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I did not fall in love with John Watson at first sight. In fact, I wrote him off as an utterly predictable type: ex-Army doctor of the decent (and thoroughly dull) British variety, who had seen enough unusual things to tolerate my eccentricities, yet who was middle-class enough to politely ignore them. I deduced aloud that he had been in Afghanistan, as no doubt the readers of those sensational accounts of my “adventures” remember with misplaced awe and admiration; and I deduced silently that he would be an agreeable, respectful, and above all private sort of flatmate.
I was not wrong about that. John Watson was, despite his shattered nerves and resultant insomnia, surely the most respectful and courteous of all the co-habiting bachelors in London. He was the kind of man who ought to have led an easy, contented life, free of violence and heartbreak, for it was not in his nature to dwell on what was evil and wrong in the world. Afghanistan had done its best to destroy his happiness and shake his faith in his fellow men, but I believe he was on his way to recovery when he met me. And that meeting, I am sorry beyond all speech to report, was the moment his happy future was pulled like a rug from under his unsuspecting feet. Little did he know—little did either of us know—that when we took up rooms at 221B Baker Street, we were already hurtling headlong into the abyss.
He was a simple man. Not simple as in stupid, for whatever his accounts of me suggest, I knew him to be possessed of a solid intelligence and a better-than-normal store of medical knowledge and skill. But his optimism and his belief that people generally acted for the good of others blinded him to so much of what I, with my unsentimental reliance on reason and experience, could see with my eyes shut. He was unduly impressed with my deductions and easily taken in by my disguises, which were too subtle for his straightforward nature. And yet this oft-deceived nature was capable of much that mine was not. I shall never forget the moment when, at the end of the case he later wrote of as “The Adventure of the Yellow Face,” he took one look at the laughing little dark-skinned girl—the hitherto secret offspring of Mr. Grant Munro’s spouse—and burst out laughing right along with her, in pure joyful sympathy, while I could only gloomily (and wrongly) assume that Mr. Munro was about to leave his wife.
That, incidentally, was the moment I fell in love with him.
My feelings had been developing gradually, since our very first case together, as much to my surprise, his decent-but-dull middle-class exterior peeled away to reveal hidden depths of loyalty, tolerance, and goodness of the deepest and yet rarest kind. The failure of my initial deductions (the fact that I, of all people, had gotten him wrong!) added a spark of mystery to him that has never quite faded away. As has been extremely well documented, I cannot resist a puzzle, and the faint inscrutability that lingered around Watson upset the otherwise comfortable nature of the friendship that was swiftly growing between us. Another mystery, that friendship—for it is rare that any man wishes to be my friend, and rarer still that I truly wish for their comradeship in return.
Even more shocking to me was the frankly sexual interest that I, or rather my body, began to develop towards him. My desires seemed to wriggle of their own accord out of the twin straightjackets I had long ago strapped around them, the first when I realized how severely love would impair my deductive facilities, the second when I came to terms with the fact—revealed to me by my attraction to the all-too-solid form of Victor Trevor—that I was an invert, and that to follow through with my desires was to invite that worst of calamities for a detective, blackmail. As a result, I had been calmly celibate my entire life, and it was not until I found myself in the proximity of Watson’s sun-browned, war-wounded frame that my body began to protest.
But it was at Norbury that I fell in love with him. And that was the first crisis. Until then I had managed perfectly to keep my affection and desires in check. Esteem, admiration, those I could hide to the small extent that it was necessary to do so. And I was not so far gone that I could not subdue or disguise my sexual appetites. But love: that was entirely new to me, and the sole fact I understood about it was that it could be very, very dangerous.
He could not love me, I reasoned—not irrationally, I hasten to add. I am a master of deduction; certainly I would know if he did. And that was overwhelmingly for the best. I, Sherlock Holmes—notorious loner, drug addict, cursed with the ability to see the dark underbelly beneath the most shining façades—could live with the constant ache of unfulfilled desire; but he, good soul that he was, should never have to.
