NINE

Heat hit him in the face, nearly knocking him down. It was like walking past the open door of a baker’s oven. He felt the short hairs on his neck curling up and the sweat springing out on his face and neck. The air itself was so thick and so hot that it was hard to catch his breath.

The doorway opened on a wrought-iron balcony that looked down on a cavernous inferno filled with machinery: pistons, wheels, axles, all moving in different directions at different speeds—side to side, up and down, round and round. It was the Scotia’s engine room, powering the huge paddle wheels on the sides of the ship. Somewhere nearby, Sherlock knew, there would be a separate boiler room, where sailors would be shovelling coal into a massive furnace where it would burn and produce heat, which would turn water in a boiler above into steam and force it through a network of pipes into this room, where pistons and joints and wheels would convert the pressure of the steam into rotary motion that would be fed to the paddle wheels via massive axles. If it was hellishly hot in here, then the boiler room would be worse than working inside a volcano. How could men stand it?

The noise was deafening: a combination of clanging, hissing, and thumping that made Sherlock’s head hurt. He could feel the vibration through the door frame where his hand was holding on and through the air itself. It was like being punched repeatedly in the chest. It would be next to impossible to hold any kind of conversation in conditions like this. The men who worked here would have to communicate by sign language. Deafness would be an occupational hazard.

Illumination was provided by dirty oil lamps that hung from the walls at various points, and also by gratings in the ceiling that let in a meagre trickle of light from the world above, but the light petered out quickly in the smoky, dusty, steamy atmosphere: and there were great pools of black shadow everywhere Sherlock looked. Air also entered through the gratings, providing a welcome cool breeze for anyone standing underneath. Coal dust and water vapour eddied in the atmosphere, restless spirits uncertain which way to go.

Sherlock quickly looked around, trying to work out where he could go. The engine room seemed to take up several levels inside the centre of the ship. Walkways were bolted to the walls and crossed from side to side at various levels. Wrought-iron ladders led up to the walkways. Massive iron beams crossed the room, giving it some stability and providing anchors for the various pipes and wheels. It all seemed to be designed so that any pipe, any piston, any wheel, any axle could be reached by a man with a spanner in case something broke.

Some of the smaller pipes terminated in pressure gauges—large instruments about the size of Sherlock’s clenched hands with dials showing the steam pressure in the pipes. Presumably the engineers could check the gauges and tell if the ship’s engine needed more coal or whether the pressure was building up too fast and needed to be vented. Other pipes had large metal wheels attached that probably opened or closed valves, allowing the steam into different pipes at differing rates.

Looking up, Sherlock could see two large pressure vessels in the ceiling space. A lot of the pipes led towards them. They seemed to open out to the deck level. It took him a moment to work out that they probably led to the Scotia’s two funnels, providing a means of venting the steam that had done its work.

Everything was made of thick, black metal that was hot to the touch, and everything was fastened together with rivets the size of Sherlock’s thumb. The machinery wavered in the heat-haze caused by the burning coal, the air itself rippling and making it hard to judge distances.

The smell of the engine room made Sherlock’s nose prickle uncomfortably. Mainly it was a sulphuric smell, like rotten eggs, but there was a tarry odour beneath that, and something else that reminded Sherlock of the taste of blood in his mouth but which was probably hot iron.

A figure moved out of the shadows. Sherlock flinched, expecting it to be Grivens, but it was another member of the crew, an engineer. He was naked to the waist and massively muscled, and where his skin wasn’t blackened with coal dust it was streaked by sweat, so that his face and body were covered with a series of black-and-white stripes, like the engravings of zebras that Sherlock had seen in books about Africa in his father’s library. His moleskin trousers were sodden with sweat, and he carried a shovel over his shoulder. His entire demeanour—the way he carried himself, his expression, everything—spoke of bone-aching weariness. As Sherlock watched he walked along past the pounding engine and vanished through another doorway without looking up, probably heading for a swinging hammock in the dark depths of the ship.

Aware that Grivens was only moments behind him, Sherlock hurried along the balcony until he got to a ladder that led both upward and downward. Which way to go? Upward would lead him towards the deck, but there might not be a way out up there. He’d certainly never seen any of the engineers or stokers on deck. They were probably forbidden from emerging into the open, condemned to spend the entire voyage in the darkness below. Down, then, and he just had to hope there were other ways out of the engine room.

