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They took Father away in October. That Christmas, Mummy forgot to buy any presents. Mycroft didn't work it out until Christmas Eve, and by then it was too late. Sherlock handled it surprisingly well.
He and Mycroft ate cereal and Hobnobs in Mycroft's room all day. Mummy drank quietly through the wine cellar until she passed out.
After Sherlock was asleep, Mycroft went into Mummy's room and took her sapphire earrings. Sherlock's birthday was in early January and he needed to be prepared. They were her favorite pair. He took them out of spite. She never noticed they were gone. She didn't notice much at all after that.
*
Sherlock sat up in bed as Mycroft entered the room. "Isn't Mummy coming up?" he said.
"Mummy's asleep. I've got one of your presents for tomorrow though, look."
"Asleep asleep or too much wine asleep?"
Sherlock reached for the present and ripped into it. Balloon-patterned paper fluttered in shreds to the floor.
"Too much vodka asleep this time, I think." He'd been down to check the wine cellar. Between October and Boxing Day, she'd finished most of it.
Sherlock paused in his assault. "That's bad," he said. "She'll be angry tomorrow. And she won't take me to the park like she promised. I want to go to the one with the boat."
Mycroft frowned. "There's one with a boat?"
"It has a big climbing thing and a flag like a crow's nest." He removed the last shreds of paper and held the book aloft like a trophy. "Pirates! You got me pirates!" Sherlock hugged his arm tightly enough to bruise.
It was a big book for a four year old, even one who'd be five in a few hours. It had minimal pictures and a lot of dense text. Mycroft had been a little unsure about it, but Sherlock did like to have all the facts.
Sherlock leafed through it, eyes wide. "This is the best book. Can I stay up and read it until I'm five?"
"I don't know, can you?"
"Yes!" Sherlock said and started reading again.
Mycroft sighed. He should've seen that coming. "No, you may not. But I'll take you to the park tomorrow if Mummy can't."
"You have school tomorrow," Sherlock said, giving him a speculative look.
"I won't go."
"What, really? For the whole day?"
"The whole day."
"And we can go to the park with the boat?"
"If you know how to get there."
"I do!"
"Good. But you have to sleep now, that's the deal."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
"All right." Sherlock put the book on the bedside table and snuggled down in bed.
"Do you want me to read you a bit?" Mycroft asked.
"No! I'm not a baby, I can read it myself."
"You had no problem with it last night."
"I'm five now."
"Not for four hours."
Sherlock squinted at him and pulled the covers up to his chin. "Fine, but you have to do the voices."
"This isn't really a storybook."
"Do them anyway."
So he did.
*
In the morning, Mycroft went to check on Mummy and bring her water and aspirin. She didn't wake up when he came in, which was not unusual. She didn't wake when he touched her shoulder, which was. Her skin was cold. He yanked his hand away.
His blood was very loud inside his head. It was a long time before he could make himself check for a pulse. Of course there was none. People with blood running through them weren't that cold.
He pulled the sheet up over her face, because he'd seen it done in films. He pulled it back down, because you couldn't go and leave someone who was dead to take your brother to the park, even if it was his birthday and you'd promised.
He would find her again, later. Maybe tomorrow. It wasn't as if she'd get any deader.
*
He thought about the logistics of it on the tube while Sherlock read his pirate book.
Probably they would go to live with Grandmother. She was very old and quiet, and she seemed breakable in a way he didn't understand. He always tried not to hug her too hard. She adored Sherlock though. That would be all right.
There was a chance they would let Father out of hospital. Father didn't particularly like either of them, but he would hire nannies or send them away to school. That would be all right, too.
There was a small possibility that Aunt Millicent would want them, and that would not be all right. That would be church every day and prayers before bed, and the last time they'd visited, she'd said Sherlock would certainly go to hell, and he'd only broken her crystal nut dish.
If it turned out to be Aunt Millicent, Mycroft would have to think of something. He still had Mummy's other earring, but he didn't know where they could go.
*
The park had a large wooden climbing structure with a tower and a flag on top. Sherlock stood atop it, waving a stick and proclaiming in ever more robust and realistic piratey language that he was going to sink every other ship in the sea and deprive them of their gold, jewels, and sweets.
"I'm not sure there was a big trade in sweets," Mycroft called up.