For even if by some miracle he had returned my feelings, unfulfilled they would absolutely have had to be. Something had happened to me in that moment at Norbury—something utterly strange, that I could only put down to the curious phenomenon of being suddenly in love. I had ceased in that moment to care about myself; ceased to worry about the dangers that being a practicing sodomite would pose to my job, ceased even to fear the effect it would have on my rational mind. And in place of those concerns a sensation sprang up that was ten thousand times stronger and more terrifying and less subject to reason than what it had replaced: I wanted to protect him. I needed, desperately, overwhelmingly, uncompromisingly, to protect him. The possibility of seeing his name dragged through the mud, his medical license revoked—the idea of him standing trial, or, God forbid, going to prison—was simply unthinkable. I would not think of it.
And for a scant few months, I did not have to. He did not love me, after all, and thank God for that. I admired him with complete discretion, and there were times, later, when the pain of loving him was far, far greater than I had ever imaged it could be, that those brief months seemed almost a paradise.
Soon, all too soon, it ended. I like to think myself an objective judge of my own abilities, but this time I had overestimated the strength of my self-control. I offer as an excuse only the fact that I was utterly unaccustomed to the ruthless and tender emotions that had taken hold of me that day at Norbury and which seemed somehow to have a will of their own.
The change came during what is now known so sensationally as “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” Watson omitted this particular incident from that narrative, of course, for reasons other than mere literary discretion, so it is not widely known that Sir Grimesby Roylott kept a key to his safe hanging beside it, and that, not having deduced, as I had, what was inside, Watson took the key from its hook and, while my back was turned, slipped it into the lock.
“Do not open that!”
I had heard the key scrape against metal and whirled around just in time to arrest his movement. Whatever my voice did not give away, my face certainly did. Watson turned to witness an expression of utter terror contorting my ordinarily stoic features. I knew he had never seen me look remotely like I did then, for the simple fact that I had never had.
With a massive effort I tried to wrench myself back under control. “Inside that safe is a poisonous snake,” I said, attempting to sound cool, detached, unflappable, like Sherlock Holmes is supposed to sound. But I heard the tremble in my voice, the raggedness of my breath. “Had it bitten you, as it certainly would have if you had opened the safe, you would be dead by now.”
He ought to have paled, shaken by his close escape. He ought to have looked at me with relief and gratitude and lingering fear. Instead, something far worse was appearing on his face.
Understanding.
“Holmes,” he said, and his voice was urgent.
I said nothing, but felt horror creeping upon me.
“Just then—in your face—I saw—I know I saw it,” he continued breathlessly, letting the key fall to the floor as he stepped closer to me.
“Whatever you thought you saw, I am sure you were mistaken,” I replied, as coldly as I could. Surely there was still time to avert a crisis. Surely I could make him forget the way I had looked at him moments before. “Split-second deductions were never your strong point.”
But he was not to be deterred. “Perhaps not, but it was there.” A sudden expression of enlightenment hit him as he stared at me, round-eyed. “As it must have been on my face a hundred times before. A hundred times a day. My God, what a fool I’ve been to think I could hide it from you!”
Please, no, I begged silently to whatever deity might be listening, as the truth at last dawned on me. Please, spare us this. Aloud I asked, calmly, the fatal question.
“Hide what?”
His face cleared. He smiled broadly. “That I love you.”
God bless the man for smiling when he said it, and God curse whomever decided it was a sin for two men to be in love, for John Watson could do no evil.
“And you love me!” he cried triumphantly. “I saw it, I saw it in your face just then! Oh, Holmes, why did you not tell me?”
“Because I did not, in fact, know you felt the same,” I answered quietly, choosing the least painful reason. I was an utter fool, but I must confess I felt no happiness at his admission. I ought to have thanked my lucky stars that a man like him, good and simple and brave, could make the mistake of falling in love with a man like me—a man who believed that the Grant Munros of this world would leave their wives ten times out of ten. But I felt only dread, and near panic, and beneath them, a quiet flicker of regret for what might have been. “You are incorrect in supposing I had deduced that. Everything else, perhaps, but not that.”
