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We had caught the early Plymouth train on the instructions of an urgent telegram from a Mr. Trevelyan of Liskeard, and we were well on our way, the gentle colours of the English countryside in summertime flashing past us, when my friend suddenly sat bolt upright, then clapped his hand to his mouth, doubled over and rushed from our compartment. Had it been any other man I should have assumed I knew the cause - Holmes, against his custom, had at the station eaten two bacon sandwiches of dubious provenance - but Holmes' digestion was, as a rule, excellent. He believed that he paid no physical penalty for his callous disregard for his own health; I knew better, but I had to admit that he seemed to pay all at once, in his occasional attacks of nervous exhaustion, rather than with the everyday aches, pains and inconvenience most mortal flesh is heir to. I was concerned, therefore, when he left our carriage in a rush, and I was more concerned when fifteen minutes passed and he did not return. At last I made up my mind to check that my friend had not had some extreme bout of sickness.
I rapped on the door of the men's W.C. It was engaged, but there was no reply. "Holmes? Are you all right?"
My friend's voice, with a shrill, hoarse note that did not reassure me, replied, "Perfectly well, thank you, Watson. I need you to do me a favour."
"Anything, Holmes," I said, now quite alarmed.
"Return to our compartment, and open my overnight bag. You will find a small pouch wrapped in my spare waistcoat. Bring it to me, if you please."
"Do you want me to call the conductor?" I said, now very worried. "The next stop is not for nearly an hour."
"No!" my friend snapped, his voice still shrill. "Absolutely not. I shall be quite all right; I need only that bag. It is essential that you be discreet, and for God's sake, Watson, don't bring anyone with you."
I followed his instructions to the letter, and easily found the bag. It was a small, cloth pouch, tied with a drawstring. I was soon tapping on the door again. To my surprise, the door opened, and a hand shot out, grabbed my collar and tugged me sharply inside. Holmes stood before me, his face muffled with his scarf so that only his eyes were visible.
"Holmes, what in the world -" I exclaimed, but before I could finish, Holmes, held up a finger and pressed it to my lips. I was so startled that I fell silent instantly.
"Damn it all to blazes," my friend cursed softly. "Watson, I am about to give you rather a great shock. Will you promise me that you will keep your head? I had hoped to take you into my confidence under better circumstances than this."
"Yes, yes, only tell me, Holmes, whatever is the matter?" I cried.
Slowly, he unwrapped the scarf from his face. There were no cuts, no blood, no swellings or marks, as I had expected; he looked remarkably well, in fact, the pallor and slight chill from our early start vanished from his cheeks, which were smooth and - I hesitated, and looked again. His cheeks were as smooth as a boy's, as if he had just received the closest shave a top-class barber could give him, except that I had watched him scrape a razor over his face not two hours before with only tepid water and soap, with predictable results. His whole face was subtly different, and yet I could see nothing that had changed. He closed his eyes.
At that moment, the train took a turn, and the carriage lurched, sending Holmes stumbling against me. His frame felt entirely unfamiliar in my arms, but before I could quantify the difference, he thrust himself back, panic evident in his expression. "Watson," he said. The hoarseness in his voice had gone, but it was not his voice. It was not a man's voice.
"I don't understand," I said, deeply shaken. This was not Holmes. And yet, it undoubtably was. I had seen him leave my compartment wearing these clothes; he had known the layout of the luggage I had seen him pack, he had answered to his name and recognised my voice.
"The remaining solution, however unlikely, must be true," my friend said softly.
"But -" I struggled, "I have seen you. I know you."
I had. I had seen him shave, smoke, walk around bare-chested. I had seen him stand to relieve himself behind a tree.
"You have never seen me like this. It has not happened for nearly a year."
He - that is, Holmes - leaned back against the wall of our small cubicle in a gesture so familiar that it made my throat ache, and yet it was done with a kind of awkward grace I did not look for in my friend.
"Are you a hermaphrodite?" I asked, aware that I sounded like a fool, but unable to comprehend what was before me.
Holmes snorted. "Although not a completely ridiculous suggestion, it does not fit the facts," he said. "I look different than I did half an hour ago, do I not? The fact is, Watson, that sometimes, I am a woman."
"Only sometimes," I echoed. I stared at him voraciously, trying to isolate the differences, as do children in the parlour game with the objects on a tea-tray. Holmes' face was rounder, softer, his mouth slightly fuller, his hairline lower on his forehead. He had always been thin, and his frame was not much lighter for being female, but he did not fill out his coat quite so well, his shoulders being narrower. He was still taller than even the average man, his hair still short and slicked down with a light pomade. His trousers hung off him strangely, but I did not dare examine his lower body too closely, nor could I take my eyes off his face for long.
