Becoming Holmes Read online

  Text copyright © 2012 by Shane Peacock

  Published in Canada by Tundra Books, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, One Toronto Street, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M5C 2V6

  Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York,

  P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011938781

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Peacock, Shane

  Becoming Holmes : the boy Sherlock Holmes, his final case / by Shane Peacock.

  (The boy Sherlock Holmes; 6)

  eISBN: 978-1-77049-291-2

  1. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious character) – Juvenile fiction.

  I. Title. II. Series: Peacock, Shane. Boy Sherlock Holmes; 6.

  PS8581.E234M38 2012 jc813′.54 c2011-906509-6

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  The author wishes to thank Patrick Mannix and Motco Enterprises Ltd., U.K., ref: www.moto.com, for the use of their Edward Stanford’s Library Map of London and its suburbs, 1862.

  Design by Jennifer Lum

  www.tundrabooks.com

  To Johanna, artist and sweetheart.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As The Boy Sherlock Holmes series comes to an end, there are many people to thank. Tundra Books has been a wonderful home for me and my work. Kathy Lowinger was the visionary at first, bringing her bravery and brilliance to bear, allowing these novels to take flight. Catherine Mitchell then sent them sailing off to other countries. Others at Tundra have contributed throughout – Alison Morgan, Pamela Osti, Sylvia Chan, and Jennifer Lum, among the key players. But no one was more important, certainly for me, than Kathryn Cole, one of Canada’s premier editors. She piloted me through the first five books with a Sherlock-like wisdom and was missed on this sixth and last. I was lucky, however, to have been partnered with Tara Walker on Becoming Holmes. Stepping into big editorial shoes with verve, compassion, and great skill, she helped me steer the Sherlock ship home. I was fortunate to have her as my guide.

  Derek Mah was a key ally all the way through this series, his lovely paintings gracing each and every novel, an artist with a sort of Watson-like ability to make his remarkable work much more than just complementary. I would be remiss if I did not mention one Samuel Peacock, whose snake research for this novel was thorough and much appreciated. And I’d also like to thank my agent, Pamela Paul, for all her efforts from day one. Jennifer Stokes’s copyediting and Margaret Allen’s proofreading were invaluable as well.

  My mother, Susan Peacock, who, as I said in my first dedication in this series, “gave me a writer’s soul,” passed away between the fifth and sixth novels. But she was with me, nevertheless, and will stay in my heart as long as I write and beyond.

  And finally, thanks goes to that group of strange people who live with me and deal, together, with the storms of life: Sophie, Johanna, Hadley, and Sam. No one has a better team. We, like the boy Sherlock Holmes, are just beginning.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  MAP OF LONDON

  PREFACE

  1 DEATH

  2 THE NEW MAN AT THE TREASURY

  3 HIS WAY IN

  4 GRIMSBY’S RISE

  5 THE GOVERNOR

  6 THE GOVERNOR’S SECRET

  7 BAD MAN

  8 FAT MAN

  9 A DEEPER SECRET

  10 BEHIND THE VEIL

  11 EVIL INCARNATE

  12 EVERYONE SINS

  13 INTO THE WEB

  14 AFTER CREW

  15 UNDERGROUND

  16 SOMETHING INHUMAN

  17 WHAT SUTTON KNEW

  18 SCUTTLEBUTT

  19 AMONG THE DEAD

  20 CREW’S LAIR

  21 FAREWELL

  22 DECISION

  23 INSIDE THE CRYPT

  24 SATAN AND HIS FRIENDS

  25 TWO DOWN, ONE TO GO

  26 CONFRONTATION

  27 MASTER SHERLOCK

  PREFACE

  The streets of Hounslow had seldom seen his like. Descending from his gleaming carriage, he walked silently beneath the gaslights, in and out of darkness, top hat pulled down, his cape shrouding his form, and his walking stick never touching the ground. He eyed the row houses until he stopped at one. He looked in both directions, turned onto the walkway and floated to the door. A gentle knock – three short and three long – let him in. The entrance closed and the neighborhood returned to normal. But this was a different night from any other, for not far down the street, a shadow had observed him.

  Another shadow lay in its dark nest south of the River Thames that night, a waste of a man. Crows called outside his marble walls, rats ran through his rooms, and spiders, left to their ways, spun webs the size and thickness of blankets above him. He was naked and sweating, spread upon his filthy stone bed. There were tears in his eyes, tears of joy. A hissing and rustling surrounded him. He had loosed his giant pets, the squeezers and the poisoners. They caressed his legs, his hips, his chest, his big, throbbing head. Though his slithering killers were the world’s most deadly, none were as lethal as his thoughts.

  “Command me!” he cried to no one.

  “Who could come to-night? Some friend of yours, perhaps?”

  “Except yourself I have none,” he answered. “I do not encourage visitors.”

  – Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in The Five Orange Pips

  “I am no doubt indirectly responsible for Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s death, and I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience.”

  – Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Speckled Band

  1

  DEATH

  London might as well be draped in black on this thirteenth morning of June in 1870. It is as if every pedestrian imagines dark ribbons hanging upon the buildings across the great city from Westminster to Whitechapel and all along little Denmark Street to the apothecary shop where Sherlock Holmes, sixteen years old and as moody as a young stallion, slumps over the laboratory table, unable to work. A single gaslight is lit in the dim room.

  “DICKENS IS DEAD!” read the headlines on the shop’s newspapers, now three days old and yet still lying nearby. The funeral will be tomorrow at Westminster Abbey.

  But much more than the sudden and shocking death of the age’s greatest novelist, the soul of England, haunts young Holmes today. He is deep in one of his black periods. They have descended upon him in short stretches since birth and grown more frequent since his mother’s death (which he believes he caused). But he has always thrown them off. When his prodigious brain has been excited by a truly challenging problem or, better still, by the scent of the solution to a crime that no one else can solve, he has always risen to heights of almost erotic energy, like an opium addict with the juice of the poppy plant freshly rushing into his veins.

  But the blackness has been with him for too long this time. He cannot shake it. Death and disappointment are all around him, and
they are not going away. He is desperate to climb up from the depths. He needs a thrill. He thinks of the dangerous crimes he has solved, recalls the heart-pumping sensation of being near murder, and wonders, for a fleeting second, if he, Sherlock Holmes, about to become a man, should kill someone, someone evil.

  He lifts his head slightly and looks at the alkaloids and poisons in his master’s cabinets: strychnine, cocaine, tubo-curarine, nicotine, morphine, and more. They do so much for our patients! Would they help me too?

  It is four o’clock in the morning.

  To the east in London, at this very hour, a boy of about eighteen, plump, with a narrow brush mustache above his thin lips and blonde hair that is parted too close to the middle and falls limply over his forehead, walks across London Bridge carrying a bag that seems to be breathing. It pulses beneath his grip.

  “Settle, pretty things,” he says in a high-pitched whine.

  There is human blood on his hands. But he won’t wash it off, not for hours. He has looked into the face of death again and been fascinated. He is thinking about that, adrenaline still coursing through him.

  “Give me more to do, boss, more to do; give me Sherlock Holmes.”

  A graveyard awaits him.

  Back in the dim apothecary shop, Sherlock is startled by another high-pitched but much more friendly voice. “My boy!” cries Sigerson Bell. The old apothecary, bent in the shape of a question mark, comes sliding down the railing of his spiral staircase upon his bum like a child, wearing his nightgown. His long, thin, white hair sails out from under his nightcap; the gown billows up revealing his nearly naked self beneath … coming straight at the boy! He appears to be achieving almost terminal velocity and, when he reaches the base, goes flying out across the lab, tucking himself into a ball and rolling right up to the boy’s feet. He has placed a huge, goose-down pillow on the floor, set in just the right spot to cushion such falls.

  But Sherlock’s master isn’t fooling him. He has slid down the railing because walking the stairs has become painful. Yesterday, Holmes found the old man’s handkerchief shoved under a mattress, spotted with red spit and phlegm. Over the last six months, Bell’s cough has become frightening, the sound in his chest like a death rattle. But he never speaks of it, never shows the least bit of concern.

  “Why are you up at this hour, my young knight?” he inquires, sitting below Sherlock on the floor. The boy reaches down, takes his old, thin hand, and helps raise him to his feet.

  “No reason, sir.”

  “That is not what I taught you to –”

  “There is always a reason,” sighs Sherlock.

  “Yes. There is. One must search for it, encounter it, and grapple with it!”

  “I cannot grapple with anything anymore, sir.”

  Sigerson Bell’s shining eyes barely hide the worry underneath. Ever since he met the boy, he has been able to pull him up from his depressions. A violent joust of Bellitsu, during which they nearly break each other’s bones, a dangerous chemical experiment punctuated with an explosion or two, or a violin lesson in the more obscure movements of the great Paganini have always done the trick. But nothing has worked for six months. The old man knows exactly why.

  Worst of all was the death of Wilberforce Holmes, not long before Christmas. That, however, was just one blow, just the hardest punch in a series of assaults upon the boy’s well-being. His hero, Benjamin Disraeli, the miraculous Jewish Prime Minister of the Empire, was defeated in the country’s last election; Irene Doyle, the love of his life, has been in America now for nine months, abandoning him for stage and voice training in New York City, her once-daily letters slowed to a trickle; and Beatrice Leckie, the poor hatter’s daughter with the sparkling black eyes and genuine concern for him, appears to have found someone else to give her the attention she once sought from him. More dangerous than all, he has been trying, once again, to keep out of criminal investigations. He is just a boy, he reasons, he needs to grow, to arm himself better. But this inaction is killing him from the inside out.

  “Shall we eat, my boy? Headcheese? Blood pudding? Stewed turnips?”

  Even those delectable meals can’t stir him. He sits facing straight ahead, his gray eyes looking all pupil and nearly black.

  To the north, only a few blocks away, a small young man sits on the floor of his gloomy bedroom, weeping. He is dark haired and dark eyed, his age difficult to distinguish; he hasn’t grown in years. He hates many people, but Sherlock Holmes is his most despised.

