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On the second floor of the lovely and lopsided cottage I share with Sherlock Holmes in the heart of the Sussex downs, there is a wide, warped window overlooking the sloping rise that leads steadily down to our front door. The house rests snugly in the arms of a valley (albeit one so shallow it barely earns its name), and consequently it is possible to see travelers approaching from a long way off, half a mile at least. On this particular morning in early June, as I sat in the broad window seat and gazed absently out across the wide, darkening sky, I spotted, cresting the distant hilltop, the shapes of two figures of indeterminate age and sex, treading the path down into the valley. My eyesight was not so keen as it had once been—this was 1928, after all, and I was more than seventy-five years old—and I could discern nothing about the pair except that they were making straight for our little house, and that it was very much in question whether they or the oncoming storm would arrive first.
Not for nothing had I lived with Sherlock Holmes for nearly forty years, however, and I was certain I knew why they were here.
“Holmes,” I called out, my voice travelling through the crooked corridor into the room across the hall, where my friend sat in his study, composing yet another monograph on the habits of bees. “We have visitors.”
A curse rang out, unchecked by any sense of propriety—a quality which Holmes had never possessed in abundance and which had dwindled to nearly nothing in his old age; reason number four thousand, three hundred and twelve, I reflected, why we had chosen a house so far from any neighbors.
“What is the point,” Holmes called back irascibly, “of moving all the way to this godforsaken countryside,” (in truth, he loved Sussex with a fervor nearing his devotion to our great metropolis), “when we are plagued night and day with as many disreputable characters knocking uninvited on our door as if we were back in Baker Street in 1898?”
I stifled a laugh. “They aren’t disreputable characters, Holmes, they are—pilgrims, after a sort. Journeying from far and wide for a sight of the great detective.”
He let out a snort, though I could hear that he was trying not to smile. “They are very needy pilgrims,” he replied. He was very good at playing the irritable old man. “They eat my honey, they take up my time—cross-examining me on the details of events which occurred thirty years ago, demanding that I reveal to them the secrets of cases that never happened at all—although that, of course, is your fault, Watson. The ‘red leech?’ The ‘giant rat of Sumatra?’”
“They were intended as jests,” I replied with some exasperation. “How was I to know anyone would take them seriously?”
“Well, they certainly did,” Holmes replied, and I could picture him raising his eyes to the heavens as he spoke. “That damned rat of Sumatra is the bane of my existence. Second, of course, to those who ask about it.”
I peered out at the approaching figures, who had gained a more definite form as they grew nearer. “There are only two of them, Holmes. And they appear quite young.”
“The young are the worst,” he said. I could picture his exaggerated shudder as well as if he were standing before me. “They have more stamina. And more impudence! The things they ask for these days—pinches of my tobacco ash, locks of my hair, Watson. They may indeed be pilgrims, but rather than fragments of the cross and vials of Christ’s blood they spirit away the bits and pieces of my daily existence. Soon I shall have nothing left.”
“As a matter of fact,” I said suddenly, “I don’t think they’re those kind of pilgrims at all.”
The two figures had come into even clearer view, and I had realized with a spark of surprise that they were women. Both wore the rather shapeless dresses popular amongst the ladies of the day, giving them, along with their bobbed hair, a vaguely boyish appearance. The shorter of the two sported the sort of straw hat that was in favor that summer amongst fashionable young men. They had hiked up their skirts above their knees—unaware, I am sure, that they had an audience—revealing sensible men’s boots. There was something about their entire assembly that made me look twice, that set off a tickle at the back of my brain. And then one of them had stumbled on an uneven patch of ground and landed nearly in the other’s arms, and from a hundred tiny signs—the ease with which the one caught the other, the unhurried efforts to untangle their limbs, the lingering touch of hands on shoulders to ascertain both remained intact and unhurt—a truth had emerged, shaking out the rolling countryside until everything fell to rights.
“Remarkable.” Holmes had appeared next to me, silent as a cat. “I do believe you’re correct.” He peered out the window at the approaching couple. “How peculiar, Watson, your unfailing ability to deduce that about people, while you have remained, throughout your life, blind to all the other hidden details of their existence.”
After many long years of practice I could recognize when Holmes was teasing me. I gave him a light kick on his shin in retribution, which he took with an amused huff.
“They really are very young,” I said, looking out again at the cloud-swept landscape, where the two young ladies had commenced their progress toward our house. “And women—that’s rather unusual for us, where that sort of visitor is concerned.”
“Yes, you’d have thought they would bother Ms. Sackville-West, up at Sissinghurst, rather than two dusty old antiques like ourselves,” Holmes remarked.
“Vita Sackville-West may have gained a good deal of notoriety since her elopement with Miss Trefusis, despite her subsequent return to marriage and children,” I concurred, slipping my arms around Holmes’ waist, “but she has not been immortalized by her lover in what amounts to the longest love letter in the English language.”
“Not as yet, no,” he conceded, his ever-smooth cheeks brushing against my grey stubble. “But I daresay she will be someday, if she keeps on as she has been.”
“And when that time comes, the young inhabitants of Sodom and of Lesbos may make pilgrimages to her and her magnificent garden, rather than to our humble abode,” I said gravely, “but as we continue to be a Mecca of sorts at the moment I had better go downstairs and let our two most recent wayfarers in. The storm is nearly upon us.”
He sighed as I released him from my embrace. “If you must, Watson.”
“Of course I must—Holmes, you are not going to secret yourself away up here!” I remarked indignantly as he made his way back to his study.
“No, no, I merely need to set down a few more thoughts while they are still in my head,” he said, waving a dismissive hand. “They do not keep as well as they used to, I’m afraid.”
I nodded, understanding all too well what he meant—my own memory was a slippery thing these days, far more reliable when it came to events of twenty years before than those of twenty minutes. My creaking joints, too, reminded me of my age as I made my way slowly downstairs. No sooner had I reached the first floor than a knock resounded through the cottage, bold at first but stuttering out into silence.
“One moment,” I called, wincing as my hip panged in protest. My old war wound was acting up again these days, catching up to me at last. I walked slowly across the bare wooden floor—on longer jaunts through the countryside I took a walking-stick, but I refused to use it in my own home—and opened the door, revealing a pair of fresh, bright faces. They were almost painfully young, I saw now, not more than twenty-two or twenty-three.
“Hello,” the taller woman said, the one without the hat. Her green eyes sparkled with ill-contained eagerness, though I could tell by her restless hands that she was nervous, too. “Are you—are you Dr. Watson?”
“I am,” I replied amiably.
She cast an excited glance at her partner, who remained silent. The second woman was shorter and darker, and devoid now of the gaiety I had glimpsed in her from my window. She looked warily at me, hands in her jacket pockets.
“My name is Julia Moses,” said the first woman, “and this is Beatrice Hackhurst.”
“Bea,” the other said sharply.
“Yes.” Miss Moses drew in a breath. “We’re very sorry to bother you, unannounced and all, but, well…”
She hesitated, and I concealed my amusement, all too familiar with the story she was about to tell.
“We happened to be passing through the area,” she said (untruthfully, of course—her dialect marked her down as a Londoner and whatever Holmes said, I had absorbed enough of his methods to know that two poor London girls did not ‘pass through’ Sussex on a whim), “and someone chanced to mention that your cottage was nearby.” This was also a lie; the closest villagers knew better than to gossip with strangers about the location of our home, and at any rate to consider it “nearby” to anything was rather a stretch. But the fabrication was as benign as it was common, and in the second quarter of the twentieth century dropping by a stranger’s house with no introduction was not the unthinkable social crime it once had been. So I merely smiled, and held open the door.
