BIRDS TO A LIGHTHOUSE, part 3

My carpetbag was, as he had thought and as I've mentioned, already packed and sitting in the bottom of my wardrobe.  I fetched it.  I packed my violin and bow in their cases.  For a crazed moment I worried that he would miss my violin too much for me to take it away, but he couldn't play it, of course, and in lieu of actually becoming a whore for the first time--which would be quite out of the question--I would need it.  I set my tall black hat on my head.  I didn't think about the man upstairs, how badly I wanted to see how he was faring a mere five minutes after I'd quit his bedroom, because that was the bargain.  He wouldn't despise me, and I'd shut my mouth for once in my life.
 
I left.  I closed the door harder than I usually do.  It wasn't anger, it was a signal.
 
You can come out, John.  I'm gone.
 
Hailing a cab that ghastly dawn passed over me like a dream, and when once I was inside it, I realized I didn't know where I was going.  So I said the first thing that came into my head.
 
When Mycroft opened his elegant white door, wearing a silk dressing gown and house slippers, barely awake, his eyebrows twitched.  He looked much better.  Entirely himself, in fact, huge and weary and slightly irritated and wonderful, though I knew he would not need to return to work until Monday.
 
"Have you any idea what time it is?"
 
I didn't answer.  He looked closer at me.  His sleepy grey eyes went wide and then they only stared, reflecting sympathetically that I must have been rather a sorry sight. 
 
"Oh, petit frere, what on earth have you made him do?"
 
As I came inside and hung my hat on his rack, I could only think, well done, Mycroft.  Phrased like a true Holmes. 

I told him all about it.  Apart from Watson's having called me a coward, of course, which would have strained my brother's temper.  And since I'd no intention of being with anyone save John Watson, it would never have done to set my only brother against him.  After I told him most of the story, we decided to pretend for a while that none of it had ever happened.  That took up most of the morning.  We played two games of chess, which I lost, of course.  I realized I hadn't bathed that day and used his washroom.  I dried my hair, shaved carefully, and then wondered why I'd bothered, as no one would be caring much what I looked like in future. 
 
We pretended interest in a long conversation about cryptology.  We played another game of chess as the afternoon waned, and naturally I lost that as well, though less badly than I might have done.  The sun set, warm and smoky, over London.  We decided not to go out for dinner, since I vastly admire Mycroft's cook.  Then things grew more interesting.

I finished two bottles of wine entirely by myself that night as Mycroft sipped his own vintage with a look on his face of studied non-judgment.  We both moved on to port at the end of the rather casually sumptuous meal, as Mycroft likes to do, though he does not generally watch me finish half a bottle.  I was beginning, I recognized by about ten in the evening, to be drunk enough to think of being separated from Watson as something tragically beautiful, like Bach's Cello Suite number Two in D minor, as opposed to simply an unbearable dagger of pain in my ribs. 
 
No, this was a fine love, a noble one, and I wasn't a coward. 
 
Or perhaps, if I was a coward, if that was the price I paid for keeping him safe, then so be it.  I would have become a murderer for him, so why not a coward as well?  A coward wasn't worse than a killer, was it?  Could one be a coward and still be a gentleman, if the cause was sufficiently noble? 
 
If so, if I could still be a gentleman, then I hadn't a problem. 
 
"You won't have any more trouble from your poisoner," I mentioned casually.
 
"No?" he queried, smoothing his napkin over his lips.  "I thank you, petit frere, for doubtless you brought him to justice, but I might add that you fail to look suitably pleased with yourself.  What on earth have you done now?"
 
"Nothing you'd be proud of me for.  Some proclivities appear to run in the Holmes blood."
 
It required only a half a second for him to take my meaning.  Mycroft's face flushed, a sudden flood of outraged colour.  A formerly grey rhinoceros, turned dull red and incensed, with a severely aquiline nose pointed right between my eyes.  The napkin landed hard next to his plate.  He leaned over the table with his hands on the edge, so angry his nostrils were flaring.  I will admit it: my first instinct was to quail before this performance.  I can only hope I gave as little as possible away.
 
"Yes, they do," he said in a remarkably rough tone for my erudite and placid sibling.  "Art, for instance.  Intelligence.  Lucidity of imagination.  A pale complexion.  One could make an argument for eccentric sense of humour, as well, and Darwin would nod to the slenderness of your fingers, though that same trait in my own hands is partially obscured.  But I cannot think of any others.  Can you?"
 
My lips moved, or began to.
 
"No.  I thought not.  Now, hold your tongue."
 
Not having been told to hold my tongue for a great many years, I allowed him to have the final word on the subject.

Then we had cigars and I switched to whiskey while my brother watched, pouring himself another glass of port.  The whiskey burned in an absolutely marvelous fashion, and once I had managed to consume enough of the rich brown liquid, the only thought beating in my skull was in for a penny, in for a pound. 

So I excused myself, and went to my traveling bag, and rolled my sleeve up, and shot into myself more cocaine than was strictly advisable.  I cannot express how madly I wanted it to be morphine instead, but I hadn't any with me, and Mycroft would never have allowed me out of the house in that condition.  It took me, already drunk as I was, a length of india rubber and three and a half minutes to ferret out a little river of a vein.  But when once I'd found it, I jabbed my syringe into my flesh as if it were entirely my arm's fault that I was in this mess.  The stab was viciously done, and made the back of my neck damp with sweat as I forced my heart to stop clattering like a wrecked carriage wheel.  For a moment, I couldn't breathe.  That was a mistake, that was a very, very bad mistake, I thought.  But then everything was all at once much better than it had been, and the world was shimmering madly, and I used a kerchief for the blood and the trickle of moisture at the base of my hairline and generally pulled myself back together.

When I came out of the spare bedroom, my brother's lips tightened.  He was standing at his mantelpiece, taking a pinch of snuff.  Mycroft didn't say anything, though.  I skipped over to my violin case, which was still in the hallway, and I opened it.  I pulled out my bow and fiddle and returned to stand before my gigantic kinfolk. 

He was in the middle of his Persian carpet, looking at me the way a schoolmaster might regard a particularly beloved student who has been thrown in the duck pond during lunch.  Not entirely disapproving, for can one really help being thrown into a duck pond?  The student, however, is still violating all dress codes and dripping with mud.  What to do with him?  Be stern, or be understanding?  Harsh words, or an escort to the lavatory and a sympathetic ear? 
 
Clearly, Mycroft was still deciding.
 
"Sit down," I commanded, twirling my violin bow like the most frivolous molly boy imaginable.  I only ever affect the characteristics of pillowmen around my brother, and only when I am incredibly drunk.  It irritates him to no end.  Mainly, I think, because he knows daintiness is hardly like me.
 
He sat, glaring at me with my own eyes.
 
"Now, thank me," I continued, giving him a dazzling smile.  "You are about to listen to Bach's Cello Suite number Two in D minor, and Bach's Cello Suite number Two in D minor--do you know the piece?"
 
"BVW one zero zero eight, you mean?  I have never heard of it," he drawled.  "Must you use your bow in the fashion of a debauched Roman emperor about to spear a bunch of grapes?"
 
"Yes, I must.  And it's actually in the fashion of a debauched Roman emperor about to spear--"

"Sherlock," he said firmly.  "I have deduced the conclusion of your sentence for you.  Therefore you need not bother finishing it."

He really is the most phlegmatic man in Christendom.  I once arrived at his doorstep--I was twenty, I think--at his old rooms near London Bridge, having taken so much morphine that I could scarcely move, and proceeded to tell him all about having lost my virginity at age fifteen to the son of our late mother's art dealer.  (Lost my virginity in the rather more feminine sense than I might have, for at fifteen I was equal parts eagerness and ignorance, and the chap who'd taken it had been delighting mine eye for years.)  And all Mycroft did was to deposit me in a hot bath while my temperature wildly fluctuated, and he smiled and frowned and nodded at all the right places.  Come to think of it, he probably had inferred the entire episode before I told him.  Mycroft is one of the two purely good souls I've ever encountered.  So I decided not to torment him any further.

