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It was, Sherlock considered, one of the great misfortunes of his life that Bakersfield College, Oxford, so renowned for its excellent reputation in the sciences, was also renowned for its medieval fair, an idiotic spectacle of negligible historic accuracy exhibited annually for the entertainment of morons.
It was a misfortune bordering on calamity that this spectacle was staged by the residents of the College, whose enthusiastic participation was enforced with a level of despotism that was positively, well, medieval.
Never mind that the five hundred or so students could have better things to do with their time, such as, for instance, studying? Not that Sherlock actually ever studied; but surely the principles of the institution were devoted to academic rigour, discipline and slavish obedience to the muses of scholarship, rather than the cheap and tawdry entertainments common at the time of Bakersfield’s founding eight hundred years ago, and now so rightfully superseded by the many and varied joys of twenty first century life, such as sanitation, spectrometers, and Wi-Fi?
Not so, apparently, for Professor Hudson had listened to these compelling arguments benignly, said, “Absolutely not, Sherlock, everyone participates; you’ll have a wonderful time, dear, everyone loves it; and if I don’t see you out there, any idea you had of taking Professor Carmichael’s Chemical Crystallography tutorials in your second year will be as dust on the wind, Sherlock; now run along, dear,” brought a floral teacup to her lips, and waved Sherlock out the door.
So it was that four nights later he presented himself to the organising committee (if one had to self-flagellate at the altar of chemical crystallography, it was best to get it over with earlier rather than later).
“Aha, Sherlock Holmes, I’d heard we might be seeing you here. Left it a little late, though, haven’t you?”
“Registrations close on the 5 th , Anderson, it says so right here,” Sherlock replied airily, gesturing at the table’s sign exhorting his fellow residents to avoid delay. “It’s still the 5 th .”
Anderson looked over an exercise book covered in scrawled notes. “Hhhmmm,” he said, tapping his chin, “it looks like we still do have a vacancy…. For the village freak!”
Sherlock turned his attention to the head of the organising committee. “Hard to get good help these days, is it?”
Irene grinned at him, then turned her attention to an iPad, flicking at the screen with an immaculately manicured fingernail. “Well, as it happens, we do have a vacancy that should be right up your, ah, street. No medieval show of any repute is complete without an Alchemist, no? Lends an air of distinction and learning, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, I don’t believe that’s what I would say, alchemy is hardly a –”
But like Hudson, Irene cared little for what Sherlock had to say, and the Alchemy demonstration tent it is. Two demonstrations per day, thirty minutes each, plus responsibility for the erection of his own tent and provisions for his own display. And the provision of his own assistant, necessary for “safety” and also for reading the sheaf of paper Anderson had shoved at him.
He manages to corner her the next day outside Lab Three.
“Molly, you’ll be my assistant at the Medieval…. Event. Fair. Thing.”
“Oh! Sherlock, Good Morning; but no, Sherlock, I can’t, I’ve already put my name down for the folk dancing and for the-”
“No, Molly. No. I….need you.”
It’s surprisingly easy.
Which is more than can be said for the tent, which was a substandard structure designed by idiots who should have stayed at home and focused on inventing something useful, like trigonometry.
He and Molly had shown up at the field which gave Bakersfield College its name, finding their tent and its assorted accoutrements that Molly had piled haphazardly on their allocated plot. Sherlock gazed at the sky as Molly flipped over the laminated instructions.
“Right,” she said doubtfully. “I think if I hold the centre pole in position, and then you can pull the lines in taught and hammer them in? Then at least it’ll be even? I think?”
Sherlock was feeling quite heartened by the time he was hammering in the line for the fourth and final corner of the tent. He stood up, pleased, and looked upon the tent. It still had a bunch of lines flapping around in the breeze, but they must be for the door flaps, or something. Easy. Simple geometry, and Sherlock excelled in geometry. “It’s in,” he called to Molly.
“I’m letting go of the pole now” Molly replied from the other side of the canvas wall.
“Uh, Sherlock, I think it’s….. Oh God!”
“Hold it, Molly!”
