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acdholmesfestWritten on Sand
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marta_bee
Author:tweedisgood
Word Count: ~6,500
Rating: PG
Pairing, characters: Holmes/Watson, OFCs
Summary: “Reputation is a fiction written on sand.” A case without a crime. Without much of a case, come to that.
Beta thanks to:mad_with_july by kind permission of Miss Kick
Warnings: Victorian prejudices
To Sherlock Holmes, nature is first and foremost a matter of science. He admires its works, but rarely glories in them. Instead he observes nature; he dissects it; he pins it to a card. For me, his humble companion John H. Watson, MD, it is a work of art.
It was early spring in the English countryside. Despite the mud that sprayed up every time the dog-cart’s wheels passed through a dip in the lane, despite the cold air nipping at the tops of my ears where my muffler did not quite cover them, the season’s gift of freshness, and the promise of warm days to come, buoyed me up.
Galaxies of blackthorn flowers surprised and delighted, their white stars scattered all about the hedgerows. Faded Persian carpets of buttery primroses, sky-blue squill and white and purple crocus lay spread over cottage gardens, waiting for the sun to bring out their colour. We bumped over a bridge across a canal, past the lock basin. Gloss-painted barges bobbed in the swells; whiskery pull-horses ate from buckets of oats strung round their noses. Willows wept the yellow fire of their new shoots into the water.
I wriggled this way and that, trying to catch sight of everything and wishing I had not tucked my notebook away in my valise. A precisely-tuned cough turned my attention to Holmes who, ever since we had left the railway station, had sat silent and still, brows drawn over the coming case, hands clasped under his chin in prayer to the god of reason. I was about to apologise for disturbing his concentration when I took in his dry, indulgent smile, and the used envelope and stub pencil he was holding out to me.
“We must all improvise from time to time, Watson.”
As I fought to keep the scrap of paper on my knee from being whipped out of my hands by the March winds, and scribbled down the impressions which appear, with a little polish, at the start of this tale, the road began to follow the line of a Carr-stone estate wall at least seven feet high. After a few hundred yards of this, we turned suddenly sharp right, through a pair of ancient gates down an avenue of limes.
Low Hall deserved its name. Its eaves hung heavy over the upper storey of a long, squat building that might have been made for midgets or dolls, so cramped were its doorways, so miniature its windows. The grounds, though, were glorious. Sweeping pastures, crowned with wreaths of oak and beech groves, rose up around a domestic garden devoted to flowering shrubs, above all to the camellia in every variety.
******************************************************************
Our client had worn a red camellia in the buttonhole of her coat, on the morning she came to call at Baker Street.
The brief telegram “REQUEST CONSULTATION BAKER STREET MORNING THIRD MARCH STOP A HEACHAM” had been welcome enough. Holmes had his lean months, even in busy years. Crime had been nodding of late - at any rate, the sort of crime that interested him.
But Miss Anne Heacham had not brought with her a crime. Only a nuisance and, as we listened to her story, I quite expected Holmes to send her away with a wave of his hand, saying that he was not, so far as he recalled, the advice column of a ladies’ weekly magazine.
From her point of view it was a considerable nuisance, no doubt. She and her sister resided at Low Hall, close by a village in the county of Bedfordshire. Their family had lived there for many generations, farming in a moderately prosperous way. It was clear that this prosperity was to be understood in the past tense. Holmes might, as he did, deduce it from her sleeve-ends or bootlaces – for she was well, if plainly, dressed in twill and country tweeds, not in the least openly shabby. I simply read more of the newspapers than the personal columns and Police reports. Estate sales and wage disputes, the flow of labourers from field to town to seek their fortune: it was all the same tale. Farming, by and large, did not pay any more.
“Offers have been made, yes, Mr Holmes. Offers for the estate outright, for parcels of outlying fields. Anything they wanted outside the wall, we have agreed. It only served to encourage the hyenas.”
Holmes, standing by the mantelpiece as I poured tea for our guest, stiffened and turned to her in surprise. “Hyenas? Rather violent language to frame a commercial proposition. There is more to it, is there not?”
She folded her arms and sighed.
“More…personal offers have disturbed our peace. We do not mingle, you must understand: do not dine out save at the houses of one or two intimate friends; do not receive guests from the neighbourhood, do not go to church. An offer of marriage from a gentleman one has never met, and whose real motives must be plain merely from his address, is a positive insult. It is not the only such insult I have had; the latest, only last week.”
Holmes cleared his throat and chanced his arm.
“Miss Heacham. I venture to suggest that the gentlemen in question may have had, at worst, mixed motives, and intended the opposite of insult. Word gets about; you are not a complete recluse. You cannot be unaware that there may be a…personal equation in these experiments?”
Even he could not have failed to notice. Symmetry of face, colour and clarity of eye, trimness of figure: these were matters of mathematics, and together the sum added up to beauty. ‘A face a man might die for.’ He had said those words, once upon a time – an observation, not a declaration, but even so. I had thought of them the moment our client had come into the room.
He swept onto the chair opposite her and leaned in, piercing her with one of his intense, scrutinising stares. If she flinched, and strong men had done so before her, there was no outward sign.
“Why, therefore,” he mused, as much to himself as to her, “do you feel insulted?”
“Because, Mr Holmes, word gets about, just as you say. The ‘word’ in Arlesey is that my sister and I have been educated above our prospects; that we put on airs and dare to argue against the dispensations of Providence; that we are, in a word, bluestockings, whom no man should care to have in his house. ”
“And you in turn have no desire to be put there.” It was not a question. “Then refuse. A lady is permitted to refuse marriage.” He appraised her again. “Forgive me if I state the obvious, and ask the obvious too. Miss Heacham, why have you come to me?"
She glanced at me, standing by the tea things and, like her, waiting on genius.
“Because I seek justice – true justice, not a mere legal sop. The difficulty, Mr Holmes, is that for my sister and I, 'justice' is not so easily won. You are a man with a reputation for putting justice on at least an equal footing with the law, for not believing with Thrasymachus that it is only a matter of the strong imposing on the weak. Also,” - and here the briefest smile touched her lips – “because I have read that you once said ‘I cannot make bricks without clay’, and it is clay that, if I may be permitted a pun, lies at the bottom of it and bricks, not matrimony, that they want.”
Miss Heacham gathered her skirts, sweeping them to the side and out of touching distance, reclaiming her own territory.
“From the beginning, then. From clay.”
“Indeed. The clay was there before any of us, before humankind, before the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. From Dorsetshire it comes near the surface across a swathe of Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire, east to the Fenlands, north as far as Yorkshire. Fine white and yellow clay, and from it the finest and most decorative house-bricks are made in their millions. Have you ever seen a brick clamp ready for firing, gentlemen? A Ziggurat of ingenuity and earth, clay and coal in precisely calculated amounts, even down to a percentage of cinder in the green brick. Once touched with fire, it glows from within as the firefly makes its own light. You are surprised, Mr Holmes. You took me for a Luddite, a Blake, wishing that England were an eternal a pastoral fantasy in which to wander. ”
“Not at all. Yet you do wish this miracle of the clamp to take place elsewhere than on your own property.”
“The grass is nothing, Mr Holmes. The wall is everything. We have endured men perched in trees, men on ladders with theodolites, men with binoculars, men applying for work who say that other men sent them. Every pretext to cover spying out the land...”
“And spying on the ladies of Low Hall,” my friend finished for her.
