Fic for KCScribbler: After, Ever After
Oct. 16th, 2012 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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acdholmesfestTitle: After, Ever After
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kcscribbler
Author:rabidsamfan
Rating: G
Characters: Holmes, Watson
Warnings: character deaths, angst, chronology musings
Summary: The War is over and much has been lost, and yet some things can still be found.
Disclaimer: – Credit must go to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for creating a world where the people are quite real and the timing is quite impenetrable.
December 19, 1918
The funeral was over; the second Mrs. Watson laid snug to rest alongside four of her children, all victims of the influenza which had refused to make a proper sweep of it. The disease had touched my friend Watson, of course, but lightly, leaving him upright however bereft. He stood now by the grave, his formal black attire still creased from wartime exile, accepting the condolences of his fellow mourners with that air of stiff-upper-lip which I have long associated with a falling barometer and cheerful excuses to avoid long walks on an aching leg.
Beside the new-turned earth an older stone marked the place where Mary Morstan Watson slept with the boychild who had not breathed long enough to need naming in her arms. I had missed that funeral, and the one which had come before, although only a depression in the grass marked the place where the stone with my own name had stood for three long years. I'd missed Henry Watson's funeral too, and knew my younger self well enough to be aware that I'd not have left my case in France to attend the solemnities even had Watson sent word to me of his brother's demise.
I read the other gravestones as Watson paid the preacher and the sexton. Here were Watson's parents, dead within a month of each other while he was still at university. Here was a sister who had never seen twenty, and here a row of tiny headstones for siblings who had failed in infancy.
With a sudden insight I understood precisely what had driven Watson to believing the handsome widow with the two healthy children when she'd claimed that the babe in her belly was his. Understood why Watson had ever sought comfort in her arms for that matter, for Ermintrude Bellevue had been unabashedly emotional in her pursuit of a second husband and openly affectionate; whereas I, shaken by that ghastly affair with the Garridebs, had been bitterly determined to reconstruct my mask of cold logic and detachment. I'd been glad, glad! when Watson left Baker Street for marriage and a medical practice the second time, certain that my work would be all the better for a lack of emotional entanglements.
And I'd been wrong.
Without a companion with whom to share my thoughts, my thoughts had seldom been worth sharing. Without a companion with whom to share the danger, danger had lost its appeal. Without a companion to remind me to eat and sleep, my health, already precarious from years of neglect, had failed me. Watson had done his best to strike a balance between his new life and Baker Street, visiting nearly every week and accompanying me now and then to the pleasant warmth of the Turkish bath, or to Simpsons, where we would dine on oysters and the illusion that nothing had changed between us. I know that he scanted his patient list to collaborate with me upon a case whenever I truly needed him, despite Ermintrude Watson's expressions of uncertainty over the propriety of a practicing physician engaging in that sort of thing.
Still, it was a matter of months, not years, before I chose to retire, grateful to Mycroft's management of my investments for the chance to immure myself in Sussex, miles away from a London that was changing all too quickly, and worlds away from Watson, transfigured into dutiful husband and doting father. For some time I lost myself in abstruse chemical analyses, until by chance a queen bee made her home in my garden and gifted me a new field of study.
"Still here, Holmes?" Watson's voice brought me back to the present, and I started up to my feet, knowing that my knees would dun me come morning for daring to crouch down to read the inscriptions.
"Of course, old fellow," I replied, easily, accepting the hand which Watson offered, but only for balance. Under my fingertips I could feel the infinitesimal earthquakes of exhaustion which racked my oldest friend. "I intend for you to come to Sussex with me – at least for a few days – so you can get some rest."
"Rest?" Watson repeated dully, and then blinked and shook his head. "I don't want to impose upon you," he began.
"You're not," I said, as masterfully as I knew how. "And I insist." I knew, none better, how desperately Watson would be seeking sleep, and how badly his dreams would betray him. So it had been in the past, when the survivors of Maiwand had begun to follow their lost comrades into the everlasting dark. Watson would receive a letter, or a telegram, and excuse himself for a day or two, and then come back home to Baker Street enshrouded in a quiet sorrow which might last for days, or weeks, depending on how close he had been to the dead man. The few funerals we had shared had had much the same effect, and nothing to be done about it but console the night with Mendelssohn and avert it was to divert my own black moods.
"I can’t leave my car here," Watson demurred stubbornly. "And I'm needed in London. This epidemic..."
