Strange though it may seem, I did feel a kind of serenity at this. My own fate has seldom concerned me less now that it is so irredeemably doomed. However, I cannot consider myself truly lost while I know that those I love most shall be looked after. If I could only find someone to give James similar attention and care…
But setting him up with a new wife is a little beyond my means, even were I at my best!
4 April - I count myself lucky that James has many subjects that naturally interest him, and as his wife, they interest me to hear him talk of them.
Even these years later, any hint of crime or malfeasance in the papers will fire his curiosity. In this way, the spirit of Holmes remains very alive in him, though I know he has, more fully than ever, come to terms with his death. In some ways, seeing me so close to the next realm has perhaps made the reality of his earlier bereavement sink in.
But anyhow, he is much occupied with the details of this latest disquiet in the most polite corners of London society. The details are as vexing as any Sherlock Holmes would have been faced with.
The Honourable Ronald Adair, a former Australian governor, had returned to London and had become quite well known in the society circles of Park Lane. He was a keen card player. On the evening of March 30, he had returned from a game alone, and when his mother and sister returned from their evening out, they found him dead in the sitting room. The door was locked from the inside, and beside two bank notes for £10 each and piles of silver and gold to the tune of £10 17s., lay a sheet of paper with the names of his friends at the club written on it. One could be forgiven for thinking he had taken his own life at the prospect of working out his debts to his fellow gamblers, but there was no weapon in the room, and the window outside had a twenty-foot drop. Most gruesomely, the bullet used to deal the mortal blow was an expanding revolver bullet - a monstrously savage touch.
There were additional, puzzling quirks that had no doubt attracted James to this intrigue. A few weeks earlier he had won £420 from Lord Balmoral, whose association with Holmes had procured us that charming room in Park Lane for our wedding. Even stranger, both that night and on the night of his death, among his fellow card players at the Bagatelle Club was one Colonel Moran. Though the Colonel’s Christian name was not recorded in the report, James had reason to believe it was the same Moran who spoke in Professor Moriarty’s defence in his brother’s poison pen letter of last year.
James admitted to me that reading over the police inquest had given him greater absorption than any of his patients had of late.
“You remain a detective first, a writer second, and a doctor third,” I chided him. “As my present condition attests.”
“My dear Mary, you should not joke about such things.”
“I am still alive, and with you, so I cannot help but think myself lucky,” I said frankly.
7 April - I grow steadily weaker, and feel certain that death cannot be far away. I have fought against it with every fibre of my being, but know I can hold it back no more.
I am so desperately afraid! Not for myself - the spectre of death has perhaps been so familiar throughout my life that it held little fear for me.
No, I fear for my sweet, beloved James. James has been fragile enough these past three years, and with no modesty I say that I have been partly responsible for maintaining his condition. There is so much he cannot cope with on his own - why, why must Fate have twisted its knife so cruelly into the back of one who so embodied decency!
11 April -Sometimes everyday life, having cruelly eroded hope for so long, will then greedily bestow miracles in compensation! Today, as my candle flickers to its last embers, I feel at peace. Indeed, I feel better than that - more whole than I have for many months. I hope I can muster enough strength to write the two incredible encounters that make my hopes so solid.
The day began as darkly as ever - I cannot recall even the notoriously gloomy London having such grey, oppressive weather for quite this long in all my years. I felt even worse than I have the previous few days, and my consumption seemed so acute that at any moment I felt the Grim Reaper would knock on my door.
These feelings were amplified whenever the nurse left the room. In this case, she had merely gone to get a sandwich for herself and a cup of tea for me, but as soon as the door shut and I was alone, I felt the darkness close in more acutely.
When a visitor did arrive, he was not admitted through the front door. In fact, seeing the figure jemmy the high window open and slither through it in a most lithe manner, I was certain I was in some ghastly reverie. This feeling did not dissipate when the man turned to me, and I saw he was a shabbily attired bookseller. Ordinarily I would have called for someone to help, but at that moment I looked deeply into his eyes, and the familiarity in them caused me nearly to lose my senses.
But the hope - the hope that recognition engendered - it made me struggle to cling on for as long as humanly possible. For you see… the bookseller was none other than Sherlock Holmes!
“Mrs. Watson, do not be alarmed,” he wheezed in an affected high voice.
“Mister … Holmes …” I wheezed out with all the energy I could.
He cast his eyes skyward, for a moment more irritated that I had seen through another disguise than what he had come to say. But he controlled himself, removed the false beard that was practically de rigeur in these get-ups, and pulled a chair to my bedside.
“Mrs. Watson, how long do you suppose?”
“Not long …”
For the first time in my entire acquaintanceship with Holmes, he stood speechless before me. “To see you like this … this fills me with grief.” He said this without emotion, but I chose to believe he meant it.
“To see you alive … fills me with a commensurate joy. How on earth did you survive?”
“A trifling matter - all to do with the Japanese martial art of bartitsu, which allowed me to control my breathing underwater … but please, never mind me. How are you?”
“I have been quite dire, Mr. Holmes. These last years have steadily worn me down, eroded my spirit as much or more than my body. And James has been worse, without you.”
