'It doesn't,' I began firmly, but he interrupted with an exasperated, 'Watson,' and I knew I was caught. The blot on my paper grew, blacking the words I'd written. 'I don't know,' I finally admitted. 'You admire her.'
'You're jealous,' he said, in wry surprise. 'You needn't worry, Watson. My admiration for you, old boy, still remains unsurpassed.'
I grumbled, gratified and embarrassed. 'I'm not jealous,' I managed, but I could feel him watching as I blushed.
The accusation stuck with me long after our evening had drifted into other conversations: jealous. I wasn't sure whether to be more embarrassed and alarmed at having been jealous – despite my denials to Holmes – or at having been so easily caught out.
Since my marriage I'd thought my affections for Holmes had mellowed, but suddenly I was not so sure. Were my feelings still so strong that I was in danger of being indiscreet? Could Holmes read that old inclination in me even now, when I returned each night to home and wife?
I took a deep breath. There was no reason to think that Holmes was accusing me of any unusual attachment. So I had been jealous at his admiration of a woman – hadn't he admitted freely that his admiration for me was unparalleled? Yet I doubted he were lying awake in his room, pondering the implications. I was being ridiculous.
Still, it made my heart ache, my stomach sick, to imagine him in love with her, even as terror at my own failings settled as a hard knot of panic in my chest.
She was gone, I reminded myself. The only dangers here were the ones of my own making, and yet I knew that when it came to Sherlock Holmes, I was always going to be coming back.
'John?'
I froze, my glass halfway to my mouth, blinking with the realisation that it was not the first time Mary had said my name. 'Sorry,' I said, putting on an appropriately contrite tone. 'I'm sorry, I lost myself for a moment.'
Mary smiled. 'I was asking whether your dinner was all right.'
I looked down at my meal; I'd barely touched it. 'Oh! Yes – I suppose I'm just not as hungry as I expected,' I said quickly. Mary's eyes narrowed for a moment, as though she was waiting for me to say something more, but eventually she nodded and picked up the conversation again.
I could not follow her words, in much the same way I had not paid attention to the meal. My mind was not at the dinner table; it was back at Baker Street, on the case Holmes had begun that morning. 'A fascinating little problem,' he had called it. 'I should be very glad of your help.'
But the dinner arrangements had already been made, and Mary had already been put off once this week. My hands were tied. Holmes had agreed I ought to go, but his eyes had been downcast as I left him.
I should have stayed, I thought, but I smiled dutifully across at Mary and tried not to appear too bored.
If A Study in Scarlet was met with moderate success in Beeton's, the publication of The Sign of Four made Holmes a minor celebrity. He was furious.
'I am a consulting detective,' Holmes cried, pacing my foyer. I'd rarely seen him so agitated. 'I rely on my ability to pass unseen! How can I go unnoticed when you're publishing this?' He shook a copy of Lippincott's Monthly at me.
'You didn't protest this much the first time! You've always said I could do as I liked!'
He sighed, and his pacing stopped. 'I don't need the recognition,' he said softly, as if it were his last lifeline in a changing world, and suddenly I understood: he didn't want the recognition.
There is, after all, some safety in obscurity. There is some comfort in the shadows, and though Holmes was a gentleman, he did not bother with social expectations. He did not marry; he didn't have a club. He was a Bohemian, isolated by choice, and I had most certainly exposed him.
I stepped forward, easing the magazine from his hand and taking him by the elbow, leading him into the parlour. 'Come with me,' I soothed. 'Come, and we'll have tea, and I shall tell you of all the wonderful letters of praise and admiration I have received on your behalf.'
'I wonder,' Holmes said, picking through the contents of a lady's dressing table. 'I wonder.'
No longer quite so upset with me, he had asked me on an unusual case: a gentleman poisoned at his own dinner table, with only his wife in attendance. The late Mr Charles Mattox was not a man without enemies, by all accounts, but the distance poison gave to a murderer made the case difficult.
