Snake Bite

CHAPTER TWO

Despite the exertions of the previous day, Sherlock awoke early. Lying in his hammock, gently swinging from side to side in the relative darkness of the sleeping area — which was barely more than a widened section of corridor with hooks screwed to either side of the wall where the hammocks could be slung — he listened for a while to the gentle background noise of creaking timbers, waves slapping against the sides of the ship, sailors snoring, snorting or talking in their sleep, and the blundering sounds of men either getting out of their hammocks or getting into them. The business of running the Gloria Scott went on all day and all night, of course, and as one shift was rising another was going to sleep. Bells were rung to signal the beginning and end of shifts, and Sherlock’s wasn’t for a while yet.

Eventually Sherlock slid out of his hammock and dressed in the same clothes he had worn the previous day, and the day before that, and all the days before that leading back to his abduction. The only washing the clothes got was the soaking from the waves which came over the side of the ship. Ducking beneath the line of canvas hammocks that, strangely, almost mimicked the ship’s sails in their swollen, occupied state, he made his way to the galley.

Wu Chung was absent. Instead, another sailor — a cadaverous individual named Scorby — was dishing out a mixture of hard biscuits, oat porridge and dried meat. Sherlock took a plateful, sat at a vacant bench and quickly scoffed it down. He wondered what had happened to the Chinese cook. The last time Sherlock had seen him, Wu had been going towards the depths of the ship. Had he survived the storm, or had something happened to him? Perhaps he had accidentally hit his head on a low beam when the Gloria Scott had been listing from side to side under the heavy hand of the wind. Or perhaps he had gone down to the bilges — the dark, wet depths of the ship closest to the keel — and somehow fallen over and drowned in the stagnant water that sloshed back and forth down there.

Sherlock pushed his empty plate away and got up. His place was instantly taken by another sailor. Heading back to where Scorby was still serving, he asked, ‘Where’s Wu?’

‘Wu Chung?’ Scorby asked, as if there was another Chinese sailor named Wu on board who Sherlock might have been asking after. ‘Up on deck, mate. ’E’s doin’ some kind of strange dance.’

Sherlock felt a sense of relief wash over him. Wu wasn’t exactly a friend, but he was one of the few sailors to have taken an interest in him. If Wu had died then who else was going to teach Sherlock Cantonese?

He headed up the ladder towards the deck. The bright light made him blink and screw up his eyes. When they had adjusted he looked around, checking for any damage that the storm had left. It was as if nothing had happened. The sails were full, the masts and yards were intact, and the deck was as dry as it ever got. The sailors on shift were moving around normally. Despite the violence of the previous night Sherlock got the impression that tropical storms were something that happened, were dealt with and were then forgotten. Everyone and everything moved on.

Wu Chung was standing in the centre of the deck. He was poised with his weight on his bent right leg. His left leg was extended straight to the deck in front of him. His right arm was raised in a hooked shape, almost cradling the back of his head, and his left arm was extended to match his left leg. The fingers were together and curled, with the palm facing upward, as if he was gesturing someone to approach him. The pose looked as if it was putting significant stress on the muscles of Wu’s right leg and back, but he kept as stationary as a statue for a minute or more before moving slowly to another pose.

As Sherlock watched, Wu Chung took a series of statue-like poses interspersed with slow movements. As Scorby had said, it was something like a dance, but there was more to it. Sherlock began to detect repeated elements within the poses — blocks and strikes, as if Wu was engaged in a very slow fight with an invisible opponent.

Eventually, he straightened up, letting his arms fall to his sides. He was breathing deeply, but not heavily. He glanced over to where Sherlock was standing.

‘You see me practise, ha?’ he said in English.

‘I did. What is it that you are practising?’

Wu smiled. ‘What you think?’

‘I think it was like a fight, like boxing but different. I think it was like shadow-boxing.’

Wu nodded, and bowed slightly towards Sherlock. ‘Very good. Most people say I am dancing badly.’

‘I’ve never seen you do it before.’

‘You have never been awake this early before. I do this every morning for one hour.’

‘Why?’ Sherlock asked simply.

‘Ah, that is a good question.’ Wu came over to stand beside Sherlock. ‘In your country, boxing is something men learn so they can hit other people and make them bleed. In my country, T’ai chi ch’uan is something children learn so they can calm their minds and master their bodies.’

