My Dear Watson (23 page)

Holmes fluttered his eyes slowly in response. He could feel himself being pulled down; it was only important to get inside before he was overtaken by paralysis. As a young man these fits of malaise had caught him unawares once or twice and it had been very awkward. He once lay across a study table in the university library for an entire day, not just sun up to sun down, but for a full twenty-four hours at least. People worried he’d had a stroke over his exams, and at last someone dared to shake his shoulder and roused him enough to send him away. They looked at him so strangely after that.

“You were not energized by the mystery, Holmes? I thought it seemed just to your taste.”

Holmes opened his mouth but could not speak. It had gone as far as his voice already. He grasped Watson’s arm to reassure him, but the gesture only made our doctor more concerned. Where was the man’s strength? Watson had had invalids hold him more tightly.

When they arrived home, Watson brought him inside and put him straight to bed. He wanted to give Holmes something for his malady, but the only treatment he knew was what Holmes chose for it, the cocaine solution, and it was no cure, but only a new disease in itself. They would do without it.

And without it they did. Holmes snapped back from his misery in a few days, just like always, but the problem remained lurking, building, underneath.

1895: Wisteria Lodge

The next story begins thusly: “I find it recorded in my notebook that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1892.” I did tell you that Watson’s notes held errors, didn’t I? Sherlock Holmes was dead in 1892. I’ve examined his original papers, and you should see this sad wiggle that he took for a
2
and in which I see a very weak and confused
5
. Certainly Watson was absolutely wrong with his number, and so I shall use mine instead.

Holmes got a note asking for a consultation, and took to it right away because of the client’s use of the word “grotesque” in relation to his troubles. What a marvelous word to Sherlock Holmes, and how he mulled it in his mouth like something savory. Here are the moments that Watson calls artistic, when the connoisseur Holmes comes out and kisses his fingers in enthusiasm. There was a certain
je ne sais quoi
in that word, something rich and scarlet and gold. Made merely of letters arranged just so on a telegram, that word was enough to start his heart racing faster. He never knew how very much of his life was spent feeling half-dead except in these small moments when a true zest for living would seize him. It was an exquisite sensation.

That is when Watson thoughtlessly asked if Holmes would see the man who had written to him.

“My dear Watson,” Holmes said to him, his voice like that of someone offended or injured. “You know how bored I have been since we locked up Colonel Carruthers. My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.” He began to get upset, an emotional state very rare for someone like Holmes, who is more prone to throwing tantrums should he ever lose control of himself; this was an inward versus an outward expression of hot frustration. It
was
tearing him up. “Life is commonplace, the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove?”

Watson gaped at his friend, shocked by the sudden outpouring of such obviously well-formed and unhappy thoughts. He wanted to ask Holmes if he was all right, for God’s sake, but before he could speak there was a step upon the stair, and their client was before them. Holmes returned in an instant to his old, guarded self.

Mr. Scott Eccles was a bachelor—he had met an attractive, lively man named Garcia and went for a stay at his household, Wisteria Lodge. Garcia received a note that unsettled him during dinner, and when Eccles woke the next day, Garcia and all his people were gone. Holmes was already interested before Inspectors Gregson and Baynes arrived and said that Garcia had been found dead. Grotesque, indeed.

Holmes was impressed with Baynes’s talent for observation, but he was not as perfectly trained in the art of deduction. He had gotten a wealth of data from the note (recovered from the fire), but from it he concluded nothing except that since a woman had written it, a woman must be at the bottom of the whole mess. Holmes doubted that to Watson: “There is, on the face of it, something unnatural about this strange and sudden friendship between the young Spaniard and Scott Eccles.” He might understand it from Eccles’s end—for no man may be a “bachelor” around Sherlock Holmes without him knowing why—but it was Garcia who had pushed the friendship, and that did not add up at all.