“No doubt you could not resist the opportunity to meet a legend in the flesh,” I remarked. “Do come in. I believe the rain has begun at last.”
Several large, fat drops had indeed landed on our heads, and the wind was picking up. “Oh, thank you, Dr. Watson,” Miss Moses said, stepping enthusiastically over the threshold. Her friend hesitated, some silent conflict playing out across her angular face, but as the rain began in earnest she conceded, and I shut the door behind us, muffling the sounds of the storm and enclosing us in a warm little circle of peace.
“Please, come and sit,” I said, ushering them into the sitting room, where the ancient armchairs from Baker Street clashed amicably with the broad, wooden table and plain sofa Holmes and I had purchased in the village some years before. “I shall fetch tea.”
I left Miss Moses staring around the room with obvious pleasure, while Miss Hackhurst’s expression spoke of something more complicated—awe, perhaps, but also distrust, maybe fear. Sadly enough, those were emotions all too commonly experienced by those in our positions—hers and mine—and while I was curious as to its source I did not take her suspicious attitude personally. I returned with the tea to find them still examining their surroundings with something akin to hunger.
Miss Moses’ eyes were unnaturally bright. “Do you—do you really live here? You and Mr. Holmes?”
I smiled. “Yes, indeed.”
She looked again at Miss Hackhurst, a smile bubbling to her face. “You see, Bea! It is true.”
Her friend said nothing, only frowned, and Miss Moses’ expression dimmed a little.
“Where are you from?” I asked quickly, finding that I did not like to see Miss Moses’ joy diminished.
“London,” she replied. “Born and bred, both of us.”
“And how long have you known each other?”
“Almost two years now,” Miss Moses said, and this time Miss Hackhurst met her smile with one of her own. “We met at a trade-school for girls—I was learning to be a typist, and Bea teaches classes there. I live at a sort of rooming-house for young women, and Bea lives at the school, but now that I have a job, we’re both saving up.” Her face shone. “We’re going to get a flat together.”
“We might get a flat together,” Miss Hackhurst replied sharply.
“Oh, Bea, you can’t argue now!” Miss Moses burst out. “Now you see that they’ve done it—Dr. Watson and Mr. Holmes. They’ve managed all their lives.”
“It’s different for them,” her friend snapped. “They’re men.”
“Yes, but it must have been even more dangerous decades ago, and with the police in and out all the time, always the risk of being caught—”
“Watch what you say!” Miss Hackhurst cried, and then they both fell silent, turning to stare at me with wide, frightened eyes.
Understanding flooded through me, a sympathy that went deeper than mere friendly concern; it was a sort of fellow-feeling whose strength I cannot describe to those who are not like me, who have never experienced the fear that simply existing is enough to make others turn against you.
“You are safe here,” I assured them firmly. “I promise you that.” I smiled at them as they relaxed slowly, though Miss Hackhurst still looked like a wild animal about to bolt. “And you are correct, Miss Moses—in some respects it was harder back then. Although I am very sensible of the fact that what you say is also true, Miss Hackhurst. It is no hardship for men to live without women, but society has made the reverse very challenging. You are lucky to live when you do; it is not as difficult or as scandalous for women to have jobs, to make their own money, as it was when I was young.”
They absorbed my words with something like shock. I wondered how often—if it all—anyone had spoken to them of their situation with such frankness, or if they lived in isolation from other inverts—other homosexuals, I corrected myself, for that had been the accepted term for many years now.
“But you managed it, and that’s the point,” Miss Moses said determinedly. “You and he, for all those years, you managed to be together.”
“Did they?” Miss Hackhurst looked at me sharply. “Only last year, Dr. Watson, you wrote that you had got married, back in 1903. That you had taken a wife and moved out of Baker Street just before Mr. Holmes left for Sussex.”
“Ah.” I laughed. “Surely you know better than to believe everything I write in those fanciful little tales of mine. Holmes is upstairs at present, but when he comes down I am sure he will be happy to lecture you on the dangers of taking me at my word.”
Miss Moses giggled, but Miss Hackhurst looked unconvinced. “And what about Mary Morstan?” she asked stubbornly. “Did you really marry her?”
“Or perhaps she was also one of your fictions,” Miss Moses interjected hurriedly. She looked at me, her eyes full of hope. “A cover, perhaps, for your relationship with Mr. Holmes?”
I shook my head. “Mary Morstan was as real as Holmes and myself,” I said. “But you are not altogether wrong, either.”
Both of them looked at me curiously, and not without trepidation. I knew what they must think: I would not have been the first frightened and ashamed homosexual to take a wife as a means of denying the truth. Happily, my truth was not quite so bleak.
“Would you like to hear the story?” I asked.
Their eyes met; a spark leapt between them. In unison, they nodded.
“Then I shall tell it,” I said, and began.
I met Mary Morstan for the first time one gray, cold evening in the early days of 1888. It was several years after Holmes and I had taken rooms together, and some weeks after the publication of A Study in Scarlet, my first account of our adventures together. We were sitting by the fire at Baker Street in more or less companionable silence, though I remember, too, that I was rather nervous about the fact that Holmes had so far failed to comment upon my publishing efforts. I feared he was offended, or perhaps that he thought my writing poor and wished to spare my feelings by saying nothing. Certainly I was not imagining the looks I caught him giving me from time to time, pensive but otherwise indecipherable, and on the evening in question he seemed more prone to them than usual.
So it was with some relief that I heard the knock at the door, and Billy the page’s footsteps on the stair.
“A young lady to see you, Mr. Holmes,” he announced, giving a comically deep bow. There was a smudge of dirt on his nose. “Here you are, miss.”
He disappeared out the door, leaving behind a woman of slight stature and steady gaze. She was quite composed, her blonde hair neat and her dress simple but impeccable, and yet it was evident from the shadows underneath her eyes that she was suffering some great strain.
“Mr. Holmes, I presume?” she enquired of my friend. “And Dr. Watson?”
We nodded. “Please, take a seat,” I offered.
She did, perching on the edge of the chair, her posture ramrod-straight. “My name is Mary Morstan, and I’ve come to ask for your help.” She took a deep breath. “My friend has gone missing.”
Holmes’ eyes narrowed. “Your friend, Miss Morstan?”
She swallowed, suppressing a wave of emotion. “Yes. Her name is Annie Grayson. She and I live at a boarding house for unmarried young women in Camden. I am employed at a school for working-class children, teaching them their letters, and Annie is an assistant to a dancing-master. She—she hasn’t been home in two days.” She took a steadying breath. “I enquired after her at the dancing-school, and she has not been seen there, either. It is very unlike Annie to disappear without warning.”
Holmes said nothing, but watched her through lidded eyes, his limbs loose and his pipe forgotten between his fingers. I expected him to start asking our visitor any number of questions, as was his usual practice, but he merely gazed at her, as if in silent assessment. She bore his scrutiny quietly, though her face was pale.
“Is it possible,” I offered, finally breaking the silence (as neither of them seemed likely to do so), “that Miss Grayson received some urgent news—a letter from her family, perhaps—and was called away without time to notify anyone of her plans?”
Miss Morstan shook her head. “Annie has no family left. And she would not leave without telling me.”
Her face was set and certain, but I could not help but hold out some doubt. I was young, and still labored under the delusion that women were flightier and less reliable than men, and I thought perhaps Miss Morstan had overestimated her friend’s steadiness.
“Have you spoken to the police?” Holmes asked, his eyes fixed intently on her face.
She hesitated, then shook her head. “I—I had heard that your abilities were far superior to theirs,” she said, shifting in her seat. “So I thought I would come straight to you, Mr. Holmes.”
