My Dear Watson (2 page)

Of course, Watson was at school too, but even in the army (another institution where men are left in close company with each other, and trusted to simply be tactful), he never experienced all that Holmes sought out. All the close situations in barracks, the intense emotions, the lonely nights almost sure to be their last… Watson never developed such feelings of romance for another man which occurred so naturally to Sherlock Holmes. He was a fox let in among roosters. He was the one other boys’ mothers worried about.

Watson was hardly even aware of such practices between men, even though they must have gone on all around him. I imagine it’s due to Watson’s incapacity for observation; just because it never occurred to him to comfort his comrades with intimacy does not mean the others hadn’t thought of it. There must have been whispers among the men, swift discharges if they were ever caught, nasty jokes the rest of the time. Watson might have witnessed dozens of pairs of soldiers in love, choosing contact over combat, but he was oblivious for years even after he’d come home. For a long time he thought what he had with Holmes was an aberration, something peculiar to themselves alone.

Hardly; Holmes began early, back in school like all the other boys.

He was a strange fellow even then, and by his own admission—morose, anti-social, and I would say rather arrogant, though Holmes himself would most likely not. He would say he was only aware of his true potential; there he was among so-called peers, and to an outsider it would seem that they were all the same, all equal. But Holmes knew that he was not equal. He’d just not had enough time to prove it yet.

When Holmes finally revealed his first case to Watson,
The Adventure of The Gloria Scott
, he teased him with it as though it were an irresistible treat, and Watson certainly fed into this attitude by clamoring for the information. “You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?” Holmes asked, as if he would mention that name by accident, as if he were innocent.

In telling Watson the details of his first case, he confessed another first; Victor Trevor was not just his only friend at school, he was his lover as well. This was another story for which the world was not yet prepared. Well, the world must prepare itself now.

I was certainly amused to read my husband’s recounting of Holmes’s story, remembering the squawking gaggle of friends I had at school, and imagining Sherlock Holmes with only one odd man, this Trevor boy. And that they only met when Trevor’s dog attacked Holmes’s leg! What a peculiar creature the young Holmes must have been, how off-putting, and without even the excuse of justification that he has now. It’s fine to be an eccentric when you’re an esteemed detective, when it’s acknowledged that your conclusions are sound even if your methods are strange. It is much harder to be so irregular when you’re still nobody, barely twenty, and studying no subject yet established.

Not every detail of Holmes’s encounter with Trevor was recorded for public consumption by Watson, and there is no guarantee that he has the whole story either. Only Trevor and Holmes himself know for sure, don’t they? The amusing story of the dog bite, the way the friendship with Trevor developed while Holmes was malingering for ten days, those details were only the barest taste of the truth. Trevor started stopping by to check on Holmes’s recovery, which lasted as long as it had to for Holmes to achieve his purpose. He aimed to seduce Victor Trevor, and he managed it neatly, as he did most everything else.

It wasn’t exactly predatory. Victor Trevor was not a baby, and he came to Holmes’s rooms under his own steam. Holmes was being…opportunistic. Holmes is famously inept at reading emotions, but it is important to note that he is more specifically ignorant of the subtleties of female emotion—he was in excellent deductive form as regards Trevor. He knew why this young man was friendless, and why he kept loafing around the student he’d injured, and what he was hoping for. At last Holmes triggered their first connection. Here is the story as Watson related it to me:

“He told me his ankle was healed in a matter of days, four at most, but he understood that Trevor would continue visiting if only he could act like an invalid. His theatrical skills, as I’ve told you before, are quite substantial. He absolutely fooled young Trevor, or so they both pretended.

“After more than a week of this trickery, he finally asked Trevor to help him up, under the pretense that he should try his ankle with the assistance of a friend. He contrived to fall full-long into Trevor’s embrace, arms draped over the boy’s shoulders, his sharp face a breath from Trevor’s round, rosy one. And then, with perfect confidence, he kissed his friend on the mouth.”

