Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

In centuries to come, some Yorkshire locals still referred to the ever-dwindling estate—dwindling due to inevitable entailment of Commons and larger and larger sections being sold off to pay debts by the distant relatives who’d assumed ownership of the farm—as “Ashcroft Farm”, but by 1800 the appellation had become “Ash Heap Acres” after the chimneys and windowless brick buildings of a profitless lead mine that had been built on the remaining 60 acres in a last-ditch effort by an American cousin to earn some money from the place. Until the lead works closed down in 1838, “Ash Heap Acres” often filled the entire Yorkshire valley with a thick, dark cloud of unhealthy lead-laced smoke.

After the death of Sherlock’s uncle Sherrinford in 1860—he had been administering Ash Heap Acres for an absentee Birmingham landlord—Sherlock’s father had bought (at far too high a price) that over-mined and overgrown Yorkshire farm and then brought the 13-year-old Mycroft and 6-year-old Sherlock out to the remaining 38 acres of ruined woodland, unyielding fields, grazed-out pastures, and polluted swamp. Mycroft never left his small room while there, but the farm—what was left of it—was an exploratory and play-filled heaven to the young Sherlock. He even had a swaybacked pony to ride during those three golden years in the Yorkshire Dales.

But by early 1863, Sherlock’s father, who was both a drunkard and spendthrift and who, in young Sherlock’s memory, had spent most of his time at Ash Heap Acres riding the plow horse to nearby Swinton to waste his nights (and many days) in Swaledale’s more sordid public houses, had lost ownership of the farm after spending the last of his brother Sherrinford’s money. Then in 1863, the father and his two extraordinary but unappreciated sons returned to London and a succession of ever-more-seedy rental homes and boarding houses. For Sherlock, it meant a return to their family life of always fleeing their creditors and his return to the streets.

But Mycroft, turning 16 that year, did not return to London with them. He went to Oxford instead.

Even while “in exile” at Ash Heap Acres in the Yorkshire Dales, their father had used Mycroft’s mathematical gifts to have his son pore through racing touts’ data sheets and pick future thoroughbred winners sold at Tattersall in London in Hyde Park, and then Holmes, Sr., after cabling cronies in the city, would place bets on those very horses at Alexandra Park’s “The Frying Pan” racecourse in the city. What Sherlock had noticed in those years (but their father hadn’t) was that Mycroft—seemingly as lazy and listless as he was overweight and brilliant—had been taking money from his father’s bets to place his own racing wagers, adding his secret picks through the agency of his father’s crony who lived in London and returning his smaller but ever-accruing winnings to a separate account. By 1863, 16-year-old Mycroft Holmes had set aside quite a bit of money. And he knew precisely how he was going to spend it.

Mycroft qualified to enter Oxford at the age of 16, paid his tuition and board with what he called his “Tattersall-Frying Pan Money”, and late one night, after waking his younger brother and uncharacteristically shaking hands with young Sherlock (Mycroft hated touching or being touched by other people), took himself off to Oxford. He brought with him only his cardboard suitcase containing a few clothes and a cheese sandwich Sherlock had made for him.

Over the next few years, disowned by his furious father, Mycroft sent Sherlock elaborately encrypted letters in which the older brother described how he reveled in everything that venerable institution had to offer, including the friendship of a certain mathematics professor at Christ Church named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, soon to be known to the world as Lewis Carroll. Mycroft and Dodgson soon became fast friends, sharing their excitement about mathematics (especially prime numbers), difficult codes, and odd patterns of numbers within such everyday things as railway schedules.

William Sherlock Holmes never met Dodgson; the younger son spent the later years of the 1860’s and early 1870’s fighting for his survival in the rough streets of London. In the late 1870’s, Mycroft Holmes plucked his younger brother out of the streets and paid to send him to Oxford. Sherlock refused to attend a school where his older brother had been such a well-known and admired figure. Mycroft then used the money to send his brother to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he hoped Sherlock would focus on Natural Sciences. Sherlock enjoyed some of his chemical-laboratory time at Cambridge but hated his instructors and fellow students and soon dropped out—twice.

To get a glimpse of the actual biography of the early years of Sherlock Holmes—a biography that will never be written—one might use as a template a biography of the younger years of James Joyce, with his drunken, often abusive father first renting fine homes in neighborhoods such as Kensington and then, fleeing landlords demanding rent, dragging his sons to ever-dirtier-and-more-cramped rental houses and then to seedy rooms in boarding houses smelling of boiled cabbage. Sherlock had almost no formal education until his brief stint at Cambridge—had never attended a school, public or private, and had only intermittent tutors at home (when his father had “made a score” on the ponies or some other shady venture).

While Holmes’s father, during the brief periods he had a few coins and he and his son were not actively fleeing landlords in the night, had the habit of hiring a succession of fairly useless (and soon-to-throw-up-their-hands-in-surrender) tutors for young Sherlock, the senior Holmes did spend real money on excellent instructors in five areas of young Sherlock Holmes’s instruction: single-stick combat which Sherlock studied from the age of 7 onwards, boxing (including time spent sparring with several retired but still-famous English champion prizefighters), four years of having a Thai expert teach him the intricacies of Muay Boran martial arts, fencing (the most expensive instruction, the young Holmes sometimes taught by top French fencing experts even when the family could barely afford food), and shooting.

It was as if Sherlock’s father envisioned his strange, wild, but often withdrawn and brooding younger son becoming a soldier someday. Sherlock Holmes, of course, even at the age of 8 or 14, had no more interest in ever being a soldier than he had in being the first aeronaut to travel via balloon to the moon.

It had begun to rain. Holmes carried no umbrella, of course, since his down-at-the-heels-working-class-American disguise would not have included such a thing, so he simply pulled his soiled and ancient Irish cloth cap lower over his brow and kept slogging along as the paved streets finally gave out for good. Streets, as such, had all but disappeared in this part of the Southwest slums and been replaced by countless, hovel-lined alleys consisting of mud and deep ruts and the occasional board thrown down to more easily traverse some important short distance as from a tumbledown tin shack to a three-sided wooden privy.

His contacts in New York had told him that for what he sought he should seek out a former blacksmith shop on what was called Casey’s Alley, but of course there were no street signs here in the slums, no corner policeman from whom to ask directions (not that he would have given them to the unemployed-bounder likes of Holmes), and when Holmes asked directions of some raggedy children playing at torturing a rat, they responded by throwing horse apples at his head.

Before he found the abandoned blacksmith shop and the men he sought, Holmes came across the sort of abandoned commercial building he’d hoped to find amidst these shacks and empty factories. He stepped up onto the structure’s disintegrating wooden sidewalk, kicked open the warped front door, and looked inside.