‘T’ai chi ch’uan?’ Sherlock asked.

‘It means “boundless fist”, or maybe “great extremes boxing”.’

‘Tell me more,’ Sherlock asked.

Wu gestured to an empty area of deck over to one side. ‘Let us sit. There is much to tell, and I am not as young as I once was.’ Once they were both settled, cross-legged on the deck, he started to speak, and Sherlock listened, fascinated. ‘I start by telling you that there are two different styles of fighting in China. There is Shaolinquan, which is all —’ he waved his arms around wildly — ‘action and activity, all about the body doing things, and there is Wudangquan, which is all about the mind controlling the body.’ He sniffed derisively. ‘Those who practise Shaolinquan leap about with strength and force, but people who are not good at this kind of training soon lose their breath and are exhausted. Wudangquan is unlike this. We strive for quietness of body, mind and intention. We seek that still point in the centre from which all activity must begin.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Sherlock admitted.

‘Good,’ Wu said. ‘That is a start.’ He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. ‘I have told you a little about China, but you should know more about the Chinese before you arrive.’ He glanced around at the other sailors. ‘These men are all fools. They do not care about where they are going. They want everywhere they go to be the same — same food, same language, same kinds of people. They are not interested in difference, only sameness. You, you are different. You look for differences, and are interested in them. You are more intelligent than them.’

‘I’ve always been interested in learning things,’ Sherlock admitted.

‘In your country, boxing and God and food and nature — they are different, yes?’

‘Ye-es,’ Sherlock admitted, not sure where Wu was going.

‘In China, they are all parts of something. We believe that everything is connected. Changes to one thing affect everything else.’ He smiled.

Wu kept talking, and Sherlock listened, but he wasn’t sure that he understood much of what was said. It didn’t really matter. Wu was obviously passionate about his beliefs, and Sherlock found himself entranced by his friend’s eloquence. On a couple of occasions Wu shifted into Cantonese when he didn’t know the correct English words, and Sherlock found that he was still following the conversation. What Sherlock did understand was that T’ai chi ch’uan was something between a way of meditating and a way of fighting, and that it was a reflection of a deeper religious aspect of Chinese life.

Eventually, when Wu ran out of words, Sherlock asked, ‘Could you teach me?’

‘I am already teaching you — Cantonese. You want me to teach you cooking now?’

Sherlock smiled. ‘No — not cooking. I want you to teach me T’ai chi ch’uan.’

Wu stared at him for a long moment. ‘You want me to teach you to fight?’

Sherlock recognized the trick in the question.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to teach me how to control my body with my mind.’

‘Right answer.’ Wu smiled. ‘Then I teach you that. The fighting will come with it.’

The weather got hotter as they hooked around the bottom point of Africa — the Cape of Good Hope — and headed back towards the equator. The skies returned to their pure blue, and the sun beat down on the deck and on the sailors, drying the one to the point where the wood began to crack while raising blisters on the backs and shoulders of the other. The sea grew quiet again, and porpoises began to accompany the ship, as they had done before, racing ahead of it like a pack of hunting dogs. Sherlock sometimes caught glimpses of other things paralleling the ship, beneath the waves, dark shapes that seemed as big, if not bigger, than the ship itself, but they never broke the surface. Were they sharks? Or maybe whales? He had read about whales. Or were they some other kind of life that nobody had yet given a name to? He didn’t know, but he desperately wanted to.

The days blurred into one another. When he wasn’t working or sleeping then Sherlock was practising the violin, learning Cantonese from Wu Chung or following the slow-motion movements of T’ai chi-ch’uan that Wu Chung rehearsed on deck every morning. Sherlock was beginning to see that if he took the graceful movements and speeded them up then they really would make an effective form of defensive fighting — blocking punches and then returning blows with either the hands or the feet. He could also see that by practising the movements slowly at first, so slowly that his muscles sometimes began to scream under the strain, he was building up a memory of them. If he ever had the opportunity to use this martial art for real then he could see how his body would automatically follow the movements that it had memorized without him even having to think about it.

Why had something like T’ai chi ch’uan never been developed in England? he wondered. The closest thing England had to a martial art was boxing, and this thing that Wu was teaching him was so much more effective than boxing. Were there other types of martial art? he wondered. Did other countries have their own, different versions?

