Forty minutes along, and the rehearsal was not going well. They had hit nasty weather the previous day, and the ship still pitched and rolled like a lumbering beast trying to rid itself of fleas.

Kit was less than pleased to be treated in such a dismissive manner. She could not sleep, she could not eat, and she could not find Sherlock Holmes. He was absent from rehearsal again today, as he had been for the last three days. The actors remained tense, just as Sasanoff remained livid, and absolutely unwilling to admit that his loss was hampering the progress of the play in any way.

Kit kept her head down, focusing on her notes as if her life was at stake.

Only Hassinia Trune was unaffected.

Helena Selby was delighted. She routinely glanced from Kit to the porthole Holmes preferred to smoke beside. Her plotting was practically audible. Kit ground her teeth together and said nothing. Even Betsey Cobham's angelic hovering around Langdale Pike was riling her today.

Finally, after a particularly Malvolio-heavy scene was stumbled through, Sasanoff placed his gloved hands palm-down on the long cafeteria table and turned to Kit, his face lit with an unholy inner fire, and said with a chilling lack of intonation: "Get him back."

The director's grey hair was in disarray, his silk scarf damp around his through with anxious perspiration. "I don't care what it takes, but get him back here working. Today."

Kit swallowed hard. "I have no idea where he is. It's a big ship. He could hide for days."

Sasanoff shook his head. "I don't care if he's stolen a skip and rowed himself back to bloody England. Acquire yourself a life jacket and row him back. Now."

The action froze on stage. Langdale Pike surreptitiously took Betsey Cobham's hand.

Kit stood. She closed her book, and then left the roof, her face beet red up to her ears.

Holmes' room was beset with it's accustomed clutter, but devoid of his presence. Kit sank onto Sasanoff's bunk, hands in her lap, and looked around dejectedly. Holmes' trunk was still there, his things spread around the floor and any other level, available surface. His smell hung in the air, aftershave and something herbal. The acrid tinge of burnt tobacco, hair tonic, his warm, soft-skinned body. She blinked away such unproductive thoughts. Her fingers drummed on her lap, and she gave them a quick glance. The bandages were gone now, and the brace only worn at night. The sight of them made her miss him even more. She loved his hands, quick long fingers, steepled, pointing, arching through the air on some crazy path from one point to the other. Everything he was showed in those hands, quick, tender, chaotic, forever reaching out and batting the unwanted away.

He had been upset at the culmination of this most recent case. She had watched him at the poolside, after they had both climbed out, his eyes fastened on Anne Austin, waiting for some sign, any quiet little acknowledgement, anything. His childhood friend had been led from the room without even a parting glance in his direction. Lord Austin had been found several hours later, hiding in steerage.

Now both brother and sister were being kept in a small room in the cargo hold, watched in shifts around the clock. And Sherlock Holmes had disappeared.

Kit had gone to see the Austin's once since their imprisonment, and asked if either of them needed for anything. Neither of them would speak with her. They simply stared, unwilling to release each other's clasped hand. Kit understood. Really, her visit had been more to assuage her own feelings of guilt rather than ease theirs. They had each other, and they were already hardening themselves to the inevitable moment when they would be parted, never to see each other again.

Kit was informed that Holmes had not been to see them at all.

She sighed, looking around the room again. So. He was hiding. Like an animal clipped during a hunt that had slunk off to crouch under some bush somewhere to lick his wounds and talk himself into some drastic decision or another.

She was mortally afraid of this. Of what he might be trying to talk himself into, or, more importantly, out of, this time. She closed her eyes and imagined him, slouched in a chair, shoulders painfully high, one cigarette after another dropping lazily from his hand to burn through the carpet. She concentrated on that. On the worst possible carpet for him to destroy. The answer can to her almost at once, and she came to her feet, smiling for the first time in three days.

The first-class lounge was unusually quiet. It was as if people had reason to stay away. Kit stood inside the door, scanning the room. It was smokier than she had ever seen it. He must be here. Undaunted by his apparent absence, she went farther into the lounge, checking all the dark corners thoroughly, all the nooks and bench seats and single-person tables nudged behind heavy privacy curtains. In the farthest corner of the room and single wing-backed chair had been turned to the wall. She could see nothing of it's occupant, but clouds of blue smoke wafted up from it towards the ceiling.

Her heart leapt in answer to the sight.

She crossed the room and stood behind the chair for a moment, peering over at the top of a slickly-pomaded head. She waited. Intuition told her he already knew she was there. If patience was the game, she knew she would win.

Finally, a snort came from the hidden occupant of the chair, and she saw the high shoulders drop a little.

"I wondered how long before you found me." His voice was rough from too much smoking.

"I'm glad to hear you haven't forgotten all about me," she countered, dragging a chair away from a small table nearby and setting it at right angles to him, so that she could at least view his profile.

He removed the pipe from his teeth and tossed her an annoyed look, tapping his cold ash out onto the carpet and slipping the briarwood into his coat pocket. There were deep purple smudges under his eyes. He steepled his fingers in front of his face, staring at her defiantly now, and she returned his look placidly, not caring what emotions he could read in her face.

"I see you expect me to confide in you," he said. "You wish me to spew some revelatory nonsense for you to devour." His mouth twisted into an ugly shape.

Kit couldn't help the smile that pulled her mouth lopsided. "No."

He rolled his eyes in frustration. "But you do expect me to unburden myself to you. I will not."

"Ultimately, that will be your decision." She did not move from her spot, simply smiled at him calmly.

"And, why should I?" he sneered.

"Because no one else can understand you so perfectly."

"'Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius'."

"So true in general, so fallacious in particular.' Not everything can be solved by quoting Gibbon, Sherlock. I know you are badly hurt."