'You wonder?' I prompted. I'd been spending more of my evening hours with Holmes of late, and even a few of my days; the doctor next to my practice was quite willing to take on a patient or two when I was needed elsewhere. Though Holmes had been in a bad way for a while, it seemed the more I came, the less he was inclined to lose himself into the fugue of his cocaine; he seemed to make an effort to have some little problem on for me to assist him with. I was delighted.
'I wonder if a poison could have been concealed as a lady's cosmetics,' he said. 'What sort of husband was he?'
I remembered the lady, white with shock but not necessarily distraught. There'd been a bruise around her left wrist, mostly hidden by her sleeve. 'She didn't say, but I would think him a brute.'
'Any idea what this is?' Holmes asked, holding up one of the little cosmetic tins.
I shook my head. 'Mary uses some of these, but I wouldn't be able to tell one from another.'
'I admit I have not devoted myself to the study of cosmetics,' Holmes went on, unscrewing the lid and examining the reddish powder within. 'I shall have to remedy that immediately.'
And then he dipped his finger into the powder, and put it in his mouth.
'Holmes!' I cried, reaching already to draw his hand back, but the effect of whatever was in the tin was instantaneous. He paled, and his next breath stopped short; his eyes widened, his mouth opened, his hands jerked. 'Holmes!'
There is a trick we soldiers learned in the Indian subcontinent, when attempting to determine whether a plant was poisonous, or whether some meat had gone bad. I'll not repeat the details, but suffice it to say that it was the work of a quick moment to induce vomiting, and never mind the lady's carpet.
'You absolute fool,' I declared, even as Holmes was holding out the cosmetics tin for me to take. I shoved it at the chest of the nearest policeman in return for a porcelain washing basin. 'Get it all up, and next time try to hit the bowl.'
'Watson?'
I huffed, turning away from the door of my room so as not to see him standing there, vulnerable in dressing gown and candlelight. It had been too late to go home, but still I regretted staying. My heart had not stopped pounding. 'Not tonight, Holmes.'
'I came to apologise.'
'No, you didn't,' I snapped, unable to stop myself glancing back with a withering look. 'You came to pretend to apologise so that I'd forgive you, and I'm not going to.'
Holmes' face, nearly skeletal in the dying light, remained utterly smooth. 'You're upset,' he said, 'but you must see that it was necessary.'
I glared at him. 'You've rehearsed this, haven't you? You aren't even listening to me.' I could not remember the last time I'd been this angry with him. 'What if it had been me in danger, and you were the one watching me do something so stupid?'
To his credit, Holmes actually seemed to consider it. 'If it were for the case,' he said, 'I'd have understood.'
It was probably meant as reassurance, but it felt more like dismissal: my own unimportance writ large. Resentment flooded me that he could so easily prioritise even a hypothetical case over me while I could never over him.
'Yes,' I conceded, suddenly exhausted. 'That, at least, I can believe.'
It was several weeks before I felt truly comfortable again. Though I'd always known Holmes to be reckless with his own well-being – had I not noticed it, the very first time we met? Had I not known it, every time he had reached for that damned Moroccan case? – it was quite something else to watch him willingly do something that would immediately result in his death.
The space underneath my breastbone ached for days, and I struggled wit
h the feeling of not being able to catch my breath. I should have locked myself away with Mary or with my work, but instead over the following weeks I often found myself heading out well after nightfall, anxious to check on Holmes and see that he'd not poisoned himself again, or fallen into a fire, or taken some grievous injury.
He made no mention of my agitation, if he noticed it. He would settle me in my usual chair by the fire, occasionally offering a pipe, sometimes tea, and recount his latest adventure.
If I had worried before that the distance of my marriage would irrevocably ruin our friendship, in these weeks those fears were laid to rest. Now that we had both settled in our new routines, we were, I found happily, as intimate and devoted as we had always been.
'What are you writing over there? One of ours?'
