My Dear Watson (34 page)

“Well that was an ugly business!” Watson exclaimed as they got outside and began walking back to their luggage, not wanting to bother the family for a ride. Holmes laughed deeply in his throat, and Watson asked him just what he could find so funny.

“Oh it’s just not as uncommon as you might think,” he said. “The majority of evils in the world are committed by bright young men with a jealous fixation. Most of the time it’s over beautiful young women, is all. Then it doesn’t look so strange.”

“Well, yes, I imagine that’s so,” Watson said agreeably.

“Did you never notice that expression on Billy?” Holmes asked, cutting his eyes sideways at Watson.

“Our Billy? Why of course not! He’d never do anything so gruesome.”

“Oh probably not so extreme, no,” Holmes said. “But he refuses to leave our employ and seek his own fortune. He won’t see himself replaced.”

“You must admit we run a rather exciting household, though,” Watson conjectured happily. “Perhaps it’s the thrill that keeps him with us.”

“Perhaps,” Holmes said noncommittally. They had taken on Billy as a page when he was only eleven years old, just three years younger than Ferguson’s own boy. An orphaned thing, taken in at a tender age, and he grew up taking his orders from Holmes and Mrs. Hudson. He was loyal to them both, almost as if they were his parents, but still not quite. Holmes knew that look of jealousy on the Ferguson boy because he had seen it before, when he caught Billy looking at Watson. Holmes was monitoring the situation for any trouble, but Billy was a much older, much more controlled being than this nasty little boy they’d met tonight.

This strange case had hardly taken up a single night. Holmes would need more, so very much more, if he was going to get himself well again.

1902: The Red Circle

It’s easy for me to see that Holmes was having an unpleasant winter. As far as it appears, he had measured his use of cocaine down to nothing, and was in a touchy, snotty mood without it. A landlady came to him with concern about her odd new tenant, and Holmes’s answer was to tell her, “I do not understand why I, whose time is of some value, should interfere in the matter.”

He was only compiling his reference books, rolling his eyes behind his scraps of paper, wondering why he was forced to suffer fools. But the lady talked him into it with his own reputation, saying she was referred by a friend who said he was so kind, so smart, etc. Watson smiled to see this flattery work. Holmes seemed to get up in spite of himself. He was very weary of his client’s unease, and where Watson saw him soothing her, he was really just trying to keep her from babbling pitiful facts about her personal situation. Indeed, when the woman had told her story and left, he took down his large book of agony columns and was still unsympathetic.

“Dear me! What a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings!” he said as he searched through the columns for any message to the lodger. He was in an uncharitable mood, which naturally changed when the case got interesting.

Finding messages he thought pertained, Holmes took up the case with at last a small bit of enthusiasm. It managed to get him out of the house, and that reminded him of what was good for him. “It is art for art’s sake, Watson,” he told my husband. “I suppose when you doctored you found yourself studying cases without thought of a fee?”

“For my education, Holmes,” Watson said.

“Education never ends,” Holmes answered. Certainly he was learning something new about himself every day, about the person he was growing into. Watson didn’t know it all at the time (he learned it later, from Holmes’s own lips, which is how the knowledge comes to me), but Holmes was nearing a pocket of very strange years in his life. The same was true for all of us.

In crawling around on this case, Holmes and Watson uncovered a couple of fearful Italian witnesses, and a rather thrillingly dangerous case that Inspector Gregson was working from the other end. They met in the middle.

“Journeys end with lovers’ meetings,” Holmes exclaimed when he spotted the official. It was a favorite flirt of his, Watson says. A little bit of cheek ever since he was respectable enough to chance it. His longtime inspectors, those who had become better investigators because of Holmes’s influence, also became that much less rigid. Gregson, and Lestrade too, could not have failed to notice his nature, but they took it upon themselves not to care. His little asides didn’t help, especially in front of the other officers, the young ones who were still zealous, still being trained, but usually they played it off as an irregular’s eccentricity. Just Holmes speaking above everyone’s heads, business as usual.