“Yes.” She flushed, angry yet refusing to be humiliated. “Oh, they want the land. Certainly they do. Demand for building materials remains high as the population, in enthusiastic defiance of Mr Malthus, continues to grow. They want the land and the clay underneath it, and would pay for it if they cannot get it by other means. Yet if it were only a matter of money. Money can, given time, economy and toil, be recovered. If it were simply about the gossip, the sneers, well: pride is a snare and reputation a fiction written on sand. I do not care for novels. What is intolerable is that they will not let us be."
Holmes, who had been known to make a choice statement or two of his own about educated women, and handled money with as little attention as he could possibly manage, could still be moved by this appeal – to be allowed to be different, as his fame allowed him to be.
Other people’s secrets fell before him like the walls of Jericho. His own could not be had for love, money, deduction, nor any other way than deliberate gift. It so happened that I was about to be offered the deepest secret of all, as an unlooked-for gift. But I did not know that, then. I only knew that he had decided to find out, then to keep and protect, the secrets of Low Hall.
“I must come down, you know,” he said. “Will it be…inconvenient?”
It would be, no doubt, but she had brought her trouble to Sherlock Homes, and she had perforce to trust him.
“You can stay at the Placket Arms, between the house and the village.” She took us both in with a glance, for there was no doubt in any of our minds that ‘I’ would ever and ever mean ‘we’.
**************************************************************
And so to the end of the avenue of limes and the front door of Low Hall, where a servant girl of no more than twelve let us in, cradling a feather duster in the crook of her arm as if it were a doll. She took our hats and coats, carried them piled on top of her until she nearly disappeared beneath a heap of plush and wool, and hung them on the coat-stand before skipping off to find her mistress. She made me feel old as Methuselah.
Our client, in her library, greeted us over half-moon glasses and a book: a book which revealed itself, as she laid it on the table beside her, to be in the original Greek. Holmes registered this as he did everything else in the room - sharp, quick glances eating up every clue and signifier, making ready to show off his wares.
“You respected Miss Emily Davies a great deal, but did not love her, spent two years sharing her roof but left for lack of encouragement rather than funds. Your father, I think, needed you at home. You study the classics because you wish to improve your mind, but science has your heart.”
Miss Heacham took off her spectacles and stared open-mouthed for a moment before remembering her dignity and coolly inviting him to explain.
“You possess a copy of Miss Davies' The Higher Education of Women but it shows no real sign of having been read and holds pride of place in the bookcase containing those volumes meant for show, not use. Oh, do not protest, madam, every library in every country house has one. The book you were reading is the Cyropaedia of Xenophon which no man – excuse me, I think no lady either – picks up purely for pleasure. You are using for a bookmark a postcard of the exterior of Girton College for women as it appeared before the newest buildings were complete; you were not there by then. In the bookshelves you use often, are well-thumbed works on natural science by the dozen. Incidentally, you want the translation of Strecker’s organic chemistry with annotations, not the original: I can recommend it.”
He perched on the window seat looking out over the garden and folded his arms, admiring the camellias and himself in equal proportions.
“My father is dead, Mr Holmes.”
This was not quite the reception his best parlour trick usually had.
“I am sorry to hear it. That was, however, why you came home?”
She nodded, moving to the window to look out with him over her inheritance. As I joined them, I saw that someone was working in the distance outside - a slight figure wrapped in a hooded cloak, seated on a low stool on the lawn and digging with a long trowel in the soil of one of the flowerbeds.
“The glory of the garden is all down to my sister. Not a day goes by without her finding some little job to make it yet more beautiful. You should see it in summer.”
“I would like to hear her impression of the trials you told me about,” said Holmes. As if she had never entertained the idea, as if it was not the most natural thing to expect, Miss Heacham turned on him with firm purpose.
“Quite impossible, I am afraid. She will not see you.”
Holmes put a hand to the back of his neck and bent his head as under a yoke.
“You put a serious obstacle in the way of my helping you. What objection can the other Miss Heacham have to me, and to finding a solution to the problem?”
“Perhaps it is only that she doubts you can help, Holmes?” I was trying to be chivalrous to the lady but only succeeded in drawing a sardonic expression out of my friend.
“Watson, you wound me. Oh, ye of little faith. It is, nevertheless, an odd fancy in the circumstances. May one enquire as to her reasons? I hope your engaging me has not caused a rift or a quarrel between the two of you.”
That was another idea which appeared to astonish our hostess.
“Strangers frighten her,” was her only comment.
I cannot often follow Holmes’ thoughts merely from his expression, not as he does mine, but as he looked again to the garden the thought that our client was not being straight with us may as well have left bootprints across his face. Yet he did not challenge her.
I was fairly bursting with curiosity to know why not, but as soon as I began to speak he shushed me with a glance. He asked to see a plan of the estate, and the rest of an hour was spent poring over it, myself being given the job of noting down roads and footpaths, neighbouring properties and their occupants, field and furrow – in short, the whole lie of the land. Somewhere in the middle of our labours, the gardener had left hers. She had gone back into the house, no doubt, but still kept well out of eye- and earshot.
Over supper at the inn, Holmes purposely avoided any talk of Low Hall for fear of flapping local ears, so it was not until we had settled in to the comfortable double-bedded room that I was able to press him on the subject. He talked lightly of dairy yields and brickfields and sidestepped most of my attempts to get him to commit himself to declaring what lay at the heart of the trouble and what, if anything, was to be done about it.
“I am biding my time, Watson,” he replied at last. “The rest will follow, if only I dare be bold enough.”
“Bold?”
“Mmm.”
But he said no more, only disappeared to the great within, where cogs whirred in the intricate machine of deduction inside his head, gears cranking, connections being made. It seemed that like everyone else, I should have to wait for the striker on the bell to tell me the time, to tell past, present and future.
People have asked me if I am ever weary of it: of waiting to be told, of being two steps behind, of being the junior partner in the enterprise, although I am the elder by some years and a man of the world as Holmes, in so many ways, is not. What they really mean, of course is that they should grow weary of it. For myself, I have long believed that the man who cannot bear to follow, to give way to greatness, is a man who fears for his own worth, not one who is secure in it. It is hard, indeed, to know oneself ordinary. Who would not wish to excel? The truth is that genius, like logic, is rare. I am touched by it, as few even are, and that is enough.
Touched. Now there is a portmanteau of a word. There’s glory for you. Touched as touch paper, to make a warming fire or an uncontrolled blaze. Touched by the sun to robust health or to prostration. Touched to attractive eccentricity or to frank madness. A simple touch of hands, clasped in the darkness and in the face of danger. A touch that is the very opposite of simple.
His long back, pressed against mine by the narrow confines of a well-worn mattress that dipped in the middle. His careless hand on my shoulder in the morning as he rose. Simple friendship was what he offered, this man who had no friends save one. It was not for me to complicated matters.
The truth was, I wanted to complicate them, had wanted to for years, before the Park Lane airgun, before Reichenbach, even before Norwood and Mary Morstan. Ordinary men have their secrets, too. Three continents hold a great many women and I have held my share of them. I have loved and lusted, greeted and parted, known and enjoyed - and been enjoyed. It is – just – permissible to hint (to boast a little, if I am honest) at those adventures in public, even in print.
Yet woe betide the man who gives so much as a shadow of a hint that his tastes may stretch further, that his attention can be captured by a delicate female ankle… but by a broad set of male shoulders equally. Or, in one case, a narrow set of them. By a brilliant mind and a sudden, violent laugh; by a temper like a flame and a heart that burns for justice - heedless, heartless ‘society’ be damned.