"It is a condition that runs in my family. Mycroft has it far more severely than I; he is a woman sometimes twice in one week. It is one of the reasons he rarely diverts from his routine or leaves his club. They are used to such... eccentricities at the Diogenes. My great-aunt ran a double life as her own husband for nearly forty years."
I listened to this extraordinary narrative with an open mouth. He answered my next question before I could ask it: "I have met only two others like myself in my life. One was a moderately successful family lawyer who had managed to keep his secret, at the cost of a number of domestic intrigues which had estranged him from his wife; the other was in a madhouse."
"I see." I was unsure of what to say. "What triggers your - episodes?"
Holmes threw up his hands. "I believe Mycroft has consulted a number of specialists on highly confidential terms, but they could do nothing for him. One of them suggested that the stages of the moon were responsible. I am not in the habit of consulting astronomers, nor do I care to be made into a medical exhibit. My bag, if you please, we have only forty seven minutes before we arrive in Liskeard."
"But Holmes, you're surely not planning to see our client like this!" I exclaimed. He took the bag from me impatiently and opened it. He drew out a roll of surgical bandages, a bundled sock, and a box, which I recognised as being from the paraphernalia he used to assemble his disguises, and began to loosen his cravat.
"It is not ideal," Holmes said, "But I have done so before. You will do most of the talking, and I will feign a cough and wear my scarf around my face. Some powder will make my skin appear rougher. My hair is already short. So far, so good. However, I will need your assistance in binding my chest. The bandages, Watson, the bandages!"
He clicked his fingers impatiently, and I began unrolling the white tape with my numb fingers, feeling as if I were in a dream, and stared at him - her - as he stripped off his waistcoat and started work on his collar. When he'd bared his white, delicate neck down to the hollow of his throat, where the skin was soft and hairless, I caught myself, appalled, and closed my eyes tightly to allow my friend some privacy.
"I'm afraid I will need your eyes open for this, Doctor," Holmes said. I could hear the amusement in her voice. "Come, now, you have seen me shirtless before. Just tell yourself that I'm a man."
"Holmes -"
"Your delicacy is both unwanted and unnecessary. I'm a man," she said firmly.
I took a deep breath and opened my eyes, still careful not to look at her. "Very well. A man."
I busied myself with the bandages as my friend stripped off her shirt entirely, but I could not help but steal glances at the bathroom mirror.
My impression of Holmes as a man, which I had tried to convey in my writings, had always been that he was rather dazzling; his high cheekbones, deep-set eyes and thin, sensual mouth were not classically handsome, but together they produced an undeniable effect. He commanded the attention of any room he entered. As a woman, Holmes had none of the characteristics which our society demands of feminine beauty - she was too tall, too thin and angular, her posture too rigid, her hands too big - but she was striking. I caught glimpses of white, muscled shoulders offset by a small mole on her back, narrow ribs tapering to a thin waist. She turned abruptly and caught my gaze, and her eyes were as piercing as ever. Her breasts were small, white and coral-pink. I flushed and busied myself with the bandages, realizing I would have to touch her. I steeled myself to think of it as simply a medical procedure. A man. My friend.
I wound the bandages around her chest, as Holmes held one end tightly against her ribs. After several turns, my fingers brushed the soft skin under her arm. She flinched, then laughed, a little breathily, when I dropped the tape. "My apologies, Doctor. Please continue."
"Are you ticklish, Holmes?" I said, trying to sound light-hearted, but my voice emerged sounding husky, and when I met my own eyes in the mirror, I was quite shaken by my own expression. Holmes fell silent, and only held up her arms, her forehead creasing as I pulled the bandages tight.
"This cannot be comfortable," I said at last, tucking the end of the bandage in and knotting it so that it would stay tight.
Holmes took an experimental breath, and moved his arms up and down. "No, it is damnably uncomfortable, actually."
I had never heard a woman of our class, a woman with Holmes' cultured vowels and tones, use such language, and although I had heard Holmes curse many times, I felt my face heating again with shock, and realized that my body was reacting.
