My Dear Watson (21 page)

“Holmes! Is it really you?” Watson was so desperate that this not be some sort of trick of his brain that he demanded an explanation about how it could be possible. Holmes hesitated, thinking he might have shocked Watson too harshly and shouldn’t overburden him with information, but Watson insisted.

“I am all right,” he said, “but indeed, Holmes I can hardly believe my eyes.” He was more willing to believe his hands. He gripped Holmes forcefully by the arm and kept handling him, palms pressing to be sure he was real, and warm with life. This was his arm, his thin, sinewy arm! Watson thought he would never feel it again.

As Holmes lifted him from his slump, Watson put an arm across Holmes’s shoulder and pressed his face beneath Holmes’s unmistakable jaw. Watson’s lips grazed the light stubble on his neck.

“Well, you’re not a spirit, anyhow,” Watson said as Holmes righted him and stepped back. A spasm of desire flexed over Holmes’s face, but now was not the time. They had a long night before them still.

Holmes removed himself to the other side of Watson’s desk and put himself in order. He lit a cigarette and started to tell of his escape from Reichenbach Falls as though it were nothing, though his body gave up more of the truth. Watson could at least make accurate medical deductions, noting that the usually thin Holmes was even thinner than usual, and pale, and rough. He had a sharper look in his eye, like a man has when they snatch him off a deserted island where he has had to fend for himself, trying to stave off beasts and madness alike.

Holmes moved subtly to stretch himself after stepping out of his hunched character. Watson watched every movement closely, as if enchanted by them. The slight crick of the neck, the way he bunched and relaxed his shoulders or extended his legs. He was magnificent to see.

“It is no joke when a tall man has to take a foot off his stature for several hours on end,” Holmes told him apologetically. “Now, my dear fellow, perhaps it would be better if I gave you an account of the whole situation when tonight’s work is finished.”

“I should much prefer to hear now,” Watson said dreamily. He didn’t really care what he heard or when, he only wanted to keep Holmes in front of him for as long as possible.

“So you’ll come with me tonight?” Holmes asked him, almost like he was requesting a dance.

“When you like and where you like,” Watson vowed to him.

Holmes smiled deeply. “This is indeed like the old days,” he said with great relief. He was afraid that Watson might have altered in his absence, that he would no longer be his man. But of course there was never any chance of that. Even in death Sherlock Holmes held his ground.

Holmes gave the quick details of his struggle with Moriarty. After all the emotion he’d felt leading up to the struggle, that heartfelt note he had left for Watson, the shadow that had hung over his head for weeks making him feel sure he would come to his end, it all amounted to a very short climax indeed. Moriarty meant to take them both over the falls, but Holmes slipped away from him as easily as any other opponent, and left Moriarty at the edge to fall or recover on his own. Moriarty naturally fell, and Holmes was wiped of all his own sentiment and adrenaline when he stuck his face out over the edge to watch his nemesis plummet. The scientist in Holmes knows how to elbow his way to the front, and he couldn’t resist the urge to observe the horrible drop that Moriarty experienced before banging off a rock and being lost beneath the water.

And all the while he was watching the Professor die, he was taking stock of his unique opportunity; to fake his death at that moment meant he might avoid a select few more assassins all together. Not only might he walk away from this place alive, but ever after he might live without that stifling pall of worry, like the Sword of Damocles twirling above his head. He would prefer not to live at all if it meant existing within that constant cloud—his own Valley of Fear. At long last he truly knew what John Douglas had been talking about it. It was a horrible way to live.

And so, like Douglas before him, Holmes faked his own death. By scaling the side of the cliff he was able to leave no track for Watson to find, though he might have simply walked backwards, as was his first idea, for all that Watson would have been able to deduce from it all.

“I watched you, my dear Watson, investigating in the most sympathetic and inefficient manner the circumstances of my death.” Watson covered his mouth with his hand to hide his smile. How long had it been since Holmes had told him he was a wretched detective? Too long to be sure! Of all the things to miss about Sherlock Holmes, this criticism Watson treasured to have back.

