Warlock Holmes--The Sign of Nine Page 27

  If the major’s gaze was a bit cold, Jonathan Small was not about to be outdone. He squinted up at his commanding officer with perfect malevolence. “No matter,” he said. “I don’t see what you could do about it. It’s my word against… well… practically nobody’s, really.”

  The major gave a grim smile. “You’re right, I’m sure. There’s no military court that’s going to hang one of our own on the word of an Indian child. It’s too bad. John Holder was a good man. And yet, Small, that’s not to say there’s nothing I can do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got one leg, no particular skills and a black mark on your character. Why would the army wish to keep you?”

  “You can’t do that!” Young Small protested.

  “I have already filed my recommendation,” said the major. “You’re out, Small. You’re being invalided.”

  “No!”

  “If I had any sense of justice, I’d let you rot as a beggar in a Bombay gutter. Luckily for you, Small, there’s still one purpose you might serve. Abelwhite? Step forward.”

  From behind us came a weedy sort of man, clutching a Bible to his chest. At first I assumed that he was an army chaplain, for he had the book and the requisite expression of someone who thought they knew everything and were being very generous when they spouted it at you. Yet his clothes told a different story. He was a civilian—a businessman, unless I missed my guess—and rather wealthy.

  “Mr. Abelwhite here runs an indigo plantation. It’s fairly isolated and—what with all the muttering that’s going about—the general’s staff feel he might be a bit safer with a few tough British lads about. And God help me, Small, I’ll say this much for you: you’re tough as they come. And you aren’t afraid to hurt a man, are you?”

  Young Jonathan Small gave a look that left little doubt he’d just added another man to the list of people he wouldn’t mind hurting. Abelwhite leaned forward, gave the Bible a little shake and said, “You have erred, Private Small, yet with hard work and diligent repentance, who is to say you may not yet be saved? Why, if you can help me bring the word of the lord to the local savages, oh what a penance that would be!”

  Small gave a bitter look, which drew a smile from the major. “You’re a civilian now, Small, so I cannot order you to take the job,” he said. “But I can tell you this: you’re an awfully long way from home and I don’t think there are many other men who would employ you in these parts. Word gets about, you know?”

  Holmes gave a tour-guide’s smile and announced, “Next stop: the plantation!”

  And with a blur and a fuzz, that’s where we stood. Abelwhite’s indigo fields stretched off in all directions, dominated by a sprawling, stately plantation house. Dozens of laborers bent to their tasks. It must have been harvest time, for they all had bushels of indigo strapped to their backs as they stooped to gather more. The nearest worker was using his bushel as armor against the efforts of younger Jonathan Small, who sat astride a horse belaboring the poor man with a whip.

  “I see you, you coolie bastard!” young Jonathan Small howled. “I see what you’re doin’! Slowing down a-purpose, are you?”

  We all turned to look with unveiled disdain at present-day Small, who spluttered, “Hey now! I’d just lost me leg, you know, and found meself trapped in a far-off land! I was only tryin’ to make meself feel better. Any man would—”

  “Yes, yes,” we all told him. “Any man would do the same.”

  “I don’t know if anybody’s told you, Mr. Small,” said Holmes, “but you have a very dim view of our species.”

  Personally, I was willing to lay some of the blame on the shoulders of Abelwhite for allowing such abuses. Yet I was in error. At that moment he came bobbing through the indigo, shouting, “No, no, Mr. Small! You mustn’t whip them! Where did you find that? Who gave this man a whip? I thought I’d been very clear!”

  Young Small shrugged. “Found it in the shed. Need it to do my job, sir.”

  “No you don’t!” Abelwhite hissed and looked about with a nervousness his wide-brimmed hat could not hide. “Things are bad enough, Small! Morale is low! And I’ve heard quite enough muttering about how we treat these fellows without you charging about whipping everybody for no reason. Now, give me that and get inside.”

  “But m’day’s not done, sir.”

  “Yes it is! Get inside!”

  “You oughtn’t to go easy on them, sir,” said Young Small.

