My Dear Watson (12 page)

Regardless, Holmes was wriggling in his seat over having a case and Watson all at once. And when he heard his client knew a man who had pierced ears and an acid stain on his forehead, his eyes sparked, but he said nothing. Bidding Mr. Wilson goodbye, Holmes smoked for nearly an hour, and then invited Watson out for lunch and the symphony. Holmes, after walking out of his way to check a supposition he had made on the case, lost himself in the music. Watson spent his time watching Holmes, contemplating his dual nature and how, after long periods of laziness, his restlessness builds up and bursts out upon some unsuspecting criminal.

With as peaceful as Holmes was throughout his concert, Watson knew something energetic was about to happen to their acid-stained friend. Outside the music hall, Holmes requested that Watson come back later that night and asked him to “kindly put your army revolver in your pocket,” before he patted Watson on the hip and slipped spritely into the crowd. Watson considered it an ominous thing to see Holmes so chipper—it meant the very worst for whoever he was hunting.

That evening was momentous. Holmes decided to bring a riding crop to a gun fight, but it worked out well enough for them when he smacked a pistol clean out of John Clay’s hand.

John Clay was a proud conquest for Holmes, a man he’d had “some skirmishes” with before, but had never yet seen. Clay turned out to be a good-looking man of royal descent (or so he claimed to the officer who went to cuff him), and Holmes was quite pleased to lay his hands on him.

“It’s no use, John Clay,” said Holmes blandly. “You have no chance at all.”

“So I see,” Clay answered with coolness. “You seem to have done the thing very completely. I must compliment you.”

“And I you. Your red-headed idea was very new and effective.”

Watson started to smile in the near-darkness, watching the two of them shift tightly against each other, knowing the many layers of pleasure that Holmes was experiencing by having this man in his grasp.

Watson let people congratulate Holmes, a bit of applause he thoroughly deserved after they all doubted him so severely, especially the foolish old man who owned the bank being robbed and complained at having to come out so late. Watson could tell the nattering sound of the man’s stupid opinions was giving Holmes a headache earlier in the evening, so it was only kind to let Holmes hear the bank owner eat his own words for a bit.

They arrived back at Baker Street just as the sun was starting to rouse. Watson didn’t even think about running home anymore, didn’t even feel a twinge of doubt as he stayed out all night with Holmes. Watson made them each a whiskey and soda and they broke down the case as the morning sun gained ground through the window.

Holmes appreciated Clay’s ingenuity in coming up with the outrageously silly Red-Headed League because it’s just the sort of strange thing people are willing to believe, and it was the first truly original trick in years. Holmes explained his logic to Watson and received praise from his truest fan:

“You reasoned it out beautifully,” Watson told him, his voice full of unfeigned admiration. “It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true.”

Homes gave a tired smile. “It saved me from ennui, but alas! I already feel it closing in upon me.” He stirred his drink pensively, staring into its depths the way he looks at his chemistry beakers, waiting for something to happen, something to react, though of course this time nothing would. “My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.”

Holmes looked so miserable after a night of such triumph, and Watson ached for him, for whatever was wrong in him that caused him to crash so abruptly.

“You are a benefactor of the race,” Watson told him gently, trying to cheer him even the slightest bit.

Holmes just shrugged, the sad smile on his face now seeming to convey pain. “Perhaps it is of little use,” he said. “L’homme c’est rien—l’ouvre c’est tout.” The man is nothing, the work is everything.

“You give yourself too little credit, my friend. In all the world there is only you.”

Holmes’s smile smoothed out and became a little more genuine. “I imagine you’ll need to be getting home soon,” Holmes said.

“Yes,” Watson said slowly. “Perhaps after one more drink.”

1889: The Boscombe Valley Mystery

It was all coming to a head: the visits between houses, the sharing of adventures, the pointed banter, the thrill of knowing so well that one person who knows you so well… It was an irresistible trajectory, and the crash was only a few months away. The tension would hold out through the summer though.