It was only a matter of time, I thought. Holmes had been without a proper case all week, making do with only a handful of trite, unimportant clients, and had finally reached his intellectual limit for the general population.
That is to say, he was bored.
'You don't mind?' I asked carefully. 'I doubt it'll be printable for many years.'
Holmes raised himself from his supine position on the sofa to peer over at me. 'The Holland family? Not sure you should be writing that one down yet,' he scolded teasingly. 'Things written down are always subject to discovery, as you know.'
'It's only a few notes for myself. I should hate to forget the details before they're beyond use.'
'You're terrible with details.' Another dull thud from the sofa: he'd flung himself back down rather petulantly onto the cushions. 'But – no. I don't mind.'
I smiled to myself. After his protest of The Sign of Four, he had calmed considerably, perhaps soothed by the praise and business recognition it brought, and I already had his permission to publish a few short stories of our lesser cases. 'Recall it for me, then,' I suggested. 'Make sure I have the details right.'
Holmes snorted, but after another moment passed, slowly, theatrically, he began.
Chapter Eight
In the summer of 1889, Mary went to Brighton for several weeks with her good friend Mrs Cecil Forrester, and I moved back into my old rooms at Baker Street. It was a great comfort, to have a companion while she was gone – though I missed her, it was admittedly a relief to go home at the end of a long day knowing that I would be entirely at my leisure.
Holmes himself was a soothing constant; fastidious and energetic, he met with clients, attended a few violin performances as well as the odd lecture, and was quick to recommend me a new book or introduce me to a new restaurant. At first I thought perhaps he was trying to put on a good front, to show me that he too had flourished since my marriage, or to show me the benefits of staying once more with him, but I soon dismissed both ideas as being utterly outside Holmes' character.
The last week of my stay, Holmes burst in with a new client and a plan – we too would take our holiday, with a case besides. 'One last weekend before you must go back again into the ties of marriage,' he insisted, laughing, and so I agreed, and together we packed our things and set off to the countryside around Berkshire.
The manor house in front of us was dark and silent. From our position hidden in the long grasses, watching and waiting, I was beginning to grow stiff and damp. Holmes' ability to weather these lookouts, to stay still and silent for hours at a stretch, was baffling in a man so otherwise prone toward ennui.
'Stop squirming,' Holmes hissed.
'Nothing's happening,' I hissed back. 'Admit it, Holmes – we've missed him. He must've been tipped off.'
Holmes huffed but made no answer. Exasperated, I rolled over onto my back, ignoring the house. Perhaps I could at least manage a little sleep while Holmes watched nothing happen.
After a moment, though, the grasses crackled and shifted, and Holmes' warm shoulder pressed into mine. 'There,' he said softly, pointing with one long, thin finger at a smattering of stars. 'Cassiopeia.'
I grinned. 'Why, Holmes. You've been swotting up.'
'Astronomy - nil,' he quoted, with a laugh. 'It's hardly good business to advertise one's weaknesses. Proving another's misconceptions wrong, however, is. I have taken advantage.'
'Show me, then. What else have you learned to prove me wrong?'
'The constellations,' Holmes murmured. His voice was close against my ear. 'The stars.' His long hands gestured toward the sky, as though directing the heavens, and my heart, having been quiet for so long, leapt into beating.
I could not sleep.
It was hardly the first time Holmes and I had shared a room on a case – it wasn't even the first time we had shared a bed, though we hadn't since I'd married. Space was priced for scarcity in these old country inns, and Holmes was not always flush with cash. Needs must, after all, and nothing suspicious ever had come out of this decrepit manor house.
But something was different tonight, something that left me feeling tense and awkward. The bedsheets never warmed around our bodies; Holmes never seemed to relax in his sleep.
I studied him from across the bed. His hand laid atop the quilt between us, palm up, fingers curled. It looked like an invitation, stretched out like that: like I could reach, and he would accept my touch.
The temptation was overwhelming.
