Slowly abandoned to his uncle's bumbling care, Archie finds a friend in the quiet, limping man living in the old groundsmaster's house across the pitch.
The Director is dead and, as fingers are pointed and heads roll, MI6 is struggling to reorganise itself in the aftermath of disaster. Janine Hawkins, caught in the crossfire, just wants to keep her job and her secrets.
Bereaved and unmoored, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson attend the reading of a will, only to discover something that may well be even more disquieting than the losses they'd suffered.
In the process of trying to make sense of it all, each stumbles across a strand in an intricate, dangerous web, one that is slowly tightening as events across the Atlantic, over the Channel, and in Whitehall itself unfold.
Hello, all.
It's been a long time since I've posted anything- in the process of moving to northern Chicago and finding employment, I've only just begun to find time to write.
This is probably going to be a long one, and I can't say I'll be able to post regularly or quickly. I'm very excited about it, however, and I sincerely hope you enjoy this opening chapter.
Chapter 1: Archie
Sunday came blanketed in a morning fog.
It was one of those fogs, dripping down windows and hanging in the air as dense as an untold secret—the sort of fog that reduced the real things in the world to yourself, the ground beneath your feet, and whatever you could reach out to and feel with your own two hands. Lights over damp pavements and doors hung in fuzzy constellations so nebulous that even the tenured teachers might have had trouble telling which light belonged to which building, were they awake to do so. As it was, with three hours yet before breakfast and no last-minute preparations for classes to knock any of the teachers up before sunrise, it was really a stroke of poor luck that saw Archie West awake early enough to notice it when a light came on in the Hobbit-hole's window.
The Hobbit-hole was not really a hobbit-hole, of course. In its early, far more prosperous days, Rudbridge's campus had included gardens and an orchard, stables, and a pitch for rugby or cricket or whatever happened to be the game du jour at that time. Like every other wealthy preparatory academy with such a campus, there had been a groundskeeper, and like every other particularly wealthy preparatory academy with such a campus, there had been a small, neat cottage just off the far side of the pitch in which to house said groundskeeper. The days of groundskeepers had long since passed, but the little house remained, and though there was a sign in front of it that read 'Groundskeeper', it hardly stopped the younger students from reimagining its origins and occupants. For a while, according to the year seven students, it had been a wizard's hut that only seemed empty because of the wizard's charms and spells on the place; last year, after a corking new Bond movie had come out, it had become the nondescript entry to a sprawling underground complex run by MI6, and anyone who went in got their memories of gadgets and supercomputers replaced with dusty floors and cobwebs. The latest imagining was probably a result of Mr Millby's movie day after his creative writing class finished reading The Hobbit and the fact that the house, like Bilbo's house, had a green door.
Even knowing that the house really was just an empty building maintained more out of respect to the past than for any practical reason, the presence of someone where there shouldn't have been anyone was enough to propel Archie out of bed, into his clothes, and out into the half-dark. He paused every now and then, straining his eyes and ears toward the house, and then resumed his approach, cringing every time his trainers squeaked in the damp grass. Soon, he came to the muddy drive up to the house; there he found tire tracks but no car, a single set of footprints, and a series of holes that hugged one side of the prints. He knew that it was possible to identify what sort of shoe someone was wearing by looking at their footprints— Sherlock had told him as much when explaining the dead nun— but all he could see was that the person had big shoes with pointy toes, a bit like his Dad's work shoes. Nevertheless, he followed the prints to the doorstep and then slowly, slowly edged along the wall, inching his way over until he was peering into the window.
"Social conventions prescribe a knock at the door when visiting someone's home," said a soft voice from Archie's left.
Archie jerked and whipped his head around, freezing in place. The tall man standing in the open door of the Hobbit-hole stared back. He wondered how the man had opened the door so quietly. "H-hello, sir. I was… just…"
"Investigating, no doubt, the light from my sitting room," the man said, looking down his nose at Archie and thumping his cane on the doorstep as if to punctuate his statement. "Come in, please, and pray take off your shoes."
The Hobbit-hole was a very different place when lit and lived-in. Empty beer bottles and cigarette butts were nowhere to be seen. Instead, a huge, plush Oriental rug in reds and blues and golds had been spread over the wood floor of the front room; on it stood matched leather chairs with shiny brass rivets, a heavy wooden coffee table with legs carved to resemble snarling lions, and a stately antique lamp with swirls and tassels on the shade. The oaken bookshelves that had sat empty and covered in graffiti for years were polished to a rich, silky shine and full of what must have been hundreds of books, nearly all with golden letters on their leather spines. Many were in other languages— Archie was sure he recognised Chinese on one and Russian on another. Except for the books, though, the inside of the Hobbit-hole looked as if someone had decorated it using the pictures from one of the house magazines Archie's mum loved to look at and sigh over. There were paintings here and there, but they were just mountains and sitting medieval ladies and a soldier with lots of medals on his red uniform and a sheathed saber over his shoulder. There were no pictures of the man, of his family, or even of a pet.