His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward, obviously fascinated by her statement—why, I could not fathom, as so far the mystery with which she presented us held none of the curious features that usually engaged my friend’s interest. “Did you perhaps ‘hear’ of my abilities in that little volume entitled A Study in Scarlet, Miss Morstan?”
She nodded, and my stomach dipped, half in pleasure, half in nervous anticipation. Holmes sat back, his cheeks flushing slightly with the triumph of discovery. But what had he discovered? Again, there was a silence that neither of them appeared inclined to break, and I found myself stumbling into speech.
“Well, I—I certainly understand your desire to consult with my friend, but—the police do have certain resources to deal with this sort of thing. I mean to say—especially as there is no evidence that any wrongdoing has in fact occurred—why not take advantage of all possible aid, and call on the Yard?”
“Because she cannot,” Holmes said softly, from the depths of his armchair. “Because it is too dangerous. Because to ask the police to look into Miss Grayson’s disappearance is to run a greater risk than doing nothing at all.” His eyes flashed to hers. “Isn’t that right, Miss Morstan?”
She looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded.
“And so you came to us,” Holmes said. “Hoping we would—understand.”
“I was hoping for rather more than understanding, Mr. Holmes,” she replied quietly, and for some reason her eyes flicked towards me. Holmes’ followed, settling on my face for a moment before skittering rapidly away. I saw his throat convulse, and Miss Morstan’s brow cleared ever so slightly.
I realized suddenly what I had been too dense to see before: they were speaking to each other, silently, without words. A whole conversation had been occurring without me, from the moment she walked into the room.
“Holmes—” I ejaculated, bemused and (I can now admit) a touch jealous. “What…” I looked from one to the other, trying to grasp the meaning of all that had gone unsaid. “I don’t understand,” I confessed lamely.
A corner of Holmes’ mouth rose. “My dear Watson. Surely you can discern why exactly Miss Morstan is here.”
I turned my gaze to her, looking for all the signs Holmes could read so expertly: smudged sleeves, folds in fabric, hairs out of place and telltale paraphernalia—train tickets, watch-chains, bits of string—protruding from pockets and reticules. But Miss Morstan was an unreadable canvas to me; I could not decipher the clues that were no doubt visible to my uncannily perceptive friend.
“It is no use, Holmes,” I said, a bit piqued. “You must know by now that I do not have the mind of a detective.”
A ghost of a smile flitted across his face. “Ah, but it is not as a detective I am asking you to think.”
Not as a detective? As what, then, I wondered? As a doctor, perhaps? I again surveyed Miss Morstan, who met my gaze with a lifted chin and only a hint of well-concealed apprehension. There were certainly medical reasons one might wish to conceal from others—illnesses of a sensitive nature, for instance, contracted in ways an unmarried young woman should know nothing about—my face burned to think of Miss Morstan in such a manner. And yet surely a thing like that could have no bearing on the case, or indeed be apparent to an outsider. At any rate, the women I had treated for such afflictions were not sober young ladies employed at respectable locations…I glanced at her sharply, eyebrows shooting upwards. No, no, I could not imagine Miss Morstan walking the streets—but perhaps her friend?—and yet my mind rebelled against the notion. There were other reasons, other ways of life besides prostitution, that one might need to conceal from others, from the police more than anyone; I myself knew that all too well…
My eyes widened with shock. I looked at the young woman, whose hands were clenched tightly in her lap, her manner composed but, underneath, her heart and mind clearly awhirl with fear for her friend, and I understood.
I had not needed to think as a doctor, then, nor indeed as a detective: but as an invert.
“Oh, Miss Morstan,” I said, filled suddenly with overwhelming sympathy, “you poor creature! You must be ill with worry.”
Her face collapsed in relief, her whole body caving in upon itself as if it were a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“Thank you, Dr. Watson,” she said fervently. “I am frightened, yes.” She took a breath, drawing herself up again, replacing her armor. “But my darling Annie” (for who else could she be, but her darling?) “is strong, and has weathered many storms. I am certain she can weather this one—whatever nature of storm it may be.” She hesitated, then reached around her neck to unclasp a locket which she drew from beneath her dress. She extended her hand and I took the small, heavy piece of jewelry, and at a nod from her, undid the clasp.
“That is Annie,” she said, pride and affection evident in her voice. I studied the picture, with, I admit, a touch of surprise. Rather than the fair skin and golden locks I had somewhat narrow-mindedly been picturing, the tiny watercolor revealed that Miss Grayson was quite dark of complexion, with lustrous black hair and grave brown eyes.
“Her father was a sea-captain, and returned twenty-four years ago from a long voyage with a wife and tiny baby,” Miss Morstan explained quietly, as I passed the locket to Holmes. “They were a happy family, but when Annie was sixteen, her father’s boat was lost at sea. Her mother was on board. Only a sudden illness had prevented Annie from being there as well. She had no other family, and has had to make her own way in the world since then—a difficult task for a poor young woman, in particular one of Annie’s heritage. But she is determined, and brave, and—and finding her was the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
Miss Morstan looked at my friend, who was gazing at the picture inside the locket with a curiously unreadable expression in his steel-gray eyes. “Please, Mr. Holmes,” she said quietly. “I know that it is something of a risk, becoming involved in this affair when you know our secret. But I can think of nowhere else to turn. Imagine if your beloved went missing, and you had no other recourse,” she said, her voice trembling ever so slightly. “Imagine if it were Dr. Watson.”
Holmes’ eyes flew open, his head rising abruptly. I found myself equally startled.
“Holmes and I are not—we aren’t…” I stammered, unaccountably at a loss for words.
“You are theorizing in advance of facts, Miss Morstan,” Holmes said smoothly, entirely in control again. “Surely two inverts may be friends without being lovers?”
She blinked rapidly, looking from one of us to the other with a puzzled frown on her face. “Of course. But…but surely…”
“We will take your case, Miss Morstan,” Holmes said.
“Oh!” Her eyes shone. “Thank you, Mr. Holmes. Annie is, to me, a treasure beyond all price.”
He handed her back the locket. I glanced at him surreptitiously, wondering if he was as taken aback as I at being mistaken for lovers. In all honesty, the idea had never occurred to me before. Holmes was too unique, too idiosyncratic, too brilliant and aloof for me to entertain the notion that he might be interested in more than friendship. But I could not read his face.
Miss Morstan gave Holmes the details of her sweetheart’s disappearance, and Holmes listened with the characteristic indolence which masked his whirring brain. She left with assurances on both our parts that we would do all we could to find her friend, and that she must not worry overmuch. When she had gone, Holmes relit his forgotten pipe and sat back in his armchair, eyes hooded as the smoke rose before his face.
“What a curious conclusion she drew from your little tale, Watson,” he said contemplatively.
My eyebrows rose. “From A Study in Scarlet? You mean—you don’t mean she thought us intimate because of that?”
“Where else could she have received that impression?” Holmes asked calmly.
I sat up straight, alarmed beyond all measure. “Well, I—I—” I gave a hard swallow. “Holmes, was A Study in Scarlet—indiscreet?”
My friend’s eyes flashed with amusement. “Indiscreet, Watson? No, I think not.” I relaxed into my chair with a sigh of great relief. “Absurdly romantic, it may have been,” Holmes continued. “Prone to flights of fancy where it ought to have contained pure reason, yes. Full of ridiculous fabrications rather than scientific facts, certainly. But indiscreet? I think not.”
He smiled dryly, and I resisted the urge to smile back, certain I ought to be offended, rather than tickled, by his criticisms.
“No, Watson,” he said, drawing on his pipe, “it will have sounded no alarum-bells, I think—except for those who, like our friend Miss Morstan, know how to listen for them.”
