Death Cloud

Chapter Sixteen

“Thank heavens for Baron Maupertuis,” Sherlock said in a heartfelt whisper as he slammed the door of the dining room shut behind them. There was no lock on the door, so he threw his weight behind a teak cabinet that stood beside it. Its legs squealed on the tiles as it shifted.

“Why?” Virginia snapped, adding her weight to his. The cabinet slid across the door, preventing it from opening. “What’s he ever done for us?”

Baron Maupertuis’s servants must have reached the door out of the dining room, because it suddenly opened a crack and thudded against the cabinet. They rattled it a few times, but the cabinet didn’t move.

“He likes everywhere he lives to look the same. That’s how I know where the stables will be. Come on!" He led the way through the back of the house to an outside door, and when he was certain that none of Maupertuis’s servants were outside he and Virginia hurried around the side of the chateau and found the stables. Judging by the position of the sun, it was mid-morning. They’d been kept drugged for at least a night, possibly more.

Ever practical, Virginia immediately began to saddle two horses. “What are we going to do, Sherlock? We’re in a foreign country! We don’t even speak the language!"

“Actually,” he blushed, “I do.”

“Do what?”

“Speak the language. A little, anyway.”

She turned and gave him a funny look. “How come?”

“My family is descended from a French line on my mother’s side. She used to insist that we learn the language. It was our family heritage, she said.”

Virginia reached out to touch his arm. “You don’t talk about her,” she said. “You talk about your father and your brother, but not her.”

“No,” Sherlock said, feeling his throat close up. He turned away so she wouldn’t look him in the eye. “I don’t.”

Virginia tightened the final strap on the horses. “So, given that you do speak the language, where do we go? Do we ask for help?”

“We head for a port,” Sherlock said. “Maupertuis gave the instruction to release the bees. If we don’t stop them, they’ll kill people. Maybe not as many as Maupertuis expects, but some British soldiers will still die. We have to stop them being released.”

“But—"

“One thing at a time,” he said. “Let’s get to the coast. From there we can send a telegram to my brother, or something. Anything.”

Virginia nodded. “Saddle up then, master swordsman.”

He grinned. “You were pretty magnificent in there as well.”

She grinned too. “I was, wasn’t I?”

Mounting their horses, they rode away from the chateau just as shouts began to ring out and an alarm bell began to peal. Within moments, Sherlock knew, they would be too far away to catch.

In the nearest village they stopped to ask where they were. They were both hungry, but they had no French money, and all they could do was look longingly at the sausages hanging up in the shop windows and the bread rolls, as long as Sherlock’s arm, that were stacked up on trays. A farmer told Sherlock that they were a few miles from Cherbourg. He pointed them to the right road, and they kept going.

Virginia glanced over appraisingly at him at one point. “Not bad,” she said. “You ride like it’s a bicycle, not a living creature, but still — not bad.”

They stopped again, half an hour later, on the edges of a pear orchard, and filled their pockets with pears which they ate as they rode on, the juice trickling down their chins. The countryside flashed by, familiar and yet different from what Sherlock was used to in England. His head pounded like the thundering of his horse’s hoofs. He needed to work out what they were going to do when they reached Cherbourg.

By the time they got there, he had no clearer an idea.

The town was built on the side of a hill that led down towards the glittering blue waters of a harbour. The hoofs of the horses clattered on the cobblestones, and they were forced to slow down to an amble so they could get through the crowds that were thronging around the various stalls and shops lining the winding streets. It was a scene that could have been anywhere along the south coast of England, apart from the style of the clothes, and the preponderance of cheeses on the stalls.

Sherlock and Virginia dismounted and, reluctantly, left their horses tethered to a fence. Someone would look after them. He tested his language skills to the limit by asking whether there was a telegraph office around, and was devastated to find that the nearest one was in Paris. How were they going to get word to Mycroft now?

They had to find a ship and get back to England. That was their only hope.

They found the harbourmaster’s office, and asked about ships or boats sailing to England. There were several, the harbourmaster told them. He laboriously went through the names. Four were local boats that took goods for market — cheeses, meats, onions — back and forth. He could put in a good word for them with their captains.

The fifth was a British fishing boat that had docked unexpectedly that morning.

It was named Mrs Eglantine.

Hearing the name was like having a bucket of cold water thrown into his face. For a frozen moment Sherlock was convinced that Mrs Eglantine — his uncle and aunt’s housekeeper — was the mastermind behind this whole thing, but then better sense prevailed. Someone was using the name like a flag, to attract his attention. And they had.

The Mrs Eglantine was a small boat, tucked into a pier on the edge of the dock. Fishing nets were strung around it like cobwebs. Amyus Crowe and Matty Arnatt were waiting for them beside its gangplank.

