My Dear Watson (37 page)

“For God’s sake, Holmes, at least have enough care to be sanitary. The last thing you need is an infected vein.” He snatched the syringe out of Holmes’s hand.

“Don’t take it too far, Watson. And don’t think I don’t have more if you’re planning to damage it,” he said, slumped in his chair with his head hung strangely to the side. Watson set the tools down on the table beside Holmes’s dangling arm. He says that he thought of me in that moment, gratefully, glad that this was not his life anymore, and that he would soon begin a new one. Probably he was not the only one thinking rather happily on the changes that had occurred at Baker Street, for in the next moment Billy arrived with dinner from Mrs. Hudson. It was food for two, but Watson knew he would not be staying. Holmes too appeared less than uninterested in the meal. Billy set it down and smiled tenderly at Holmes, an almost motherly look that did not belong on his handsome, boyish face.

“There he’s having a good time, then,” Billy said, though he was not directing himself to Watson, but more to the room and himself.

Billy walked over to the chair where Holmes lay like a rag doll. When he was not on a case, he let the energy of the drug build within him instead of expending it. He had the most unparalleled chemistry, reacting in ways no one else would to the same stimulus. Anyone else would be abuzz, but Holmes could contain that power, concentrate it. He was a very peculiar creature.

Billy raked his hands through Holmes’s thin hair, and the sensation seemed to give Holmes some kind of charge. His eyes contracted quickly and he encouraged Billy to keep at it by a flaring gesture from his hand. Watson decided it was time to leave.

He put on his hat and left the room without any notice being taken of his movements. He was halfway down the stairs when Billy called out, “Visit us again soon, Doctor,” in a questionable tone. Watson froze in the stair well and heard Holmes say in a low voice, “Be nice, Billy.”

Watson wouldn’t see Holmes again until September, for one of the last cases of his career. If Watson was feeling tired and in need of a change, it was nothing to how Holmes felt. London just wasn’t what it used to be. Neither was fame, neither was cocaine, neither was crime. He was planning, very quietly, with only Mrs. Hudson knowing the full details because he wanted her to go with him, to retire to the coast. Though he was only forty-nine years old, it was time for Sherlock Holmes to wind down. To stop.

1903: The Creeping Man

Holmes had to keep his hands busy in the meantime however, and it was to his old reliable pastimes that he turned. Watson writes, “The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar. He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them.” Like the violin, the tobacco, and the cocaine, Holmes would reach for Watson as a matter of course, and Watson would almost always move to meet him.

Not that it was necessarily a request, in this case. A note arrived from Holmes: “Come at once if convenient—if inconvenient come all the same.” Not exactly an easy summons to ignore.

Holmes was one of his dearest friends, no one else like him in all the world or all the men that Watson had known. Writing had taught him to be even more sentimental than he already was, and even though half the time with Holmes was spent rolling his eyes or getting nagged at, he returned out of a sense of duty and friendship and hope that this would be one of those other, happier times.

Upon walking in, Watson found Holmes curled up in silence, and he waited until Holmes came pleasantly out of his thoughts and welcomed him to his former home. He seemed a tad too cheerful, and then asked a seemingly ridiculous question about dog behavior, and Watson started to wish he’d not come at all. It showed in his face, of course.

“The same old Watson!” Holmes said. “You never learn that the gravest issues may depend upon the smallest things.” He went on to explain about one dog in particular who had started treating its owner strangely, attacking him on one or two isolated occasions, but with a viciousness that did not make sense, as the creature used to be very devoted. It was all to do with the case that a Mr. Bennett was bringing to him.

“Young Mr. Bennett is before his time if that is his ring,” Holmes said after they heard the bell. “I had hoped to have a longer chat with you before he came.” Holmes had some news to break to Watson. He finally knew his date of departure from the city. He would be leaving hardly a week before our wedding. I do believe he was officially invited, but no one ever expected him to attend, and Holmes naturally met that lack of expectation. I had never set eyes on him until he walked into my house after the armistice.