I may say it here, in a story that shall never cross an editor’s desk nor see a letterpress. I may say that I loved him. That I love him still, that I live and will die loving him – as friend, as master, as more. As everything, body and soul.
There. Those are words enough on the subject, John Watson. Words to condemn you and him together. Hide them; better still, strike them out altogether. Cut out your heart. Tell instead what happened next at Arlesey, in the County of Bedfordshire.
All the morning Holmes stayed where he had gone to some destination on foot, without me. He set me the task of being his eyes and ears, of playing the part of casual visitor, of striking up those easy conversations with strangers, which I take pleasure in and he treats as mere business. At the inn, the grocer, the tobacconist and Mrs Morris’ Pantry (“Tea and a tart, tuppence ha’penny”), I picked up what gleanings I could and took them back to my notebook to thresh them into a neat pile fit to give Holmes when he returned.
I found far less curiosity and censure about the inhabitants of Low Hall than I expected. They were more interested in news from London, in the price of livestock and the state of the roads. A few criticised the absence from church on Sundays, but more excused it on the grounds that old Mr Heacham had never set foot there, and it did not prevent him being a fair-minded employer and generous to the unfortunate, unlike some they could name.
“Think carefully, Watson. You did just as I said and did not ask after the Misses Heacham by name?”
“Yes, but why-"
“All in good time. We must leave. Be so good as to find a carter to take us back to the station, and pay the innkeeper’s bill.”
“Leave! Have you solved the mystery already? Or are you giving up on it after all?”
He was positively enjoying my confusion but only murmured a warning to keep my voice down. As the carter lifted up our bags I noticed for the first time – so entranced had I been by the signs of spring during our journey to Arlesey – how much luggage he had compared to mine and to his usual habit, which was to take a change of linen or two and trust to luck as to the rest. When we reached the railway station he told me to sit out of sight of the road.
Beside the station was a goods yard. Stacks of timber, bags of feed and barrels of tar crowded one another with only a few spaces between. Into one of these Holmes scrambled, carrying his bags awkwardly in front of him, nearly toppling a pile of empty pallets. The foreman, I noticed, was enjoying a swift smoke and a newspaper behind the outhouse.
I waited. The London train came and went. After half an hour, Holmes had still not emerged. As I had no idea what he was looking for or why, I could only hope that he had not somehow got on the train by a back way and left me behind, and that the end of my vigil should not be a telegram from Town bearing brisk apologies and brisker instructions.
“Pardon me, sahib. Could you direct me toward the lower hall of Ar-less-ee?”
A sallow-faced man with a neat but full black beard, wearing a suit cut in the fashion of an Anglo-Indian clerk and swathed in a shawl big enough for an elephant, peered at me through pebble glasses from underneath the brim of a deep umbrella. His voice was soft, his words a little accented but perfectly clear.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to find a carrier,” I said, wondering what exotic quest had brought him to the middle of the English countryside. “It’s nearly three miles, if you mean Low Hall.”
The coincidence of it struck me suddenly and I looked closer.
“Holmes!”
He adopted a crestfallen expression even more theatrical than his disguise and put a gravy-browned finger to his lips.
“For two days I have practised that character in spare moments, and here you are not taken in for more than a minute. It is as well I am a moderately successful criminal agent: evidently, I should not make a career upon the stage.”
“What on earth are you up to?” I hissed. Two days? protested my mystified brain.
“Introducing a fly into the ointment. A fly which I hope will put off further interference with Miss Heacham and her household. Play along with me, Watson. I have stowed my proper luggage with my friend the foreman over there – his friendship can be bought for half a crown – and kept only this.”
He held up a wicker travelling case, looking for all the world as if he were planning a picnic. So, I took the part of helpful guide, making sure that the dog-cart driver had the news that my companion had returned to London and that while I waited for him to conclude urgent business there and either himself return or require me to go, I, being an old India hand, had set myself to help a gentleman traveller from the subcontinent. Thus I bid him good bye at the gates of Low Hall and turned back for the station and the waiting room.
How aptly named. I waited, with a book from the kiosk, until hunger drove me to the public house down the street. An indifferent lunch and a pint of flat beer later, I went back to the ticket office. No-one had called for me, or left a note. The foreman at the goods yard told me that “that tall bloke” had not said how long he wanted his cases kept safe, that it was no skin off his nose, what was another package among a hundred, they could stay there a week for all the difference it made to him.
I began to wonder if I’d been forgotten in the thrill of the chase, and my temper grew as thin as a farthing. When the message finally came, I snatched it from the butcher’s boy with a growl, and had to make it up to him with a good tip or he might have burst into tears.
“Post Office, High Street. Leave this for ‘Mr Heacham’”. With it was a sealed envelope addressed to a Post Office Box number.
The postmistress, about to put up the shutters for the day, told me all about it – all about the real owner of Low Hall, the son of old Mr Heacham’s deceased elder brother and an Indian lady, “of the highest rank in those parts, practically a princess”, come to claim his property in England. To think, she said, that all this time we never knew. The misses Heacham had welcomed him, to their great credit, and it was thought he would continue to let them live there, having occupation in the law and desiring to live in London. Probably just as well, not many of his sort in Bedfordshire to be had, he’d feel out of place. And he was in correspondence with Mr Sherlock Holmes! He’d sent Mr Holmes ahead no doubt, to check that all was in order, well, you had to wonder why a famous detective had come here, it’s not as if we go in much for crime , sir.
In one half-excited, half-scandalised breath the deed was done, and she had surely repeated something like it to everyone who had come in before me. If the local public house was the chief centre for country gossip, the post office was surely the other.
I had no more instructions, and did not know what else to do besides walk back up to the Hall. As if he had been expecting me to do exactly that, Holmes-as-Heacham-sahib, coming the other way, greeted me in the lane with a furled umbrella.
“Ah, Watson. Well-met. We have been invited for supper. It is a rational household and dressing for the occasion is, thankfully, optional. Come along!” And he spun on his heel.
I felt far too sweaty and rumpled to be presentable, however ‘rational’ the company, but if she noticed (and she did) Miss Anne forgave me. Holmes had done it again – turned a reserved and doubtful client into a loyal acolyte, quite prepared to accept that all would be well, now he had attended to the problem. She did not gush, of course, did not fawn. It was not her nature. Yet she was in such peace of mind that not only did she welcome us at her table, we were given the rare privilege of an introduction to Miss Emma.
Who was not in the least as I had expected. She was merry, she was outspoken, and she was fiercely intelligent - well, I ought to have expected that. She was also, if one may be permitted a private judgement, rather plain – but a plainness combined with such energy and light that it hardly signified and besides, I was hard put not to keep looking at something else altogether.
She wore trousers. Elegant, well-cut, feminine ones, in glowing cinnamon silk – but they could not be mistaken for skirts. I had never seen such a garment on a lady in England. However Holmes did not comment, and so neither did I. He sat, still in disguise – he often took pleasure in being someone else- lapsing from time to time into character, making the company laugh, and assured me that no-one else had been able to tell his real identity, not even the ladies until he chose to reveal himself
“Your face, if you will pardon me, Miss Heacham, was the epitome of astonishment.”
“I should think so. My uncle died barely four months after arriving in Calcutta. I’d have been very surprised to think that he had time to marry meanwhile.”