“I perceive you are angry with me.”
It was such a bluntly obtuse statement that for a moment I contemplated responding with the coarse expression using his name that was common on the London streets [13]. Instead I rejoined with a withering, “What an extraordinary deduction. I sincerely hope you have an explanation for concealing your survival from James.”
“It was Moriarty. His organization still had some active tentacles. I thought that having severed the head, they would die in due course, but they continued to thrash independently. For Watson’s safety I could not reveal anything to him. I was concerned for him … and also for you and your charming daughter.”
“You cannot know how low your absence has laid him. The anguish it has provoked.”
“I should be gratified to hear that. But please accept my assurance that it was vital.”
“Why then, have you returned to London? Is it now safe?”
Holmes vibrated with cynical laughter. “I should wager less than ever. Moriarty’s chief of staff, Colonel Sebastian Moran, roams the London streets plotting my assassination. You may have read of the death of the Honourable Ronald Adair - his handiwork. However, I am ready for him, and I have a deception that he shall never suspect.”
The energy with which Holmes related his exotic deeds and what lay in store filled me with a similar animation. More than that, I was overcome with joy - joy that there was something beyond the grey slate of the London sky, beyond my deteriorating health, beyond the certainties of the lengthy and enervating death that seemed my lot. I told Holmes as much - no doubt seeming very sentimental and inelegant.
He, however, was a changed man since last I had seen him. The sharpness, acidity, and inhumanity seemed to have left him as he sat by my side and listened to my rambling account of the last two years. He was solicitous and sympathetic. There shou
ld be nothing surprising about that - who else but Holmes could return from that undiscovered country I am bound so shortly for?
Our talk was all too quickly cut short by the nurse traipsing up the steps. “I do wonder what could have kept her, enjoyable though I have found this discussion?”
Holmes gave a perfunctory check of his pocket watch. “The water will only have switched back on about five minutes, twenty-six seconds ago, so she has performed her tasks admirably with that … unanticipated handicap.”
I laughed at his effrontery. “Something, of course, you would know nothing about?” I asked.
“Modesty forbids me to say.”
“Now I doubt you really are Sherlock Holmes. He possessed no modesty.”
The maid was now trying the door, which Holmes’s pile of books appeared to have stopped. “I expect I shall not see you again, Mrs. Watson. Let me tell you again how sad I am - if I could prolong your own life by even one day at the cost of my own, I would gladly do it.”
“And I you,” I replied with full candour. “You see, I was so desperately worried about James without you and myself in his life. But now that I know … I know that you will be returning to his side … as long as his future is happy, then mine is also.”
Without another word, Holmes climbed to the window, and pulled his books up by their length of string. The door now unloosed, the maid came crashing in just as he disappeared down the side of our house.
“Something had stuck that there door,” she explained. “By the way, Doctor Watson has sent a telegram that he would be on his way directly.”
I shall keep my strength up - hold death’s door back, as much as I can - by writing down this extraordinary experience, while I wait for my dear James to return. Oh, how I hope that I can look upon his face one more time! To know that there is someone in this miserable world to look after him, someone with whom his joie de vivre can return! It makes me feel so wonderfully light, I almost feel quite well again!
By the time James arrived, my energy had dissipated. “I don’t know who sent me the telegram, the maid says she knows nothing about it,” he mumbled.
“It doesn’t matter,” I answered, not wanting to ruin the surprise that lay in store for him. “Please, James, do look after yourself. And make sure little Mary is cared for by Mrs. Forrester.”
“I shall see to her care myself,” he said.
“I think you may find yourself otherwise occupied,” I admitted coyly. James of course thought I was delirious, but I had to say one more thing to him. “By the way … I think it would do you good to look out for a bookseller …”
“A bookseller? What do you mean?”
“Just one of those street vendors with the little bundles of books. You never know who you might run into selling books.”
“Of course I shall. If you say so, dear.”
I wrote up these last few words, but now I must put my pen down for the last time. I have spent my last moments so very happy. I am so happy for the reunion that lies in store for James. I am happy that he has been here by my side. Ultimately, I shall end my days in happiness. And that is all anyone can ask at the end of their life.
13 Most scholars believe this was some Victorian predecessor to the modern-day coarse expression, “No sh*t, Sherlock.” No one, however, can find specific examples of what the phrase would have been, and its modern variant apparently first appears in 1970s New York slang.
1895-1926
The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association. I was alone.
-‘The Blanched Soldier’ (1926)
(The following is an abridgement of Mary Forrester’s recordings. )
I was not present when my mother passed away, and over the following years I grew to feel I had not been present when she was alive. For not only was she, who was more dear to me than anyone else in my life, now gone. But my father, who had been so caring and solicitous a parent in my dimly-remembered toddling years, changed completely.
It was not long after Mother’s funeral that the formal process of Mrs. Forrester’s custody over me was committed to paper. For the purposes of schooling, I was registered as Mary Victoria Watson Forrester, and it was as a Forrester that, most days, I came to identify myself.
Mrs. Forrester was as loving and supportive to me as she had been to my mother. Some women have a naturally maternal nature, and it seems so cruel that she was never blessed with children of her own. I cannot imagine any child who would not benefit from the tutelage and encouragement of someone like her.
I spent several years feeling, in my marrow, to be a little emptier from Mother’s absence. Any more personal feelings, I held back with every fibre of my being. With a few years’ distance I had dulled the sharp sensations, and the painful memories, of those early months of 1894, and focussed almost entirely on the trivialities of the present: my school and my ambitions in adulthood. To a child, the passage of a few years can be such a wide gulf that I had detached myself from those desperately sad memories of my dear mother’s last days.
My exception to this was visiting, once or twice a week, Mother’s graveside. I made sure, though, to contain what I had felt there, and as such it felt like a spiritual separation from my daily routine.
I had, of course, been complicit in the arrangement in which I grew up. However, in my childish naïveté I had not thought it would be as great a wrench to me as it undoubtedly was. I cannot say I bore my father ill will for this. The years may have hurt me as they passed, but I never directed what anger and heartbreak I felt at anyone - least of all a man I regarded with such love.
I fully remember that day in April when he told me of Sherlock Holmes’s return. “I knew he’d be all right,” I said with my youthful arrogance.
“Of course you did, my dear. Why do I not always listen to you and your mother, eh? But it’s the most important secret, you know. You cannot tell anyone that he is alive. It’s the most important thing you can do. Just between ourselves, eh?”
I was happy then to be taken into his confidence.
The most important question to me as I think back on this time was: at what point did I know my father was beginning a new life - a life without me? Frustratingly to me now, I find this a very difficult question to answer. There was no definitive moment, no point of no return. There was just a slow accretion of details and disappointments that drove my father and me further apart.
I attended his wedding in 1902, along with Mrs. Forrester and a few of Father’s friends, then only dimly familiar to me. Sherlock Holmes still wished the public to think him dead, so he attended in disguise - wearing an elaborate moustache, darkening his skin to give him a faintly Mediterranean appearance, and adding some particularly obvious false jowls. He was introduced to all the guests as Mr. Altamont, a friend of Father’s from the club. I, however, saw through him at once - a talent I had evinced even as a little girl. Sometimes I think Holmes himself tipped me the wink, as it were, because there was always something about his eyes that gave his true self away - a certain kindliness that he would probably not bestow upon a criminal. With his secret safe, he took on an avuncular interest in my school-work, and we talked at length over the wedding breakfast. I remember being quite embarrassed when Mr. Holmes reminded me that in my youth, I had such difficulty pronouncing his name.
Perhaps I was being naïve, but I really had no inkling that his new wife would change Father so thoroughly. Holmes was as terse with her as he was with most people (I noted with some pride that I marked an exception to his aversion of the fair sex, no doubt aided by the affection he held for my mother). She was a younger woman, her accent carried with it a trace of American pronunciation. Like many Americans, she was gregarious and warm, but I think now that there was insincerity behind her kind words.
“Don’t you look lovely!” she said to me. I was, at a precocious twelve years of age, slightly too old to take such compliments at their face value, and beca
me embarrassed at the attention. As we talked, she said, “Mrs. Forrester is doing such a splendid job bringing you up. I am so glad to have you in our family.”
“I am glad also,” I replied with as much propriety as I could manage.
Nevertheless, I took from this exchange a promise that I would return to my father soon. It is an odd trick of the mind that I did so, as I now think back on the conversation and see that this was patently not what was said.
This promise remained unfulfilled over the months to come. During that time I felt more anger and disappointment towards my new stepmother than Father, but I actually thought little of it. Perhaps it was some mark of denial on my part that I latched quite so voraciously on to the fresh Sherlock Holmes stories published by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the new century. This new avenue opened up to me one day after school, when I came upon the then-recently published The Hound of the Baskervilles at a small shop on Charing Cross Road. It was commonly believed that Sir Arthur’s knighthood had came about because he bowed to public demand and ‘resurrected’ Sherlock Holmes (though I remained smug in my knowledge that he was still alive), and I shared the nation’s gratitude entirely.
I read the whole book in one sitting - and was thrilled to think that this dark and supernatural tale, with its elements of folklore and adventure, and its exotic wilderness setting of Dartmoor, was actually solved and experienced by these two men whom I considered my nearest kin. That strange disjunction - of not quite being able to believe the reality of these accounts - was a sensation that I recall fondly from reading it. For what did seem real, and indeed I knew and remembered from just a few years earlier, was the robust dependability of my dear father. I pored over his words and actions as much as Holmes’s - and I was so pleased that he had such a prominent role in the story, making the initial investigations of Baskerville Hall and protecting Sir Henry, while Holmes observed from afar.
As soon as I had finished the book, I went back and re-read it from the beginning. Its uncanny power and lustre seemed to gain with the second reading, and this time I paid more attention to details and embellishments that had first escaped me. It was not the simple family connection, but a genuine love of the thrilling and adventurous tale Father had told, that I found so compelling and fascinating.
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