  “He doesn’t know what I ’ave endured,” he whimpers. “The boss doesn’t really know either. I should kill them both, I should. I deserves more.”

  He had been left at a workhouse doorstep as a baby and raised inside its black stone walls, eating its gruel twice a day, taking rudimentary reading classes at a Ragged School, smarter somehow than the others, but torn away from the workhouse at the age of ten and put into the streets. He cost too much to keep.

  “I were clever in schooling!” he cries. He sniffles and stops his sobbing with a great effort of will. Then he shouts, “I ’ave an opportunity, NOW, I does!”

  His house has no furniture but his bed. He only ever has one visitor. He looks at the clothes that have been purchased for him, lying in a pile nearby: respectable suits, cravats, and waistcoats; black leather gloves, a bowler hat, and an umbrella. In the morning, he will comb his hair as he has been taught, clean his face, put on the boots he has been told to polish.

  “The boss is ’iding something from me! I will find what it is. I will ’ave more than just this job ’e is making me do!”

  He has fought Sherlock Holmes many times, sometimes in desperate combats down on the cobblestones, instructed by his leader. He remembers those struggles, how he had wanted to do something terrible to the half-Jew. If he’d been allowed a knife, he would have driven it deep into Holmes’s breastbone and through his heart. He remembers the good boy panting beneath him, squirming, and treasures the memory of that fear. But Holmes is not such easy prey anymore. He has been taught how to fight, has lethal skills a strange apothecary has shown him.

  It would be best to not fight fair with him, thinks the little man. That is always best.

  “Someday soon, I will finish ’im!”

  Sherlock takes a long time to respond to Sigerson Bell’s invitation to eat. His mind is far away. He is thinking about Malefactor. Holmes could use the excitement of a confrontation with that blackguard now. In fact, he needs it. But Malefactor has become a shadow too, scheming somewhere, planning even bigger things. A year ago, the crook had said that he was turning respectable. Sherlock knew what that meant. Greater evil was coming. His villainous lieutenants, Grimsby and Crew, have vanished with him.

  To the west, in a beautiful home, a wealthy man lies awake. He sees two monsters when he closes his eyes, monsters he loves. But someone knows. Some fiend, some shadow he cannot lay his hand upon, told him by letter what would be done if “arrangements” were not made. And so, he had used his influence to put a worthless human being with perhaps evil intent into a place he does not belong, into a position of power. And the villain who engineered this is still plotting.

  That enemy is far away in a respectable place, a spider spinning a web. At least once a day, he says to himself with a snarl, “Stay out of this, Sherlock Holmes.”

  Holmes became an orphan suddenly, in his mind, though he should not have thought that. Kind Beatrice had pushed him to renew his relationship with his father, and they had set aside their grief and Sherlock’s guilt about his mother’s murder and had begun seeing each other. His father had been growing thinner with every visit, but the boy had chosen to ignore it. When Beatrice’s frantic thumping sounded on the apothecary’s entrance on a cold December night, he knew what had happened. He opened the door and saw her standing in a snowstorm, the jingle of carriages behind her, a gaslight glowing down on her as though she were an angel, but her black eyes filled with tears. Word had been sent to the hatter’s shop: a paralytic stroke
had taken his father from him.

  The funeral, at a respectable church in Sydenham and paid for by the old man’s Crystal Palace employer, brought few mourners. Sherlock sat between Beatrice and Bell, down a pew from his older brother – Mycroft was seven years his senior and had left home long ago. They had seldom seen each other since.

  Holmes had wept uncontrollably and was horribly embarrassed. Beatrice had attempted to take his arm but he had pulled away, trying to stiffen his upper lip. Bell knew not to interfere. The boy had risen from his place and moved nearer Mycroft, and that, for some reason, had helped him stifle his emotions. As the service went on, he drew comfort from his older brother’s presence, though they never once looked at each other. Mycroft didn’t shed a tear, but as they were leaving, he noticed the redness in his younger brother’s eyes.

  “Well, Sherlock, it has been a pleasure to see you. If it is orphans we are to be, then orphans we are. Oliver Twist made out all right.” Then he paused. “Uh, you may come to see me, if you please, at the office. It would be a … pleasure. Send your card first.” And with that, he was off.

  Mycroft Holmes has no real interest in seeing his brother at this time in his life. Perhaps in the future, when the pain of their childhood, the stain of their “half-breed” origins, and the trauma of their parents’ deaths have faded, they could become friends. Had the boy ever appeared near Mycroft’s tiny office at Her Majesty’s Treasury, that ominous stone structure where the nation’s money is controlled, the older brother would have nearly fainted from the sight.

  But as Sherlock sits at the lab table, he desperately needs friendship. There are pains in his chest, and he feels a shortness of breath. It is as if he were slowly being squeezed to death.

  To the south that morning, a ship unloads its cargo on the smelly docks of the River Thames. It has come from South America. A red-haired man awaits its most precious passenger. But it isn’t human. The man smiles when he sees it. He has just emerged from a prison himself. A strange thought flickers through his mind, a magical one.