*********************************************
Back at Baker Street, after he had heard out my own astonishment at the bohemian style at Low Hall – I admit this took quite some time – I asked Holmes how it was that the appearance of a supposed owner of the property would answer all the ladies’ complaints. What of the constant intrusions into their privacy?
“My dear Watson, have I not often said that it is principally those who have something to hide who believe everyone is spying on them?”
To my knowledge, he had not often said it, nor even once, but I let that pass, for it did sit with the comparative indifference I had noticed at Arlesey towards the misses Heacham. Nevertheless, I could not see what, aside from those trousers, they would have to hide.
“At first I suspected the father to be still living, but hopelessly mad, or at least senile, and their isolation to be a way to cover that up. Then I formed an idea, and as it grew I gave you that warning not to mention them by name, but just to see what came up in conversation. In your appreciation of Miss Emma, did you not notice one significant fact? No, Watson,” he continued as I opened my mouth to speak, “not the trousers, extraordinary as they undoubtedly were. Her eyes.”
“A tendency to myopia, perhaps, but that runs in families, you know. Miss Anne already needs spectacles.”
“Tsk. Well, as you have your professional interests, so I have mine. Miss Emma has brown eyes. Both Mr Heacham and his wife, whose photographs and portraits have pride of place in the library at Low Hall, were blue-eyed. Are we back in medical territory yet, Watson?”
“Ah. Two brown-eyed parents may sometimes have blue eyed children...”
“But never the other way about. Exactly.”
“By-blow smuggled in? Hardly enough reason to hide her away – people are, as you do very often say, unobservant, and take things to be as they expect. Or they may instead be friends, as close as sisters. Whichever it is, surely it makes no difference to their plight.”
He hesitated. He feared, I know now, that I would be scandalised by his conclusions. That if I accepted them as true, I might condemn the ménage at Low Hall, and others like them. That I would not be bold.
“They are friends, yes. Friends of a…very particular kind.”
He searched my face, to see if I took his meaning, and what I might make of it if I did. I am, it is true, sometimes slow on the uptake. He tried again, stressing his words with a lift of his expressive brows.
“Consider that Miss Anne reads Greek very well, Watson.”
Meaning obediently dawned. It had a habit of showing itself for Sherlock Holmes. A moment later, when I had stopped goggling at him as if he had just told me that Mrs Hudson was in the pay of the Metropolitan Police, it fell to me to ask him how on earth had he deduced that?
He sighed. “It was not, in fact, the trousers. I can see that thought striding all over your face, don’t deny it. Those who look at outward appearance are condemned to be proven wrong nine times out of ten. I had come already prepared to test my theory that Miss Anne had something to hide, that her talk of spies and insults hardly matched her evident self-possession. Adopting that disguise enabled me to clear away the old top growth masking the living heart of the plant – if a man who ‘knows nothing of practical gardening’ may be permitted that metaphor.”
Damn that damned list
“I told her that I could divert all attempts to acquire or to mine her estate – I shall have any future correspondence for ‘Mr Heacham’ dealt with by a solicitor who is in my debt – and that I could not see why that should not be the end of it. When she hesitated, I told her that she should not be ashamed of her nature. I could have meant her intelligence, her reticence, even her looks. But when she glanced, without a second thought, at the camellia garden, her fear came into focus. She loves another woman, body and soul, and has not yet altogether shaken off society’s incomprehension of nature’s true variety.”
I felt myself on shifting sand, reputation about to be swept away by the sea. What if he should discover the variety which existed under his very roof? Attack, so it is said, is the best form of defence.
“Holmes! Even for you, that is surely a leap too far, and a really outrageous suggestion to boot. Please tell me you did not so much as imply in her hearing that there was anything improper going on?”
“I am a scientist. I do not recognise anything in nature which does no harm as ‘improper’ so no, I did not. Propriety has a good deal to answer for. Cruelty, infidelity, greed, disgrace – all children of ‘propriety’.” He looked directly at me, a challenge in his eye, but compassion too. “Above all, Watson, my very dear friend: hypocrisy.”
He knew, then. Knew at least some of it, had marked it somehow from my manner, from the way I folded my pocket-handkerchief, from a long-ago innocent slip of the tongue. I had been so careful, so careful but of course, I could never have been careful enough. This was Sherlock Holmes. Had he also guessed – no, he never guesses – had he seen the rest: that in my divided nature I had turned to him, as a spring flower to the sun?
We took our seats on either side of the fire, as we often did when there was no case to write up and Holmes had not disappeared into a chemistry experiment, or into one of his black fits of withdrawal. I expected to be quizzed, to be put under the microscope like a bacterium and all my parts described, but he said nothing, only smoked a long pipe, his faraway eyes deep in thought.
“I find that, like Miss Anne Heacham, I do not care for novels,” he said, at long last. “Nor, for that matter, shorter fiction. Too little unvarnished truth; too much playing to the crowd.”
“Holmes?”
“Your own oeuvre, for example,” he went on, “is expressly designed to flatter me. I am its subject, and its intended audience.”
I began to protest, but he would have none of it.
“You have said so yourself. You wish me to read that I am the supreme rationalist, the man who thinks but does not feel, who has never loved nor is ever likely to, who desires no-one and nothing save work and white poison. Other people may read it too, of course, may pay for the privilege of thinking that they know Sherlock Holmes. Well, there is little harm in that and some distinct good, in the circumstances. But let us have no fiction here, between the two of us. Let us have unvarnished truth.”
He paused, knocked out his pipe on the arm of the chair and put it back in the rack. To do so, he had to cross to my side of the hearth. What he did not have to do, was to go at once to his knees by my chair and take hold of my hand. Yet there it was, my hand clasped between his long, fine fingers, even before I yelped with the shock of it. There was his narrow face, inches from mine, grey eyes fixing me with a look that I could not fathom: half yearning, half apology.
“If crime is common, hypocrisy is well-nigh universal, it seems. I, too have been guilty. I allowed your little fictions to go unchecked, until they became a reputation that shielded me so well, I did not mind that it hemmed me in as well.”
“The truth….” He braced himself and met that truth like a man, “… is that I am like you, and unlike. Your nature is to love widely, across continents, across the sexes, to be generous in your passions. Mine is to keep back everything until I must, to keep close to home, to desire only men, and precious few even of those. I am quite out of the habit of feeling, but not out of the power of it. Out of the practice of passion, but not its anticipation. You have thought about me in that way: one could hardly miss it. I want to tell you…to say…”
I could hardly believe this was happening. It was a stage play come to life, and my scripted line must be:
“Yes, Holmes?”
“…that I do not mind.”
Holmes of course, could never stick to a script. He would have truth and not fiction, however much it stung me. He pressed my hand, compelled me to look at him again, and spoke with a fervour he usually reserved for the courtroom.
“I beg you do not misunderstand me, my dear fellow. My dear Watson. John. I have never loved – but one. Never made room for another’s love – but one. It is spring, the very time for new beginnings. High summer will come, autumn and winter too – we shall spend them all together, if you will permit it. Just now, though: just now, I would wait. Live with this understanding a little while longer, before we have declarations and déshabillé.”
He should not have been who he is, otherwise. I should not have been who I am if I did not know how much he was offering, and what it cost him to do it, to speak of it at all. That precious gift of understanding, and the promise to entertain more, I accepted with a full heart. He is not a calculating machine, whatever Doyle may say. That is a reputation written on sand, and I knew that the tide would come in as, in the fullness of time, it did.
We swim in it still, together.
