My Dear Watson (13 page)

And this is how he solved the case; it was only a matter of realizing that the two men seen at different times in one room were the same man in a disguise, and an amusing one at that. A respectable family man was employed lucratively as a beggar, masking up his face every day so that he appeared to be a very tragic, ugly street figure. Even the police officer thought it more funny than criminal. He promised not to even bother about it all, so long as the gentleman was never caught out begging again with any face but the one he was born with. Their suspect/client was so embarrassed by his predicament that he swore to it on the spot.

Watson liked the light-hearted circumstances, but Holmes was bored as soon as the story was out. The more hideous the case, the more Holmes tends to savor it. I’ve a theory that it makes him feel more alive, just the way a war causes a boom in births; tragedy prompts a certain kind of person to live even harder, in defiance. Sherlock Holmes is that sort of belligerent person.

1889: The Engineer’s Thumb

Lucky for Holmes, most of their cases were not so charming. The next month Watson stopped by Baker Street with a mutilated man named Victor Hatherly, but before getting into that, Watson explained:

“I had finally abandoned Holmes in his Baker-street rooms, although I continually visited him, and occasionally even persuaded him to forego his Bohemian habits so far as to come and visit us.”

If, like myself, you are tired of the back-and-forth between them, it is absolutely nothing to how Watson felt about it. It was balancing on a precipice, it was holding a trigger steady, it was Sisyphus at the summit…it was agony. But as a doctor he knew the habits of man, and if he had a dime for every patient who would harass their own wounds by picking and prodding, he would have money enough to retire. And it seemed that fate would insist on throwing he and Holmes together, even without their being able to help it. Hatherley did need to consult with Holmes. What else could be done?

That is what he said to Mary when he went up to tell her he’d be away for a while. He had at last learned to be a little more oblique with his references to Holmes, but he could not pretend on this day that he was just headed to the club.

“What can I do?” he asked Mary carefully. “The man has been through a terrible ordeal.”

“And Mr. Sherlock Holmes will make it all better?”

“He’s shed light on worse,” Watson told her cryptically. “I don’t know when I’ll return. I’ll send a wire if I’ll be gone through the night.” He went to kiss her goodbye and she flinched from him almost imperceptibly. This, at least, Watson observed as if he were the very man they spoke of. He left without bestowing his kiss.

It’s a creepy story Hatherley tells about being commissioned for his expertise in hydraulics to a mysterious house in the countryside. He is tricked there, blindfolded, and nearly killed when he discovers that the press he’s working on is not used for the purposes of making fuller’s bricks as he had been told, but rather counterfeit coins. My sympathy for him was slightly marred when he ignored the fearful warnings of a woman inside the house; it was a rather bad habit of men of the time to assume all women were hysterics, half-mad from bleeding once a month and weak from their breathless corsets. Should Hatherley have heeded her from the outset, he’d have retained his digit.

In the end, he was lucky to only lose a thumb. The engineer who went before him was never seen again.

Sherlock Holmes managed to have quite a bit of fun, especially under the gory circumstances. He even took a moment at the train station to let everyone in his party guess four separate compass directions that the house of the counterfeiters must lie in, just so he would have the pleasure of telling them that they were all wrong.

“But we can’t
all
be,” Inspector Bradstreet protested. Holmes smiled as he said, “Oh yes, you can,” and explained how cleverly the coiners had driven Hatherley in circles until he’d swear he was miles from the station, though in fact he was very close by.

It was a hell of a situation Hatherley got himself in, and though his life had been only just gotten away with, he still had the nerve to be ungrateful, complaining about his lost thumb, and unbelievably, his lost fee!

In a remark I appreciate considering my feelings against Hatherley, Holmes told him he had at least gained some experience, and an entertaining story for parties!

Watson had to stifle a smile. He is naturally sympathetic and makes a fine physician because of it, but Sherlock Holmes was starting to override the best in him, yet again. This was July, and by September something between them would finally click back into place.