In June the ache became bad enough, the time had been long enough, and it was just over a year after Watson’s marriage that Holmes finally broke and did something more than coy. He sent a note over to Watson in Paddington:

“Have you a couple of days to spare? Have just been wired for from the West of England in connection with Boscombe Valley tragedy. Shall be glad if you will come with me. Air and scenery perfect. Leave Paddington by the 11.15.”

The assumption that he would come when invited shows just how far it had gone. Even Mary could see it. She didn’t need to have the note read out to her to know who it was from. The smile on Watson’s face was evidence enough of Sherlock Holmes. But she heard the contents of the message all the same when Watson read it aloud as though it wouldn’t sting her.

I can just imagine the way her face would have tightened as she asked, “What do you say, dear? Will you go?”

“I really don’t know what to say,” Watson told her, knowing as well as Holmes did what his answer would be.

Mary, her face like a bitten lemon, said, “You have been looking a little pale lately. I think that the change would do you good, and you are always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s cases.”

Even Watson sensed how cool she was being, and it cowed him. “I should be ungrateful if I were not,” he said meekly from his end of the breakfast table, “seeing what I gained through one of them.” He tried to smile at his wife; she began to cut her food vigorously. If Watson had not already known he would go, the atmosphere in his house that morning would have forced him out soon enough.

He left Mary and headed for the train station later that morning. Holmes was pacing up and down when Watson arrived, and when he noticed his friend, he broke into a smile so genuine I’m sure it would have made me sick.

“It is really very good of you to come, Watson. It makes a considerable difference to me, having someone with me on whom I can thoroughly rely.” He could have told Watson to meet him at the bottom of a river, and Holmes would not have waited there long enough to drown.

Holmes quickly broke down the circumstances surrounding the death of a landowner named Mr. McCarthy which left his son looking like the culprit. A sad case, but not so tragic that Holmes could not take personal pleasure in it as both a puzzle and an excuse: “Hence it is that two middle-aged gentlemen are flying westward at fifty miles an hour, instead of quietly digesting their breakfasts at home.”

A moment of silence passed that is not detailed by Watson in the official telling. Holmes, with his uncanny knowledge, asked Watson, “And how is your wife this morning?” But Watson only shook his head in a warning to Holmes that Mary was not to be a subject of his today, and in a rare moment of consideration, Holmes heeded him.

But he didn’t keep his mouth shut the whole day, and managed to cross Watson a few times with his thoughtless words. After meeting young McCarthy he had this to say: “He is not a very quick-witted youth, though comely to look at, and, I should think, sound at heart.”

Watson, rather stung by the knowledge that Holmes was looking at other peoples’ youth, and having met the accused man’s love interest earlier that day remarked back, “I cannot admire his taste if it is indeed a fact that he was averse to a marriage with so charming a young lady as this Miss Turner.” They both were blessed with good sight, and Watson could admire the young people too, if Holmes wanted to start.

“Yes, I saw that you approved of the young lady,” Holmes said. “You have a very predictable type in women, my dear Watson. Something soft but firm in their personality, a sort of steely presence in their gentle eyes…” Watson gave a cocked look to Holmes, advising him away from the subject of Mary once again. Holmes quickly launched into an explanation of why the junior McCarthy had not yet proposed to Miss Turner though he was madly in love with her, and they spent an uneasy night at the inn, an inauspicious beginning to the romantic journey as Holmes had imagined it might be.

The next day they resumed the investigation, and Holmes continued to put his foot in his mouth throughout. The first of it was when Lestrade, who brought him to the case, had a little dig at Holmes’s methods.

“We have got to the deductions and the inferences,” said Lestrade, winking at Watson. “I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies.”

“You are right,” said Holmes, with an affected modesty. “You do find it very hard to tackle the facts.”