He shook his head, amazed, and reached for my hand. “My dear Holmes—”
“Do not touch me!”
I spat the words out, I fear with far more virulence than I had intended. He stopped mid-motion, hurt and puzzlement crossing his open face. It was the first time I had wounded him in that way, but it would not be the last.
"But, Holmes—”
“You must not touch me,” I said, far more gently. “Not because I do not desire it, and not because I think it is wrong, but because it is far too dangerous.” I had mastered myself again, externally at any rate, so he could not see that as I said the words my heart was breaking.
“Are you afraid of the effect it might have on your reputation if discovered?” Concern mixed with disappointment in his beautiful face, and I believe if I had lied, and said yes, he would have backed away like a perfect gentleman, and we would have been spared no end of pain. But I told him the truth.
“No,” I said. “It is for you I am concerned.”
He relaxed. “That is very chivalrous of you, my dear fellow, but I assure you, it is a risk I am willing to take.”
Had he taken it before, with others? I wondered suddenly. He had been a soldier, after all. I pushed this terrible thought out of my mind. In any case, he was not about to take it with me.
“Do you have any idea how easy it is for a reasonably intelligent man to discern that one of his fellows is conducting an affair with another man?” I asked, trying to reason with him, keeping the desperation out of my voice. “I know of a dozen at least whom I could put behind bars for that offense, were I to consider it truly a crime.”
“Then we should all be grateful that nobody else is as ‘reasonably intelligent’ as you,” Watson countered, the ghost of a smile flitting across his face. “And at any rate, as I said, I am willing to take the risk.”
“I am afraid I shall not allow it,” I said. I believe I was three shades paler than usual, but I kept my voice even. The impulse to protect him, to keep him safe from all harm, was gripping me fearfully, and if locking him up at Baker Street would have done it I would have rushed him home then and there, case be damned.
“You shall not allow it?” His tone darkened with anger. “You shall not allow me to make decisions about my own life?”
“Not in this instance, no,” I replied coolly.
He threw his head back proudly, and my body convulsed with the desire to crush his defiant mouth to mine.
“I won’t accept that,” he said.
“Will you force yourself upon me, then?”
He froze. There it was, the trump card. He would never force himself on anyone, ever, under any circumstances. I knew it, and I wished to God I did not.
“So,” he said slowly. “What is it you expect, then? Shall we sit across the breakfast table and gaze longingly at each other over the butter dish, silently breaking into pieces? Shall we retire to our separate bedrooms each night, and listen to each other breathing through the wall?”
“Yes,” I answered, for when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
“I will not,” he said suddenly, struck with determination. “I shall leave. I cannot live under those conditions.”
“Very well,” I replied, as every fibre of my being cried out against it. “That is your choice.”
“I will leave,” he said again, and strode from the room.
But he did not leave. He sat vigil with me that very night in Miss Stoner’s chamber, and he accompanied me back to Baker Street in the morning. It had been a gamble: his pride against his love for me. The latter won out, at least for the moment, and I felt like a prisoner on death row who has been given a temporary and entirely undeserved stay of execution.
We did indeed break into pieces as we stared at each other across the butter dish, and my awareness of his presence in the bedroom next to mine, though I could not literally hear him breathing, was enough to rob me of sleep and drive me to morphine and all-night chemical experiments. Watson never spoke to me on the subject we had broached so briefly in Grimesby Roylott’s chamber, nor did he ask me if I had rethought my position on the matter. He did not have to, for the question was written constantly in the tilt of his sandy head as he listened to my deductions, the flick of his wrist as he passed me my pipe, the slope of his retreating back as he left our sitting-room each night. And now that I knew he loved me, I could read him as never before. I knew when he was suppressing the urge to press my hand in his or, in worse moments, his lips against mine; I knew when he was thinking of all that went unsaid and undone between us—and I am afraid he was thinking of it a great deal of the time. It was also impossible to miss the signs of how much these repressions were costing him: first the small indications only I would catch, like the spasms of hurt that flickered across his face when our fingers or eyes accidentally met, and later, the much more obvious ones, as his clothes grew looser from lack of appetite, his moustache grew scruffier from lack of care, and shadows appeared under his eyes from lack of sleep.