“I am holding it!” May hollered frantically.
“Fuck!” Sherlock yelled desperately. With a wet-sounding thwack , one of the other stakes pulled free of the ground. The guy line pulled taut, raced over his palm and snapped out of his hand.
He only had time to gaze at the tent’s accelerated speed of collapse for a few horrible moments before he was sprawling on the ground, gasping for breath and blinking stars out of his vision.
“Shit, are you OK?”
Sherlock blinked up at his interrogator, the one who’d so rudely barged into him and knocked him gracelessly into the dirt. The short, stocky man, whose golden hair was suddenly illuminated in a shaft of sunlight peeking over the top of the tent he was trying to wrestle back to an upright position. “Are you OK?” the man asked again, peering over his shoulder as he manfully struggled against the tent’s momentum, feet slowly sliding towards the shrieking, swearing mass that was Molly inside the collapsing canvas. “Shit, Bill! Little help!”
Sherlock’s field of vision was suddenly full of hairy calves rushing to and fro, as reinforcements arrived to the fray and started heaving on the tent’s various lines, hoisting it back to the vertical in short order.
Sherlock too was shortly back on his feet, courtesy of a small hand heaving him upright with no apparent effort, then turning over his blistered palm as the hand’s owner clucked sympathetically.
“John Watson, by the way,” the man said easily as he led Sherlock to a small tap on the edge of the field. “Sherlock Holmes, first year chem, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes I know,” snapped Sherlock, running his stinging hand under the flow of the water. “That is to say that I –”
“Well, that’s positive,” John replied mildly. “Rules out concussion, at any rate.”
He caught Sherlock’s eye for a moment before bringing up his hand to his mouth and dissolving into giggles; high, breathy and infectious. Sherlock’s mouth twitched, a few deep chuckles escaped him as he withdrew his hand from the water and presented it for John’s inspection.
“C’mon,” said John, cocking his head in the direction of the scene of the crime. “I’ve got some stuff in my bag.”
And so Sherlock followed John, so docilely as to surprise even himself, back to where a small crew of hardy-looking people were busy pulling on stakes and hammering in lines. Or something. It was rather difficult to tell when John Watson, fourth-year medical student, Captain of the Bakersfield College Rugby team, possessor of golden locks and golden good looks, was carefully daubing your split open palm with antiseptic cream. Women wanted him and men…. Well, that depended on which man you asked. Sherlock suppressed a shiver.
“Your tent’s coming along,” John said, fishing out a roll of bandage from a sports bag.
Sherlock hummed affirmatively. It did, indeed, look more structurally sound than it had hitherto.
“And what are you doing for the fair?”
“Alchemy. Just going to do a few demonstrations. Golden rain, flaming balls, black snake; you know, that sort of thing.”
John made a choking sound. “Not sure I do, but ah, I could be… educated , I suppose? But there you go, all done. Do you… rely your left hand for these…. demonstrations of yours?”
“I should be capable of generating the….” Sherlock flexed his bandaged palm experimentally “required reactions.”
He looked up to John, who seemed to be watching his lips very closely, for some strange reason.
“Required reactions,” said John breathily. “Yeah, right.”
“Hey, do you want these erections left up?”
There were gasps and splutters.
“These erection lines,” said one of John’s team of tent-assemblers, pointing at one of the many miscellaneous lines coming out of the pavilion’s roof with an innocent expression, “do you want to leave them up? You don’t need ‘em, but people like the way they look sometimes and….what?”
Within the tent there was no respite from the vulgarity of the world, as upon sweeping over the canvas door flap of the tent, he was confronted by a silver-haired man leaning one-handed against the pavilion’s supporting pole, against which Molly was propping herself up. Upon Sherlock’s entrance she sprung back like a blushing maiden, which was hatefully medieval of her, felt Sherlock.
“Ah,” said the man, pushing himself off the pole. “The tent’s all done, is it then? It’s a nice one, you’ve got here.”
“This is Greg,” Molly said, flushing. “He was just helping me with the pole.”
Sherlock contented himself with a withering glare.
