My Dear Watson (5 page)

1887: The Reigate Squire

By April of that year, Holmes is exhausted. Poor baby! In fairness, he had involved himself in quite a few cases that spring, one I believe being
The Adventure of the Second Stain
, though Watson was careful to conceal its date and even its decade in his account, which is all of little consequence to me. Though I found the mystery intriguing, I have nothing more to add to it, and I have skipped it here.

Watson did his best to cover for Holmes in the public record, blaming Holmes’s “strain” on some international case he worked over the spring of 1887. This is not to say that Holmes did not run himself ragged during this investigation, but I do mean to imply that his constitution might have been more unassailable if he hadn’t been walking with a syringe-shaped crutch for weeks on end. I think it is fair to say that Holmes was interrupting his own fragile balance, and he did not like discovering that his system of highs and lows was one he would have to embrace to remain healthy. One cannot function at such a feverish pitch of productivity without requiring a rest. And since Holmes often refused to even sleep during a case, as close upon its completion as possible, his body would take its rest by force. It took a massive act of willpower to fight his doldrums then, or else a tiny needle filled with cocaine solution.

The habit was in its infancy, and this breakdown was the first proof Holmes had received that he was not invincible. He could not control everything, least of all the demands of his own body. Watson was optimistic that perhaps removing him from Baker Street during the inevitable emotional crash that comes after an exciting case would help break the pattern he was establishing. He thought if he could absent Holmes from temptation, from the unhealthy routines he had established in their home, the problem would fade away. He is a dreamer, my Watson.

Watson and Holmes were invited out to the country home of Colonel Hayter, an old army patient of Watson’s from Afghanistan. Holmes was naturally resistant to go, “but when Holmes understood that the establishment was a bachelor one,” he became willing. I told you Watson would have missed it if one of the soldiers surrounding him during the fight was a member of the club, so to speak, and Colonel Hayter is proof of that. It never occurred to Watson why Hayter kept inviting him to come round, and it also didn’t occur to him that when the invitation was extended to Holmes as well, it was Hayter’s way of recognizing them as a pair, and of giving up his pursuit of Watson with grace.

Alas Hayter and Watson were the only gentlemen in the room. When Holmes arrived, and he and Hayter began to get along as Watson hoped they might, Holmes started making himself more than comfortable. He draped himself over the Colonel’s couch as Hayter and Watson talked guns (and no man is ever innocent of double entendre when talking about guns), Holmes smirked all the while, quite enjoying himself in languid repose, until Hayter brought up a local mystery that perked him from his snide little reverie.

Watson threw a wet blanket over his excitement; Holmes was wrung out from work and recreation, and he was forbidden from involving himself in the matter. However; it is unwise to leave Sherlock Holmes with idle hands. He didn’t turn to cocaine that night (he didn’t have the solution with him is all) but he did find something else to do.

Colonel Hayter had already complimented Holmes on his most recent European endeavor, and he had witnessed my tender Watson mothering Holmes on the subject of work and relaxation. The Colonel was an independent man himself; no wife, no children, certainly no one tsking at him when he overexerted himself. He had a measure of sympathy for Holmes, and when the detective cast a wry look at Hayter while Watson shook his finger and said, “You are here for a rest, my dear fellow,” Colonel Hayter smiled back at him, and even dared to wink, or so Watson now swears he saw.

There must have been some kind of signal that passed between Holmes and Hayter, because they rather connected later that night. Sherlock Holmes was not and is not a man you can curb. Watson was trying to be his doctor, his lover, and his friend; a triple threat to Holmes’s autonomy that he was not going to tolerate. If Watson was going to act like his wife, then Holmes would treat him with the complete disregard he has for women. After all their years together, and knowing what Watson assumed about their mutual fidelity, Holmes was sure to be indiscreet in his flirtation with Hayter. This was so much less about the Colonel than it was meant to hurt Watson, and hurt him it did.