I nodded and rose to my feet, wearied enough by the drama of the evening’s events that I was inclined to retire early. As I pushed open the door of our sitting room, Holmes spoke again, an unfamiliar catch in his voice.
“Watson,” he began, and then stopped. “I thought…I rather thought that was your intention. With A Study in Scarlet. That you meant it to be a—a signal, in a sense, to others like us. A coded message, if you will. A sort of—cry into the darkness.”
I blinked. “Well,” I said, thinking of certain phrases I had written, certain gaps I had left open, a trail of breadcrumbs that might lead to an unspoken truth, if one were inclined to follow the path. “Yes,” I admitted, “I suppose it was.”
“And are you glad that someone has answered?”
Holmes’ voice was very quiet. I thought of Miss Morstan opening her locket for me, opening, indeed, much more than that. How good to meet another who kept such a secret behind the locked door of her hidden life; how good to be admitted in.
“Yes,” I said, a smile breaking over my face. “Yes, I am.”
Miss Moses and Miss Hackhurst stared at me avidly as I stopped speaking, their mouths slightly open and their eyes big as saucers.
“Oh, Dr. Watson,” Miss Moses breathed after a long pause. “Is that all true? Was Miss Morstan really—like us?” She indicted the space between her friend and herself, a gesture I had seen a hundred times before when inverts wished to describe themselves without resorting to language that often seemed cold, clinical, removed from actual experience. I smiled to see it repeated now, by one so young.
“She was indeed,” I replied.
Miss Moses smiled, but Miss Hackhurst’s intense expression only deepened. “And what of Annie Grayson?” she demanded. “Did you find her?”
“Oh, yes,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry, I hadn’t intended to keep you in suspense. Holmes traced her to the home of one of her dancing pupils, a young man who, it transpired, was more than a little unbalanced. He had somehow taken it into his head that the soul of his recently deceased sister had inhabited Annie’s body, and had forced Annie to come home with him, where he gave her the sister’s clothes to wear and her former chambers to sleep in. Annie, being a shrewd and steady young woman, elected to go along with the charade while looking for a chance of escape. We found her under strict lock and key, but unharmed.”
Miss Hackhurst breathed a long sigh of relief, her clenched fingers relaxing as she sat back in the armchair.
Miss Moses looked pleased as well, but then a shadow crossed her face. “You and Mr. Holmes,” she began. “Were you and he not—are you merely—friends?”
I smiled. “We were at the time, yes. But those were early days, Miss Moses. Many things changed as the years went on.”
“Did Miss Morstan change?” Miss Hackhurst asked. Below her darkening brow I thought I caught an undercurrent of anxiety. “Did you—did you truly marry her? What of The Sign of the Four?”
“Ah,” I said, coughing delicately. Holmes often teased me for diverging from strict truth in my little tales, but none so much as in my second novel. Frankly, where that particular tome was concerned, he had every right to do so. “The Sign of the Four is…not precisely…well, let us say that long-lost treasures and colonial adventures are rather safer to write about than the true circumstances of my marriage to Mary Morstan. Ah, yes, we did marry,” I said, as their eyes flew open wide, “but it isn’t what you think.”
“And you and Mr. Holmes?” Miss Moses asked, biting her lip. “What of your relationship?”
“And what of Miss Grayson?” Miss Hackhurst queried insistently.
I held up my hands. “I will tell you,” I said, torn between sympathy and amusement. “Please, do not worry.” I glanced upwards, at the ceiling where, above me, my dear Holmes sat and scratched out some long, complicated theory about the machinations of bees. “I promise you, this is a happy story.”
Mary and Annie quickly became fast friends with Holmes and myself. Very often they would visit Baker Street, chatting amiably with me while my companion read the newspapers and interjected the occasional dry comment into the conversation. It is difficult to overstate the pleasure of having other inverts as friends. Out in the world, I was forever being asked when I planned to marry and to have children, and I know Mary and Annie suffered worse from such enquiries, proportional to their sex; but here, before the fire, there were no secrets, no necessary but demeaning pretenses at normality—we understood each other perfectly.
One late afternoon, some six months after our first meeting, Holmes and I were sitting in our armchairs, recovering from a case and waiting for our friends to arrive. It was curious that the case in question had exhausted us so, as Holmes managed to solve it without leaving Baker Street, but the client had been a middle-aged woman of indefatigable energy and an unstoppable tongue, who insisted upon laying out her story from five or six different angles ‘just in case I’ve forgotten some crucial bit of evidence, Mr. Holmes, I would hate to think you got it wrong because of my scattered little brain, though I do say I have a head for details, really, but just in case, are you sure you don’t want to come along and examine the scene for yourself?” Holmes listened with thinning patience and reached the same conclusion each time (the cat ate it). Eventually the woman had no choice but to leave, and I was shaking with silent laughter before the tread of her footsteps disappeared down our seventeen steps.
“You shouldn’t laugh, Watson,” Holmes admonished, lifting an eyebrow. “You were in serious danger there, my dear boy.”
“Danger?” I asked in astonishment. “From the woman whose cat ate her reticule?”
“From her, and many more who enter our humble abode,” he responded gravely. “If I were not here to protect you, I daresay you would have been carried off by many a female client before now—dragged bodily to the altar, and subsequently to the marriage bed, where you would no doubt be offered as a sacrifice in exchange for five or six fat young Watsons, each the spitting image of their hapless father.”
“Holmes!” I protested, surprise turning to laughter, though my cheeks were growing embarrassingly pink. “Don’t be absurd.”
“I am not,” he replied calmly. “Haven’t you noticed the way they look at you? Like they are cats, licking their lips at the sight of—”
“A delicious reticule?”
“Precisely.” He crossed his ankles over each other, his long lean body stretching into an improbably longer, leaner line. “Truly, Watson, at times I fear for both your honor and your safety.”
“I am not going anywhere, Holmes,” I replied, amused. “You know as well as I that our female clients, no matter how lovely, tempt me not one jot.”
He surveyed me with pursed lips, and I thought he might say something else. But he did not.
“Perhaps I should pen another one of my little tales,” I joked. “Send out the signal again. Bring in the right sorts of clients this time.”
His eyebrow shot up. “The ‘right sort,’ Watson? Ah, I see—you mean the sodomitically inclined.”
I flushed, but said lightly, “And why not? I daresay we could attract a suitable man for each of us. Tempt them to our hearth, away from the outside world.”
“Is there a suitable man for me in the outside world, I wonder?” Holmes asked dryly.
“Of course there is,” I said in some surprise. “Good heavens, Holmes, why wouldn’t there be?” I leaned back, contemplating. “I can picture him now. He must be intelligent, of course, or you would tire of him. A bit older, perhaps—yes, a distinguished man, his hair turning to silver at the temples, possessed of the gravity that comes with age. A gentleman, but not an idle one. Ah! I have it. He is a scientist. A chemist, I think.” I gave Holmes a smile of triumph. “He has come to you because his research—his brilliant, groundbreaking research—has mysteriously gone missing. And you, of course, shall discover who has stolen it.”
“This is quite a tale,” Holmes said sardonically. “And what happens then, Watson? He falls into my arms with gratitude?”
“Yes,” I replied stubbornly, irked by my friend’s obvious skepticism. “As well you deserve.”
Holmes was silent for a long moment. Then he rose abruptly, stepping over to the window and gazing out at the street below.
“And what of you, Watson?” he asked, not moving from his post. “What sort of man would you prefer to walk through our door?”
“Oh,” I said, honestly surprised by the question. “Do you know, Holmes, I haven’t given it a thought.” When on earth, I wondered, had I stopped dreaming about such an eventuality?