Even so, the man fit in the place, like he had been born amongst soft leather and polished dark wood and old, big books. He wore navy blue trousers that had perfectly straight creases down the legs just like in the movies and a matching waistcoat, and he had funny little bracelets over the sleeves of his collared shirt that sat just above his elbows. His clothes looked like the kind that Archie had been forced to wear to Dr John and Miss Mary's wedding, but instead of looking itchy and uncomfortable in them, the man seemed as comfortable as if wearing pajamas. He wasn't a skinny man, not like Mr Livingston the upper maths teacher, but he wasn't large, either, and he didn't quite have all of his brown hair. His eyes were sharp and dark— as he looked closely at Archie standing next to the chair, it seemed for a moment that those eyes were looking right through his skull and into his brain like a book. "I-I'm sorry to bother you, sir."
The man's expression didn't change, but he did huff out a little breath, a bit like a laugh. Leaning heavily on his wooden cane as he walked, so that his footsteps were more of a labored tap-thump, tap-thump, the man went to the lion table and poured a second cup of tea from the service sitting atop it on a silver tray. Two slices of toast spread with what looked like honey were carefully arranged on a small plate. "There is a chair in the kitchen. Fetch it and join me for breakfast."
Archie hurried to do as he was bid; he was half-convinced that he was in the presence of some sort of wizard or spymaster and this was just a test to decide whether to let him live or turn him to dust where he stood. Wrapping his arms around the wooden back of the chair, he wrestled the unwieldy, heavy thing into the sitting room, edging around tables and other furniture before lowering it to the floor next to the lion table. The man set a second plate of tea and toast on the table in front of Archie once he was seated. Archie wondered if it meant he'd passed the test.
"I admit that I was surprised to see someone your age," the man said after delicately chasing a bite of toast with a sip of his tea. "I was given to understand that this was a secondary school."
Archie looked down at his hands, still creased a bit by the carvings of the chair, and fiddled anxiously as he finished chewing. "I'm not a student here."
His very rich stepfather must have been quite convincing after the wedding two years ago, because it had only taken Steve about a week to talk Archie's mum into leaving Archie with his uncle at Rudbridge's so she could go off on 'Business Trips' with him. It wasn't terrible—Archie had a whole dorm room to himself with a bunk bed and a huge window and no curfew—but he did miss seeing his mum every day, and her phone calls weren't as frequent as they had been during the last trip, and the trips just seemed to get longer and longer every time. He'd spent the last winter hols at Rudbridge's; there were some shells and a painted boomerang on his bookshelf now, with love from Mummy and Steve from Melbourne!, and a book on anatomy from Sherlock Holmes with lots of pictures and scribbled notes in the margins. He still couldn't tell which one it had surprised him more to receive. Mostly he just wondered if things would be different if he fought being sent to Uncle Ulysses next time, and did his best to fend off the creeping suspicion that Steve really hadn't been very convincing at all. He knew he reminded Mum of his dad; sometimes she looked at him and just… closed up.
The man was watching Archie with that see-through look again; he nodded with such understanding in his expression that Archie wondered if he'd accidentally spoken aloud. "I cannot honestly say I would have chosen to come here, either." Something about his cool, quiet expression shifted minutely and suddenly it was a warm, quiet expression. "What is your name, child?"
Archie swallowed another bite of the toast and honey. "Archie." When the man didn't respond immediately, he floundered a bit. "Er. Archibald West, sir."
The man smiled. "Archibald. A strong name— you should be very proud."
"It's weird," Archie huffed reflexively, and then winced. "Sorry, sir."
Instead of getting angry, the man merely flicked one hand dismissively. "People are rarely kind to those they regard as being different, Archibald, and it is very unusual for their reasoning to have any basis in logic or fact. This holds true for adults as well as children." Archie suspected that was meant to be reassuring, as it sounded a lot like some of the things Sherlock had said when Archie mentioned the other kids making fun of him at school. Instead of saying it out of long practice, however, something told Archie that the man believed what he was saying without question.
For a moment, the man went quiet as he stared through the fireplace. Archie stilled his swinging legs and even stopped chewing— the man looked sad in the same way that Sherlock sometimes did, like he was somewhere very far away in his brain where things had been happy, or at least better than they were. It always seemed… wrong, somehow, to keep doing whatever he was doing when someone looked like that. After a long, quiet wait, the man dropped a hand to his right leg and massaged it gingerly. "You and I are rather alike, Archibald."
"We are, sir?" The idea that he might have something in common with this man, with his posh clothes and his limp and his wizard's eyes, was as surprising as it was pleasing.
"Yes indeed." Archie almost looked away when the man turned from the fire and met his gaze, but something kept his eyes locked on those piercing, dark ones. "We stand apart, you and I, through no choice of our own," the man said softly, sadly, fiercely. "We stand apart and, perforce, we notice."