Well, so: their client’s future father-in-law, employer, and landlord was acting strangely and being bitten by his own dog. He had just returned from traveling abroad in Germany and had with him a locked box that he guarded passionately. During the telling of his story the client became agitated when he felt that Holmes had quit listening to him. He was only doing a little calculating in his head, however. The incidents of the dog’s attacks happened at regular intervals, and between those facts, the foreign box, and secret correspondence between the professor (for the man they were focused on was an eminent scientist), and what turned out to be a rather unorthodox doctor, Holmes formed a theory. He still wanted more evidence, and he invited Watson to come out with him: “There is, if I remember right, an inn called the Chequers where the port used to be above mediocrity and the linen was above reproach. I think, Watson, that our lot for the next few days might lie in less pleasant places.”

I allowed Watson to go, since I was not his wife as yet, and because every man needs a last bachelor’s hurrah before he’s married. I believe Holmes meant to inform Watson of his retirement that weekend, but he was caught accidentally by this case and the pleasant time he was having with Watson; he didn’t want to sour it just then, and they would need to return in a week anyway to see its conclusion, so instead of his own affairs, Holmes talked of his theories all through dinner.

Holmes thought the professor was nursing a drug addiction (he would think that), and the man was in a way, though of a more Jekyll and Hyde variety than even Holmes’s habit. A week later Watson went off with Holmes again, to catch the professor in the act. They enlisted their client to follow him, and they staked out the house. It was here, and the narrative we have from Watson glazes over the moment, that Holmes told Watson he was leaving.

“It was a fine night,” Watson did write, “but chilly, and we were glad of our warm overcoats. There was a breeze, and clouds were scudding across the sky, obscuring from time to time the half-moon. It would have been a dismal vigil were it not for the expectation and excitement which carried us along.” Holmes, being as he was emotionally immature, could bring out the child in anyone. They were boys on an adventure, always.

“Remember I once had a notion, Watson,” Holmes said, huddling close, “to retire to the seaside spend the rest of my life in scholarly pursuits?” Watson did remember. A few times Holmes had joked about it in all their long years, moving out of the city for a quiet, respectable life. Watson chuckled to remember how Holmes said he would study alchemy, try to live forever! What had he wanted to study? Ants? No, bees! Watson’s chuckle quieted however when he remembered the dark days of Moriarty, and the night Holmes came to him to talk about retirement as if he’d never live to see it. He thought he would die young, be murdered. But here he was still, right beside Watson. Holmes said to him: “I leave for Sussex at the end of October.”

“Permanently?” Watson asked. Holmes nodded. The news was numbing. “Will Billy be going with you?”

“Oh, no,” Holmes drawled. “He doesn’t like me that much. A young man like Billy wouldn’t give up London unless he had to. Mrs. Hudson has consented to look after me though.” Holmes glanced at Watson during a patch of moonlight. “You’ll come to visit me?”

“Of course, Holmes, of course!” Watson said with whispered vigor. “Don’t be ridiculous old chap, it’s you who will never come to me. I bet you never even meet my new bride.”

“Probably not, my friend.” He touched the side of Watson’s face then, his cool fingers feeling the smile lines that crinkled from Watson’s eyes, and at that moment their prey for the night emerged, and they were sucked into the game again.

The old professor had found a younger woman to marry and was taking shots of monkey extract to rejuvenate himself, the main side effect however was to make him more volatile and ape-like, a state which greatly concerned those closest to him. They found a letter in his locked box from a dubious doctor named Lowenstein, whom Watson recalled being “an obscure scientist who was striving in some unknown way for the secret of rejuvenescence and the elixir of life.”

Holmes, on the brink of his retirement, rather mused over what this case revealed. How fateful it seemed; he
had
established bee hives for himself in Sussex. It began as a joke and then became like a promise he had made to himself, an artful ending. He certainly didn’t expect to find some ambrosia through them, but now it seemed not so funny to even try or pretend.

“There is danger there—a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit.” How disgusting the mere idea should seem to any scientist. Holmes judged Professor Presbury harshly. He decided he would do something else with the bees, because the immortality of Sherlock Holmes? Well, that was already assured. Watson with his stories had seen to that. They would both live on, after a fashion, forever.

