My Dear Watson (7 page)

But all of this only reminded Watson how his efforts had been so little appreciated by Holmes that morning. Holmes allowed the buffoon Athelney Jones to insult him repeatedly in an effort to remind Watson of the early days, the days before a disciple had come to write the gospel of Holmes, but it all blew back in his face. If only he had thought of losing Watson before it was too late! For now he struggled in vain.

A man of sport however, as we have already established, Holmes was willing to have a fair fight. He may not like women, but he could be man enough to lose to them if he were rightly bested. He sent Watson on an errand to deliver Miss Mary Morstan home; Holmes had made his presentation to Watson in solitude, so now she could make hers. Mary got into a cab with Watson and immediately burst into tears over the strain of the night. Game, set, and match. It was a first round knock-out.

Even a grand show of athleticism from Holmes as he shimmied down from the deceased Sholto’s roof and a playful chase through the city following the mutt hound Toby couldn’t put Holmes back in the lead. In the throes of this exciting case, Holmes’s world became bright again: “How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo.” No more “dreary, dismal, unprofitable world,” no more “yellow smog” and “dun-colored houses.” Things are not so tedious if only he is on a case, and that is all very well for him, but not for my dear Watson. Who could stand to live with such a mercurial creature as Sherlock Holmes? Who could stand to love him?

Oh, the game was up but Sherlock Holmes kept playing. He served breakfast the next morning, serenaded Watson on the violin, but he was already beaten. Watson said: “I have a vague remembrance of his gaunt limbs, his earnest face and the rise and fall of his bow. Then I seemed to be floated away upon a soft sea of sound until I found myself in dreamland, with the sweet face of Mary Morstan looking down upon me.” Holmes was utterly bested, and throughout a disappointing day in his detections, he started to know it, and turn bitter again.

As Watson left to go visit Mary, and after a long day of no news on his suspects, Holmes said, “Women are never to be entirely trusted—not the best of them.” Watson left in an offended huff. He returned to find Holmes in such an agitated state that even Mrs. Hudson was concerned. That Watson should be drifting away from him
and
his case to be in shambles? It was one of the worst days of Holmes’s life.

It was partially the case that kept him up all night, but mostly the prospect of losing Watson, to
a woman
no less, that was driving him to madness. He became sullen and started to ignore Watson, attempting to reject him first. They peel apart in this story, it can be seen even in Watson’s sugar-coated recounting of the events. Watson writes that he began to doubt Holmes, to wonder if he might be wrong entirely on his deductions. The pink scarves were off the lampshades, and Holmes wasn’t as attractive as he once seemed.

Meanwhile, and uselessly, Holmes rallied his efforts of persuasion, setting himself an audience of Watson and Athelney Jones so that he might parade around in a most convincing costume, surprising them both and prompting Jones to declare that Holmes would have made a rare actor. He should have been a great many things, apparently, but none of those things greatly interested Watson anymore.

You see, Holmes rallied when he caught scent of the criminals again, knowing that if he could recapture the treasure belonging to Mary Morstan, she would be out of Watson’s reach forever. Holmes was so pleased at the prospect he was almost humble; though he had the potential to be an unbeatable boxer, a criminal mastermind, a most promising officer, and an actor of the stage, what he
would
put his energy to was securing Watson. If the doctor wanted a wife, could Holmes not be that as well? He prepared dinner and told his friend, “Watson, you have never yet recognized my merits as a housekeeper.” Watson raised his eyebrows and glanced sidelong at Inspector Jones, but he was more interested in dinner than in Holmes’s remark. Watson felt that they were too obvious, that they had always been. Normal men have wives, don’t they? What could he have been thinking?

Holmes displayed his talents as both a housekeeper and a conversationalist throughout dinner. He pulled out all the stops as this case came to a close, but he couldn’t get the better of his own nature.