"I came by train," I countered. "And if you would prefer to be useful, there are plenty of potential patients in Sussex, and far too few medical men." I frowned, remembering seeing the black crepe at a neighbor's door. "The influenza has not spared the countryside any more than it has the city."
"Ah." It was a measure of Watson's weariness that his eyes didn't brighten at the call of duty, nor did his shoulders straighten. But he nodded agreement, as I knew he would. "I had not thought of that."
"Come along, my dear fellow, if we start now we can be home before nightfall."
The car, a small pre-war model which I knew from the night when Watson and I had foiled Von Bork's plans for once and for all, was parked near the sole inn of the little village, guarded by a small boy sitting upon the fender with his nose parked in a book. One of Watson's, I observed with amusement. I diverted the child while Watson collected his luggage and exchanged condolences with the proprietor of the inn. The two old men were contemporaries, I gathered, and the innkeeper's sons had both died in the trenches where Watson had spent so much of the past four years. It was a salutary reminder of how much of Watson's life remained outside my ken. Even now I knew little of the boy who had spent his school holidays living in the gray stone house beyond the churchyard, and scarcely more of the soldier who had tended to spend his brief hours away from the battlefields of France trying to mend the fraying bonds of family. Ermintrude had never been best pleased with Watson’s return to the military, when at his age he could have remained safely prospering in England. It was one of the few subjects upon which we held complete agreement, she and I, although we had differed on whether it were possible to dissuade him from his duty.
I did not attempt to convince Watson that he should allow me to drive -- I merely asserted the necessity, citing my knowledge of the roads, still lacking in signage in many places despite the Armistice, and took my place behind the wheel. The decision was fortuitous in that it gave Watson little to do but sleep, and sleep he did, but it gave me far too much time to contemplate the changes which grief and war had wrought. There was a scar on his neck, below his left ear --something sharp had struck him there, and recently enough that the mark had not yet had time to whiten. His hair had whitened though. Not a trace remained of the soft brown I remembered brightening to gold like corn under summer suns. The laughter lines near his eyes were shallower, the frown lines near his lips deeper. He was too pale. Too thin. And even in sleep his hands twitched and clenched around phantom surgical tools.
Between my own contributions to the War Effort, and Mrs. Watson’s jealousy of her husband’s scant visits to British soil, I had seen Watson but three times since the start of hostilities. Twice at the Diogenes, where we had dined together at Mycroft's invitation, and once at Westminster Abbey, when my brother was accorded the only public accolade which the country had ever been able to foist upon him. That funeral had been far too long, and the speeches far too pompous, and Watson and I, both giddy with weariness and grief, had kept each other awake by exchanging whispered deductions as to just what pungent commentary Mycroft might have supplied to leaven the interminable encomiums being heaped upon his memory. Another man might not have taken comfort from such morbid humor, but I did, and I was grateful to Watson for indulging my peculiarities.
And yet, much later that night, when Watson and I stood beside the steaming boat train that would carry him back to the Front, I had taken a more lasting comfort from the spontaneous embrace with which he’d gifted me. He'd mumbled something about missing Mycroft against my collar, and then stood back, measuring me with knowing eyes. “You’ll be all right, alone?” he’d asked, doubting.
“Of course,” I’d said then, thinking that it was true. Now, with the memory of the shadowed weeks which followed, I knew better. It was the memory of that moment which had been my shield against the bitterness of loss. The warmth of Watson’s arms around me, the scratch of the resurgence of his beard against my cheek, the tang of the brandy we'd shared over our suppers, even the acrid taint of gas that had permeated the wool of his uniform, never to be washed away. The honest strength of his regard for me, more articulate in a simple touch than in a thousand words on paper. Watson might have been in France when I finally wept for my brother, but I was not without him, nonetheless.
And if I, a man who had never sought affection, had gained such solace from so simple a thing, then what of Watson? Surely he would benefit from a similar gesture. It was only logical. But having reached that conclusion still dozens of miles from our destination, I began to doubt my capacity to be the one to make it. It had been sixteen long years since Baker Street. Years in which I had, for the most part, neglected our friendship. If Watson’s visits to Sussex were rare, so too were my visits to his house in Kensington. It was not for lack of invitation. Watson would have welcomed me to his table on any visit I made to London, and to her credit, Mrs. Watson would have welcomed me too, during those early years. But I did not go. I could not bear to see how happy he was, there without me. I flinched away from knowing that his stepsons worshipped him, and that the tiny girl who had caused all the trouble was the light of her father’s eye. He was a marvellous father, my Watson, and yet all I could think of when he bent his head to listen patiently to a lisping confidence was the years he had wasted his talents on me instead of becoming the paterfamilias which was so obviously his proper destiny.
