Vanishing Girl by Shane Peacock Page B

angry. Has the ancient apothecary run out of patience after all? Is the apprentice about to be sent back to the streets? While Sherlock was away, he had barely given a thought to the fact that he hadn’t told his old friend where he’d gone and that he’d missed school. All he had considered were his own goals.
    “My deepest apologies, sir,” says the boy. And he means it.
    Sigerson Bell has a heart as soft as a marshmallow. It is especially squishy when it comes to Sherlock Holmes. He admires the boy’s brains and integrity, though he worries about his inwardness and the sadness he doesn’t seem able to shake.
    “Solipsistic, that’s you,” says the apothecary, clearing his high-pitched voice. “Look up that word in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary some day, my boy.
Solipsistic!
”
    “Mr. Bell, I will understand if you –”
    “Well, well,” declares the old man, “no need to wallow in past disappointments, get right down into the mud, the … cow dung of regrets … are you well, young man?”
    “I have something to tell you.”
    Bell smiles in spite of himself. He motions for Sherlock to take a stool at the long lab table and sits on one by his side. He is “all ears” at this moment, bending one of his elephantine lugs in the boy’s direction.
    Sherlock tells him almost everything. He includes the way he feels: how, against his better judgment, he tried to investigate the Rathbone kidnapping, what Inspector Lestrade said about him in public, and how desperately he wanted to defeat and shame him; how he hoped to blunt the plans of the devious criminals who did this, members of a class of humanity he hates. He doesn’t mention what Mr. Doyle might have done for him because that dream is gone, and he forgets about the little boy in the workhouse.
    “Well, first of all, one must pursue things for the right reasons,” says the old man after a lengthy pause. “And secondly … you know, you know very well, that I am an alchemist as well as an apothecary. That doesn’t simply mean that I embrace the ancient dark arts of the sciences, that I believe I shall one day make gold from another substance. It also means that I am a disciple of the philosophyof the alchemist, which is to say that I believe one can turn
life
into gold.”
    Sherlock smiles.
    “I embrace, I veritably hug and cuddle, the concept of optimism. It is at the core of my approach to my existence. I shall give you an example. Fetch me my stick.”
    Sherlock retrieves the Swiss fighting stick, a long, thick pole with the belting power of a stallion’s kick, one of two leaning against a wall beside the water closet, resting where it was left after Bell’s last lesson in clubbing an opponent.
    “Strike me!!”
    Sherlock doesn’t hesitate. The apothecary has taught him the importance of the tactic of surprise: get off a blow when least expected. He has also taught him to never hold back. The boy expects Bell to show him some sort of unanticipated defensive move, something that will act as a metaphor for his ideas about optimism.
    But the old man just stands there and Sherlock’s strike, delivered smartly, makes a cracking sound like a pistol going off as the stick connects with Bell’s forehead. It echoes all the way out to the shop’s front room … and likely into the street. The ancient apothecary goes down like he has been axed.
    For an instant, Sherlock can’t see Sigerson Bell. Then he hears a weak voice on the floor.
    “I shall be better shortly.”
    Though it takes the boy several hours to truly bring the old man around (a shot of laudanum is found to be mosthelpful), he is, indeed, eventually better. “One can rise from any blow,” he finally squeaks. That, in short, was his message, built upon a sacrifice he offered up for his apprentice.

    With the old man moaning in his room upstairs, Sherlock goes to his little bed in the laboratory wardrobe thinking about this lesson in the school of hard knocks. The boy knows that Bell has