END
For:
marta_beeAuthor:
tweedisgoodWord Count: ~6,500
Rating: PG
Pairing, characters: Holmes/Watson, OFCs
Summary: “Reputation is a fiction written on sand.” A case without a crime. Without much of a case, come to that.
Beta thanks to:
mad_with_july by kind permission of Miss KickWarnings: Victorian prejudices
To Sherlock Holmes, nature is first and foremost a matter of science. He admires its works, but rarely glories in them. Instead he observes nature; he dissects it; he pins it to a card. For me, his humble companion John H. Watson, MD, it is a work of art.
It was early spring in the English countryside. Despite the mud that sprayed up every time the dog-cart’s wheels passed through a dip in the lane, despite the cold air nipping at the tops of my ears where my muffler did not quite cover them, the season’s gift of freshness, and the promise of warm days to come, buoyed me up.
Galaxies of blackthorn flowers surprised and delighted, their white stars scattered all about the hedgerows. Faded Persian carpets of buttery primroses, sky-blue squill and white and purple crocus lay spread over cottage gardens, waiting for the sun to bring out their colour. We bumped over a bridge across a canal, past the lock basin. Gloss-painted barges bobbed in the swells; whiskery pull-horses ate from buckets of oats strung round their noses. Willows wept the yellow fire of their new shoots into the water.
I wriggled this way and that, trying to catch sight of everything and wishing I had not tucked my notebook away in my valise. A precisely-tuned cough turned my attention to Holmes who, ever since we had left the railway station, had sat silent and still, brows drawn over the coming case, hands clasped under his chin in prayer to the god of reason. I was about to apologise for disturbing his concentration when I took in his dry, indulgent smile, and the used envelope and stub pencil he was holding out to me.
“We must all improvise from time to time, Watson.”
As I fought to keep the scrap of paper on my knee from being whipped out of my hands by the March winds, and scribbled down the impressions which appear, with a little polish, at the start of this tale, the road began to follow the line of a Carr-stone estate wall at least seven feet high. After a few hundred yards of this, we turned suddenly sharp right, through a pair of ancient gates down an avenue of limes.
Low Hall deserved its name. Its eaves hung heavy over the upper storey of a long, squat building that might have been made for midgets or dolls, so cramped were its doorways, so miniature its windows. The grounds, though, were glorious. Sweeping pastures, crowned with wreaths of oak and beech groves, rose up around a domestic garden devoted to flowering shrubs, above all to the camellia in every variety.
******************************************************************
Our client had worn a red camellia in the buttonhole of her coat, on the morning she came to call at Baker Street.
The brief telegram “REQUEST CONSULTATION BAKER STREET MORNING THIRD MARCH STOP A HEACHAM” had been welcome enough. Holmes had his lean months, even in busy years. Crime had been nodding of late - at any rate, the sort of crime that interested him.
But Miss Anne Heacham had not brought with her a crime. Only a nuisance and, as we listened to her story, I quite expected Holmes to send her away with a wave of his hand, saying that he was not, so far as he recalled, the advice column of a ladies’ weekly magazine.
From her point of view it was a considerable nuisance, no doubt. She and her sister resided at Low Hall, close by a village in the county of Bedfordshire. Their family had lived there for many generations, farming in a moderately prosperous way. It was clear that this prosperity was to be understood in the past tense. Holmes might, as he did, deduce it from her sleeve-ends or bootlaces – for she was well, if plainly, dressed in twill and country tweeds, not in the least openly shabby. I simply read more of the newspapers than the personal columns and Police reports. Estate sales and wage disputes, the flow of labourers from field to town to seek their fortune: it was all the same tale. Farming, by and large, did not pay any more.
“Offers have been made, yes, Mr Holmes. Offers for the estate outright, for parcels of outlying fields. Anything they wanted outside the wall, we have agreed. It only served to encourage the hyenas.”
Holmes, standing by the mantelpiece as I poured tea for our guest, stiffened and turned to her in surprise. “Hyenas? Rather violent language to frame a commercial proposition. There is more to it, is there not?”
She folded her arms and sighed.
“More…personal offers have disturbed our peace. We do not mingle, you must understand: do not dine out save at the houses of one or two intimate friends; do not receive guests from the neighbourhood, do not go to church. An offer of marriage from a gentleman one has never met, and whose real motives must be plain merely from his address, is a positive insult. It is not the only such insult I have had; the latest, only last week.”
Holmes cleared his throat and chanced his arm.
“Miss Heacham. I venture to suggest that the gentlemen in question may have had, at worst, mixed motives, and intended the opposite of insult. Word gets about; you are not a complete recluse. You cannot be unaware that there may be a…personal equation in these experiments?”
Even he could not have failed to notice. Symmetry of face, colour and clarity of eye, trimness of figure: these were matters of mathematics, and together the sum added up to beauty. ‘A face a man might die for.’ He had said those words, once upon a time – an observation, not a declaration, but even so. I had thought of them the moment our client had come into the room.
He swept onto the chair opposite her and leaned in, piercing her with one of his intense, scrutinising stares. If she flinched, and strong men had done so before her, there was no outward sign.
“Why, therefore,” he mused, as much to himself as to her, “do you feel insulted?”
“Because, Mr Holmes, word gets about, just as you say. The ‘word’ in Arlesey is that my sister and I have been educated above our prospects; that we put on airs and dare to argue against the dispensations of Providence; that we are, in a word, bluestockings, whom no man should care to have in his house. ”
“And you in turn have no desire to be put there.” It was not a question. “Then refuse. A lady is permitted to refuse marriage.” He appraised her again. “Forgive me if I state the obvious, and ask the obvious too. Miss Heacham, why have you come to me?"
She glanced at me, standing by the tea things and, like her, waiting on genius.
“Because I seek justice – true justice, not a mere legal sop. The difficulty, Mr Holmes, is that for my sister and I, 'justice' is not so easily won. You are a man with a reputation for putting justice on at least an equal footing with the law, for not believing with Thrasymachus that it is only a matter of the strong imposing on the weak. Also,” - and here the briefest smile touched her lips – “because I have read that you once said ‘I cannot make bricks without clay’, and it is clay that, if I may be permitted a pun, lies at the bottom of it and bricks, not matrimony, that they want.”
Miss Heacham gathered her skirts, sweeping them to the side and out of touching distance, reclaiming her own territory.
“From the beginning, then. From clay.”
“Indeed. The clay was there before any of us, before humankind, before the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. From Dorsetshire it comes near the surface across a swathe of Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire, east to the Fenlands, north as far as Yorkshire. Fine white and yellow clay, and from it the finest and most decorative house-bricks are made in their millions. Have you ever seen a brick clamp ready for firing, gentlemen? A Ziggurat of ingenuity and earth, clay and coal in precisely calculated amounts, even down to a percentage of cinder in the green brick. Once touched with fire, it glows from within as the firefly makes its own light. You are surprised, Mr Holmes. You took me for a Luddite, a Blake, wishing that England were an eternal a pastoral fantasy in which to wander. ”
“Not at all. Yet you do wish this miracle of the clamp to take place elsewhere than on your own property.”
“The grass is nothing, Mr Holmes. The wall is everything. We have endured men perched in trees, men on ladders with theodolites, men with binoculars, men applying for work who say that other men sent them. Every pretext to cover spying out the land...”
“And spying on the ladies of Low Hall,” my friend finished for her.