The road spun away beneath the car as the sun moved across the sky. I stopped once to purchase petrol, and Watson roused long enough to turn his face to find me before settling back into sleep once more as I began the second half of the drive.
I did not know when the cracks began to show in his marriage. Before 1906, when their youngest child was born, no doubt. But the trouble had been planted from the start. Ermintrude had never been content with Watson’s income from the practice, of that I good cause to know. His reluctant request to me for permission to test the waters of public interest with a new tale of our adventures had come early on in the marriage, when I was yet in London and they still lived in the cramped quarters on Queen Anne street. The response of the readers startled both of us. I’d only allowed him to publish the Baskerville case as a posthumous memoir, and yet I swear it paid for the house he bought. And not soon after my retirement he came to me, his hat quite literally in his hand, and asked to tell the tale of my return.
That permission I gladly granted, knowing that it was no easy task for a man of his years to establish himself anew; and for all that, writing was as much his profession as medicine had ever been. For two years the words fell readily from his pen, tributes to a life we both had left behind. But then, as his children grew, and his practice prospered, the words came more sporadically. The visits even less so. He saw Mycroft more than I, resting within the companionable silences of the Diogenes every Thursday evening like clockwork, and it was there I met with him now and then. But even in the Strangers’ Room our words were scant, those years. It was not Watson’s fault, not entirely, for I had little interest in the small doings of his household, and would turn the topic to past glories when I could. By the time I went to America, to serve my country in a different way than he once had served her, the damage was truly done. I could convince myself that Watson was a friend of the same sort as Harold Stackhurst was in Sussex before the War. Someone to talk to, now and then, but not an intimate. Not someone who would confide in me the reasons why his hat had taken on a layer of dust.
And now we came to the last few miles, the roads winding gently along the green of the downs, past the villages where lights shone out defiantly from windows that had been too long darkened by fear. To the last few stretches of memory as well.
I did think to drop Watson a note before I vanished from England’s shores in 1912. Just a line or two to say that I would be travelling and difficult to reach. Had I not been sworn to secrecy I might even have told him why I was going. If ever a man understood the need to serve his country it is Watson! But it was finding the tale of the Culverton Smith case in a four month old magazine in the spring of ‘14 which reminded me that he’d had no word of me for over a year. And more, it reminded me of how he had forgiven me, not once, but twice, for being alive and well. I had forgotten. I did ask him, once, if he’d written the tale to remind me that he was waiting for word, but he said no. He’d written it to remind himself that I had a way of turning his grief to joy.
I did not think I could turn his grief to joy now.
He’d written during the War too. Not tales of our adventures together, although he did resurrect an old manuscript to publish a chapter at a time as a supplement to his Army stipend at the behest of his wife and his literary agent. No, during the War he wrote letters, brief missives to me, describing the people he met and attempting deductions to please or amuse me; dispatches to Mycroft describing the inimical conditions where he laboured to keep men from dying. Unguarded, unpolished prose, snipped here and there by the censor’s scissors, chronicling the relentless transformation of optimism into endurance, and endurance holding out as best it could against despair.
After Watson’s oldest stepson was lost at Verdun, after Mycroft had fallen too, and I gave over being my brother’s agent in an attempt to somehow be my brother, Watson began a new story for publication. “His Last Bow” he’d called it, and I’ve good reason to believe that he’d meant it for his own farewell and not just mine. Why else step back from the narrative, to pretend that it was some other hand that drove his pen? The east wind had blown for three long years, by then, and no sign of stopping before all was sere and sterile. But it stopped just the same, Watson had not withered before it.
Eastbourne Road, Millersgate Road, The Gables. The car rocked as we made the turn down the lane to my villa and Watson awoke, coming alert to scan the nightshrouded countryside for danger. But this time when he found me beside him it was no comfort to him remember where he was or why. I felt more than saw him stiffen his spine against his grief, knew without looking that he was assembling a mask to play the courteous houseguest, due to depart in the proper way when his welcome had worn thin.
“Not long now,” I said, slowing the car to save the tyres from the hazardous ruts. I could see the black shape of my roof edging up into the starlit sky.