"The sentence is aborted, in that case.  But I--what was I about to say to you?"
 
That question, if posed between any two other men in the world, would have been a ridiculous one, I am well aware of the fact.  As for myself and Mycroft, I actually thought he might know.

"I believe you were about to explain to me how you came to transpose it, actually," my brother replied.
 
"Yes!  Thank you.  Yes, I was.  As you can see, I haven't a cello at my disposal and I doubt I could play it all that well if I did.  But Bach's Cello Suite number Two in D minor so happens to be the saddest piece of music ever composed by a human being.  And so, for the two weeks that I didn't have any violin, before I bought that wretched pawn shop instrument when mine was...broken--"
 
"I always meant to ask you just how that came to pass," Mycroft mused neutrally.  He took a sip of port.
 
"Not important," I replied, slashing the bow in his direction.  "The least important question you have ever asked me.  Completely irrelevant, brother mine."
 
"Ah.  Yes, I always thought it was something of that kind.  I'm sorry, my dear boy.  But I beg your pardon.  Go on."
 
There.  That is what it feels like not to have any secrets. 
 
Poor Watson.  But I wasn't meant to be thinking of Watson, was I?  No, I was thinking of Bach.  Much better.  Because when drunk--and thus rather more subject to flights of fancy--enough cocaine can get me to see pieces of music leaving space trails like...like the residuum left in the air after a laugh or a kiss or a gunshot.  I was already seeing them and I wasn't even playing, only thinking about living in that wretched garret before meeting Sydney, paying rent daily and stealing paper from hotels.
 
"I was saying I hadn't a violin," I continued, "but I knew the piece by heart of course and so I arranged it for myself with a great many variations on paper in lieu of playing it.  I wanted rather badly to play it at the time.  There was nothing I wanted more, come to think of it.  Damn it all, after a fellow has been thrown out of a house--no, listen to me, I am trying to say that--I think, listen, when once a man has been thrown out of his house, no, listen, he ought to be able to play Bach's Cello Suite number Two just as much as he likes, don't you think so, and not be forced to do it on paper because a man's violin met with an unfortunate accident.  The violin should never have entered the picture.  It simply wasn't fair, to my mind, you see.  The entire episode.  What I mean to tell you is that in my opinion, when you are tossed out on your ear, Bach shouldn't be confined to paper.  No, he should bloody well be played, and so now you get a concert because my Strad is fit as anything."
 
"Are you certain that you are--"
 
"Fit as anything?"
 
I thought for a moment.
 
"That doesn't matter very much," I answered.
 
"Forgive me if I don't take your word for it," Mycroft said with a sad smile.  "As a side note, in light of new information disclosed this evening, I intend to use my political connections to cause something ghastly or other to happen to Lord Harry Rogers.  Something truly abhorrent, though I have not yet made up my mind as to what." 

"I don't think--"

"I always suspected he'd provoked my ire, you know, but was never sure.  It will be a very pleasant diversion for me, whatever it is."

"No, you don't have to--"

"I do." 

"But--"

"You haven't a choice, my boy.  I am waiting, rather patiently I think, for my concert.  Proceed."
 
So I did.  I played the piece that I had wanted to play so badly well over a decade before when I had thought that it would help with being thrown out of a house.  Before, on paper, it had been an experiment in how close I could get to music without any actual instrument.  I'd hummed my way through it, and vocalized occasionally, but with a violin in my hands everything around me faded to blacks and brown and ivories like a photograph.  I played it beautifully.  I'd altered the cadenzas slightly, elongated them without ever losing Bach's mesmerizing grace, and the Minuet had turned into a bird circling mindlessly, desperate for a light that had been shut off. 

When I finished it, I stared at the wood in either hand for a moment.
 
"Well, there's my answer," I murmured.  "It does help.  But not enough."
 
I set the bow and the fiddle on the carpet where I stood and retreated to the spare bedroom.  At first I thought, I am going to get a pretty little vial of morphine and solve everyone's problems by dying rather more quickly and for that I need a few shillings.  But of course, that was only a thought, and a truly cowardly one.  I kicked my slippers off and curled up on the coverlet.  The room was acting suspiciously like a carousel, and my neck ached terribly, and my eyes felt electrified inside their sockets.
 
The gas lights came on, only a little.  There was an enormous shadow in my doorway.

"I have not the smallest desire to converse with you about it," I called out.

My brother disagreed.
 
"You can't possibly be going to bed yet," he said evenly, walking in my direction with soundless steps.  "You're fully dressed."
 
"Sod this dinner jacket, it's never fit perfectly," I growled into the pillow.
 
"Everything you own fits perfectly.  Stop strewing obscenities all about my rooms.  Come now, haven't you any desire to hear how utterly thrilling I find it to have a little brother who is not only a world-renowned criminologist but an artist of surpassing skill?"
 
"You'd think that would be the sort of thing I'd want to hear," I admitted.  "But go away regardless.  I'll say my prayers like a good boy without you staring down my neck."
 
"If you're going to waste your time, you may as well speak to me as to the Void," Mycroft said pleasantly.  He was at the edge of the bed by this time.

I believe in God, but I equally believe He considers me a particularly amusing dark joke.  I should find His brand of gallows humour admirable, perhaps, if I were not the subject of it so very frequently.  Mycroft, on the other hand, has long since stopped believing there is a God at all.  I understand his logic, though I cannot possibly agree with him.  It is easy for me to see how he formed his conclusions, however, and the reasoning is sound, from Mycroft's perspective.  His atheism has a very great deal to do with witnessing something unspeakable happening versus enduring something unspeakable.  The person enduring a small hell can think perhaps he deserved it, or that it is all part of a Plan, or that it had bloody well better be part of a Plan.  The person who lives a quarter mile distant in the same rambling house and would sacrifice anything to put a stop to it but cannot, however...

That person becomes my elder brother.

Mycroft sat down on the edge of the bed.  Then, as if rethinking his approach, he lay down upon it fully, with his hands neatly crossed over his massive torso.  One brother curled into a ball on his side facing another brother who--though I tried my best not to picture it--might as well have been calmly taking nap in his own coffin.  A coffin of alarming proportions.

"Go on with what you were about to be saying," he suggested.

I cannot begin to guess what that sentence's tense went through to be birthed into the world.

"I am not going to ask you why this is happening to me."

"No," he agreed.  "Pray continue."

"It is all well enough to believe that something will eventually get better, that the hereafter is waiting for you wrapped with a scarlet bow," I explained.  "But I am doing the only thing which can be done, and it is robbing me of...of my life, brother mine.  So far as you're concerned, when I die, I'll finally be allowed to cease thinking and will be taken by utter oblivion.  So far as I'm concerned, St. Peter will look me over and laugh, and I'll either go numb permanently or be thrown into a large charcoal brazier.  Neither of us is stupid enough to suppose I'll be rewarded for longsuffering when I am not longsuffering, no matter how long a fellow has suffered."

"What are you saying, petit frere?" he asked in as gentle a tone as Mycroft knows how to produce.

"I'm saying this life, this right now, is either going to be all I'll ever have, or else the best I'll ever have, and I can't be with him, and that's...that's such a waste," I finished.

Mycroft spent an inordinate period of time ruminating over his next audible comment.

"I wonder if I ever told you about the banking conundrum I got myself into week before last," he announced at last, in a smooth monotone.  "Nuisance doesn't even begin to describe it.  You know how unnerving it is for me to alter my habits, in particular for a trivial matter, and can you imagine an issue more trivial than this one: my bank had altered its transaction forms to the point that they actually could not process an old payment I had made via my chequebook to this very flat's fire policy.  Some trivial clerical snare, I took it.  The notion of this place catching fire is far-fetched, I'll admit to you, but at any rate, the policy had lapsed and they only noticed the error due to a note written by a sharp-eyed clerk from the insurance company.  And so they summoned me.  Imagine, Sherlock: I was forced to arrive at my bank in the flesh, in a very great deal of flesh, as you would say, to sort it out.  No one employed by my bank, my dear boy, has the slightest notion of how to speak to a client who has a tremendous antipathy to being there physically.  I rather think they expected me to be glad of the opportunity for a visit.  The reason they gave for changing the form in the first place was twaddle in its purest incarnation, and so I soon abandoned that topic by way of asking what they supposed would be sufficient remuneration for the sheer waste of...."