He let out a low sort of hum. Then he whirled to face me. “I am sure I can deduce it,” he said, striding back to his chair and perching on its arm. He peered into my face, so intently that I squirmed a bit. “Oh, Watson, it is rather obvious, is it not? A strapping young solider boy, no doubt, with a sunburned face and muscles like an ox.”
Holmes might have been describing any number of men I had fancied during my youth—done more than fancied, too, in several cases. But I was not the same man I had been ten years before.
“I have rather had my fill of strapping young soldier boys,” I admitted.
Holmes’ head jerked up. He blinked rapidly, then twisted his mouth in a smile. “No doubt they have filled you many times.”
“Holmes!” I cried, blushing scarlet.
“Your delicate sensibilities never fail to astound me, Watson,” he said. And then I think he might have gone on to say something more, had we not been interrupted by a knock at the door and the sound of feet on the stairs.
“Tea for you, gentleman,” Mrs. Hudson called out before entering the room, “and Miss Morstan and Miss Grayson are here as well.”
She bustled in with the tea things, beaming widely at us all. She liked our new friends very much, and I suspect she harbored hopes of us pairing off, though in a rather more conventional configuration than was likely. Mary and Annie settled themselves on the sofa. Once the landlady had gone, Mary let out a long sigh, and Annie began to massage her shoulders.
“She’s had a long day,” the latter informed us.
Mary’s days teaching gaggles of unruly children to read were often long, but she usually bore them with admirable fortitude. “What happened?” I asked.
Mary shook her head wearily. “The schoolmaster asked me to marry him again.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. Even Holmes looked sympathetic.
“Yes,” Mary answered, rubbing her temples. “And he is so wounded by my refusal. He has the most enormous eyes, which grow damp and sorrowful whenever they catch mine. If only I could tell him the true reason I cannot accept—”
“The true reason,” Annie cut in, a bit severely, “is that you don’t wish to marry him. A simple no ought to be enough, never mind the rest.”
“You’re right,” Mary agreed, “but it would be easier if I could tell him my affections are permanently engaged elsewhere.”
Annie looked rather mollified by this statement, despite herself.
“I think I am going to have to find another position,” Mary sighed.
I winced. “Oh, Mary. This is, what—the third time?”
She nodded.
“Poor darling,” Annie said, tucking a lock of her sweetheart’s straw-colored hair behind her ear. “She’s so wonderful that everyone falls in love with her.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Mary replied. “Although I do wish my superiors would cease asking for my hand. I am growing tired of lecherous old men and young moon-faced ones alike.”
“Watson must feel much the same about scheming widows and besotted maidens,” Holmes put in unexpectedly. “Our client this morning was very nearly panting after him.”
“Holmes,” I admonished uncomfortably. “She wasn’t, and at any rate you know it isn’t the same thing at all. I am protected by virtue of my sex. I should never have to flit from job to job because my female superiors would not stop proposing to me.”
The notion, at least, brought a smile to Mary’s face. Annie merely sighed, leaning back against the sofa. “The boarding-house is becoming tiresome, too,” she confessed. “At least in the beginning, the danger was ameliorated by the excitement of an illicit affair—sneaking around in the middle of the night, stealing kisses in the corridors. But that is no way to carry out a long-term relationship. The circumstances have grown no less dangerous, but infinitely duller.”
“I wish we could afford a flat,” Mary said, “but even if we could, the risk of raising too many eyebrows is so great.”
“Surely with your enormous brain,” Annie said to Holmes, “you could think of a solution to our problems. How do a couple of unrepentant Sapphists approximate an ordinary life together?”
“Mr. Holmes is a detective, not a magician,” Mary said, smiling.
“Not that, at times, they don’t appear to be the same thing,” I quipped, smirking at my friend.
But Holmes said nothing. His eyes narrowed, and he surveyed each of us in turn, his gaze lingering last on me. “As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, “the solution is quite simple.”
Annie ran a hand over her black hair, suppressing a laugh. “Is it indeed, Mr. Holmes?”
“It is,” he replied. His eyes flickered again to me, curiously pensive. But then the corner of his mouth tugged upwards in a dry smile, and he stretched out his long legs in that lazy way he often did before making a startling and brilliant pronouncement.
“Well?” Annie insisted.
“Watson and Miss Morstan should marry.”
There was a resounding silence in which none of us, I think, knew whether we were meant to laugh.
“Mr. Holmes,” Annie said, just a bit of an edge in her voice, “quite apart from all other very considerable objections to your proposal, I am right here.” She took Mary’s hand, and Mary gave a reassuring squeeze.
“And there you shall stay,” Holmes said calmly. “Imagine it, Miss Grayson. Watson and Miss Morstan marry, freeing the latter from the unwelcome attentions of schoolmasters forever and ever, amen. Watson purchases a medical practice and resumes his occupation as a doctor, which he has been secretly itching to do for some time. Their house is rather larger than they need, and it is only natural that they should let the upstairs chambers to their dear but destitute friend, Miss Grayson. They employ a servant who is either very deaf or very good at pretending to be so, and each night Miss Morstan walks quietly upstairs, where her true spouse awaits.”
Holmes’ words, and their utter seriousness, took a long time to sink in. I sat there, stunned, turning them over in my head.
Mary recovered first. “And John remains downstairs, alone in his bed?”
Her tone was startlingly sharp.
Holmes’ fingers tapped on the edge of his chair. “It is no different than him being alone in his bed here at Baker Street.”
I admit the words stung a little, but Mary, for some reason, seemed angrier than I. She opened her mouth to retort, but Holmes cut her off with a sudden lightness in his tone.
“Or perhaps he will be on one of his nocturnal adventures with his friend Mr. Holmes, about which his dear wife is so very understanding. And now and again the good Dr. Watson returns to his old bachelor quarters for a visit, as Mr. Holmes keeps them ready for him at all times.”
Mary narrowed her eyes, but said nothing. My mind was still churning, still laying out Holmes’ proposition for me to consider. A medical practice—a chance for Mary and Annie to live together without fear—a house full of friends, which Holmes might visit at any time—
“Mr. Holmes,” Annie said, hope slowly suffusing her prematurely lined face, “have you truly just solved all our problems?”
Mary cast a quick glance at me, and while there was obvious concern on her face, she couldn’t hide the hope that was also burning in her eyes.
“Good heavens,” I said, laughing. “I believed I would go my whole life without saying these words. Mary Morstan, will you—”
“Don’t you dare, John Watson,” Annie cut in severely, but she was smiling. Her hand found Mary’s, and if I had any remaining doubts about the rightness of my decision, the joy in their eyes was more than enough to vanquish them.
But then I caught Holmes gazing at me from across the room, and though he gave me a slight nod of approval before looking away, something caught in my chest, a curious flutter I took to be sadness at the thought of leaving Baker Street but which I believe now to have been closer to disappointment, as though either he or I had failed at something, though at the time I did not even know enough to ask what.
I sipped my tea and enjoyed the growing wonder in my young friends’ eyes as they looked at me, and then each other. They appeared to be having an entire conversation without speaking. Finally, Miss Moses turned to me.
“Did it work?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” I replied. “Marvelously. We are not the only people to have made such an arrangement, you know,” I added, thinking again of Vita Sackville-West and her equally non-heterosexual husband.
“I don’t know if I’d like that,” Miss Hackhurst said slowly. “Even if I did know a man who would do it.”
“It is a rather deeper sort of hiding than ‘bachelorhood’—or ‘spinsterhood,’ for that matter,” I conceded. “But it had its benefits. No one ever again asked Mary why she kept turning down marriage proposals. And Annie, who had always seemed to have passed straight from childhood into middle age, blossomed into someone cheerful and young. For us it amounted to allowing the further secrecy that accompanied the greater happiness, and I would make the same choice over again. Which isn’t to say, of course, that such an arrangement is for everyone,” I added. “I was lucky enough to have two dear friends in Mary and Annie, with whom I was happy to share a home.”
