My Dear Watson (33 page)

In this particular case, Holmes was able to acquire the black pearl of the Borgias in such a remarkable, inscrutable way that it caused Watson and Lestrade, both old veterans of Holmes’s queer methods, to burst into wonder-filled applause. Holmes blushed like one of us mere mortals, and took a grateful bow in his own sitting room. Watson said, “It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to its depths by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend.”

This case was the one instance where Inspector Lestrade, a stoic man himself, revealed to Holmes just what he had meant to him and the officials at Scotland Yard: “We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down tomorrow, there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.”

Holmes thanked him with as much earnestness as he had ever felt, even turning away to hide his small display of emotion. He wouldn’t have been so touchable, you can be sure, if there had not been cocaine in his veins, but the emotion was at its base his own true one. He was not, regardless of how he acted or seemed, anything but human.

1901: The Priory School

Sherlock Holmes does not make mistakes like you or I. First of all, his mistakes are never one hundred percent wrong, he is always right somewhere. Second, his mistakes matter more. When I commit a mistake I need a new sheaf of paper or I have a simple apology to make; Holmes has people’s lives in his hands. He enjoys being so much smarter than everyone else, but he has a responsibility to be just as right as he always thinks he is. Cocaine, after a period of extended use especially, will compromise anyone’s mind. That’s all fine for some rough on the street, but Sherlock Holmes had finally earned the stature of a man whose word was above question. He wagered more than himself when he bet on cocaine.

He had kept his discipline for over a year, never allowing himself to get into a frenzy of use, but the dosage had by necessity increased. He couldn’t rely on Watson to be his physician here, and so it was the chemist in Holmes who administered the substance. I am surprised he did so well for long. He must have had an iron constitution indeed, but even iron will rust.

The small oversight in this case was negligible, not unlike the matter of The Yellow Face. It was a missed inference due to missing information, a hazard of his trade to be sure, but not one he ever used to suffer so often or so easily.

The apparently kidnapped child of a wealthy former statesman managed to draw Holmes out of London though his plate was overflowing with work. It ended up being a very lucrative case to Holmes, since he neatly acquired a reward from the boy’s father before telling him that he was the man suspected in his son’s kidnapping. That was not, needless to say, an act of greed on Holmes’s part, but an act of poetry. He might have had double the sum if he wanted to help conceal the case, but he rather enjoyed taking this respected man’s cheque and then informing him of his own complacent guilt. The only thing was, it wasn’t the father’s plot, but a thing cooked up by his older illegitimate son, whom he was only covering for to avoid a scandal.

It was otherwise a pleasurable and successful case, for Watson as well, who got to enjoy the Holmes who emerges only on our English moors, “a very different Holmes from the introspective and pallid dreamer of Baker Street.” In his maturity Holmes shifted not only from the love of fame to the love of informed credit, but also from the exhilaration of the city to the thrill of open air. He got to fake a sprained ankle, drag Watson into the dirt and across the morass, and hoist himself on Watson’s shoulders to spy at his suspects. He had a good time all around, but he was not the pistoning machine he used to be; he could not engage every last bit of himself. Little bits of his mind held themselves aloof.

Upon learning who all was involved in the crime, and pointing out that all those who willingly take part in the committing of a crime are morally guilty of all that results from it, he still let it largely go. “I am not in an official position, and there is no reason so long as the ends of justice are served, why I should disclose all that I know.” It was enough for him to catch the murderer, and let the rest of the schemers go with a shrug. The drug was dulling small parts of him, vital parts of him, even while it gave him the energy he thought he needed to keep himself in operation. Before the autumn of the year, he would finally come to the full realization of what he was losing, and it would scare him.

1901: Lady Frances Carfax

Holmes began this summer mystery in artificially high spirits, teasing Watson for having gone to the Turkish baths, knowing that Watson went only for legitimate, healthful purposes, unlike himself. His mind was darting around talking of Watson’s boots, of the hazards presented by independent women, of one in particular who had gone missing, the Lady Frances Carfax. He gave this French assignment to Watson, pleading extreme busyness and the fact that his absence from England “causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.” I mean all this to illustrate that he was busy indeed since the cocaine made his hands restless—this he thought he could maintain forever.

His symptoms had not escaped him, but Holmes thought they were minor. When I say his hands were restless, I mean that even Watson had seen (and recognized in hindsight) the way Holmes’s fingers trembled and clenched like he was developing a nervous condition. He had gained some restless habits like rubbing his face and arranging his cigarette ashes in little piles. He would stand or sit as if in trances, in a numb fog of distraction, but these were never worrisome things in Holmes—his natural state was so like that of a drug-user that it was hard to know the difference until he was more than a little afflicted.

Holmes had found himself too active for even London to occupy him though, and so he followed Watson out to France to head him off, and managed to keep him from getting killed before roundly criticizing everything he’d done.

“A singularly consistent investigation you have made, my dear Watson. I cannot at the moment recall any possible blunder which you have omitted,” he said in his annoyingly brisk manner, as if he were only telling you of his itinerary. In his later years he had grown better at not scolding Watson so, but the drug certainly caused a regression in him, so that he hardly noticed Watson’s hurt feelings.

At any rate, they returned together to London to seek out a vicious man with a bitten ear and his accomplice wife. Lady Frances was in a great deal of danger from this pair, but eh…there was only so much Holmes could do about all that until they began to pawn some of her jewelry. And even when the lady’s suitor saw these villains purchasing a coffin, Holmes hardly cared until he realized he might be justified in breaking into their rooms.

“We simply can’t afford to wait for the police or to keep within the four corners of the law,” he told Watson in a sudden notion. “We’ll just take our luck together, as we have occasionally in the past.” So much for trying to avoid prison, but when one contains such multitudes as Sherlock Holmes, one can act in several different directions at once and barely feel the pull.