My brother's first two sentences, I confess, confused me.

But by the time the third burst into wordless sparks behind my eyes, I found that I was far too drunk to listen to him in spite of the cocaine.  That was telling. 

And then, at the same instant I realized that Mycroft was simply giving me the steady cadence of his voice because it was all he had left, and he can't bear to see me hurt, and speaking utter nonsense was last possible way he knew of to ease my pain, I lost consciousness entirely.

Just exactly as he had supposed I would.


 



Later that night, when I was sober enough to spell but not yet sober enough to censor myself, I wrote John Watson the letter.

I'd awoken alone.  With a coverlet over me and out of the dinner jacket, waistcoat and cravat, which were on the chair with my collar and cuffs.  There was still a dent in the bedclothes adjacent to me, but my brother had been gone for some time.  Evidently he had spent some ten or fifteen minutes making certain I knew all about his fiscal escapades and was thus sound asleep, and had then rescued my dinner coat and retired himself.  What time was it, I wondered?  Two hours later, by the clock on the mantel.  And the standing clock in the corner. 
 
My muscles were frozen stiff, meanwhile, and the mingled whiskey and chemical taste at the back of my throat was utterly nauseating.  Sitting up, I found water at my bedside and drank it.  Mycroft Holmes--even if I don't deserve him, I don't care: I am keeping him nevertheless.

I could waste no time on the letter, I knew, for I had to leave in the morning.  So I staggered out to Mycroft's moonlit sideboard for a slice of bread to calm my stomach and then staggered back to the guest room, sitting at the desk and turning the lamp up.  Finding pen and paper, I began.

My

I stopped.

dear Watson.  No.

love.  God, no.  He would burn it before reading it.

own.

That would do in a pinch.

My own,

There are things I need to tell you.  Not for my sake.  Your knowing some of them, perhaps, might bring me a modicum of relief, but by the time you are reading this, I do trust that you shan't be in the humour to grudge me a brief respite.  You know me well enough to suspect that I may have need of it by now.

You said you would not be able to communicate with me.  And you said you could decide when I left, as you could not decide when I came back.  You were wrong on both fronts.  I should have told you in person, but you were entirely in the right, and it is better this way.  I had rather write vows on paper than speak them into thin air, for as you well know the things which emerge from my lips do not of necessity bear any resemblance to life.

As to your hearing from me directly.

You will not.  I am eternally sorry.

As to your being able to write to me what- and when-soever you like.

I plan to purchase each and every copy of the Strand Magazine from now until the day I come home.
 
I stopped and rolled the pen over my lips for a moment.  This had to be done precisely, and my brain was feeling less than precise.

Whenever you desire to, write me your fictions.  Write it all down, John.  Tell me hundreds of things you never told me before and hide thousands of thoughts I'll never know.  The journal you kept during the Afghan War, in which you housed your fairy tales and suited reality to your pleasure, you claimed to have been the saving of your peace of mind.  Do it again.  And I will read every word.  If you are filled with spite and brimstone at me, write me callous and unfeeling and tell the universe of my shortcomings.  If you miss my company, write it for yourself.  I'll say anything you like on paper, John, and never begrudge it to you.  Never.  Grow wholly heartsick of marriage and write yourself a tall, pale, statuesque, sable-haired wife to torment you with her faithlessness, and then flee back to Baker Street and your old friend Sherlock Holmes.  She could fix you with long fingers and frosted-over grey eyes and you could forsake her for adventure and I tell you I would not care a whit if only it brought you some satisfaction.  Write her a whore and me a hero.  Write cryptic, codified, impossible-to-decipher sentiments and then know that I will always ruin your secrets.  Write me worse than I am or a paragon of my best features, only write us together and I will understand you. 

And if you write yourself a wintry wife with black hair who frays your heartstrings, I shall understand that too.

There.  That was done.  I pictured him writing her-as-me and cringed, but he certainly deserved the option.  Then followed instructions.

If you should find you need to call me back one day, my dear fellow--if you can no longer bear it or are in danger or know that my enemies are in London and you require my presence here--then write of my death.

You think I'm mad to suggest such a thing, but see how practical it is.  A simple code could go awry.  I could misread it.  If you are to signal me, it must perforce be clear.  And aside from clarity, it would confuse our enemies tremendously.  It would utterly baffle them.  Write me dead, and I will be in London just as soon as I can, John.  As fast as steam or sail could carry me.  Should it ever come to such a pass, I would ask that you spare me neither ludicrous dramatic value nor your own natural forthrightness--send me over a waterfall and vilify me in retrospect if you like, and in any event that way I'll know whether you've any desire to see me again.
 
This was growing maudlin.  It could not be allowed to grow maudlin, I admonished myself.  I looked longingly at my traveling bag and the cocaine that would counteract the maudlin but instead told myself to stop acting such a confounded fool.  Syringes might be the only thing left to me, but--

My thoughts crashed to a halt.  God in Heaven. 

The only thing left to me.  The only thing left to--

He wouldn't, though--he could not.  No, no, no, no.  No.  John Watson knew what morphine would do to him just the same as I did, and no.  I felt sick to my stomach all over again.  He wouldn't, he knew what it would do to me if he took morphine because I'd left him, and Watson is very selfless, not the sort to leave me a haunted shell at all, so he'd never dream of it.

But it would be difficult nevertheless, I thought, to abstain from another addiction when a marginally healthier one--me, that is--had been snatched away. 

And you won't be there to stop him.

I wouldn't be there for all sorts of things.  I knew Watson needed me, but I had never before stopped to catalog just what I did for him, in the practical sense.  I am a tyrannical watchdog against clinking spoons, for example.  Small susurrations no one notices--I systematically eradicate them.  I shut carriage doors softly, and I cover scraping sounds with dry remarks about London.  I carry my keys wrapped in a pocket handkerchief.  No longer.  And it was more than that, I realized with growing horror.  The enteric fever relapses were never easy, and it was hell watching half of him desperately wanting me there while the other half wanted me anywhere else, but I...I was necessary.  Two attacks a year, at minimum, and so far I'd witnessed a grand total of nineteen days when he couldn't even walk.  I'd stopped him accidentally drowning in our bath on one occasion, when he'd been trying to bring his own fever down.  I don't even want to think again about what happened to him when we investigated the alleged murder of Colonel Barclay, surrounded by crippled veterans.  As for the morphine--

"Stop it," I said out loud.

So long as he lived, that was what mattered.  And he'd die if I stayed in London.  I'd make it up to him later.  Everything.  I would fix it.  What I could not do, should it come to that, was bring him back from the dead.  I lifted the pen.

I need not promise you that I'll abstain from the habits of my youth.  That would suggest that returning to such had occurred to me, and it has not.  You are all I'm ever going to want, and I've known it since the day Jabez Wilson desired to learn why a club so very felicitous as the Red-Headed League should be dissolved.  But I will swear this to you, because this remains a temptation and a thing which gnaws me whenever I am brought low, and strike me dead if I don't abide by my word: I will not be taking morphine simply because you are not there to see it.  On my honour, John.

I made every disposition of my property before leaving England and handed it to my brother Mycroft.  You are now the sole title holder to our modest fortune.  Needless to say, when I return, I should like permission to share it again.  But I don't insist on the point.

I ask but one further thing of you.  And if you deny me this, I don't know how I can live with myself.