“Yes.” She flushed, angry yet refusing to be humiliated. “Oh, they want the land. Certainly they do. Demand for building materials remains high as the population, in enthusiastic defiance of Mr Malthus, continues to grow. They want the land and the clay underneath it, and would pay for it if they cannot get it by other means. Yet if it were only a matter of money. Money can, given time, economy and toil, be recovered. If it were simply about the gossip, the sneers, well: pride is a snare and reputation a fiction written on sand. I do not care for novels. What is intolerable is that they will not let us be."
Holmes, who had been known to make a choice statement or two of his own about educated women, and handled money with as little attention as he could possibly manage, could still be moved by this appeal – to be allowed to be different, as his fame allowed him to be.
Other people’s secrets fell before him like the walls of Jericho. His own could not be had for love, money, deduction, nor any other way than deliberate gift. It so happened that I was about to be offered the deepest secret of all, as an unlooked-for gift. But I did not know that, then. I only knew that he had decided to find out, then to keep and protect, the secrets of Low Hall.
“I must come down, you know,” he said. “Will it be…inconvenient?”
It would be, no doubt, but she had brought her trouble to Sherlock Homes, and she had perforce to trust him.
“You can stay at the Placket Arms, between the house and the village.” She took us both in with a glance, for there was no doubt in any of our minds that ‘I’ would ever and ever mean ‘we’.
**************************************************************
And so to the end of the avenue of limes and the front door of Low Hall, where a servant girl of no more than twelve let us in, cradling a feather duster in the crook of her arm as if it were a doll. She took our hats and coats, carried them piled on top of her until she nearly disappeared beneath a heap of plush and wool, and hung them on the coat-stand before skipping off to find her mistress. She made me feel old as Methuselah.
Our client, in her library, greeted us over half-moon glasses and a book: a book which revealed itself, as she laid it on the table beside her, to be in the original Greek. Holmes registered this as he did everything else in the room - sharp, quick glances eating up every clue and signifier, making ready to show off his wares.
“You respected Miss Emily Davies a great deal, but did not love her, spent two years sharing her roof but left for lack of encouragement rather than funds. Your father, I think, needed you at home. You study the classics because you wish to improve your mind, but science has your heart.”
Miss Heacham took off her spectacles and stared open-mouthed for a moment before remembering her dignity and coolly inviting him to explain.
“You possess a copy of Miss Davies' The Higher Education of Women but it shows no real sign of having been read and holds pride of place in the bookcase containing those volumes meant for show, not use. Oh, do not protest, madam, every library in every country house has one. The book you were reading is the Cyropaedia of Xenophon which no man – excuse me, I think no lady either – picks up purely for pleasure. You are using for a bookmark a postcard of the exterior of Girton College for women as it appeared before the newest buildings were complete; you were not there by then. In the bookshelves you use often, are well-thumbed works on natural science by the dozen. Incidentally, you want the translation of Strecker’s organic chemistry with annotations, not the original: I can recommend it.”
He perched on the window seat looking out over the garden and folded his arms, admiring the camellias and himself in equal proportions.
“My father is dead, Mr Holmes.”
This was not quite the reception his best parlour trick usually had.
“I am sorry to hear it. That was, however, why you came home?”
She nodded, moving to the window to look out with him over her inheritance. As I joined them, I saw that someone was working in the distance outside - a slight figure wrapped in a hooded cloak, seated on a low stool on the lawn and digging with a long trowel in the soil of one of the flowerbeds.
“The glory of the garden is all down to my sister. Not a day goes by without her finding some little job to make it yet more beautiful. You should see it in summer.”
“I would like to hear her impression of the trials you told me about,” said Holmes. As if she had never entertained the idea, as if it was not the most natural thing to expect, Miss Heacham turned on him with firm purpose.
“Quite impossible, I am afraid. She will not see you.”
Holmes put a hand to the back of his neck and bent his head as under a yoke.
“You put a serious obstacle in the way of my helping you. What objection can the other Miss Heacham have to me, and to finding a solution to the problem?”
“Perhaps it is only that she doubts you can help, Holmes?” I was trying to be chivalrous to the lady but only succeeded in drawing a sardonic expression out of my friend.
“Watson, you wound me. Oh, ye of little faith. It is, nevertheless, an odd fancy in the circumstances. May one enquire as to her reasons? I hope your engaging me has not caused a rift or a quarrel between the two of you.”
That was another idea which appeared to astonish our hostess.
“Strangers frighten her,” was her only comment.
I cannot often follow Holmes’ thoughts merely from his expression, not as he does mine, but as he looked again to the garden the thought that our client was not being straight with us may as well have left bootprints across his face. Yet he did not challenge her.
I was fairly bursting with curiosity to know why not, but as soon as I began to speak he shushed me with a glance. He asked to see a plan of the estate, and the rest of an hour was spent poring over it, myself being given the job of noting down roads and footpaths, neighbouring properties and their occupants, field and furrow – in short, the whole lie of the land. Somewhere in the middle of our labours, the gardener had left hers. She had gone back into the house, no doubt, but still kept well out of eye- and earshot.
Over supper at the inn, Holmes purposely avoided any talk of Low Hall for fear of flapping local ears, so it was not until we had settled in to the comfortable double-bedded room that I was able to press him on the subject. He talked lightly of dairy yields and brickfields and sidestepped most of my attempts to get him to commit himself to declaring what lay at the heart of the trouble and what, if anything, was to be done about it.
“I am biding my time, Watson,” he replied at last. “The rest will follow, if only I dare be bold enough.”
“Bold?”
“Mmm.”
But he said no more, only disappeared to the great within, where cogs whirred in the intricate machine of deduction inside his head, gears cranking, connections being made. It seemed that like everyone else, I should have to wait for the striker on the bell to tell me the time, to tell past, present and future.
People have asked me if I am ever weary of it: of waiting to be told, of being two steps behind, of being the junior partner in the enterprise, although I am the elder by some years and a man of the world as Holmes, in so many ways, is not. What they really mean, of course is that they should grow weary of it. For myself, I have long believed that the man who cannot bear to follow, to give way to greatness, is a man who fears for his own worth, not one who is secure in it. It is hard, indeed, to know oneself ordinary. Who would not wish to excel? The truth is that genius, like logic, is rare. I am touched by it, as few even are, and that is enough.
Touched. Now there is a portmanteau of a word. There’s glory for you. Touched as touch paper, to make a warming fire or an uncontrolled blaze. Touched by the sun to robust health or to prostration. Touched to attractive eccentricity or to frank madness. A simple touch of hands, clasped in the darkness and in the face of danger. A touch that is the very opposite of simple.
His long back, pressed against mine by the narrow confines of a well-worn mattress that dipped in the middle. His careless hand on my shoulder in the morning as he rose. Simple friendship was what he offered, this man who had no friends save one. It was not for me to complicated matters.
The truth was, I wanted to complicate them, had wanted to for years, before the Park Lane airgun, before Reichenbach, even before Norwood and Mary Morstan. Ordinary men have their secrets, too. Three continents hold a great many women and I have held my share of them. I have loved and lusted, greeted and parted, known and enjoyed - and been enjoyed. It is – just – permissible to hint (to boast a little, if I am honest) at those adventures in public, even in print.
Yet woe betide the man who gives so much as a shadow of a hint that his tastes may stretch further, that his attention can be captured by a delicate female ankle… but by a broad set of male shoulders equally. Or, in one case, a narrow set of them. By a brilliant mind and a sudden, violent laugh; by a temper like a flame and a heart that burns for justice - heedless, heartless ‘society’ be damned.