Virginia rushed into her father’s arms. He swung her up into the air and hugged her close. Sherlock pounded Matty on the back.

“How did you know where to find us?” he asked. “How did you even know which country to look in?”

“You got to remember, I’m a tracker by trade,” Crowe said. “When you didn’t return to the hotel, and when we realized that Ginny was missin”, we tried to retrace your steps. I heard about the fire in the Rotherhithe Tunnel, an’ a little bit of questionin’ established that a boy fit-tin’ your description was seen running away. Meanwhile, Matty here traced the boat that took Ginny to the docks. By the time we got there, Maupertuis’s ship had sailed, but we found a dockmaster who remembered seein’ both of you taken on board. Dragged on board, he said. The ship set sail, but he remembered hearin’ the sailors saying as to how it was a short trip across the English Channel to Cherbourg. So we hired ourselves a fishin’ boat and headed on over to look for you. We arrived here only shortly after Maupertuis’s ship did. Either they were slow, or they stopped somewhere along the way. Not sure which.” His voice was as solid and thoughtful as ever, and his words gave nothing away about his mental state, but Sherlock thought that he looked older somehow, more tired. He kept his arm around Virginia’s shoulders, pulling her close. She didn’t seem to want to pull away. “I found out that the Baron had a place nearby, an’ I was just about to hire some local men to form a posse when you showed up. A useful confluence of paths, I would say.”

“It makes sense,” Sherlock said. “We were heading for the nearest port to Baron Maupertuis’s chateau. That was obviously where his ship would dock, and you were following his ship. The chances were we would all end up in Cherbourg at some stage.” He smiled. “The only amazing thing is that you found a boat named after my uncle’s housekeeper. What are the odds of that?”

“She used to be called the Rosie Lee,” Crowe said, smiling back. “I reckoned as to how a more familiar name might attract your interest, if you was in the area an’ lookin’ for a way back to England. I was goin’ to rename her the Mycroft Holmes, but her captain informed me in no uncertain terms that ships an’ boats get women’s names.”

“You expected us to escape from the Baron?”

Crowe nodded. “I’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t. You’re my pupil, an’ Ginny’s my kin. What kind of teacher would I be if you’d both just sat back an’ let yourselves be kept prisoner?” His words were jocular, and there was a smile on his face, but Sherlock could sense a deep undercurrent of unease, perhaps even fear, within Crowe that their appearance had only just begun to wear away. He reached out with a big hand and grabbed Sherlock’s shoulder. “You kept her safe,” he said, more quietly. “I thank you for that.”

“I know that everything you did to get here was logical,” Sherlock said, just as quietly, “and it all worked, but what if it hadn’t? What if we’d never escaped, or if we’d gone a different way, or if you’d been at one end of the dock and we were at the other, getting on a different boat? What then?”

“Then things would have turned out differently,” Crowe said. “We are where we are because things happened the way they did. Logic can shorten the odds considerably in your favour, but there’s always random chance to contend with. We were lucky — this time. Next time — who knows?”

“I don’t expect there to be a “next time”,” Sherlock said. “But we still need to stop the Baron’s plans.”

“What are they?” Crowe asked, face creasing in puzzlement. “I’ve pieced some of it together, but not everythin”.”

Quickly, Sherlock and Virginia explained about the bees, the contaminated uniforms and the plan to kill off a substantial proportion of the British Army as it rested in its barracks in England. Crowe was as sceptical as Sherlock about the plan’s efficacy, but he agreed that there would be some deaths, and that even one death was too many. The bees had to be stopped.

“But how can the bees find their way across the sea to the mainland, an’ then find their way to the barracks?” Crowe asked.

“I’ve been reading about them in my uncle’s library,” Sherlock replied. “Bees are amazing creatures. They can distinguish between hundreds of different scents, at concentrations far far smaller than a human would require, and they can travel for miles in search of the source of those scents. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were possible.” He paused, remembering. “He talked about a Fort. He told his man — Mr Surd — that the bees had to be released from a Fort. Are there any fortifications along this coast, or along the coast of England, that he might be using?”

“It’s not that kind of fort,” Matty Arnatt interrupted.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s forts built out in the English Channel, round Southampton and Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, like islands,” he said. “They was put there in case Napoleon ever invaded. Most of them are deserted now, cos the invasion never came.”

“How do you know?” Virginia asked.

Matty scowled. “My dad was stationed on one of them when he was in the Navy. He told me all about them.”

“So what makes you think Maupertuis is using one of them?” Sherlock asked.

“You said as how he hates the British cos of what happened to him. Don’t it make sense that he’d use one of the forts that we built to defend ourselves against the French back against us?”

Crowe nodded. “The boy has a point. And although his ship left London a while before Matty an’ me could hire ourselves a boat, they only arrived in Cherbourg just before us. They must’a stopped off at one of those forts to leave the beehives behind.”