This story was told to me on a long winter’s night trapped indoors, locked down against the elements, sitting close up on a fire. The flames spoke louder than Watson did. He was always breathless telling these secrets, even to me, even after he knew all of my indiscretions, and after I had already guessed the nature of his partnership with Holmes. I gripped his hand in mine, found it impossibly cool and clammy when we were all but touching the logs of our fire. He was aflood with desire and jealousy, the waters rising into his eyes, full of wavering liquid in the warm light of the flames.

Here is when Watson’s official story jumped abruptly forward in time, to the school break when Holmes got to visit the Trevor family home in Norfolk and try his odd talents against the elder Trevor’s mysteries. There was so much left unwritten by Watson; the nervous nights spent in each other’s rooms, the way Holmes contrived to be invited home with Trevor by talking about how orphaned and lonely he was, the nervous way Trevor finally asked him, while holding his hand, as if he were proposing… The way Holmes laughed at Trevor’s sentiment even while he accepted it, the same bursting laugh he has now, like a clap of merry thunder.

However: once Holmes and Trevor arrived, Holmes was immediately impressed by the manliness of the father, the appealing contrast of his rough body and gentle blue eyes, and with one offhand comment from this man on the science of detecting, Holmes was sparked by his new profession: “I don’t know how you manage this, Mr. Holmes, but it seems to me that all the detectives of fact and of fancy would be children in your hands.”
That
is indeed what Holmes wanted. He finally knew his true calling.

That vacation in many ways ignited Sherlock Holmes, his passion for puzzles, and for those remarkable individuals whom he deems worthy of his admiration: criminals. Even young Trevor felt the rumblings of Holmes’s fascination with his father, and he naturally didn’t like it. As with most of Holmes’s relationships, the tiny sprout of affection that had erupted between them was obliterated by Holmes’s intensities.

It was strained first by Holmes’s obvious attraction to the elder Trevor, and then by his alienation of the same with his intrusive observation. How different from the boys’ first night in the Donnithorpe home—when the thrill of privacy and legitimacy had them in a gentlemanly frenzy of fondness—was the moment a few days later when it turned so disturbingly uncomfortable? Young Victor Trevor had cause to say, “You’ve given the governor such a turn that he’ll never be sure again of what you know and what you don’t know.” That suspicion shared by the Trevors towards their strange guest quickly squashed what had been budding between the boys. The love that dare not speak its name is a delicate bloom under the most ideal circumstances; Sherlock Holmes put a positive burden on it.

Holmes was pressed by extreme social discomfort to cut his visit short, but when he was invited back for the exciting conclusion of his first curiosity, the death of old Trevor (who turned out to be old Armitage instead), the drama of the event drew the boys rather closer again. Close enough at least for Victor Trevor to once again lean on his only friend before striking out to make his fortune in tea in Terai, leaving childish things behind him, and leaving Sherlock Holmes to become what he would be in his own independent fashion. They left each other amicably, and forever, which is the only way to part from Holmes successfully, if you ask me.

Watson, learning of Holmes’s first dalliance, was surprised to find a pattern of masculine preference in his friend. He felt at once less special and more ignorant of life and the world, feelings that Holmes often prompted in Watson, and exploited to his advantage more than once. Their partnership was an uneven one, and had been so from the start.

1881: A Study In Scarlet

Not every story needs to be retold, and I’ve already skipped over
The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
which occurred in 1878 (I am relaying events chronologically, which my dear Watson never did) because it is nothing to do with what Holmes and Watson were to each other, aside from Watson’s domestic little introduction. Outside of learning several more annoying quirks of Holmes’s personal housekeeping habits, that story is only curious if one wishes to know of Holmes’s first significant commission as a consulting detective. It’s mostly told by Holmes himself, and I confess now that I can’t divine as many secrets from his writing as I can from Watson’s. I may skip several more of the cases if they don’t provide portals to the story that was never told, and I certainly won’t go into unnecessary detail about the mysteries themselves, which are already laid out in Watson’s accounts. I’m under the impression that everyone is familiar with my husband’s tales; with those so well known already, though most of them quite tainted by Watson’s rose-colored devotion, I will tell only the parts that need to be recast (for the sake of the truth), and I will add in all that I have learned further.