"Have I offended your delicate sensibilities, Doctor?" Holmes laughed, watching me in the mirror. She was, I felt, with a rush of irritation, taking this all too easily. Great heavens, I was in a men's W.C. in a railway carriage with a half-naked woman wearing men's clothing. What we would look like, to a stranger - what we looked like to me -
"You can hardly blame me for being disconcerted, Holmes; you're not much of a lady," I said, I'm sorry to say, rather archly. "Surely you've had - misunderstandings while in this body?"
Her forehead wrinkled, and she cocked her head and stared at me in the mirror with an expression so familiar I almost believed, once again, that this was some kind of joke, and that my friend had not changed at all. But the unmistakable evidence was still before me, even if I had helped conceal it.
"Misunderstandings of a romantic nature, you mean? Have I had a man proposition me?"
Holmes' voice was light, but her eyes were stormy, suddenly, and I regretted my question. I had meant to discomfit him, make him share this strange feeling of electric unease which was drowning me, but I was striking in the dark, and I suddenly felt that we were close to doing something unnameable, something unforgiveable. The carriage swayed, and my fingers inadvertedly skimmed the rough bandages and fell against the smooth, pale skin of her - his shoulder.
"Perhaps I have," she said, her voice low. The eyes of her reflection met mine, as if in a challenge, and I ran my finger along her arm, feeling the altered muscle density, in a bizarre simulacrum of a medical examination. I had never had a conversation like this with a woman. I had never before touched a man this way.
"Would you proposition me, Doctor, if you met me in a public house?" She smiled at me in the mirror, suddenly all lazy, coquettish charm, although it looked strange under her close-cropped hair, and chirped, "What's a nice fella like you doin' in a place like this? Buy us a drink, guvner?"
I stared, torn between mingled amusement, horror and a peculiar excitement. "Holmes, you don't."
She became herself again at once, an eyebrow arched, and I felt my face heating again. I let out a shaky breath, inadvertedly blowing across Holmes' bare shoulder, and I stared, rapt, as Holmes' lips parted soundlessly, and she shivered. Reckless, and burning with a strange fever, I pressed my lips to the place where her neck met her shoulder. She froze for a second, then, as time seemed to slow, tipped her head slightly, offering me her neck; I kissed her again there, and her breath caught. I wanted to laugh, a desperate, hysterical impulse which I strangled in my breast.
"Watson," Holmes whispered, her grey eyes fixed on my reflection.
Perhaps to avoid answering the question in her voice, perhaps for simpler reasons, I tugged her around and kissed her. Her mouth was soft and yielding and felt entirely like every other mouth I had kissed before that moment, but tasted like Holmes, like black tea and cigarettes and hard, cold brilliance. It was intoxicating.
"I'm a man," she whispered, biting my lower lip, her hands settling upon my waist. She was still taller than I. "I'm a man, John."
"You're beautiful," I said. Barely sensible of what I was doing, I took hold of her shoulders and pulled her against me, and felt the rough flatness of the bandages against my chest. She hooked her ankle behind my calf, ground against me, and a guttural moan escaped her. Then she was struggling to unbutton her trousers as I watched, suddenly, painfully aroused. Panting sharply, she tugged at the bandages around her breasts until they came loose, and her breath came more easily.
"Can your leg hold my weight?"
I nodded, helpless, and she pulled her tatty white undershorts down around her ankles and off, exposing her sex. Dumbly, I began to open my trousers. She hopped back and up onto the small basin, then pulled me to her without finesse. I kissed her blindly, then my own urgency overcame my last few vestiges of sane objection to what we were doing, and I encouraged her to wrap her legs around my hips, then guided myself into her, shaking with excitement. She groaned as I entered her, and clutched my shoulders so tightly through my shirt that I knew she was bruising me.
"Watson," she gasped. "Oh, God, this is madness."
She was hot and tight around me, blissfully so. I pressed my face into her neck, willing myself control.
"For God's sake, man," she groaned in my ear, hardly audible over the noise of the train, and she began to squirm against me as best she could from her precarious perch. I could not reconcile this woman's naked need with my friend's cold self-possession, and yet it was his need, he who wanted me so badly, and that knowledge almost undid me before we had begun. "Watson. Please."
I bit my lip, and moved gently within her, until her gasps and embraces became urgent. "Harder," she gritted out.
Her throat was lily-white, and I was held rapt by the fragile line of her collarbone. I had fought alongside Holmes against ruffians, and watched him beat a swamp adder back from me with a cane; surely he could not be this warm, quivering body in my arms. She suddenly gripped my waist with her strong thighs and raked her nails painfully along my back beneath my shirt, and I jerked back to meet her gaze, startled. Her eyes were dark with need, desperation stamped across her features. "For God's sake, Watson, let me feel it," she rasped. "I am not made of porcelain."