“D’you need any more help? Setting up your tables and such? The birds won’t get here for a few hours yet, happy to help you if you need?”
“Birds?” said Molly, disappointedly.
“Birds?” said Sherlock, dubiously.
“What’s this about birds?” said John, sweeping aside the canvas doors and stepping inside the tent.
“Yeah, the birds? I’m with the Boscombe Valley Farm, we do the falconry shows? Falcons, hawks, owls, that sort of thing, yeah?”
“Oh, owls, really?” exclaimed Molly. “Has one got a letter for me, it might be a few years now though, ahahaha!”
Greg gave a pained grimace and toed at the floor.
“Get that one a lot, do you, Greg?” said John breezily. “These muggles think they know how it all works,” he continued, winking at a mystified Sherlock.
“You’ve no idea mate” said Greg. “If only they knew it’s all lizards, right?”
“I don’t think lizards would be very good messengers,” interjected Molly. “How would they hold the letters?”
“Well, that’s the magic, innit?” said Greg with a wink.
“Boring,” said Sherlock. “Didn’t you say something about assembling tables?”
Within a surprisingly short amount of time Greg, John and Molly had converted the tent’s furniture from piles of wood lying askew on the ground into a table meant for his displays, two chairs, a wooden chest and a rather sizeable bed, and arranged it according to Sherlock’s directions.
“I’ll do,” he said, and nodded to his crew of sweaty assistants.
“Glad you think so,” huffed Molly, hauling two large, stripey plastic bags through the tent’s openings to a horrified chorus of “more??” from its male occupants. “Yes, more !” Molly snarked. “Give that here,” said Molly, yanking a pillow out of John’s hands. “You haven’t even got the sheet on yet, honestly.”
“I did try and tell him,” Greg said knowledgeably. “Really”.
Molly snorted. “Well then,” she snapped “John, why don’t you and Sherlock go make yourselves useful and go and get all his stuff for the display. Greg can help me with the bed, seeing as you know so much about it.”
“If that’s what you’d like,” he said, picture of obliging chivalry.
Molly flushed again.
“Yes, good plan. Yep. Righto,” said John, eyebrows in his hairline. “Sherlock?”
And so it was that Sherlock found himself hurriedly striding back to his room, heart pounding as loudly as the echoes of his feet in the chambered halls as he took the steps two at a time, John Watson trotting along behind. He pressed his lips together as he jiggled the key into the dodgy lock, half-falling into the room as the door suddenly gave way.
“Christ,” said John as he stepped over the threshold of room 221B. “How’d you manage to get it like this in half a term?”
Sherlock flitted around the room gathering what he needed, trying to ignore John, who was standing just inside the doorway, looking intently at the papers and notes stuck to the wall. It was like trying to ignore the sun – the imprint from having looked right at it still on the retina when you closed your eyes. Cotton balls. A handful of pennies he shakes out of a shoe. A roll of aluminium foil.
“Is that a real one?”
Sherlock followed John’s gaze to the shelf above the desk.
“Mmm, that’s Billy, he can come too,” Sherlock replied, stashing what he’d collected under one arm and grabbing the skull off the shelf. Unfortunately Billy’s removal destabilised the stack of papers on which he was reposing and they cascaded down to the desk and onto the floor, picking up some of their fellows from the desk along the way.
Before he could react, John was crouched over, sweeping all the papers together and tapping them into a tidy sheaf. Unfortunately for Sherlock, one group of papers stuck out, larger than the rest, and this inevitably caught John’s eye. “Hey!” he said, extracting it carefully, “isn’t this our calendar?”
Where to look? Looking at John was impossible; and looking at the Oxford University Rugby Club First XV 2017 charity calendar he was holding seemed inadvisable, at the very least. Despite that, it was where his attention fell as he watched with fascinated horror as John stood and flicked through it, casting his eyes casually over the images of nude men, so tastefully captured in black and white photography.
“Bloody cold it was doing this, I can tell you,” John said conversationally, flicking through the pages. “Oh look, there I am,” he said with a smile, holding up the photo for Sherlock’s inspection. “Mr. August.”