“Thank you,” Watson said gruffly, watching the pool of light from the headlights move along the grass. “I should have taken a turn at driving.”
“I didn’t mind.”
We topped the rise and the Channel spread out beneath us, the little lights marking the ships moving peacefully upon the water. I drew up next to the garden wall and shut down the car, and Watson and I sat in silence a while, letting our eyes adapt to the dim light of the stars before rousing ourselves to deal with the practicalities of our arrival.
It did not take long. We had a routine, of sorts, left over from the days when he would find a specialist to chase me out of London for a week or two to rest at some remote cottage where my friend would watch over me with the help of a girl from the village and not infrequent references to his medical bona fides. Each of us brought inside a valise with nightshirt and toothbrush before I turned my hand to the lamps and the fires and he to the linens and the teakettle. The heavy luggage we left in the car, waiting for the morning and a sturdy lad in need of sixpence. It was no time at all until the two of us were sitting in chairs by the fire, warming our toes and hands as the teakettle rumbled softly on the hob.
The long drive was catching up for me, and I felt my head begin to nod, but “She wanted a divorce, you know,” Watson said suddenly. “After Robin died in France. She said he’d never have enlisted if I hadn’t done it first.”
He was staring into the fire, although I doubted he saw the flames.
“I don’t even think she loved me by the end. If it hadn’t been for the children, I don’t think she would have stayed.” He put his face into his hands, muffling his words. “If it hadn’t been for the children, I’d have been glad to let her go.”
I reached for him then, all hesitation forgotten, and drew him into the circle of my arms and held him until the dam broke and he began to weep. Words tumbled out of him then, stories sobbed against the growing damp patch on my shoulder, a litany of grief going back through the years, Ermintrude and Katie and Sophie and Jack. Mycroft and Robin and soldiers he’d known for scant hours before they succumbed. Mary and the baby. His brother Harry. His comrades at Maiwand. Me, for three long years.
At last the tears ebbed, though he still clung to me. “How do I do it, Holmes?” he whispered to my sleeve. “How do I stay alone? I’ve never had the knack.”
“You don’t,” I told him, and stepped back a pace, my hands still on his shoulders so that he could not help but see my promise and the future on my face. “You stay here.”
Recipient:
kcscribblerAuthor:
rabidsamfanRating: G
Characters: Holmes, Watson
Warnings: character deaths, angst, chronology musings
Summary: The War is over and much has been lost, and yet some things can still be found.
Disclaimer: – Credit must go to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for creating a world where the people are quite real and the timing is quite impenetrable.
December 19, 1918
The funeral was over; the second Mrs. Watson laid snug to rest alongside four of her children, all victims of the influenza which had refused to make a proper sweep of it. The disease had touched my friend Watson, of course, but lightly, leaving him upright however bereft. He stood now by the grave, his formal black attire still creased from wartime exile, accepting the condolences of his fellow mourners with that air of stiff-upper-lip which I have long associated with a falling barometer and cheerful excuses to avoid long walks on an aching leg.
Beside the new-turned earth an older stone marked the place where Mary Morstan Watson slept with the boychild who had not breathed long enough to need naming in her arms. I had missed that funeral, and the one which had come before, although only a depression in the grass marked the place where the stone with my own name had stood for three long years. I'd missed Henry Watson's funeral too, and knew my younger self well enough to be aware that I'd not have left my case in France to attend the solemnities even had Watson sent word to me of his brother's demise.
I read the other gravestones as Watson paid the preacher and the sexton. Here were Watson's parents, dead within a month of each other while he was still at university. Here was a sister who had never seen twenty, and here a row of tiny headstones for siblings who had failed in infancy.
With a sudden insight I understood precisely what had driven Watson to believing the handsome widow with the two healthy children when she'd claimed that the babe in her belly was his. Understood why Watson had ever sought comfort in her arms for that matter, for Ermintrude Bellevue had been unabashedly emotional in her pursuit of a second husband and openly affectionate; whereas I, shaken by that ghastly affair with the Garridebs, had been bitterly determined to reconstruct my mask of cold logic and detachment. I'd been glad, glad! when Watson left Baker Street for marriage and a medical practice the second time, certain that my work would be all the better for a lack of emotional entanglements.
And I'd been wrong.
