My Dear Watson (15 page)

Watson’s narrative in the official canon suddenly loses daylight, as though the men were so carried away discussing the details of the case that they lost track of the time. But I have the truth from Watson. He gave me as many details as he could bring himself to speak, one day about a year into our marriage, when he realized that he and I had never had an argument.

“Darling,” I told him. “We’re too old for arguments.” He smiled and took my hand. We were at the seaside on an anniversary trip.

“Mary and I fought,” he told me. “Horrible, long, silent stand-offs.” The sun was just beginning to set, and it felt as if it was falling down on us, so thick did the sunlight seem by the sea. A breeze disturbed Watson’s mustache, or maybe his mouth twitched in agitation. He said softly in addition, “Holmes and I fought too.”

But, so the story went, they always made up spectacularly. On the moors, after all their dissonance and Watson’s marriage and their hesitant resumption of courtship in the past few months, they found themselves alone at last, in the twilight, in a place far from Baker Street and the scene of their old troubles.

Holmes ducked back into his ancient dwelling, and he pulled Watson in after him, finger still hooked under the neck of his shirt. The hut was too low to stand in, so Holmes sunk straight to his knees and brought Watson down with him.

Watson and I, and Holmes as well, we’re from a modest generation. Our mothers might have never been fully naked past the age of infancy, and we have all inherited that shyness. In my experiences making love with Watson, some bit of clothing always remained in place, and such was true, as far as I can gather, with Sherlock Holmes. I would be surprised if in this particular instance they even unbuttoned their shirts all the way. It wasn’t strictly necessary.

The air would have been clammy as the evening fog rolled in, but the chill would have been kept at bay by their breaths, their bodies. Sherlock Holmes, his muscles as tight as the strings on his violin, pushed and pulled Watson as he pleased. They had each been a long time wanting this connection; they quivered on the edge of it, fearful lest it should escape them once again.

They kissed savagely, Watson’s mustache in complete disrepair, Holmes’s usually thin, pale lips flushed with passion. They loved each other forcefully for only a few moments, their stamina at a significant low after so long apart, but it was enough to sate them. They sat back on the packed dirt floor of the hut to catch their breaths.

They did get around to talking about the case eventually, just as Watson has written down, but it was mixed in with a kind of intimate chatter, the likes of which is usually found shared over bedroom pillows. At first they began by laughing about Dr. Mortimer’s strange fixation with skulls, and Watson relayed the trick he used in distracting Mortimer from asking too much about the case.

“I am certainly developing the wisdom of the serpent, for when Mortimer pressed his questions to an inconvenient extent I asked him casually to what type Frankland’s skull belonged, and so heard nothing but craniology for the rest of our drive!” He had not lived for years with Sherlock Holmes for nothing. It is a tactic that works on any obsessive personality.

“Has the good doctor asked after your skull as he has after mine?” Holmes said, his words taking solid shape with the smoke from a cigarette. He sat on an outcropping of rock, having allowed Watson the stone slab of the bed. There was much amusement in his voice.

“He hasn’t. I suppose I’m a much less interesting subject.” Holmes made a gesture waving away Watson’s modesty. Watson continued to speak cautiously. “Dr. Mortimer is a peculiar fellow, is he not? So much so that when he first asked to examine your skull, I…well I thought he was after something else.”

“He wasn’t, Watson. He is just a scientist. We are locked away in laboratories for so long we forget how to talk to people. Besides which, though he is a curious person, he is of absolutely no interest to me.”

“Why is that?” Watson asked, beginning to right his buttons and smooth his hair.

“Most men pale in comparison to you, Watson.”

Watson opened his mouth to speak, but it was rather too much for him to process. Holmes was in a most loving mood lately, relative to his usual behavior. It was, and still is, very flattering to experience praise from such a Caesar.

They lapsed into a discussion of the case, and by the time Holmes suggested that Watson had best get back to Sir Henry, his endangered charge, they were put together once again as though nothing had happened. A question was thick in the air between them about what would occur once they returned home, but no one was going to speak of it just then, and in any case they were interrupted by a blood-chilling cry from outside.