Sherlock looked at the photo as prompted, although of course it was nothing he hadn’t seen before. Multiple times before, if one was to be accurate about such things. It was one of the famous views of Oxford, popular on postcards and with smartphone wielding tourists: the Bridge of Sighs stretching over Cattle Street, with the Sheldonian in the background. In black and white, the famous honey sandstone was not the feature; instead the eye was drawn to the footballer lining up to kick a ball towards the famous monument; drawn to the strain of the muscles in his back and legs, the motion in his foot and arm as he approached the ball, and to the contrast between the dark tan of his upper body and the skin on his bottom, pale where it has been hidden from the sun, secret and special. John Watson’s bum; the man himself proudly holding up a photo of it and smiling at Sherlock.
“Well, it’s not August yet, so who made it for June?” He flicked back a few pages. “Ah, it’s the flankers.” He propped up the calendar on the shelf above the desk, displaying two men looking out on the city skyline from the tower of St Mary’s. One was short, one tall. They were holding on to their genitals, presumably to protect them from the sandstone. They both had tendrils of dark hair curling over their buttocks.
Sherlock swallowed, suddenly realising he had been silent during this whole mortifying interlude. “I had to buy it, Molly made me,” he stammered. “It was for charity,” he said defensively, although this had not been his primary motivation for parting with ten pounds.
“Indeed it was,” John said with a small smile. “Quite right.”
With Billy in one of the three archive boxes full of chemistry equipment Professor Leopold had been only too happy to provide him on mention of Irene’s name, none of which Sherlock has any intention of returning, they are ready to go.
After a brief argument, they agreed that Sherlock could carry some things in a backpack so they didn’t have to make two trips and his hand would be spared. So Sherlock dumped Billy, the things he’d scrounged, whatever was made of plastic, and some of the chemicals that wouldn’t react with each other into a backpack fished out from under the bed and they proceeded, John peering out over the top of the two boxes he had stacked one on top of the other.
Despite John barely being able to see (Sherlock had to grab him by the arm twice to divert him from an obstacle) they made good time back to the field, John full of entertaining stories about the calendar shoot, the team surprising locals by cycling naked around the Radcliffe Camera, having to keep cycling in loops as they waited for sunrise so there was enough light to take the photo.
“Someone came out and got a photo of me when I was doing mine, you know,” he said, “full frontal and everything!” he sounded a bit miffed. Sherlock immediately wondered if it would be possible to deduce the identity of the photographer, but quashed the impulse as unworthy. Mostly quashed it.
Upon return to the tent, it looked appropriately mysterious, the dark walls not letting much daylight through, shrouding the interior in obscurity and gloom. Molly had been extremely organised when it came to the props, with a stuffed lizard and copper pots of indeterminate use on the shelves behind his display table. Bunches of fresh and dried herbs poked out from some of the copper and hung from the tent’s roof. There was a fabric hanging showing what looked to be a medieval horoscope chart on the opposite wall, which made Sherlock sniff in distaste.
John carefully deposited his boxes on the exhibition table, which had been draped in black velvet to hide the fact it was made from plastic. He was just admiring the lizard (“It’ll keep Billy company”) when another student stuck his head inside and told John they needed his help to set up the archery butts.
“So what time are your demonstrations tomorrow?” John asked, setting the lizard down.
“Nine forty-five and two,” Sherlock replied, opening one of the boxes and extracting his prized large, round-bottom flask, which he laid down carefully on the bed.
“Well, uh, I might come by for the afternoon one?” John said hopefully. “I’d like to see it.”
Sherlock made a vaguely affirmative noise as he set down a bunsen burner on the edge of the table.
“Then after you can come and see my demonstration, if you like,” John offered offhandedly, twiddling one of the velvet corners.
“Hmmm?” said Sherlock, momentarily pausing in the quest to extract the retort stand without smashing at least three of the cylindrical flasks.
“It’s Smite the Knight,” John said with an air of slight forced joviality. “We give the kids a pretend sword and let ‘em smack us up a bit – ‘Avast ye, ye varlots!’” he said, flourishing an imaginary sword at Sherlock.