He clambered down the iron ladder as fast as he could, his fingers burning on the hot rungs. The vibration of the engines was transmitted through his hands to the point where he could feel his teeth shaking. The heat and the lack of breathable air were making him feel weak; twice his sweat-slicked hands slipped off the rungs and he nearly fell. Eventually he got to the bottom, and rested his forehead gratefully against the ladder before he pushed himself away and moved off.

Up on the balcony, the door smashed open again. Sherlock could hear it striking the wall. Silence for a moment, and then a pair of booted feet clanked on the metal grille flooring.

Sherlock slipped into an alley running between two large parts of the engine: irregular masses of black iron festooned with pipework. His shoulder brushed against one of them and he flinched back. It was boiling hot.

The alley ended in a rivet-covered curved metal surface, part of a pressure vessel of some kind. It was a dead end. No way out.

The shadows between the parts of the engine shielded him. He tried to make himself as small and as quiet as possible.

Footsteps on the ladder, and then silence as the newcomer reached the floor.

“Kid,” shouted Grivens’s voice, “let’s talk about it. Got off to a bad start, we did. I overreacted. Come out into the light, there’s a good boy, and we can chat it through like old friends. We’ll laugh about this all, one day, I promise we will, yes?”

Sherlock didn’t trust the man’s words and he didn’t trust the man’s tone of voice. If he came out, he knew he’d be killed.

“All right,” Grivens went on. “All right, then.” It was difficult to hear him above the clanging and thudding of the machinery. “You’re scared. I understand that. You think I’m going to do you harm. Well, let’s talk about money, then. I’ve been paid to off you, that much you already know, but I’m a practical man. A businessman, if you’d credit it. I’m sure the big Yank can more than match the money I’m being paid by the blokes who hired me. Let’s you and me go up to see him together and set the situation out, like men of the world. He can write me a cheque, and I’ll forget all about the three of you. How’s that sound?”

It sounded like a trick, but Sherlock wasn’t stupid enough to say so. Instead he just kept silent.

Somewhere nearby, a valve snapped open and released a plume of steam with a deafening hisssss.

“Kid? You still there?” The voice sounded closer this time, as if Grivens had moved. He was looking for Sherlock, not content with just hoping that his reassuring words would persuade him to emerge from hiding. “I know we got off on the wrong foot, but I want to make it up to you. Come out and talk.”

Sherlock realized that his back was pressing against a pipe, or a section of engine, that had steam in it. The heat was spreading through his jacket and his shirt, blistering his back. He tried to edge forward, but that meant moving part of his body into a patch of light. He moved slowly, but the heat was too much and he had to jerk away before he was badly burned. His foot hit a section of pipe. The noise rang out round the engine room like a bell.

“So, you are here.” Grivens sounded as if he was just a few feet away. “Well, that’s a start, anyway.”

A shadow fell across the mouth of the alley in which Sherlock was hiding. In the ash-grey light that shone through the gratings above, Sherlock could make out the silhouette of Grivens’s head and shoulders. He was holding something in his hand, which was raised above his head, ready to strike. It looked like a spanner; a very large, very heavy spanner.

It occurred to Sherlock that down here, in the bowels of the ship, Grivens didn’t even have to worry about getting Sherlock’s body up to the deck and throwing it overboard. He could just chuck it in the fire and let it burn. All he would have to do was to bribe the stokers with a couple of shillings to look the other way, and Sherlock would be reduced to grit and dust.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Grivens sang. His body now blocked out all the light entering the alley. He seemed to sense where Sherlock was. Rather than moving on, he turned into the alley.

Sherlock ducked down, trying to stay in the shadows. Another few seconds and Grivens would see him, and then it would all be over.

His hand touched the warm floor, and it took him a couple of seconds to realize that it had slipped past where the pipe he was pressed against should have met the deck. He moved his hand around, exploring. It seemed as if the pipe didn’t go all the way down to the floor, but curved around underneath. It was sitting on struts that were bolted to the floor, but there was enough room for Sherlock to slide underneath. Hopefully there would be a way out on the other side. If not, he would still be as trapped as he was now but considerably more uncomfortable.