Uncle Ulysses had much to say on the subject of the man in the Hobbit-hole. "It's ruddy irregular, is what it is," he huffed darkly around the stem of his pipe. Uncle Ulysses was one of those men who very sorely wanted everything to be regular. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner took place atprecise intervals, queues were orderly, lessons were taught properly, and everything was done according to strict, regular protocols, no exceptions. Naturally, this meant that every irregularity was yet another incontrovertible sign of the crumbling moral rectitude of the nation. Uncle Ulysses was a stalwart bastion of regularity in a disorderly moral void, a lonely crusader from a time of sense and sensibility. He was also one of the biggest idiots Archie had ever met, and Archie's classmate Donnie ate glue when he thought no one was looking.
"We needed a replacement for Saunders," said Mr Millby, twirling a pencil over long, clever fingers. "With exams right around the corner, none of us have the time to cover his class when his curriculum's all but illegible."
Smoke billowed from Uncle Ulysses' nostrils, making him look a bit like a darkly-mustachioed dragon. "That we did, but it's irregular, Wes, hiring a man after that interview. Why, my Archie could have got the job if he'd stood for it that day!" He thumped Archie's back and Archie barely avoided spilling his orange juice all over the table. "Who is he, anyway? Never seen a man limp like that unless he'd been shot, and where the hell does a man get shot in old Blighty, I ask? Nowhere, not unless he's up to no good!"
"I heard Mr Rudbridge say something about America," Miss Laurence the secretary added breathlessly. "They've all got guns over there, you know, guns and rights." This was said decisively; clearly Americans possessing both guns and 'rights' was enough to convict them of the crime. Next to her, Sister Constance had her palm halfway to her face before she caught herself and redirected it, propping her chin and attempting to look serious and thoughtful. Just as it was generally known that Miss Laurence was hired primarily for her phenomenal talent for organisation, it was widely understood that Sister Constance, an Ignatian nun, had been hired for her tireless logic and intellect. It was also widely understood that Sister Constance's religion was all that kept her from taking Rudbridge's resident idiots off at the knees every time they opened their mouths. Archie hid his face in his second breakfast; his uncle, being one of those idiots, had apparently interpreted Sister Constance's pained expression as support for his rant instead of the exasperation it was.
Puffed up with righteous agitation at the mere mention of Americans, Uncle Ulysses chomped at his pipe and furrowed his brow and straightened in his chair with a grunt of disapproval. "Americans!" he spat in distaste, and then said it again: "Americans!" In a world gone mad, Americans were the ones opening the door to let the bull into the china shop, the ultimate offence to all things properly ordered. "No interview, shows up at six on a Saturday, mysterious limps, and now Americans! I say he's no good, no good at all— mark my words, that man is trouble with a capital T!" he declared with a sharp rap of his fist on the table. Someone at the other end muttered 'and that rhymes with P', drawing stifled chuckles from Mr Millby and Miss Gurnee the drama teacher, which only incensed Uncle Ulysses further. "His CV's blank as a slate! Graduated from the University of London in '88 with top marks and a doctorate, and then faffed off to nowhere for twenty-seven years. No publications, no teaching, nothing— and now all the sudden he's here after a round of QI and a cuppa? I want to know what a man does for three decades that doesn't show up on his damn résumé!"
Archie clenched his jaw and very deliberately did not mention Mr Thornton the ex-chemistry teacher and his recreational research, Ms Scorese and the inch-thick file the Interpol agent had given Mr Rudbridge, or Mr Dean and the unlocked lockbox full of jewellry, silver picture frames, bone china, smartphones, and school silverware a pair of prankster students had found in his desk drawer—they had all been as regular as church on Sundays, according to Uncle Ulysses. Listening to some of the things his uncle was saying, however, Archie decided that he wouldn't stay quiet. The man in the Hobbit-hole was like him, alone because people made him alone, and Archie wasn't about to let his uncle add to that. "It could have been a car accident," he said, loudly enough to cut through Uncle Ulysses's bashing-on.
"What's that?"
Sitting up, Archie met his uncle's gaze and, for the sake of damage control, put on his best 'innocent boy trying to talk with the grown-ups' face. "Well if he's got a bad limp, maybe he was in a car accident, like Monty in Year Five." Monty in Year Five didn't exist. What did exist was the anatomy book with Sherlock's scribbles that described all the ways a broken femur played out in the long term based on how badly it was broken, but Uncle Ulysses didn't think much of facts from books he hadn't read. "He's got a cane and a limp and everything. His mum said he'd have it for the rest of his life."
The pipe dipped a bit as Uncle Ulysses stared down at Archie. "I suppose that's possible," he ventured gruffly, visibly caught off-guard. He never did know how to respond to the Innocent Boy sham, for all of his bluster and arrogance around other adults— his regard for Archie hovered somewhere between a teacher's interest in an intelligent pupil and a baffled, paternal protectiveness, which was just enough that he would cut off his rants if Archie put himself in opposition. "You mustn't hang about him, though, Archie. Haven't got the measure of him yet. It's all very irregular, you see. Got to be careful."
Archie nodded dutifully. Across the table, Sister Constance lifted an eyebrow.