Both men rushed into the darkness assuming their client had fallen prey to the legendary hound of his forefathers, both sick in their hearts at the sound of it. Holmes was in an absolute state, furious with himself and with Watson for allowing their client to be killed when they knew enough to have stopped it.

Guilt welled up in Watson even as hysteria seemed to consume Holmes when, after much stomping and shouting, he started to dance and laugh.

“Good heavens, have you gone mad?” Watson asked. I cannot think of a more useless question to ask of someone who might be mad, but Sherlock Holmes was not mad, he was merely ecstatic. Setting aside how disturbing it is to ever be so enthused beside the body of a man you just heard die in terror, even Watson felt lighter when they both realized: this was not Sir Henry, but the unfortunate convict, in Sir Henry’s old coat.

Holmes was in a fit of joy that did not end until Stapleton arrived and he was required to control himself. The murderous naturalist was just as cold as Holmes was hot over these proceedings. Strolling up to the man he’d just killed by design, he was also able to conceal his surprise at finding the wrong man in the right coat.

Holmes can never truly mask himself like that, for he is not a cold man, no matter how often he aspires to be machine-like. A steam engine is a machine too, and Holmes was positively stoked with the excitement of this problem. He often trembled with the effort to hide his exhilaration; it shivers through him when he must swallow it down, like a nasty medicine, and it’s never far from coming back up. When he and Watson parted ways from Stapleton, it was all on his surface again. Holmes was breathing deeply the moist air like it was the sweetest incense. Watson kept his eyes sliced sideways, watching him.

“Could this be my stern, self-contained friend?” Watson wondered. “These were hidden fires, indeed!”

Yes, indeed.

1919: Retreat

I clear the table myself, stacking the dishes noisily and escaping into the hall outside the kitchen. My Watson makes an effort to be discreet, but Holmes is going out of his way to make me uncomfortable. Eyeing Watson and all but licking his chops, I think he may have even winked… It’s making me feel rather ill.

I could probably tolerate it from any other man, but then I know there isn’t any other man when it comes to Watson; there is only this one.

I won’t pretend that it doesn’t break my heart a little. The knowledge that my husband’s love is divided, that his loyalty lies sometimes elsewhere. He loves me, but he loves Holmes too, and he has known Holmes longer, and stuck with him through worse. The biggest difference is that I have never betrayed Watson, I have never taken from him more than I’ve given, I have never hurt him. But perhaps I do not have the capacity? Perhaps only Sherlock Holmes could truly injure him.

But I am letting the world-famous detective get to me. He is not so untouchable. Sure, I am stifling tears in the hallway while he is making love in the dining room, but whose house is he in? Who has Watson chosen, and made vows to, and stuck by? Who puts him back together when he returns from Holmes’s seaside house in agony?

It is easy to be intimidated by thoughts of them at their best. Watson and Holmes; they were golden, they were unstoppable, but it’s balanced out by their worst. Mathematically I should have nothing to worry about, but I can think of a way to be positively sure.

I compose myself in the hall mirror, then grasp it by its heavy frame, and remove it from the wall. I know that if I can angle it properly, I’ll be able to see the men’s reflection in the china cabinet. I look like a madwoman sitting on the floor with a mirror bigger than my torso, tipping it this way and that, but I need to get a glance at them alone. When I finally find their pale likenesses in the glass, what I see actually helps.

They are grasped together at the table, hands squeezed firm on each other’s arms, heads leaned close together. But Watson’s head is shaking back and forth, and he looks upset, and Sherlock Holmes has lost the superior look he has for me and now seems concerned, conciliatory, as if he is begging for something that’s being refused to him.

I am soothed by this tableau. I replace the mirror on the wall and prepare myself to take dessert out into the dining room. I pop into the kitchen for the tray and avert my face from Maurice so he won’t see that I have been upset. Watson would notice, and Holmes too I assume, but right now they are probably too wrapped up in each other to consider me at all. Still: better to hide myself.

I walk into the dining room with the tray in front of my face and start polite conversation about where the cake and the coffee came from before setting it down on the table. My words die on my lips when I realize the room is empty.

