The Watches of the Night

by Darcy Lindbergh

  Chapter Seventeen

  The page stretched out in front of me, blank and pristine. I could think of a hundred stories I needed to tell, but I was not sure I could write down the ones I wanted to tell the most. Holmes' warnings rung in my ears as though he were in my study himself. Things written down are always subject to discovery, he whispered. Perhaps you ought to make a mention of your wife.

  I didn't want to write about my wife.

  I wanted to write about him. Not about Holmes – not about the great detective with the great mind. I wanted to write about Sherlock.

  I wanted to write about his hands, his delicate fingers, his graceful movements. I wanted to write about the way he laughed, the way he flushed, the way he gasped under my touch. I wanted to write about his eagerness and his gentleness and his endless curiosity; I wanted to write about his eyes and his smile, his strength and his softness, and his love for me.

  I didn’t want to write accounts of his deductions and accomplishments. I wanted to create a portrait of the man, I thought, picking up my pen at last and putting it to the page. I wanted to draw him back into life and make the memory of him breathe.

  'John.'

  I looked up, blinking at the light of the lamp in Mary's hand; I hadn't noticed the fire burning out. 'What time is it?'

  She put her hand to my forehead. 'He wouldn't have wanted to see you like this,' she said, her voice thick with sympathy. 'You must go up to bed, John. I've had the second bedroom made up for you.'

  'The second bedroom?' We had slept separately before, but only when one of us was ill. I didn't think I was, but judging by the look on Mary's face, perhaps I was wrong.

  'I thought you'd be more comfortable if you slept alone,' she said carefully. She twisted her hands, hesitating, as though she were trying to explain something she didn't quite understand herself. 'If you did not – if you did not mistake my warmth for his.'

  I drew back, shocked. I should've denied the words, denied every one vehemently, but instead my eyes filled with tears and I could only bury my face in my hands. 'You knew. Mary. I'm so sorry.'

  Her hands touched mine, stroking and soothing. 'I think I always have,' she said, as gently and kindly as I could never deserve. 'It's all right. You loved me as well as you could, John. But I've always known that you loved him better.'

  That winter, Mary took a turn for the worse, and finally I realised the true depths of my depravity.

  While I had been with Holmes, Mary had contracted tuberculosis.

  She was dying.

  The infection worked quickly through her body, once it had begun. It made my veins run cold – that Mary had been suffering for months under my unseeing eye – but I could do nothing about it now. The helplessness ate at me the way the disease ate at her; at times I hoped it would prove just as fatal.

  I thought about my mother, convalescing all those years alone by the sea, and of Mary's own holidays to the coast. I had thought she meant to escape my poor company for that of her friends; instead she had spent them in an attempt to prolong her life away from the prying eyes of her doctor husband, who had been too busy with his own affairs – literally and figuratively – to even notice.

  In the end I had proved no better than my own father, than his hate and apathy.

  My betrayal was as complete as any man's had ever been, and I could do nothing but watch as Mary wasted away, as her lungs began to disintegrate. I could do nothing but watch, as the pillows, drenched with sweat, turned bloody.

  It didn't take long for the smell of Mary's sickroom to turn into that peculiarly sweet, rotting smell of a deathbed, and the long hours I spent next to her awoke memories of the base hospital at Peshawar.

  I'd been sure I was going to die there. The enteric fever left me delirious, dehydrated, in terrible pain and in terrible weakness. With the lingering pain from the Jezail bullet on top of it, I had wanted to die.

  Perhaps it'd been obvious. One of the nurses had taken a special interest in me, and when I asked her to tell me about the afterlife, she had instead insisted I be taken out to spend an afternoon on the verandah; my doctor had protested, sure it would kill me, but she'd stood firm: 'He's going to die anyway,' she had whispered, 'you may as well allow him some final sunshine.'

  Once on the verandah, I had croaked to her, 'I heard you say that. You think I'm going to die.'

