First published by Improbable Press in 2020
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Copyright © Darcy Lindbergh 2020
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data:
Darcy Lindbergh
The Watches of the Night
ISBN: 978-0-6488487-4-5 Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-6488487-5-2 E-book
Cover artwork by © Wendy C Fries
Design & Typesetting by Clan Destine Press
Improbable Press
improbablepress.co.uk
For fandom, for giving me the courage to tell stories,
for the tables of New Orleans, for helping me decide which story to tell,
and for Leslie, for always believing I could tell this one, and for
every comma in it.
'I left Holmes seated in front of the smouldering fire, and long into the watches of the night I heard the low, melancholy wailings of his violin, and knew that he was still pondering over the strange problem which he had set himself to unravel.'
A Study in Scarlet
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887
Preface
Night falls, and London comes alive.
Gas lamps sputter into life, gloomy and ineffective against the fog that descends upon the city. There's something wild about London at night, something swift and ruthless that feeds in the shadows, growing and twining insidiously into the brickwork: intrigue and conspiracy, greed and violence, loneliness and fear and despair.
It was into this darkness that Sherlock Holmes cast his light.
I was not surprised to find that Holmes made his detective's living from deeds so often done by cover of night. The night is a natural hiding place, after all, a refuge where no one sees too clearly nor looks too closely, where everyone sins and so no one's sins are counted. Where people shed their masks and become what they truly are, instead of what they pretend to be.
Men are easier to kill in the dark.
And easier, sometimes, to kiss.
So like a magician revealing an impossible trick, Holmes unveiled the depths the night could hold: the secrecy and the mystery, the terror and the beauty, the peril and the peace. He took me, hand in hand, and led me through the shrouded life that's lived between dusk and dawn, and showed me every wondrous, dangerous thing – except for those things which I showed to him.
Night falls.
The adventure begins.
Chapter One
The first night, I laid awake for hours.
My injuries often left me awake in the months since I had returned to London, exhausted yet unable to sleep – but this felt different. I had never lain awake out of such keen excitement, with such hope for the morning.
It was the first night after I had met Sherlock Holmes, and I felt different.
The offer to share rooms had been unexpected but not unwelcome, and despite Stamford's cautions to me about Holmes' character, I looked forward to meeting him again. He was a curious fellow, with sharp eyes and a quick tongue; his enthusiasm for his experiment had been captivating, and the exchange of our vices both charming and startlingly practical. I found myself quite interested in him, in a way I had been interested in little else since my return to England.
His hands had been bandaged, I remembered; his skin blotched with chemical discolourations. He'd stuck his finger to draw blood – not clumsiness, but carelessness: his physical self subservient to discovery.
I had no idea, that night, what the coming nights might eventually mean to Holmes and I – what we might come to mean to one another. Instead, I remembered his hands, and wondered if my medical expertise may yet be of some use.
I hoped it would be.
It was already well into the evening when Holmes finally arrived at 221B Baker Street with his own possessions. I had spent the day working myself into a state over the prospect of sharing lodgings, being unaccustomed to spending much time in company, and was relieved to finally have my fretting cut short.
I needn't have worried, though. Holmes was genial and accommodating, but after we had spent several hours settling our things, he seemed just as uncertain of himself, just as unused to constant companionship. It set me at ease: we were both unsteady in the society of others, and would therefore have the chance to decide for ourselves how we might best live together.
It was over a late dinner that I broke our tentative silence. 'You knew I had been in Afghanistan, when we met,' I said. 'But I cannot think how you knew to look me up.'
'I didn't,' Holmes chuckled, though he didn't elaborate. 'It's a curious thing – people enjoy hearing things they already know about themselves, when the circumstance is right.' He looked at me from the corner of his eye, as if eager for an invitation, and my interest could not be helped.
'You said yourself we should know each other, if we are to live together,' I said. 'What circumstance could be better?'
Holmes settled himself in front of the fire, settled a pipe between his teeth. For a long moment, he merely looked at me, his eyes sharp and his smile slowly fading into his focus. 'You must tell me if I get anything wrong,' he said, rather sternly.
I readily agreed, but I needn't have bothered – he was right about nearly everything. His declarations ran something like this:
- that I was Scottish by birth, but often spent summers in London; that I had been a lonely child, though he did not comment on my parents;
- that I preferred my tea and liquors strong, and my desserts mild, though before my time abroad it had run the other way around;
- that I had studied at the University of London and at Netley; that I had wanted to be a soldier since I was small;
- that I had been a good student; that I had played rugby somewhat regularly; that I was never in trouble exactly though was not a model of ethics (my breath stopped here, and so did he, without elaborating on the subject);
- that I had landed first in Bombay, before joining the fighting in Candahar; and that I had been shot, but that my actual injury lay more in my mind than in my body.