There had been no resistance to my entrance, I realized, and I wondered if she had not been joking; if she had done this with other men, strangers. The thought kindled an unreasoning rage in me, a burn for possession.
"Yes," she whispered, a strange glimmer in her eyes. "Be angry. Make me forget them."
Some last vestige of restraint and delicacy snapped within me, and, God help me, I took her against the wall of the compartment. Driven by an urgency I did not entirely understand, I was rougher than I intended, but at my first thrust she threw her head back, relief stark across her features. Her gasps swiftly became panting groans, and I had to cover her mouth, for fear that we would be heard. She sucked two of my fingers into her mouth and moaned around them, so that I could feel the vibration against my skin, and I stared at her face, mesmerized by the naked, animal hunger I saw there. She dropped her gaze before I did.
"You are not Holmes," I panted nonsensically, my body trembling with exertion. "You can't be."
I had, I think, meant it as a joke, but she shook her head with a gasped, bitter laugh. "No."
She braced herself against the sink with one arm, sliding her other hand down between us. I bit my lip when I realized her purpose, trying desperately to control myself as her knuckles brushed rhythmically against my stomach. She turned her face to the side and sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, then her inner muscles tightened around me as she reached her completion in utter silence, her face contracted, as if in grief. I stilled to gentle her through it, although my heart was pounding and my own urgency was at fever pitch. At last, she went lax and pliant in my arms. I held her, trembling, as she reached forward and slowly unbuttoned the top three buttons of my shirt, her eyes heavy-lidded and absent. She licked the base of my throat.
"Holmes," I said hoarsely, a warning.
"Let me," she murmured, "Let me, let me," and she unlocked her legs from around me and pushed me back so that I slipped free of her, then, with awkward agility, she dismounted the sink and fell to her knees before me. She looked up at me, almost tentative, as if she feared this would be the point at which I would refuse her. But I was too far beyond the limits of my own self-control to do any such thing, and I simply let my head fall back against the wall of the moving train and let her take me in her mouth as if she were an East End strumpet. At the end, I tangled my fingers in her short hair.
When I had finished shaking under the ministrations of her mouth, my legs collapsed under me, and I sank to the floor. She swiftly rose, wincing as her joints cracked, allowing me to stretch out my legs; in unthinking protest, I grasped her arm and pulled her back, and she fell down to straddle me. I caught her mouth with my own, and her startled intake of breath, then the eagerness with which she returned the kiss, sent a thrill through me to which my body could not respond. She swiftly regained her balance, however, and drew back.
"Watson," she murmured, and I tried to kiss her again, but she evaded me. She let out a swift breath, and pressed her damp, hot forehead to my own. "You are right," she said. "I am not Holmes. I cannot be. Do you understand?"
I was hardly in a fit state to think, but I tried to concentrate. "No, I'm afraid I don't," I said at last. She made a low noise, perhaps of frustration, and kissed me again, a light brush of her lips against mine that turned to a deep, probing kiss in which I lost myself. I tasted our mingled essences on her tongue, and reached up to press her closer to me, but again she shook me off.
"For God's sake," she said raggedly, her mouth red. I watched the struggle in her face for a moment, before she pulled herself up and away from me, and stood. She turned to face the wall, and began re-tying her bandages. "You had better clean yourself up," she said, her voice flat. "We have less than fifteen minutes before we reach Liskeard."
That jolted me, and I began to fumble for my clothes, dazed, my face flushed. As I attempted to wash myself in the trickle of water at the sink, she spoke again, her tone still expressionless.
"I apologise for putting you in this position, Doctor. I suggest you erase from your mind everything which has transpired in the last half hour. It will not happen again."
She was struggling with the loosened bandages under her arm again, unable to pull them tight. She tugged at them viciously, and cursed when the end began to unravel. I reached to help her, abandoning my own clothing, but she recoiled. "Don't touch me," she hissed. My heart turned cold and sick in my chest as I began, I thought, to understand. She gave the bandage one last tug and tied it into a sloppy knot, then shimmied into her shirt before I could recover enough to protest. She wet her hand and slicked down her hair, then began to pull on her trousers, fastening the sock to the inside of the crotch with a safety pin.
"Holmes," I said slowly. "When you are a woman, you desire - men. But when you are a man -"
"I desire my work," she snapped. "I desire to be left alone. This was a momentary weakness, Watson, the kind the female sex are prone to. I beg that you will forget it."
