My Dear Watson (36 page)

The next case would not be told by Watson at all. It is one of only two that are written by Holmes himself, and it is solved without Watson at his side. It was what Holmes needed to do, for the good of both himself and Watson, a true severance. In that time apart they both moved on to new companions; Watson to me, and Holmes to a short string of men who could distract him from the curious loneliness he never thought himself capable of: the loneliness of a love lost.

1903: The Blanched Soldier

Not that Holmes could really go anywhere without Watson; they had each formed the other, changed him, affected him irrevocably. Holmes, working always to be more like a machine and less like a man, couldn’t shake off the presence of knowing what Watson would think, or the mistakes that Watson would have made, had he come along. It even helped to know Watson’s human nature, to understand the nature of army men and the bond between soldier friends…that helped him with this case. It was almost like a bereavement to Holmes, to be so close to his memories of Watson without including him. It was almost as if his friend had died. Why else shouldn’t he be called in to assist?

But Holmes’s resolution was strong, and Watson’s singular devotion to him was migrating. Holmes says in introduction to this case that Watson had left him for a wife, a single selfish act that Holmes could not hold against him, since Holmes had taken more that he could ever repay from Watson. We were not, as yet, married, and would not even be engaged until 1904 after he had met all of my family and secured their approval, but Holmes knew the writing on the wall, he knew the trajectory of my presence. Once Watson had mentioned me to Holmes, it had gone quite far enough, and there was only one way it could end. That ending would be a beautiful beginning, a wedding that would happen in November of 1904, on Guy Fawkes’ day. It was the last temperate autumn Saturday of the year. It was perfect.

So Holmes was doubly disingenuous when he wrote, “The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife,” since it was Holmes who had left, and I was not yet officially Watson’s wife. This story has not gone to print at this time, but Holmes refuses to change a word of it now. I have seen it in several different forms: Holmes’s original all marked over with notes from Watson, a second draft where Holmes took absolutely none of Watson’s advice, and what appears to be a penultimate version which I copied out for Watson’s literary agent. I believe Holmes wants this to be his effort alone, and that he has his own reasons for putting things the way that he has.

He missed Watson on this soldier case, and I think that emotion more than anything else is what prompted him to write it down and at last appease Watson’s requests that Holmes take up the pen himself. Chief among the things that reminded him of Watson was the military man who secured Holmes to find out what had happened to his old army friend. Holmes could relate to this client, since he was missing an honorable old soldier himself. Mr. James Dodd was very frank with his feelings, saying plainly that he loved his friend Godfrey and only wished to find out what had happened to him. Holmes took up the case not least because he found the figure of a hidden, white-faced former solider interesting, but also because he genuinely wanted to help Mr. Dodd.

More than the army aspect of the case, it reminded him of Watson in its medical elements; Godfrey, it turned out, was suffering from leprosy (or as it happily turned out to be, pseudo-leprosy), and it panged Holmes to think that he did not have Watson to simply turn to and ask for advice. Even in the writing of this narrative he felt the overwhelming emptiness that Watson left. We never stop realizing all that someone was to us once they are gone—those surprising pockets of vacancy persist forever.

“And here it is that I miss my Watson,” Holmes wrote. “By cunning questions and ejaculations of wonder he could elevate my simple art, which is but systematized common sense, into a prodigy.” More than simply missing the man himself, Holmes missed the way Watson’s eyes saw him; I too know that feeling of elevation and esteem from Watson. His admiring gaze is like the light of the sun, warm and nurturing and very sorely missed when it is gone.

1903: The Mazarin Stone

They still, of course, saw something of each other while Holmes remained in London and before Watson and I were officially wed. Watson continued to visit Baker Street and occasionally got mixed up in cases despite being busy in his own profession once more. I know for sure that they engaged in the Three Gables case in the spring, though I have little more to say about that one. Holmes was in a real mood the whole time, threatening people, insulting their racial features, extorting money…essentially finding an amusing way to pass the time. Being apart was starting to become commonplace, comfortable. They cooled as they separated, like the precipitate that results from a chemical reaction; it was a volatile concoction once, but it was settling now.