“And Mr. Holmes?” Miss Moses asked.
“I missed him,” I replied simply. “But I saw rather more of him in those days than I later indicated in my stories. And—well, I was still blind, you see. I had not yet realized what exactly it was that I was missing.”
They glanced at each other, and I could see it in their eyes: fear at the thought of not knowing each other’s love, and mutual reassurance and relief as they saw their feelings mirrored in each other’s faces.
“What happened?” Miss Moses asked quietly.
I took another sip of tea and felt, even now, at so many years’ distance, the ghost of a shudder pass through my body.
“He died.”
There isn’t much I wish to say about my experience at the Reichenbach Falls. In truth, I remember it only in patches, certain vivid details—the sharp edge of a footprint on rock, the smudge of a lowercase b in Holmes’ farewell note—blooming garishly amidst great swaths of blurry gray. I know it took me a full week to return to London after his death, for I was in shock and in no fit state to travel. I recall neither trains nor ferry, only the moment I appeared on my own front doorstep and fell into Mary’s arms.
I wept for the first time as she stroked my hair and Annie made me cup after cup of tea, insisting I partake at least of some dry toast or I would surely collapse from exhaustion. I might have felt some shame at being thus reduced by even so great a tragedy as Holmes’ death, but through my grief and pain a terrible truth was beginning to take shape. Certainly a man might mourn his friend as deeply as I mourned Holmes, but it was not mere sadness I felt at his passing: it was regret. Regret at all that had gone unsaid and undone between us—for I was only now beginning to understand that something vast had lurked in our silences, in the crackle of the fire and the smoke from our pipes. Or at least, on my part it had.
When my body ceased its uncontrollable shaking and I found myself able to speak once more, I looked at Mary and saw tears sparkling in her eyes, too. They were for Holmes, of course, but I suspected that they were also for me.
“Mary,” I said slowly, wiping a hand across my wet face, “how long have I been in love with Holmes?”
A tear fell from her pale lashes. She brushed it away, and her look was akin to that of a mother who had wished in vain to spare her child from the inevitable pain of growing up.
“Oh, John,” she said, ignoring the tears which continued to drip silently down her face. She tended to mine instead, wiping the salty residue from my cheeks with her thumb.
“Mary?”
“For as long as I have known you,” she confessed. “For longer still than that, I have no doubt.”
She was right, of course. “I am a fool,” I moaned, burying my head in my hands. “It is blindingly obvious now. How could I not see what was right in front of my face?”
Astonishingly, a tiny smile fluttered across her lips, quickly suppressed but definitely there. “My dear John,” she said, her voice cautious, “you are not always—you have not always been known to—to—”
“To see what was right in front of my face?” She looked at me warily, worried that she had given offense. “You sound like Holmes himself, Mary. ‘An excellent job, Watson, except that you have missed everything of importance.’”
She looked at me gravely for a moment, and then we were both laughing, so long and hard that Annie came into the room in order to ascertain whether we had both gone out of our minds with grief and ought to be packed off to Bedlam.
There were times, in the next three years, when I wondered if that might in fact be the best place for me. For try as I might, I could not shake the illusion that Holmes would be there when I walked into my sitting room, smoking his pipe, or that I would run into him on some familiar street corner, pursuing a lead with the gleam of discovery in his eye, or that one of my patients might suddenly remove beard and glasses and, growing suddenly three inches taller and significantly leaner, would transform into my friend.
Of course, in the end it transpired that I was not mad—only improbably prescient.
When Holmes finally did appear in my house, shedding the guise of the ancient bookseller as easily as old clothes, I was, for all my fond imaginings of such a scenario, taken utterly by surprise. My fainting fit was not, I regret to say, an invention of my pen.
The less said of the first few weeks after his return, the better. My initial reaction was one of overwhelming anger. I knew he had meant to protect us both by keeping his continued existence a secret, but that did not make it hurt any less. I have never said such dreadful things as I did then. But we have long since put it in the past, he and I, and there is no sense in reopening old wounds.
When I finally calmed down enough to recall that I was in fact happy to have my friend back, Mary sat me down and gave me a talking to.
“You must tell him, John.”
I shut my eyes tight and shook my head.
“Don’t be absurd. You have been given a second chance. To say all that you never said, do all that you were never able to do—”
“All that he never said or did, either, because he almost certainly didn’t want to,” I answered. Now that Holmes was back, the idea that he might return my affections seemed more absurd than ever. He was the same rational machine he had always been and he had never once indicated that he wished otherwise.
“Holmes has always spent a great deal of energy denying that he is interested in love, and particularly in mine,” I said to Mary. “He has always scoffed at the very thought.”
She raised an eyebrow, surprised. “Has he?”
I gave her an indignant glance. “Of course he has, Mary, you know that perfectly well. Why, the first time we ever met, you thought we were a couple, and he very emphatically laid that possibility to rest.”
“No, he didn’t,” she said, looking at me curiously. “Is that what you remember?”
“That is what happened.”
She shook her head. “What happened was that you denied it—which was true, of course—and then Holmes said I was theorizing in advance of facts and that two inverts could be friends without being lovers. Both of which are startlingly impersonal statements, John, and neither of which can be construed as even mild ‘scoffing.’”
I stared at her. She was right—I remembered his words, but I had always filled them, in my recollection, with a good deal of scorn. “But surely—I have heard him deny the possibility of having such feelings for me a hundred times.”
“Really?” Mary asked skeptically. “In so many words? In my memory he has always avoided particulars in favor of very general statements about the benefits of reason and the perils of emotion, which has always seemed to me an attempt to protect himself against disappointment, more than an active philosophy.”
“But…” I stared into space, attempting to purge my memory of all biases and impressions and recall only the bare facts. What had Holmes actually said?
Not that the idea of loving me was laughable. Not once had he actually stated as much.
“But he never said he did love me,” I burst out. “Perhaps he never denied it, but if it was true, why did he not simply tell me?”
“You never told him,” she pointed out.
“I did not know!” I pulled at my hair in frustration. “You do not think Holmes was so blind, do you? He might have simply said the words, if he wanted to, at any moment.”
“Oh, John.” Mary took my restless hands and held them in hers. “You are a writer, my dear, and an invert. Your entire life is predicated on your ability to read between the lines, to hear what is not spoken aloud. I imagine Mr. Holmes believed that you would see his truth plain as day if only you cared to look.”
“Then he was giving me far more credit than he ever has to my face,” I muttered. “No, Mary, I wish I could believe you, but—”
“You don’t have to believe me,” she said firmly. “You just have to talk to him.”
And I knew, however much I wished to deny it, that she was right.
I was too much of a coward to face him alone, so I filled every spare moment with busy work until Mary finally took me by the arm and dragged me to Baker Street. She pushed me up the steps and into the sitting room, where Holmes looked up from his pipe, startled by my sudden entrance. My mind went blank.
“Hello, Mr. Holmes,” Mary said, after a long moment in which Holmes and I stared at each other inanely, my head buzzing with the fear of what I had come to do, his, no doubt, full of the bitter words I had so recently thrown at him on the subject of his disappearance. “John has something to say to you.”
“Ah,” Holmes replied mechanically, the lines between his brows contracting ever so slightly in what I recognized, with a small spasm of guilt, as worry.
“Perhaps we ought to sit,” Mary said with some exasperation after the silence continued to stretch on.
“Oh, yes,” Holmes replied hurriedly. “Please do.”