Sherlock blinked. “I think that’s pirates.”
John rubbed the back of his neck. “Is it?”
“Quite certain.”
With a muttered farewell, John ducked out of the tent and into the bright sunshine, leaving Sherlock looking after him, heat-resistant tile clutched in his hands.
---
Irene cornered him as he picked his way across the field after a ferociously early wake-up call from Molly, hem of his costume clutched in his hands to keep it from the dew. “Don’t you look a treat, in that lovely monk’s habit,” she purred. “Look a bit too demure to be the sort of boy who takes John Watson back to his room, but looks aren’t everything, are they?”
Sherlock merely strode a bit faster, hitching up the skirts of his habit.
“Ohh, now, don’t be missish. If that Ken doll of a man has gotten under your skin, it wouldn’t hurt to let him get all over it, now would it?”
“You’ve got the wrong idea.”
Irene looked him dead in the eye as they paused outside the tent. “I am wrong,” she said, surprising Sherlock. “John Watson is no Ken doll. From everything I hear,” she murmured in his ear, “he’s definitely not flat in front.”
Inside the tent all was calm and certain; although it was still so dark he needed to look at the experiment he started yesterday with the torch on his phone. The amalgam of crystallized silver and mercury looked suitably dendritic in its flask, which was very pleasing. Sherlock hummed quietly to himself as he created the lead nitrate and potassium iodide solutions.
But of course the day was not chemistry for its own subtle and exacting pleasures, it was chemistry for the entertainment of the yokels of Oxford and surrounds, out for a good, clean day of merriment.
There were a few visitors before the first demonstration of the day. They mostly looked at the silver and mercury amalgam (Sherlock had to bark at them to stop them tapping it and dislodging any of the crystals from its tree-like branches) and cooed, impressed, when Sherlock shook up the lead iodide precipitate, which now that it ’d had a few hours to react, did indeed look like Sherlock had made little gold flakes in his stopped-up flask.
One woman eyeballed him skeptically and demanded a demonstration, so he turned water (from the bottle with the green label) into wine. She looked suitable awestruck as the water turned a deep red the moment in came in contact with the glass; and Sherlock was just beginning to explain the reaction with the phenolphthalein that was hidden in the glass when she picked it up and asked if she could drink the wine. Sherlock blinked.
“It has sodium hydroxide in it.”
The woman looks at him blankly, still holding the glass of ruby-red liquid to her lips.
“Caustic soda?”
She looked at the glass a bit skeptically.
“Put the glass down and get out.” She did.
For the advertised demonstration slot, people started to get the fidgets waiting as Sherlock held the copper penny in the zinc solution, but they were easily cowed by Sherlock’s demand for silence and watched in hushed fascination as the coin gradually turned silver. There was an appreciative ‘oooh’ when Sherlock held the silver coin in the Bunsen burner flame and it turned a bright gold.
He was rather looking forward to the ethanol combustion experiment, although Molly looked extremely alarmed and insisted he use the safety screen and everyone move back to the opposite end of the tent. The experiment worked very well, better than planned, the height of the rather lovely lilac flame just shy of the tent’s roof, which caused a few startled yelps and then a spontaneous round of applause when the reaction died down, although Molly looked less impressed.
Molly objected strenuously when he told the audience the next experiment was dancing flames, firmly of the opinion that there had been enough flames so far. Sherlock however did not share this opinion, and besides that he was already dissolving the copper chloride in the hydrochloric acid, and a small boy in the audience was hard at work carefully tearing off long strips of aluminium foil; so dancing flames it was. When the reaction started and was ignited, it burned with a rather lovely blue-green flame, leaping and swaying in the flask, and the audience jostled each other to see it as he held it above their heads.
“It’s magic!”
“No, little girl” said Sherlock, “it’s Science.”
The best part was when the young child who’d rolled the tinfoil claimed that the coin hadn’t been made gold at all, but had rather been plated with a brass alloy. Sherlock is so pleased with this deduction that after everyone has left he demonstrated the dehydrating properties of permanganic acid by setting a few cotton balls on fire for the young man’s entertainment. He even let Archie keep the plated coin.
