My Dear Watson (35 page)

“Holmes,” Watson said slowly. “You don’t have to—”

“I believe this is what is best for me,” Holmes said carefully. “But I know that it’s the right thing for you.”

Watson’s mouth hung open; what was all this? He was all right, everything was all right before tonight! There was no reason to be so drastic!

Holmes held up his long-fingered hand to Watson’s stuttering. “This isn’t a rash decision,” he said.

“I don’t see how not! Holmes you’ve been clear of this drug for five years, you’ve been doing so well! Please don’t sacrifice that progress because of such a small injury,” Watson pleaded, gesturing at his leg.

Holmes smiled patiently. “I’ve only been away from it less than a year,” Holmes confessed. “I took it up again without you ever noticing, and used it successfully for quite some time. I lied to you.”

Watson, frowning, shook his head in disbelief. Holmes had a look on his face of sorrowful resignation. Each man kills the thing he loves, and Holmes had finally realized what (or who) it was that he loved. His mind was safe, but his Watson was wounded—it had almost happened right under his nose! How to save Watson from the danger that Holmes could not help but put him in? Better to drive him away and save him. Better to kill the thing he loved second best.

“I know you won’t tolerate this,” Holmes said, pointing to the drug. “And I know equally that I must use it, as I see fit, if I am to be what I must be. I hope we can still be great friends, dear Watson, great partners, but…” he trailed off with a flutter of his hand, and then allowed it to reach for Watson across the table. Their fingers clutched together tightly. “You’ll be safer this way.” He was saving Watson by sacrificing himself.

Watson had become so comfortable, he had become so accustomed to their life together; it just didn’t occur to him that anything could upset it. And yet, his leg throbbed, shot through by a bullet again, and just like the last time he had felt that sting, his life was at a precipice. Holmes was serious. Things larger than himself were moving him once again.

“You’ll be all right,” Holmes said, rising and leaning over the table to press his cheek to Watson’s forehead. “You’ll be much better off.”

He left to go to his room, leaving the cocaine bottle where it stood on the table, staring at Watson like a tiny being that
wanted
to give him some privacy, but obviously could not. Watson grabbed the bottle and stared at it, aghast that it could make such a drastic impact on his life, but he set it right back down again. If this was what Holmes wanted, again and still, then what could he do about it? Did he really want to wage that fight forever?

That summer Watson moved out of Baker Street. The separation was amicable, almost as if they really were just fellow lodgers and not so much more. Watson set up his medical practice once again, he struck out on his own with a renewed purpose to establish himself as an individual, not as Sherlock Holmes’s scribe.

He became aware in the process of reestablishing himself of just how stagnant he had become living in the shadow of Holmes, how much he had been complacent with a life of leisure and disconnect. He wouldn’t knowingly live with a drug user, and since clearly Holmes was making the choice to be one, he was ending their cohabitation. The way it was presented, he was telling Watson that his decision, however strangely it was motivated, was a firm one. Watson loved Holmes enough to leave when he was asked. And might some distance not be a renewal for them both? There was no reason not to think so.

1919: Departure

At last it is time for Holmes to take his leave. I am glad to see the back of him, and yet…what do I really hate him for? Ultimately it was he who released Watson back into the world for me to find. Perhaps he regretted it later (who wouldn’t?), but in 1902 Watson moved out again. He kept involved with Holmes for quite a long while, but within two years he was moving on from the steady role Holmes had cast him in; he was his own man again! And as a man alone he was, as per his nature, on the look-out for a woman.

I was that woman. I met Watson when he came to treat my father for his heart—I remember my first sight of him. I didn’t know who he was at first, and after I learned of him I was skeptical about this literary and crime-fighting doctor. What all did he know about medicine, about my father’s health, when he frittered away half his time writing stories and solving mysteries?

But when I saw him I took him in right away as a military man; with seven brothers—three of whom were joined up at the time, the rest of whom went when the war required them—I could spot all the signs. The regulation mustache, the stiff walk, the language. I said to him moodily as soon as he walked in, “Oh just what we need, another soldier!” And he told me that I was highly observant, and that I reminded him of a very close friend of his. How unsettling.