  She had, surprisingly, smiled. 'Prove me wrong, and I'll apologise.'

  Mary would not prove me wrong, no matter what sunshine I summoned. I could only wait, trying to remember that missionary's name, what she had looked like. Her hair had been dark, I thought, but her eyes – her eyes had been blue.

  I slowly began to prepare for Mary's last days, and for the days that would come after. I nursed her, despite her protests – if I hadn't contracted the disease in Afghanistan, I told her, nor in the years living alongside her, I was unlikely to now – and tried not to think on whether it was better or worse to know the end was coming.

  I didn't let her see my pain. For once in my damnable life, I tried to do what would make her happiest: reading to her, bringing new messages or gossip, recounting stories of India and Afghanistan, and even, once or twice and only ever at her own request, of Sherlock Holmes himself. This I could do; this I owed to Mary.

  'Tell me what he was like,' she said, coughing. Fresh blood sputtered onto the pillows, smearing red over the older rust of dried sputum. 'When you were together, the two of you.'

  'You met him,' I reminded her, avoiding her true meaning. 'You knew him well, in fact.'

  She shook her head, a rare smile playing on her lips. 'I didn't know him the way you did. No one did. Please, John. I want to be able to recognise him when I see him again.' She closed her eyes. 'I want to give him my blessing.'

  In the end, I put away my journals. Packed up my pens and papers; gathered together all the half-completed thoughts stuffed into the various books and files and drawers of my writing desk. It was, in its own way, part of the ritual of mourning: as necessary and as clumsy and as heartwrenching as packing away Mary’s dresses, as changing the sheets on her bed.

  How does one accept a consolation graciously? How does one limit their responses to the polite thank you and the stiff upper lip? Mary’s friends made their presentations in full etiquette, Mrs Cecil Forrester’s eyes swimming in tears, reaching her gloved hands out to me, and I constantly felt two steps away from spilling out the truth: that I hadn’t loved her as I ought to have. That I had loved her, but not well enough.

  ‘You must tell us if there’s anything we can do for you,’ Mrs Forrester told me, as the fluttering ladies she’d arrived with dabbed at their eyes. I couldn’t remember a single one of their names, and was left to watch them, wondering whether they were here out of honest grief or just in observance of the procedure. ‘We’re so terribly sorry.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, instead of saying what I meant: not as sorry as I will always be.

  As the weeks passed, I was surprised at how many people seemed to hear of Mary’s death and think immediately of Sherlock Holmes, as if the world saw their passing as two sides of the same event.

  My editor had begged me to write a novel of the events of Holmes' death – 'For the public's mourning, Watson! How could you deny them?' – but I'd emphatically declined. The public didn’t need to know the details of Holmes' death in order to mourn him; they only wanted the details for the salaciousness of it, to imagine his expression as he went over the Reichenbach Falls, to prod at the depths of my grief. They didn't want to mourn Sherlock Holmes; they wanted to mourn a hero.

  I did not know that hero, and no story about Holmes' death would have included the story of Mary's. I could never tell one without the other's, I knew, and so I could not tell either at all.

  I packed up the house Mary and I had shared and moved into smaller quarters on Queen Anne Street. I took more patients and worked longer hours. A year passed, then two, and finally the publ
ic began to forget about Holmes.

  For myself, I remembered, and even after I came out of the mourning suits, I remained in black.

  So it went, for years. I walked. There wasn't anything else to do.

  The chill of London pressed in on me, suffocating me under the never-ending rains that threatened to wash the city out. The cold ran down into my bones; my feet, constantly damp, grew raw and red with sores. I walked and walked, going nowhere, trying to escape the fate I'd brought upon myself: a cold and hollow existence, bereft of those I'd loved.

  I had betrayed them, Sherlock and Mary. Selfishness and cowardice had guided my hands, and now they both lay dead at my feet as surely as if I had dealt the final blows myself. No amount of contrition was going to bring them back from where they'd drowned in the depths of my neglect – in the waters of the Reichenbach, in the blood of her own lungs.