They’re gone.

1889: The Hound of the Baskervilles (continued)

Sherlock Holmes may have been excited about the death of the convict on the moor, but the poor man’s sister was not. He was hated by all the citizenry in the county for his horrid crimes, but still the man’s sister loved him. “Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him,” Watson noted. That is true enough.

Pleased as he was to find the convict dead, Holmes wondered aloud if he shouldn’t arrest the whole household for aiding him in the first place, but he said it with a smile. As if he had never ignored the law himself, and encouraged Watson to do the same! But then he spotted the line of portraits of past Baskervilles and realized something that made him ecstatic all over again. Holmes was required to suppress this emotion while in front of Sir Henry, but when Watson came to his room later that night (sometimes discretion in these narratives is entirely left wanting—Watson was not quite accustomed to being guilty), Holmes seized him by the arm and took a candle down with them to look at the portraits alone.

It was the one of Sir Hugo, the Baskerville who allegedly conjured the devilish hound and inadvertently set it upon his whole family. Holmes quizzed Watson on it, and then covered the hat and hair of the painted man to reveal a remarkable family resemblance to…Stapleton.

Watson was astonished, and Holmes nearly lost himself in a fit of laughter. For some reason, among my friends, I find people are under the assumption that Holmes is a stoic figure; reasonable, rational, and always in the right. I have read these stories quite closely, and if one isolates his objective behavior from all the trappings of admiration that Watson surrounds them with, Holmes easily appears insane. Not just the strange circumstances of his depressions, but these wild upswings as well! The way he goes gibbering off on the obscure threads of a case, the way he receives a charge from the mere figuring out of a problem… He never loses his reason—for it is his reason alone, once he has proven himself right, that saves him from the asylum—but at times he almost cannot harness himself. At any rate, he could not hold his madness down indefinitely, and it usually exploded in front Watson, who never appeared to judge him harshly.

This fit was brought on by the idea of catching Stapleton and adding him to their Baker Street collection, the image of pinning him under glass like a specimen. “I have not heard him laugh often,” Watson wrote, “and it has always boded ill to somebody.” What a disturbing sort man whose laughter means danger and whose pleasure is violence. There is nothing so happy that Sherlock Holmes cannot make it seem sinister.

Holmes was rather partial to the image of catching Stapleton like one of the naturalist’s own butterflies, and metaphorically refers to nets all during the case, though usually he is resistant to such literary speech. But he liked Stapleton as an adversary, liked all the hoops and troubles he had to go through to trap him. It was one of the more elaborate and taxing cases Watson recorded, but Holmes enjoyed it all the more for the energy he expended. He put a few more things into place, but still noted, “Even now we have no clear case against this very wily man. But I shall be very much surprised if it is not clear enough before we go to bed this night.”

Watson snorted into his mustache as they stood waiting for Lestrade to arrive from London and dared not look at Holmes lest he be crippled by the subtext in those words.

Lestrade was much more disposed towards Holmes here than we’ve seen him previously; he had become a more experienced detective himself, and as such recognized Holmes’s greatness at the profession. But that does not mean Lestrade understood Holmes any better, for he and Watson were both frustrated by Holmes’s habit of fostering mystery. During dinner and on the long drive out to Baskerville Hall, they were left to stew in their own anxieties as Holmes retained all his knowledge for himself. Watson hazarded a couple guesses at why:

“Partly it came no doubt from his own masterful nature, which loved to dominate and surprise those who were around him.” This is my guess! The need to reinforce his assumed superiority, to constantly reassure himself that he is better by keeping everyone else in the dark. Watson gives him more credit, as though Holmes has ever truly felt humble: “Partly also from his professional caution, which urged him never to take any chances.”

Holmes was anything but professional. The thrill of the case caused him such reckless giddiness that it affected those around him. He manages to pull Lestrade into some suggestive banter about whether he’s armed and where. I’m surprised Watson could transcribe it all without blushing, but something about a hunt turns men into boys again, and it was all ribaldry and singing nerves as they approached the Stapleton house in the dark.