Snake Bite (15 page)

Wu Fung-Yi turned to look at the two boys. ‘They were visiting,’ he said, half apologetically. ‘They followed me here.’

Cameron seemed about to argue, so Sherlock poked him in the back. He shut his mouth, and handed over the scrap of paper that Tsi Huen had given him.

The old man unfolded it and read it. He nodded slowly. ‘Snake bite, eh? Very serious. Very expensive to treat.’

Wu Fung-Yi bristled. ‘We can pay!’ he protested.

‘If he can’t I can,’ Cameron said. He turned to look at Sherlock. ‘Hey, I may think this whole thing is stupid but I’m not going to let your friend die if I can
help it.’

‘Thanks,’ Sherlock said. ‘I appreciate that.’

‘Let me get the things I will need,’ the old man said. Rather than turn back inside the shack, as Sherlock had expected him to do, he walked across to his garden. Bending over with
the flexibility of a man a third his age, he took hold of various plants, checked their leaves and stems, and either pulled them out of the ground or left them and moved on. Eventually he had ten
or so plants dangling from his hand.

‘Medicine,’ he said, waving the plants at the boys. ‘Very good for snake bites and insects.’

The return journey was slower than the journey there. The old man walked faster than Sherlock had expected from the look of him, but he couldn’t run. Or wouldn’t run: Sherlock
wasn’t sure which. He even stopped once or twice to talk to people that he recognized on the way, and Wu Fung-Yi had to virtually drag him away from the conversation in order to get him going
again.

When they got to East Renmin Street, Tsi Huen was standing outside the door of the house. Her hands were fluttering like birds as she gazed along the street. When she caught sight of the three
boys and the elderly healer her hands leaped up to her throat in relief.

‘How is Father?’ Wu Fung-Yi called as he got closer.

She winced. ‘No better.’ She placed her hands together and bowed to the ancient healer as he got to the doorstep. ‘Thank you for coming. I am in your debt.’

He bowed his head to her. ‘Let us see what can be done,’ he replied. ‘I make no promises.’

He entered the house, using his cane for support. Tsi Huen followed him, hands still fluttering. Wu Fung-Yi moved towards the door, but Sherlock put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Wait here,
with us,’ he said. ‘The healer needs to work, and you might distract him. Besides, your mother needs to worry about your father, not about you.’

Wu Fung-Yi turned to look at Sherlock. His eyes were shiny with tears. ‘But . . . but he might die.’

Sherlock nodded. ‘Yes, he might, and if he does you shouldn’t be there. You should remember him the way he was.’

The time seemed to trickle past slowly. The three of them sat outside, waiting. At one point Cameron wandered off, and returned a few minutes later with a watermelon which he proceeded to cut up
with a pocket knife. The boys sucked the moisture out of the slices. There was little talking.

Tsi Huen came out of the house a short while after they had finished the watermelon. She looked tired, strained.

‘How . . . ?’ Wu Fung-Yi started to ask, but he couldn’t finish the question.

Tsi Huen shrugged. ‘He is very ill,’ she said quietly. ‘The healer is doing everything he can.’

She went back inside, and the boys went back to waiting.

After another hour or so, the healer came to the door. He gestured to Sherlock. ‘You – foreign devil – you look intelligent. You remember where my house is?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sherlock replied. ‘I think so.’

‘Very important – you need to go there now, quickly, and get a plant from the garden. It is a tall plant, up to your waist, with small blue flowers and leaves that are curled up. You
understand?’

I understand,’ Sherlock said. He nodded towards Wu Fung-Yi. ‘But shouldn’t he go? I mean, he knows the town better than I do. He won’t get lost.’

The healer gazed at Wu Fung-Yi with an unreadable expression on his face. ‘He needs to be here,’ he said quietly. ‘In case . . .’

‘I understand.’ Sherlock glanced at Cameron. ‘But even he knows the town better than I do.’

‘Yes,’ the healer said, ‘but he does not look as intelligent as you do. He might bring back the wrong plant. Now go.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sherlock ran off, retracing the journey that he and the other two boys had made earlier. He ran as fast as he could, heart pounding in his chest and veins pumping in his neck and his temples.
When he got to the old man’s shack he stopped for a second, hands on knees as he sucked as much air into his burning lungs as he could. As soon as he was able to move again he ran into the
garden and quickly sorted through the plants. Too tall . . . too short . . . flowers not blue . . . leaves not curly . . . yes! There was one plant, over near the fence, which matched the
healer’s description. Sherlock pulled it from the soil and ran back with it.

