My Dear Watson (29 page)

And here finally was proof of that. How funny Watson found it! They’d known each other for sixteen years at this point, lived more than enough together for several lifetimes, so Watson would not begrudge Holmes getting them both killed if it would only drag him out of his sad mood. What is the point of a long life if it is a daily misery, after all?

It is odd how Watson could see the point of risking this dangerous substance for Holmes’s happiness, but not the cocaine. Perhaps his problem was the way cocaine altered the personality he loved, made Holmes rabid and fragile at the same time. He would rather see Holmes dead than changed it seems, but I doubt Watson would ever put it quite that way. I guess we all have blind spots, don’t we?

Holmes assumed they would be able to stop the experiment in time should it become too overwhelming, but the symptoms were strong and immediate. Watson was almost consumed by the poison, but in a last moment of clarity he caught sight of Holmes’s face, rigid with horror, and in a heroic moment he managed to lunge them both through the open door, saving their lives.

Outside the air was clear, and their bleak surroundings turned heavenly. Both men gasped at the air, trying to replace the noxious smoke as quickly as possible. The sky seemed dizzying, high and huge after escaping from such a dark place. It was minutes before either one spoke.

“I owe you both my thanks and my apology,” Holmes said to Watson in a shaken voice. “It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one’s self, and doubly so for a friend.” He reached for Watson’s hand across the grass and their clammy fingers clasped together. “I really am very sorry.” Holmes put himself in that kind of danger all the time, but he was never so careless with Watson’s life, at least not when he was well. Everything was an unfair trade with Sherlock Holmes; with or without the drug he became reckless, in one direction because he felt too much, and in the other because he felt too little. But he was trying, the tragic man, only the game was rigged against him.

Watson nearly died a second time to see Holmes so raw, so open to him. “You know that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you,” Watson told him gently, bringing Holmes’s shivering fingers to his lips. The moment didn’t last long, but it was worth a thousand near-deaths to experience it for Watson. He wrote that this was the most he had seen of Holmes’s heart, and my only surprise is that it was ever enough to sustain him through all the other times.

In the next second Holmes was already making dark jokes about how they must have been mad before ever inhaling the smoke, and he was desperate to discuss the case. His one lingering sign of tenderness was to link arms with Watson and lead him into the arbor to clear their lungs of the smoke. There Holmes broke down his suspicions, his mind sparking as the flint chips of all his observations went striking against one another. And yet even as his brain sped away from what had already happened into what it meant for the case’s conclusion, his body seemed to be under someone else’s control, someone who wanted to linger and remember what had just been survived. It was a testament to how distressed he had been by their ordeal, for Holmes’s hands moved almost without his notice to smooth and check Watson. It was only when Dr. Sterndale came upon them early that Holmes snatched his hands back and beckoned for the explorer to come and approach them. It was time to accuse him of the murder of Tregennis, whom Holmes had deduced to be the poisoner of his family.

Sterndale nearly attacked Holmes, but held himself back. “I have lived so long among savages and beyond the law that I have got into the way of being a law unto myself,” he said as he gathered himself. Watson could feel Holmes suppressing a laugh, probably because he had said the same thing himself, though in reference to the beasts of London instead of the jungle. That made two of them, didn’t it? In fact Holmes was rather coming around to like the idea of taking the law fully into his own hands; mightn’t he like the sensation of doing whatever he pleased, not just in support of the law, but also in spite of it? He had always had a notion that he would be a superior criminal, after all.

Just look at the way he was able to cow Dr. Sterndale who had stalked and killed lions in the jungles of Africa. What a fearsome presence Holmes would be as the leader of a criminal organization, perhaps better than Moriarty himself, since Holmes was so perfectly prepared to thwart the police after working alongside them his whole life (excepting a toe or two out of line of course).

But that was not the issue here, while law-abiding Holmes still had a case to complete. Holmes told Sterndale of all his own movements, saying that he had followed him everywhere he went.

“I saw no one,” Sterndale protested.

