My Dear Watson (26 page)

It did not look like a warm, familial relationship from the outside, but that is the way of things with men named Holmes. Mycroft demanded that Holmes drop his petty problems and concentrate on this irritating problem that had landed in his lap. Holmes was nevertheless anxious to please him, reassuring him that he cared little for recognition, less even than Mycroft himself cared (an utter lie), but that it was only the love of the game he was after. Watson smiled to see Holmes acting like such a puppy, but the smile was brief on his face. Before they departed from Mycroft, as Holmes dressed and he and Lestrade busily bounced ideas between one another about the solution of the mystery, Mycroft waved Watson nearer to him and leaned his impressive head close to Watson’s ear.

“My brother is not well,” he said to Watson. “What do you know of it?”

“Oh,” Watson said in surprise at Mycroft’s blunt question. “He has been down lately because of the smog…”

Mycroft shook his head. “Sherlock isn’t so capricious as to let the air disturb him. He looks ill, and his eyes seem feverish. What does he take into his body? Is he eating well? Does he drink much? Smoke? I don’t recall many vices or imagine him prone to them.”

Watson pulled on his mustache nervously, feeling like a nanny being grilled by the mother. Had he been slacking on the health of his charge?

“Well,” Watson said. “I wrote of his use of cocaine a few years back, but he hasn’t touched it since…” Watson trailed off, before saying too much.

“In your stories, you mean?” Mycroft asked lazily. “I don’t read them, they’re positive rot. But cocaine, you say?” Mycroft arched his eyebrow, and then began to nod heavily. “I might see him at that. Be sure to check him for it!” After that brief order he was gone, lumbering back to his customary orbit, without even saying goodbye to his brother.

Watson turned around to find Holmes and Lestrade impatient with him. It was time to go, on with his coat! He tried to watch Holmes, tried to see into his eyes, but what was the difference between “cocaine and ambition” as he had phrased it years before? It had been a long time since Watson had seen them in contrast. He was keen to remember it now.

Standing on the rails where the dead government worker was found, Holmes was struck with the hard, quivering stance of a hunting dog. Watson frowned while watching his friend. He took in every detail. Holmes “was a different man from the limp and lounging figure in the mouse-colored dressing-gown who had prowled so restlessly only a few hours before round the fog-girt room.” Holmes was alive, but was it only the case that had revived him?

“There is material here,” Holmes said. “There is scope. I am dull indeed not to have understood its possibilities.” Was that an indication that his mind was compromised? That in his normal state he might have known better? Watson was no good at this; he was no detective.

After pulling out a map of London, Holmes took to the streets on his own, telling Watson to wait for him, and confident enough to say that Watson may even now begin his story about how they saved the State. Watson was at last thoroughly suspicious: “I felt some reflection of his elation in my own mind, for I knew well that he would not depart so far from his usual austerity of demeanor unless there was a good cause for exultation.” What was that cause? Which case had him so pleased, the criminal case or the morocco one? Watson resolved to find out for sure.

Watson spent his hours at home that evening cleaning and straightening, a thin excuse to search their rooms thoroughly. But all that he was able to find was what Holmes asked him to bring to dinner: a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. He met Holmes to hear his theory of how their murdered body got on top of a train, and his excuses for his own behavior: “When I found that the leading international agent, who had just left London, lived in a row of houses which abutted upon the Underground, I was so pleased that you were a little astonished at my sudden frivolity.”

“Oh, that was it, was it?”

“Yes,” said Holmes seriously. “That was it.”

At last Watson was suspicious in his own right. Once again, just like during the Wisteria Lodge murder, Holmes told Watson that the case demanded they break the law. Or not “they” really—Watson would stand guard in the street and watch Holmes commit the actual crime. It started to dawn on Watson just how long he had been oblivious to Holmes’s shifts, and just how dangerous it was to let Holmes get a taste of lawlessness, especially if he was (as Watson had almost entirely despaired of) injecting cocaine again. But what could he do right then? Holmes always told him he was a man of action, and it was the truth. He would not derail progress so important. He agreed to do whatever Holmes asked. He would follow him into hell if that was where Sherlock Holmes was headed, and it just so happened…

Watson’s heart was sinking as Holmes stood to shake his hand. “I knew you would not shrink at the last,” Holmes told him, his gaze softening almost imperceptibly. “For a moment I saw something in his eyes which was nearer to tenderness than I had ever seen before,” Watson wrote. What he did not record was that this look nearly broke his heart.

