Mycroft Holmes (2 page)

“Yes,” Holmes responded coolly, “I am a Cantabrigian. I take it you wagered on Oxford?”

“Oxford University has won every race against Cambridge for a solid nine years running,” the string bean huffed, pulling a soiled-looking kerchief from his pocket and wiping his brow underneath a cocked hat, as if the day were sweltering. “Or are you not aware of that fact?”

“I am indeed.” Holmes smiled.

“Well, then,” the beadle spat as if it were a personal affront, “why wager on a losing team? Is it affection, sir, that moves you?”

“I assure you,” Holmes replied, “that it is not.”

“Then what does?” the beadle demanded.

“Profit,” Holmes asserted. “Pure and simple.”

“Profit!” the beadle guffawed. “Well, if it’s profit you seek, then you are seeking in the wrong arena. Yet I suppose I waste my breath—most young men disdain the advice of their elders…”

“But if Oxford should win yet again,” Holmes parried, “you shall not stand to gain much, for it is a certain bet. Whereas going against the odds will yield me twenty times the original sum.”

“You, sir, are a dreamer,” the man asserted.

“I assure you, sir, I am not,” Holmes said quietly, turning and walking away.

“Then you are
arrogant
, sir!” the beadle called out. “Yes, an arrogant young whip.”

That, I can accept more readily
, Holmes thought, as he could not imagine the great sin in that.
But a dreamer? Hardly.
He prided himself on his practicality. It was an asset that, along with his intellect, he particularly prized. It was, in fact, the very combination of intellect and practicality that had brought him to this juncture in life.

His position as secretary to the Secretary of State for War was sound, placing his career on an upward path. His monthly stipend was more than adequate, his future promotions certain. Most important, after a full year’s engagement, he was still madly and passionately in love with the prettiest, most intelligent, kindest woman in the world.

That was why, on this bright April day, Mycroft Holmes the non-gambler, the frugal civil servant whose future and parameters were set, had made a wager that went against good judgment. One that he hoped would add substantially to the nest egg he was stowing away for his wedding and his new life.

It was love that moved him—something an old churchman could know nothing about.

It was a risk, but a calculated one.

For he had a
plan
.

* * *

He crossed the field to the area that separated fans from athletes. Removing his coat, he folded it neatly, placed his hat on top, and proceeded to scale the barrier blocking the little beachfront where the crew prepared to depart.

“Say! You can’t be here!”

Holmes looked down. It was nothing but a student masquerading as a guard. He paid him no mind, continued his clamber up, and dropped to the ground on the other side. Brushing himself off, he sauntered over to Cambridge’s deputy rowing coach, one Stephen Tidwell.

Like Holmes, Tidwell had enrolled at both Eton and Cambridge. And though Tidwell was Holmes’s senior by two years, he’d been one of the so-called “Mycroft’s Minions”—a group of boys so taken with Holmes’s powers of observation, and what Holmes referred to disparagingly as his “memory tricks,” that they followed him as one might follow a conjurer or a magician, perpetually waiting to be entertained.

Tidwell recognized Holmes immediately and swallowed his surprise. Before the coach could utter so much as a syllable, Holmes pinned him with his gaze, ran a hand through his hair as if beyond exasperation, and leveled a finger at one of the rowers.

“
Tidwell
,” he spat as if the name itself were accursed. “You had the boys doing calisthenics only moments ago, and look at the bowman. Not a drop of sweat on him, yet he is dehydrated, and will weaken in the stretch—or worse!” he added for effect, then waited for his prediction to reach its desired result.

After a bewildered silence the rower in the bow laughed, with a few others joining him.

“Dehydrated?” the young man responded derisively. “Have you the foggiest how much water I consumed to get my weight up?”

Holmes did not grant him so much as a glance but continued to train his accusing glare on the coach.

“I know
precisely
how much he drank,” he thundered at Tidwell. ““He was, what, eleven stone and seven pounds at the weigh in, and now he’s eleven stone five. This ‘bulking up’ has depleted his reserves.”

It was, Holmes knew, a trick that any carnival huckster could perform. All one had to do was gauge how much liquid a lad of that particular poundage, height, and musculature could retain in, say, a week. Then factor in the loss via sweat and other cruder forms of elimination. Given enough time, a carny might arrive at an accurate computation, while Holmes could do so in the proverbial blink of an eye. Calculation was almost as natural to him as breathing.

Recognizing that the numbers were true, the rower seemed to swallow his tongue. The laughter ceased.

And still, Tidwell hesitated.

“Cambridge has lost
nine in a row
,” Holmes continued, his voice dripping with disdain. “Care to make it ten?”

And that
, he mused,
will strike a nerve.

The rowers eyed their coach and noted the hesitation there. Holmes had succeeded in making them as skittish as new colts. Tidwell had no choice.

“Randolph, take his place in the bow,” he snapped to another man.

“Just a moment, Tidwell.” Holmes wasn’t finished. “There’s no gain to be had from making matters worse.” He turned to face the crew.

Employing a trick he’d learned from a friend of his father—an astute physician by the surname of Bell—he commanded the rowers to stand in a queue and hold their hands steady in front of them, while he scanned the line and noted the essentials: calluses on fingers, slouching shoulders, even the tucks of their chins.

“Stuff and nonsense!” seat seven grumbled as he held his arms extended. “Our strength is in our legs, everyone knows that! How our
chins
could possibly factor in—”

“Your chin
is
connected to you, is it not?” Holmes replied, overhearing. “And so has a vote in how your body functions. A peculiarity you shall notice in your later years, should you live long enough. Name?” he inquired.

“Lowe,” the man replied sullenly.

With the point of his shoe, Holmes tapped on the hull of the boat and watched the manner in which it rocked in the water.