“But there’s loads of them,” Matty said. “We ain’t got time to search them all.”

“He wouldn’t want the bees to have to fly too far,” Sherlock pointed out. “We’re looking for the fort nearest the coast. And he’d want them to be close to a fair-sized Army base. We need a map of England and the coast, and we need to draw lines between every offshore fort and every British Army base. We’re looking for the shortest line.” He glanced between Amyus Crowe and Virginia’s amazed faces. “Simple geometry,” he said.

“What do we do once we’ve found the right fort?” Matty asked.

“We could head back to the British coast, send a message to Mycroft Holmes,” Crowe rumbled. “He could send a Royal Navy ship out to the fort.”

“Too much of a delay,” Sherlock said, shaking his head. “We need to go there ourselves. Now.”

In the end, they did both. The Mrs Eglantine, formerly and soon to be again the Rosie Lee, set out from Cherbourg while Crowe and Sherlock drew lines on maps and identified the most likely fort. When they drew near, several hours later, the sun was heading for the horizon and the English coast was a dark line in the distance.

“This fishing boat’ll be spotted straight away,” Crowe pointed out. “Even with the sails down the mast’ll be seen, assumin’ they’re keepin’ watch — and if I were them, I would be.”

“There’s a rowing boat lashed to the side,” Sherlock said. “I spotted it when we boarded. Matty and I can row across to the fort. You keep going to England. Raise the alarm.”

“How about if I row to the fort and you, Matthew and Ginnie head for the coast?”

“We can’t sail,” Sherlock pointed out. His heart was thudding fast within his chest at the thought of what he was volunteering for, but he could see no alternative. “And besides, the Admiralty and the War Office will believe you before me.”

“Logical,” Crowe conceded reluctantly.

“Wherever you land,” Sherlock continued, “if you’re near Portsmouth Dockyard, Chatham Dockyard, Deal, Sheerness, Great Yarmouth or Plymouth, there are semaphore stations. If you give them a message they can flash it across country via the chain of semaphores, all the way to the Admiralty. It’s probably quicker than a telegram.”

Crowe nodded, smiled, then stuck out his huge, calloused hand and shook Sherlock’s hand. “We’ll meet again,” he said.

“I’m counting on it,” Sherlock replied.

Sherlock and Matty slipped into a rowing boat and rowed hard and fast towards the location of the fort. A rowing boat could get in close without being seen, whereas a fishing boat, no matter how inconspicuous, would be noticed. As they had agreed, Crowe and Virginia carried on towards the English coast, where they could send a message alerting the government.

Virginia stood on the side of the Mrs Eglantine as it drew away from the rowing boat, staring at Sherlock. He gazed back, wondering if he would ever see her again.

The sea was grey-green and choppy as the two boys pulled on the oars. The fort was a dark blob on the horizon that never seemed to get any closer, no matter how hard they rowed. Sherlock could taste salt on his lips. He wondered how he had ever managed to get himself tangled up in this strange adventure.

After a while, he looked up to find the fort was just a few hundred feet away: a mass of wet, seaweed-encrusted stone that seemed to erupt from the waters of the English Channel. Somehow, they had managed to close in on it without noticing. It seemed empty, deserted. He scanned the crenellated rim, where only a few decades ago British forces would have been watching the sea for approaching French warships. He could see nobody. Nobody at all.

The rowing boat coasted the last few feet to the black bulk of the fort. It ended up at the base of a set of water-slicked stone steps that led upward.

Quickly, Matty tied the rope to a rusted iron bar that had been cemented into a gap between the stones. The two boys scrambled up the steps. Sherlock nearly lost his footing, and Matty had to grab him to stop him toppling into the water.

“How do we know it’s not too late?” Matty asked.

“It’s night. Bees are dormant at night. The Baron’s servant hasn’t had much more time to get here than we have. The bees will be released in the morning.”

When they got to the top, they knelt behind a low stone wall that ran around the outer edge of the fort. The gaps between the stones were infested with moss.

Sherlock scanned the top level — he supposed it was technically the deck, although this particular “vessel’ wasn’t going anywhere — but the flagstones were empty of anything except coils of rope, tufts of sea grass and the occasional splintered crate.

Across the other side of the fort he saw the sudden flare of a match illuminate a bearded face with a scar running across it. Whoever was running this fort had posted guards. He and Matty needed to be careful.

The guard was moving away from them, and Sherlock spotted him passing an opening in the stone deck which had a wooden rail running around three sides of it. Probably a stairway into the depths of the fort. As the man moved on, Sherlock tugged at Matty’s shirt and pulled him over.

He was right. A set of stone steps led down into darkness. The smell of dankness and decay rose up to greet them.