1889: The Five Orange Pips

Now, when I first became serious about Watson, I read all of his stories. I’d come across one or two before with little interest, honestly; I found Holmes insufferable from the start. Later of course I read them for information on Watson. Every phrase he chose added to my knowledge of him, ingrained his cadence into my head. I was love-sick then, and didn’t see a single flaw. It wasn’t until much later, when I heard more about Holmes from Watson that didn’t seem to match the demi-god of his stories, that I sat down to serious study. The first thing I noticed then were the numerous discrepancies: impossible dates, mix-and-match combinations of introduction material and the case details, even fully fleshed lies in some cases! Those mostly about women, probably to deflect suspicion.

I am Watson’s second, and hopefully final, wife. I should be able to line up the stories that mention his only other wife, Mary, in a very neat line. If only that were so! I had to laugh at him once I compared some of his notes, knowing when his first wedding anniversary was and having the ability to count. I gave myself a headache trying to sort it all out before I remembered how unfortunate Watson can be with numbers.

“What was her name?” I asked him once, biting down on a smile as I pushed up my reading glasses. It was an evening well before the war, and we both sat engaged in perfectly domestic study—he with the newspaper, myself with his narratives.

“Whose name, darling?”

“The wife you had in September of 1887.”

He lowered his paper and frowned at the toe of his shoe. “Mary and I weren’t married until 1888, my dear, in the very early spring, on the first warm and twittering day of it, if I remember right. I was a bachelor before then.”

“Oh really?” I said, nearly drawing blood in my effort to keep a serious expression. “Because some fellow signing himself Dr. Watson says otherwise.”

“What?” He got up from the paper and came over to the desk, attempting to argue with me. I had just gone through all his papers with a fine-toothed comb:
The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips
is recorded as happening in late September of 1887, and yet in the scene that precedes it in the story has Watson speaking of a wife away visiting her mother when he did not meet Mary until the next year, and she was an orphan on top of that, and Holmes mentions the one woman who has ever outsmarted him, meaning of course Irene Adler, whom he did not encounter until March of 1888.

“Or Irene might have been in 1889, darling, I truly cannot tell,” I told my husband. “It is the same sort of thing later when you mention
The Sign of Four
; that also occurred in 1888, in July,” I said, and then glancing at my notes, “or September.”

Watson seemed flustered and started shuffling through his papers, but I shooed him away; I’d just given them some semblance of organization. I wouldn’t have him messing them up again.

The best I can figure, Watson somehow altered the date, and this Five Orange Pips case took place in September of 1889, which is where I have placed it. It was either that, or Watson accidentally paired a rainy day in September with a rainy case in September, not realizing that they were two separate years, and not bothering to check on something so seemingly incidental as the idle chatter that transpired before the arrival of a client. Watson was grumpy at me for days after I pointed it out to him, so I never asked for more clarification. I want to keep the cases in order, but I cannot bend my understanding around this clearly anachronistic front matter, and so have had to move it. He may sue me if he dares.

Mistake or not, I would have been short a bit of joy if I hadn’t read this introduction. If indeed this scene did take place after Watson’s marriage to Mary Morstan, the sulkiness of Sherlock Holmes fills me with glee. A man comes stumbling up the street, and Watson wonders if it is some friend of Holmes’s. According to Holmes: “Except yourself I have none. I do not encourage visitors.” Such a pronounced pout, even through the page! Perhaps he should have treated his one and only friend a bit better if he wanted for company, but his loss was my eventual gain, so I cannot rightly complain.

That being said, this “visit” Watson was on strikes me as unlikely. As I said before: Mary was an orphan. She was not off staying with her mother. I think Watson lied here (terribly) to disguise the fact that he had temporarily moved out from the home he shared with his wife, and back into Baker Street. During every case he records that winter, he is residing at
221B
, and he hardly makes any reference to it at all. Things were not ideal in the Watson household.