When Sherlock was working he was concentrating so much on his tasks that he could see nothing else around him. But on those occasions when he had some time to himself he sometimes, in the evening or the early morning, noticed the ship’s captain, Tollaway, standing on the rear deck making observations of the sky. He used a brass device that looked like a cross between a small telescope and a large set of compasses. He seemed to be observing stars. Sherlock remembered something that he had read once about navigation at sea, and decided that the thing the Captain was using was a sextant.

As the ship ploughed on through the waves, the horizon a line that merely separated one shade of blue from another, it was hard to believe that they were making any progress. Maybe the Gloria Scott was sitting stationary on the surface of the ocean, and the sense of movement was an illusion caused by the waves and the feel of the wind on their faces. Only the billowing of the sails indicated that something was actually propelling them forward.

Sherlock found himself joining in more and more with the sing-songs in the evening. After the sailors received their ration of watered-down rum — something for which Sherlock found he was acquiring quite a taste — they would gather together and sing sea shanties. Sherlock’s developing skills at the violin were much in demand — so much so that a sailor everyone called Fiddler, who had lent Sherlock his instrument, was relegated to the sidelines. Sherlock’s excellent memory meant that he could remember all the words as soon as he heard them, and he discovered to his surprise that he had a fine baritone singing voice.

Sherlock found that there were whole stretches of time — hours, in fact — when he didn’t think about home, about Mycroft and about his friends — Amyus Crowe, Matty and Virginia. Was he coming to terms with his situation, he wondered, or was it just some kind of mental self-protection mechanism — his mind avoiding subjects that were too painful to think about?

Sherlock didn’t know how long it was after the storm, but one morning Mr Larchmont called everyone to the stern of the ship, where he stood on the raised area of deck and looked down at them.

‘It’s been a long journey, lads,’ he shouted, ‘and there’re more to go, but the Captain reckons we’re just a spit away from Sumatra now. He intends to dock in Sabang Harbour. Sumatra is controlled by the Dutch, of course, which at least means that the food will be edible, they’ll take the Queen’s coins and we’ll be able to make ourselves understood. Some of you have been there before — for those of you that haven’t, all I’ll say is that Sabang is a rat-hole infested with all kinds of tropical diseases that can rot a man’s fingers and toes off within a day, and that you’re far better off staying on the ship than going ashore. The only thing worse than Sabang is the jungle that covers the rest of the island. Not that I expect that to stop you from going ashore. We’ll be there for two days, picking up a cargo of coffee beans and taking on a Dutchman as a passenger.’ He gazed around the crew, who had visibly brightened up at the news they would be hitting land soon. ‘That’s all. Back to work, all of you, and hold off on dreamin’ of those beautiful Sumatran maidens until land is in sight.’ He turned back to the wheelhouse, and Sherlock heard him saying, only slightly less loudly than his previous shouting, ‘Tack five degrees to starboard and then maintain a steady course.’

The next day, land was sighted. It started as a dark line fractionally above the horizon, much as the storm had done, but instead of running from it Mr Larchmont ordered that a course be struck directly towards it. How did he know that it was land? Sherlock wondered. As they got closer, however, it became clear that he was right. Soon the whole crew could see what looked like hills, but which soon resolved themselves into mountains covered with lush green vegetation.

They arrived in Sabang slowly, and accompanied by a great deal of waving from children on the quayside. In comparison with Dakar — their last port of call — Sabang was a bustling mass of people heading in all directions on all kinds of business. Men wore what looked like brightly coloured sheets wrapped around their waists. Some wore jackets to cover their chests, others went bare-chested. The women wore the same kinds of brightly coloured sheets, but wrapped around their whole bodies rather than just from the waist down. All in all, the place was a riot of colour and activity.

After they docked, the first order of business was for the Captain, accompanied by Mr Larchmont, to go in search of their cargo of coffee beans. The crew were allowed to disembark, and within a few moments the Gloria Scott was empty apart from the two sailors left behind to guard it, and Wu, who said that he preferred to sleep.

Sherlock walked down the gangplank with some trepidation. As with the arrival at Dakar, he found that making a transition to walking on a surface that wasn’t moving up and down was pretty tricky. It took him a good few hours to stop feeling queasy. Looking at the men who passed him on the quayside and in the street, he could tell which ones were sailors who had recently disembarked. They were the ones who were staggering from side to side, anticipating waves that never came.