“What did he want with Eccles?” Holmes wondered. “What could Eccles possibly supply? I see no charm in the man. He is not particularly intelligent—not a man likely to be congenial to a quick-witted Latin.” Holmes concluded that Garcia must have valued Eccles for something else. “Eccles is the very type of conventional British respectability.” He would be believed by police whatever he said. Holmes and Watson had watched him go out with the inspectors still unsuspected, despite how badly his own story implicated him. Perhaps that was the value he held for Garcia; he would have been an unassailable alibi.

Holmes conceded that there might be some kind of tryst. The lady in question might have a jealous husband who would beat a man to death over such a note as they had read, but Holmes doubted it, and it was all speculation at best. “We can only possess our souls in patience until this excellent inspector comes back for us. Meanwhile we can thank our lucky fate which has rescued us for a few short hours from the insufferable fatigues of idleness.”

He said it in a light way, but he wasn’t being funny. His eyes already had that haunted look in them. It wasn’t enough; it was absolutely never enough.

The case brought Holmes and Watson out to Wisteria Lodge the next day, and there they found some gruesome items, blood and bones and the like, and Holmes was left to his own investigation since Inspector Baynes was anxious to prove himself independently. Watson was encouraged to see Holmes enlivened by the case, but even he had to watch closely to see it: “I could tell by numerous subtle signs, which might have been lost upon anyone but myself, that Holmes was on a hot scent. As impassive as ever to the casual observer, there were nonetheless a subdued eagerness and suggestion of tension in his brightened eyes and a brisker manner which assured me that the game was afoot. After his habit he said nothing, and after mine I asked no questions.”

He may not have seen all that he imagined, for the days went on in the country and Sherlock Holmes was actually
not
acting like himself. He was muted, taking long walks, chatting with the village folks and looking in on some local plants. He was still on the case, covering his investigation by posing as an amateur botanist, but he did it all so quietly, as if only out of habit.

The only rise Watson got from him was the day Holmes thought Inspector Baynes might have scooped him by making an arrest, but even that Holmes did with an air of sighing. Baynes was so very promising, but so very wrong in his arrest of the cook, and Holmes merely warned him against acting rashly. Not that he was prepared to take his own advice, as we shall see shortly.

Holmes brought Watson back to their room to convince him that they must break the law to find a missing woman—the author of the note, Miss Burnet. I wonder if Holmes wasn’t hoping to make the case more thrilling for himself by forcing the point. He could talk himself into anything, just as easily as he could convince Watson: “There was something in the ice-cold reasoning of Holmes which made it impossible to shrink from any adventure which he might recommend.” It ended up not being necessary to break out Miss Burnet, and also that Baynes was on the same trail as Holmes after all, and using his arrest of Garcia’s cook as a trap for their suspect. In the end, they did not even capture their man; they had to solve their case through news out of Madrid by matching the description of a dead man to the one whom they had chased. He was Don Murillo, The Tiger of San Pedro.

Inspector Baynes brought the news and they all agreed their case was concluded. After his departure, Holmes sat with his pipe and listlessly asked Watson if there remained anything he didn’t understand. A few questions about the bizarre voodoo items found in the house were all he voiced, and Holmes explained what he had learned about such practices.

“As I have had occasion to remark,” Holmes said as he slowly closed up his notebook, “there is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible.” He let the book slide out of his lap and onto the floor as if he didn’t have the energy to lift it again.

1895: The Solitary Cyclist

The string of curiously unsatisfactory cases continued for poor Holmes. He was waiting for a problem to save him from himself, from making the same mistakes with Watson all over again. He couldn’t rely on his old syringe to get him over the rough patches anymore, but things were different now. Ever since the struggle with Moriarty, he no longer trekked over peaks and valleys in his quest, but plodded through a dry, flat desert of dull happenings and commonplace mysteries. The cases just didn’t seize him like they used to, and perhaps the drug would be a failure too, even if he did go back to it. He tried to hold onto this idea to keep himself out of the substance, but a chemist knows better; of course a drug would do what it always did, so long as the variables were the same. Was he the same? Something was changed, either physical or mental. If it were mental, the cocaine would help him once more; so had his brain altered, or was it only his mind?