During this time, we engaged in many cases together. I knew Watson was angry with himself for staying with me, and I am ashamed to admit that I knew, too, and took advantage of, the things that stopped that anger from driving him away. Unexpected remarks of praise; a smile as he handed me the newspaper; the thrill of the chase as we pounded down the streets of London after a criminal and the heady triumph of carrying off a brilliant maneuver—all served as little tugs on the strings that bound his heart to mine, keeping him at 221B Baker Street despite his pride and his better judgment.
We investigated a blackmailer, once. I had long hoped to get my hands on Charles Augustus Milverton, for he was, as I told Watson, “the worst man in London”—temporarily usurping the title from the one man who deserved it more, as a certain mathematics professor was out of the country at the time. Milverton and his kind were my strongest reason for denying Watson what he and I both desired so much, and I had thought that taking on the unfortunate Lady Brackwell’s case might do a little in helping Watson understand my position. But, unexpectedly, it did the opposite.
“That man,” he said to me abruptly after Milverton left our sitting room, his body upright and rigid, “you are allowing that man to run our lives.”
He was quite pale.
“Surely you see how dangerous he is,” I replied steadily as my heart began to race. I recognized the look of anger and pride rising in Watson’s eyes, realizing with terror what would happen if I did not stop it.
“He is a small, mean, worthless piece of vermin,” the good doctor said quietly, “and I refuse to allow him to dictate my actions.”
“Surely you see that even if we succeed in putting an end to him, to Milverton, there will always be others who—”
“Yes.” Watson’s hands were clenched around the arms of his chair. “But they are worms, and I am a man.” He took a breath. “Holmes—”
“Do not leave me,” I whispered.
I wish I could say that the words were involuntary, that they escaped me despite myself, but that would be a lie. They were deliberate. They were true, but they were calculated. I held my breath, hoping, and ashamed of hoping, that they would work.
He said nothing. But he stayed.
I never once entertained the possibility that I would be happier without Watson. I was absolutely certain that having whatever small, incomplete, insufficient part of him I now possessed was far preferable to losing him entirely. But I could see that he did not always share that conviction. More and more, I resorted to little tricks, little twitches of the strings, to keep him by my side—and more and more, I saw the growing shame and self-disgust that his capitulations caused him. His love for me remained undiminished, but there was only so much he could take. He was a strong and proud man and that meant that someday he would leave me; and someday was growing ever closer.
The crisis occurred during one of those cases that was never put before the public for reasons of its international import. Suffice it to say that I had been abroad for some weeks, and had returned to England, much depleted and exhausted, in pursuit of a man who shortly thereafter clipped my brow with a bullet from his pistol, and who was only prevented from killing me by another bullet, this one from Watson’s revolver.
“Holmes!” He rushed toward me, ignoring the man who lay groaning on the pavement, letting his gun clatter on the cobbled stones as he lifted me gently in his arms.
“I’m—all right,” I gasped out as he ran his expert fingers probingly across my forehead. They came away shockingly, luridly red. I could tell that I was not badly hurt, but head wounds bleed profusely, and when I imagine how I must have looked—pale as a ghost, the scarlet blood running in streaks down my face, its colour set off by the whiteness of my skin and the blackness of my hair—it should have come as no surprise that never had I seen more fear in a man’s eyes than there was in Watson’s as he gazed upon me in the cold light of that early morning.
“Be still,” he ordered firmly, and even through the blood clotting my eyelashes I could see him banish, businesslike, the emotions that had just a second ago threatened to overwhelm him. He pulled a small surgeon’s kit from his coat pocket—he had taken to carrying it with him on our expeditions—and extracted a sterile needle and thread from the leather-bound case. As gently as he could, he wiped the blood from my forehead with his shirtsleeve.
“I haven’t any laudanum,” he said, hesitating.
“You’d know better than to give it to me anyway,” I rasped out, prompting—miracle of miracles—the tiniest, briefest of smiles.