“Lowe,” he repeated, as if he didn’t much care for the sound of it. “Will you be so kind as to move from seat seven to seat five. Phelps, you are now at six, not four, swapping with Spencer. And you there—”

He pointed to another rower.

“Strachan, sir,” the man said, properly intimidated.

“Strachan, yes. Right. You are at seven, not five. As for you…” He indicated the coxswain, Gordon. “Don’t let your stroke man push too hard before Hammersmith. Keep an even pace at the start. You shall still get ahead.”

The rowers took their positions with a glazed look, as if they’d been scrambled by a typhoon—while the dumbfounded Tidwell uttered not a squeak of protest.

Good
, Mycroft thought.
Disorientation will force them to focus on nothing but the task at hand.
He stood back and examined his handiwork with satisfaction.

“Let victory be its own reward!” he said aloud, and he turned back the way he’d come. As he clambered quickly over the barrier and past the student guards, he heard the disgruntled Faulkes calling after him.

“Pride goeth before destruction,” the young man shouted. “And a haughty spirit before a fall!”

Haughtiness?
Holmes thought.
Not at all! I am simply correct in my assumptions!

Still, it was the second time in a day that he had been so reprimanded. As he retrieved his coat and hat, dusted them off in turn, and moved quickly back toward the spectators, he thanked the heavens that he was not the sort of man given over to superstitions.

Once he had rejoined the throng—none of whom had a clue as to what had just transpired—Holmes checked his pocket watch and calibrated how long it would take him to ride to the end point of the race, Chiswick Bridge. There he would meet his friend.

Too quickly
, he thought.
No challenge there
. So he lingered, enduring the crush of humanity, the cheers and the jostling as both teams got on their way.

After a sufficient time, whistling Rossini’s “Figaro,” he sauntered past the throng, back to the post where he’d tethered his horse.

He was looking forward to a final bit of fun.

“
EASY, BOY, EASY,
”
HOLMES MURMURED TO HIS HANOVERIAN
, stroking his flank. A warmblood, Abie was not the swiftest of foot, but he had an intelligent gaze and an unfussy nature. Like many of his fellows, he was balanced, sturdy, and well proportioned. Holmes had purchased the five-year-old gelding for forty guineas—an excellent price, as the beast was easily worth twice that.

When Georgiana had first laid eyes upon him, she’d laughed.

“Ah, what a handsome lad,” she said. “Dark blond hair, a good, strong chest, a keen and brilliant eye, and a steady disposition… much like its owner!”

Holmes hadn’t known, at that moment, whether to be pleased or not, though upon further reflection he had decided that the horse indeed resembled him, and that since he liked the horse, and Georgiana liked him, she had meant it as a compliment.

Unlike his younger brother Sherlock—tall, dark, impossibly thin, with facial features that reminded one of a bird of prey—Holmes had been told since childhood that he was “a strapping lad.” Tall enough, well muscled, with a pleasing yet noble profile. That last, he supposed, he owed to his mother—if little else.

In any case, he and Abie would race the rowers to the finish line, from Putney Bridge to Chiswick Bridge, four miles along a snaking obstacle course. That would make his journey nearly two miles longer than the rowers’.

A fair fight
, Holmes asserted,
is the essence of competition.

Though fully aware that it might be a tactical error, he lit a Punch Habana and allowed the delicious smoke to expand, tasting it, accepting the risk of missing the finale whilst secretly congratulating himself on this bit of recklessness—not one of his usual traits. Abie did not protest. He seemed perfectly content to stand in that spot of sun a few moments longer, shooing the occasional fly with a twitch of his tail.

Holmes waited a full eight minutes. Then, cursing the little war in Cuba that was pushing already unreasonable tobacco prices through the roof, he put out his cigar and swung up on Abie’s back.

A kick of his heels, and they were off.

* * *

Horse and rider moved as if they knew every little knot and turn of Greater London. They avoided squalling flower peddlers, clanking boardmen, groaning mule carts, spitting bootblacks, shouting paperboys, lollygagging costers, and the occasional pair of oxen, missing each by a hair’s breadth. All the while they nosed out the cleanest thoroughfares and most deserted byways, as if they and the city were gears in the noblest Swiss watch.

Holmes delighted in Abie’s easy athleticism, and his own. Just as the rowers were passing the Chiswick Eyot, where the river ran both straight and deep, Holmes took the time to lean down and scoop up an errant hat that had been plucked from the head of its owner by a fine spring wind, flinging it back to the startled but grateful little man—all without breaking Abie’s canter a whit.

Just as they were turning onto Chiswick Bridge, a sewer worker blinded by sunlight poked his head up from a manhole right into Abie’s path. The street was so narrow and the turn so tight as to make a collision unavoidable… but for a plank of wood, listing precariously from the back of an old abandoned cart on the side of the road. Holmes shifted Abie ever so slightly and sent him galloping up the plank, across the cart, and over the head of the startled laborer, who looked up in time to see the hooves and belly of a flying horse.

“Good lad!” Holmes said, patting Abie on the neck as they continued on.

* * *

At Chiswick Bridge, the crush of onlookers was even greater than it had been at Putney. Holmes was pleased—though not surprised—to confirm that the teams had just broken the sight line and were in the final leg. He quickly dismounted and handed his hat and reins to a very tall, distinguished-looking black man of forty or so, who took both without a word as Holmes jostled through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.

Holmes found a spot that gave him an unimpeded view of the finish line, and sat down. The black man, his skin the color of cinnamon, appeared at Holmes’s side without a sound and stood by as the teams glided over the water in two faultless lines.

Still watching, he bent low toward Holmes.

“I thought you would never make it in time,” he murmured.

“Well then, Douglas, you thought wrong,” Holmes replied. Then he added with a smile, “Not for the first time, I am sure. I take it you placed a wager, as well?”