When he got to Wu Chung’s house, Cameron and Wu Fung-Yi were standing outside with Tsi Huen. She was sitting on the front step, crying. Wu Fung-Yi’s hand was resting on her shoulder.
He was crying as well.

Cameron walked over to Sherlock.

‘He’s dead,’ he said, and the sound of the two simple words was like stones dropping heavily to the ground.

‘I’m too late!’ Sherlock said. The full weight of the run to and from the shack suddenly descended on him: he felt weak and exhausted and defeated.

Cameron shook his head. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said sombrely. ‘Wu Chung died about ten minutes after you left. The healer came out and told us that he had
“joined his illustrious ancestors”, which is what the Chinese people say when someone has died. You wouldn’t even have been at the garden when it happened. There’s nothing
you could have done. You could have flown the entire way there and back and it still wouldn’t have made a difference.’

Sherlock could hear Cameron speaking, but it sounded as if his friend’s words were coming from a long way away, through thick cotton wool. He found that the enormity of the cook’s
death was more than he could deal with. He hadn’t really prepared himself for the fact that it might actually happen. That Wu Chung might suddenly . . . not be there any more.

He felt strange. Disconnected. He felt as if he was floating slightly above the ground, and that the world was tilting gradually sideways.

He leaned over, put his hands on his knees and took slow breaths, trying to steady himself.

He had seen death before, of course. Even back when he had just left Deepdene School for Boys and moved to Farnham he had seen a dead body in the woods outside his aunt and uncle’s manor
house, and later he had seen men die on the Napoleonic fort that Baron Maupertuis was using as a base. He had seen Duke Balthassar die at the claws and teeth of his cougars, and also seen the
stabbed body of a man at the Diogenes Club. There was the sailor who had fallen and broken his neck on the
Gloria Scott
, and the others that had been killed by the storm and by the pirates.
But all of these had been people he didn’t know – or, at least, hardly knew. He had never had to come to terms with the death of a friend.

It wasn’t as if Wu Chung was a
close
friend, he tried to tell himself. He wasn’t like Matty Arnatt, or Amyus Crowe – or even, he thought with a chill, Virginia Crowe. It
wasn’t as if he was a member of Sherlock’s family, like Mycroft, or his sister Emma, and yet . . . Sherlock had been close to him. The Chinese man had taught him so much, and he had
been an important part of Sherlock’s life, and his absence would leave a hole that would be impossible to fill.

‘How are Wu Fung-Yi and Tsi Huen dealing with it?’ Sherlock asked, and he could hear that his voice was hoarse – more of a whisper.

‘His wife is pretty broken up,’ Cameron said. ‘It must be hard, having your husband away for so long, then losing him again the moment he comes back. The kid is trying to put a
brave face on it. Frankly, I don’t think he knows quite how to feel. He’s kind of being guided by what his mother is doing.’

As Sherlock glanced over at the house, the healer emerged, still leaning on his stick. He walked past Tsi Huen and Wu Fung-Yi towards Sherlock and Cameron. He looked calmly at the plant that
drooped from Sherlock’s hand.

‘I will take that back,’ he called. ‘I may be able to replant it. Maybe.’

‘What happened?’ Sherlock asked.

The healer looked at him in surprise. ‘You know what happened. He was bitten by a snake. I did what I could, but it was no good. The poison had taken hold in his body. There was nothing I
could do to help.’

‘Are you sure it was a snake bite?’ Sherlock heard himself asking. For a moment he was amazed at the words, until he realized that his mouth was expressing a thought that his brain
was only just processing.

The healer nodded. ‘There is a clear bite mark on his back.’

‘But how did the snake get into the bedroom?’ Sherlock asked. ‘The only window was too high for any snake to slither up to, and if it had come in through the front door then it
would have had to go through several other rooms, past several other people, before it got to Wu Chung.’

‘Who can predict the actions of a snake?’ the healer said, shrugging. ‘There is no doubt in my mind – a snake bit him, and the poison killed him. I have seen this kind of
thing before.’

‘In town?’ Sherlock pressed. ‘In a bedroom?’

The healer raised a white, thin eyebrow. ‘You have a better idea?’

‘No,’ Sherlock had to admit. ‘No, I don’t.’

The healer reached out and took the plant from Sherlock’s hand. Sherlock watched as the old man walked slowly back to Tsi Huen. Still crying, she took some coins out of a purse and passed
them to him. He bowed his head, thanking her, and walked away, the plant still dangling from his hand. Sherlock found himself hoping that the healer hadn’t charged her for the plant that had
arrived too late.

Wu Fung-Yi was standing to one side, staring at the house. Sherlock and Cameron walked over to join him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Cameron said awkwardly.

‘Me too,’ Sherlock said.

Wu Fung-Yi didn’t say anything. He just stared into the distance.

‘I wish I could see the body,’ Sherlock said quietly to Cameron.

‘What?’

‘Wu Chung’s body. I wish I could see it again.’

‘That’s a bit morbid, isn’t it?’

Sherlock shrugged. ‘Is it? He’s dead – I’m sure he won’t mind.’

‘Maybe his wife and his son might.’

Sherlock glanced over at them. ‘I suppose they don’t need to know.’

‘Why do you want to look at his body?’

‘I want to check that bite. The one on his back.’

Cameron shuddered. ‘Don’t remind me.’

‘Didn’t it strike you that there was something odd about it?’

‘Like what?’

Sherlock shook his head, trying to visualize the wound that he had seen on Wu Chung’s back. Part of him knew that he was thinking about Wu Chung’s death as if it was a puzzle so that
he wouldn’t have to deal with the emotion of it, but another part of him knew that there really
was
a puzzle there. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘The fang marks, if
that’s what they were, seemed to be different sizes. One was bigger than the other – it looked torn.’

‘So – the snake had a broken fang. What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know. But an old friend of mine once told me to look for things that were out of place. Those were the things that told you something interesting was happening, he
said.’

‘And a snake with a broken tooth is interesting?’

‘That depends on what broke the tooth.’ He looked over at where the boy and his mother were holding each other. ‘Do you think if I asked her she would let me go in?’

Cameron looked over at Tsi Huen, then back at Sherlock. ‘Her husband has died. I hate to think how I would feel if my father died suddenly. How would
you
feel?’

Unexpectedly, Sherlock found his thoughts suddenly pushed towards his own father, somewhere in India. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he had been killed in some British Army action against the natives,
and the message hadn’t even got to England yet. Or maybe it had got to England, and his mother, his sister and his brother already knew, but weren’t able to tell him. He tried to
analyse the feelings that welled up within him, but he couldn’t. There was something there, some messy mixture of emotions, but he couldn’t pull them apart.

‘Sometimes,’ he found himself saying, ‘I wonder if my father isn’t already dead to me. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to remember his face, or his voice, or
his laugh. I used to have memories of him – now I think that I just have memories of having memories.’

‘That’s awful,’ Cameron whispered.

‘Is it?’ Sherlock stared at Wu Fung-Yi. ‘Maybe the awful thing is caring too much.’ He shook himself. ‘Look, I made a promise,’ he said. ‘I told Wu
Chung that I would tell the Captain of the USS
Monocacy
that he wouldn’t make the voyage. I’d better go and do that.’

‘I suppose I should go and tell my mother and father what has happened. I’m not sure how much use I can be here.’

Sherlock looked around. Nobody nearby seemed interested. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that being here is enough. Look, I’ll be back within an hour, I promise.’

‘All right.’

Sherlock left the house and headed downhill, towards the quay. His side ached from all the running, and he had to bend forward as he walked to keep the pain at bay. He hadn’t noticed
before, but there were places where the blue sweep of the bay was visible through gaps between the houses. He could even see the masts of ships sticking up above the roofs, and as he got closer to
the waterside he could, every now and then, see the great wheel of the USS
Monocacy
looming above everything.

It was only as he was passing through the gate in the wall that ran around the town, past the uniformed guards, that he suddenly wondered how he was going to get back in. He shrugged the thought
away. He would face that problem later, if necessary.

He made his way along the quay towards the long bulk of the American ship. There were still plenty of sailors and local Chinese people around. He kept an eye out for the gang of youths who had
tried to steal his money the day before, but although there were plenty of people the right age around, he didn’t recognize any of them. More importantly, perhaps, none of them recognized
him.