“Bite down on this,” he ordered, offering me his jacket, “if you feel too much pain.”
He is an excellent doctor and he stitched me up beautifully, easily, and I ignored the searing sensation of metal piercing my skin as best I could, strangling with his coat sleeve the shouts that threatened to break free from my throat. Even through the piercing pain I was aware of his fingers brushing my face, one hand resting on my forehead as the other sewed me up again, staunching the flow of red, and in my near-delirious state I had a sudden vision of him taking a needle to both our hearts, damming up the river of desire and longing and hurt that seemed to run ceaselessly out of us like blood, stitching us up until we were whole again, new and clean and happy, remade by his miraculous surgeon’s hands.
But when he set down his needle, those steady hands began to shake violently, and I saw with awful clarity that it was costing him every ounce of self-possession he had not to take me in his arms. And it was all I could do not to let him.
“You’d better—better go tend to our friend over there,” I said, breaking the silence, wincing as I lifted myself onto my elbows. The man Watson had shot—in the knee, of course, for he never shot to kill if he could help it—was moaning louder now.
“Yes,” Watson said, and his face closed like a shutter. “Don’t move. Stay still.”
I could tell by his studiously blank expression when he left me there on the cold pavement that something had broken, irrevocably, inside of him. I was nearly blind with dread as we walked wearily home from Scotland Yard, after the police had locked away the criminal and taken our statements, and he did not have to ask for a talk when we reached Baker Street. I sat myself in my armchair, knowing that at long last, my sentence was about to be passed.
“I cannot do this any longer,” he announced flatly, without preamble. “I cannot watch you almost be killed, then sew up your wounds as you bleed into my hands, and not be allowed to touch you afterwards merely to ensure that you are, indeed, still alive. I cannot.”
I looked at my blood on his cuffs and said nothing. What was there to say?
“And you talk about being inconspicuous!” he continued angrily, as though it was something I spoke of often, rather than never. “I’m more conspicuous than I’ve ever been in my life! I’ve conducted affairs practically under the noses of an entire British regiment and not been suspected.” I paled, both to imagine him with other men and at the thought of him facing a court-martial. He went on furiously, hands clenching around the back of his chair. “But now, acquaintances at the club—people I barely know—have been asking me if I am ill or if I have had a death in the family. One man, hitting rather closer to the mark, asked if I had been jilted by a ‘heartless female.’ I do not sleep, I do not eat; I may as well pronounce to the world that I am lovesick and heartbroken!”
Still I said nothing. He had never spoken of this previously, of course, but I had followed his thoughts often enough to know that he had made these arguments in his head a thousand times before. And each time, my silent answer had been the same: Whatever the world’s suspicions may be, they are still unfounded. And I will not risk your safety by making them true.
“For God’s sake, Holmes, it is tearing me to pieces!” he cried, pacing across the sitting-room floor. “I am not like you, I cannot maintain a cold, disaffected demeanor when every second my body cries out for what it is missing. I have no chemical researches and complex puzzles to occupy my mind.” He swallowed convulsively. “My very existence is a love letter to you, Holmes, you must know that.”
“If you think that I do not also love you, and suffer for it—” I broke in finally, stung by his accusation of my coldness and moved beyond words by his last statement. Whatever else he thought of me, I could not endure it if he doubted my love.
“I know that you love me,” he answered, his voice finally breaking. “You can hide it from the rest of the world, Holmes, but you cannot hide it from me.” He stared at me bleakly. “That is what makes it so difficult, you see. If I thought you had ceased to feel for me what I feel for you, I might have a hope of moving on. But as it is…” He ran his hands over his face wearily. “You do not understand, Holmes. You think it is your job to protect me.”
It is my job, I thought fiercely. That is what loving you means. “Watson, I—John—”
He held up his hand, screwing his eyes up tightly for a moment. “No. I can’t—I—if I listen to you talk, I might stay.”
My lungs twisted themselves into a knot and I was breathless, dizzy. I had known where this conversation was headed, but I must have held out some blind hope that it would veer off at the last second, for when it did not I felt as though I had been hit by a bullet for the second time that day, only this time with much more accuracy. Watson had always been an excellent shot, after all.