The case played out dashingly. Holmes was easy in the face of death, another point in his favor, but he was just as easy with their prisoner, Jonathan Small. It is one step forward, two steps back with him. Watson noted of Small that “his face in repose is not an unpleasing one,” and surely Holmes noticed it too. Holmes offered the convict a cigar, a pull out of his flask, and his sincere regrets that it had to come to this. There was something mutual between Holmes and Small, and Watson stood just wondering at the way his friend took such a shine to such a wretched man. It was a case closed, in more ways than one.

Holmes talked closely with Small, assuring him that he could prove him innocent of the Sholto murder (though he would stand guilty for his other crimes), and Small returned the favor by complimenting Holmes: “How you kept on our track is more than I can tell. I don’t feel no malice against you for it. But it does seem a queer thing.” It does indeed. Watson couldn’t bear to watch them exchange pleasantries anymore. He snuck away at the first opportunity.

Watson left Holmes in his element, the grimy world of crime and criminals, the company of men, and may he be happy there, as Watson planned to be where he was headed. Watson was charged with taking the supposedly recovered treasure to Miss Morstan, and when he arrived he found her calm and soft, tied in a red-sashed dress like a present. When they went to look at last upon the treasure and found the chest empty, they were both relieved. They had each kept up some hope that they might be together. Watson declared his love to Mary on the spot, and she returned his sentiment, and he rejoined Holmes with that precious knowledge in his heart, as though the muscle had become a priceless ruby that he would get to keep from then on, his own little piece of Agra treasure.

After Small made a full confession and tipped his congratulations at Holmes a few more times before being led off to jail, Watson broke the news: “I feel that this might be the last investigation in which I shall have the chance of studying your methods. Miss Morstan has done me the honour to accept me as a husband in prospective.”

Holmes let out a groan of pain and had to collect his face in his hands as he told Watson, “I feared as much.” He then managed to put on a brave face by asserting that he was not sorry and had no regrets, talking about how detrimental emotion is to the logical faculties. He swore he would never marry, never allow human affection to corrupt his mind, and Watson nodded sadly, knowing it all too well. It hurt him that Holmes would pretend the end of their partnership was nothing more than a mild disappointment. And so Watson kept talking, hoping to wound Holmes back for all the times it had been done to him. Couldn’t Holmes at least acknowledge all that he was losing? Or did he consider Watson to really be nothing so much to lose?

“The division seems unfair,” Watson said to Holmes. “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?”

Holmes sneered a tad, I suspect to hide his emotion, although he may well have been outraged too by the idea of Jones taking his credit. He spoke quite a bit in this case about how little he cared for fame, how it was the love of his art alone that made him exert himself, the perfection he achieves in practicing it so flawlessly. He couldn’t really begrudge Watson for using his own nasty method against him. I mean, at long last he was starting to rub off on this noble doctor! But Holmes was still the master at it. Had this also been a boxing match, both men would have limped away bleeding.

“For me,” he said as he reached out luxuriously towards the mantle where his own poisonous barb once again rested, “there still remains the cocaine-bottle.” Holmes smiled in a pained way, but he loaded his syringe with slow deliberation, watching Watson’s face fall with despair, showing him that he was so adept at this process he could do it without looking. Watson told me he finally had to leave the room in disgust and misery, and that this is what he best remembers about the evening he first became engaged.

They didn’t speak to each other again for days.

1919: The Sitting Room

The things I know about Sherlock Holmes, you’d think he wouldn’t smirk at me like that in my own house, but he has no shame. Perhaps he thinks I’m just like Mary, that I don’t know the whole story, and I’m content to have secrets in my marriage. I am not, but I think he already realizes this and is only taunting me.

I don’t judge her; truthfully, it was a different time, and Mary Morstan was a different sort of woman. I’d have a hard time comparing myself to her even if I cared to. She was a quiet, dignified, delicate thing whereas I am somewhat more robust and brash. She was innocent of many social troubles while I have made myself something of an activist—for dress reform, for suffrage, for the poor. Mary, as I understand it from Watson, was a creature of the home. She didn’t consider a husband and wife should be equals, but rather compliments of each other. I am not at all of that opinion, but at the time she was good for Watson, and he was good for her.