Watson gifts Holmes the Wagner recording as he is heading towards the door, forces it into his hands as we all stand awkwardly shifting. My heart is…undecided. It’s fluttering in excitement and anxiety as our party comes to a close, as Holmes picks up his hat and coat, and pulls his serpentine pipe out of the pocket. He has already been nearly five hours without it, the deprived man.

I step up to say goodbye first. Holmes reaches out and starts to stoop towards me, as if he will kiss my hand. I grasp him in a handshake however, and look him in his steely gray eyes, and he winks at me on the side that Watson cannot see, and it does make me smile. I see his wager by kissing his cheek and telling him, “Good-night, Mister Sherlock Holmes,” as Irene Adler did before me. Holmes knows what I mean by it. We part from each other, each looking lemon-faced, but I know it is only to hide our amusement. We have grown tolerant of each other over this visit, somehow. Perhaps it is all our common ground.

I touch Watson’s elbow and tell him, “I’ll be in the dining room,” which is on the other side of our central stairs, and as far as I can be from him without stepping into the kitchen or going up stairs. I’m telling him that I will give them some privacy. I’m tempted to actually do it, too.

I comprise my morals; I move out of the foyer, go through the sitting room, and tuck myself behind the wall in the dining room. I cannot see them, but if I press myself tightly to the wall and shut my eyes, I can channel all my focus into hearing what they are saying. I can only pick up some few sweet murmurings.

“Well,” Holmes says. “Journeys end in lovers’ parting, my dear Watson.”

“I’ll see you again soon, though, shall I? I might travel to the coast before the weather turns frigid. And of course you’re always welcome to come see us here.”

Holmes’s response is indecipherable, but I think I know the sounds that follow: a rustling of cloth, a sighing of breath, a low sound from Watson like he makes when he is holding in a flood of tears—the same noise he made the day we went to war, and the same noise he made when we were all called home again. My heart breaks to think of them embracing, but I’m more hurt to think of Watson’s pain. He hates goodbyes, however temporary they may be. He always has.

1902: The Illustrious Client

Twenty years is not so easily set aside, however. Watson had moved out to Queen Anne Street to resume practicing medicine, and a prestigious list of patients he had too, being at last in some upscale premises and with his own bit of fame due to his stories. Holmes had forced some distance between them (very selflessly I think—he realized that, sober or soused, his company was a threat to Watson), but it wasn’t a clean break. A bit of backsliding was necessary perhaps, a period of gradual lessening, a more casual redefinition of their friendship. Watson acquired new rooms over the summer and autumn, but still in September he and Holmes saw each other regularly. When Watson first learned of this illustrious client in fact, he and Holmes were enjoying each other’s company at the Turkish baths. This, hopefully needless to say, is before Watson ever met me. I wouldn’t be in his life until December.

They maintained flirtations, and as far as it appears to me, carnal relations as well, but by Holmes’s choosing they established themselves independently once more. Whenever he felt the desire to take up with Watson thoroughly again, something like this very case would come along and remind him why distance was necessary. The uncommon violence of what should have been a simple matter of disillusioning a young lady over her fiancé underlined for Holmes what a perilous life he led. He needed the reminding, and he took it quite to heart; his whole aim of depriving himself of Watson was to keep Watson from injury, and yet old habits die terribly hard. Not three months after divorcing himself from Watson he was asking him back as if he didn’t know how not to. After explaining the details of his latest matter to Watson, he concluded:

“I am bound, therefore, to hope that it is not a false scent and that he has some real need for our assistance.”

“Our?” Watson asked, surprised.

“Well,” Holmes fumbled. “If you will be so good.”

“I shall be honored,” Watson told him. And so it went on between them as if neither one knew better.

Their illustrious client’s illustrious representative was a man of rather flamboyant fashion, maybe “posing as a somdomite” as Lord Queensberry would put, maybe a fully fledged member of the club. One would hope a man who had his sexuality to conceal would not go around in lavender spats and winking and such, but who knows. People have been known to act more recklessly than that.

“Of course, I was prepared to find Dr. Watson,” he said with a raised eyebrow and lowered head. Holmes and Watson shot glances at one another, but let the remark slide. How is it any business of his where anyone was living or why?