“That is what you may expect to see when I follow you,” Holmes told him. The fear of never knowing which of your secrets he had discovered could convert a great many people to do as he instructed them, should Holmes ever choose to bend himself that way. Even Sterndale believed he was the devil himself, and Holmes smiled to hear such a kind compliment. Holmes would not have to miss Moriarty if he became him, would he? It was starting to cross his mind in those days.

Sterndale told a very sad tale about how he had to remain estranged from the deceased Tregennis sister, about how the outdated laws of England would not grant him a divorce from his first wife so that he might marry his true love. And so when she was killed for money by her own brother, Sterndale avenged her with the same fate, locking up the brother Tregennis with the deathly powder that Sterndale himself had accidentally supplied.

“Perhaps, if you loved a woman, you would have done as much yourself,” Sterndale concluded. Holmes asked him what his plans were if the murder had gone undetected, and Sterndale said he would finish his work in Africa. Holmes sent him off to do it, letting him leave their presence a free man. Sterndale was not the first person Holmes would let escape from the laws of the land, but he was much further from being the last. It gets to be a bit of a habit with Holmes for a time here, a measure of control that he exercised when he found his own body exempt from his mastery.

He started smoking and made some smart comment about the fumes. He and Watson remained where they sat for a time, only enjoying the air, and the sanity in their minds, and the life in their bodies. At least that was what occupied Watson’s thoughts; Holmes was still lingering over the case. He asked if Watson agreed that the man should be released, and Watson did. And then Holmes told him, “I have never loved, Watson, but if I did and if the woman I loved had met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done. Who knows?”

I know. While I don’t believe he was mis-speaking when he said that he had never loved, since how the rest of us know that word is quite unlike any emotion Holmes has ever had, I do know that he would avenge Watson if anyone should ever harm him. He would prove it himself soon enough, and even show himself to be selfless and sacrificing for Watson’s sake. So what does he call that, I wonder? And what would anyone else call it either, if not love? Perhaps there simply isn’t a word for what he feels towards Watson.

1897: Abbey Grange

They returned home in autumn when Holmes at last seemed stable, and once again Holmes tried to lose himself in his work. All that year he went from case to case, from papers to projects to potions on his chemistry table. Watson didn’t know if Holmes would ever be happier without the drug, but if he could only learn to be content with a life unthreatened by poison… How long would it take for him to stop missing it?

By winter of that year Holmes was in a dark mood most days, less lethargic than he was before their vacation on the coast, but all the more worrisome when one considered what he was busy with. Watson had wandered by his desk on several occasions and, based on glances at the papers Holmes kept doodling on, he had a suspicion that Holmes was planning a perfect crime, one that he himself would not be able to detect. It was only an intellectual exercise, of course, but Watson still didn’t like it. It was only a matter of time before that attitude bled into his work and his relationship with the law. What had Professor Moriarty been if not an intellect unconnected to a sense of morality? That poor man Wilde had once said of his evil character that he was “a face without a heart,” and hadn’t Watson once thought something similar of Holmes? “A brain without a heart,” he’d written during The Greek Interpreter case. Someday the slim connection between Holmes’s thoughts and his conscience might shrivel from disuse, and then who would be the detective to stop
him
? There was no one else.

Holmes woke Watson early one winter morning, telling him to dress and come, because the game was afoot. Hopkins had sent him a note proclaiming a most remarkable case, and so Holmes hurried out to Abbey Grange to see it. Hopkins had never called him in on any problem that was not worthy of his attention before, and so he was buzzing with the promise of it. Even Watson found something to like about the cases Hopkins brought, for he had included every one in his stories.

“I must admit, Watson, that you do have some power of selection, which atones for much which I deplore in your narratives. Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations. You slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy, in order to dwell upon sensational details which may excite, but cannot possibly instruct, the reader.”