Without a companion with whom to share my thoughts, my thoughts had seldom been worth sharing. Without a companion with whom to share the danger, danger had lost its appeal. Without a companion to remind me to eat and sleep, my health, already precarious from years of neglect, had failed me. Watson had done his best to strike a balance between his new life and Baker Street, visiting nearly every week and accompanying me now and then to the pleasant warmth of the Turkish bath, or to Simpsons, where we would dine on oysters and the illusion that nothing had changed between us. I know that he scanted his patient list to collaborate with me upon a case whenever I truly needed him, despite Ermintrude Watson's expressions of uncertainty over the propriety of a practicing physician engaging in that sort of thing.
Still, it was a matter of months, not years, before I chose to retire, grateful to Mycroft's management of my investments for the chance to immure myself in Sussex, miles away from a London that was changing all too quickly, and worlds away from Watson, transfigured into dutiful husband and doting father. For some time I lost myself in abstruse chemical analyses, until by chance a queen bee made her home in my garden and gifted me a new field of study.
"Still here, Holmes?" Watson's voice brought me back to the present, and I started up to my feet, knowing that my knees would dun me come morning for daring to crouch down to read the inscriptions.
"Of course, old fellow," I replied, easily, accepting the hand which Watson offered, but only for balance. Under my fingertips I could feel the infinitesimal earthquakes of exhaustion which racked my oldest friend. "I intend for you to come to Sussex with me – at least for a few days – so you can get some rest."
"Rest?" Watson repeated dully, and then blinked and shook his head. "I don't want to impose upon you," he began.
"You're not," I said, as masterfully as I knew how. "And I insist." I knew, none better, how desperately Watson would be seeking sleep, and how badly his dreams would betray him. So it had been in the past, when the survivors of Maiwand had begun to follow their lost comrades into the everlasting dark. Watson would receive a letter, or a telegram, and excuse himself for a day or two, and then come back home to Baker Street enshrouded in a quiet sorrow which might last for days, or weeks, depending on how close he had been to the dead man. The few funerals we had shared had had much the same effect, and nothing to be done about it but console the night with Mendelssohn and avert it was to divert my own black moods.
"I can’t leave my car here," Watson demurred stubbornly. "And I'm needed in London. This epidemic..."
"I came by train," I countered. "And if you would prefer to be useful, there are plenty of potential patients in Sussex, and far too few medical men." I frowned, remembering seeing the black crepe at a neighbor's door. "The influenza has not spared the countryside any more than it has the city."
"Ah." It was a measure of Watson's weariness that his eyes didn't brighten at the call of duty, nor did his shoulders straighten. But he nodded agreement, as I knew he would. "I had not thought of that."
"Come along, my dear fellow, if we start now we can be home before nightfall."
The car, a small pre-war model which I knew from the night when Watson and I had foiled Von Bork's plans for once and for all, was parked near the sole inn of the little village, guarded by a small boy sitting upon the fender with his nose parked in a book. One of Watson's, I observed with amusement. I diverted the child while Watson collected his luggage and exchanged condolences with the proprietor of the inn. The two old men were contemporaries, I gathered, and the innkeeper's sons had both died in the trenches where Watson had spent so much of the past four years. It was a salutary reminder of how much of Watson's life remained outside my ken. Even now I knew little of the boy who had spent his school holidays living in the gray stone house beyond the churchyard, and scarcely more of the soldier who had tended to spend his brief hours away from the battlefields of France trying to mend the fraying bonds of family. Ermintrude had never been best pleased with Watson’s return to the military, when at his age he could have remained safely prospering in England. It was one of the few subjects upon which we held complete agreement, she and I, although we had differed on whether it were possible to dissuade him from his duty.
I did not attempt to convince Watson that he should allow me to drive -- I merely asserted the necessity, citing my knowledge of the roads, still lacking in signage in many places despite the Armistice, and took my place behind the wheel. The decision was fortuitous in that it gave Watson little to do but sleep, and sleep he did, but it gave me far too much time to contemplate the changes which grief and war had wrought. There was a scar on his neck, below his left ear --something sharp had struck him there, and recently enough that the mark had not yet had time to whiten. His hair had whitened though. Not a trace remained of the soft brown I remembered brightening to gold like corn under summer suns. The laughter lines near his eyes were shallower, the frown lines near his lips deeper. He was too pale. Too thin. And even in sleep his hands twitched and clenched around phantom surgical tools.