He dropped to his hands and knees, then to his stomach. The floor was uncomfortably hot against his skin. His shirt was wet with sweat, and it stuck to the floor as he tried to slide under the machine. He reached out and grabbed one of the struts supporting it, hoping he could pull himself along, but the strut burned his hand and he cried out in pain.

“Aha!” Grivens rushed into the alley, his spanner clanking against the pipes. “Where are you, you little cur?”

Sherlock braced himself and reached out for the strut again. The metal seared his palm but he endured it, pulling hard, scrabbling with knees and feet, dragging himself under the engine part and away from Grivens. He suddenly sensed space above him, and climbed shakily to his feet. His hand throbbed, but he was in a different part of the engine room. Another alley led away from him, the walls formed by an interlocking series of pipes. He ran down it, looking for a ladder or a door.

Something went clang behind him. He turned, to find Grivens standing at the end of the metal-walled alley. He’d just hit his spanner against a metal stanchion.

“All right, kid. End of the line. You’ve had a good run, but it’s time to call it a day. Let old Grivens just put you out of your misery, yes?”

“Is it too late for that deal you mentioned?” Sherlock temporized.

Grivens smiled. “Far too late,” he said. “Sad to say, I’m a man of my word. I shook hands on a deal, and I have to see it through. Couldn’t really break my contract now, could I? What kind of man would that make me?”

“So it was just words.”

He nodded. “Just words. There was always a chance you’d believe them and come out of your own accord, but I didn’t have much faith.”

He began to walk forward, swinging the spanner.

Sherlock looked around frantically for something he could use to fight with. It looked like fighting was his only option now.

Clang! The spanner hit an iron pipe, sending shock waves reverberating around the engine room.

“Just look at me,” Grivens said in a calm, low voice. “Just look at me, kid. Look me in the eye. Don’t look for a means of escape. Accept the inevitable, yes?”

Sherlock felt the calmness of the voice, the reasonableness of the words, and the heat of the engine room lulling him into a trance. He shook his head abruptly. He couldn’t let himself be hypnotized by the steward.

He glanced desperately from side to side. Something caught his eye—something leaning against a ladder. A shovel! One of the stokers must have left it there at the end of his shift. Its handle was black with coal dust and its blade was partly melted, as if it had been pushed by accident too far into the flames. Sherlock reached out and grabbed it, holding it across his body with the blade up by his face.

“So the cur’s got some spirit in him, yes?” Grivens’s face was set into a grim mask. “Just means I have to work a bit harder for my cash.”

He lunged forward and lashed out with the spanner, trying to catch the side of Sherlock’s head. Sherlock ducked back, and the spanner hit the side of an iron tube. Sparks flew across the room. Sherlock felt them burn his face. He brushed at his hair in case any of them had caught in it.

Grivens snarled and pulled the spanner back. Raising it over his head, he brought it crashing down towards Sherlock’s scalp.

Sherlock blocked the blow clumsily with his shovel. The spanner hit the wooden shaft at its halfway point and dented it, nearly knocking Sherlock to his knees. The vibration transferring from the shovel felt like it might tear his arms from their sockets. He managed to bring the shovel around and caught Grivens’s kneecap with the blade. Grivens screamed and staggered back, mouth open in an “O” of disbelief.

“You little beggar!” he cursed. Swinging the spanner like a club, he lunged at Sherlock again.

Sherlock brought the blade of the shovel up to meet the spanner. The two connected with a sound like the crack of doom. Grivens bounced backwards, the spanner whirling away from him and disappearing into the darkness of the engine room. Sherlock’s suddenly nerveless fingers dropped the shovel on the floor.

Grivens was standing in a half crouch, cradling his right elbow in his left hand. His face was twisted into an animalistic snarl.

Sherlock turned and ran.

The alley ended in another junction, with more alleys heading left and right. Sherlock took the right-hand one and tore along it, stopping only when he came to a ladder leading upward. He glanced back over his shoulder. No sign of Grivens. Feeling the weakness in his shoulders from where the steward had brought the spanner down on his shovel, he clumsily climbed up the ladder to a walkway.

