Snake Bite (27 page)

‘You’re welcome,’ Sherlock said. ‘But don’t expect it to be easy.’

‘Nothing worthwhile ever is.’ Arrhenius made a small motion with his bladed staff. ‘Now, shall we finish this? With the failure of the plan to blow up the USS
Monocacy
I
am short several hundred thousand dollars in payments. I will need to start building diplomatic bridges with my employers if I want to keep on working.’

Sherlock opened his mouth to say something meaningless to delay the inevitable, but Arrhenius abruptly swung his staff around, aiming the blade at Sherlock’s face. Sherlock jerked his
sword up, blocking the blow, but the impact knocked him sideways, twisting him around. His shoulder slammed into the wall. His sword dropped from numbed fingers, clattering on the floor.

‘Goodbye, Master Holmes,’ Arrhenius said. He kicked the sword away. It skittered across the flagstones. Arrhenius hefted his bladed staff like a spear. The point was aimed at
Sherlock’s heart. Sherlock felt stone, cold and hard against his back. It seemed to be sucking the warmth, even the life, from him.

Sherlock let his hands drop to his sides. This was it. The game was over.

His fingers brushed against something in his right-hand pocket: a hard-edged, metal object. He slipped his hand inside the pocket and closed his fingers over it, feeling the rough edges. Feeling
a sudden flush of hope.

‘Goodbye, Mr Arrhenius,’ he said.

He pulled the object out and raised it up to his face. With a flick of his thumb, Sherlock operated the spring mechanism. The jaws snapped wide open. His thumb found the rubber bulb inside and
jabbed it, hard.

A spray of snake venom arced across the few inches between Sherlock and Arrhenius. Droplets splattered into Arrhenius’s eyes. He screamed, dropping his bladed staff and clutching his hands
over his face. He staggered backwards, still screaming.

‘For God’s sake!’ Arrhenius cried. ‘The pain! The
pain
! Kill me!
Kill me now!
I’m begging you –
kill me now!
’

‘Not in cold blood,’ Sherlock said quietly. ‘That’s not the kind of person I am.’

Arrhenius collapsed to his knees and he writhed, and screamed, and cried, and fell forward, so that he was lying on his face on the stone slabs that made up the floor of the ruined fort.
Eventually Arrhenius stopped moving. Only then did Sherlock turn and walk away.

Three days later, Sherlock was sitting on an empty crate on the quayside, looking at the
Gloria Scott
. European sailors and Chinese dock workers were scurrying all over
her like ants, checking the rigging and the sails, and carrying barrels and crates up the gangplank.

‘She’ll be leaving tomorrow,’ Cameron said from beside him.

‘I know,’ Sherlock replied.

‘You’re going to be on her?’

He nodded. ‘I thought about staying,’ he said. ‘But there’s too much waiting for me back home. My brother, my friends . . .’

‘And that girl,’ Wu Fung-Yi said from Sherlock’s other side. ‘The one you don’t talk about.’

‘Then how do you know there’s a girl?’ Sherlock asked.

‘Because you’re going back,’ Wu said with unarguable logic.

Sherlock turned to look at Cameron. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Do you think you’ll stay here in Shanghai?’

Cameron shrugged. ‘I doubt it,’ he said eventually. ‘I think Mother wants to go back to America. I must admit, I would like to see the place. I want to see if it’s as big
as everyone says.’

‘And you’re staying?’ Sherlock asked, turning to Wu.

The Chinese boy nodded. ‘My mother needs me. I’m all she has left. So I’ll stay. Maybe I’ll learn to cook, like my father. Maybe I’ll do something else. Mother
wants me to take the examinations for the Civil Service, but that costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time.’

‘But if you get in,’ Cameron observed, ‘then you’re made for life. No more financial worries, ever.’

Wu smiled, and nodded. ‘My father would be proud,’ he said, ‘if . . .’

‘Yes,’ Cameron said quietly. ‘If.’

‘Write to me,’ Sherlock said. ‘If you can. If you get the chance. I’ll give you the address.’

The three boys sat there for a while in silence, each thinking his own thoughts.

‘Anyone fancy lunch?’ Cameron asked eventually. ‘I’m getting hungry.’

‘One of the fishing boats brought a catch of squid in earlier,’ Wu said. ‘Fried in ginger and soy sauce, it’s wonderful. You can’t beat it.’

‘Better than bacon and eggs?’

‘Far better.’

The two boys stood up. ‘You coming?’ Cameron asked Sherlock.

‘I’ll follow in a while,’ he said. ‘Save some squid for me.’

The two boys walked off, arguing and shoving, and Sherlock watched them go with a smile on his face. It had never occurred to him that he would find friends as good as Matty and Virginia, but he
had. Maybe he always would, wherever he went.

He thought about what he would tell Matty and Virginia about his adventures when he got back to England. He thought about the voyage out, the storm and the pirate attack, and he thought about
the experiences he’d been through in Shanghai, and along the Yangtze River. So much to tell.