Holmes had lain on a thin ledge above the falls and from there watched Watson make all the wrong conclusions, hardly thinking to care at all for the agony that Watson was in, only noting every wrong assumption and watching Watson weave together his own ending. When Watson published the account of The Final Problem, Holmes had snapped it up with keen interest. It’s not every man who gets to read his own eulogy. A right Tom Sawyer there is in Sherlock Holmes.

The terrifying side of the cliff had its unnerving effect on Holmes, both as he climbed up and then back down, though going down he had more than that to worry about, namely a confederate of Moriarty’s who had seen Holmes live and was now trying to murder him with falling rocks. Holmes escaped from him and travelled by night for more than a week before reaching Florence and contacting his brother. Though it would have been kind to let Watson know he was still alive, it would not have been practical, because (as has been established before) for Watson to play a part correctly he must not know he is acting.

“I owe you many apologies,” Holmes said again. He never did speak any of his apologies outright, though Watson found a way to forgive him anyway. Probably because of this: “Several times during the last three years I have taken up my pen to write to you, but always I feared lest your affectionate regard for me should tempt you to some indiscretion which would betray my secret.” He was upon the Tor again, careful not to provoke Watson’s human kindness.

“I would have suddenly grown undeniably happy,” Watson agreed with him. “I would have dropped every last thing in my life and come to you at once.”

“I suspected as much,” Holmes said quietly.

Holmes travelled and amused himself as he waited for his enemies to stick their necks out, and he even published under the name Sigerson some few narratives about his explorations. He couldn’t help himself. Holmes had grown used to being heard about and could not give that up as easily as he abandoned everything else. He went through Tibet, Persia, the Sudan, back to France, and then finally to London.

Watson had been right about the murder of Ronald Adair—it had proved irresistible to Holmes, who hurried back not just because the case was so interesting, but because Colonel Sebastian Moran was involved. Holmes came home, gave Mrs. Hudson the same sort of shock he was then giving to Watson, and found his rooms just as he had left them to Mycroft. The only thing missing was Watson. It did pang Holmes occasionally during his solitary travels to be without Watson, but it was especially apparent how much he was missed once Holmes was back in their old rooms. Watson’s chair was poignantly covered with dust.

Watson wouldn’t have believed the story of Holmes’s escape from anyone else’s lips, but there sat Holmes: spare, spritely, unsinkable Holmes. He seemed an absolute miracle.

A moment passed as the story of Holmes’s resurrection faded into their past. Holmes then looked around at their present, and he deduced something.

“These are smaller digs than you had before, Watson,” Holmes suggested carefully.

“You have learned somehow of my other sad bereavement,” Watson said. He waited to see if Holmes had any remark to that. He did, naturally.

“I told you that women are never to be entirely trusted, didn’t I?”

“Don’t be unfair, Holmes. She couldn’t help dying on me.”

Holmes waited a beat before saying softly, “I could.”

Watson should have been offended (I certainly am) that Holmes had such a choice in whether or not to abandon him and
always
did it anyway. But Watson only continued bursting with happiness—here was this incredible man who could resurrect himself from the dead! He was maybe second only to Jesus Christ, but with at least one very important difference: he needed Watson for his own salvation as much as Watson needed him.

At last Watson could detain Holmes no longer, and it was time for another adventure. He almost laughed out loud in the cab on the way over, feeling himself in his old life again, armed and ignorant at the side of Sherlock Holmes. All he knew about where they were headed was what he could glean from Holmes’s face: that a grave mission lay before them, but that Holmes still had some reason to smile sardonically from time to time as he directed the cab through a maze of byways and alleys, trying to avoid being traced. Watson knew that such a smile boded ill for whoever they were chasing that night.

At their final destination, they made their way through the back door of an empty house. It was too dark to really see, but Watson could feel that the rooms they entered were empty, and using the walls to guide him he could feel that the wallpaper was in tatters. Watson was stepping around timidly, blind to where his feet were setting down, when Holmes took his wrist and led him confidently, if quietly, into the front room of the house. There he could dimly see Holmes’s shape in the light that filtered through the dirty window. Holmes brought him very close and whispered in his ear.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked. Watson did; they were just opposite the old rooms in Baker Street, but he took a moment to answer this, because the feel of Holmes’s breath across his face nearly put him into a swoon.