Over the next few hours, he got a surprisingly plentiful stream of visitors, some of whom ask him how Dumbledore and his friend Nicholas Flamel is, which was nonsensical. Sherlock shouted at them and they left. Some of them asked sensible things, so Sherlock did the water to wine demonstration a few times and ignited a few more cotton balls whenever there was a big group of people.
It was all very pedestrian.
Then a knight walked in and asked Sherlock why he was covering the bed in aluminium foil.
“It’s for an experiment.”
John raised his eyebrows, rubbed the back of his palm across the back of his neck where the chainmail meet the skin. “Can I help?”
Sherlock watched John wrestle with the foil as he pottered about with the copper wire and set out beakers. He moved lightly despite the chainmail, possessing both strength and stamina. Hair all stuck up at odd angles and the sides and back, he had been wearing a helmet. Blades of grass were stuck to his red and yellow tabard and in his hair; some of the children who had been smiting him for entertainment had forced him to the ground. His tongue was poking out at one corner of his mouth in concentration; the roll of aluminium foil was a worthy adversary.
With the bed suitably protected, John examined the experiments on the table and enquired after Sherlock’s hand. He flexed it experimentally; it felt fine; he’d been wearing a glove over the bandaging to keep it clean, which John praised. Sherlock had made the mistake of getting chemicals on open skin before; the memory sturdily resisted deletion, which must have been a self-conservation feature he hadn’t previously known he was in possession of.
John correctly identified the silver and mercury amalgam, although he called it the Tree of Diana, which was sentimental. The Golden Rain reaction was also correctly identified, John swirling the shimmering gold flakes in the flask for a few long moments and quietly saying “beautiful” while looking straight at Sherlock.
There was a large crowd for the final demonstration of the day. Sherlock shouted at them all until they let Archie to the front of the crowd gathered over by the bed, where he has laid out the ingredients for what he gleefully told the audience was the assistant he was Summoning from Beyond. He ignited the little dish, which promptly puts out a few blackened balls of ash; Sherlock had time to relate a few interesting facts about carbon compounds before the reaction really got going and started to extrude the thick black snake and the audience was lost in horrified fascination.
After a few minutes of watching the black tube curl across the bed, Sherlock delegated the supervision of the summoning to Molly and got on with the next one, shouting at the audience to draw the tent flaps closed. In the darkness of the tent he passed around a few of the pre-prepared flasks and the bent copper wires. On the count of three everyone put the wire into the flask and went ‘ooh!’ ‘cool!’ ‘wow!’ or some variation thereof as the copper wire immediately glowed blue (thanks to the luminol in the solution) and a flame-like effect sprung up from where the copper ions catalysed in the solution. At least Archie and John looked attentive at this information, the rest of the audience captivated by the cool flames, dancing in the dark.
With the tent doors back open, the blinking audience deposited their flasks back on the table and gasped in fascination as Sherlock drew their attention back to the bed, where the reaction had stopped and a rather hideous black snake, easily two metres long, looped across the bed. “It’s made from ash,” Sherlock cheerfully informed the recoiling crowd, and then told them how to replicate this experiment at home, causing the children in the audience to look very interested and their parents to look aghast.
With the light still good, Sherlock moved the final experiment into the middle of the table. While he waited for the round-bottom flask larger than his head to fill with oxygen from the small gas cylinder under the table, he informed audience of the fascinating discovery of phosphorous from dehydrated refined human urine. That done, he placed the flask ceremoniously onto the stand on the table, checked the gas runoff tube was in place and once again called for darkness. With just a touch from a heated glass rod to the phosphorus on the deflagrating spoon it ignited, and Sherlock lowered it into the immense flask and secured the bung firmly.
The reaction began immediately and Sherlock and the audience watched in hypnotised silence as twists of smoke like so many jellyfish stingers formed at the top of the flask and coiled down to its base. When the flask filled, it was a glowing yellow-red orb, a miniature sun blazing in the gloomy dim of the tent.