The pirate attack. Something still bothered him about that. It was the way he’d found that pirate searching Mr Arrhenius’s cabin, apparently looking for the coded message intended
for Malcolm Mackenzie. The pirate had known it was there, which suggested that the entire pirate attack had been mounted just so they could get hold of that message. But who had the reach and
influence to organize Chinese pirates to attack a trading ship so they could get hold of a coded message?

The Paradol Chamber, of course.

They had abducted Sherlock in the first place, and put him on the
Gloria Scott
. Sherlock had been assuming all this time that they had done it for revenge, to punish him for the way he
had interfered with their plans, but maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe the Paradol Chamber had found out about the plot to blow up an American ship and wanted to stop it. Maybe a war
between America and China didn’t suit their plans, and they decided to interfere.

Was that the real reason the Paradol Chamber had placed Sherlock on the
Gloria Scott
? Had he inadvertently been working for them all this time? But surely with a reach like theirs, they
could have stopped it in some other way? They didn’t need a boy from England or some Chinese pirates to do it?

He smiled. It didn’t matter, not really. He and Cameron and Wu had saved lives and prevented a war. It didn’t matter whose idea it had been. They had done the right thing.

‘’Scuse me.’

He glanced up. A man was standing in front of him. He was wearing typical sailor’s clothes, and judging by their sun-bleached, salt-caked look, and the tanned look of his skin, he had
recently disembarked from a ship. Sherlock looked him up and down, and quickly characterized him, based on what he could see. Born in Yorkshire, but living in London. Married. Five children. Mother
alive but father died recently.

‘Yes?’ he said politely.

‘Is your name Holmes?
Sherlock
Holmes?’

He straightened up. ‘Yes. Yes it is.’

The man held out an envelope. It had been folded and refolded many times, and there was dirt in the creases of the folds, as well as water stains and candle wax on the thick brown paper.
‘This is for you. I brought it all the way from England. I was given it.’

Sherlock’s mouth was suddenly dry, and his heart was beating faster than it had when he had fought Mr Arrhenius. ‘Thanks . . .’ he said, reaching out to take it. His other hand
delved into his pocket. ‘Here, look, I should—’

The man shook his head. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve been paid well to deliver it. I’ve been working for your brother for several years now, travelling around the world for him. He
told me not to take any money from you. He said, “Tell the young man that he needs to conserve his money if he is to have any hope of getting home in one piece.”’

Sherlock laughed. The sailor’s impression of his brother Mycroft was spot-on. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’

The sailor looked around. ‘You’ve been here a while,’ he said. ‘Any tips?’

‘Apparently,’ Sherlock said, ‘the squid is very good.’

The sailor frowned, then nodded and walked off. Sherlock noticed that his legs were still not used to dry land.

With hands that trembled a little bit more than he would have liked, Sherlock opened the envelope. From it he pulled out a letter, and a smaller envelope. Putting the smaller envelope to one
side he began to read the letter.

Sherlock lowered the letter. His hand was trembling. He picked up the second envelope. The writing on the front was delicate, feminine. One minute ago, knowing that it was a
message from Virginia, nothing could have prevented him from reading it. Now, having seen Mycroft’s message, the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to open it.

But it was too late. The message had been conveyed. The genie had been released from the bottle.

He swallowed, and stared at the
Gloria Scott
, as it was being readied for the voyage home.

How could a few words change his world so completely?

How could his heart be broken so quickly by someone so far away?

Slowly he crumpled the half-read letter from Mycroft, and the unopened envelope from Virginia, as he stared blindly out at the bustling activity on the quayside.

Young Sherlock Holmes: Death Cloud

Young Sherlock Holmes: Red Leech

Young Sherlock Holmes: Black Ice

Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

Five books. I never thought I’d make it to five books about Sherlock Holmes as a teenager, but I have, and there are more to go. At least
one
more and (Macmillan
Children’s Books willing) possibly another three or more on top of that. I’ve got to get Sherlock back from China in one piece, which might take some time, and then I’ve got to
somehow resolve the issue of the Paradol Chamber. And, of course, there’s what’s happened with Virginia – how will that affect Sherlock’s character? (Those of you who have
read some or all of the Conan Doyle stories will, of course, know the answer to that one.)

Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the original Sherlock Holmes stories, told us that Sherlock was (by his mid-twenties) an expert swordsman, boxer, martial arts fighter, chemist, actor and
violinist. I’ve managed, in the five books I’ve written about Sherlock’s early life so far, to lay the groundwork for his boxing, his acting, his martial arts and his violin
playing. I still have to do some work on his swordsmanship and his love of chemistry, and that’s two different books right there.

As usual, I’ve tried to make the book as accurate as possible, so rather than rely on what I thought China in the 1860s was like (based largely on an old Japanese TV series set in China
and called
The Water Margin
that was shown, badly dubbed, in the UK when I was growing up) I have read an awful lot of books about the subject in an attempt to get the feeling right. Some of
these are modern books looking back at China over a hundred years ago, while others were written by people who travelled in the Far East at about the right time.

The most useful of the modern-day books were, just for your interest:

The most useful period book was: