Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm by Andrew Lane Page A

problems of the mind. With his morphine treatment Siger grew up tall and strong, with nobody outside the family knowing that anything was wrong. He married into a good family, and joined the Army. If it was discovered that he was ill in the head, then he would be cashiered from the Army. His friends and neighbours would withdraw from him. Shame would be brought on the family – not that I care particularly about that, but he and your mother would lose everything . Not only that, but the stigma would attach itself to him, to her, and to you and your brother. You would be labelled as the sons of a madman. People would assume you were likely to go mad yourselves.’
    ‘How did Mrs Eglantine find out about this?’ Sherlock whispered.
    ‘She was a maid at the asylum,’ Aunt Anna said quietly. ‘This was when she was young. She must have seen Siger one day, quite by accident, when he was older and wearing his Army uniform. She realized the scandal that would attach itself to the family if it were known that he had spent time in an asylum and was dependent on drugs for his sanity, and she started blackmailing us.’
    Sherlock frowned. ‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Why blackmail you ? Why not blackmail my father, or my mother, or Mycroft?’
    ‘Perhaps she was,’ Sherrinford said simply. ‘We never asked.’
    A thought occurred to Sherlock. He paused before saying anything, turning the thought over and over in his mind, examining it from all angles just in case he’d missed something. It was a big thought, and he wanted to make sure he’d got it right before he said something embarrassing.
    ‘From what you’ve told us,’ he said eventually, and carefully, ‘the family secret that you were keeping concerned my father, and my father’s side of the family. It occurs to me that if the secret got out, the family shame wouldn’t reflect on you . It would be us – and in particular him – who would face problems.’
    Sherlock’s Aunt Anna smiled at him and reached out across the table to pat his hand. ‘Bless you, Sherlock,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t let that happen to Siger. He’s family. He and Sherrinford grew up together. We couldn’t stand by and let him be shamed in that way. I remember how proud he was when he got into the Army. It would be quite wrong to take that away from him.’
    ‘But your lives have been affected badly by Mrs Eglantine’s presence in this house.’
    ‘The Good Lord puts us all through the fire at some time in our lives,’ Sherrinford said. ‘He tests us, and we must not be found wanting.’
    ‘What else should we have done?’ Aunt Anna asked, more practically. ‘Should we have told that odious Mr Harkness that we were not going to pay, and then watched as our own kin was humiliated in public? That would not have been right.’
    Sherlock glanced from his aunt to his uncle. He found himself thinking about them in a different way. They weren’t fusty old relics of a bygone age to him now; they were living people, with feelings and cares and concerns. He tried to visualize Sherrinford and his father playing together as boys. He tried to visualize his aunt as a younger woman, in her finest dress, perhaps attending the wedding of Siger Holmes and Sherlock’s mother. For a moment he found that he could.
    ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. ‘On behalf of my mother and my father, neither of whom can say this themselves for different reasons, thank you.’
    ‘It was the least we could do,’ said Sherrinford.
    ‘It wasn’t,’ Sherlock replied. ‘That’s why it was such a noble and self-sacrificing gesture.’
    ‘Now,’ Aunt Anna said, ‘I must go and see to hiring another housekeeper. This place won’t run itself, and the maids are so flighty that they need someone looking over their shoulder all the time, otherwise who knows what will happen.’
    ‘And I have a library to tidy,’ Uncle Sherrinford said. ‘That could take some time.’
    They both