What did such emotion even mean if it was artificially stimulated? Watson would make sure before he absolutely despaired, but… Could Mycroft really be mistaken? And wasn’t Watson totting up enough circumstantial evidence to convince the average English jury? His answer would have to wait for the night, for he had a case to assist in, but my husband was greatly troubled by the investigations he would soon have to make himself.

Watson ended up going along with Holmes in the burglary, following him upstairs to where their victim had been transferred through his own window onto the roof of a train car and left to pitch and sway as the machine would. The smudges on the window sill were enough to confirm it.

“So far we are justified. What do you think of it, Watson?” Holmes asked breathlessly in the dark.

“A masterpiece,” Watson said grimly. “You have never risen to a greater height.”

“I cannot agree with you there,” said Holmes, also grim. Still nothing could reach him the way that Moriarty did, nothing could ever make him so grand. Like a chilly finger down his spine, that is how Moriarty touched him; the only man who ever made Holmes look over his shoulder.

Holmes made a full confession to Lestrade about breaking into the dead man’s house. Lestrade could hardly believe it, and Watson too was aghast—what was all the secrecy about, if he was just going to blurt it out to the nearest official? Mycroft too, in his own languid way, was also surprised. He shot up an eyebrow, aimed at Watson, and returned his attention to his sizzling brother.

Lestrade was the first to speak of it. “No wonder you get results that are beyond us in the force. But some of these days you’ll go too far, and you’ll find yourself and your friend in trouble,” Lestrade warned, also glancing at Watson, as if he were worried for him too.

“For England, home and beauty—eh, Watson?” My husband moved his mouth like a guppy, unable to really answer Holmes’s extreme excitement. “Martyrs on the altar of our country. But what do you think of it, Mycroft?” Holmes asked anxiously.

“Excellent, Sherlock!” Mycroft boomed loudly, his face serious. He would not disappoint his brother in this moment. They made an appointment to catch up with their suspect that night (the man had been dispatching cryptic messages through the paper), and Lestrade and Mycroft left, both uneasily. Watson remained behind.

It was painful for Watson to talk around these events when he wrote this story, but the case was too important to leave out of the fullness of his record. He did his best to disguise the events in the background, but I can see them plainly. Once you know where to look, it’s all there quite clearly. Holmes threw himself into work of a different sort, every few hours going to his room, and coming back with skipping steps. It disturbed Watson to a terrific degree.

“For my own part,” Watson wrote, “I had none of this power of detachment, and the day, in consequence, appeared to be interminable.” At last it was time for the conclusion of their investigation. They met with Mycroft and Lestrade, went to the meeting place, and laid in wait. Holmes was on a preternatural plane of perception and heard their man approaching long before anyone else. When at last the subject was revealed, it was the very unfraternal brother of another man who met his death in the whole mess, from the stress of it all. Watson could sympathize.

Holmes was taken aback by the identity of their man, and he told Watson to write him down as an ass for not realizing it before. The man was put away and would eventually die quickly into his prison sentence. Mycroft patted Watson heavily on the shoulder as they all departed, warning him with a last look to keep after Sherlock, to take care of him properly. He was a doctor after all, and someone had to do it. Mycroft had put in his time already, when Sherlock was a boy, and it was now Watson’s responsibility.

Watson kept his mouth shut for a while, trying to figure it out on his own, using Holmes’s own methods. But Watson could not confirm one way or the other whether Holmes was truly back on the drug. At one moment it would be all but obvious that he was on the brink of destruction from it, exhausted to the point of collapse, on the edge of a breakdown. But the next moment Holmes would seem well and calm, like he had been getting regular exercise and eating healthy portions since the day he was born. Watson knew the way to find out for sure; get a look at Holmes’s arm, see if there were fresh marks from the needle. But Watson couldn’t bring himself to do it for weeks. Even messages from Mycroft every half-month with nothing more than an annoyed question mark upon them were not enough to force a confrontation.

