Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1) Read Free Page A

lest these rough men of the sea suspect a landlubber’s heart beating within his breast.
    As the night wore on, Dunning drank and sang sea shanties and listened to barnacled tales until his ordered, ledger-bound life in the City seemed but a dim-recalled dream.  He drank and caroused till the ebb of the morning, when he could distance himself no farther from that life of soul-thronged streets and metal-framed business bags, of desperate men and flying hansoms swiftly going nowhere. Then, filled with the bitterness of regret and frustration, he began to slip back.  He yearned for endless voyages upon golden caravels beneath tropical bronze suns, but he could not escape the steel trap of his appointed life.
    Finally, with a world-weary sigh, he stood unsteadily from the long table, pushed his top hat to a defiantly rakish angle, and bade his tippling companions a most very good morning.  He settled his bill with the keep, gave up trying to count his change and made for the doorway.  Even as he gripped the handle, he hesitated, wanting to go back to the light, but it was too late, and he pushed on out the door.
    The fog was just thick as when he had first sought refuge from it, perhaps thicker now in the lee of the morning.
    With the light and life within the Neptune now irretrievably behind him, he felt grasped by a bitter melancholy.  He would never know the life for which he constantly yearned, never as long as he remained a marionette to his brother’s social aspirations.  He was naught but another’s puppet, and those controlling strings were quite unbreakable.
    There were no hansoms or growlers prowling the foetid darkness of  Rotherhithe on this April morning.  He suddenly realised he had walked some distance away from the Rotherhithe Station, his intended destination, but he was not concerned, for he knew if he continued southward along Neptune to Lower Road, walking between the edge of Southwark Park and Saint Mary’s Workhouse, he would within a few minutes come within sight of the Deptford Road Station; there he could either catch an early train or indulge in the luxury of a cab, or at least pass the remainder of the darkness in relative comfort and security.
    He trekked through the fog-bound night south along Neptune until the avenue emptied into Lower Road.  He found himself strolling along the eastern limits of Southwark Park, sixty-three acres of unmitigated blackness behind the nearly impenetrable fog. Opposite him was the brooding lightless bulk of the workhouse. He did not like the loneliness of the region, the desolation of warehouses and ramshackle boarding houses for foreign sailors, any of which could easily have been a front for slaving rings or opium dens. Although he had a romantic turn of heart which his brother would never understand, he was not so foolish to remain ignorant of the dark ways of the world, or the evils of the human soul.
    He forced a smile at the worries suddenly welling from within him, a combination of the black depression that gripped him and too much talk this evening about the darker mysteries of London.
    Perhaps stopping at the Neptune, or lingering so long, had not been altogether wise.  If he had followed his brother’s orders he would have been home out of the fog hours ago; or if he had shown a little more moderation in his indulgence, he would have been able to find his way to the busy Rotherhithe Station without confusion.  He was able to shrug off his brother’s concerns more easily than he was able to dismiss the foolishness or possible consequences  of his own intemperance.
    As he walked, letting the morning’s coolness draw off the heat of the evening’s carousing, he kept an ear out for the quick clopping that would indicate a passing hansom in the mist, or the low rumble of a four-wheeler for hire, however unlikely they were to appear in this district, at this hour.  But all that came to his hearing were his own ragged breaths and his own muffled