“I am leaving Baker Street, Holmes.”
He waited, watching me, but there was only one thing that could make him stay now and I could not, would not give it to him. He must have seen the refusal in my face, for his features tightened and the curtains closed behind his eyes.
“Very well, then,” he said, and turned on his heel and left.
In a month, he was married. He bought a medical practice and moved himself and his new wife into a small but snug house with well-worn front steps and large windows.
I had no illusions that he was in love, or even happy, but that barely eased the weight of his absence, which had lodged itself in my chest and which I carried around day and night. Nor was I comforted by the knowledge that he had acted thoroughly decently in his choice of a bride, as Mary Morstan, pretty and demure as she was, was about as far from a naïve and innocent young girl as could be. Not only was she fully aware of Watson’s feelings for me and of his current predicament, she herself possessed a female lover, an actress in Chelsea. People were just beginning to raise eyebrows over the two women’s friendship and Miss Morstan believed that her marriage to Watson was sufficient to quell the rumors and allow her affair with Miss Lyons to continue unsuspected. In all fairness, perhaps—for a woman and one less paranoid than I—it was.
I read about the marriage in the papers with a good deal of bitterness, as it had been I, during our adventure of The Sign of the Four, who had alerted a thoroughly startled Watson to Miss Morstan’s secret. They had soon become fast friends, through that mysterious power of Watson’s to invite confidences and inspire trust almost at first sight. I knew she had been his confidante during his time at 221B Baker Street, her sympathetic ear probably the only thing preventing Watson from going utterly mad, and I suppose in that respect, I ought to have thanked her.
But I also suspected that Miss Morstan had been responsible for A Study in Scarlet. I knew she encouraged Watson to write, for after their visits together he unfailingly closeted himself in his room and emerged many hours later, ink stains on his fingertips. A year before he left Baker Street, he had presented me wordlessly with a copy of the novel—fresh from the printer’s, an uncorrected proof—that detailed our meeting and our first case together. It was a good adventure story, even I could tell that, but it was all so horribly wrong. Our relationship had been reduced to one of casual friendship; he had drawn me a cold, mechanical sort of man to whom emotion was a mere distraction, and who strung a fumbling Watson along in order to prove his own brilliance. I said nothing when I returned the manuscript to him, and still less when it was published to much acclaim, but it had wounded more than I could express. And however wrongheaded it may have been, I held Miss Morstan in some way to blame, for I knew I was very much out of favor with her, and Watson’s opinion of me could not have benefited from their time together.
So it was that for the first months of Watson’s new life, I did not so much as darken his door. Instead, I kept myself company with more morphine than even I considered strictly safe. For I had been right: his absence was worse, far worse, than the pain of his proximity had been. I would have given anything that was mine to give for the sight of him in his armchair by the fire. So I threw myself headlong into whatever cases came my way, and in the dreadful black periods between them, when the drugs were not enough, I admit, shamefully, that I would shut myself in his room and lie on the bed that still smelled like him and take my own miserable desire into my hand.
In the end I could not stand it. I am used to getting my way, and I wanted to see him, and it had been long enough that I could convince myself that my memory overstated the amount of pain my presence had caused him; and so I called uninvited at his house.
Miss Morstan—I shall never call her Mrs. Watson—answered the door. She was short and plump and gave off an air of feminine softness, but I had never failed to notice the sharpness in her eyes. Her initial look of shock faded quickly into a coolly appraising gaze.
“I have half a mind not to let you in,” she said.
I smiled at her, as politely as possible. Neither of us were fooled. “I did solve a rather important mystery for you once, you know.”
She pursed her lips. “That is true.” She opened the door wider, but stepped in front of it before I could enter, blocking my tall, lanky frame with her small but determined figure. “After all, whether he sees you is his choice, not mine. I love him, so I let him make his own decisions.”