The quayside was lined with cranes made out of bamboo which had been tied together using some kind of local rope. They looked pretty ramshackle compared with the more substantial cranes that Sherlock had seen in the docks in London and Southampton. He wondered how often they failed, and how many men were injured each time.

In the shadow of the cranes he noticed stalls selling all kinds of food and other goods, like clothes, and knives, and musical instruments, and wooden puppets. Sick and tired of the restricted ship’s rations, Sherlock decided to look at what was on offer. Remembering the advice that Mycroft had once given him about never taking the first hansom cab he saw in case it was a trap, Sherlock went past the first few stalls and stopped at one further down the line.

The man running the stall was small, brown-skinned and dark-haired. He smiled at Sherlock with a mouth that seemed to contain too many teeth. He held out a stick on which were some chunks of meat coated in a brown sauce. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘You try, yes?’

Sherlock gazed dubiously at the proffered morsel. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Satay Ponorogo,’ the man replied. ‘Is goat. Goat in sauce.’ He frowned, and turned to the next-nearest stallholder. They talked in what Sherlock presumed was Sumatran, if there was such a language, for a few moments. The stallholder turned back. ‘Is sauce made with peanuts,’ he said.

Sherlock shrugged. He’d never eaten goat in England, although as far as he was concerned it was no different from eating lamb or mutton. He had tried peanuts when he was in New York a year or so back and liked them. ‘All right,’ he said, and handed over a coin. The stallholder passed the stick to him, along with some change.

Sherlock bit into the meat. For a second he could taste the goat and the peanuts, but then his lips started to tingle. He debated whether to spit the meat out or swallow it. In the end he swallowed it, if only so that he didn’t offend the stallkeeper. He could feel the burning sensation all the way down his throat.

‘Sauce is also made with chilli and lime,’ the stallholder added with a big smile. ‘You need drink to cool mouth down? Coconut milk do cooling job really good.’

‘Thanks,’ Sherlock said, ‘but no thanks. And I admire your technique for getting customers to buy your drinks as well as your food. Very good. Very clever.’

He walked on, waiting for the burning in his mouth to subside. After a while he felt a prickle on the back of his neck. It felt like someone was watching him. He didn’t believe that there was some kind of sixth sense that meant he could tell he was being watched even though his back was turned, but he was prepared to believe that he might have caught a glimpse of a watcher out of the corner of his eye and that part of his brain was trying to alert him to something. He turned, letting his gaze roam across the crowd of sailors, Dutch and English settlers and locals.

One man stood out. He was wearing a grubby linen suit and a straw hat, and his white shirt was creased and sweat-stained, but the most obvious, and strange, thing about him was that his face and hair were completely obscured by a black gauze veil, like the ones worn by beekeepers. The veil was tucked into a silk cravat which was tied loosely around his neck. The cravat was wilting in the heat and the humidity. He was leaning on a cane and seemed to be staring at Sherlock, although the black veil made it difficult to see anything more than the shape of his head.

‘Can I help you?’ Sherlock called, feeling a shiver run through him. He thought it was just the memories of being watched from afar by the agents of the Paradol Chamber that were making him edgy, but as the man started to walk across to where Sherlock was standing the feeling became more intense.

The man stopped a few feet away. ‘Are you from the Gloria Scott?’ he asked. His voice was thin and reedy, like the sound of an oboe, or a high note from a church organ.

Sherlock nodded.

‘My name is Arrhenius,’ he said. ‘Jacobus Arrhenius. I will be a passenger on your ship. Please to tell me where the Captain may be found.’

‘He… he is currently ashore, sorting out our next cargo,’ Sherlock said. ‘I think he intends to be back soon, if you could wait.’

‘Thank you,’ Arrhenius said. ‘I will wait in the shade by the gangway.’ He glanced up at the sky — or, at least, that was the direction his head turned in. The veil made it impossible to tell what he was actually looking at. ‘The sun and I do not get on well. Not at all.’ He turned away, then looked back so that he could see Sherlock again. ‘You know my name, but I do not know yours.’

‘Sherlock. My name is Sherlock Holmes.’

‘I am pleased to meet you,’ Arrhenius said. He extended his right hand, which was encased in a black leather glove which ran up inside his sleeve so that no flesh was visible. Sherlock took the hand gingerly. Beneath the soft leather it felt strange — not like a normal hand.

‘I will see you again,’ Arrhenius said before moving off, and Sherlock wasn’t sure if that was a promise or a threat.