He continued this way for some time, jumping from my childhood in Edinburgh to my preferences in literature, from my interest in anatomy over chemistry to my inclination toward rereading the papers to calm my nerves. He seemed endlessly amused with each new discovery; I reveled in the details of my life, told back to me.
Yet he insisted this knowledge was only the result of careful observation – the accent in the pronunciation of my consonants, grown lazy with comfort as the night wore on – the significances of the curiosities I had picked up in the subcontinent – a certain text on my shelf – a certain stain on my fingers.
It was not, as one might have supposed, anything like being picked apart: it was like being identified. Not picked apart, but picked out: noticed, for the first time since I had disappeared with my ruined health and devastated career into the drain of London.
It was a test, I realised, of my limitations, a scouting of my boundaries; I found, to his obvious delight, that I had very few.
'You have a keen eye,' I exclaimed. 'Quite incredible.'
> 'A blessing and a curse both,' he answered modestly, but I could tell he was pleased as he settled back into his chair, having apparently exhausted himself: he could not hide his blush.
The dreams began something like this: the air was heavy and cloying, thick with the smell of bodies and gunpowder. Overhead, the dark Afghani night was a velvet blue, pricked with the diamond white of stars and shrouded in smoke.
The sky was the only thing fantastic or exotic about Afghanistan. There was no magic in that land; there was only the rank and rot of death and fear, the deceptive sweetness of starvation, the sour stench of infection.
Then the dreams shifted, and a voice cried out – not in pain, this time. 'Watson! Come and have a drink with us.'
I looked over: the boys by the fire looked back, exhausted and dirty but whole, complete men, eyes and limbs still in their places, wounds smoothed over by their tired smiles. A bottle passed between them, but I knew it wasn't really whisky they were offering. I sighed and smiled back and heaved myself up to rejoin them.
When I woke, I lay in bed for hours, wondering whether it had been a dream or a nightmare, a blessing or a curse: sitting under that sky with men who never made it home, sharing a drink and a memory that never happened, laughing as though there was still breath in their lungs.
As though I had never left them behind.
Though I had not been on a battlefield in months, I was still not used to silent nights; my thoughts were too free to dwell on things better forgotten. My future, confined by my injuries, suddenly unfolded prophetically before me: a ceaseless parade of quiet and calm, leaving me forever trapped in the memory of war, waiting for a call to arms that was never going to come.
Finally I attempted an escape to the sitting room, but it wasn't empty. Holmes looked up from his chair by the fire, surprised; I drew back, apologetic. 'I didn't mean to disturb you.'
'Not at all,' Holmes said, recovering himself. 'Please, come and sit. I don't mind the company, and you look like you would be better for it.'
I hesitated, but he beckoned me forward and even lit my pipe for me before falling back into his thoughtful silence.
There was an intensely private air about Holmes sometimes, I thought, but there was something else, too, something that seemed to reach out. Perhaps it was not such a coincidence after all, to have found him alone and expectant by the fire. He did not say another word to me that night, nor I to him, but we were there together all the same, and suddenly the silence was much easier to bear.
Chapter Two
In the first weeks of sharing rooms with Holmes, I frequently thought that if only I were privy to the conversations he held with his perplexing array of clients, I might better understand his business, and thus more of Holmes himself. Even his title – a consulting detective – failed to satisfy my curiosity, so when at last he invited me to join him for a case, I was thrilled that I might finally uncover his mysteries.
How wrong I was!
Oh, I did better understand his work; indeed, once he laid out his reasoning, it seemed astonishing that I had been so blind. But the enigma of Holmes himself only deepened – how had he learned such skills? How had he the abilities to walk with police as comfortably as ruffian children? How did he so easily lay traps for murderers and wrestle them into submission?
Holmes listened intently as Jefferson Hope recounted his tale, but I could scarcely pay attention to it; I confess I was, instead, entranced by Holmes himself, wondering what conclusions he was drawing from each word, wondering whether he had some secret to know if they were the truth. If he could look into the darkness and tease out the light.
My nerves, I suddenly realised, were calm; when Holmes looked back at me, his eyes were bright.
The most irritating thing about Sherlock Holmes' vanity, I thought afterward, when the papers began publishing their accounts of the Jefferson Hope murders, was how very deserved it was. Watching Holmes in action on the case, I had been surprised and impressed; now, having understood his meticulous analysis of the facts, I knew he deserved more credit than he had got. 'Credit doesn't concern me,' he told me one night, flinging another paper that had made no mention of him down into a stack. 'It's only the work that matters.'
It might have been convincing, but for the scorn in his voice.
