The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(42)
“Well done, Holmes!”
“But this discovery was commonplace compared to finding the Bountiful Harvest.”
“Another ship?”
“Certainly, another ship, Watson, but not just any ship. The ship. A whaling ship out of the very same stretch of Massachusetts coastline from which our two refugee sisters have come. Or at least it pretends to be a whaler, but really the ship is too small for that purpose. At any rate, the sisters’ ship has come from New Bedford, but this one sails from a much smaller harbour called Innsmouth. It arrived just after the Lady Evelyn, but secured itself at one of the little wharfs, so as to avoid notice. But I found her anyway, right where she sits in the harbour still like a bloated leech, waiting, waiting…”
He shook his head, reached over and pushed the covered curried fish plate another foot further away, and continued his narrative.
“I carried out my investigation in the guise of a dockworker, as you saw, confident that I might gather all the information that I needed as one of their own.” He mashed his barely smoked cigarette into his breakfast plate and jumped to his feet. Rummaging among the desk he found the briar pipe. Finding this evidently more satisfactory, he packed some shag in and lit it from the gas.
“The Bountiful Harvest,” he said, “has lain there less than forty-eight hours, but already dark myths spring up all around it. The sailors and dockworkers talk of nothing else. The swollen deformity of the hull, the odd sounds heard during the late hour from inside, the general disreputable look of the crew… but the most striking detail of all was the date, which the harbourmaster had just sent via telegram to America to confirm. I did not ask him to, mind; he’d already taken the expense upon himself. In another ship, the small detail might have been attributed to clerical error, but the Bountiful Harvest has caused such a commotion that all the details which do not match the expected are to be confirmed.”
“What details?” I asked.
“As I said, Watson, the date of departure was the most striking of these,” he said. “The Lady Evelyn, which the Nowaks took passage on, was a transatlantic steamer, and so took only a little over a week to cross the Atlantic, which is a fair but not unheard of time for a steamer. Quite the advancement over the three to six months it takes a sailing ship. Not only is this due to sustained greater speeds despite the wind conditions, but also to the fact that a steamer can take a straight line to its destination, whereas a sailing ship is often forced to track back and forth in a rather indirect course. Now, considering that the Bountiful Harvest is visibly a sailing ship, and not a terribly new one, how long would you expect it to take?”
“Three months?” I said.
“What would you say if I told you that the Bountiful Harvest, without the advantages of steam power, completed their journey in less than four days. The captain submitted a much more reasonable date to the harbourmaster, but a chance comment from one of the crew disclosed the actual departure date, which the harbourmaster confirmed with the American port. How would you account for that?”
“I really have no idea,” I said.
“Nor I.” He knocked out the still-burning embers of the pipe into the fire and proceeded to refill it. “The simplest assumption would be that the date is some error or fabrication, but certainly there is something very odd about this ship. Have you ever seen a ship with ports at the bottom of the hull, Watson?”
“Ports?” I said. “You mean an entrance of some kind?”
“That is exactly what I mean,” he said. “I could see them quite clearly through the water, standing as I was on the docks. Permanent fixtures near the bottom of the boat. Keeping the copper hull clean on an older boat such as the Bountiful Harvest is no easy matter, and this task is a common obsession to any decent ship’s captain. Barnacles and the like are scraped off any time she puts into harbour, for such protrusions affect the resistance of a hull moving through water and add unnecessary time to any voyage. But instead of a flat copper hull, this ship has huge, flat metal doors, with seals and handles required for their operation. In addition to this, there are a curious set of sealed holes high up in the hull. Though covered with clamped-on metal lids, they still presented themselves as great curiosities. No captain would allow such constructions, yet there they were, like an artificial mole on the face of a court beauty. Why?”
“I’m sure I have no idea,” I said. I was intrigued by Holmes’s story now, despite my previous urgency to relate my own.
“The crew, in general, is an unsavoury lot; dirty, sullen, and hunched over to a man. They watched me with unwavering expressions and took pains to drive me away from the boat when they saw that I had interest in it. Both of the other ships using the same wharf have made excuses and departed, so now the Bountiful Harvest is all by itself, sitting underneath the Blackfriars Bridge, like a poisonous reptile under a rock.
“My investigations after that were forced, by necessity, to be done from a distance. But before the afternoon, I chanced to see one of the sailors leaving in a most furtive manner, slipping down a rope near the bow rather than using the gangplank. He seemed different than his fellow shipmates, tall and blonde and without the open stare that seemed to characterize the rest of them. I took a chance and followed him and was quite rewarded for the trouble.
“He left the riverfront behind, moving at a brisk walk, as if all he wished were to put as much of the city as possible between him and the ship. When he seemed to feel that he had accomplished this and slowed his steps, his first destination was an alehouse near St Barts. I followed him in, made his acquaintance as if by accident, and with the application of a few more glasses of beer, drew his story from him. It was not difficult, for I don’t think he could bring his mind around to anything else.