The walkway ran parallel to the main axle that crossed the room, exiting through a gap in the engine-room wall and driving one of the paddle wheels. Sherlock had lost track of which way was forward and which was back. He wasn’t sure which paddle wheel the axle was turning. Maybe both of them. Not that it really mattered. The axle turned slowly alongside him, as thick as his body, glistening with grease. Further back towards the centre of the engine room was the complicated arrangement of toothed gear wheels, pistons, and offset cams that drove it.

Leaning over the barrier that ran alongside the walkway, he tried to see where Grivens was. No luck. The steward had vanished.

The fight seemed to have attracted no attention. Was the engine room always this deserted, or had Grivens bribed the crew to stay out while he dealt with Sherlock?

Something grabbed at his ankle and pulled. Sherlock fell to the walkway, feeling his leg being tugged over the edge. He grabbed hold of the barrier to stop himself being pulled over. Grivens’s face was pressed up against the metal grille of the walkway. It was his hand that had grabbed Sherlock’s ankle.

“You’re really going to make me earn this money, aren’t you?” he hissed. “Just for that, I’m going to make the Yank and his daughter suffer. Just think about that as you’re bleeding to death here.”

Sherlock’s only response was to kick out with his other foot, scraping the sole of his boot down his leg until it hit Grivens’s fingers. Grivens grunted in pain and released his grip. Sherlock rolled away and pulled himself to his feet.

Grivens’s face appeared at the top of the ladder, followed by the rest of him. His teeth were exposed by the grimace of hatred on his face.

“This isn’t about money anymore,” he hissed. “This is personal.”

Sherlock backed away slowly. The steward reached the top of the ladder and moved on to the walkway. His shoulders were hunched, his fingers curled into claws. His previously immaculate white uniform was now grey and streaked.

Sherlock felt something hard pressing into the small of his back. He glanced down quickly. He’d reached the end of the walkway. He was pressed into one of the wheels that controlled the flow of steam through the pipes. Alongside him, the massive cylindrical axle rotated endlessly around on its bearings. He’d reached the area where the offset cams transferred the linear motion of the pistons into rotary motion, driving the axle. There were several of them, and they looked like grease-smeared metal horses’ heads bobbing up and down in a complicated rhythm. For a second Sherlock found himself appreciating the sheer brilliance of the engineering at work in the ship. How could people just assume these things worked without wanting to know how?

Not that he would be getting the chance to ever learn anything again. Grivens was still stalking towards him, closing the gap. He reached out for Sherlock’s throat with both hands.

“I should get a bonus for this,” the steward whispered. His fingers closed around Sherlock’s throat and he squeezed tight. Sherlock felt his eyes bulge with the pressure. His chest wanted to suck air in, but no air was getting through. Frantically he clutched at Grivens’s wrists, trying to pull them away, but the steward’s muscles were locked tight, hard as iron. Sherlock shifted his grip to the man’s fingers. Maybe he could pry them away from his throat. His vision had turned red and blurred, and black dots were beginning to swim around in front of him, obscuring Grivens’s face. His chest burned in agony.

Desperately he twisted his body with his last ounce of strength. Caught off balance, Grivens half fell onto the barrier running along the side of the walkway, but his grip on Sherlock’s throat did not slacken. The cams were pumping up and down beside them now: chunks of metal pounding the air just inches from their faces. Grivens’s expression was feral, his eyes pinpricks of black hatred.

Sherlock let his body drop, as if he’d run out of energy. Grivens, taken off guard, let him drop. Instead of falling to his knees, Sherlock shifted his hands from the steward’s fingers to his leather belt. Grabbing the belt, he straightened up again, pushing as hard with his legs and pulling as hard with his arms as he could. Grivens’s feet left the walkway as Sherlock lifted him up by his belt. Already twisted around as he was, the weight of Grivens’s body carried him sideways to the edge of the barrier. Sherlock expected him to let go then, scrabbling for purchase on the barrier, but he kept his grip on Sherlock’s throat, pulling him over as well.

Until his sleeve caught in one of the pounding cams. It caught the material and pulled. Grivens screamed—a short, despairing cry of fear and rage—as his body was jerked off the walkway and into the machinery. Sherlock let go of the man’s belt and brought his arms up, knocking the steward’s hands away from his throat and allowing him a lifesaving breath as the steward’s body was pulled away, wrapping around the rotating axle and catching in the cams as they hammered up and down.

