Andrew Lane - Red Leech

“But how did they know we’d take this ship?” Sherlock asked. Then he realized. “They paid off someone on every ship?”

Grivens nodded. “Every ship leaving for the next few days, anyway. That’s my guess. They found most of us in the same place — a bar where the ships’ stewards hang out between voyages.”

“But how much would that cost them?”

Grivens shrugged. “Not my problem, as long as they have enough left to pay me when I get to New York. They didn’t seem short of cash.” He reached forward and grabbed Sherlock’s hair. “They said they’d pay extra if I could get you to tell me how much you know about their plans. You can do it the easy way, without pain, and I’ll do you the favour of making sure you’re unconscious when I throw you over the side, yes? Or you can do it the difficult way, in which case I’ll have to snip your fingers off with a cigar cutter, one by one, until you tell me, and then throw you overboard still conscious.”

“I’ll shout out!" Sherlock blustered. “People will hear.”

“Didn’t I mention?” Grivens said. “I started off as a ship’s chandler, making sails, before I became a steward. Your fingers never forget the feel of an iron needle going through canvas. I’ll sew your lips shut with thick twine, boy, just for the pleasure of looking into your frightened eyes when I throw you overboard.” He paused. “Now, answer the question. How much do you know about the plans of these Yanks?”

He leaned forward, reaching for Sherlock’s hair. The iridescent blue tattoo on his wrist seemed to glow in the darkness of the cabin.

Sherlock lashed out with his booted foot, catching Grivens in the groin. The steward folded nearly double, grunting in pain.

Sherlock scrambled to his feet. Grabbing Grivens’s shoulder, he pulled him forward. The man fell, and Sherlock scrabbled to get past him and through the doorway.

The steward’s hand grabbed for Sherlock’s ankle. He pulled hard, dragging Sherlock back into the room. Sherlock twisted, lashing out with his free foot and catching Grivens above the eye. He released Sherlock with a spat curse and fell backwards.

Sherlock knew that he had to escape, and then he had to get to Amyus Crowe. He launched himself towards the door and pulled it open. The light from the oil lamps hanging on the corridor wall outside streamed into the cabin. He scrambled out, pushing the door closed, and ran off down the corridor. Behind him he heard the crash of the cabin door hitting the inside wall as Grivens pulled it open, and the thudding of feet as the steward chased after him. The corridor ended in a junction; Sherlock went left, heading for the stairs up to the deck and to safety, but he must have gone wrong somewhere because there was no sign of the stairway. Instead the corridors took him deeper and deeper into the bowels of the ship.

Faced with the choice of a stairway that led down and going back again, he chose to go down. This wasn’t passenger territory any more: the walls were cruder wood, without the ornate panelling of earlier, and the oil lamps were guttering and yellow. There was only bare wood beneath his feet: not soft carpets.

From somewhere behind him, Sherlock heard footsteps. Grivens was still on his trail. He kept moving.

The sound of the ship’s engines was closer now, like the thudding of some huge mechanical heart, and the atmosphere was noticeably warmer. Sherlock was sweating, partly because of the chase but partly because of the steam in the atmosphere.

He went round a corner to find a large door ahead of him. It was shut. He glanced over his shoulder, briefly, but there was no point going back. He could only go onward.

He opened the door and went through.

Into Hell.

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 which 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 in turn 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 which 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 doorframe 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 that. The men who worked there 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 somewhere for the various pipes and wheels to be attached. 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 pressures 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 which 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.