I may say it here, in a story that shall never cross an editor’s desk nor see a letterpress. I may say that I loved him. That I love him still, that I live and will die loving him – as friend, as master, as more. As everything, body and soul.
There. Those are words enough on the subject, John Watson. Words to condemn you and him together. Hide them; better still, strike them out altogether. Cut out your heart. Tell instead what happened next at Arlesey, in the County of Bedfordshire.
All the morning Holmes stayed where he had gone to some destination on foot, without me. He set me the task of being his eyes and ears, of playing the part of casual visitor, of striking up those easy conversations with strangers, which I take pleasure in and he treats as mere business. At the inn, the grocer, the tobacconist and Mrs Morris’ Pantry (“Tea and a tart, tuppence ha’penny”), I picked up what gleanings I could and took them back to my notebook to thresh them into a neat pile fit to give Holmes when he returned.
I found far less curiosity and censure about the inhabitants of Low Hall than I expected. They were more interested in news from London, in the price of livestock and the state of the roads. A few criticised the absence from church on Sundays, but more excused it on the grounds that old Mr Heacham had never set foot there, and it did not prevent him being a fair-minded employer and generous to the unfortunate, unlike some they could name.
“Think carefully, Watson. You did just as I said and did not ask after the Misses Heacham by name?”
“Yes, but why-"
“All in good time. We must leave. Be so good as to find a carter to take us back to the station, and pay the innkeeper’s bill.”
“Leave! Have you solved the mystery already? Or are you giving up on it after all?”
He was positively enjoying my confusion but only murmured a warning to keep my voice down. As the carter lifted up our bags I noticed for the first time – so entranced had I been by the signs of spring during our journey to Arlesey – how much luggage he had compared to mine and to his usual habit, which was to take a change of linen or two and trust to luck as to the rest. When we reached the railway station he told me to sit out of sight of the road.
Beside the station was a goods yard. Stacks of timber, bags of feed and barrels of tar crowded one another with only a few spaces between. Into one of these Holmes scrambled, carrying his bags awkwardly in front of him, nearly toppling a pile of empty pallets. The foreman, I noticed, was enjoying a swift smoke and a newspaper behind the outhouse.
I waited. The London train came and went. After half an hour, Holmes had still not emerged. As I had no idea what he was looking for or why, I could only hope that he had not somehow got on the train by a back way and left me behind, and that the end of my vigil should not be a telegram from Town bearing brisk apologies and brisker instructions.
“Pardon me, sahib. Could you direct me toward the lower hall of Ar-less-ee?”
A sallow-faced man with a neat but full black beard, wearing a suit cut in the fashion of an Anglo-Indian clerk and swathed in a shawl big enough for an elephant, peered at me through pebble glasses from underneath the brim of a deep umbrella. His voice was soft, his words a little accented but perfectly clear.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to find a carrier,” I said, wondering what exotic quest had brought him to the middle of the English countryside. “It’s nearly three miles, if you mean Low Hall.”
The coincidence of it struck me suddenly and I looked closer.
“Holmes!”
He adopted a crestfallen expression even more theatrical than his disguise and put a gravy-browned finger to his lips.
“For two days I have practised that character in spare moments, and here you are not taken in for more than a minute. It is as well I am a moderately successful criminal agent: evidently, I should not make a career upon the stage.”
“What on earth are you up to?” I hissed. Two days? protested my mystified brain.
“Introducing a fly into the ointment. A fly which I hope will put off further interference with Miss Heacham and her household. Play along with me, Watson. I have stowed my proper luggage with my friend the foreman over there – his friendship can be bought for half a crown – and kept only this.”
He held up a wicker travelling case, looking for all the world as if he were planning a picnic. So, I took the part of helpful guide, making sure that the dog-cart driver had the news that my companion had returned to London and that while I waited for him to conclude urgent business there and either himself return or require me to go, I, being an old India hand, had set myself to help a gentleman traveller from the subcontinent. Thus I bid him good bye at the gates of Low Hall and turned back for the station and the waiting room.
How aptly named. I waited, with a book from the kiosk, until hunger drove me to the public house down the street. An indifferent lunch and a pint of flat beer later, I went back to the ticket office. No-one had called for me, or left a note. The foreman at the goods yard told me that “that tall bloke” had not said how long he wanted his cases kept safe, that it was no skin off his nose, what was another package among a hundred, they could stay there a week for all the difference it made to him.
I began to wonder if I’d been forgotten in the thrill of the chase, and my temper grew as thin as a farthing. When the message finally came, I snatched it from the butcher’s boy with a growl, and had to make it up to him with a good tip or he might have burst into tears.
“Post Office, High Street. Leave this for ‘Mr Heacham’”. With it was a sealed envelope addressed to a Post Office Box number.
The postmistress, about to put up the shutters for the day, told me all about it – all about the real owner of Low Hall, the son of old Mr Heacham’s deceased elder brother and an Indian lady, “of the highest rank in those parts, practically a princess”, come to claim his property in England. To think, she said, that all this time we never knew. The misses Heacham had welcomed him, to their great credit, and it was thought he would continue to let them live there, having occupation in the law and desiring to live in London. Probably just as well, not many of his sort in Bedfordshire to be had, he’d feel out of place. And he was in correspondence with Mr Sherlock Holmes! He’d sent Mr Holmes ahead no doubt, to check that all was in order, well, you had to wonder why a famous detective had come here, it’s not as if we go in much for crime , sir.
In one half-excited, half-scandalised breath the deed was done, and she had surely repeated something like it to everyone who had come in before me. If the local public house was the chief centre for country gossip, the post office was surely the other.
I had no more instructions, and did not know what else to do besides walk back up to the Hall. As if he had been expecting me to do exactly that, Holmes-as-Heacham-sahib, coming the other way, greeted me in the lane with a furled umbrella.
“Ah, Watson. Well-met. We have been invited for supper. It is a rational household and dressing for the occasion is, thankfully, optional. Come along!” And he spun on his heel.
I felt far too sweaty and rumpled to be presentable, however ‘rational’ the company, but if she noticed (and she did) Miss Anne forgave me. Holmes had done it again – turned a reserved and doubtful client into a loyal acolyte, quite prepared to accept that all would be well, now he had attended to the problem. She did not gush, of course, did not fawn. It was not her nature. Yet she was in such peace of mind that not only did she welcome us at her table, we were given the rare privilege of an introduction to Miss Emma.
Who was not in the least as I had expected. She was merry, she was outspoken, and she was fiercely intelligent - well, I ought to have expected that. She was also, if one may be permitted a private judgement, rather plain – but a plainness combined with such energy and light that it hardly signified and besides, I was hard put not to keep looking at something else altogether.
She wore trousers. Elegant, well-cut, feminine ones, in glowing cinnamon silk – but they could not be mistaken for skirts. I had never seen such a garment on a lady in England. However Holmes did not comment, and so neither did I. He sat, still in disguise – he often took pleasure in being someone else- lapsing from time to time into character, making the company laugh, and assured me that no-one else had been able to tell his real identity, not even the ladies until he chose to reveal himself
“Your face, if you will pardon me, Miss Heacham, was the epitome of astonishment.”
“I should think so. My uncle died barely four months after arriving in Calcutta. I’d have been very surprised to think that he had time to marry meanwhile.”