He also said, when I threatened to put down an accurate account of the case, that I ought to do as I liked. I hadn't taken it seriously at first, but watching him now, it struck me that perhaps I ought to take him at his word. My notes on the matter were not entirely complete, but I was sure if I thought carefully, I could remember enough about the case to write an account out well enough to be published, and I might even make an admirable job of it.
And concerned with credit or not, I knew from experience that Holmes could be flattered; surely, I thought, a little acclaim would ease away some of that bitterness.
'How do you decide which volume they go into?' I asked a few evenings later, picking up one of the scraps Holmes was pasting into his complicated filing system. My curiosity in his methods was piqued, and I wanted to know more. 'Vampirism in Hungary – under V? or H?'
'It depends upon which part one is more likely to require,' Holmes instructed easily, his pride in his index evident. 'As a singular topic, Hungary is too broad to be of any real use. Vampirism, on the other hand – ' He looked up, questioning. 'Isn't that only a myth, a superstition?'
'Yet men are superstitious. I suppose I would file it under V.'
Holmes was visibly delighted. 'Precisely! That's precisely it. And so it goes, always with an eye toward the detecting business. Then you'll always be able to find what you're looking for.'
'And if what you're looking for isn't here?'
'Then you look elsewhere, Watson. Everything is discoverable. One must only not give up too early.'
'I shall try not to,' I promised.
Holmes studied me a moment. Quietly, almost shyly, he added, 'Then I shall be very glad to trust you.'
I thought of my fledgling attempt to write an account of his work, hidden away in my room, and hoped he meant with more than just his books.
'Watson?'
Holmes' voice was soft in the dark, tinged with concern. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping he would think me asleep and go away, but instead he crept closer toward my bed. 'Watson, are you all right?'
I sighed, caught out; the summer had grown long and hot, and I was not faring well in it. 'Just a headache. Some nausea. It will pass.'
'The enteric fever,' Holmes deduced. 'It still flares up sometimes.'
'It's not unusual.'
'No,' he agreed. 'Is there anything I can do for you?'
I looked up; in the moonlight, Holmes' eyes were pale with worry. 'No,' I managed, though he seemed in earnest. 'I can only wait for it to pass.'
He shifted on his feet. 'I could bring you a cup of tea.'
'Mrs Hudson will have gone to bed already.'
'I'm sure I can manage,' he insisted, indignant at the implication that he could not, and went to prove himself.
He did, in fact, come back some time later – and if it was much later than it would have taken Mrs Hudson, I chose not to mention it. He set a cup on the bedside table and pressed a cool cloth to my forehead. 'Thank you,' I said.
'You're quite welcome,' Holmes said softly. 'I hope that by tomorrow you are feeling better.'
My tomorrow was not, in fact, any better.
'Oh, for God's sake – ' I slammed my book shut in disgust as I looked up at the clock again. It was half past eleven in the evening: only three minutes later than it had been since the last time I had checked.
There was still no sign of Holmes.
He'd set off hours ago, disguised as a dock worker and intending to situate himself in a few disreputable pubs to listen to the gossip, hoping for some word of the whereabouts of some notoriously dangerous criminal. Although by now quite familiar with his work, tonight I worried: he
would be in danger if he were caught, and there was no one to aid him. Once again, I cursed my health – would that I could've been a trustworthy fellow to have at his back.
Finally I heard the turn of the latch-key in the door, and was on my feet in an instant.
'Watson,' Holmes exclaimed when he saw me, clapping his hands together. 'Good, you're awake. I must tell you everything.'
He was fine, of course. 'I'm ready to hear it,' I managed, trying to hide my relief from Holmes' attention. I could not tamp it down entirely, though – for the first time all night, I felt as though I could breathe.
Chapter Three
In those first months at Baker Street I healed, though not entirely. The fevers became less frequent; the ache of my shoulder and thigh less troublesome. Holmes began bullying me out of the flat on occasion, slowing his long gait so I could walk beside him through Regent's Park, deducing passersby, or else taking me to dinner in the Domino Room or down Fleet Street whenever the irregularity of my appetite was brought to his attention. In return, I began bullying him about his use of narcotics, fussing about the negative effects on his mind and his person whenever I had the chance.
We were neither of us terribly at ease with society at large – Holmes being somewhat of a Bohemian in character, and myself being somewhat averse to strangers or crowds – but as 1881 passed inevitably into 1882, and then 1882 to 1883, so too did we pass inevitably from simply sharing rooms into an easy friendship.
'Did you know,' he said some January night, blowing blue smoke into the room, 'We've been sharing rooms two years now, Watson.'
'Have we? It hardly seems so long.'
'And yet it seems as if we've always done, doesn't it?'
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