Of course, the Pinkerton man from America wasn’t as concerned with that, though he did blush deeply when Holmes recognized his name and complimented him on a case he’d worked. Still had a few glittering charms hanging off him, Holmes did. He wasn’t all the way past his prime.

The case ended up in the happy death of a vicious criminal, and Holmes was pleased enough after finding his case so worthy that he took Watson out to a Wagner concert. There he sat, content and distracted, hopeful that his most trying personal times were behind him, that the only challenges in the future would be those he received from puzzles, but…that was not exactly the way of things. Before the year was out, he and Watson would be separated again, and it wouldn’t be over a woman (I would come along quite later) or over cocaine. It would be at once simpler and more complicated than that. It would be a surprise to them both.

1902: Shoscombe Old Place

The year progressed normally enough; cases in, cases out. Another horse-racing problem came upon them. Watson at last knew more about the situation than Holmes since he gambles on the races (I know absolutely
nothing
about horse-racing and still don’t care to—Watson feels the same way about bird-watching, so it’s an even situation). Debts, horses, a family only just holding on to some married-into wealth, bones in a furnace. Why wouldn’t Holmes get excited? These criminals, these weird crimes, they were doing him a kindness. They gave him a bit of a challenge.

Watson called it a “bright May evening” that found them traveling out to Shoscombe in a first-class carriage by themselves. Holmes had his feet up on Watson’s knee, happy to be pretending with Watson that they were fishermen, and that they were in the country for nothing more than leisure. Lying was a quick way to feel superior; present people with a simple picture, and they never suspect you again.

The case turned out to be very little trouble, all told. The nature of a dog, so much more consistent and logical than the nature of thinking man, proved to Holmes that the lady at the center of this case was somehow altered, since a dog did not change its loyalty for no reason. She had died of disease and was being impersonated by her brother to maintain her widow’s property until the brother could pay off his debts. No large crime, and nothing to get too excited about, though Holmes did relish the opportunity to break into a crypt over it. It was just the concealment of a death, but the mystery had given Holmes some pleasure to solve, and that was enough to be getting on with.

Holmes had vacillated between testing his theories and actually expending some leisure with a fishing pole during their stay. They caught dinner one night, and had some lovely private moments that Watson has never detailed. I’m sure they were quaint and pastoral and vomit-inducing, but I guess they deserved to be, while the sun still somewhat shined on them.

1902: The Three Garridebs

I don’t like Sherlock Holmes, and I think I have made that perfectly clear. I could criticize him all day; his self-love, his vanity, his insanity, his addiction, his obsessions, his egotism, his cold and flinty devil’s logic… But I cannot hate him for one thing, and it is the love of my dear Watson. Consistently, and no matter what kind of sour mood he was in, he has never failed my husband on a mission of importance. If it meant getting in the way of an attack, if it meant sacrificing his own life, if it meant botching the evidence for a case, so be it: he would not allow harm to befall his partner. And if an injury did ever arrive, he felt sick about it, no matter how minor it was.

In this case we have another simple client who is tricked out of his house with an unlikely story about an eccentric American millionaire who wanted to fund men with similarities to himself. Something like this is in the case of The Red-Headed League, and now here we have a man who claims his name is Garrideb who says he must find two more to make them all wealthy. I don’t know why it is so easy for some Englishmen to believe that America is full of rich loons who love to bequeath their wealth to strangers. I suppose I’ve heard crazier things about America, but it is still surprising that so many have been so thoroughly fooled. It isn’t
that
foreign a place, really.

Watson begins the case by acknowledging that its events might be either a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where one concentrated. Sure the swindle was amusing, but as Watson foreshadowed, a lot would be lost over it: one man’s freedom, another’s reason, Watson a bit of blood, and Holmes too would pay a price in the end. That part did not make it into the public account.