Watson told me what he saw. He didn’t like how chummy things were getting, and the way Holmes kept smirking at him made him nervous; those shifting gray eyes, chameleons of his mood, there was something lurking in them, something premeditated. Watson thought he would try to lead the men to bed by yawning, stretching, and retiring at a reasonable hour. But he only managed to force himself away early, leaving Holmes and Hayter sitting beneath the mantle with night caps they were both careful not to finish too quickly. Watson is cursed with an emotional divining rod, an unsatisfying tool when compared to Holmes’s deductive lens; Watson can sense disturbances, but he can’t identify them. He has to have every situation play out before his very eyes.

Watson knew something was brewing in the room he’d left, so he staked himself in the hallway, peeking around occasionally to see whether his suspicions would be confirmed. He did not have to wait long, since the whole point was for Holmes to prove that no one owned him; Holmes would have noticed that Watson’s footfalls stopped in the hallway and did not continue upstairs. He knew he was being observed. Colonel Hayter probably did not, but he had only one thing on his mind, and it wasn’t Watson.

Watson has complimented Holmes’s acting ability on numerous occasions, and about this he was not exaggerating. It’s a delicate matter to proposition another man in this century, and it was certainly more dangerous during the last. After the Labouchère Amendment passed in 1886, getting caught participating in “gross indecency” (which could be anything that made the public clutch at its pearls) was no longer just a personal disaster among one’s relations or a fatal blow to one’s reputation; it could mean a jail sentence, even castration. The day the amendment passed Holmes threw down the paper in disgust and told Watson not to worry, not about themselves at least; “These bumbling fools who call themselves the law, I’d like to see them prove a single charge against me. I could have them turning in circles like a dog after its tail.”

Right as he may have been, Holmes was still not so unwise as to be reckless. No one could speak the thing aloud, and so it had to be communicated by body and movement and expression. Holmes stood from his seat slowly and started examining the Colonel’s gun collection, prompting Hayter to rise as well and join Holmes beside his display of weapons, standing close behind the newly international consulting detective.

It was past the point of words. Watson held his breath watching, on a razor’s edge between horror and hunger, between offense and obsession.

Holmes stretched out a long, dexterous finger to stroke one of the gun barrels, and when Hayter and Holmes next looked at each other, it was all confirmed in an instant. Holmes laid his hand on the back of Hayter’s neck, his thumb stroking Hayter’s Burnside beard, pulling him closer with some real strength; no matter how much it is clearly desired, resistance seems to be an eternal component in these sorts of couplings, as if men must always fight for it.

Watson witnessed this scene as long as he could stand it. Hayter’s easy reception absolutely mystified him, because he never realized that Hayter’s constant invitations to the country were motivated by anything other than friendship. He was also stunned, almost more than he was hurt, that Holmes would pursue another the same way he had gone after Watson himself. He naïvely thought he was the only one, bless his innocent heart. And here he was finally learning just how much farther than he these men of the world had traveled.

Watson watched their mouths tangle roughly, the sweetness of what a kiss should be nearly lost in a clash of teeth and whiskers. He turned away when Holmes finally set down his drink to unfasten Hayter’s collar. Unlike Holmes, Watson can only cause himself so much pain before he has mercy. Watson had horrible dreams that night of vipers circling each other, striking back and forth, one with tiny needles for fangs, and the other with the head of a gun. He can still remember the way his skin crawled when he woke up. He told me about it with a shiver.

The next morning, Holmes was perfectly chipper, revoltingly so. Hayter alone had the decency to avoid Watson’s gaze in shame, though he had quite a time of it once the local Inspector came to beg Holmes away, and Holmes maliciously spoke only to the Colonel as he left Hayter and Watson sitting together, alone. It was a tense while before Watson (of course) at last took pity and said to Hayter: “It isn’t you who should feel guilty.”

“What happened wasn’t my intent,” Hayter mumbled into his mustache.

“Of course not,” Watson said. “But no man’s intent could stand up against his.”

Hayter met Watson’s eyes across his breakfast table, and now he was the one gushing pity like a ruptured organ. He opened his mouth, probably to espouse some words of comfort, but before he could speak, the Inspector returned saying Holmes was acting strangely.

“I don’t think you need to alarm yourself,” Watson said wearily. “I have usually found that there was method in his madness.”