I sat on the sofa next to Mary. The emptiness of my usual old armchair worried at my stomach, but I could not manage to be so close to my friend, or to take up what had once been mine when—if the conversation went badly—I might lose it again so soon.
“John,” Mary prompted.
“Yes.” I took a deep breath. Holmes’ face was smooth, blank, as impenetrable as I had ever seen it. I searched for some indication that Mary was right, that he would welcome my affections, but he was like a book in a language I could not read. Panic rose within me.
“I—I wanted to say,” I began helplessly, “that…that I…” I took in a lungful of air and the words, the wrong words, rushed out of me. “That I forgive you for everything—for—the Falls—and—”
“John!” Mary interjected indignantly. “That is neither true, nor the reason you are here.”
Embarrassed, I flushed. “No. I—I am sorry. I…”
Holmes stared at me, confusion evident in his pale eyes. He had no idea what I was about to confess.
I stood abruptly. “This was a bad idea. I should go—”
“John Watson, sit back down!” Mary exclaimed. “You too, Mr. Holmes,” she added, for he had also risen to his feet. “For goodness’ sake, the pair of you.” She raised her eyes to the heavens, then turned to me. “John Watson, you are a writer. Use your words.”
I swallowed, and sank back onto the sofa. Heart pounding, I closed my eyes and considered what she had said. I was a writer. I could imagine, perhaps, that this was one of my stories—one of the many stories I had written of Holmes during his absence. After all, they had served, to a great although necessarily veiled extent, as confessions of the same sort as the one I was about to make.
“When I believed you had disappeared over the Reichenbach Falls,” I began, wishing I had a pen in my hand, “I was utterly distraught. I was crushed, I was—wrecked.” A spasm of guilt flashed across Holmes’ face, but I raised my hand to forestall it. “I am not here to accuse you of anything, my dear fellow. I say this to you so you understand how great a catastrophe it took for me to finally realize that—well—that I…I had been somewhat misrepresenting—or misinterpreting, rather—the nature of our, our friendship—or at least on my part. I—please do not take offense, I could not help—well, I cannot help feeling this way, and I do not ask for—for anything, really, only I needed to say it—”
“My dear Watson,” Holmes said, confusion and affection twisting themselves up together on his long pale face, “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
I sighed in despair, rubbing my hands over my face. Words, words, confound them all.
“I love you, Holmes,” I said wearily. “That is all.”
After a silent, pregnant moment, I risked a glance at my friend. His face was wide with shock.
“You—love me?” he demanded.
The blood crept slowly to my cheeks. “I am afraid so, yes. As I said, I am sorry if—”
“But your stories!” he cried.
I looked at him, utterly taken aback. “You have read my stories?”
“Every one.”
A laugh bubbled up inside me, more from faint hysteria than mirth. Somehow I had not expected that. “Good God, Holmes, then you know exactly how I feel about you.”
“Exactly how you feel—” Holmes gripped the arms of his chair and leaned forward. His eyes were burning. “Watson, your stories were—they were like A Study in Scarlet, a—a signal, a ‘cry into the darkness,’ as it were, only—only a hundred times stronger. No invert could have read them and not understood that you were among their number, that you were writing for them.” He laughed shortly, without a whit of true amusement. “I imagined scores of men turning up on your doorstep, drawn by your signal, offering themselves to you as our female clients used to do—”
“Holmes!” I interjected, shocked. “Holmes—I—the only men who turned up on my doorstep were there to offer condolences on the death of my lover.”
Holmes’ mouth fell open. But no words came out.
“My stories were not a mating call, Holmes,” I said, shaking my head with helpless wonder. “They were a memorial. More than that, they were a—a picture of how things might have been. Of how I wished they had been. Every invert who read them believed you and I were lovers, Holmes, and that was not an accident.” I hesitated. “If I have given offense, I am sorry. If I represented us as more intimate than we truly were, well, you must remember—I believed you were dead, and beyond the reach of mere words.”
Holmes said nothing. Next to me, Mary pressed her knee firmly against mine, a helpful sort of anchor, as I felt poised to fall off the edge of the world.
“I am sorry, Holmes,” I said. “I can leave now, and—”
“You blind fool,” Holmes growled. “You’re never leaving again.”
My heart turned over in my chest. My breath seized. “Do you—do you mean…”
“Why do you think I suggested you marry Miss Morstan?” he snapped. “I wanted all your eager readers to believe you had given up your deviant ways and were therefore entirely out of their reach.”
Mary let out a startled laugh.
“Well, and to help Miss Morstan and Miss Grayson, naturally,” Holmes amended with some impatience.
“I…” My head was swimming. “Do you truly mean to say…”
“Yes, Watson!” he cried.
“Then say it,” Mary said quietly.
Both of us looked at her.
“Some things are perfectly clear without words,” she remarked. “But that does not mean the words should not be said.”
Holmes’ eyes darted around the room. His pale cheeks grew faintly pink. I watched, fascinated and still dreadfully in suspense, as he cleared his throat.
“I love you too, Watson,” Holmes stated.
“Ah,” I said, my throat growing dry.
“Yes.”
We looked at each other, suddenly helpless.
“What on earth happens now?” I asked finally.
“Now,” Mary said, fondly exasperated once more, “is generally when words cease to be necessary.” She stood, and with a light kiss on my cheek and (I swear I did not imagine it) a wink at Holmes, she left the room.
Holmes and I rose to our feet as one. We closed the distance between us with halting steps, and when I could see every darker fleck in his pale gray irises, I put my hand on his cheek and smiled.
I came back to myself with a start. Miss Moses and Miss Hackhurst were hanging on my every word.
“And then,” I said, coughing to hide my sudden embarrassment, “we, er—shook hands, and—clapped each other on the back—”
The women dissolved into laughter.
“Dr. Watson,” Miss Moses said delightedly, “you are quite the Victorian after all.”
I muttered something about the sensibilities of young ladies, more to humor them than anything else, and they laughed harder. It was lovely, I had to admit, to see them laugh.
“So—so…the, er, the ‘sad bereavement,’” Miss Hackhurst said slowly, her giggles fading away. “In ‘The Adventure of the Empty House.’ You wrote that Mary had died, while Holmes was away. That was…not true?”
“Oh, heavens, no,” I said, smiling. “But I had to make some excuse for why I moved back into Baker Street.”
“What happened to her and Annie?” Miss Hackhurst asked anxiously. “Did they have to return to the rooming-house?”
My eyes sparkled. “No indeed. As you probably remember, I wrote that Holmes, without my knowledge, paid a relative of his to purchase my practice so I could move back into 221B. Well, at the same time, and with the help of his brother Mycroft, he arranged for a, er, long-lost ‘great-aunt’ of Mary’s to conveniently surface—or rather, her great-aunt’s long-lost will, in which she left Mary a generous bequest in the form of an annual income more than sufficient to support two sensible women. They moved into a flat not far from Baker Street.”
The joy on the young lovers’ faces was wonderful to behold.
“And—and were they all right?” Miss Hackhurst asked, darting a glance at Miss Moses. “Despite the dangers?”
I nodded. “Mary’s separation from me, however skillfully and quietly we managed it, caused more of an upset than her living with Annie did. I think that small scandal, in a strange way, protected them from other sorts of rumors. On the other hand, so did their reputations as sober, serious women. And they neither of them looked the part of the female invert as described in the medical textbooks of the time. In these things they were far luckier than some. Of course, they had to be very careful. It was not by any means easy. But neither was it impossible—not for them, at any rate.”
“And for you and Mr. Holmes?” Miss Moses enquired worriedly. “Did you find it difficult?”