Only please believe me to be, my dear fellow,
Entirely yours,

Sherlock Holmes

I addressed it, and left it in Mycroft's mail.  He would notice it the next day and deliver it by hand.  I knew he would.  Crawling back into his spare bed, I fell into a fitful sleep just before dawn rose, knowing that it was the last day for what could be a very long time that I would awaken in London.




After breakfast next morning, and a hot bath, I gathered up my things.  Mycroft watched me, perfectly still, sitting at his gorgeously polished dining table.  When I'd finished, and retrieved the fiddle and bow Mycroft had already packed away for me the night before, I took a very deep breath and went to shake my brother's hand. 
 
Standing, he held it out, like the flipper of a whale, and pressed mine firmly.  Mycroft's eyes were an oddly warm grey that morning--ashes in a just-smothered hearth fire.

"Take every care with yourself, my dear boy," my brother said.

I stared at him in complete shock.

That was the extent of it?  That was his goodbye?  No don't go, or only stay a little longer, or you are insane and possibly suicidal and I'm going to put a stop to this instantly?

"Take care?" I repeated, dumbfounded.

"You seem confused, Sherlock."

I was.  Watson had as good as chained me to a lamppost, and my brother was sending me off into the jungle with a pat on the head.  Either he didn't love me, he was going mad, or I was.  None of those options seemed very pleasant.

"How can you...how can--"

"Oh," he said.  A very, very sad smile crossed his lips.  "How can I not object?"

Wordlessly, not knowing what would come out, I nodded.

"Well," he explained, "that is very simple.  You and I both often make use of our imaginative faculties to surmise what sort of thought processes led an agent or a suspect or a witness or an expert to a particular decision.  And so last night, after you had fallen asleep, I put myself in your shoes so that I could best know how to tell you that you weren't doing any such imbecilic thing as going off on your own but were instead hiding out in London while we take care of this together.  Then I pictured, you see, how I would feel if my very presence were a danger.  I imagined what my brain would conclude the logical next step was if I had found you poisoned on the floor of your parlour, and then I imagined what I would do if the only person in the world whose life meant more to me than my own was threatened, and only I could stop the threat, and that by going away.  And then I queried what argument might convince me to stay near you in such circumstances, and the answer was no argument at all.  Nothing would stop my going.  So I am saving my breath, you see.  Here is a token, if it makes you feel better: don't do this, petit frere.  Now, since you aren't going to listen to me, you had best be on your way."

It wasn't an embrace so much as a crushing together of torsos.  I blindly, desperately fisted my hands in his jacket and then, wondering how it was going to be possible to survive without either one of them, I let my brother go.  I picked up my things and walked over to his door.
 
"Sherlock."
 
I paused, my fingers on the handle.
 
"Hurry back," he suggested, "so that I might resume my usual religious views.  For the period of time you are gone, I intend to believe in God, you see, which is entirely distasteful to me.  Quite against my nature, as you know, but still.  If I didn't temporarily suppose there was someone watching you as I do, I should handcuff you to my table.  So do return with all speed."
 
And I had always thought that I was the poetic one beneath the mutual severity of our logic.  He cannot play an instrument, nor paint as our mother could, nor any of the rest of it, but there you have it.  The most beautiful mind I have ever seen.  Barring none.
 
"Je dois y aller maintenant," I said.
 
"Au revoir, then," he replied.  He took out his watch and flipped it open.  "Until I see you again."
 
I turned away from him.

"Do remember to eat something on occasion, my dear boy.  Without anyone available to remind you, I rather fear that you'll return to us the width of a piece of blotting paper."

"I shall consider it my duty on the Continent to make my journey a culinary tour," I promised.  "Au revoir, Mycroft."

That time I managed to actually get one foot out the door.

"Should you require anything of me overseas, do not hesitate.  I need not mention that I shall be working closely with your friends of the Yard to make this city safe for you again, but I have also many contacts abroad."

"I'm aware of that.  Thank you."

"Do you know, I am not going to be able to do this," he murmured, as if distantly surprised at himself.  "You had better run along.  If you wait for me to cease speaking to you, you'll live in my doorway."

"I'll be fine," I told him.  "I promise."

"Be very careful about travel arrangements," he added abruptly.  My god, his hands are trembling, I thought to myself.  His hands are the steadiest I know.  "Coachmen and conductors and the like.  You must look to them especially, for transit can make a man quite vulnerable."

"Are you going to remind me to load my gun and check foods for poisons and wear an overcoat in the snow?" I asked him gently.

"For as long as you are still in my front hall, I am," he sighed.  "I cannot seem to help myself."

"Goodbye, brother mine.  Be happy and fat in my absence."

"I can promise you the one, but not the other," he managed in a very strange voice before forcing himself to look away from me. 
 
I couldn't torment him any longer, so I did as he said.  I left. 
 
"Farewell, Sherlock," I heard as the door was shutting behind me.  "Hurry home."





A cab brought me to the river, for instead of taking the train to Dover, I planned to go by water.  The sky above me was a gratingly delighted shade of giddy summer blue.  So beautiful that it seemed quite malicious.  I was leaving, and London didn't even care.  How appropriate.

When I arrived at the docks with a steamer ticket in my hand, I kept a very watchful eye on the milling crowds.  There was a group of Hassidic Jews saying goodbye to another knot of black-garbed men, and several ladies with giggling sisters and cousins, and an old woman under a pink parasol.  The usual throng of aloof banking types.  Rough stevedores trundling packing crates from place to place.  A little man in a tweed suit with dark, close-set eyes, thin lips, a bowler hat, and a face like a lapdog.  Not reading, not sitting, just waiting with his arms crossed.  A man so anonymous-looking that your eyes slid off him instantly.

Geoffrey Lestrade.

"What the devil are you doing?" I wondered, going to him with my hand outstretched.  "It's to begin today.  You ought to be with Patterson.  Confound it all, I am counting on you to fix this wretched mess.  How did you know I would be here?"

"I checked all the likeliest passenger manifests after we finished questioning Jed Green," the Inspector answered.  "He's going to be fine, by the way.  In any case, I knew that you would want to leave a traceable trail behind you, so that they would know you had gone.  I also know that it's easier to track a man leaving by steamer packet than by train to the coast.  Old-fashioned, tried-and-true police work.  I'll explain it to you sometime."

"Good.  If you can trace me, anyone can."

Lestrade smiled thinly at that, knowing it for an exhausted joke.

"You didn't answer my other question.  What the devil are you doing?"

Shrugging his slender shoulders, Lestrade replied, "Saying goodbye to you, of course.  We shall do all we can.  I'm still very sorry about your brother.  From the moment that happened...well, and when Green was taken into account...  I assumed you would be going, of course.  The Doctor isn't pleased, I take it?"

"The Doctor is displeased," I agreed grimly. 

"I thought he might be.  Anyway, it wouldn't have been right, your leaving without anyone to see you off."

"Can you be serious?  You are tightening the net today around an unspeakably evil network of criminals, and you're here to see me off?  Are you going to hold my hand as I walk up the gangplank?  You're losing your mind, Lestrade.  I'm not worth it."

Lestrade coughed, bringing his petite hand up to his lips.  Under the veneer of complete and mind-numbing averageness, the Inspector does have a few interesting quirks, one of which is the oddly fastidious little gestures he makes with his hands.  He drew his fingers over his small, sharp chin.

"That's what I wanted to say to you," he replied.  "I wish you all the best luck, but I am a man who faces facts, Mr. Holmes.  Facts are my whole life.  And the fact is, I may never see you again.  I hope that isn't the case, but you're heading into a hell of a lot of danger and we both know it.  So I had to tell you that this, what you've done for the city and now your leaving, running your head into certain trouble to draw it away from...it's the bravest damn thing I've ever seen."

I was dumbstruck.  And that annoying little ferret of a man just stood there, looking at me with frank and simple and admiring dark brown eyes, not helping, nor saying anything further.  Watching me gape at him like a half-wit.  Had he not just touched me more deeply than he'd ever done before, I could have slapped him.  I wanted to.  Finally, he saved me.