I do wonder what the first Mrs. Watson thought of Sherlock Holmes. I lost Watson for a weekend here or there before the war, but she had to seriously share her husband with this man, so what did she make of him? Certainly he solved a case for her, so she would have been sweet on him for a while, but how many nights did she spend alone before she grew to resent him? Did she never wonder what power Holmes held over her husband?

I know full well what has passed between them, what still exists there, holding them together all these long years, in spite of themselves. I share Watson too. I’m not so unlike Mary in that sense, but I don’t lose him for whole cases, days and nights alone. There are just places in him that I can’t reach, but I have secret pockets too. It’s only what happens when two people marry later, when they have lived their whole lives apart.

“So, Mrs. Watson,” Holmes says to me, resting his drink on his knee, smiling like he knows every last thing about me, the horrible man. “What was it like growing up with seven younger brothers?”

“You’ll have deduced that from the pictures?” I ask, pointing vaguely behind me where there are hung family photos of my brothers. They all have the same mother, and were born after my mother died and my father remarried, but I’m sure Holmes knows all of that somehow. They all have similar ears or noses or some such thing that I lack.

“That, and your rather masculine demeanor,” Holmes says. Watson nudges Holmes with the toe of his shoe. He has told Holmes to be on good behavior. I could have told him not to waste his breath. “Tell me,” Holmes rejoins. “Did they all die in the war?”

Watson hides his face in his hand, but I’m not afraid of the truth, and that’s all Holmes ever has over anyone.

“All of them,” I say with a nod.

Looking at the wall clock Watson says, “We’ll be having dinner soon.” He is trying to veer the conversation, but he tries for nothing.

“You know, with seven brothers I’m not surprised that no one ever trained you in the culinary arts.”

“Oh, yes, and I feel very deprived.”

The detective’s hawk-like features, still sharp even in his old age, shift all together slightly, as though he were hiding some discomfort; he doesn’t like me either, it’s clear. I’m glad of that.

Dinner is announced. I make my way into the dining room first, leaving the men to murmur and chuckle secretly behind me. Here they are, both in their sixties, acting like children whispering behind mother’s skirts. I do realize why Watson continues to associate with Holmes—it makes him feel young again, brings back the heady feeling of their golden moments together. I myself am only forty-six, but I already value anything and anyone which can take me back to my youth, or remind me of the world we lost.

1887: The Noble Bachelor

A truce was established soon enough. When the reality of Watson’s marriage became clear to Holmes as an inevitability, he decided to make the most of the time they had left together. What didn’t help matters was that one of the first cases they worked after this involved a wedding and a missing bride, but Holmes can often be a creature of great control, when he wants to be. He managed to hold his tongue.

It’s quite a different side of Holmes, an affected Holmes, that appears in this story. He gets rather Wildean in his comments, letting out clever barbs and, despite Watson’s observations early in their relationship that Holmes knew nothing of literature, alluding quite easily to a notion from Thoreau. I would submit that he was feeling somewhat sentimental, and we all turn to literature for that.

It started right away. Watson, who was trapped at home because of the pain in his injured leg, sat drowning himself in newspapers in an attempt to imagine anyone’s life but his own. As if they drew from the same well of energy, as Watson became depleted, Holmes bubbled over. Holmes returned from a morning outing to find Watson yearning for his attention, remarking on a fashionable bit of correspondence that had arrived for the detective.

“This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie,” Holmes quipped, but it ended up being the case of a missing bride, one which he quite enjoyed, possibly because it tickled him to imagine a wife just disappearing and making everyone’s lives much simpler.

When the Lord St. Simon arrived at Baker Street to tell his story and began to presume that he was of a much higher class than Holmes usually deals with, he was put into his place. Holmes had the delightful pleasure of informing his client that he was actually descending, from the King of Scandinavia to a mere moneyless domestic title, and this was only the first dressing-down Holmes got to deliver that day. Lestrade too came in too proud, sure that the missing bride had drowned because her gown had been found in the water: “By the same brilliant reasoning, every man’s body is to be found in the neighbourhood of his wardrobe,” Holmes said to him. He was in a rare and playful mood that day.