In the summer of 1902 Holmes was in one of his funks. After the Shoscombe case in May he languished during the week that crossed into June and had “spent several days in bed” according to Watson, only emerging from his room when this case came to him.

The facts of the case helped pull him out of his emotional pit, hand over struggling hand. First there was an American man with London clothes and an inoffensive accent. How suspicious! After catching the man out on several tiny lies, Holmes started stacking the facts he knew, the little inconsistencies told by the American man who claimed his name was Garrideb. As he investigated further, a sinister flavor turned up; the man they were dealing with was (predictably) an imposter, but his real identity was “Killer” Evans. He killed the man who used to live in the real British Garrideb’s house, and he needed access to a hidden area beneath the floor which contained money forging equipment.

Holmes warned Watson of the danger, that their “Wild West friend” might live up to his nickname. I wonder if they felt a sense of foreboding about it, though of course I can only speculate. They had walked into lion’s dens before and come out unscathed. Maybe they felt no fear at all because they thought themselves invincible.

They waited for Evans to break into the house, and tried to creep up to capture him, but he was alert to them. In another convincing ruse, he rose as if he would give himself up to capture, but then pulled out a fast revolver and fired into the room towards Holmes and Watson.

Watson was hit, grazed really. In the same old leg that always gets shot. I’ve seen the scar on his thigh. I’ve kissed that scar. It’s a uniting mark that ties Watson to both Holmes and myself, but it’s a dividing line as well, as I will soon explain.

Holmes cracked Evans on the head with the butt of his gun and searched him for weapons in a flash. Then he was at Watson’s side, arms around him, lifting him into a chair.

“You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!” He knelt at my husband’s knees and cut open his clothes over the wound to see that it was as Watson said, only “a mere scratch.” And though the wound stung at first, Watson said he could hardly feel it when he realized what was happening to Holmes, the overwhelming emotions (imagine emotions on Sherlock Holmes!) that were swarming his face.

“It was worth a wound,” Watson wrote, “it was worth many wounds to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.” This was the peak of them, right in that very instant! Watson might have guessed, with his literary flair, what would happen from here, but I doubt he would take the moment back. In fact, I’m sure that if he were being honest, he would want the whole case and all its outcomes exactly as they happened. Ends are all inevitable anyway, one might as well appreciate a nice one.

When Holmes realized that Watson would live, he mastered himself once again. One profound sigh of relief, and then he turned on Evans with a cold look.

“If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive,” Holmes told the man simply. What, if not love, could make Sherlock Holmes a murderer? Though he would flirt with crime on his own, he would never dare take a life with his own hand, not for any reason. Only his dear Watson could force him to that extreme, and without hesitation, without a single regret. It would not have even been a question.

Their prisoner, bloodied and dazed, explained what he had done and his motivation. He asked Holmes whom he had hurt, what he had done to Garrideb that was criminal? He had paid his debt in full for the shooting death of his former partner, and Garrideb was fine!

Yes, but Watson was injured. “It’s only attempted murder, so far as I can see,” Holmes told him briskly. Evans would absolutely not be allowed to go free.

After placing a call to Scotland Yard and handing over Evans, Holmes and Watson returned to Baker Street. Leaving Watson beside the fire, Holmes went to knock up a pharmacy for bandages, ointments, and…something else. He came back as the sun rose, and sat nervously as Watson bandaged himself. Holmes left one hand in his pocket, the other rubbing his lips the whole time, chewing on his fingernails. Once Watson declared to him that he was as good as new, Holmes brought him over to their breakfast table to talk. He had something serious to say.

“Tonight has been a revelation, my dear Watson,” he began. “It has reminded me how much…how very much you mean to me.” Holmes struggled to be able to say all of what he meant. Watson smiled fondly at him before Holmes took his hand out of his pocket and set something on the table between them. It was a small glass bottle. It was a liquid cocaine solution.