"They must've had sugar," Sherlock shouted back. "They could've made sweets."
"Who's he talking about?" said another boy. He looked about seven or eight. He wore a school uniform, roughed up at the knees, blood on the collar.
"The ships pirates preyed upon," Mycroft said.
"Are you a pirate?" the boy called up.
"I'm the worst, scariest, meanest pirate ever!" Sherlock said. "I'm Bloodeye!" He leaned so far over the edge that Mycroft twitched involuntarily. "Who're you?"
"I'm John," the boy said.
"That's a terrible pirate name. I'll call you Two Sword, and you can have two swords and be on my crew, and I'm going to have three. Swords. But also three crewmen." Sherlock climbed down and started scrounging for suitably sword-like sticks. "Mycroft, you have to play too. What's your name?"
"Ishmael."
Sherlock frowned but nodded. "That's pretty good. What can we called our ship?"
"The Endeavor?"
"No, that's stupid. John? I mean Two Sword?"
John chopped at a bush with one of his two sticks and got it caught. He thrashed it around a bit trying to get it out again. "Oh," he said. "Um. What about the Shadow?"
"The Blood Shadow!" Sherlock said. "Come on, get aboard! You too, Mycroft, you can't be boring, it's my birthday!"
"Happy birthday," John said politely, as he climbed up the ladder onto the lowest platform.
"Do you want to see my pirate book?"
Mycroft followed John up more slowly and looked out over the empty park while the other two flipped through densely worded pages.
"These aren't very good stories," John said. "Where are all the pictures and people talking and 'Avast, matey!' and 'Yo ho ho' and rum and swords and blood and setting things on fire?"
"There's lots of setting things on fire! Look, it says here they looted the Dutch Lily and kept Lord Darney's son for ransom and then set the ship on fire and it burned all away into the sea and there was nothing left and so no one believed they'd done it and wouldn't send the money until they sent the son's hand all packed up in salt to his father."
"That can't be true!"
"It is! Mycroft wouldn't give me a book that had lies in it. They should've sent it preserved in honey like Alexander the Great though. I bet it was all dried out and wrinkly when it got there. It could've been anyone's hand."
"But it says it had his ring, so they knew it was him," John said, pointing out the passage in the book.
"They could've just stolen the ring. Or made one that looked like it. Or maybe Lord Darney just really wanted the ring back."
"He would've want his son back more."
"He might not have if he was a lot of trouble."
"No, he would have anyway because he was his son. It doesn't matter how much trouble kids are, their parents still want them back."
"That's not true," Sherlock said, with a note of triumph. "Our father doesn't want us back. He went to live in France and we haven't seen him since."
France was the agreed upon lie. Sometimes Mycroft wished that the grown ups would just lie to him, too.
"He'd still want you back if you were kidnapped and someone sent him your hand packed in salt," John said, with certainty.
"Honey. I haven't got a ring so he'd have to know it was me."
"All right, honey. But he'd still want you back."
Sherlock tilted his head to one side, and his eyes got a faraway look.
"No," Mycroft said. "We're not staging your kidnapping and sending Father a hand preserved in honey."
"I just said you couldn't be boring on my birthday!"
"Where would we get a hand anyway?" Mycroft said, knowing it was a bad idea to play along, but unable to stop himself.
"We could make a mold of mine and then make it out of plaster and paint it!"
"You can't get plaster wet," John said. "Honey is sort of wet."
Mycroft studied him briefly and wondered if he thought Sherlock were joking. Most people didn't take this well to Sherlock's mad plans.
"Wax then," Sherlock said. "Wax can't dissolve in honey or bees couldn't build things with it."
"We are not sending Father a wax replica of your severed hand, Sherlock."
Sherlock stuck his chin out, and his eyes were going dark, sure signs of an oncoming storm front. Mycroft braced himself. Sherlock's tantrums were never pleasant, and less so in public.
"We should bury a treasure," John said, oblivious.
Sherlock's expression lightened minutely. "What sort of treasure?"
"I've got a yo-yo," John said. He produced it from his pocket.
"That's not very good."
"It's new! And it glows in the dark."
"It does not!"
"Does."
They huddled briefly under John's jacket, and Sherlock reemerged with all traces of fearful weather cleared from his face. "It does glow in the dark! Mycroft, look!"