Colonel Sir James Damery gave them the details of the problem: a promising young woman named Violet was in all ways devoted to an absolute scoundrel. Adelbert Gruner was a convicted murderer, but he still managed to talk his way into an engagement with Violet, and the man who was being represented by this flouncing Colonel Damery wanted the girl disabused of her illusions. It was nearly impossible, for her heart was resolute.

Holmes first went to intimidate Gruner, then to attempt to reason with Violet. He found her “indescribably annoying in the calm aloofness and supreme self-complaisance” she displayed, which is only fitting medicine, since he is just as irritating to everyone who speaks with him, and more so since he is almost never wrong. Violet at least had the redeeming quality of being totally deluded and pitiable. Holmes repels pity.

He provoked an attack on himself, knowingly, and then let the papers play it up that he was within inches of death. Didn’t tell Watson either, again. The poor man’s showed me the placard that he stood on between the Grand Hotel and Charing Cross Station when he saw the news.
“Murderous Attack Upon Sherlock Holmes,” the paper blared. Watson hurried to Baker Street with what was by then a familiar feeling of nauseous fear. How many times had Holmes done this to him? How many times had he promised that it would never happen again?

Watson met a surgeon in the hall who told him as soon as he spotted Watson’s stricken face, “No immediate danger. Two lacerated scalp wounds and some considerable bruises. Several stitches have been necessary. Morphine has been injected and quiet is essential, but…an interview of a few minutes would not be absolutely forbidden.” There could be no telling Watson to leave now.

Holmes was in mostly darkness, seeping through his bandages, whispering roughly. “Don’t look so scared, Watson. It’s not as bad as it seems.” At some point he complained to Watson about the morphine, upset that at first it made him itch and hallucinate, and eventually that it made him so complacent and dull. Not his drug at all, but not to worry the medical man in the room! He would quit the cocaine while he was on morphine. Heaven knows what they’d do in combination. He disliked the thick, molten sensation of morphine so much that before he was fully healed he gave it up. He chose to feel the pain of his injury over the suffocating lethargy that morphine brought. Something about that numbness scared him more than his cracked brow, more than the idea of death itself.

At least during this case, for all the damage it inflicted, he told Watson to act as if his friend were dying, and did not require him to believe it was true all the while. Holmes decided he would fool his surgeon instead, and that Watson’s playacting abilities, such as they weren’t, would be sufficient. What a mercy! If only he’d thought to extend it before the papers caught the story.

He was still malingering though, for sympathy, and for fun. “There was a curious secretive streak in the man which led to many dramatic effects, but left even his closest friend guessing as to what his exact plans might be.” Watson didn’t mind it, he was just happy to have his infuriating friend alive and in good spirits. “He pushed to an extreme the axiom that the only safe plotter was he who plotted alone. I was nearer him than anyone else, and yet I was always conscious of the gap between.” I think, perhaps, that this is why he didn’t have much of a turn when Holmes asked him to leave in the first place. It seemed…unavoidable, but more than that, it seemed right. Holmes belonged on a pedestal. Watson did not.

Holmes took his lumps over this case, but once out of commission and pretending to be at death’s door, he sent Watson to try and distract Gruner, a feat he would never have successfully accomplished, since lying is not in his nature and being tricked was not in Gruner’s. Holmes had to burst in, injured though he truly was, to stop Watson being murdered. During the upheaval a spurned lover threw vitriol into Gruner’s face, destroying its European good looks in a second.

It was, in the end, an ugly matter. A triumphant case objectively, but still leaving a horrible disfigurement, a wronged woman charged with vitriol-throwing, a marriage cancelled, and very nearly Holmes standing in the dock for burglary (which he was in the habit of committing yet again—it appears to go with the territory of cocaine confidence). But they needed Gruner’s diary to win Violet to the side of reason; it was only his client’s standing, and not Holmes’s own, that saved him from the law in the end. It may have seemed like only another notch in his belt, but this case and all its risks reminded Holmes first that Watson was still not safe with him, and second that he was still not immune from the law. His worst torments were dogging him still. More distance was necessary, even more distance.