Between my own contributions to the War Effort, and Mrs. Watson’s jealousy of her husband’s scant visits to British soil, I had seen Watson but three times since the start of hostilities. Twice at the Diogenes, where we had dined together at Mycroft's invitation, and once at Westminster Abbey, when my brother was accorded the only public accolade which the country had ever been able to foist upon him. That funeral had been far too long, and the speeches far too pompous, and Watson and I, both giddy with weariness and grief, had kept each other awake by exchanging whispered deductions as to just what pungent commentary Mycroft might have supplied to leaven the interminable encomiums being heaped upon his memory. Another man might not have taken comfort from such morbid humor, but I did, and I was grateful to Watson for indulging my peculiarities.
And yet, much later that night, when Watson and I stood beside the steaming boat train that would carry him back to the Front, I had taken a more lasting comfort from the spontaneous embrace with which he’d gifted me. He'd mumbled something about missing Mycroft against my collar, and then stood back, measuring me with knowing eyes. “You’ll be all right, alone?” he’d asked, doubting.
“Of course,” I’d said then, thinking that it was true. Now, with the memory of the shadowed weeks which followed, I knew better. It was the memory of that moment which had been my shield against the bitterness of loss. The warmth of Watson’s arms around me, the scratch of the resurgence of his beard against my cheek, the tang of the brandy we'd shared over our suppers, even the acrid taint of gas that had permeated the wool of his uniform, never to be washed away. The honest strength of his regard for me, more articulate in a simple touch than in a thousand words on paper. Watson might have been in France when I finally wept for my brother, but I was not without him, nonetheless.
And if I, a man who had never sought affection, had gained such solace from so simple a thing, then what of Watson? Surely he would benefit from a similar gesture. It was only logical. But having reached that conclusion still dozens of miles from our destination, I began to doubt my capacity to be the one to make it. It had been sixteen long years since Baker Street. Years in which I had, for the most part, neglected our friendship. If Watson’s visits to Sussex were rare, so too were my visits to his house in Kensington. It was not for lack of invitation. Watson would have welcomed me to his table on any visit I made to London, and to her credit, Mrs. Watson would have welcomed me too, during those early years. But I did not go. I could not bear to see how happy he was, there without me. I flinched away from knowing that his stepsons worshipped him, and that the tiny girl who had caused all the trouble was the light of her father’s eye. He was a marvellous father, my Watson, and yet all I could think of when he bent his head to listen patiently to a lisping confidence was the years he had wasted his talents on me instead of becoming the paterfamilias which was so obviously his proper destiny.
The road spun away beneath the car as the sun moved across the sky. I stopped once to purchase petrol, and Watson roused long enough to turn his face to find me before settling back into sleep once more as I began the second half of the drive.
I did not know when the cracks began to show in his marriage. Before 1906, when their youngest child was born, no doubt. But the trouble had been planted from the start. Ermintrude had never been content with Watson’s income from the practice, of that I good cause to know. His reluctant request to me for permission to test the waters of public interest with a new tale of our adventures had come early on in the marriage, when I was yet in London and they still lived in the cramped quarters on Queen Anne street. The response of the readers startled both of us. I’d only allowed him to publish the Baskerville case as a posthumous memoir, and yet I swear it paid for the house he bought. And not soon after my retirement he came to me, his hat quite literally in his hand, and asked to tell the tale of my return.
That permission I gladly granted, knowing that it was no easy task for a man of his years to establish himself anew; and for all that, writing was as much his profession as medicine had ever been. For two years the words fell readily from his pen, tributes to a life we both had left behind. But then, as his children grew, and his practice prospered, the words came more sporadically. The visits even less so. He saw Mycroft more than I, resting within the companionable silences of the Diogenes every Thursday evening like clockwork, and it was there I met with him now and then. But even in the Strangers’ Room our words were scant, those years. It was not Watson’s fault, not entirely, for I had little interest in the small doings of his household, and would turn the topic to past glories when I could. By the time I went to America, to serve my country in a different way than he once had served her, the damage was truly done. I could convince myself that Watson was a friend of the same sort as Harold Stackhurst was in Sussex before the War. Someone to talk to, now and then, but not an intimate. Not someone who would confide in me the reasons why his hat had taken on a layer of dust.
And now we came to the last few miles, the roads winding gently along the green of the downs, past the villages where lights shone out defiantly from windows that had been too long darkened by fear. To the last few stretches of memory as well.
