My Dear Watson (38 page)

Holmes was finally becoming a reasonable sort of person, with some of his worst spikes being dulled down by the wind and sea. He was mostly sober—he knew better than to try and “give up” the drug definitively since there was never any predicting when he would need it again, but he seldom used it anymore. Boredom was now to be expected, and he had chosen a life of quiet uniformity, and the choice seems to have made the difference to him. Before he had been workless without his wish or consent, and now he accepted it. Watson was proud of him, in a way, but a Holmes without that maddening passion was not really the one he knew. He couldn’t exactly be jealous of Stackhurst because they did not share the same man. Stackhurst had seen only a small exercise of Holmes’s power and was absolutely staggered at its brilliance. He hardly knew that power! But he did know this quiet new Holmes, and Watson had questions about how he was doing now. Stackhurst had some questions too, and they finally got asked during one of Watson’s visits after the Lion’s Mane was killed.

“You’ve known him well,” the headmaster said. “Is it really usual for him to, after a case has ended, for him to…” He struggled for the words. “He said it was a normal occurrence, but it seemed so…”

“Was he disconsolate for a few days?” Watson asked knowingly.

“Longer than that! He was in a wretched state for over half a month. He shrugged it off when he could bring himself to move, but how could such a thing be usual?”

“His talents come at a price,” Watson said sagely. “But you’ve said that this was unusual to you? That is a positive sign. Holmes needs either ever-challenging cases or consistent hobbies.”

“Hobbies he has here,” said Stackhurst. “He studies more than even my professors, and he never seems to tire of taking notes on those bees, watching their every minute behavior. Heaven knows what use it all is to him, but he records it all the same.”

Watson smiled; yes, still gathering obscure and apparently useless knowledge, always for his own secret purposes. This conversation with Stackhurst had been had while Holmes instructed Mrs. Hudson on the dinner he wanted prepared for his friends. Holmes returned from the kitchen, took one look at his two guests, and knew in an instant.

“Talking about me, I see. I hope you have not been telling tales out of school, Stackhurst.”

“How could you know we spoke of you?” Stackhurst burst out wonderingly.

Holmes looked Watson over affectionately and said, “I can tell by my old friend’s smile.” That trip was the last they would see of each other for some time; life got away with them for a while, and soon after that, international conflict would get away with life for all of us. And yet circumstances would throw them together one last time.

1914: His Last Bow

Rumblings of war called all those able and honorable into service for the country. Everyone’s plans, the natural trajectory of our lives, were interrupted. Watson thought he’d be a comfortable old man for the rest of his days, when he had to leave our house and return to active duty. We spent most of the war apart—Watson abroad and myself working domestically to help the newly orphaned, widowed, and childless cope with their circumstances. I received as much help as I gave, for I lost my family one by one, everyone except for Watson. I worried that he would find me too changed when he returned, that we wouldn’t fit one another anymore, but somehow we had grown together, even as we lived apart.

Between Watson leaving our house and taking up with his regiment, Sherlock Holmes managed to find him. He needed someone upon whom he could thoroughly rely, and as Mycroft was absolutely indispensible from the government for even a moment, it fell to Watson. God knows how he tracked him down, or if he’d kept tabs on Watson all the while, waiting to snag him for this job when he knew there was no chance of meeting me (seems a bit too much of a coincidence otherwise, if you’ll excuse my flattering myself). However it was done, they were off on a mission to stop a spy returning to Germany before they could even shake hands, Watson acting as a chauffer, and Holmes as an Irish-American turncoat, a roll he’d been building for two years.

Now, they hired a detective to do a spy’s job, and a vain detective at that, one who prided himself on always getting his man. He was reluctant to start this job, and eager to finish it, and so once Von Bork the German agent was secure, Holmes blew his own cover. He would continue to make himself useful during the war, naturally, but not as the creatively talkative Altamont. Apparently he gave the impression of having “declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.” All an act, of course, and a fine one at that. The stage surely wept at losing him all over again.

