brave mission.”

“Just a job, sir,” Mr Surd said from the end of the room.

Even though he had worked most of it out already, the sheer effrontery of the plot took Sherlock’s breath away. And appalling as it was, he couldn’t see any obvious flaws. If the bees were as aggressive as Maupertuis said, and if the uniforms were distributed as efficiently as he intended, then it would work. It would work.

“My brother will stop you,” Sherlock said calmly. It was his last hope.

“Your brother?”

“My brother.”

Sherlock heard a whispering from the darkness. It sounded like the gravelly tones of Mr Surd again.

“Ah,” Maupertuis said in his leaf-thin voice. “Your name is Sherlock Holmes. Your brother must therefore be Mycroft Holmes. A clever man. We had already marked him down as someone of interest to our group. It seems you take after him.”

“I’ve already sent him a telegram telling him what’s going on,” Sherlock said, as calmly as he could manage.

“No,” the Baron corrected, “you haven’t. If you had, there would be no need for you to have been investigating my boat. Mycroft Holmes would have sent his own agents in to do the work.”

His own agents? Sherlock had a sudden, sobering realization of the extent of his brother’s powers.

More whispering from the end of the room.

“We may have to deal with your brother regardless,” Baron Maupertuis whispered. “If your intelligence is an indication of his then he may well be able to work out our plans and try to stop them. You and he will die within the same week, possibly even on the same day. At the same hour, if I can arrange it, for I am a man who appreciates neatness. And it will save your parents the cost of arranging two funerals.”

The full cost of Sherlock’s arrogance suddenly descended upon him. By proudly working out the whole terrible plot and demonstrating his cleverness to Baron Maupertuis and then, worse, boasting about his influential brother, Sherlock had condemned them both to death.

“I believe you have told me everything you know,” Maupertuis continued, “and I am surprised at the amount you have determined. We obviously need to be even more secretive in future. Thank you for that, at least.”

“Why London?” Sherlock asked quickly, sensing that things were drawing to a close and that his — and Virginia’s — lives would shortly be terminated. “Why did you move the hives to London before shipping them here rather than, say, Portsmouth or Southampton?”

“Your escape forced us to move earlier than planned,” Maupertuis whispered. “There was no berth available in Portsmouth or Southampton, and the ship had been waiting in London for our instruction to move. It was inefficient, taking the hives to London, but it was unavoidable. And with that, your usefulness to me has ceased — yours, and that of the girl who sits beside you. I had intended to threaten her life in order to force you to talk, but no force had to be applied. If anything, shutting you up was the problem.”

Sherlock turned to Virginia, feeling his face flush with mortification, but she was smiling at him. “You stopped me being tortured,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Sherlock said automatically, not entirely sure whether he should actually take credit for it or not.

“Mr Surd,” Baron Maupertuis’s voice said from out of the dark. Although he whispered, his voice carried to every corner of the room. It was a voice used to command. “We need to accelerate our plans. Give the order. Release the bees from the Fort. By the time they find their way to the mainland and across country, the uniforms will have been distributed. And then confusion will reign!"