My Dear Watson (8 page)

My goodness, he was even kind in his opinion about Americans, assuring the found bride and her American husband who was once presumed dead, that someday the children of Britain and America would be “citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.” Hardly; and Holmes had a rather caricatured view of America that I doubt he altered even after spending a considerable amount of time there during the war. But nothing seemed to upset him once he had decided to be pleasant, for he did possess an iron will when he chose to employ it.

This was a neat little case, involving only the barest amount of footwork, a pure intellectual puzzle. The missing bride was found reunited with her original husband, and the Lord St. Simon had to excuse himself from the friendly dinner Holmes had prepared for all involved. He went home to sooth his wounded pride, rather uncharitably Watson thought. Watson’s sympathy was with the love of these young Americans that endured death, distance, and years of separation.

“Ah! Watson,” Holmes said. “Perhaps you would not be very gracious either, if, after all the trouble of wooing and wedding, you found yourself deprived in an instant of wife and of fortune. I think that we may judge Lord St. Simon very mercifully, and thank our stars that we are never likely to find ourselves in the same position.”

I have it from Watson that he gave Holmes the most withering look he could conjure, because of course Holmes meant to imply that Watson may well be in that position very soon, the sod. Holmes only grinned spritely back at him and picked up his violin.

Holmes was right in one aspect of his teasing; if you don’t invest yourself in anyone, you won’t get hurt. Not that he was able to take his own good advice, because he never truly let go of Watson.

Ah well; as a man with many similar qualities to Holmes once said: “The only thing to do with good advice us pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.”

1888: The Valley of Fear

The landscape at Baker Street slowly began to change as acceptance of Watson’s pending wedding settled over the two men. It was really happening, but it wasn’t the end of the world, nor was it the end of their friendship. They both started remembering who they were before they fell into each other’s laps, and who they wanted to be. Watson had always liked the idea of marriage and a medical practice, and Holmes rather fancied himself the type to never settle down. How had they gotten so far from themselves? Silly to have made such a scene of separating when it was only the natural thing.

In fact, on the surface their relationship hardly changed at all. Holmes returned to his old snipe of a self, and Watson continued to endure his abuse, comforted in knowing that soon he would be moving on. He even managed to come back at Holmes with his own insults; they were nearly equal to those of Holmes, for once. They were at last on equal footing.

“I am inclined to think—” Watson began one day, and Holmes cut him off saying, “I should do so.”

“Really, Holmes, you are a little trying at times,” Watson scolded.

Holmes was consumed in a cipher message he had just received about Professor Moriarty and did not respond. For that snub, Watson got him back. He said of the Professor, “The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as—”

“My blushes, Watson!” Holmes exclaimed, thinking he was about to be complimented.

“I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public,” Watson smiled.

Holmes laughed, a good sport since he was in a relatively good mood. Watson let Holmes tweak him all morning, walking him through the deductive steps to decode the cipher message. He had a wife in his future, and the prospect of practicing medicine again, and what did Holmes have? The new page Billy, who was growing into attractive young manhood before their eyes, and on this occasion Inspector MacDonald; lustrous eyes, precise manner, and a humble admiration of Holmes. Watson went so far as to call him affectionate towards Holmes, and the feeling appears to be mutual if they did indeed smile and wink at each other the way Watson described: “Holmes was not prone to friendship”—to be sure he was
not
—“but he was tolerant of the big Scotchman, and smiled at the sight of him.”

Holmes and MacDonald even teased one another with the lightness of flirtation that Watson once knew. After seven years living together, even the most innocent jabs between him and Holmes drew blood—they simple knew each other too well. Holmes and this inspector where still sounding each other’s boundaries.

I don’t know that Holmes and MacDonald ever went any further than their loaded repartee; I feel there is a chance MacDonald was a lover of women and only amusing Holmes (and himself) by this banter. His admiration of Holmes was so intense that it might have swayed his nature temporarily, but then again, maybe not. We can only speculate irresponsibly on what all this eventually led to:

Holmes noted that MacDonald had arrived early and said, “I fear this means that there is some mischief afoot.”