She finished fastening her trousers, seized the leather pouch and began to rummage in it. I did not think I would ever be able to look at my friend's face again without seeing him flushed and sweet with release. But now that hunger and tenderness I had seen for a few brief moments was gone without a trace, and already I felt as if I had dreamed it. I dressed, covering my ruined shirt with my jacket, and watched my friend make up her face, making her features appear sharper, her chin newly-shaved. I felt hollow, as if she - he - were striding towards some desperate danger into which I could not follow him, and I did not know how to call him back.
"You can dismiss this from your mind," he continued, adding the final touches to himself in the mirror, and beginning to slip into a lower vocal register, his voice becoming husky. I had seen him don disguises many times, but this was the most absolute transformation I had ever seen, and I could not look away. He could always be in disguise, I realized; perhaps he always was. "It was a woman of loose virtue you met on a train, nothing more. You need not be disgusted."
I frowned. "Why would I be disgusted, Holmes?"
He looked at me then, his eyes bitter and black with an irony that was like an arrow to my chest. "Do you usually fuck men in train toilets, Dr. Watson?" I blinked, shocked, as, no doubt, he had intended, and his lip curled. "No, I thought not. Deserted alleys?"
"You know I do not," I choked out. But I saw now, I thought I saw, a glimmer of light at the end of this darkness Holmes had brought us into. "But Holmes, you are not -"
"I am," he snapped. "Or rather, I was, and I will be again very soon, probably tomorrow. And you will be disgusted, unless you school your mind to separate what just happened from our everyday encounters."
"I see," I said evenly. "And will you? Separate it? I am still the same, after all."
He turned to stuff the pots and brushes back into the pouch, but I had seen him falter. I stepped closer to him, and his shoulders stiffened.
"It was only -"
"A momentary weakness, yes, you said." I laid a hand on his narrow shoulder, and he flinched, but did not move away. "You misunderstood me," I said quietly. "I was about to say, you are not a stranger, man or woman."
"You don't know what you're doing," he said. His voice had slipped back into its feminine range again, and was barely audible. "Watson, don't. I'm like this barely once a year. You won't -"
"Have you ever," I said, my breath catching, "made love to a man? As a man?"
There was a silence. The train rattled and its whistle sounded; we were coming to our stop.
"Have you?" he said at last, looking up at me, and for a moment, he was recognisably a woman.
I hesitated, although I had expected the question, and his expression hardened again, his mouth twisted.
"I was a soldier, Holmes," I said, trying to recover him. "I'm not entirely innocent in these matters, you know."
"You're a fool," he snapped. "We must gather our bags before we go all the way to Plymouth. Let me out."
"Not until you answer my question," I said.
"Do not make me force you out of my way, Doctor," he said, feigning a weary tone, but he looked like a cornered animal. I did not move. The train's brakes began to squeal.
"I was once held overnight in a cell in Kentish Town for soliciting," Holmes said abruptly. "Luckily, I did not change again until after I had been released. Do you know what the charge would have been, if I had been a man arrested on the same charge?" He did not wait for me to reply. "Five years, in all likelihood. In all your intimate knowledge of my habits," he spat those words, and I winced, "how well do you think my sanity would fare in prison, with the roughest dregs of humanity, with no intellectual stimulation, for five years? Not to mention the brutality I would no doubt face in prison from villains with a grudge against me, whom I would, eventually, not be able to fight off. But once a year I can go to any public house in London and find a -"
"Neither have I," I said. He looked up, startled. I took a deep breath. "On what basis, then, do you claim greater experience than I in the matter?"
"I -" he said, and then he stopped. I could see his mind working. It is probably the only time I have ever talked Sherlock Holmes into silence. I pressed my advantage, speaking low and quickly, like a man pleading for his life, for in that moment I could not bear to never see Holmes again as I had seen him today. "Do you think I could ever pretend that you are anything - or anyone - other than yourself? Do you think I was pretending, fifteen minutes ago?"
"You're talking nonsense," he said at last, and made to push past me to go out into the corridor. I caught his sleeve, and I heard his breath stutter.
"Your scarf," I said. He'd forgotten it. I took it from the hook on the wall, and placed it around his neck; he wrapped it twice around his face.
"I will follow you," I said, meaning it, and wishing him to know it.
He hesitated, then met my eyes, very briefly. Wrapped as he was, I could not discern his expression.
"I'll wait then," he said. "On the platform." And was gone.
End