"Take care with yourself, Mr. Holmes," he said, holding out his hand again.

"You are a rarity, Inspector," I said, pressing my hand with his.  "I didn't used to know it.  But you are."

"You're that and more yourself, Mr. Holmes.  A regular violet elephant."

"A what?"

"Never mind," Lestrade smiled, glancing over at the ship.  "It's a queer little phrase, probably just a family quirk.  Goodbye, then, and know that I'll do my best to fix this."

I fidgeted with my hat for a moment, nodding gravely, and then I headed for the boat.  I had only gotten a few steps when I remembered something.  I turned back, pulling my cigarettes out and fishing for one.

"Lestrade, will you grant me one favour?"

"Name it," he said readily.

"After you've secured the gang today, and do please take every precaution, might you perhaps be in the mood for a billiards match with a worthy opponent?"

"Mr. Holmes, billiards has been much on my mind of late," he replied with a wink.  "I've been planning on improving my game.  That'll take a great deal of practice, I figure."

"Thank you," I said softly.

I watched him walk away from a vantage point high on the deck of the boat, smoking as the waves lapped against the pilings.  And the oddest thing was, when Lestrade's slim back disappeared into the crowd, the most unremarkable figure in a sea of unremarkable men--that was when I grew frightened. 

I was going where no one could help me.  Being called a coward hadn't shaken me from my unwavering belief that I was doing the right thing, but being called courageous made me wonder if I could survive the ordeal.  He hadn't meant to have that effect, I knew.  But I was so alone of a sudden.  I had taken my leaves in reverse order of import, apparently, for I needed John Watson to love and Mycroft Holmes to live and Geoffrey Lestrade to work.  I couldn't have them, though.  None of them.  I was the tallest man by far on the deck of a steamer, deserting everything and everyone that mattered to him.  How would I manage it?  How endure, how cope, how take any rest, how keep my very shaky hold on sanity itself?  Lestrade disappearing into the crowd that morning was one of the most terrifying moments of my life.

How could I be brave without them?



 
 
That night, I stood on the deck of the ship after dinner for a very, very long time.  The water beneath me rippled as if possessed--a cold, malicious black sapphire colour, not fit to be seen by human eyes.  I was getting further from London every second.  Moriarty and Moran had either been captured by now, or they hadn't been.  Either the Yard had enjoyed a miraculous level of success, or not.  And I am only a mortal fellow, and the world is very wide.
 
Now or never, I thought.
 
It is not as if I had never considered the action before, wondered if it might be profitable.  It was that I wondered whether or not it was gentlemanly to ask a favour of someone I did not like, had refused acquaintance with, someone who in all honesty would probably cross the street to avoid my company.  I am a number of unsavoury things, but I do my best to be a gentleman.  I always have done.  And I never wanted to make cheap requests of a distant stranger, not unless driven to desperate measures. 

Measures, for instance, such as the ones I found myself in.

One did these things aloud, did one not? I reflected.  Yes.  Aloud, or it was not merely presumptuous and ungentlemanly, but cringing.
 
"I don't know whether or not You can hear me," I began.
 
And that had always been the second most essential problem.  Beyond the social niceties, I had of course wondered why anyone should assume they were listened to when making overtures.  I surprised myself by not being abrasive and caustic, but after all I know when charm is warranted.  Civility, still more so, and I did not have the upper hand on that night.  I was not sending a subordinate out on an errand.  Just then, floundering for any and every foothold, I was merely trying to make myself an appealing supplicant.
 
"I would never presume to..." I began.  "That is, I know I cannot impel an outcome merely by asking for it.  That would be ridiculous, and frankly--if You indulged the perpetrators--would lead to countless contradictory desires."
 
Stars above, a manmade deck below, and only myself to confront.  Visibly, that is.  So I soldiered on.
 
"So I won't ask for something special," I murmured as my stomach lurched alongside the waves beneath me.  "No specifics.  I'll ask for how I'd wish it to end, either way.  I think You know what I mean.  And so, if I am allowed to go home...."
 
I thought for literally four minutes over what could constitute a moral request.  A plea from a sodomite which might not be summarily dismissed.  Finally, I found one.
 
"Please keep my family intact in the meanwhile."

Men underestimate the weights they carry. 
 
I know they do.  Because when I let that weight slip away from me, I suddenly knew from the intensity of its loss that it had been about to snap my spine like a twig underfoot.
 
I cannot describe how amazing that singular experience was.  It took a short passage of time hearing myself say the words, but--when peace washed over me--it bathed me like a reprieve from the gallows.  It was as if an anchor had been attached to my breastbone and I had simply wielded a knife and cut it loose.  By asking a question of thin air.  I had now, unbelievable as it seemed, done everything possible.  If an action could be taken which led to John Watson's safety, it had been taken with gut-deep ardor.  It was all I breathed for.  I had just requested an invisible force to alter the future for the better, and whether it had worked or not, I could have fallen to my knees with pure relief.  A dizzying gust like a warm wind swept over me when I understood that I had now left nothing out, and that whether or not God chose to listen was hardly within my purview as a mortal.  I had debased myself in every way possible.  It was over, the worst was over, and I was free of it.  Now there was nothing left but God's will and my own luck.  
 
And in spite of my hardships, I have always had exceptional luck.
 
Then I recalled that I had not yet quite finished the request.  I was so drained by the ultimate denial of self-sufficiency that I had forgotten the rest of it. 

I was giddy with the weightlessness of asking. 

I must add that it was the only moment in all of my days when I felt so.  Later, much later, when the War tore us apart, when I could have made the same request a second time, I had thought it would be an insult to want the identical thing over again.  A crude repetition which would lead to swift disaster.  I had also been too angry to ask, thinking it entirely too cruel of God to take him away from me for the third time, and that when I had just served two years' penance for the good of my country.  On that marvelous day in 1891, however, I was indeed a falling leaf, but an endlessly falling one--unlike Verlaine's, I would cherish the ceaseless rocking, and let the winds caress my edges, and never in my life hit the ground.  Or so it felt for an instant.
 
Where was I?  Ah, yes.  The alternative.
 
"And if I cannot go home," I finished simply, every breath lighter than the one before, "and if they take the trouble to bury me at all--if I drown or am incinerated then never mind, of course, for it won't matter, but if I am buried--I want something of the gravedigger, please."
 
I will swear before all that is precious to me that Someone waited upon an explanation.  I will swear it on any Holy Book you like without fear of perjury.
 
"Tell him to make my grave shallow," I whispered to the waves.  "That way, when it rains, it will feel more like London."





I ran for my life for a longer period of time than I care to recall.  Running for your life, I discovered, can be a tedious affair.  But I had brought it on myself, and I thus made survival my sole business.

I went to Switzerland.  At times, I drifted into France and worked as a chemist.  The old cities were lovely, I suppose, but it was difficult for me to notice when at any moment a gun might be pressed to my head, or a cord slipped round my neck.  I bought some henna and tried dyeing my hair, but my hair is black and nothing could change it but bleach, which would have looked bizarre.  So I grew a neat black beard, and I spoke nothing but French, and one by one I sent my persecutors to gaol.  Every month I bought a magazine and read it with my heart in my throat, waiting for my husband to make it quite clear he hated me with a passion and I could live in Africa for all he cared.

But that changed at the end of 1891.
 
That December, just before Christmas, I picked up the latest copy of the Strand.  I was living in Lucerne, playing my fiddle in friendly gas-lit cafes, trying every day not to be killed.  I took the precious periodical back to my little garret flat to read it, sitting cross-legged on my bed with the lamps blazing and a cigarette in my fingers, quite alone.  And thank God I was alone, for had I been sitting on a public bench or wedged into a comfortable restaurant booth, I should have mortified myself in front of strangers a hundred times more severely than I ever had before.
 
There was a tale within called "The Man with the Twisted Lip."  In it, John Watson had a spouse. 