One experiment would be all it would take to test the question, but should the drug lift him even the slightest bit out of his miserable trudge, he would take it up again with a vengeance. His arms would be covered in small scars like the old days, and Watson would find out, and what would happen then? Watson had already left Holmes once before; would he do it again? Or had the death of Sherlock Holmes affected Watson as well, made him more tolerant of all his friend’s faults, if only he might have him alive?

Holmes’s problem was the work—if only the work would be good again. That could sustain him, but it was not to be so.

“It is true,” Watson begins the story of The Solitary Cyclist, “that the circumstance did not admit of any striking illustration of those powers for which my friend was famous.” I really feel like Holmes was making his best effort to keep his hands busy, but to no avail. Watson said in this and at least one other story (the case of Black Peter, in July of the same year) that 1895 was the start of an unprecedented busy time for Holmes. In fact he was interrupted from some other work by the story of this cycling woman, and he let it disturb the business he was already pursuing, hoping that it might draw his passion better. This is how his busyness began that year, with Holmes reaching desperately for any case that might enrapture him, any problem at all, letting them all stack upon him, and yet still he could feel no great excitement. Later it would be the unnatural frenzy of the drug which kept him so active, and not much later at all; he would be back on the substance before the summer was out.

Watson found this case very exciting indeed, and even I sit on the edge of my seat, the way he tells of their chase after the abducted girl, and a brief shoot-out around her forced marriage to a wretched man who was after the inheritance she didn’t even know she was due yet. The only pleasure Holmes got out of the whole thing was the day the horrible bridegroom surprised him as he was making inquiries and tried Holmes at a little impromptu boxing. Holmes got off with a cut on his lip and a bruised face while the other man had to be carted home. It is so infrequently that Holmes is ever taken unawares so abruptly that for half the day he felt a lovely tingling throughout his body, a whisper of the roaring sensation he once felt when he struggled for a solution. His lip throbbed in time with a hard-beating heart, and he was nearly optimistic. But it was a short-lived thrill, and the tedious business of rescuing people and learning of their insipid and uninspired motivations… Well, all that only made him
miss
Moriarty. Terrifying as he was, the man was at least an artist and a gentleman. He took pride in his work.

This case was completed in late April, just when the papers were exploding with a criminal and social scandal: the trials of Oscar Wilde. Holmes had pointed to the paper on April third, when the whole mess started, and had said to Watson, “I told you they’d find him out.” Wilde’s conviction absolutely terrified the homosexual men of London—there was a mass exodus of Uranians to France while the trial was under way. Wilde’s case proved to them that no one was safe from the law passed in 1886, the amendment to the Offenses Against the Person Act that turned them all into criminals, and named them in the public square at last as a race apart. It would unsettle Watson and Holmes as well, though in totally different ways, exciting sympathetic concern and destructive action respectively. It would snap the string of their tenuous reunion, and trigger an event that would affect both of them profoundly, and adversely, for longer than either man realized.

1895: The Three Students

Holmes was, and still is, unmatched in the field of detection. He had been approached by both sides of the Wilde scandal and declined to contribute to either; one side because they were right, and the other because they were so provably wrong. He would not help the Marquess of Queensberry in his personal vendettas against the people who influenced his sons—the man had wanted Holmes’s services in regards to his eldest son’s relations with Lord Roseberry, and he had requested Holmes, much more vociferously, to investigate his younger son’s relationship with Oscar Wilde. Holmes had declined both times. Not only was he honorable enough not to persecute others for what he did himself, he didn’t care for Lord Queensberry; the Ninth Marquess was a violent and unstable man. Holmes knew his rules for boxing quite well, but Queensberry himself fought men in the street and carried a horsewhip with him everywhere he went to threaten and cow people. He did not keep to the spirit of fair sportsmanship that his own rules promoted, so why should Sherlock Holmes promote the spirit of laws which he found unjust and unfair on the man’s behalf?