I winced internally at this barb, a reaction I do not think she missed, and I winced, too, at her easy declaration of love, for I knew it to be true, if not of the usual conjugal variety. Nobody ought to be able to say that of Watson save myself, the one person who could not. I followed Miss Morstan into the sitting room, where she left me for some minutes. I paced the floor, involuntarily deducing unwelcome details of Watson’s married life from the books and the walls and the carpet.
He entered warily, and he spoke warily, but in the end he agreed to accompany me on my case, for, as I knew all too well, he could refuse me nothing when I asked for it directly. And so it was that my life grew, for a period, slightly more bearable, as from time to time I called him to my side on the pretext of requiring his assistance for a case—though of course my true desire was to drink in his presence for a few scant hours or days. I began to ration those times, waiting as long as I could between visits to his house, holding off like an addict whose supply is growing low. Indeed, he was like a drug to me, and I could no more easily stop myself from seeing him than I could throw my morocco case and hypodermic syringe out the window and suffer no ill effects.
When a man abuses a drug, however, the substance itself is not, of course, harmed. But my abuse of John Watson truly deserved the name. He had left me, and I had pursued him, rather than leaving him in peace as he wished. I knew I was preventing him any chance at moving on, at forgetting me and being happy, for my own utterly selfish reasons. And yet I could not stop; so in the end, it was he, again, who was forced to utter the words that split him apart.
“I cannot do this anymore, Holmes,” he said to me after another nighttime vigil at my side, this one in the cellar of a bank during what has come to be known as “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League.” He was weary, more than angry, this time. “I had thought perhaps The Sign of the Four would prove too much for you. I see I was mistaken.”
For a moment I was speechless, shocked at this frank revelation. He had published his second novel about our adventures several months before. In it, Mary Morstan is described as “refined and sensitive,” “appealing,” “most attractive”; I, on the other hand, am “an automaton—a calculating machine,” “positively inhuman.” At the end of the novel, he tells me of his engagement and I look down on it with condescending regret as being “opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all other things.”
It had hurt me deeply. I had suspected he meant it too. But I had not expected him to admit it.
“I cannot continue to do this,” he said again. “If you truly need my assistance on a case, Holmes, I am willing to help, but it seems to me that you are merely bringing me along on these adventures in order to spend time with me; and I would like you to recall that the pain it causes me to be in your presence was the reason I left Baker Street in the first place. So please, unless it is really and truly necessary, refrain from calling on me in the future.”
He shut the door in my face, and I nearly broke down and cried. Instead, I went home and dosed myself with morphine and tried to think of a way to live without John Watson.
I could not. It was simply impossible. So I thought instead of a way I might die without him.
Professor Moriarty had long been in my sights as the most dangerous man in London, and it was not difficult to goad him and his associates into action. The danger was very real when I burst into Watson’s house that day, talking wildly of air-guns. He did not doubt me for a moment, trusting as he is, and paled quite visibly. The thought of a threat to my life pushed all personal considerations aside, and he agreed to accompany me to the Continent, declaring through white lips that he would do whatever he could to keep me from harm’s way. This proof of his undimmed devotion nearly swayed me from my purpose, and for a mad and guilty moment I considered confessing what I intended to do when we reached Switzerland; but the wheels had already been set in motion, and after all, even if I could have halted Moriarty’s inevitable progress toward the Reichenbach Falls, it would only have been to resume the miserable state of affairs back home.
So we fled England, and at the appointed hour, Moriarty already waiting at the Falls, air-guns in place, I sent Watson the false note about the ill lady, and left him behind for the last time, memorizing in a single glance the anxious tilt of his sandy head, the tap of his finger on his thumb, and the depths of fear, pain, and undying love in his bright blue eyes as he turned away.
I sent Moriarty spinning into the Falls with barely a blink. I do not boast; my state of mind at the time was such that I had little thought to spare for the drama of battles to the death. Besides, I knew that Moriarty had been injured in the knee during a cricket match at Eton when he was fifteen, a fact which he had stupidly failed to keep secret from a fellow mathematics professor, and which rendered him particularly susceptible to a jab in a certain relevant tendon. I daresay he had not even been aware of this weakness himself. At any rate, my victory had been predetermined, or I should not have met him there at the Falls. However worthless my own life had become, I refused to die with Moriarty still at large.