Watson, the eternal boy, had no idea what he was walking into as he went to meet Sherlock Holmes. His friend Stamford had more than an inkling as he introduced them, I think. He was at least aware of Holmes’s proclivities, for there were too many rumors for all of them to be scurrilous, and everyone in the lab knew it was so. It’s not as if Holmes was flagrant, or that he brought unexplained “friends” around. Oddly it was his solitude that caused him to be rumbled—uninterested in women, uninterested in revelry, but not wholly consumed by science. He could be perfectly charming and sociable when he wanted to, but he did not want to. And his “peers” eventually figured out why.

Stamford, our match-maker, does not appear to have been a member of the club. I believe that amongst themselves homosexuals referred to each other as Uranians back then, a female soul in a male body. I doubt that Holmes ever adopted the term for himself, and he despised being part of any group. Whereas most men enjoy the comradery of belonging, all it did to Holmes was make him feel average. But, a Uranian by any other name!

Stamford brought about the subject of Holmes to Watson cautiously, unsure if it was wise to spread the malady of Holmes to someone else, but rather struck by how fateful it seemed that they should both mention the subject of rooms so desperately in one day. Certainly Stamford could see that Watson didn’t know what he was saying when he blurted, “I should prefer having a partner to being alone,” and he tried to warn him in as discreet a way as possible, saying judiciously, “You don’t know Sherlock Holmes yet.” But soon that would change.

Even reading Watson’s blithe account of the set-up reveals what was really going on. What at first began as two fellows with symbiotic needs—Holmes in possession of
221B
Baker Street if only he could find someone to go halves, and Watson in want of affordable digs—almost immediately became something more. Holmes was a piece in bloom on that day, smiling and shaking hands, and the rest is history.

Watson met Holmes on a peak; I wonder endlessly if they had met in one of Holmes’s valleys, would they have ever become what they are to each other? By all accounts, it is easy to like Sherlock Holmes when he is right, and energetic, and held by some fascination. On the day he met Watson, Holmes had just achieved the invention of a blood-detection test, and anyone might have loved him then, seeing him filled with childish glee, and drawing on others to celebrate with him. Despite Stamford’s warnings, and even some cautions from Holmes himself about how erratic he could be, Watson threw in with him immediately. How was Watson to believe a man so electrified saying he can “get in the dumps at times,” not speaking for days, not eating? It’s like seeing sunshine while someone forecasts rain. Who would you believe: a stranger or your own lying eyes?

At first Holmes’s habits appeared agreeable and regular—early to bed and early to rise, Watson watched him come and go. Sometimes to the laboratory, sometimes the dissecting room, sometimes on “long walks which appeared to take him into the lowest parts of the City.” Darling Watson…it never occurred to him that Holmes might have had friends in low places, or that he might be a patron of flesh in the seediest corners of London. He was even optimistic about whatever psychosis put Holmes into fits of incapacity, which did of course reveal themselves as time went on.

Watson’s account skims over the listless periods Holmes would cycle through as if they were merely an eccentricity. The discretion was a favor to Holmes, since the whole point of writing down his exploits was to make him look intelligent, not mad. In reality, Watson was a touch disturbed to see a grown man slip in and out of catatonic stupors as though it were nothing, just an oddity of the body, like a joint that aches before a storm. He even wondered if Holmes was an addict of some sort, but perish the thought! Holmes was too clean and too precise and Watson was enamored of him already. He was also, in the end, wrong.

Watson could not contain his fascination for Holmes. As a medical man, and as a captive of his own bad health after the war, it was both a duty and a pleasure to study Holmes so minutely. It is interesting to see how his burgeoning love for Holmes disguised itself in a hundred different ways, cloaked as friendship, as tutelage, as gratitude. What Stamford was so suspicious of? It flourished immediately.

What else but love could brush off evidence of severe psychological imbalance like so much dust? What else but love tolerates the smug ignorance of someone who tells you he knows nothing of literature, politics, or the earth’s place among the stars because it does not make “a pennyworth of difference” to him? What else but love would allow one to live with Sherlock Holmes?