*********************************************
Back at Baker Street, after he had heard out my own astonishment at the bohemian style at Low Hall – I admit this took quite some time – I asked Holmes how it was that the appearance of a supposed owner of the property would answer all the ladies’ complaints. What of the constant intrusions into their privacy?
“My dear Watson, have I not often said that it is principally those who have something to hide who believe everyone is spying on them?”
To my knowledge, he had not often said it, nor even once, but I let that pass, for it did sit with the comparative indifference I had noticed at Arlesey towards the misses Heacham. Nevertheless, I could not see what, aside from those trousers, they would have to hide.
“At first I suspected the father to be still living, but hopelessly mad, or at least senile, and their isolation to be a way to cover that up. Then I formed an idea, and as it grew I gave you that warning not to mention them by name, but just to see what came up in conversation. In your appreciation of Miss Emma, did you not notice one significant fact? No, Watson,” he continued as I opened my mouth to speak, “not the trousers, extraordinary as they undoubtedly were. Her eyes.”
“A tendency to myopia, perhaps, but that runs in families, you know. Miss Anne already needs spectacles.”
“Tsk. Well, as you have your professional interests, so I have mine. Miss Emma has brown eyes. Both Mr Heacham and his wife, whose photographs and portraits have pride of place in the library at Low Hall, were blue-eyed. Are we back in medical territory yet, Watson?”
“Ah. Two brown-eyed parents may sometimes have blue eyed children...”
“But never the other way about. Exactly.”
“By-blow smuggled in? Hardly enough reason to hide her away – people are, as you do very often say, unobservant, and take things to be as they expect. Or they may instead be friends, as close as sisters. Whichever it is, surely it makes no difference to their plight.”
He hesitated. He feared, I know now, that I would be scandalised by his conclusions. That if I accepted them as true, I might condemn the ménage at Low Hall, and others like them. That I would not be bold.
“They are friends, yes. Friends of a…very particular kind.”
He searched my face, to see if I took his meaning, and what I might make of it if I did. I am, it is true, sometimes slow on the uptake. He tried again, stressing his words with a lift of his expressive brows.
“Consider that Miss Anne reads Greek very well, Watson.”
Meaning obediently dawned. It had a habit of showing itself for Sherlock Holmes. A moment later, when I had stopped goggling at him as if he had just told me that Mrs Hudson was in the pay of the Metropolitan Police, it fell to me to ask him how on earth had he deduced that?
He sighed. “It was not, in fact, the trousers. I can see that thought striding all over your face, don’t deny it. Those who look at outward appearance are condemned to be proven wrong nine times out of ten. I had come already prepared to test my theory that Miss Anne had something to hide, that her talk of spies and insults hardly matched her evident self-possession. Adopting that disguise enabled me to clear away the old top growth masking the living heart of the plant – if a man who ‘knows nothing of practical gardening’ may be permitted that metaphor.”
Damn that damned list
“I told her that I could divert all attempts to acquire or to mine her estate – I shall have any future correspondence for ‘Mr Heacham’ dealt with by a solicitor who is in my debt – and that I could not see why that should not be the end of it. When she hesitated, I told her that she should not be ashamed of her nature. I could have meant her intelligence, her reticence, even her looks. But when she glanced, without a second thought, at the camellia garden, her fear came into focus. She loves another woman, body and soul, and has not yet altogether shaken off society’s incomprehension of nature’s true variety.”
I felt myself on shifting sand, reputation about to be swept away by the sea. What if he should discover the variety which existed under his very roof? Attack, so it is said, is the best form of defence.
“Holmes! Even for you, that is surely a leap too far, and a really outrageous suggestion to boot. Please tell me you did not so much as imply in her hearing that there was anything improper going on?”
“I am a scientist. I do not recognise anything in nature which does no harm as ‘improper’ so no, I did not. Propriety has a good deal to answer for. Cruelty, infidelity, greed, disgrace – all children of ‘propriety’.” He looked directly at me, a challenge in his eye, but compassion too. “Above all, Watson, my very dear friend: hypocrisy.”
He knew, then. Knew at least some of it, had marked it somehow from my manner, from the way I folded my pocket-handkerchief, from a long-ago innocent slip of the tongue. I had been so careful, so careful but of course, I could never have been careful enough. This was Sherlock Holmes. Had he also guessed – no, he never guesses – had he seen the rest: that in my divided nature I had turned to him, as a spring flower to the sun?
We took our seats on either side of the fire, as we often did when there was no case to write up and Holmes had not disappeared into a chemistry experiment, or into one of his black fits of withdrawal. I expected to be quizzed, to be put under the microscope like a bacterium and all my parts described, but he said nothing, only smoked a long pipe, his faraway eyes deep in thought.
“I find that, like Miss Anne Heacham, I do not care for novels,” he said, at long last. “Nor, for that matter, shorter fiction. Too little unvarnished truth; too much playing to the crowd.”
“Holmes?”
“Your own oeuvre, for example,” he went on, “is expressly designed to flatter me. I am its subject, and its intended audience.”
I began to protest, but he would have none of it.
“You have said so yourself. You wish me to read that I am the supreme rationalist, the man who thinks but does not feel, who has never loved nor is ever likely to, who desires no-one and nothing save work and white poison. Other people may read it too, of course, may pay for the privilege of thinking that they know Sherlock Holmes. Well, there is little harm in that and some distinct good, in the circumstances. But let us have no fiction here, between the two of us. Let us have unvarnished truth.”
He paused, knocked out his pipe on the arm of the chair and put it back in the rack. To do so, he had to cross to my side of the hearth. What he did not have to do, was to go at once to his knees by my chair and take hold of my hand. Yet there it was, my hand clasped between his long, fine fingers, even before I yelped with the shock of it. There was his narrow face, inches from mine, grey eyes fixing me with a look that I could not fathom: half yearning, half apology.
“If crime is common, hypocrisy is well-nigh universal, it seems. I, too have been guilty. I allowed your little fictions to go unchecked, until they became a reputation that shielded me so well, I did not mind that it hemmed me in as well.”
“The truth….” He braced himself and met that truth like a man, “… is that I am like you, and unlike. Your nature is to love widely, across continents, across the sexes, to be generous in your passions. Mine is to keep back everything until I must, to keep close to home, to desire only men, and precious few even of those. I am quite out of the habit of feeling, but not out of the power of it. Out of the practice of passion, but not its anticipation. You have thought about me in that way: one could hardly miss it. I want to tell you…to say…”
I could hardly believe this was happening. It was a stage play come to life, and my scripted line must be:
“Yes, Holmes?”
“…that I do not mind.”
Holmes of course, could never stick to a script. He would have truth and not fiction, however much it stung me. He pressed my hand, compelled me to look at him again, and spoke with a fervour he usually reserved for the courtroom.
“I beg you do not misunderstand me, my dear fellow. My dear Watson. John. I have never loved – but one. Never made room for another’s love – but one. It is spring, the very time for new beginnings. High summer will come, autumn and winter too – we shall spend them all together, if you will permit it. Just now, though: just now, I would wait. Live with this understanding a little while longer, before we have declarations and déshabillé.”
He should not have been who he is, otherwise. I should not have been who I am if I did not know how much he was offering, and what it cost him to do it, to speak of it at all. That precious gift of understanding, and the promise to entertain more, I accepted with a full heart. He is not a calculating machine, whatever Doyle may say. That is a reputation written on sand, and I knew that the tide would come in as, in the fullness of time, it did.
We swim in it still, together.
END
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Date: 2014-05-17 04:09 pm (UTC)