  “Ha! And I was right, too!” cried Older Small. “For, do you know what happened next?”

  The scene around us fuzzed, just slightly. We stood in exactly the same place, but now smoke and flames poured from the windows of the plantation house and the air was alive with screams. Screams of joy, of triumph, of fear and of pain—disparate emotions given the same voice.

  “The Great Mutiny,” said Small, with an air of satisfaction. “The little brown bastards rose up all over the place.”

  “Can’t imagine what drove them to it,” I muttered.

  Nobody worked the fields now, but a quick look around showed us young Jonathan Small—shirtless and with dripping wet hair—coming up a path from the nearby river, looking confused. A man on a horse flashed by us and up to Small.

  “Hey, look! It’s old Dawson!” our version of Jonathan Small said. “Bloody great fool, he was.”

  Dawson pulled up just beside the younger Small and shouted, “John! John, we’ve got to get out of here!”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Word just came in—the whole countryside is in open rebellion! The instant the natives heard, they were on us. They got to the tools, the machetes, rakes and spades. Catherine and the girls… they didn’t survive, nor Mr. Abelwhite. It’s just you and me now. Look, the barn is on fire, but some of the horses got out. See if you can catch one. You’ve got no chance if you can’t get a horse.”

  Young Jonathan Small nodded at the wisdom of this advice, reached up, grabbed Dawson by the shirt, and pulled him from the saddle. He made sure Dawson landed heavily on his head.

  Lestrade paused, notebook halfway up and wondered, “What do you think, Torg? Should we count that one?”

  Torg hesitated. Dawson gave a pained groan and reached up, feebly trying to catch Small’s trouser leg and stop him from mounting. Small turned and gave Dawson a savage kick. There was a resounding tunk as his wooden leg connected with the side of Dawson’s skull. Dawson sank to the mud, senseless.

  “Yeh,” Grogsson decided. “Dat’s free.”

  “I was about to be murdered by rampaging heathens!” Jonathan Small protested. “Any man w—”

  “Look, just save it, all right?” said Holmes. “You killed your friend and you got your horsey. Now, where are you off to?”

  “Oh, ho! You see, now that’s where it gets interesting,” said Small. “Because now, I’m off to the fortress at Agra.”

  12

  “THE FORTRESS AT AGRA” WAS SOMETHING OF A MISNOMER.

  What the British high command probably ought to have called it was the “hey-remember-when-we-tookover-that-crumbling-old-fortress-then-built-a-shiny-great-modern-section-but-neglected-to-cart-off-the-oldwreck-it’s-connected-to” at Agra.

  Which is to say that the British Army’s lack of architectural foresight somewhat complicated matters, once the Great Mutiny began.

  Agra being the only fortified camp for miles around, hundreds of British soldiers and civilians flocked there as soon as things went wrong. In some ways, it was a good choice. There was a well-stocked armory at Agra, ample food, and reasonable medical support. The fort commanded a strategic bend in the river and was well defended on… let us say… two and a half sides. Those portions might have bested a modern army.

  It was the other side and a half that was the problem. Over the years the fort had gone through many iterations and most of these had simply been cobbled on to the ruins of what came before. A wiser, less budget-minded army would have cleared the old section away. But no, we’d left
it. Which was to say that—on any given foggy night—there were dozens of entrances into the old, decrepit portion of the fortress that might be crept into. They were so far from the section where the troops and civilians lodged—so well hidden by bent and crumbling corridors—that half a regiment of enemy troops might easily get in and live undetected for a week or two. Then, at their leisure, they could pop into the modern portion and slit every sleeping throat they found. Thus—though cannons were at a premium—three of the fort’s finest guns were aimed not to the outside, but the inside, loaded with canister shot and trained down the three main corridors where the old section met the new. The fort’s command had no illusions: if there were to be an infantry charge that overwhelmed their garrison, it would come not from without the fort, but from within. Combine this with the fact that the Indian allies upon whom all depended looked just the same to British eyes as the Indian rebels… well… it was hard to get a good night’s sleep at Agra.