After that both Watson and Lestrade were annoyed with him, and it put Holmes in a prickly mood until they arrived on the scene of the crime. Holmes forgot all about himself in the ecstasy of the hunt, and Watson too was distracted by watching Holmes’s transformation. I find it a rather ugly description of animalistic focus; the same feeling of discomfort fills me when a familiar and friendly dog is suddenly and aggressively on the scent of a rat. But Watson was only fascinated. He never had a natural horror of Holmes, to his great disadvantage.

As the facts fell into place, Lestrade chose to ignore Holmes’s findings, and as is true with most cases, only Watson remained to hear the full details. It was a testament to all that Watson had done with his writing that Holmes was content, in these later stories, to let the officials ignore him and allow his solution to stay secret. When Watson first met him, Holmes was wild with the injustice of being disregarded. It was the effort of Watson to record his every impressive move that gave him public status, and gave him peace about his legacy, so that later he would be free to claim that he never did anything for the recognition, only the art. It is easy to care little of renown once it is had.

After dinner, Holmes asked Watson to listen to him while he unspooled his thoughts. Watson obliged, and the way Holmes solicited his attention put him in a tender mood that endured through a visit from their culprit. The man confessed to McCarthy’s murder, but as Holmes found his death justified, he let the ailing murderer go. So long as young McCarthy was not wrongly convicted, he would say nothing at all.

Though the case was solved, the true intention of this trip to the countryside had failed. Watson admitted to me that coming home from Boscombe Valley he felt like a man without a country. Holmes was still Holmes, superficially fun but a shallow well from which to draw for human affection; and yet, his wife was not all that he hoped she’d be either, she could not give him all that he desired. In all fairness, he did hazard to guess that she felt the same way towards him. He wanted a wife that had all the excitement of a whip-snap like Holmes, yet with all the quiet domesticity of his own mother. She had expected a husband to be a full-blooded man, whose love for her would be noble and passionate and unwavering until one or both of them should die. However, Watson came bundled together with someone who would never let him go, and there simply wasn’t any recourse for either of them when it came to the problem of Sherlock Holmes.

1889: The Man With the Twisted Lip

Watson’s was not the only unhappy wife. Kate Whitney arrived at the Watsons’ home one night in June to send her doctor into an opium den after her husband while she stayed behind to be consoled by Mary. Apparently, “folk who were in grief came to her like birds to a lighthouse.” They must have known that she could sympathize.

Mary and Watson had once found comfort in each other, but now relations were strained, and I know right well why. While retrieving Mr. Whitney from his den of iniquity, Watson came across Holmes in disguise, and was drawn into his doings as quickly as Holmes could insist on it. Watson knew it all himself: “It was difficult to refuse any of Sherlock Holmes’s requests, for they were so exceedingly definite, and put forward with such a quiet air of mastery.” No sooner did Holmes tell Watson to write a note to his wife saying he would not be home that night than Watson had done it and turned to wait at the beck and call of his friend. “Mastery” is almost too subtle a word; this was outright ownership.

Holmes emerged from the den laughing, pleased at his disguise, and at discovering Watson so accidentally. He was quick to assure Watson that he hadn’t started using opium, and he brought up his taste for cocaine so breezily that it was clear he was experiencing a period of sobriety. The re-winning of Watson had become his new task, and puzzling out the best way to do it had begun to sustain him quite sufficiently in between cases.

Holmes gave the quick and dirty details of a prolific murder-trap location and conjured a vehicle from the night that would take him back to his hotel.

“You’ll come with me, won’t you?” he asked Watson. And of course, the answer was, “Of course.”

It was a grateful ride out to his client’s house, quiet at first, and then Holmes described the details he was concerned with—the case of someone else’s missing husband. It seems to have been quite an epidemic that night, husbands disappearing out from under their wives all over London. Holmes was presented with fresh evidence before they even turned in for the night, so the tantalizing promise of a double bed went unfulfilled as Holmes perched himself on the floor throughout the night, and did not sleep for all his thinking. Watson reports:

“In the dim light of the lamp I saw him sitting there, an old briar pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent, motionless, with the light shining upon his strong-set aquiline features.”