I did think to drop Watson a note before I vanished from England’s shores in 1912. Just a line or two to say that I would be travelling and difficult to reach. Had I not been sworn to secrecy I might even have told him why I was going. If ever a man understood the need to serve his country it is Watson! But it was finding the tale of the Culverton Smith case in a four month old magazine in the spring of ‘14 which reminded me that he’d had no word of me for over a year. And more, it reminded me of how he had forgiven me, not once, but twice, for being alive and well. I had forgotten. I did ask him, once, if he’d written the tale to remind me that he was waiting for word, but he said no. He’d written it to remind himself that I had a way of turning his grief to joy.
I did not think I could turn his grief to joy now.
He’d written during the War too. Not tales of our adventures together, although he did resurrect an old manuscript to publish a chapter at a time as a supplement to his Army stipend at the behest of his wife and his literary agent. No, during the War he wrote letters, brief missives to me, describing the people he met and attempting deductions to please or amuse me; dispatches to Mycroft describing the inimical conditions where he laboured to keep men from dying. Unguarded, unpolished prose, snipped here and there by the censor’s scissors, chronicling the relentless transformation of optimism into endurance, and endurance holding out as best it could against despair.
After Watson’s oldest stepson was lost at Verdun, after Mycroft had fallen too, and I gave over being my brother’s agent in an attempt to somehow be my brother, Watson began a new story for publication. “His Last Bow” he’d called it, and I’ve good reason to believe that he’d meant it for his own farewell and not just mine. Why else step back from the narrative, to pretend that it was some other hand that drove his pen? The east wind had blown for three long years, by then, and no sign of stopping before all was sere and sterile. But it stopped just the same, Watson had not withered before it.
Eastbourne Road, Millersgate Road, The Gables. The car rocked as we made the turn down the lane to my villa and Watson awoke, coming alert to scan the nightshrouded countryside for danger. But this time when he found me beside him it was no comfort to him remember where he was or why. I felt more than saw him stiffen his spine against his grief, knew without looking that he was assembling a mask to play the courteous houseguest, due to depart in the proper way when his welcome had worn thin.
“Not long now,” I said, slowing the car to save the tyres from the hazardous ruts. I could see the black shape of my roof edging up into the starlit sky.
“Thank you,” Watson said gruffly, watching the pool of light from the headlights move along the grass. “I should have taken a turn at driving.”
“I didn’t mind.”
We topped the rise and the Channel spread out beneath us, the little lights marking the ships moving peacefully upon the water. I drew up next to the garden wall and shut down the car, and Watson and I sat in silence a while, letting our eyes adapt to the dim light of the stars before rousing ourselves to deal with the practicalities of our arrival.
It did not take long. We had a routine, of sorts, left over from the days when he would find a specialist to chase me out of London for a week or two to rest at some remote cottage where my friend would watch over me with the help of a girl from the village and not infrequent references to his medical bona fides. Each of us brought inside a valise with nightshirt and toothbrush before I turned my hand to the lamps and the fires and he to the linens and the teakettle. The heavy luggage we left in the car, waiting for the morning and a sturdy lad in need of sixpence. It was no time at all until the two of us were sitting in chairs by the fire, warming our toes and hands as the teakettle rumbled softly on the hob.
The long drive was catching up for me, and I felt my head begin to nod, but “She wanted a divorce, you know,” Watson said suddenly. “After Robin died in France. She said he’d never have enlisted if I hadn’t done it first.”
He was staring into the fire, although I doubted he saw the flames.
“I don’t even think she loved me by the end. If it hadn’t been for the children, I don’t think she would have stayed.” He put his face into his hands, muffling his words. “If it hadn’t been for the children, I’d have been glad to let her go.”
I reached for him then, all hesitation forgotten, and drew him into the circle of my arms and held him until the dam broke and he began to weep. Words tumbled out of him then, stories sobbed against the growing damp patch on my shoulder, a litany of grief going back through the years, Ermintrude and Katie and Sophie and Jack. Mycroft and Robin and soldiers he’d known for scant hours before they succumbed. Mary and the baby. His brother Harry. His comrades at Maiwand. Me, for three long years.
At last the tears ebbed, though he still clung to me. “How do I do it, Holmes?” he whispered to my sleeve. “How do I stay alone? I’ve never had the knack.”
“You don’t,” I told him, and stepped back a pace, my hands still on his shoulders so that he could not help but see my promise and the future on my face. “You stay here.”
