But on the fourth day he had risen.
With her dying breath, Rose Holmes had told him that he had much to do in life. He knew she was right. It had taken those three days to truly believe her.
There was a reason to go on living and he started at that moment. He had the brains, the street connections, and the desire to help bring justice to the world around him. If he began immediately, worked every day without pause, he might, by the time he was an adult, be rebuilt into a crime-solving machine. He would be a new sort of London detective, the scourge of every villain: not just to the one who had taken Rose’s life and swung from a rope outside Newgate Prison last week, his neck snapped solely due to evidence Sherlock’s own daring had produced. The boy’s involvement in the Whitechapel murder had drawn his mother into the killer’s lair and the evil inside the villain’s heart had slain her. He would never forgive or forget.
But several times over the last month he has broken down and descended into black depressions. He misses his mother terribly and wishes he had his father back. How can he, half-breed, poverty-stricken Sherlock Holmes, aspire to the heights he harbors in his mind? Involving himself in this trapeze incident would be a mistake, just as sticking his big nose into the Whitechapel case had been. Some day he will be capable of such endeavors, but it doesn’t make sense now – it is far too dangerous. He had better just tell the police what he knows, let them take the credit if they must.
And yet … an opportunity is before him.
He thinks of his mother again. He made her an unbreakable vow.
THE STRANGE MAN IN THE LABORATORY
Old Sigerson Bell isn’t really waiting for Sherlock. At least he’d never admit it. But he’s grown fond of the boy. He has given him the afternoon off and misses him terribly. He polishes his three statues of Hermes, fusses with his two gaslights, pulls his pocket watch out of his worn silk smoking jacket, and glances toward his door. It has been a month since the lad first rapped the knocker against his big, wooden entrance in the night, smelling even worse than the miasmatic London air. He was soaking wet from the pouring rain of a crashing thunderstorm and was dressed in the most tattered frock coat, waistcoat, and necktie Bell had ever seen – all arranged as neatly as the boy could manage. Had it not been so pitiable, it would have made one smile. Sherlock’s gray eyes were intense below his black hair, and his hawk-like nose almost seemed to sniff the aging apothecary and his dwelling, looking for answers. In his hands was a drenched piece of paper: the old man’s notice, which had fallen off the outside of the arched, shop door in the violent downpour.
It had taken Bell some time to respond to the knock, and when he arrived he didn’t unbolt the door, but simply drew back its sliding peep-hole with a snap.
“Speak!” he demanded.
“It says on this notice that you are looking for an apprentice?”
Only the old man’s big, bulb-tipped nose was visible through the opening. The lad’s eyes were almost even with his.
“No, it does not.” The peep-hole slammed shut again.
The boy kept pounding. Bell finally returned in a huff
“If you don’t clear off, I’ll …”
“I need this position, sir.”
The old man examined the intruder this time, noticed his teeth chattering and saw him wipe the rain from his prominent brow. His words were enunciated clearly, like someone of breeding, and there was a remarkable earnestness in his voice. And yet, he was dressed in such rags.
“If you observe closely, reading from top to bottom and left to right, as one does in the western hemisphere, you shall see that I require a ‘partner/investor’ foremost, then, in small print at the bottom of the page, an ‘apprentice,’ the position to which you refer. One is contingent upon acquiring the other. Good day.”
“I shall work for free!” barked Sherlock.
The peep-hole had stopped in mid-slam.
Sigerson Trismegistus Bell smiles in recollection. He doesn’t really need an apprentice. He is too aged for that. The number of patients he sees is dwindling. He mostly gives advice now to the few who will have him. He’s always had what others consider crazy ideas about health anyway: that colds and influenza, typhoid and tuberculosis, do not come from bad air, but from things like microscopic bugs – germs and bacteria, carried in London’s putrid river water and in the human body. He has known that for many years, but others don’t believe him – even now, when men like the Frenchman Pasteur and the queen’s physician, John Snow, are writing about it.
Along with his advice, Bell dispenses medicines to his patients: herbs, tonics, carbolic acid mixtures for infections, pinches of arsenic and other alloys of poisons and chemicals. But he’s more than a medical man. He’s a scientist, an alchemist: a wizard in search of magical solutions and gold. As he grows older, he seems to grow stranger.
He lives in the middle of foggy, dun-colored central London, on Denmark Street near where the rookeries of St. Giles and The Seven Dials meet Charing Cross Road and lead to seedy Soho. This little cobblestone artery is so narrow that its old, three-storey buildings block out the sun at street level, making it dark and frightening. There are gangs in the neighborhood and the old man must look out for himself.
He is remarkable to behold. Stooped, his body is arched like the top of a question mark; his white hair and goatee long and stringy, his violet eyes active, glasses on the tip of his always-perspiring nose, and a square red fez on his big head. His high-pitched voice is often hoarse from talking, usually to himself. “What is wrong with enjoying a chat with an intelligent person?” he likes to ask with a twinkle.
But his smelly shop, his livelihood, is in greater disarray than it appears. His advertisement still hasn’t drawn the partner he desperately requires. He knew his chances were slim when he first posted it. There’d be criminals looking to get inside his place or sons of working-class men with rough educations and dreams of medical careers, who would sneak with trepidation into his neck of London, take one glance at him and his laboratory, the human skeletons hanging about, the fresh organs in jars he’d purchased from unregulated gravediggers … and run.
The boy’s presence is some consolation. Almost the minute he came dripping into the shop, he began to fascinate the old man: skeletal, from the streets, but possessing a brain that sparkles and a reluctant tongue that, once employed, can say marvelous things. He is a boy full of mystery, with a great sadness in his soul, but resolution in his voice, who can stay right with the apothecary, no matter the weight of the subjects he broaches. Every time Bell speaks of his scientific discoveries, Sherlock Holmes listens as if he were a tracking hound.
“Eureka!” the alchemist had screamed at the top of his lungs a few weeks ago, dropping a test tube deep into the mess of a cadaver’s guts. “I have isolated a characteristic in the blood of this corpse! Do you know what this means?”
It had been a rhetorical question – Bell had forgotten that he was no longer alone in the shop.
“Yes, I do,” said a fascinated voice right behind him.
Bell had started so badly that he knocked the body off the table, depositing it and various organs on the floor: the pancreas went splat near his boot, the gall bladder wobbled away. The boy was not only in the room, but peering over the scientist’s shoulder.