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and bustle of Paddington Station. He would miss London. He would miss it terribly, and he vowed, as he walked up Baker Street away from the station, to come back and live there one day.
    On the appointed day, Sherlock took what few possessions he had – some clothes, his violin and a few books – and joined Matty on his barge in Camden Lock. They set off in silence,
with Matty very aware of his friend’s mixed feelings about leaving. Matty, by contrast, was happier than Sherlock had seen him in a while. Matty was, in so many ways, the exact opposite of
Mycroft Holmes. He was thin where Mycroft was fat, intuitive where Mycroft was logical and, critically, restless and active where Mycroft was settled and lazy. The only point of similarity they had
was their fondness for food.
    Harold, Matty’s horse, walked steadily along the towpath, pulling the barge slowly and sedately along the Grand Junction Canal. Matty stood at the back, steering with the rudder to ensure
that they neither ploughed bow-first into the bank nor drifted out into the centre of the canal, pulling Harold into the shallow water. Sherlock sat cross-legged at the front, watching out for
obstacles and tunnels, and letting his mind drift. They passed fields and forests, roads and rivers. Whenever they passed a barge travelling in the opposite direction, usually laden with coal or
wood or metal pipes, Sherlock would raise a finger to his forehead, and the man on the other barge would do likewise. Whenever they came to a lock – one of the gated enclosures that allowed
the water level of the canal to rise and fall in line with the landscape – Sherlock would leap out and guide Harold to a stop, throw his weight into closing the first set of massive wooden
gates behind the barge while Matty carefully steered, then he would open the water sluices set into the equally massive second set of gates to let the water on the other side pour into the
enclosure, raising the level of the water inside and therefore the barge until the second set of gates could be opened. Even as he was rushing around, opening and closing gates and winding metal
pump handles, Sherlock marvelled at the inventiveness of the mechanisms. How incredible that human ingenuity had come up with something so complicated, so useful and so clever!
    The two of them ate when they were hungry – buying food from farms or taverns that they passed – and slept when it was too dark to keep moving safely. Rather than measuring their
journey by the towns and villages they encountered, as he would have done if travelling by road or rail, Sherlock found himself tracking their progress by the names of the various locks they
travelled through and the rivers that either passed under them or joined with them. The ones that stuck in his memory were Black Jack’s Lock, Iron Bridge Lock and Lady Chapel Lock, the River
Musbourne, the River Bulbourne and the River Chess. About the only major population centre that he was aware of was the market town of Aylesbury, where the two of them stopped for a day to look
around and to buy cheese and pies.
    They came off the Grand Junction Canal eventually, on to the Oxford Canal.
    ‘It runs between Oxford an’ Cambridge,’ Matty yelled from the rear of the barge as they made their laboured turn into the offshoot, ‘prob’ly for all them students
that get thrown out of the one an’ fancy their chances at the other. You might need to know that one day!’
    ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Sherlock said laconically.
    As they got closer to Oxford, Sherlock began to see signs of increasing wealth – bigger houses, set in their own grounds, and buildings made of cut stone transported from distant quarries
rather than rough stones cut locally. The clothes that people were wearing were better quality as well, with straw boaters increasingly replacing flat caps.
    One house, which they passed at dusk one day, particularly caught his attention. It was illuminated by the