The engine didn’t even falter, but Sherlock had to turn away before he had seen more than a fraction of what happened to Grivens’s body as it was pulled into the rotating metal.

Sherlock bent over, hands on his knees, trying to pull as much of the hot air into his lungs as possible. For a few moments he thought he was going to suffocate as his body demanded more oxygen than he could give it, but gradually his gasping subsided. When his vision wasn’t red and blurred anymore, and when he could breathe without his chest hurting, he straightened up and looked around.

There was no sign of Grivens. The black grease on the axle and the cams looked redder and shinier than it had before, but that was all.

Eventually Sherlock climbed down the ladder and crossed the engine room, looking for a way out. He wasn’t sure if the door he found was the one he’d entered through or another one, but it didn’t matter. Outside, it was cool and the air was fresh. It was like leaving Hell and entering Heaven.

People stared at him when he emerged on deck, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to get back to his cabin, wash the grime and the grease off his body, and change his clothes. He would put the ones he was wearing in the laundry. Maybe the laundresses on board could clean them, maybe they couldn’t. In the end, he just didn’t care anymore.

Amyus Crowe was in their cabin when Sherlock pushed the door open. “I think someone’s been in here, searchin’,” he said, then turned and saw the state of Sherlock’s face and clothes. “My God, what happened?”

“The people we’re following to New York—they spread some money around the port,” Sherlock replied wearily. “There’s probably one man on every ship leaving this week who’s been promised money if he kills the three of us.”

“At least one,” Crowe said. “But we can worry ’bout that later. Who was it?”

“One of the stewards.”

“An’ where is he now?”

“Let’s just say they’re going to be down one member of staff at dinner,” Sherlock said.

He told Crowe the story while he washed off and changed clothes. The big man listened silently the whole time. When Sherlock started repeating himself, Crowe raised his hand.

“I think I understand the full story,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Tired, dehydrated, and sore.”

“That’s understandable, but how do you feel?”

Sherlock glanced at him in puzzlement. “What do you mean?”

“I mean a man’s died, an’ you were the cause. I’ve seen men spiral into a morass of guilt an’ sadness after an event like that.”

Sherlock thought for a minute. Yes, a man had died, and Sherlock was responsible, but it wasn’t the first. Baron Maupertuis’s thug Clem had almost certainly drowned when he fell off Matthew Arnatt’s boat, but that had happened because Matty had hit him on the back of the head with a metal boathook. Maupertuis’s right-hand man, Mr. Surd, had been stung to death by bees, but that could arguably have been classed as an accident—he’d fallen backwards into the hive. And there were the people who’d been on the Napoleonic fort when it had exploded in flames—they may have burned to death or drowned when they jumped into the sea, but their fates seemed several steps away from anything Sherlock had directly done. Was Crowe right? Was this the first death he’d directly and unequivocally caused?

“I’m not what you’d call religious,” he said eventually. “I don’t believe there’s a God-given instruction that ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but I suppose I believe that society functions better when there are laws and when people can’t just go around killing other people. That’s part of what Plato argues in The Republic, which my brother gave me to read. But the steward was trying to kill me, and if I hadn’t done the same to him then he wouldn’t have stopped. I didn’t choose to kill him. He picked the fight, not me.”

Crowe nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Was that the right answer?”

“There is no right answer, son; least, not as far as I can make out. It’s a dilemma—society works because people follow rules an’ don’t go round murdering each other, but if people choose to live outside those rules, what do you do? Let them get away with their behaviour, or fight them with the same weapons they use to fight you? If you follow the former course, they get to take over society, ’cause they’re always prepared to fight harder and dirtier than you are. If you follow the latter course, then how do you stop yourself becomin’ as bad as them?” He shook his head. “In the end, the only advice I can offer is—if you get to the stage where a man’s life don’t matter to you, then you’ve gone too far. As long as death bothers you, as long as you understand it’s your last resort, not your first, then you’re probably on the right side of the line.”

“Do you think Mycroft knew something like this would happen?” Sherlock asked. “Do you think that’s why he gave me the book?”

“No,” Crowe replied, “but your brother is a wise man. I think he knew that at some stage you’d be askin’ yourself these questions, an’ he wanted to make sure you had the tools to answer them with.”