Both of them moved on from one another, not in their deepest hearts, but still they added new lovers to their lives. I myself was Watson’s addition; while we were courting I knew little of how he spent his time away from me, but I did not require his full faith and fidelity until we were vowed to one another. He didn’t see Holmes for some few years after we were first married. We were rather wrapped up in ourselves then.

But in 1903, Holmes had found someone else too, someone who had been right under his nose for nearly fifteen years—Billy, their page. He was twenty-six now, and with Watson gone he was promoted from mere page to somewhat of a secretary, apprentice, and companion. Watson was visiting Baker Street after several months away, and he looked around at everything fondly, including Billy, “the young but very wise and tactful”—an important requirement—“page, who had helped a little to fill the gap of loneliness and isolation which surrounded the saturnine figure of the great detective.” Billy however did not return Watson’s kind feelings; he smiled, but it was as if the ends of his mouth had been riveted into place.

“It all seems very unchanged, Billy,” Watson said as he rocked pleasantly back and forth on his feet. “You don’t change either. I hope the same can be said of him?”

Billy, in fact,
had
changed from the child he used to be. He had a bit of Holmes in him I suspect, that icy part, except untempered by any of Holmes’s human connections—his brother Mycroft and friend Watson. Billy was much more alone, and his concern with Holmes was more possessive than it was affectionate. He was jealous seeing Watson returned. They found room enough between one another to talk about Holmes, with Billy commenting that Holmes was sleeping all day and refusing food. “You know his way when he is keen on a case,” Billy said.

“Yes, I know.”

Billy’s lips pursed slightly. I think he was making fun of Watson as he told of Holmes’s exploits: “He’s following someone. Yesterday he was out as a workman looking for a job. Today he was an old woman. Fairly took me in, he did!” He went on to tell Watson that he liked who Holmes liked, and did what Holmes asked him to. “Mr. Holmes always knows whatever there is to know,” he said. He was really quite taken with the man.

Watson noticed something that was unfamiliar, a curtain drawn across the window. “We’ve got something funny behind it,” Billy said with a small smirk on his face. It was a dummy of Holmes. Billy detached the head to show it to Watson, explaining that there were men staked out across the street bent on assassination. Watson remembered the adventure of The Empty House and told Billy, “We used something of the sort once before!”

“Before my time,” Billy told him crisply. He was around back then but at only fourteen, he wasn’t involved with Holmes in quite the same way. Now he was in the thick of it, in danger right alongside his mentor. Billy peaked out the window to look at the men who were menacing them. Holmes came charging out of his room to snatch the curtains closed again.

“That will do, Billy,” he said darkly. “You were in danger of your life then, my boy, and I can’t do without you just yet.”

Watson, bless his sweet soul, hadn’t thought of what might be going on between them. Billy’s face was still quite young and boyish, but his eyes displayed a cunning age. He had turned out to be handsome, and very devoted to Holmes. The circumstances started to dawn on Watson once Billy was out of the room.

“That boy is a problem, Watson,” Holmes said seriously. “How far am I justified in allowing him to be in danger?”

It was the same problem with Watson, obviously, but to Holmes it must have felt different, since he didn’t force Billy to leave, but rather let him hang around as much as he liked. It is risky to stand so close to Sherlock Holmes, but it was a risk that Holmes, in the end, would not let Watson take. Watson got pushed away, a selfless act to help preserve his precious life. But Billy was something else—he could make his own choices, and take his own chances. Holmes felt somehow less culpable of any fate that might befall Billy. He wasn’t in love with the boy, after all, so the stakes and the rules were different; Billy could still leave at any time, and Holmes wasn’t making any great effort to have him stay. With Watson, Holmes had lied and cajoled and even paid to keep him in Baker Street, for his own sake and regardless of what Watson would do if left uninfluenced and told the whole truth. Theirs hadn’t been a fair partnership; Holmes had stacked the deck against Watson with his ability to act and mislead. Indeed, this very case reminded everyone how flawlessly Holmes pretended to be someone he was not, a workman, an old woman, any disguise he chose. With such talent comes a greater responsibility to use it well and to know its power. If he lies to people he absolutely becomes responsible for them. Billy wasn’t being lied to.