“If you said ‘hope’ instead of ‘fear,’ it would be nearer the truth, I’m thinking, Mr. Holmes.” And he was right of course, for a moment later when MacDonald spotted the now decoded message and exclaimed that its subject had been murdered, everyone first had to stop and consider the curiosity of Holmes’s cold scientific nature. Watson wrote: “Without having a tinge of cruelty in his singular composition,” and please note that I did roll my eyes when I read that, “he was undoubtedly callous from long over-stimulation.” Undoubtedly.

It was the scarlet thread again, “one of those dramatic moments” for which Holmes existed and could hardly stand to live without. His obsession with Professor Moriarty, though a matter of some giggling for the police and MacDonald who believed Sherlock Holmes had “a wee bit of a bee in your bonnet over this professor,” was as serious a matter as Holmes ever engaged in. This was no mere fixation; without ever laying eyes on the man, right away Holmes recognized in Moriarty the true test of himself. They were so much alike in so many mirrored ways, one of those ways being their profound potential. MacDonald himself remarked that Moriarty would have made a “grand meenister” with his solemn voice and serious appearance. He probably would have made a fearsome consulting detective too, much like Holmes, as Watson pointed out during
The Sign of Four
, would have made a fine criminal.

Holmes had in fact already overstepped the law in his study of Moriarty, for though he had never seen the man, he had gone into the professor’s rooms: twice under honest conditions, and once under false. He did not, however, go into great detail of this mission in front of MacDonald. A professional courtesy, I’m sure, so that MacDonald would not be obligated to arrest him.

Instead they focused on the murder at hand, Holmes warming instantly to the challenge after what Watson describes as “a long series of sterile weeks” which lay behind them. Those were the arctic days after Watson announced his engagement and Holmes returned to cocaine in retaliation, but those days were over. For the moment.

Now Holmes was feeding from the energy of a tricky case, a dead man whose wife and friend seem to celebrate when they think they’re alone. Suspicious footprints, an inaccurate timeline, a missing dumb-bell. Holmes was naturally stimulated by all the brilliant facets of the mystery. He was a chemist over forming crystals, a botanist before a bloom.

Keep in mind that this case is in the earliest months of 1888, just before Watson’s own wedding, and you’ll understand all the focus paid to Mrs. Douglas, the dead man’s wife. In questioning her, she seemed sympathetic, at least to Watson. She said she knew her husband was uneasy, that he existed in a “valley of fear” which he never explained to her. When asked how she knew about it then, Mrs. Douglas answered:

“Can a husband ever carry about a secret all his life and a woman who loves him have no suspicion of it?” No, indeed,
I
don’t believe so, but the idea rattled Watson at the time; he had secrets he wanted to keep.

It was not long after marrying Watson that I guessed at his “secret” history with Holmes, and it was not long after that when I asked him about it. I said, “Darling, were you quite in love with Sherlock Holmes?” He was cleaning and sorting his medical instruments at the dining room table (a habit I despised but had not yet asked him to stop—there were more important things to mention first). Watson frowned and his hands slowed over his work.

“What makes you ask such a thing?” he said.

“Because I imagine it to be true,” I told him.

He compulsively straightened a few of his gleaming tools. He would not look at my face, though if he had he would have seen I was not accusing him. I only wanted him to tell me, and to be perfectly comfortable with my knowing. He hadn’t even had a correspondence from Holmes in weeks, let alone seen the man. This wasn’t about Holmes; it was about us.

“Does it disturb you?” Watson murmured.

“It does not.” I was aware long before meeting Watson that some people were capable of loving both men and women.

Watson glanced up from his work at last and saw that I was smiling, and was put at ease. The next day I took up the study of his stories, and found I had more questions than I would ever receive answers for.