Watson’s prose expands for this story, full of love towards the country he has fought for over and over again. He has departed again from his standard narrative format to allow the story to be bigger than himself, bigger than even Holmes, encapsulating the whole darkening landscape and the specter hanging over the entire civilized world. Here more than ever before did Watson become something beyond a mere chronicler, but an artist unto himself; and though it may annoy Holmes to have liberty taken with his deeds, here it was only too valuable. At last it was a bit of a collaboration between himself and Holmes. They made history together.

Holmes was sixty, but still devilishly spry, still full of nerve. While in character he prodded Von Bork about the five agents they’d lost to the British police since he joined, knowing full well that the latter is what caused the former. Even after Von Bork was subdued he continued to be smart, sharing the man’s wine with Watson, needling him with how terribly he had been fooled. Von Bork swore he would revenge himself on Holmes.

“The old sweet song,” he said, turning sentimentally towards Watson and laying a hand on his heart. “How often have I heard it in days gone by. It was a favorite ditty of the late lamented Professor Moriarty. Colonel Sebastian Moran has also been known to warble it. And yet I live and keep bees upon the South Downs.” He even had his book with him, a small joke on his part, wrapping it up as a prop for Von Bork.
Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen
. It amused him how human in organization those insects were, how British in their devotion to their Queen. England was greatly on his mind in those days, as it was for all of us.

“You are a sportsman,” Holmes said to his prisoner, “and you will bear me no ill-will. You have done your best for your country, and I have done my best for mine, and what could be more natural?” Don’t we all owe a debt? Who we are, our characters, whatever freedoms we’re able to find—each one of us has something to give back to wherever we call home.

At last, with Von Bork trussed up and quietly contemplating his wretched luck, Holmes finally remembered who he hadn’t seen in a couple of years, and paid him some due attention.

“But you, Watson!” He grasped my husband by his shoulders and turned him towards the light. “How have the years used you? You seem the same blithe boy as ever.” And he was; a little portlier, a little gray, but with a face like a child, still full of sparkling hope and awe.

“I feel twenty years younger, Holmes.” He had been expecting a soldier’s life again, dreary and bloody and coarse, when Holmes had pulled him out for another adventure. How thrilling! How like the old days. “But you, Holmes—you have changed very little—save for that horrible goatee.” He reached forward to stroke Holmes’s face and chin. Von Bork was so past caring what they did that it was as if they were alone.

At last they put Von Bork in the car. Holmes prodded him further by offering to light a cigar and stick it in his mouth, and the man struggled furiously to get out of his bonds, but Holmes was as good at knot-tying as anything else, and it was all a vain effort. Holmes lit a cigar anyway and passed it to Watson, the end damp with his own mouth.

“Watson,” he said as he prepared a cigar for himself. “You are joining up with your old service, as I understand. Stand with me here upon the terrace, for it may be the last quiet talk that we shall ever have.”

They walked a bit, always keeping the car in sight, in case Von Bork should somehow manage to escape. They were by the sea, with tall grasses whispering all around them, and a moon high and bright in the sky. They walked arm-in-arm, laughing over things remembered and teasing one another fondly. Everything was so new, so strange. Watson says he had never seen Holmes so nostalgic, so romantic. He told Holmes that night that it seemed like the last moment of peace in all the world.

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson,” Holmes had said somberly, looking out at the bright, serrated sea. It flashed like knives as far as his eye could see, and it worried him greatly. He was not without a sense of crown and country; he did not ever want the sun to set permanently on the empire, even if it did get dark every now and again.

“I think not, Holmes,” Watson answered, noticing the direction the grass was leaning, feeling the air. What was Holmes talking about with the wind? “It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson!” For once it seemed that Holmes was the sappy one, Watson the man of concrete observation. It made Holmes smile and kiss his friend’s lightly wrinkled cheek. “You are the one fixed point in a changing age,” he told Watson. “There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind that never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.” It brings tears to my eyes to even transcribe this, and if they were Holmes’s own true words and sentiment, well… I guess I like him more than I thought.