He watched the veiled man’s retreating back, then, when Arrhenius had been swallowed up by the crowd, he moved on.

After a while Sherlock got bored by the stalls. The heat and the humidity were weighing him down. He wondered whether to explore the town further, or to go back to the ship. Eventually he decided to go back: it wasn’t as if he was going to be living in Sabang for any length of time, and being back on board would allow him to continue with his violin practice, Cantonese lessons and T’ai chi ch’uan in peace for a while.

When he reached the gangway he turned and looked around the bustling quay. He could feel the same tickle on his skin as he had earlier. Somewhere, Arrhenius was watching him again. Eventually he spotted the veiled man in the shadows beneath a palm tree. When he saw that he had been spotted, Arrhenius bowed slightly to Sherlock.

A few minutes later Captain Tollaway and Mr Larchmont returned from their meetings in Sabang, and Sherlock watched from the deck as Mr Arrhenius stepped out of the shade to greet them. Sherlock couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, but neither of the two sailors seemed at all amazed by the black all-encompassing veil or the gloves. Either they had met him before, Sherlock reasoned, or they had been warned in advance.

The three men came up the gangway and disappeared into the depths of the ship. Sherlock presumed they had gone to the Captain’s cabin. About half an hour later a cart arrived alongside the ship, pulled by some kind of big-horned cow. When Mr Arrhenius appeared at the side of the ship to watch the contents of the cart being loaded on board Sherlock concluded that it was his luggage.

One box in particular seemed to concern the Dutchman. It was made of wood and had holes drilled in the top. Arrhenius came down the gangway and walked behind the local labourers as they carried it on to the ship. The wind changed direction briefly, blowing towards Sherlock, and he caught a whiff of a strange, musty odour. The box vanished down a hatch and presumably towards Arrhenius’s cabin, as did the rest of his luggage, and the strange smell vanished with it.

More carts began to turn up with crates — bigger ones this time. Rather than being carried on board, the crates were attached to the ropes hanging down from the two nearest bamboo cranes and then hoisted up into the air. Mr Larchmont had mentioned coffee beans earlier, and Sherlock assumed that was what these were.

It took the rest of that day and a significant portion of the next for the crates to be lifted on board the Gloria Scott and lowered into the hold through the deck hatches. Sherlock watched during the breaks in his violin, T’ai chi ch’uan and Cantonese classes. With few sailors on board, and the Captain and Mr Larchmont eating with the local Dutch townsfolk most of the time, Wu Chung was short of things to do, and so he enthusiastically took Sherlock under his wing.

Sailors began to drift back to the ship in ones and twos at midday on the third day. Sherlock assumed that some kind of message had gone out. There were some that Sherlock didn’t recognize — it looked as if Mr Larchmont and the Captain had recruited some Dutchmen and Englishmen left there by a previous ship as replacements for the men who had died in the storm. By mid-afternoon they were fully crewed again, and after Mr Larchmont had signed off some paperwork on the quayside the Gloria Scott cast off the lines that were holding her against the dock and began to manoeuvre out into the clear waters of the harbour.

Next stop Shanghai, Sherlock thought.

There was a different feeling on board the ship on the last leg of their voyage from Sabang to Shanghai. The sailors seemed more eager, happier. They knew that they were close to their destination, which meant they were close to the point when the ship would turn around and head back to England, where most of them had families. The presence of the new sailors was a factor in this different feeling, of course, but they quickly integrated into the crew, as Sherlock had done.

And there was Mr Arrhenius, of course. He seemed to spend a lot of time on deck, staring at the distant horizon. Once or twice, when Sherlock passed him by, he nodded in greeting. The other sailors obviously avoided him, and Sherlock heard mutterings in the evening singalongs that he was not human but some kind of demon beneath the veil. The nervousness of the crew got to such a pitch that Mr Larchmont had to call a meeting of all the sailors and reassure them — in his usual gruff tones — that Mr Arrhenius was as human as the rest of them, and he merely suffered from a disease that had disfigured his skin.

Mr Arrhenius always had his meals in his cabin. Wu Chung took him a tray twice a day — usually something better than whatever the crew were having. The crew saw this as another thing to mutter about, but it seemed only fitting to Sherlock — after all, the man was a paying passenger.