His hand was warm and dry against the pad of my finger. He did not pull away, so I dared to stroke his skin again, tracing the lines of his palm. My heart pounded; my breath caught in my throat.
I wondered what the rest of his skin might feel like.
And then: he twitched, his fingers closing around mine. I went as still and silent as I could, watching his hand around my own, and hardly dared to breathe.
'Marriage is a difficult business,' Nurse had told me once, when I was very small. 'When you are grown, you will understand.'
I had hated when adults said that, and I remembered pouting loudly as she readied everything for bed. My mother and father had been fighting again; it must have been before my mother had gotten ill, before she'd gone away to the country, but I remembered her fighting – red-eyed and furious – more than any other way. 'I shan't,' I had retorted. 'If they don't like each other, why do they live together?'
'Oh, there are many reasons a husband and wife might remain so,' Nurse had said. 'Love is only one of them.'
Had I really already known so many stories, so many romances, as to turn my head? Had my nurse, a woman memory recalled as sensible and shrewd, had a taste for fanciful tales of love? I couldn't recall. I only remembered looking up at her with the outrage only a child can manage and vowing, 'If I ever get married, I'm going to love them forever and ever.'
'I hope you do,' Nurse had answered. 'Now, what story would you like?'
I've broken my vow, I thought, but then, Nurse had been right: marriage was far more complicated than any story at a child's bedtime.
Holmes had pointed out my lack of imagination many times before, but never had I felt the lack so keenly. I should have been able to imagine what might happen, thrown back into close quarters with him for a case in the country, without the usual reminders of Mary. I should have known – but I hadn't, and now I was destroyed by my lack of foresight.
I knew now that I was in love with Holmes.
My feelings had outgrown their fresh spring beginnings and turned into an angry, wild thicket in my chest. Whatever small affection I had thought I could prune back with marriage and distance had run rampant with neglect, and now I was helpless against the need and the fury and the want I felt for Sherlock Holmes. To touch him, to hold him. To love him, in every way I knew how. To know him, in every way I did not know him yet.
The journey back to London was quiet. Holmes' one-sided conversation had long since dissipated into silence; the space between us prickled with everything that I couldn't say and that he, for once, could not guess at.
I sat in that solitude, so close to him and yet so far, and counted every passing second as yet another
moment of my unending betrayal.
The fire roared, flicking and leaping over the logs, threatening to overcome the small protection provided by the screen. I sat too close, staring into its furious depths as the heat grew great enough to sting – the first suggestions of a burn.
I had never been afraid of Holmes before.
For years, his mind had delighted and surprised me; it had never occurred to me to fear his deductive powers. I remembered, in fact, our first night together in Baker Street, when he'd told me any number of truths about myself. I'd relished it then, had reveled in it, eager to be seen as only he could see me.
I had been a fool.
Now the things Holmes might see in me could condemn us both, and still I couldn't turn my thoughts from them: the shape of his hands, the curl of his mouth, his face when he slept, his eyes as he woke. His laugh and his smile and his voice, his exuberance and his sincerity. The way my heart blazed when he looked at me. The way my hands ached when he touched me, desperate to touch back.
I sat and watched the fire, wondering how it would feel to be condemned by Holmes' deductions. I imagined it would be as blistering, and as permanent, as a brand.
Chapter Nine
I didn't hear from Holmes again for several days once we'd returned to London and I to my own house, which was not so unusual that anyone noticed but myself. I was a coward and a scoundrel, and I saw my patients, sat down to dinners, and went to bed at night feeling more like an actor on the stage than a man – like I was watching my life happening around me, detached and apathetic.
Even Mary noticed something was amiss with me. I knew she was concerned that something had happened during my stay with Holmes, and it had – but not as she imagined it. She saw my listlessness, my depression, and thought I had been endangered or insulted or even summarily dismissed. Perhaps she thought that it was Holmes who had been endangered, and I was merely uncomfortable with worry.
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