But Watson still was, in little ways. Holmes downplayed the danger he was in (hard to do after already admitting that a magnificent hunter was planning to murder him) and sent him out to fetch the police, through the back so the potential murderer would not be suspicious. Watson insisted upon staying to help protect Holmes, but he was not allowed.

“I can’t possibly leave you,” Watson told Holmes.

“Yes, you can, Watson,” Holmes said with a small, twisted smile. “And you will, for you have never failed to play the game. I am sure you will play it to the end.” Even Watson’s stalwart insistence was nothing to Sherlock Holmes. No man’s will is his own if Holmes has decided to manipulate it. He even told Watson that this villain he was about to host would not be immune: “This man has come for his own purpose, but he may stay for mine,” Holmes said.

The suspect arrived, Count Sylvius, and was cheerfully stopped from murdering Holmes’s likeness. The Count was informed that he himself would tell Holmes where the missing Mazarin stone was hidden. The man was skeptical of this assertion; Holmes was not. Holmes intimated to his would-be attacker that it had been his own “play-acting, busybody self” who had been following the Count for some days, and that the only fact which he did not know already was the location of the stone.
That
remained for Count Sylvius to reveal, and Holmes told him that he would confess it before he left those very rooms. This did not sit well with our criminal.

“You won’t die in your bed, Holmes,” Sylvius told him menacingly. Holmes shrugged; he already suspected that he would not.

After having Billy usher up this man’s muscular companion, Holmes swapped himself for his own dummy and was able to snatch the stone right out of Count Sylvius’s hand. They gave up the game without much of a struggle after that, since fighting had just become so pointless.

“I believe you are the devil himself,” the Count said.

“Not far from him, at any rate,” Holmes answered with a polite smile, and I’m sure some amount of pride. He had a few more tricks to keep the pleasure of his capture going—a bit of nothing-up-my-sleeve, slipping the stone into his client’s pocket and then insisting jocularly that he was an accomplice. When the joke on Lord Cantlemere failed to amuse anyone but Holmes (Watson was mostly embarrassed, Cantlemere irritated and harassed by Holmes’s “perverted” sense of humor), it became clear to Watson that Holmes was indeed still using his drug. Something about all of Holmes’s actions seemed caricatured and over-exaggerated, and Watson even wrote the account of the case rather strangely, using an unprecedented third-person narration. I don’t know why, unless the whole circumstances simply made him uncomfortable enough to want to distance himself.

Billy was called back up to usher Lord Cantlemere out again, and as he left behind their rather nonplussed visitor, he lingered just inside the door.

“That was a very deft capture, Mr. Holmes,” Billy said softly, leaning as close to the detective’s ear as decency would permit. Billy continued on downstairs after saying this, and Holmes merely shrugged his eyebrows at Watson and threw his long form into a chair.

Watson could not say nothing. He sat across from Holmes in his old chair and shook his head slowly, letting the truth sink in.

“He’s young enough to be your son, Holmes.”

“So what if he is?” Holmes said lightly. “I haven’t got any sons, and he hasn’t got a father, and you know that I am much more concerned with the letter of the law, not always the moral spirit behind it. You paint me gray enough in your stories.”

“I’m not asking about the law’s morals, I’m asking about your own.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t, Watson,” said Holmes as he leaned to reach beneath his chair and pulled out a familiar case. “You won’t like the answers.”

Watson watched as Holmes extracted cocaine into his syringe and rolled up his sleeve. There were the marks, fresh and numerous, that made Watson recall their earlier years together. No, he did not like this at all.

“Is Billy aware of your habit?” Watson asked.

“He is,” Holmes said. “He even likes to inject me himself when I’ll permit it.” Holmes injected himself right then, and Watson nearly shuddered to think of anyone but a doctor doing something so intimate. A scarlet thread of blood bloomed into the glass like a tendril. Holmes looked at it fondly before he pressed the plunger down. The liquid sped into his arm. His eyes closed down to slits. He brought the needle to his mouth to get any residual fluid off of it, and at last Watson could not stand it anymore.