He stared at her for a moment, and then, using his hands on the armrests of the chair, pushed himself upright and stalked out. Kit watched him go.

She then stood, rearranged the two chairs around the small table close-by, and ordered a pot of tea and sandwiches from the Barman. She was just re-seating herself when Holmes came striding back in, accusing finger leading the way.

"You, woman, are a menace! You presume entirely too much, and I don't think you have any idea what a serious and precarious situation you find yourself in at present! And I know several people who can pick out Gibbon without any serious trouble. His work on Greco-Roman-"

"On the contrary, Sherlock," she cut him off quickly, "I understand it all to well. Perhaps better than you. Please sit." She gestured to his recently vacated chair.

"I will not."

The Barman appeared with the refreshments, setting them on the table. Kit crooked an eyebrow at Holmes. "Then I will just have to finish all this alone."

His eyes cut away from her, and she watched the muscle in the side of his jaw twitch frantically as she began to set sandwiches on two plates. He lasted until she poured the tea. She handed the cup and saucer over to him as he petulantly retook his seat.

"Splash of milk, one sugar."

He nodded and grudgingly took a sip. She could just make out the rigidity in his forearms lessen. His shoulders lowered a fraction of an inch more. "How long has it been since you've eaten?"

He muttered something unintelligible, not lifting his head from his cup.

"That's what I thought." She carried on blithely, setting the sandwich in front of him. She had ordered roast beef. Something she knew he was partial to. Without mustard. He glanced at it, and then back at her, one eyebrow hiked up slightly.

"They were your trusted friends, Sherlock, and they were willing to trade on that friendship. They relied on it to influence you. It is understandable that you should feel betrayed."

He set his tea cup back down with a sharp porcelain clink.

"And now you are in a quandary," she continued. "Because they have unwittingly justified all your worst fears about trusting people. They have opened a wound in you, and I think I've just caught you in the act of worrying it."

His stare remained icy, turning his often storm grey eyes into something flat and steely. "You, woman, are perverse."

"No, I am curious, Sherlock. Will you decide that I fit into this new category of people who Shall Not Be Trusted? Or that I Must Be Kept Safe from them? For my own good?"

For the first time, he seemed at a loss, and Kit pressed her advantage, meal, setting, time and space all forgotten. She leaned foreword, drawn towards him, wishing she could reach out and grab him. She knew he would bolt if she did. "I wonder if you will decide to shut me out? Just to feed on the secret pleasure of your own pain. Like worrying a loose tooth. It is a difficult pleasure to forego."

His chest rose and fell, fingers twitching against each other in front of his face. A lock of slick hair had fallen over one of his eyes, cutting a dark line across his now white face.

"Are you quite finished?" His voice was low and lethal sounding. She nodded, swallowing around her certainty that he was about to leave again. Instead he shifted his eyes to the ceiling, as if unwilling to look at her face. His fingers played with a fold of fabric across his knee. "I'm glad you're able to dissect me so calmly," he said.

"I'm not calm, Sherlock. I'm terrified. I think you may be just stubborn and self-destructive enough to convinced yourself that you would be leaving me for my own good. In time, you might even be able to talk yourself into believing it. You would be able to move on, where as I…couldn't."

"And I should just forgive, should I?"

"No, darling," she reached for his hand, but he yanked it away from her. "What the Austin's did was despicable. You have every right to be devastated."

"I am not-" he broke off suddenly, realizing he was dangerously close to confiding in her. And he longed to so much. He glared at her instead. "And it's within your power to ease me, is it?"

"Of course it is. You are half of my heart. I will care for yours as well as mine, if you'll let me."

His eyes found hers again with a look of awe. She waited patiently for him, unwilling to move even one inch.

Holmes remained silent for what seemed to him a very long time, before he allowed himself the slight movement of leaning forward to reclaim his tea. When he straightened up again his anger was gone, replaced instead with a pensive expression, his eyes a drizzly colour of grey.

"You are an unusual problem to solve, Miss Rushford."

"Indeed, Mr. Holmes. Lucky for us both I know how you treasure a mystery."

He smiled slightly, and they continued to sit comfortably in silence for a moment, until a stray thought brought Kit's head up sharply.

"Sherlock?"

"Hmmm?"

"When were you born?"

"January sixth."

"Ah. Capricorn. I should have known."

He twitched an eyebrow up at her. "I daresay. I have known almost from the moment I met you that you were a Leo."

"But, how…"

"Dramatic? Creative? Self-confident? And extremely difficult to resist." He shook his head, and set his tea down on the table between them, pulled a cigarette out of the case in his pocket, and lit it. "I suppose Sasanoff will be expecting us back in rehearsal soon."

"Indeed," Kit agreed.

Holmes raised an eyebrow, noting her lack of movement. "But not yet, it seems."

"No, not yet," Kit confirmed. "For the moment I think we are just fine as we are.

Here Holmes's story paused, and I blinked, unaware that I had been sitting trace-like before him, dumb to the passage of time. Not so my compatriot, who, though in the midst of a memory, had noted that about nine o'clock the light among the trees had been extinguished, and all was dark in the direction of the Manor House.

Two hours had passed slowly away, and then, suddenly, just at the stroke of eleven, a single bright light shone out right in front of us. It was at this sign that Holmes ceased his story.

"That is our signal," he said, springing to his feet; "it comes from the middle window."

As we passed out he exchanged a few words with the landlord, explaining that we were going on a late visit to an acquaintance, and that it was possible that we might spend the night there. A moment later we were out on the dark road, a chill wind blowing in our faces, and one yellow light twinkling in front of us through the gloom to guide us on our sombre errand.