“Come on,” Sherlock hissed. “Let’s go.”

The two of them scuttled down the steps into the depths of the fort. At first it seemed as black as the depths of Hell in there, but after a few moments Sherlock’s eyes adjusted and he could make out oil lanterns fastened to the wall at regular intervals. They were in a short corridor that seemed to open up into a larger, darker room which the orange wash of light from the lamps barely illuminated.

Sherlock and Matty crept along the corridor to where the walls suddenly opened up. The circular space revealed probably occupied most of the level they were on. Stone pillars every few yards supported the roof overhead, but what made Sherlock’s breath quicken was the beehives, lined up in a regular pattern across the flagstones. There were hundreds of them. With tens of thousands of bees in each hive, that meant something like a million aggressive bees were located just a few feet away from him. He felt his skin itch in an unconscious response to their nearness, almost as if they were walking across his shoulders and down his spine. Whether or not Maupertuis’s grand scheme would work across the whole of Britain, the presence of all these bees in one place was definitely dangerous to anyone in the locality.

“Tell me we’re not going to carry them up the stairs and throw them over the edge,” Matty whispered.

“We’re not going to carry them up the stairs and throw them over the edge,” Sherlock confirmed.

“Then what are we going to do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

“I mean I haven’t thought it through yet. It’s all been a bit of a rush.”

Matty snorted. “You had plenty of time on the fishing boat.”

“I was thinking about something else.”

“Yeah,” Matty said, “I noticed.” He was silent for a moment. “We could set fire to them,” he pointed out.

Sherlock shook his head. “Look at the spacing. We could set fire to one or two of them, but the flames wouldn’t spread and the bees would probably get us.”

Matty looked around. “What are they eating?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re in the English Channel. There’s no flowers out here, and I don’t think seaweed counts. What are the bees eating?”

Sherlock thought for a moment. “That’s a good question. I don’t know.” He glanced around. “Let’s look round, in case we find something. Split up, and meet on the other side. Don’t get caught.”

Matty headed left and Sherlock headed right. Looking back, Sherlock saw that the gloom had already swallowed Matty up.

The serried ranks of beehives passing by as he moved formed an almost hypnotic pattern. He couldn’t see any bees — perhaps the darkness was keeping them confined to the hives — but he thought he could hear them: a low, soporific buzz, almost on the edge of his consciousness. He noticed that there were wooden frames set up at various points in the cavernous space. Some of them held wooden trays, others were empty. Sherlock wondered where he had seen trays like that before. Something about them was familiar.

A grotesque figure came into view through the gloom: a man dressed in an all-encompassing canvas suit whose head was covered with a muslin hood held away from his face by bamboo hoops. He was bending over a large box — one of many that Sherlock could now see were lined up along this portion of the curved wall that bounded the space. He straightened up, holding a tray like the ones that had been fitted into the easel-like frames scattered around, and walked towards the hives. A fine haze seemed to rise up from the tray as Sherlock watched him go.

He remembered just as the man in the bee-suit reached a frame and slotted the tray inside. He’d seen beekeepers in the same suits at Baron Maupertuis’s manor house just outside Farnham removing similar trays from underneath the hives. And then suddenly everything fell into place — the trays, the haze of powder that rose up from them, the ice that he’d seen the thug Denny unloading from the train in Farnham and Matty’s question about how the bees ate in the absence of flowers. It was all so perfectly logical! Bees collected pollen from flowers, storing it on fine hairs on their legs until they got to the hive and then used it as food. Put a tray beneath a hive, and create some kind of “gate’ that the bees had to go through to get into the hive, and you could brush some of the pollen from their legs and collect it in specially positioned trays. Put the trays on ice and you could store the pollen for when you needed it — for instance, when the bees were being kept somewhere where there were no flowers. Place the trays scattered around, and the bees could collect the pollen from them, not even realizing that this was the second time they had collected the pollen.

Remembering Farnham, and the station, another memory clamoured for Sherlock’s attention: something that Matty had told him. Something about powder. About bakeries. He ransacked the lumber room of his memory, trying to bring the words to mind.

Yes. Powder. Flour. Matty had mentioned a fire that had occurred at a bakery where he once worked. He’d said that a powder like flour was highly inflammable when it was floating in air. If one speck of flour caught fire then it would spread from speck to speck faster than a man could run.

And if it worked for flour, it might just work for pollen.

“Penny for your thoughts,” said a voice behind him.

Sherlock turned, knowing what he would see.

Mr Surd, Baron Maupertuis’s faithful retainer, was standing in the shadows. The leather thong of his whip spilt from his hand and curled around his feet.

“Never mind,” Surd said, advancing on Sherlock. “If the Baron wants to know what’s in your head, I’ll just give him your head and he can pull it out himself.”