1907: The Lion’s Mane

At last here is the Holmes I have known and heard of throughout the decade of my marriage to Watson, the one who has lived a dull little life in the Sussex Downs. Watson left our house maybe three or four times a year to go visit Holmes. I brooded during those long weekends, wondering what they were doing, and wondering would I consider my husband unfaithful if he were with another man. Would he mind if I took up relations with one of the girls I knew at university? Does gender make a difference? Should it? It all gave me a terrible nauseous headache. I just assumed each of his visits were no more than he told me about after each return, and enjoyed being alone in the house. Good weekends those, after I decided to see them as mine and not his. I hosted husbandless parties. I didn’t have a problem with Sherlock Holmes back then, or at least not much of one.

It did concern me for a while that Watson would come back from his visits with a painful smile that wouldn’t fade for days. The weekends he spent with Holmes were very occasional because they filled him with a sort of wistful sadness, they made him miss things he could not have back: the way London used to be, the way Holmes used to be, the way he used to be.

It also was not enjoyable—just as Holmes didn’t like the thought of me nor I of him—for Watson to meet Holmes’s most recent companion after Billy: Harold Stackhurst, a nearby schoolmaster. He and Holmes took to each other quickly, both intellectuals, and both with athletic interests (Stackhurst was a rowing Blue in his day). Mrs. Hudson confirmed what kind of friend Mr. Stackhurst really was, by accident, for on one of these visits she remarked that it was surprising to her that Holmes should find another friend as good as the doctor in a place so remote. All those years in London, all those people in and out of her house, and Holmes had managed to find only Dr. Watson to get along with before. And now Stackhurst.

The story I have before me, another still unpublished, as quite of few of these later narratives are, is the only mystery Holmes solved in retirement, aside from the gossiping questions about who was having an affair with the inkeeper’s wife, and which boy had vandalized one of Stackhurst’s classrooms. It’s a rather nasty little mystery, surrounding a man who appeared to have been whipped to death, but was actually attacked by a horrible great jellyfish with fiery colors called the Lion’s Mane. In writing up the account, Holmes (playing the author for the second and so-far final time) completely lost the rest of his discretion when it came to his relationships. Truly he might have been right not to care; how could the law really touch him anymore, so far from the city, and so respected as he was?

Holmes wrote of his companionship with Mr. Stackhurst thusly: “He and I were always friendly from the day I came to the coast, and he was the one man who was on such terms with me that we could drop in on each other in the evenings without an invitation.” This is a fact that Watson was able to ascertain during a visit a little time before this gruesome mystery, since Stackhurst came walking into Holmes’s little villa unconcernedly one evening as they sat talking of the social habits of Holmes’s bees.

“Well, I think I know who this is!” Stackhurst exclaimed when he realized that Holmes was not alone. “Could it be Dr. Watson? An honor and a pleasure to meet you!”

Watson liked him right away; he was a very cheerful fellow. Watson even had an idea to get him alone to talk about their mutual acquaintance—the reason I have been told all about Holmes in recent years is most likely due to Watson’s overwhelming need to discuss the man and all the impact their friendship has made on his life. But though I am unique in my understanding of them, there are many points which I cannot rise to meet; the fact that I am a woman, and that I don’t even like Sherlock Holmes, and that I have never known a love that was perilous—all this keeps me at some distance that I cannot overcome. Stackhurst filled in those spaces, but Watson would not be able to speak with him until some time after the events of the Lion’s Mane case occurred and were written down.

Throughout that mystery, Stackhurst stepped into Watson’s roll as they tried to find out who (though it turned out to be what) killed his science master. Holmes described Stackhurst as “a willing collaborator” in the investigation against the math master who was the dead man’s rival in love. The woman impressed Holmes, a sure sign of his maturity: “Women have seldom been an attraction to me, for my brain has always governed my heart,” he wrote. “But I could not look upon her perfect clear-cut face, with all the soft freshness of the downlands in her delicate coloring, without realizing that no young man would cross her path unscathed.” A kinder man, a calmer one; retirement, against all odds, seemed to agree with Sherlock Holmes.