  It was into this cauldron of uncertainty that a wretched, rag-clad, one-legged man stumbled one night. To the commanding officers’ horror, he made it across the river, past the few sentries, through one of the doorless doorways in the old section of the fort, and all the way to the garrison. Really, the only thing that salvaged the situation was that when he hove into view of three startled guards who tossed away their cards and went scrambling for their rifles, the tattered specter threw up both hands and declared, “Wait! Hold your fire! I’m an Englishman! I need help! I’ve lost m’leg!”

  Though, as they sprang forward to offer medical aid, he did demur and clarify, “Well, my wooden one…”

  “Looks like you had a bit of an adventure getting here,” Holmes observed, to present-day Small.

  “I’ll say. Lord only knows how many of those mutinous buggers I had to kill before I finally made it safe.”

  “Curses!” said Lestrade, throwing down his notebook. “Now the whole count is just rubbish.”

  Yet Grogsson was unwilling to give up this great new game. “Just count da ones we see,” he urged.

  Lestrade gave a grumbly little sigh. “Very well.”

  “So, anyway,” said Holmes, “you murdered and murdered and murdered and finally made your way here. Then what?”

  “Well, they found out I had military experience,” said Small. “Now, I might not have told them exactly how much, but as it were a bit of a situation they gave me a uniform and a rifle and welcomed me back into the fold. Ah! They were fine days. I even made a bit of a name for m’self. See, we found out there was this camp of rebels out near Shahgunge. And I were ready to get some of me own back, so I talked the colonel into giving me a company of men for a night attack and—by God—we gave ’em what for! Oh! Let’s see that part! Please, can we see that part?”

  “No,” said Holmes. “I don’t like you. We’re skipping right past it.”

  Sure enough, there we stood amongst the garrison at Agra, as happy soldiers recounted their adventures while their jealous-eyed fellows listened. It had been the only successful mission in weeks, so everybody gathered around young Jonathan Small to slap him on the back and pour another drink down him.

  And oh, the look on older Jonathan Small’s face as he watched… He must have relived that night over and over a thousand times in his memory: the hour a universally hated man was loved. How he must have longed to return to this exact moment. Now he beheld it once more, but with the knowledge that such joy would never be his again. I felt a deep swell of sympathy for him.

  Then again, he was just a crazy murderer.

  And there was something else… My eye kept traveling to one fellow standing on the outskirts of the gathering. He pulled aside several members of the successful sortie, one by one, and spoke with them in guarded whispers, often gesturing towards Jonathan Small. He was a native, a nervous-looking sort of man with dark circles around his eyes. Very dark. The sort of circles that made you want to spend years befriending him, just to build up the kind of rapport that eventually allows you to ask, “Say, I’ve always wanted to know: is that your natural coloring, or do you just never sleep?”

  My curiosity about the fellow kept growing, until I realized I had a rather felicitous way of finding out more about him. I elbowed Jonathan Small and asked, “Who’s that?”

  “Ah!” he cried. “Mahomet Singh! He is my brother—the man who nearly saved me, who nearly turned my life’s fortunes around.”

  “And,” I whispered to Holmes, “one of the other signatories to Arthur Morstan’s ‘sign of nine’ map.”

  To Jonathan Small I said, “He seems to be taking something of an interest in you.”

  “That makes sense,” Small admitted. “He knew all about me by that fateful night—the one that changed everything.”

  “Oh!” cried Holmes. “Fateful night? Let’s go there!”

  The world fuzzed and blurred around us once more. We found ourselves standing in a small guardroom, with an open doorway that looked out over a rain-swollen river. Once there had been a door, but now there was nothing left of it save a few rotted planks and one rusty iron hinge that still clung to the wall. In the feeble moonlight I could see gray rain falling onto gray water, from which thick gray mists arose. A finer night for an ambush I could hardly imagine.

  In the room with us stood young Jonathan Small, leaning on his rifle and looking out across the river. Mahomet Singh was there as well, and another Indian fellow whom I did not recognize. The third fellow constantly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and his eyes betrayed such nervousness that it was hard to believe he hadn’t already wet his trousers.