Watson, to his sometime credit, would follow a friend anywhere, even into the embarrassing scene that Holmes rushed into. He forced his way into the house, only to be confronted by a cool criminal and a convincing story as to Lady Frances’s disappearance. Holmes let go his own name, but it did nothing to intimidate the villain. He promised to search the house until he found Lady Frances, and brought out a revolver so that no one would stop him. He had the police called on him, since he was making a circus of the entire siege. This was not the subtle, sure, and gentlemanly detective that Watson had always admired, this was like being partnered with a drunk.

“Why, you’re a common burglar,” Holy Peters told him, seeming to enjoy being for once in good standing with the law against another man, especially if that man could be an internationally respected detective.

Holmes only smiled back at him, hardly knowing how badly he was being lured. “So you might describe me!” he said. “My companion is also a dangerous ruffian. And together we are going through your house.” The man looked Watson up and down contemptuously, and Watson found himself in a rather surreal position, feeling the need to make polite excuses to a man he suspected of murder and theft. His friend was acting strangely, crazily, even more so than usual. Watson stuck by him though, remembering that he had been fooled before; how many fake seizures, trick disguises, and dramatic scenes had he had to take up his cues on and support? Hoping that Holmes was just pulling an extended ruse, Watson set his features and tried to appear as confident as Holmes did.

Holmes demanded to see the contents of the coffin, and since Peters would not give his consent, Holmes ran in and lifted the lid without it. Inside was not Lady Frances, it was some elderly woman they had pulled out of the workhouse infirmary and brought to die in their house, “as Christian folk should.” A shiver of sickening rage shuddered through Holmes. It was hard to see, but Watson standing just beside him, could feel the tremor.

“I’d give something for a photograph of your gaping, staring face when you pulled aside that lid,” Peters jeered at Holmes. He even got the satisfaction of having the police force Holmes from his house, though the young sergeants wouldn’t put their hands out to arrest Holmes, having heard of his legendary skills. They only asked him to leave, since it was the law, and they could not bend it for him.

Holmes’s hands once again betrayed him, clenched in tight annoyance at being mocked, though he kept his voice clipped and pleasant for the officers. Watson was burning with embarrassment, and as they went off to confirm the story behind this elderly body, he watched Holmes with a wondering eye. What was all of this, then? Could Holmes have really been so mistaken?

They had to wait for the warrant until the next day, and Watson left Holmes alone that night since he was “too irritable for conversation and too restless for sleep.” Watson could tell he had not slept at all when, on the next morning, Holmes tore into his room with his eyes sunken and his face haggard.

“Good heavens, Watson, what has become of any brains that God has given me? Quick, man, quick! It’s life or death!” They went to find Lady Frances very nearly dead, but not past the point of resuscitation. The lady was saved but the criminals were lost, and as such this case was a failure. Holmes certainly knew why, but he didn’t dare admit to it explicitly; Watson was aware of something uncharacteristic rumbling around them, but it was one thing to have him frowning, silently curious, and quite another to have him know. Holmes was at least aware of his own culpability:

“Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dear Watson, it can only be as an example of that temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be exposed,” he told Watson as humbly as could. “Such slips are common to all mortals, and the greatest is he who can recognize and repair them.” This comment is the best inkling that I have that he was going to attempt to be his own doctor for once. He was very disinterested in his physical health, but what does he have, after all, without his mind? He had come to this conclusion before, and yet here he was again. Was he not ashamed?

“It had all been so clear,” he told Watson about this case, “if only my own sight had not been dimmed.”

He would attempt to cleanse himself again. It would end…differently than the other times. It would end in my favor.

1901: The Sussex Vampire

It was too bad for him at first to be handed a case of whimsical fancy. He wanted to gently wean himself down, but vampires? Such a silly question could drive him to much worse than cocaine. He despaired of the whole topic, wondering what he and Watson had to do with “walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts.” But it was more than just simple superstition; a curious accumulation of morbid evidence really did seem to point to a blood-sucking Peruvian mother.

The man recommending the case to Holmes gave Watson as a personal introduction: they had played one another at rugby years and years previously. Watson remembered the man—what he lacks in dates and numbers, he makes up for in faces and personalities—he recalled him as being “a good-natured chap. It’s quite like him to be so concerned over a friend’s case.”

It almost made Holmes smile, but he was a bit pulled from missing his drug, and so he only shook his head at Watson, wondering at his blindness. This man Ferguson, he was not so privy to another man’s marriage, it was his own that he wrote for help on.

“I never get your limits, Watson. There are unexplored possibilities about you,” Holmes said wearily.

Watson truly was rediscovering himself however, for when his old rugby mate walked in, Watson realized just how old they both were, and sighed at his lost vigor. He was not the only one feeling so worn.

When Ferguson beseeched Holmes to come at once and advise him on his troubles, he agreed to go see about the matter: “There is a lull at present. I can give you my undivided energies.” Vampires; Holmes was obviously desperate for a distraction.

But he already had an idea what would motivate a woman to suck blood from her own baby. Arriving at the household, Holmes started collecting confirmation of a unique sibling rivalry. The older boy, a sickly teenager from Ferguson’s previous marriage, was a remarkable little monster. The moment he ran in to hug his father with “the abandon of a loving girl,” Holmes could have laughed. This was a type far more interesting than vampires, a boy with a viciously sharp mind inside of an insufficient body. He had learned of a way he might murder his young half brother, and therefore keep all of the affection he unnaturally craved from his father. After revealing the culprit and recommending they send the boy to sea for a year to set him right. He and Watson left Ferguson to make up with his wife.