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Holmes

Tuesday, April 24, 1821 Bay of Naples

I t was the captain’s idea to interview them all, to perform a methodical inquisition. He pulled aside each sailor, asked them the same questions: Who saw who, and when? The officers then weighed these responses against the watch schedule and the list of tasks that had been assigned to each sailor the prior morning.

This narrowed it down to four men, Holmes among them. It was then a mere matter of exclusion.

With the four men corralled, Quinto demanded they pull out their knives again. With these in hand, he went to the front of the ship where the damaged rigging still lay. He began to saw away at the lines, just as Holmes had done. He then held the ropes close, examining the way each blade cut through the threads.

In the end, it was undeniable: Holmes’s knife had done it. It was so obvious, even Holmes could not deny the charges.

“Have you been the one stealing from the men, too?” Quinto asked him. He’d sent the other men to the berthing deck. “The snuffbox, my brandy…”

“No,” Holmes spat back. “If so, you’d have seen me drunk by now.”

Quinto narrowed his eyes. “Why’d you do it, then? Why’d you cut the rigging?”

Because you intend to capture and kill the woman I love , Holmes thought to himself. But he didn’t dare reveal this or anything else he’d overheard when eavesdropping on the conversation between Quinto and the captain. Instead he stayed silent, praying his journal—which he’d tucked against his lower back in the event he was caught and banished from the ship—did not come loose. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, feeling the book’s waterproof oilskin sleeve chafe against him.

Holmes’s silence only infuriated Quinto further. Quinto pushed him against one of the masts, put his hand against his throat. “Do you know about the—”

But then he stopped, eyeing Holmes suspiciously.

About the what? Did he mean the plan to seize Positano’s women or something else?

Quinto released his hold, and Holmes bent over, gulping for air. “I’d kill you if I could,” he said. “But I think Matteo would prefer to do it himself.”

“Kill me?” Holmes said. “For cutting some lines? Hardly seems worth it.”

Quinto spit out a laugh. “He doesn’t give a whit for the rigging.” He tucked Holmes’s knife into his back pocket. “You haven’t any idea what else is on this brig, you fool. If I let it sink, why, they would never forgive me.”

He grabbed Holmes by the arm and led him to the cargo hold, as far aft as they could go. The space was dark and dank, hidden by wooden crates.

Ahead, Holmes spotted their destination: an iron cage built into the very beams of the ship. His prison cell. And next to it, something wrapped in a dark canvas shroud. It was six feet long. Motionless.

Nico’s dead body.

***

The vessel remains impotent , Holmes wrote in his diary a short while later. It will be some time, I think, before we begin to move.

I hear the constant sloshing of the bilges below the cargo deck where I’m imprisoned—a mix of seawater, festering excrement, tar, and food scraps. I smell it, too, piss and fish guts.

A rat has crawled through the iron bars. He sits at my feet, gnawing on the sole of my shoe.

It is very dark, for only the faintest light comes through a few cracks between planks. It is bitterly cold, too.

I will never sail again. This I know. After they arrest me, they will kill me.

I do not think I have fully grasped the reality that I will never lay eyes on my Mari again. I cannot breathe if I even begin to think of it. Instead, I occupy my mind with trying to unravel the puzzling comment Quinto made earlier today, moments before he imprisoned me.

You haven’t any idea what else is on this brig.