She was beautiful and kindhearted.  She was loving.  She was mannerly and resilient and honest and easy and domestic and warm and intelligent.  She loved him with a simple and complete earnestness that not one human being in a score can lay claim to.  Her name was nothing short of hallowed, a sacred moniker that went uncannily well with John.  It was not Lillith or Delilah or even Eve, transgressing catastrophically by sheer willful accident.  Her name was Mary, as a matter of fact, and she was flaxen blonde without and radiant gentle light within.
 
People who were in grief flocked to my wife like birds to a lighthouse.

That was what he chose to write.  Us by the fire and his spouse a guardian angel to whom strangers made their appeals.  Those were the words he affixed to the man who had broken his heart.

I imagine there are only a very finite number of souls who can claim ever to have been moved to uncontrollable tears by the Strand.  It is a very innocuous family magazine, after all.  And the poetry found therein is terrible, not to say embarrassing on behalf of the editorial staffers.  But whether I am in wide company or not, I am one such.  I don't possess that particular copy of December 1891 any longer.  Within an hour, it was useless to keep it and my throat was scraped raw and I couldn't see a thing anyway and I had never felt better. 

I had never wept like that in my entire life, not that I could remember.  Not with my knees drawn into my chest, torrents pouring out of me, scarce able to breathe.  I learned that day that my tears are as silent as my laughter, and that they shake me just as violently, and that goodness and mercy will follow John Watson for all the days of his life, and that more than all the rest of it, I love him for being that man.  The man so full of kindness that he can suppose a creature like me a lighthouse.  I never wept for my mother, for it hurt far too badly--nor my sister, nor my father, and not even all the times when I was too aching and alone to want to breathe any longer.  I came close the night I took Watson for my own and within a matter of hours, because I'd shot morphine into my veins and he cannot be near the wretched stuff, I'd imagined he was going to send me away from him.  I came closer still the night I'd almost managed to kill myself with the same substance, and using the Doctor proved the only act capable of awakening me to the possibility that he might not care for that scenario.  Still, I hadn't split entirely.  Nor did I break down when he did finally give me my marching orders. 

But being called a lighthouse dashed me quite to pieces.  By the time I was through rereading that sentence for the thousandth time, it was illegible.  As ruined as everything else I lay hands on.

So I bought myself a new one from a different vendor the next morning--one that did not appear to have been all but erased by a sudden rain.

Excerpt from the Pall Mall, September of 1891:

Fashionable London was shocked last month to learn that Lord Harry Rogers, highly respected peer of the realm and these four years the administrator of a powerful government banking office, had been terminated from his position.  It seems now that he was dismissed for 'reasons of a highly personal nature, not to be discussed with the public at large,' or so said the official who was yesterday kind enough to speak with this publication.  Our readers will recall that, as is often the way with adversity, it was then revealed that the unfortunate gentleman's estate had been heavily mortgaged, due to a combination of high living, poor investments, and exceedingly expensive treatments prescribed by a notorious doctor who specializes in curing Cupid's disease.  One wonders whether the latter trouble was in part responsible for his sudden loss of position, for there is certainly the whiff of scandal about this sad business.  He is said to be a broken and pitiable man, selling what he can to cover legal expenses and living a meagre, solitary existence near Hyde Park.




Excerpt from a Swiss newspaper, translated from the French, October of 1893:

More details are coming to light over the mysterious and disturbing body discovered in the countryside near the banks of the Rhine River.  It will be remembered that the as-yet still unidentified man was heavily armed, with an unfired pistol in fact gripped in his hand, and a second gun hidden in his coat.  He was shot in such a manner that police have theorized perhaps a duel was being fought, with the bullet penetrating his stomach from the front and exiting out his ribcage.  After being shot, however, he was stabbed in the heart, in what could either have been an act of mercy or one of vicious violence, as we cannot know the murderer's mind.  The unknown gentleman was quietly and professorially dressed, fifty years of age, with a balding head and a high, domed cranium.  No trace of his killer has been discovered.

Police have recently disclosed, however, that the man carried a picture in his pocketbook of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the highly respected consulting detective who disappeared from London in 1891.  The image is rare, for Mr. Sherlock Holmes is seldom photographed, but it appeared to have been much used, for it was very worn.  Whether this new data lends a clue to the mystery, however, is yet to be seen.

Swiss police have consulted with Scotland Yard in an effort to shed more light on the matter, and have shared all they know with Mr. Holmes' colleague Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade.  Said Inspector Lestrade of the body, "He is completely unknown to me.  No man of that description is currently being sought by the Yard.  As for Mr. Sherlock Holmes, his whereabouts are still undisclosed.  It is possible that this murdered gentleman belonged to the criminal class that so detests Mr. Holmes, and that--while seeking him--he met with some misadventure.  Such types lead hard and dangerous lives."  Doubtless this is a reasonable assumption, and we are told that both police forces will redouble their efforts to learn more about this gruesome crime.


 
 
Excerpt from the Strand Magazine, November of 1893:
 
A few words may suffice to tell the little that remains.  An examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other's arms.  Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation.  The Swiss youth was never found again, and there can be no doubt that he was one of the numerous agents whom Moriarty kept in his employ.  As to the gang, it will be within memory of the public how completely the evidence which Holmes had accumulated exposed their organization, and how heavily the hand of the dead man weighed upon them.  Of their terrible chief few details came out during the proceedings, and if I have now been compelled to make a clear statement of his career, it is due to those injudicious champions who have endeavored to clear his memory by attacks upon him whom I shall ever regard as the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.
 
 
 


 
 
June 22, 1919.

I straightened up, my back aching horribly, my left shoulder feeling as if I had pulled out an oak with my bare hands and not simply thirty or forty subsequent milk thistles.

"Bugger," I said softly, rotating it.

I said it at least half to my brother, though he was nowhere near me.  He is the only man who has ever objected to some of my more colourful expressions.  Or at least, objected audibly.  And so I think of them--even in his absence, even when he is in Pall Mall and I am on my knees in a vegetable garden in Sussex trying to patrol the borders as Nature invades--as small tributes.  Or fractions of them.  It isn't a wholly conscious habit, but I could have said drat and spared myself a syllable.
 
The back door of our cottage banged open cheerfully and I heard John Watson coming down the stairs.  It was early enough after his homecoming still that the sound of him moving about always sent shivers of relief down my spine.  I didn't look back at him, though, idly deducing.  His pace was a happy, useful, determined one.  He'd been doing something practical that he nevertheless enjoyed.  Writing?  No, he'd have been writing on the front porch and thus come round the side without entering the house.  Fiddling about with the mechanics of our automobile?  No, I'd have heard him, or smelled fuel oil.  Oh, of course.  I knew what it was.  And why he was here, come to that.  I reached out and plucked a generous spring of rosemary off the bush and handed it to him as his shadow approached.

"Good Heavens, Holmes.  I know you can read minds, but how can you read minds when the subject is behind your back?"

My friend crouched and then sat down next to me in the grass with one knee drawn up as I angled my head to grin at him.  There was a streak of flour in his pearly hair.  I was right, then. 

Watson, when we moved to Sussex and no longer had access to the French bakery we'd frequented for decades, had announced one day that he was sick of brown farmer's loaves even if they were delicious with honey the first fifty times, and that he had a fine pair of surgeon's hands and always had done, and that he would make better use of them and do the baking himself.  How hard could it be?  For John Watson, not hard at all, though one or two experiments proved less than perfect.  By now he is adept at it, and claims that it helps his injured hand.  But the real reason he enjoys it so is that he loves manual tasks--writing, billiards, stitching people back together--and that out of pure admiration I am inclined to eat twice as much of his bread as I am anyone else's.  Particularly when my bees have made a contribution.  It's a happy partnership.

"I don't need to see you to read your mind," I said mildly.

"That's an absolutely appalling thing to say.  What am I thinking now?"

"You're thinking there's a mirror in the lettuces."

"For the love of God, my dear boy."

"But there isn't.  That would be utterly ridiculous."