  “What are you doing?” Holmes asked.

  Small shrugged. “Well, it had become clear that a single sentry was not enough to hold a door. It was too easy to overpower a lone guard—and silently, too—as I had proved when I got in.”

  “I hope you didn’t hurt him too badly,” said Holmes.

  “Oh… er… well…”

  “Four,” said Grogsson. Lestrade scribbled a note.

  “Look, the point is,” said Small, “we needed more guards. But there weren’t enough soldiers. And which of the natives could we trust? So we started putting one British private with a rifle at every door, and two unarmed natives. Harder to sneak up on three than on one, eh? Of course we knew you can’t hold an entrance against a determined enemy with only one rifle. If a door was attacked, the sentry was a dead man. But the hope was that in the time it took to overwhelm all three guards, one of them might fire the rifle and warn the garrison.”

  “Hmm,” I noted. “Bleak.”

  “Aye,” said Small, “but that was not to be my fate. Just watch.”

  So we did. There stood young Jonathan Small with a cigarette paper in one hand and a rifle in the other. He had a tobacco pouch on his belt but—here’s the rub—no third hand to get the tobacco out of the pouch and into the paper. He gave his two Indian comrades a distrustful look. Should he chance it? No. Dutifully Young Small turned his attention back to his job, rifle in hand, eyes constantly scanning the river. For a minute. Maybe two. But he still had that empty cigarette paper in one hand. He looked down at it almost hungrily, then cast a suspicious glance at his native companions. No! Duty! Eyes across the river! But then… slowly… eyes back to his empty cigarette. Because caution is its own reward. But then, so is tobacco. And at what point does caution become folly? With a final sigh, Jonathan Small leaned his rifle against the wall and reached for his pouch.

  In an instant, the unnamed third man pounced upon Small’s rifle, snatched it up, and ran into the crumbling bowels of the fort. As he passed me, I could see his eyes were squeezed shut in desperate horror, with the hint of tears at the corners. He made it through the doorway and halfway down the corridor, before he ran face first into a wall and fell over with a cry.

  A split-second later, Mahomet Singh reached into the folds of his tunic and produced a “pistol” which he leveled at young Jonathan Small’s chest. “Freeze where you are,
sahib!” he croaked. “I have a gun! And it is loaded! And it is not carved of wood! And I will shoot you if you try anything and I will not even cry because I am a bad, bad man, just like you!”

  I rolled my eyes at the feebleness of his deception. Modern-day Small blushed. Small the Younger was taken in entirely. He gasped and threw his hands up, sending a plume of tobacco into the wall behind him. Mahomet Singh seemed relieved his gambit was proceeding so well. He paused to wipe a great slick of terror sweat from his brow. The other fellow crept cautiously back into the room, sporting a bloody nose. He made a vague attempt to point Small’s rifle at him but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it.

  Young Small, whose terror-widened eyes had been taking the whole situation in, offered the observation, “If you shoot me, the noise will bring the garrison. Then we’ll all be dead. You can’t do it. You can’t take the fort.”

  “What? No, no. I am not trying to take the fort, sahib. Why would I do that? I am a Sikh. It would be greatly against my own interests. Besides, it is very difficult for my people to do bad things. We know we’re not supposed to, you see, and it makes us feel very…”

  But he realized what he was saying, gave a gasp, waggled his fake gun at Small’s chest and insisted, “But I will, though! I will kill you, so hard! Bang! That’s what it will sound like!”

  It was plain that Young Small was entirely confused. “Er… so… what do you want?” he wondered.

  “I want to make you rich.”

  “Eh? Why?”

  “Listen to me, sahib. Listen. What do you intend to do after the mutiny?”

  “Probably just… stay in the army, I guess.”

  “But, sahib, as everybody knows: you are not in the army.”

  “Yes, but they might let me stick around, don’t you think?”

  Mahomet shook his head. “It is not their way.”

  “Then I’ll go back to England.”

  “How? Have you money for the journey? Have you any prospects waiting for you there? I only ask because you have several times told the fellows around here that you do not.”