  The lamps were no match for the wretched days and nights, and the shadows grew long under the rain. I walked Oxford Street, then Hampstead Road, then set into Regent's Park. Even those walkways were vacant, and I walked them slowly, remembering the days I'd wandered them arm-in-arm with a lover.

  When next I remembered myself, I was standing before Baker Street. I looked up, but all the lights were out, and the windows were empty and black.

  'That's never Doctor Watson? Why, hello!'

  I turned, and there on the pavement was none other than Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, hurrying toward me, half-grimacing, half-smiling. It had been more than two years since I'd seen him.

  'Oh, Inspector!' I greeted.

  Lestrade took my hand, obviously in earnest. 'The good Doctor,' he said. 'There is not a day that goes by that his name is not thought among those at Scotland Yard, you know.'

  There was a sharp pain in my chest. 'Is that – is that so?' I asked faintly. His name. As though his was the only name.

  'I tell all the new constables,' Lestrade went on, oblivious, not letting go of my hand. 'I worked with him! I had the chance to observe the genius at his work, to see the bloodhound in his element. Sherlock Holmes! We are very proud of him down at Scotland Yard, yes, we are, and of you as well.'

  'Oh, erm, thank you,' I managed, taken quite aback. 'He was the genius, though. I only took the notes.'

  'We have thought of you since his passing,' Lestrade said, still ignoring me. 'You have our condolences, sir. He was a very great man, and you must be missing his friendship, sir. We, too, are missing more of him than just his amazing brain.'

  My chance meeting with Lestrade opened a wound in me, and it was one that could not be staunched.

  Memories of Holmes, which I'd firmly repressed over the last few years, blossomed again in my mind. The quirk of his grin, the light of his eyes, the warmth of his hands – the details of all our adventures came rushing back, prodding at the loneliness I'd become so accustomed to. I remembered the rush of our feet against the cobblestones, the gas lamps piercing the fog, the adrenalin of his quick strength and his confident conclusions.

  My journals had sat in dust too long. I brushed off the neglect and opened them, remembering the dreamlike haze in which I'd written those last words, the detached reality in which I'd lived before Mary's condition had finally come to my horrifyingly belated attention.

  Could I really revisit all of those words now?

  Could I finally tell Sherlock Holmes' last story?

  Could I revisit the Reichenbach Falls, the swirling mist of that devilish cauldron that had claimed him? Could I revisit the hours I had spent, tracing his footsteps in the damp paths, wondering what his last thoughts had been?

  I didn't know if this would finally close Sherlock Holmes' wound in my heart, but I picked up my pen, and, once more, I began.

  I was still awake when the night began to lighten. I put down my pen, watching from my bedroom window as deep violet turned to grey, as pink brushed along the horizon. Once I might've thought it beautiful, a display of hope and survival – a sign that I had lasted out the night. Now it only heralded another day to spend going through the usual mechanisms – having breakfast, seeing patients, picking at dinner – as I waited for the sanctuary of the dark.

  The lone solace I granted myself was in the newspapers and my journals, in accounts of the many crimes and intrigues that plagued the public. I scoured each article, using the methods I had learned at the hand of the world's foremost criminal expert, but more often than not I found myself distracted from the evidence and arguments by the ghost that walked between the lines.

  Sometimes I could even see him again: his tall, lean figure stalking around a room, flourishing his hands, pointing out this clue or that. I wondered what clues he might see about me now, what deductions he might make. Whether I would catch his eye the way I had that first night together, so many years ago.

  Whether Sherlock Holmes would still want to deduce the fragments that were left of his Boswell.

  There are a thousand ghosts in London.

  I could still see Sherlock Holmes sometimes, in this restaurant or that news-agent's. I saw him sitting at the table in Simpson's where I'd first fallen in love with him; I could see him in Regent's Park, turning his sharp gaze to the spring leaves. His face peered out of passing cabs and shop windows. He stood with Mary behind the columns of the Lyceum Theatre, turning their faces toward me, expecting me to follow along.