"Holmes, look at me before I change my mind about you entirely and decide you're in league with the very devil himself."

I did.  He was smiling broadly, and his hair was so fascinating the way it was now, spun out of glinting cobwebs.  Then I saw what he was wearing.  It was a plain white shirt with a tiny blue stripe in it, once good but now very old, and he hadn't buttoned it all the way.  He was wearing it open-necked, with the sleeves rolled up and a bit floury, untucked from a pair of loose cotton summer trousers.

"Wherever did you find that shirt?" I marveled.

"In a very old traveling bag.  Why?" he asked.  "Doesn't it suit me any longer?  I supposed it good enough for baking, or gardening, or being pursued by bees.  I don't imagine I should wear it in public, however.  It's as old as dust, but I had thought it still fit."

It did still fit, of course.  And it was ideal for gardening.  And baking.  Neither did I object to the fact that he had left the top four buttons unfastened.  I was simply recalling the first time I had ever seen him wearing it.

I had been walking down a crowded London street with plane trees all around me, sick with worry and feeling a fraction of myself.  I was going to Kensington by way of the Oxford Street end of Park Lane.  It had been days since I'd eaten a full meal and not an apple snatched in passing from a vendor, and longer since I had slept properly, though I was carefully shaven and every square inch of my linen immaculately clean.  And then I saw John Watson standing not four yards off, staring at me the way one would stare at a graphic carriage accident.

"You were wearing it when you once had a regrettable mishap on a crowded London thoroughfare," I said.

Watson narrowed his eyes at me curiously.  "Was I?  What sort of mishap?"

"It involved a copy of erotic Latin poetry," I hinted.

For Watson in 1894 had only stood staring at me for a bare instant before colliding violently with an ancient bookseller.  The poor man was elderly and deformed, and Watson knocked down several of the books he had been carrying.  By the time I arrived on the scene, the old fellow was screaming in a hoarse, high voice, using language so vile I alone in Park Lane could comprehend it all, Watson was on his knees trying to pick up books and apologize with apparent sincerity while simultaneously staring a hole through my neck, and I dove down next to him and stilled his hands with mine.

"Please forgive me.  Whatever's ruined, I'll pay for it," I had said, not truly knowing which man I was speaking to. 

And the old bookseller had merely cackled unpleasantly and called us a pair of clumsy sods, which was only half true for we are never clumsy, and shaken a mud-soaked copy of Catullus in Watson's face, and in a daze I had handed the old man a sovereign and ended up standing before John Watson with my arms full of Catullus, British Birds, and The Holy War, all of them looking as if they'd been run down by an omnibus.

We had stood there, in the middle of Park Lane and I gripping filthy books, staring at one another struck entirely dumb.  He had written me off the edge of a waterfall a few months previous, knowing that I had the opportunity to end Colonel Moran's career for good and all, and I had flown as swiftly as I could back to him.  He'd had the most peculiar expression on his face, as if I had materialized out of thin air.  Which I rather had done, come to think of it.

Watson in the June Sussex garden, meanwhile, ducked his head a little when he understood me.  Lifting his arms, he gazed at his sleeves.  "You truly recall I was wearing this exact shirt?"

"On my honour.  I know every word the both of us said, too.  I thought you were going to disembowel me."

My friend dropped his arms and squinted into the distance, leaning back on his palm.  "You said to me, 'What is your favorite Catullus verse, now we've a completely unreadable copy?  I never asked.'  I couldn't believe I was looking at you.  It was as if five minutes had passed.  You were identical to the man I remembered every morning.  You were so uncannily the same.  I thought for a moment that it could not be you, that it was a trick of my mind, because I could not have remembered you so perfectly."

"Is that why you said nothing?" I questioned curiously.

"I don't know," he replied with a soon-vanished smile.  "What did you say when I didn't answer?  Oh, yes, that you'd always felt an affinity with number forty-three, because you had neither a small nose nor black eyes nor a dry mouth nor a refined tongue.  And I said--"

"'You do have long fingers, though,'" I put in.

"And then you looked absolutely wild for a moment and begged I answer the question.  I remember thinking how deucedly like you it was to demand I quote Catullus rather than simply ask how I felt, but we were in the middle of a crowded street, after all.  And so I said--"

"Ni te plus oculus meis amarem, iucundissime, etc. You were paraphrasing."

"If I did not love you more than my own eyes, I would hate you.  Yes.  It was not a very kind thing to say."  Watson smiled at me.  "I had missed you rather badly."
 
"Did you ever forgive me?" I asked him, unthinking.  "For leaving you?"

"No," he said softly.  "I couldn't." 

Something about the ground beneath me turned soft and uncertain for a moment, a tangible fault line.  We both froze.  I frankly do not believe Watson had intended to tell me the truth when his mouth opened at all, but his mouth had formed habits and did so automatically.  The plain fact of the matter is that we both of us have craters dug into our skins from long-ago collisions, which makes us almost equally dangerous--and what is still more volatile, we never managed to stop loving each other to a degree that defied all sense.  This was a new potential catastrophe, and as such it was impossible to respond to him for a moment.  Not even I always know what to say instantaneously.  But I waited too long, for he continued, looking absolutely stricken.

"I never could.  I still have not.  I never meant to tell you."  His words were ungraceful and thick with self-reproof.  "It was--"
 
"A secret," I finished, not without a trace of humour.  "But not any longer.  Not with me around."
 
We were silent for a little.  I pulled out another milk thistle and added it to the pile, wincing slightly without thinking.  Watson ran a hand rapidly down my shoulder, nudging me back toward him so he could see me better.  His fingers, on his left hand at any rate, are less agile than they once were and tend to cup slightly in on themselves since he was wounded abroad for the second time.  I notice it mainly in the mornings in the wide cottage bed, when all my bones are aching from war injuries and rheumatism and I cannot help but be awake.  My arm is curled around his flat belly at times, and at other times the hand that rests on my breastbone has fingers which now curve in like a seashell.  They work perfectly, but I know the difference.  There are no secrets from me, after all.

"Is that the worst secret I've ever exposed by sheer misadventure?" I mused.
 
"Probably.  Yes, I think so.  Oh, Holmes."

It really would not do, Watson looking like this.  His face could not be rigidly still beneath the golden strands that had begun alchemically to turn into silver in 1899.  We were not young and vulnerable any longer, damn it all to hell, and it was June in the countryside, and neither one of us ought to be alive.  My friend, from the way he was staring at me as if I were a glass about to shatter, had it all wrong.  I had not known he failed to forgive me in 1894, true.  But I had not known he failed to forgive me in 1894.  How much could I claim to have suffered by it?  This news only confirmed that my lover of three decades was in fact a sane man.

"You're sure?" I attempted in a far lighter tone.  "Nothing further you would like to tell me before I unwittingly snatch the truth from your lips again?  Come, now.  How many men tried to sleep with you at the Front, for instance?"

"Five or six, perhaps," Watson replied.

"And how many would have done a good job of it?"

"One," he answered, allowing a wry twist to cross his lips.

"I'll kill him," I vowed in mock chivalry.  This was better.  This was progress.  I could still navigate such waters.  I certainly had enough practice.  "Was he handsome?"

"Yes.  You speak of him in the past tense."

"It is a commonplace feature of English to refer to dead beings in the past tense.  Was he a gracious and well-spoken gentleman with the heart of a steadfast British soldier?"

"Yes."  Watson pulled a piece of grass from the dirt, coughing charmingly.

"I really will kill him," I reflected.  "Tell me his name instantly, that I might hate all others with the moniker hereafter, when once he is dead."

"Franklin," he said with a faraway look.  "He never would have suited me.  He was not in the least bit high-spoken, aristocratic, or arrogant."

"No?  He was a rifleman, I suppose?"

"He was a doctor."

"A doctor?" I demanded, letting my voice rise as we sailed further into good, clear, safe waters.  "I'll tear him limb from limb and then I'll kill him.  Did he love you?"