Sadly Watson spent the whole rest of the day wondering what method was behind this torturous treatment. For the whole day snooping around the scene of a murdered coachman, Holmes pointedly only spoke to Watson indirectly through the Colonel, intentionally ignoring him. And then later, in the interest of drawing the murderers into a trap, Holmes had no problem abusing Watson’s gullibility (which he would do on several more occasions, most famously at his greatly exaggerated death) so as to gain a piece of evidence. Holmes pretended to faint with no thought as to how much it would worry Watson, and it did bother him quite a bit, despite what Holmes had done the night before. And then Holmes went so far as to purposely knock over a table and blame it on Watson, knowing that his partner would take his cue, regardless of how terribly he was being treated.

And after the murderers Cunningham threw Holmes to the ground and choked him half to unconsciousness, Holmes still had the cool nerve to only address Colonel Hayter (who was along for the ride with the Inspector and Watson) when he sent the two retired army men off alone once more. Holmes wrapped up the case with local law enforcement, and he didn’t require them any further.

Returning to the Colonel’s house, Hayter and Watson couldn’t help but smile over Holmes’s antics; his wretchedness is principally in that it’s impossible to hate him, no matter how many just reasons he presents, because he remains so remarkable. Shaking their heads over Holmes’s theatricality, the two men became warm friends once more; after all, they now had one more thing in common.

Holmes returned later with a minor player in the case, a little old man he used as a buffer against any raw conversation that might break out within the triangle he’d created. He certainly entertained this elderly gentleman with all his clever deductions, and Hayter and Watson played along in good sport, oohing and ahhing at all the appropriate moments, having somewhat forgiven Holmes, and each other, and even themselves in the intervening time when Holmes was absent.

At the end of recounting his success, Holmes was in the pink of health again. Perhaps it was only his ego that had been fatigued during such a long case away from his adoring public? He declared, to Watson at last, that in the morning they would return to Baker Street. The Colonel saw them off the next day, and with only the slightest hesitation said that both men were welcome back whenever it pleased them to come.

It is always a waste of one’s precious time to wait for an apology from Sherlock Holmes. His pride will not allow a true confession of regret. But someone like Watson might be rewarded for his long suffering. On the trip back into London, the subject of Colonel Hayter was entirely left behind, his significance less and less as the dwellings moved closer and closer together. By the time Holmes and Watson were sitting in a hansom cab from the train station, they were healed. The largest proof of that came to Watson when Holmes discreetly slipped his arm into Watson’s as they sat, and wound them tightly in the most intimate embrace he could dare to engage in publically. It was Holmes’s way of reassuring him that he felt better now.

Watson was content with this small token of affection, ready to let this whole sojourn to the country be forgotten. Holmes had gotten whatever bile he had towards Watson out of his system, and arriving home, it was back to their customary spots. The only irregularity was when Holmes, with studied casualty, closed up his syringe case and shut it in his desk. I suppose even he could recognize when things had gone too far, and it was time to distance himself from a habit that made him so unpredictable. This renunciation would not last long at all, but the flame of admiration it rekindled in Watson would go on protecting Holmes from his true opinion, although that too would reemerge soon enough.

1887: The Sign of Four

I said Holmes’s sobriety didn’t last long; specifically it was about three weeks until he took up with the substance again. This was a boredom problem, and Sherlock Holmes had a cocaine solution. Watson couldn’t believe it, and he didn’t dare to speak against it lest Holmes seek out another of Watson’s army buddies and seduce him out of spite. But at long last it became too much. Sherlock rejoined the drug in May, and by September of 1887, Watson could endure the behavior no more.

“What is it to-day,” he asked, his voice thick with a thousand other pointed questions he had tried to swallow down, “morphine or cocaine?” Implying, as he had less directly on other occasions, that it was only a matter of time before cocaine led to morphine, morphine to opium, and opium to destruction. He had seen it on too many occasions, the scions of wealthy houses fallen to ruin, his fellow soldiers returned from the Orient completely disoriented, addicted to that powerful smoke. Watson dreaded the day he would find Sherlock Holmes sprawled on a bunk in some opium den.