They drove back to London, deposited their prisoner, and parted company. Holmes was off to shave his face, change his clothes, and try to purify his well of English since it was allegedly “permanently defiled” by his time in America, though he sounds perfectly British to me now. Holmes and Watson didn’t see each other again until this very day in 1919. And now they are parting again.

1919: Dear Holmes,
Dear Watson

Watson looks devastated when the door clicks shut behind Sherlock Holmes. He watches through the small glass panes beside the door as Holmes descends our front steps and gets into the car which was brought round for him by Maurice. Watson stands and gazes until the dust from the tires settles and the rear lights are not even pinpricks in the night. We agreed before Holmes ever arrived that it wouldn’t be right to have him stay the night, but my Watson looks so sad now that I almost wish I had ignored my own discomfort and had Holmes placed in the guest room for as long as he’d consent to stay. I feel like I’ve done Watson an unkindness.

This feeling only redoubles as I go to put my arms around my husband and he cringes away from me. Not as if I have become repellent to him, mind, but as if he thinks himself unworthy of comfort. Maybe he thinks he should be hard enough to withstand what he feels alone, or maybe he thinks that Sherlock Holmes would not crumble so and wishes to emulate his exalted friend; I would say he is wrong on both counts.

“I only want to be alone now, darling,” he says thickly. His face is turned away from me, but I’m sure his tears are flowing. He reaches blindly out behind him for the stair rail, and I direct his hand to it. “I shall go to bed early, I think,” he says as he drags himself heavily up the stairs. Every one of his footsteps feels like a blow to my heart. I feel his pain as if it were my own, and who’s to say this isn’t my pain as well? We are one union of man and wife, after all, and this visit has impacted me too.

There is no real way to resolve the situation; the story is too long, too old for revision. It is finished.

And yet… I feel the need to have my say, to do something about it all, to put my unique position in use. What good is all my knowledge and all the evidence I have collected if I cannot be, in a sense, a man of action. If there is one thing that comes across clearly throughout Watson’s three decades of stories, it is that all the information in the world may yet be useless if it is not properly, practically applied.

And so: I go to the writing desk and lay down a piece of paper. On the top it has embossed
From the Home of Dr. and Mrs. Watson
, which might well be unfortunate for what I am about to create, but it is what it is, and well it would be if we all learned to deal with it. I take up a pen and write:

Dear Sherlock Holmes,

I never would have thought the words, nor expected myself to write them in earnest, but there they are. After finally meeting Holmes, who would I be kidding if I were to act as if I am not somewhat sympathetic, if I made believe that he is a man totally without my ken? We are not so different, he and I, we never have been. Watson, with a wisdom he hardly ever gets credited for, has known it all along.

For that wisdom there should be at last some form of thanks. I must do something if I can—and I do think I can—to make sure that my husband never goes crawling to bed with a hurt so unbearable again. A little gratitude is warranted, from Holmes and myself, for all that we have been privileged to receive from Watson. I steady my hand, and I compose my letter thusly:

I have a horrible suspicion that you can read handwriting as though it were a crystal ball, but I write in my own hand even knowing that I must be revealing myself. You may have an idea of how thoroughly I see you, of how well I am versed in your life with my husband. I feel that I could show you no more of myself than I already understand about you, and there are many reasons for this belief.

It is not only that Watson holds no secrets from me that he does not first hold from himself, and that being his wife and a woman, I can see plenty more that he is unaware of even in his own mind. He assures me, for example, that though his life has been full of those he has loved, he no longer pines for anyone but me. He would believe this with all his heart, but you and I both know that it is not true, and why. Certainly that alone brings us into intimate understanding with one another, and we should not pretend otherwise.