“But why are we here?” Watson asked, shaking himself out of his daze.

Holmes smiled. Watson could tell by the way what little yellow light there was in the room gleamed on his teeth, and he nearly lost his head again to think that he might have a whole lifetime of seeing that grin in the night.

Instead of answering, Holmes instructed Watson to the window, to look up and see for the second time that night, the impossible yet unmistakable shape of Sherlock Holmes.

Watson was so astonished by this trick he threw out his hand to grasp Holmes in the dark, just to be sure he had not truly transferred himself to the window across the street. He could feel Holmes being wracked with a silent fit of laughter.

“Well?” Holmes managed to ask.

“It’s marvelous!” Watson told him.

Holmes was proud to tell Watson all of this bust, who made it, out of what medium, where it was done, and how long it took. Watson could hear the joy of the artist in his companion’s voice. “It really is rather like me, is it not?” Holmes asked.

“I should be prepared to swear it was you.”

Not that Watson was so much of a skeptic; if he could have seen the outline of the Queen in that window, he’d swear that she was up there too, but Holmes was still tickled to hear that his idea was so convincing. It had to fool Colonel Moran, who had already failed to kill Holmes at Reichenbach, into trying the murder one more time.

Holmes, practically overcome with excitement over his first real case in years, was in no mood for anything but hunting. When Watson thought he observed two men in the street, Holmes shushed him, for naturally he had seen them long before, and they were police plants anyway. When Watson noticed the dummy’s shadow had moved in the window, Holmes snapped that of course it had moved! It had to look realistic. To sit still now, so close to the first capture of his revised career, was painful to Holmes, and he was preparing to make it painful for Watson too when Moran finally arrived after two hours of waiting.

Holmes’s screed against Watson’s idiocy was cut short with a gasp, and Watson heard the detective all but choke on his excitement, trying with all his might to keep hold of himself. It also came to pass that he had need to take hold of Watson as well. Holmes dragged him into the darkest corner of the room with that disturbing strength he becomes possessed of when his solution depends on it. Holmes put his hand over Watson’s mouth, warning him not to make a sound, his hand quivering so that he could not feel the way Watson’s lips puckered beneath them, sneaking him a kiss.

Then at last Watson heard what Holmes could hear, the movement of someone else in the house. He clasped his revolver as he and Holmes both flattened themselves into the shadows, and from there they watched Moran creep in, assemble a gun, and aim it at the figure in the window.

In Moran’s eyes was the same shimmering look that Holmes would get when he was about to close in on a target, and Moran sighed before he pressed the trigger of his gun, the same sigh Holmes used to give before pressing the plunger on a cocaine syringe. These were men of the same feral breed, snapping at each other’s heels in the jungles of the city.

After the shot rang out, Holmes sprang upon Moran. He got his neck squeezed a bit before Watson ran in to help, and then Holmes blew a whistle summoning a plainclothesman from the street and Inspector Lestrade, who greeted Holmes cordially, saying it was good to see him back in London.

Holmes tried to reciprocate the kind sentiment, and almost managed it: “I think you want a little unofficial help. Three undetected murders in one year won’t do, Lestrade. But you handled the Molesey Mystery with less than your usual—that’s to say, you handled it fairly well.”

Lestrade and Watson raised eyebrows at each other and tried to pinch the smiles off their faces. This was serious business and all, but how fun to have Sherlock Holmes returned and seemingly improved. He must have missed them as well to come home so complimentary.

With more light in the room, Watson got a solid look at Moran: “With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil.” Who else does that sound like, then?

Holmes recognized the kindred connection, as did the prisoner. Moran kept muttering “You fiend! You clever, clever fiend!” as if he was only just understanding the caliber of the prey he’d been after. What was this man Holmes doing working for the police if he was going to be so horribly, horribly clever? He should have been their new commander after Moriarty, the wretched creature!