  In the spring of 1894, London gained a new ghost: the Honourable Ronald Adair, the murdered young man that became the subject of great interest in what was known as the Park Lane Mystery.

  I'd been trying to resolve the mystery as a little exercise of Holmes' old methods, but hadn't gotten very far; I thought perhaps viewing the scene would be instructive. If Inspectors Lestrade or Gregson were in charge, I might stand some chance of being invited in. I set out, but it was no good; I did not recognise any of the constables.

  It didn't matter, I thought, as I helped gather the books I had knocked out of some old bibliophile's arms. There were many ghosts in London, but none of them were real, and no ghost of Sherlock would fill his place besides.

  I didn't understand. I couldn't understand.

  The remnants of the old, decrepit bookseller sat discarded on my examination table; a spectre sat in my patient's chair. I heard his voice, smelled the smoke of his cigarette, and still I barely dared believe it.

  'I owe you a thousand apologies,' Sherlock Holmes had said, offering a smile. 'I had no idea you would be so affected.'

  He was alive. Sherlock was alive, and joyful, sitting in my chair and telling me stories of Tibet and France and everywhere in between, of exploring everything and learning anything and gathering what information he could about Professor Moriarty.

  He'd watched me, that night at the Reichenbach Falls. He'd watched as I cried out for him. As I believed that he had gone willingly into the water. As I believed that, in denying him the whole of my life, I had driven him to his death.

  Every word he spoke cut me deeply, but I couldn't turn away from him for fear that he would disappear again. Instead I put on a trembling smile to match his own, locking away my despair. No idea, he'd said, that I would be so affected, and I decided, then and there, that if Holmes could not deduce it, I would never show him the true extent of my bereavement.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I had been consumed by a fantasy – or else by a nightmare. I was not yet sure.

  Holmes flitted around his old rooms at Baker Street as though he'd never left them, examining his books, and expounding on his deductions. It was as though he'd already forgotten his time abroad, and now intended to take up his old post as though nothing had changed.

  Everything had changed.

  I had changed.

  My mask of delight and relief finally began to falter. I wanted nothing more than to go home, to bury my face in my hands and burn out every pointless thought I'd had, blaming myself for things that had not even happened. Despising myself for things that we
ren't even true.

  Holmes, incredibly, mistook my troubled mind for exhaustion. 'Why don't you lie back on the sofa,' he said, putting his books aside, 'and take some rest, dear boy.'

  He reached out, as though to guide me back, but I recoiled from his touch, and the first hint of distress appeared in his features. 'You're safe here,' he said, his voice gone soft and soothing. 'I understand it's quite the shock.'

  I laughed, helplessly, but I could not relax in that eerily familiar room with my eerily familiar companion. In the end, I took the first opportunity I could find, and bolted.

  I felt like my chest was being ripped open as I ran. Like my fragile heart was finally being torn in two.

  I'd been naught but a pawn in Sherlock's game, and I'd been played – a worthy actor on the stage for the benefit of Moriarty's actors, and then even as the need for deception had passed, I'd been forgotten. All the pain and grief and mourning I had suffered, every sleepless night, every nightmare, every moment trying to close the wound in my chest that Holmes had left behind: simply, utterly meaningless.

  He was alive.

  He was alive, and I'd barely survived the years of his silence and his duplicity. He was alive, traveling the world, conducting experiments, learning and exploring, and I had been in London, watching as Mary slipped away, clinging to my own survival.

  I raged through my rooms for days, swearing never to see him again, but when I finally picked up my papers, my half-written accounts of our adventures, drawing back my hand to throw them into the fire, I could not make myself do it.

  In life or in death or in resurrection, no matter how heartsick or heartbroken, would I always be drawn toward Sherlock Holmes? Would I never really be free of him?

  Would the ties between us never truly be broken?

  I went back. Of course I did.