“At times, and for a number of reasons,” I said, smiling, “not all of them related to our peculiar situation. Holmes and I still had to learn to understand each other, as partners now as well as friends. He is not the most transparent man, as far as his true feelings go, and I am not generally known for my intuition. But we managed. And,” I continued, as Miss Moses opened her mouth to ask again, “we managed to cope with the dangers that threaten those whose very existence breaks the law. I used my writing to divert suspicion—claiming Mary had died, and, as you noted earlier, pretending that Holmes retired alone to Sussex and left me to my imaginary second wife. There were narrow misses—a particular blackmailer comes to mind, dealt with swiftly by Holmes but no less terrifying for all that.”
“And the police?” Miss Hackhurst asked anxiously. “They never suspected?”
“Ah, well,” I replied, remembering one heart-stopping conversation, on the eve of the century’s end, when I had momentarily believed the game was really and truly up. “Once…”
They looked, even now, as if I were about to pronounce their doom. So I told them about Stanley Hopkins.
Inspector Hopkins was a bright young man whom Holmes considered a cut above the rest at the Yard. Mostly, this was due to his sharp eyes and quick mind, although it must be said that his devoted admiration of Holmes played some part in the latter’s high opinion of him. He was generally a cheerful man, even when baffled by a case, so his anxious appearance when he entered our sitting room that night came as a surprise.
“Mr. Holmes,” he said, bobbing his head nervously at my friend. “Dr. Watson.”
He stood in the middle of our rug, fidgeting with the hat in his hands and failing to meet our eyes.
“Inspector Hopkins,” Holmes said after a moment, clearly hovering between concern and amusement. “To what do we owe this honor?”
The young inspector swallowed hard. I could see his Adam’s apple bob. “I, erm, I. I’ve been…” He took a deep breath, then darted a glance at me. “I’ve been reading your stories, Dr. Watson. Well, re-reading, really, I…”
He trailed off. I raised my eyebrows at Holmes, bemused.
“I hope you have not been taking the doctor’s tales as a primer on the science of detection,” my friend said lightly. “They are unforgivably muddled in that arena, and absurdly romantic to boot.”
Hopkins flinched. “I…” He rubbed the hat between his fingers. “The thing is, I’ve noticed something. About your stories. Or, well, about…about you, actually. About—the pair of you.”
My breath froze in my lungs. Time seemed to slow, growing thick and prolonged as the drip of molasses, and I looked over at Holmes, who was looking over at me. He had never worn his heart on his sleeve, but in that moment I could see sheer terror burning in his eyes.
“What about myself and Dr. Watson, Hopkins?” Holmes enquired with every semblance of calm; I daresay only I could hear the infinitesimal tremor in his voice.
“You’re—” He drew a shuddering breath. “There’s—more. More to you—to your—your friendship—than you want generally known.”
Time pooled around me, distorting the familiar shapes of Baker Street into something nightmarish and strange. I had done this—if Hopkins had discovered the truth of Holmes’ and my relationship by reading my stories, it meant I had unknowingly crossed the line between a secret signal and a dangerous alarm. I had ruined us.
“And, you see,” Hopkins said, still fighting to get the words out—the poor man, I thought distantly, torn between his duty to the law and his friendship with the detective, “you see…” Hopkins inhaled deeply. “I just wanted to say thank you.”
Everything stopped. I looked up at him sharply, and Holmes did the same.
“Before the two of you,” Hopkins continued, voice growing thick with suppressed emotion, “I never knew it was possible. For two men to have what you have. I thought—I thought that loneliness was a sort of punishment. For being built all wrong. But I…” He swallowed. “Your stories, Dr. Watson. I think they might have saved my life.” He tilted his chin up and gave us a watery but determined smile. “Thank you. Both of you.”
And before either of us could say a word, he hurried out, and we listened to him go, astonished beyond all words.
“There were times,” I concluded, “before that day, when I had thought my stories frivolous—that perhaps I ought to turn my pen to more serious matters. I never worried about that again.”
“That’s why we came, Dr. Watson,” Miss Moses confessed, a catch in her voice. “Because we read your stories, and we understood.”
My eyes twinkled. “I know. You’re not the first people who were merely ‘passing through Sussex’ and ‘happened to hear that we lived nearby.’”
She blushed, but I shook my head. “I am more than happy to tell my story to those who need it. This cottage is a holy site for some, and such visitors are pilgrims of a sort.” I smiled. “Pilgrims of our sort.”
“And what of Mary and Annie?” Miss Hackhurst asked. “What happened to them?”
“Oh, well,” I said lightly, pretending not to know the effect my answer would have, “they still live in London. In the very same flat they occupied in 1894.”
Miss Hackhurst opened her mouth, but closed it again after a moment, unable, apparently, to speak. Her eyes misted over and, blindly, her hand sought out her friend’s.
“I could give you their address,” I offered quietly. “And a letter of introduction, so you would not have to make some excuse about ‘simply passing through.’”
Miss Hackhurst smiled through her tears.
“I am sure they will be happy to help, in whatever way they can,” I assured them both. For Mary and Annie know, like Holmes and myself, that it is both the least and the most we can do.
“So you think it possible, Dr. Watson?” Miss Moses asked, rubbing her friend’s knuckles with her thumb. “For two people like us to be happy together?”
I opened my mouth to answer with a resounding yes, but I did not have to: a much more eloquent response was sounding through the house, as Holmes’ footsteps began to echo down our stairs.
“Damn this hip,” I could hear him curse, as he took the steps at a snail’s pace, then, “Bugger.” I turned to apologize to the young ladies for his irredeemably foul vocabulary, but their eyes had grown huge and their faces betrayed a mixture of intense awe and anticipation.
“The great detective,” I muttered, as Sherlock Holmes shuffled into the sitting room.
“Watson, our stairs are growing more treacherous daily,” he complained, looking every inch as dignified and handsome as he always had.
“Holmes,” I said patiently, “meet our guests, Miss Julia Moses and Miss Bea Hackhurst.”
The women sprang to their feet to shake Holmes’ hand. He greeted them casually, though I was not fooled: he was extremely pleased by their attentions, his aged crankiness a blind for the fact that he appreciated genuine admiration as much as he had ever done.
“Have they asked for a lock of my hair yet?” he enquired dryly, arching an eyebrow in a perfect imitation of himself.
“They do not want a lock of your hair, Holmes,” I replied, fighting back a smile. I shook my head at our guests. “Honestly, he is the most terrible egoist I have ever met.”
The women looked as if they weren’t sure whether laughing at the great Sherlock Holmes was really something that was allowed.
“What about honey?” the man in question asked, undaunted. “Have you given them any honey?”
“I—”
“Really, Watson, you can’t entertain visitors here without having them taste my honey,” he scolded, moving toward the kitchen with remarkable grace for someone who had complained so loudly about his hip only moments before. He returned with a small pot and several slices of plain brown bread.
“Try it,” he urged them. “It’s very good. I made it myself.”
I snorted. “You did not make it yourself, Holmes. The bees did.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “I harvested it, and I raised the bees.” He fixed his eye on our guests, who were obediently spreading honey over the bread. In truth, Holmes was as proud of his beekeeping as he had once been of his crime-solving, and his eagerness to witness their reactions was entirely genuine.
“It’s delightful,” Miss Moses said after swallowing, and Miss Hackhurst nodded her assent. “Truly, it is.”
Holmes’ eyes shone. “I have been raising my bees for over two decades now, you know,” he said, reaching for the pot himself, “and the honey never lets me down. In fact,” he continued, slipping a hand around my waist, “I think it gets sweeter every year.”
His smile was bright and true and all for me, and as our new friends moved to mirror our position, Miss Hackhurst encircling Miss Moses with one steady arm, I thanked my lucky stars that I had no trouble, these days, understanding perfectly what Holmes was trying to tell me.