However, when Holmes came back home with an emerald tie-pin from the dead man’s fiancée, gay as ever, as if the whole case had been nothing but fun and gain, Watson at last broke. He asked Holmes closer, saying that he wanted to see the ornament on his neck, and then he clasped Holmes by the wrist and pushed back his sleeve in one rough motion.

And there were the marks.

Holmes slapped Watson as he ripped his arm back. He started to breathe in a ragged sort of way, pacing up and down the room, shooting dark glances at Watson, who only stayed still, trying not to lose himself to his emotions. Holmes’s face burned red with embarrassment and outrage, but it was Watson who eventually spoke first.

“Mycroft told me I should check,” he said. Holmes halted in his tracks and his face blanched to white.

“Mycroft knows?”

Watson’s lips twisted like he’d just bitten something bitter. Was Mycroft the only one he worried about disappointing then? No one else in all the world who he should be ashamed in front of?

“Apparently it was perfectly obvious to him,” Watson said from his chair by the fire. “Me, I saw nothing amiss, even though it’s been going on for months, hasn’t it?”

“I didn’t want to worry you,” Holmes said, sitting down at last across from Watson. The light from the fire cast half of his face in darkness. He looked like a man with two faces, a man divided.

“How long?” Watson asked him.

“It’s been since May,” Holmes said. He had been deceiving Watson for some time. At least he admitted it.

“It’s starting to tell on you,” Watson said. “I only saw it after your brother pointed it out to me, but you can’t deny that you’re acting rashly, that your body has become dependent on the drug. Shall I tell you what your symptoms are? What they will become? Are you not restless enough without cocaine? Do you not tax your body enough already? My God, Holmes, I cannot think of a worse drug for a man like you! I’m surprised that your heart hasn’t burst already!”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Watson, I’ve used it longer than this before and not dropped dead.”

“Yes, but that was ten years ago, Holmes! You aren’t a young man anymore! And with the strain you put on yourself I’d wager your heart’s even older than you are!”

“Keep your voice down!” Holmes hissed. “You’ll disturb Mrs. Hudson.”

“You don’t care about her,” Watson said, shaking his head sadly. “You’re only ashamed, Holmes, and well you should be. It’s weak of you.”

“Weak?” Holmes asked, his eyes flashing dangerously. “You think this is what weakness looks like? It isn’t an easy balance to strike, Doctor. Maybe the drug is killing me, but it’ll do it slower than a bullet.”

“You…you don’t mean to suggest you’d harm yourself?” Watson asked. The suggestion of death again was all it took to douse Watson’s anger, but it only inflamed Holmes.

“I might save a lot of men a great deal of trouble if I did,” Holmes said, getting up to pace again, his hands clenching and unclenching as he went. “You’re a simple man, Watson, very painfully simple sometimes, and you don’t understand what this is like. It’s something wrong with me, it’s a sickness that cannot go untreated.”

“This isn’t a cure, Holmes!” Watson said emphatically, though he was now keeping his voice down. “It’s poison!”

“It works, Watson. It’s the only thing that does.” Holmes moved without ceasing, some part of him was wringing or twitching even when he stood still. It was a terrible thing for Watson to see a man as extraordinary as Sherlock Holmes so sadly afflicted.

“I won’t watch you destroy yourself, Holmes,” Watson said seriously. “I care entirely too much about you. If you can’t stop, I…” Watson trailed off. He could not imagine going back to their early days, of keeping his mouth shut while Holmes corrupted himself in tiny measurements. He’d rather never set eyes on Holmes again than see his powers wither away.

But no, that wasn’t true. Watson would much rather alleviate Holmes of this addiction, to save
him
for once, to be
his
hero. He stood up resolutely.

“Not to worry, my friend, we’ll get this fiend off your back.” Holmes was quite a bit less enthused by the prospect, only holding his head in his hand and rubbing his face like he is trying to erase himself. “Where are you keeping the stuff, Holmes? We’ll start right away.”

Holmes made no motion to fetch the drug for Watson. The silence got longer, it was horribly awkward, and the only sound in the room was the impatient movement of Holmes’s foot under the table and the crackling of the fire.