Mycroft looked. It did indeed glow in the dark.
"What have you got?" John said.
"I've got a dried toad," Sherlock said, with a defiant glance at Mycroft. He pulled a small box from his pocket and displayed the unfortunate amphibian. "It got squished by a car, and dried like that on the road, look, you can see its guts and its little toes."
Mycroft closed his eyes briefly. "I told you to get rid of that."
"You said because it would smell, but it doesn't!"
Sherlock stuck it in Mycroft's face to demonstrate. Mycroft backed up fast and nearly toppled off the climbing structure. Sherlock and John giggled, and John snatched the toad and gave it a good sniff.
"It really doesn't though," he said, offering it to Mycroft less violently.
"I'm not smelling it. Anyway, if we're burying it, it doesn't matter if it stinks or not."
"So what do you have?" John asked.
"Tube fare home. And I'm not burying it."
"Money isn't treasure anyway," Sherlock said. "It has to be something important."
"Money's important," John said.
"Something special."
"It's pretty special when you don't have any."
"Don't you have any?"
John shrugged and rubbed at a smudge of dirt on his uniform trousers. "Mum and Dad argue about it a lot. Mum says my school's too expensive. I don't even want to go there. It's stupid and I hate it."
"Is that why you got in a fight?" Mycroft asked.
John's eyes went wide. "How did you know I was in a fight? Anyway, it was his fault!"
"There's blood on your collar and you're all messy," Sherlock said.
"Scratch on the back of your hand, knuckles slightly reddened," Mycroft added.
John looked at his hands for a moment and then curled them into fists. "Piers Upton saw my mum dropping me off and he said our car was rubbish and we were probably on the dole and I shouldn't be allowed to go to the school at all and then he said my middle name was stupid, and it was my grandfather's name and it's not. And then I hit him."
"Hamish," Mycroft said.
John and Sherlock both stared at him.
"Magic," Mycroft said.
It was a simple combination of John's initials on his school bag, his fading but still recognizable Scottish accent, and a decent guess. Sherlock glared at him.
"Is not! There's no such thing as magic."
"Right," John said, but he still looked awed. "So how did you do it?"
Quite abruptly, Mycroft didn't want that look aimed at him, or Sherlock's more cautious wonder and curiosity. He wanted to rewind time six months, to when Father just locked himself in the library for days at a time and Mummy only drank at parties and never told Mycroft more than he wanted to know. He put his hand in his pocket and squeezed Mummy's other earring until it bit sharply into his palm.
"What's wrong?" John said.
Mycroft sat down carefully and shuffled closer. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Look what I've got."
He showed them the earring. It was a deep, clear blue, and it sparkled even in the pale, January light.
"Oh," John said softly. "It's real treasure."
"It's Mummy's," Sherlock said. "Did you steal it?"
"Yes. That's what pirates do."
Sherlock just nodded. "Okay. We have to find a box then. I mean a treasure chest."
They found a cardboard box (too flimsy) and an empty whiskey bottle (mouth too narrow) and a number of other possible containers, but none were quite what they needed. In the end, Bloodeye and his pirate crew stormed a nearby sandwich shop, where Mycroft bought them all sandwiches and crisps and hot chocolate, and Sherlock successfully begged an empty mayonnaise jar from the woman at the counter, despite showing her his dried toad.
"We have to make a map," Sherlock said as they ate. "With an X to mark the spot."
"Three maps," John said. "So we all have one."
Sherlock nodded approvingly. "But first we have to find a good spot."
Their treasures were wrapped in the paper bags from lunch and packed carefully into the jar. Mycroft kept it while John and Sherlock went all over the park, discussing different landmarks and the permanence of various park features. When they started shouting at each other over whether the water fountain shaped like a lion would still be there in ten years, Mycroft stepped in.
"This whole park might be gone in ten years," he said. "If you really want to be sure, we'll have to to go somewhere that won't change."
He took them on the tube to Regent's Park, his very small brother and a boy he didn't know. He held tight to both their hands, over John's objections that he was much too old for that, and didn't mention that John's parents must be frantic with worry.
The police, if they'd been called in, would be looking for a boy on his own, not three together. John's jacket hid his uniform, and Mycroft's scarf hung around John's neck to hide the blood on his collar. It was only one day. Tomorrow everything would change.