It is clear where Watson got the idea that a wife, despite all her vows, might not be entirely devoted to him. It was not only the experience of catching Mrs. Douglas smiling and laughing with her husband’s best friend just moments after Mr. Douglas would have lost the warmth of life. Mostly it was a lifetime of living with Holmes and hearing his frequent discourses against the fairer sex. They were all seeds of doubt, and they were sprouting.

In discussing the behavior of Mrs. Douglas, Sherlock confessed, “I am not a whole-souled admirer of womankind, as you know, Watson.” My husband made a noise of derision but chose not to speak to that. Holmes went on, “Should I ever marry, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her.” Of course, if Sherlock Holmes were ever to marry, the woman he would choose would certainly be that cold. Did he not already tell Watson that “the most winning woman” he ever knew was hanged for poisoning children? And in just a few short weeks he would meet Irene Adler, and esteem her more for her unemotional shrewdness than for any of the attributes he would consider feminine or wifely. But he would never marry anyway, so every word hung on that hypothesis was delivered for some other purpose. Holmes was merely sowing the beginnings of sabotage in his friend, who was soon to be a groom.

Holmes was reestablishing himself as a single man again, referring to Watson as “Friend” a little more forcefully, but the habits of affection were hard to break. They ended up sharing a room at the inn, with Watson going out of the way to mention the separate beds; I don’t know where the line was drawn, but at some point Watson broke off his physical relationship with Holmes in anticipation of his wedding. It was not directly after the engagement that this happened, because it was important to Watson to fix what he had with Holmes before he left it behind. I can’t even be sure that the intimacy ceased before this very case, for the shared room is suspicious (I highly doubt the inn was full at this ancient town in northern Sussex, murder or no, so what other need would there be to share?). Holmes returned after a night spent in the Douglas house, in the room where the master died, and whispered to his friend, “I say, Watson, would you be afraid to sleep in the same room with a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?” Watson said, “Not in the least,” and why should he be? They’d been sleeping together for years.

The next day proved that Holmes’s mind was as firm and lucid as ever, though still afflicted with “some touch of the artist.” He had to set up a performance of his capture, as was his wont, to appease the dormant actor in him. He couldn’t just hand over the facts on a plate, he had to conceal them in a covered dish and yank the lid off with a flourish to reveal the facts at the most dramatic instant. In this proclivity he is not alone, for the murdered man too arrived with a flourish—later in the story, once it was revealed that Mr. Douglas was not dead but only concealed, and the dead body that of a man sent to kill him. Holmes warned him that his troubles were not yet and would never be over. With Moriarty commissioned on his murder, Douglas was still a hunted man, and in danger much more immediate from Moriarty’s gang than he was from the American gang of Scowrers.

They sent him away from England for his own safety, but he didn’t even survive the boat ride; he was lost overboard in a gale, and it was ruled an accident. Holmes knew that was not so right away, saying there was no accident in all the world, that this was not a coincidence, and that, “there is a master hand” in that man’s death.

“You can tell an old master by the sweep of his brush. I can tell a Moriarty when I see one,” Holmes said, clenching his fist distractedly.

Moriarty too was an artist, and even an unofficial entity like Holmes, a “great consultant in crime” instead of detection. Their trajectories were nearly parallel, but with just the slightest curve towards each other, meaning they must, eventually, touch.

This is the last case recorded before Watson leaves Baker Street for the married life, and it doesn’t make mention of the momentous occasion. This story merely falls off the edge of the mystery; their last moments together were private, until I asked.

Holmes did not attend the wedding. He wouldn’t have gone if it had been Watson’s funeral either, and for much the same reason. But Watson prepared himself for the ceremony at Baker Street. His things were moved out, his house waiting for him and his bride with servants installed, but he would not enter it until he was legally wed. Holmes tolerated all the pomp with his back turned, flipping papers around on his desk and tinkering with his beakers and such, trying to keep his mouth shut. It was not the day for a fight.