“Why do you not write them yourself?” Watson said sharply. It is quite a bit more fatal, Watson could see, to think of everything in units and figures, and Holmes was quite a one to talk about sensational details as if he was above being drawn in by them. If Watson had ever watched Holmes purr once over a salacious plot or a grizzly murder, he’d seen him do it a hundred times. Holmes promised Watson that he would write a textbook someday (he is working on it now I believe), in his declining years. Watson thought about digging Holmes over his bad habits, telling him he might not live as long as he thought, but that would be a hateful thing to say. Besides, there was always a chance that Holmes was more vulnerable than he appeared, and it isn’t fair to shove a man when he’s near a ledge, no matter how shamelessly he bluffs that he would never lose his balance.

At first Holmes despaired of the case, thinking that Hopkins (like everyone else) had at last disappointed him. It appeared to be an obvious story of robbery and violence. A drunkard had been happily murdered, his poor young wife roughed up but probably better off without her husband. It was perhaps a sign that he was already in his declining years that Holmes did not realize until he was on a train home all the inconsistencies he had failed to add up properly: a blood stain on a chair that was supposedly covered by a restrained victim, the knots in the repurposed bell cord, the dregs of wine left by the killers. Holmes was not at all intuitive about human nature, but he knew the observable pattern of its expression; murderers would have surely finished their drinks.

Even the most finely made timepiece cannot function if it is not wound up. Holmes could be slow to start in those days, with neither his old youthful impatience nor the artificial kick-start of cocaine to engage his mind’s machinery. It seized him on the train, and Holmes leapt outside as it was pulling out of the next station, yanking Watson with him.

“Excuse me, my dear fellow,” Holmes told him, patting back down his collar and staring around at where they had alighted. His thoughts were firing quickly now, and he told Watson that if he had not let the very convincing account of the wife fill him with complacency, he would have known it to be wrong by the evidence right away. It was the hazard of narrative to science once again, I fear; the facts were being clouded by the story.

Watson returned with him to Abbey Grange and for two hours sat with Holmes in the dining room, like a maid with an overactive child, as Holmes darted to and fro, climbing half the furniture and crawling beneath the rest.

“Dear me, how slow-witted I have been, and how nearly I have committed the blunder of my lifetime!” Holmes said happily when he had finished his inspection. He was now looking for a single suspect, not a gang of men, and his was a sailor of higher class than an average crewman—a captain it turned out to be. And since the dead man was such a brute and the captain apparently an unstained gentleman, Holmes stayed his hand until he could speak to this quick, strong person who had so nearly tricked him. Something about so thoroughly obstructing a case rather tickled him; it was like being guilty by proxy.

“I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience,” he said carefully. Watson was partly relieved that Holmes considered his conscience in his cases at all, though he was just as bothered that Holmes so easily disregarded the law as being inconsistent with his values. Lestrade had been right; Holmes might someday put them both into trouble.

Such as when Holmes kept his developing theories to himself, giving Hopkins only physical hints, like the location of the supposedly robbed silverware, sunk in a lake near Abbey Grange. “I believe that you are a wizard, Mr. Holmes,” Hopkins had told him when the silverware was indeed uncovered. “I really do think that you have powers that are not human.”

Holmes let Hopkins leave while biting his tongue. Wizardry! The silly man. He would have liked to explain it all, but instead he deliberately neglected to tell the whole truth, keeping the secrets of the murderers and going a long way in making himself an accomplice in the concealment of their crime. If he had only raised a finger to aid them he would have been guilty, but Sherlock Holmes knew very well the line he must walk.

“What I know is unofficial,” he explained to Watson. “I have the right to private judgment, but Hopkins has none. He must disclose all, or he is a traitor to his service.” Holmes however had long grown accustomed to serving only himself. His unique powers gave him the privilege (which he quite enjoyed exercising at times) to withhold information he deduced in his own mind and which any discerning man might realize if he cared to apply the proper methods. He did it even to Captain Crocker, who arrived in a nervous state moments after Hopkins had left, and said to Holmes, “Speak out, man! You can’t sit there and play with me like a cat with a mouse.” But he really, truly could.