They finally settled on a spot marked by the shadow of an ancient oak tree. Its branches crossed at such an angle that an almost perfect X fell on the ground.
"So we'll have to come back on this day," Sherlock said. "Or close to this day. Otherwise the sun won't be in the same place. But it's easy to remember because it's my birthday."
"Easy for you to remember," John said. "I'm writing it down."
Mycroft drew maps for all three of them in one of John's school notebooks. He wrote the date and time of day, and then they began to dig. The area was fortunately sheltered from casual view, and they left Sherlock as a lookout. They used sticks and John's pocket knife and the cover of his history text book.
It was not a quick process. The hole seemed to grow an a snail's pace and more than once he and John had to spread John's jacket over it and sit on it until someone had passed by. Their fingernails and shirt cuffs were muddy and damp, and Mycroft had a blister on his palm by the time they were done.
He had no idea why he'd gone along with the game at all. It was chilly. He was damp and sweaty and getting cold as they stood around the finished hole. Mummy was lying dead at home. He dug his nails into his palms and felt his throat tighten.
"We have to swear an oath," Sherlock said. "And write it down and sign it in blood."
"That's a lot of blood," John said. "Maybe we could just prick our fingers and make bloody fingerprints."
Sherlock considered. "That would be okay," he said. "Fingerprints are better anyway."
Mycroft cleaned John's pocket knife as thoroughly as he could manage under the circumstances. He held the blade to his finger and paused, staring down at it.
"I'll go first," John said. He took the knife, pressed it against his finger until the skin barely parted, and left a smeary print on the paper.
Sherlock looked at the knife, looked at his own finger, and then held it out to John. "You do me," he said.
John did, as carefully as Mycroft could've wished, and Sherlock made his mark as well.
Mycroft felt a bit ill now, not to mention cold and tired, but he took the knife anyway. He was the oldest, and he should be looking after both of them. He couldn't have John do it for him. He bit the side of his tongue hard and pushed the knife against his skin.
It slipped and went deep. There was blood on the knife, the paper, running down his finger, pooling in his palm. There was no pain, only a wave of dizziness that made him sit down and look away from the wound.
John took his hand, blotted his finger on a tissue, and pressed it to the paper. "There," he said. "All done. I guess you could've signed it in blood though. That was a lot."
"Now we have to swear," Sherlock said. "Quick, before there's no more blood. Everyone has to swear not to come and dig up our treasure unless we're all together."
They swore, and Sherlock pushed their cut fingers all together and held them fiercely in his fist for a few seconds.
"Can we bury it now?" John said.
Sherlock looked doubtful, as if they might be forgetting some key component of treasure burial protocol.
"We should each write a secret," Mycroft heard himself say. He felt rather faint and far away, and he wasn't sure why he'd made the suggestion, but it seemed important.
"That's pretty good," Sherlock said. He looked surprised. "You go first then. We'll read them out when we dig it up."
They all wrote down their secrets on separate sheets, and then folded them and tucked them inside the jar. They'd never be back to dig it up. Mycroft knew that. Even John probably knew that. They would probably never see John again, and, after tomorrow, Sherlock would forget all about this.
Mycroft's paper read: I knew she was dead this morning. I found her. He'd never tell anyone else.
It was much easier to put back the dirt and cover it all up with the cut out patch of turf than it had been to dig the hole.
*
It was almost dark. They walked John home. His mother wanted to drive them home, but eventually accepted Mycroft's lie that they lived nearby. She sent them off with two large slabs of chocolate cake, gratitude, and a plaster for Mycroft's finger.
It was fully night when they got home. The moon was visible through shreds of cloud. Mycroft sent Sherlock off to wash immediately and did the same himself. He found Sherlock in bed a few minutes later, lids drooping, hugging his book like the stuffed toys he'd never wanted.
"Will Mummy be better tomorrow?" Sherlock asked.
"Yes," Mycroft said. "I'm sure she will."
"I wish every day was like this. This was the best day."
"I liked it too." He found, to his surprise, that it was true. "Happy birthday, Sherlock."
Sherlock smiled and closed his eyes. "G'night, Mycroft."
"Good night."
He straightened Sherlock's covers and turned out the lights. He went back to his own room. He read for half an hour as he usually did. Sleep came easily.