As for the case itself, that of The Five Orange Pips, I must say I get rather tired of America being portrayed as a wild land of cults and violence. I’ve been to America, and my mother was an American, and though the people are still rather rough around the edges, they aren’t all Mormons or Klansmen or what have you. But alas, those people do blight America’s reputation.

So when threats signed K.K.K. start to menace young Oppenshaw and he is recommended to Holmes, Watson is in residence. It was a tense arrangement, thick with expectation. After a fight with Mary, the details of which I have never been told, he showed up on Holmes’s front step with the same lie he would later tell his readers, though of course Holmes was much harder to fool.

“My dear Watson, surely you realize that even if I didn’t know Mary to be parentless, you have a very obvious tell,” he said, letting Watson inside gleefully. “You cannot look me in the eye with a falsehood, and it’s clear as day that you’ve been arguing with a woman anyway.”

“How is that, Holmes?” Watson wondered childishly as he set down the quick suitcase he had packed with the efficiency of all his military training.

“You look greatly annoyed and frustrated, but your hand is unmarked. If a man had caused you such grief you’d have struck him and been satisfied.”

“Ah,” said Watson, smiling at the explanation.

“And you’ve packed in an unexpected hurry, as can be seen by the sleeve peeking out of your valise.”

“Well then, I hope you have room for a liar and an unsatisfactory husband?” Watson asked.

“Always,” Holmes said, clapping him on the shoulder.

They kept up the good-natured ribbing for a few loaded days, all the way up to when the client had come and gone. They reminisced about old times like two circling fighters, feinting and hesitating, waiting for the first strike. Watson was back at home again, so when would it be, when would it be? And who would risk the first movement? Each of them had a matter of pride to consider, wanting the other man to know that things could be got on without him. It was important to prove to each other that they didn’t need anything, as though only the weak required more than food and shelter. They were such men about it.

Watson recalled carefully to Holmes the time when they were new to each other, remembering that he had made some observational conclusions about the practical composition of Sherlock Holmes.

“Violin player,” Watson reminded him. “Boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.”

Holmes grinned at the last item. “Well,” he said. “I say now, as I said then, that a man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use.”

“And the cocaine?” Watson asked, his smile frozen on his face. “Is that something you’re likely to use?”

“Not lately, my friend. Not since you left.”

A dove of hope began to coo within Watson, to rustle as if it would take flight, but it would have to wait just the slightest bit longer. The next morning Watson and Holmes discovered that their client died suddenly after leaving Baker Street alone, and though the official word on his death was accidental, they both knew better.

Watson could tell that Holmes was disturbed by the news, though he put on a casual tone at first. Once it had sunk in, he honestly said, “That hurts my pride, Watson. It is a petty feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride.”

Watson was entranced with watching Holmes feel anything in front of him, even if the emotion was entirely inappropriate, and when Watson asked him if he would go to the police, Holmes said, “I shall be my own police!” And tore from the house to be just that.

Watson, though not currently sleeping at home, still had need to work there. He stayed out of the upper quarters, attended to his patients as though everything was fine, and returned to Baker Street at the end of the day. Holmes returned hours after him, having neglected to eat in the intervening time, and Watson listened to all his plans and figuring on how he would avenge his client.

Watson went to touch Holmes on the shoulder, but Holmes was so agitated by his failure that he brushed it right off, like a dog that won’t be patted during a thunderstorm.

And speaking of dogs…

1889: The Hound of the Baskervilles

Two weeks later, in October, Watson is still clearly living at Baker Street. You’ll notice the slip-up in speech as he speaks to Holmes about “our visitor” who left a walking stick behind, and Holmes echoes him by saying “our visitor” had provided quite a bit of information about himself by leaving his cane. Holmes challenged Watson to make some deductions from the object, and he failed to find a single fact, but you can tell that Holmes was working to be kind to him by the way that he complimented Watson regardless.