Three days after leaving Sumatra, Wu Chung asked Sherlock to take some food to Mr Arrhenius’s cabin. The tray had two plates on it, one of chicken stew and one of raw fish. Puzzled, Sherlock manoeuvred his way along the ship’s corridors until he reached the cabin near the front where Arrhenius spent his time. He knocked with one hand, balancing the tray with the other, and waited until Arrhenius opened the door.

Sherlock’s arrival appeared to have taken Arrhenius by surprise. He wasn’t wearing his hat, or his veil. Sherlock saw that his face and scalp were hairless, but that wasn’t the most disconcerting thing about him. No, the most disconcerting thing about him was the colour of his skin. It was a silvery-blue, and as the light from the oil lamps in the corridor shone on the man Sherlock saw that the whites of his eyes were also the same colour. It was as if he was a metal statue come to life, and Sherlock found himself taking an inadvertent step backwards.

‘Yes?’ His voice was as high and as piping as Sherlock remembered.

‘I have some food for you, sir.’

Arrhenius just stared at him. ‘You are the boy from the docks, yes?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The cook, the Chinaman, usually brings my food.’

‘He’s busy, sir. He asked me to bring it.’

‘Very well.’ Arrhenius seemed annoyed, although Sherlock couldn’t work out why. The Dutchman reached for the tray.

‘Would you like me to put it on a table for you?’ Sherlock asked.

‘No — just give it to me.’

Sherlock handed the tray through the doorway. He turned to leave, but as he did so he saw something moving out of the corner of my eye — a shape, about the size of a dog, rapidly slipping out of sight in the shadows behind Arrhenius’s back. As the thing moved Sherlock could hear a clicking noise. He glanced at Arrhenius to ask him what it was, but the Dutchman was staring at him with an expression that clearly indicated that he wanted Sherlock to leave. Confused, Sherlock backed away. The door closed in his face.

Fiddler was walking past as Sherlock stood there, thinking. Sherlock caught him by the sleeve. ‘Does our passenger have a pet of any kind?’ he asked.

Fiddler scowled. ‘What, that devil-creature?’ He shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge,’ he said. ‘But if he does then it’ll be some kind of familiar from the depths of hell!’

‘Thanks,’ Sherlock said. ‘Very helpful.’

As he moved away his foot caught something and he accidentally kicked it towards the bulkhead. It made a rattling noise. Curious, Sherlock bent down to see what it was. For a moment he thought it was a tooth, fallen out of someone’s mouth — a common thing with sailors, he had found — but it glinted silver, like Mr Arrhenius’s skin. He picked it up. It was a pointed cone, slightly curved, and it appeared to have a hole running through it. He didn’t have a clue what it might be, so he slipped it into his pocket in order to examine it later. If someone had lost it, maybe he could give it back to them — and find out what it was into the bargain.

It was later that day when one of the crew spotted something on the horizon, and called an urgent warning out to Mr Larchmont.

‘Sails!’ he yelled from his position in the rigging. ‘Sails on the horizon!’

Sherlock was working alongside Gittens at the time, pulling frayed ropes apart into fragments that they would then plug between the planks of the ship to help keep them watertight. He glanced over at the dark-faced lad. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked. ‘There’re all kinds of ships sailing across the ocean. We’ve never had a warning before.’

‘We’re in the South China Seas,’ Gittens said grimly. ‘There’re Chinese pirates all across these waters. They plunder any ship they find, and they ransom the passengers if they look important.’

‘What if they don’t look important?’

‘I heard a story, once,’ Gittens confided. ‘Old sailor. He’d been on a ship that got boarded by Chinese pirates. They were ransacking the place and they believed the captain had hidden some jewels from them, so they tied him between the masts, a rope tied tight around his right thumb and a rope tied tight around his right toe, and they hauled him up between the foremast and the mizzenmast. Then they took turns riding on him like he was a swing.’

‘Ah,’ Sherlock said simply, but inside he was sickened at the casual brutality that Gittens had described.

Gittens grinned, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. ‘They normally start with the youngest,’ he said. ‘That’ll be you, then.’

‘And you next,’ Sherlock pointed out.

He glanced over to where Mr Larchmont was standing by the rail, telescope to his eye. Larchmont turned, and his expression was as black as the storm they had only recently escaped.

‘Sails on the horizon,’ he confirmed. ‘It’s pirates, lads, and we’re in for a fight!’