“It’s like a planet,” John’s dreamy voice from close to Sherlock’s ear, where he watches the play of smoke inside the flask. “It is red phosphorous, right?”
Sherlock nodded. “As if I’d waste white phosphorous on a demonstration; do you know how much it costs?”
“And also with the flesh-melting and the igniting spontaneously in the air,” said John.
“Mmm,” Sherlock replied, watching the last of the reaction burn out.
As the light flickered out in the flask, the audience burst into applause. Sherlock graciously inclined his head.
With the flask now full of phosphorous oxide smoke, he poured the water with indication fluid the gas runoff had been bubbling through into the smoke, where a blood-red liquid began to bubble at the bottom of the glass.
“H 3 PO 4 , phosphoric acid,” Sherlock informed the audience, “used in fertiliser, cleaning products, and jam. It gives it a bitter taste.” John looked askance at the bubbling brew.
“Wasn’t that fun,” said Sherlock, looking up at the audience, who nodded brightly. “Well, it’s over. Now open the doors and get out.”
“Bye, Sherlock!” said Archie, being pulled out by his parents, obviously replete with medieval merriment.
“Fare thee well, Archie.”
The work of cleaning up goes quickly with John helping, and before long Sherlock was blinking in the bright light of day. Without knowing quite how it happened, he found himself being squired round the fair by John, looking into various tents and watching some of the activities. The mock-fighting was boring until John started up a conversation about injuries sustained from broadswords, which lead into a fascinating discussion about wound patterns and post-mortem bruising, which was a clearly a topic that required more investigation.
Sherlock enjoyed visiting Mike in the medical tent as John quizzed him on the purpose of the medieval instruments. He got nearly all of them right, only getting flustered by a wooden plug looking one, but John said it was for biting on, what with conscious surgery being the order of the day. The folk dancing was infantile but Sherlock deduced the Morris Dancing squad’s other hobbies (adultery, alcoholism, embezzlement) for John. Inspired, John tried, but got nearly all of them wrong. The one about being a keen gardener was merely a good guess based on statistical probabilities.
John bought him an ice cream before they watched the bird show. The triumphant expression John wore after several minutes rustling underneath his chainmail to pull out a crumpled fiver made Sherlock’s chest feel like the phosphorus sun.
Molly found them at the end of the show, face pink and gleaming and wanting to know if they saw her with the owl, having being pulled out of the audience as a volunteer.
She walked with them over to the Smite the Knight exhibit where John was rostered for a bout.
“Oooh, look at all the little princesses lined up!” Molly cooed as they approached. John’s face fell.
“My knees will never survive,” he said mournfully. “The girls are the worst. Killers.”
The beleaguered knight staggers out of the ring and dropped his sword and shield on the ground, ripping off his helmet.
“Alright, Bill?”
“No,” said Bill shortly. “They’re hyped up on sugar and they’re merciless little buggers. Good luck.”
Molly and Sherlock leaned over the fence and watched John struggle manfully against the horde of small children trying to strike him with foam weapons.
“Those kids really are determined” said Sherlock, perturbed.
John dodged a vicious-looking pair of princesses, called them varlots, and fended off a kid in an iron man costume with his shield.
“Aw, look how much fun they’re having!” cooed Molly.
John called them all lily-livered and poked a few with the tip of his sword, which caused the children to redouble their efforts.
“Fun?” said Sherlock. “This is reminiscent of the coliseum”.
John ran a few circles around the ring with the children pursuing like so many angry hornets, swords waving as they bore down on him.
“What do you think the past tense of smite is?” Molly mused.
One particularly enthused child ran at John’s legs and he fell as he dodged, hitting the ground with a loud crash, and his helmet rolled off. “Aaaagh! You knave!” John cried, putting up his shield over his face as the blows of a dozen foam swords rained down on him.
“Smote? Smoted?” suggested Sherlock.
“No,” said John, back up on his feet now. “They smite ,” (he parried a blow), “You smote ,” (a foam sword went flying past his head), “but I ,” (he dropped a quick kiss on Sherlock’s cheek) “ I am smitten.”