"No.  Heavens.  No, I don't think so."

"Did he flirt with you?"

"Very often.  We had little else of trivial amusement to occupy us, you see."

"Did he touch you?"

"Of course not.  Don't be asinine.  You're the only man who's touched me in that way since eighteen eighty-two.  My God, that's a long time," he added with a note of admiring surprise.

It was a long time, admittedly.  But only in the sense of years.  When I imagine what it would be like to grow tired of him, I have a tendency to make myself laugh.  I haven't managed to understand him completely in over three decades, after all, and that was with the advantage of knowing everything about him.  I thought of him that morning--barefoot, sleepy, pouring a glass of water from a pitcher next to the kitchen window and then tucking his hand inside my dressing gown pocket when I joined him--and experienced a feeling of graceful, spreading awe.  Three decades, and he'd still prefer his hand in my pocket than his own.  I was in pain, of varying levels, one hundred percent of the time due to an unfortunate encounter with a zeppelin, and I was the happiest I had ever been in my life.

"I made it worth your while, didn't I?" I coaxed.

"You made it worth my while this morning just after breakfast, unless my aging memory fails me," he returned dryly.

"Your memory serves you perfectly, and I thank you for the compliment.  Did he try to touch you?"

"No, you ridiculous man."  Watson was chuckling at the grass between his fingers.  Thank God.  He was pulling up bits of sod while shaking his head and huffing at me blithely, and thank God.  We had been through enough without being heartsick and stricken in Sussex of all places.  "He only said he liked my company, but...well, I knew what he meant."

"So do I, and thus his sad Fate is sealed.  He meant just what I mean, which is that I'd very much like to ravish you against a wall."

"I was not aware that was what you meant when you express a regard for my company," he observed, unconsciously batting his eyelashes just once in my direction.  On any other man the flourish would be effeminate and on him it is as masculine as a soldierly wink.

"It is, as a matter of fact.  Have I ravished you against a wall lately?" 

"No, not since I've been back.  Against a desk, last week, but more generally against the mattress."

"A topic to ponder further, in that case.  We shall pencil it in.  What did you say to him when he asked you to break my heart?"

"I said that I don't confine my inversion to the battlefield, and that I already had someone, and he said you were lucky.  I pined for you horribly that night.  I wrote you a letter telling you how wretched I was and then I burnt it because I could see your face, reading the thing.  Franklin Bliss never knew he'd made me miserable, I devoutly hope." 

"Why?" I exulted delightedly.  "I am thrilled to my core he made you miserable.  Here you are safe and sound and I'll make it up to you again as soon as I've washed my hands."

"Why?" he mimicked me.  "I like when your hands are dirty for a change, you know.  So long as it's garden soil."

"Noted.  Tell me why you cared a whit for his feelings before I track him down and assassinate him."

"Because he meant well enough.  Pity you're going to kill him, as he mended my hand."

"Oh."  Borrowing said hand from him, I ran a finger over the odd little white mark and then kissed it briefly.  The work was really very well done, not a stitch visible and barely an indentation.  Lovingly done, I thought, but of course it was.  Watson's grip on reality is still not perfect.  Everyone loves him.  "Frederick--"

"Franklin," Watson laughed.

"Your brother medico has done immaculate work repairing what is mine and is thus forgiven."

Bugger, bugger, bugger, I thought an instant later, as his perfect face shadowed.  What an unfortunate choice of words.

"Holmes," Watson murmured, catching my hand when I moved to let his go, "I used to feel so guilty over not forgiving you.  I hated myself for it, please believe me.  Because I never loved you any less, you see.  Not for a moment.  But--as foolish as it is--I feel better about it now I'm back from the War.  Now that you can't forgive me either.  I committed the same crime, after all, though for another quite different set of equally crazed reasons."

There was a tiny crashing in the bushes yards away from us and my head cocked instinctively.  A thrush.  No, no, there it was again, and digging at something with...forepaws, but small ones.  A squirrel.  Meanwhile, I was patently failing to respond. 

"Holmes, look at me.  Holmes.  Sherlock Holmes, please."

I did look at him--and he couldn't help but see that there wasn't a single unforgiving cell in my exceedingly thin body.  Watson's perpetually bright face fell like a sand castle collapsing.

"Have you forgiven me for the same crime?" he barked out in dismay, appearing quite panicked.

"Yes," I confessed.  "Very nearly the moment you asked me to.  If not before you had asked."

"Don't say that," he moaned, wincing.  "Please, I can't--"

"No, let me explain," I protested.  "It's right this way."

"How can it be right?"

"Well," I said slowly.  "You want me to forgive you.  And so I do.  But for my part, it's enough to have you without having your forgiveness.  There are limits to every man's luck.  You're already a miracle many times over, and here you are, alive.  God may not be cruel to me any longer, but I don't expect another.  Had I not forgiven you, however...I thought that would make you unhappy."

And John Watson's happiness was all I ever wanted, after all.

Deliberately, I gathered the thistles into a pile, not hiding the sad smile which was gentling my lips.  Over thirty years in my company and he still did not understand the way of the world.  Lighthouses are not required to forgive the birds which flap in single-minded circumference around them when the birds catch a fierce gust and hurtle into glass windows.  Because the bird, provided he has not brained himself to death, will simply pick up and keep circling regardless, and the lighthouse remains unscathed. 

But I am not blessed enough to be a feathery satellite.  I am a ruinous tempest and I love him.  So I forgive him when he wants me to, when it would make him happy, and he need not forgive me any more than it would occur to him to forgive the weather.

"Do you know, your professed raison d'etre is remarkably steadfast," Watson said with a gravelly thread of desire running beneath the love and the awe and what was still dangerous and overwhelming between us.

"Is my raison d'etre faring well at present?" I inquired teasingly.  "Is there anything I can do to--"
 
He slid forward on his knees a little, batting the weeds out of my lap from my loosely grasping fingers.  John Watson kissed me and I felt all the calcified dark matter melting out of my bones into the ground.  My breath caught, snagging on something weightless.  My heart caught next, again on nothing, and I tilted my head.  More, I thought as his mouth opened, and more after that, but there was always more.  How anyone could be more than enough for the likes of me I don't know, but he is.  His hands came up and barely grazed against my eyelids my cheekbones my jawline, just ghosting over skin, and then when my own hands rose to meet them he gripped me by the forearms as hard as he could.  The coal in my bones was ash and then just running silt, bleeding into the earth.  I was a sparrow with a hollow skeleton.  His lips were lush and caressing and his mouth was warm and I was just a fluttering fragile thing, knee to knee on the grass in Sussex with the man who was happy I had ruined him. 

My friend stopped, pulling away.
 
"I forgive you," he whispered. 

His eyes were wet and soft and blue.  He meant what he said, and after all those years.  It was true.  I had a clean slate again for the very first time since 1891.
 
And I laughed, angling my face heavenward and rocking back and softly landing my weight on my heels.  I imagined that the sound of it made the leaves rustle their edges together above us.  I laughed as hard as I could, and that is saying a great deal.  I was not accustomed to the audible presence of my own mirth and tried to mute myself, for the echoes still quite unnerved me, but I failed miserably.
 
"Why are you laughing?  No!  No, no, please keep laughing, I love to hear you, but why?" he asked urgently, his smile mirroring mine.  "I was perfectly serious."
 
"I know," I managed, shaking with mirth. "You looked perfectly serious, darling.  You've obviously forgotten I'll require pardon again within ten minutes."
 
The smile flashed wider.  "Ah.  What shall we do in the meantime, then?"

Look at him, I thought.  Look at him in Sussex under a June sky with his shirt badly done up in 1919.  Look at him loving you without anything to pardon you for.  Don't waste it.  You've only got ten minutes.
 
"You've forgiven me.  You really have.  You have, you have, look at you," I grinned, madly laughing while the planet was reeling away from us.  "Kiss me again at once.  Kiss me until the world stops."

He still obeys me after all these years.  And so that is just what he did.