I dodged the air-guns, and I left Watson the note of farewell I had penned earlier that morning while he still slept. And then I fled the country and began my life as a dead man.
It was not good, but at first it was better. Better, that is, than the prospect of living mere miles from Watson and not being allowed into his presence. Now, as I wandered through Europe and into Asia and Africa, I was no longer Sherlock Holmes; I changed my name whenever I moved, and pretended to be all sorts of things. True, I could not outrun my love for my blue-eyed army doctor back home, but then, I had not expected to, and losing myself in disguises and false identities went a long way in assuaging the ever-present ache of it. And at first, I reveled in my self-inflicted exile, romanticizing (as I have never romanticized anything before) the loneliness and bitterness of it. Then, two months into my life-after-death, I stumbled upon something I at first thought might truly save me—something that, in the end, nearly killed me instead. I should have known better; but then, an addict never does.
It was in Prague that it happened. I was masquerading as a scholar of chemistry—not such a pretense, after all—and I met a man, another chemist, whose hair had gone slate grey at the young age of thirty-seven, who had a crooked and devil-may-care smile, and who quite obviously found me irresistibly attractive. Even had my deductive powers not been what they were, I would have known it, for he made certain unmistakable advances.
I was about to turn him down, firmly but without reprimand, when I realized that there was no reason on earth that I should. True, my heart belonged to another, and always would, but this man was not looking for love. I was no longer a famous consulting detective, with a career and a reputation at stake; and after all, how do you put a dead man on trial? I found the chemist reasonably attractive, as much as any man could be who was not Watson, and I fear I cared little for whatever ill consequences might befall him as a result of our encounter. And so, in short, I acquiesced.
It was earth-shattering. I found myself taken apart, obliterated, wiped absolutely clean in a way I had never been before, not once, not through drugs or sleep or deduction. For the few brief seconds of orgasm I was no longer aware of elbow patches and trouser stains and hidden crimes and secret plots and the pointless muddle of existence and the Roylotts and Stoners and Munros and Milvertons that populate this miserable world. It was intoxicating. It was the best high I have ever experienced.
I am not a man to do things halfway, and as I had thrown myself wholeheartedly into celibacy in the days of my youth, so too did I hurtle headlong into the sexual underground of Europe. I learned much from the chemist, but soon exhausted his stores of knowledge and moved on to another, and many more after that. It became my sole obsession to seek out new information, new skills, more arcane and fascinating knowledge of sex as practiced between two or more men since its heyday in ancient Greece. Sex took the place of the cases I had left behind, and became the sole mystery I wanted to solve.
It should be clear even to those who have read only Watson’s expurgated accounts of me that I have a deeply addictive personality—whether it is drugs, or crime-solving, or obsessively cataloguing information about cigarette ash and footprints and gunpowder—and the dark escape of sex, the black hole of pleasure that sucked one’s identity away with greedy relish, was all too readily converted into an addiction. And like morphine before it, what started as relief became a dangerous and life-threatening necessity. I craved the company of other men, but eventually I had to face the fact that I was not pleasuring but punishing myself, since when I came out of the annihilating ecstasy of orgasm, the fact that it was not Watson I was lying next to was always a gut-wrenching, guilt-inducing revelation. Soon enough, no man would spend more than a night with me, skilled as I had become, for in my pain and frustration, I treated them all miserably after the act was performed.
I would have tortured myself no matter what, but the thing that sustained my guilt at such a high pitch over the years of my absence, spiking it higher again whenever I felt even a flicker of relief, lay in the pages of the Strand magazine. For Watson was publishing again.
He wrote twenty stories about me during the years of my absence. They were better than the novels, though of course they left out much. They kindled a greater wave of enthusiasm for my erstwhile powers than even my supposed plunge into the Reichenbach Falls had, and I found myself, bizarrely, more adored in death than I had been in life. I could not understand it. It puzzled me as nothing had before. Surely Watson had not intended to make me into a hero?
In the last story, the final story, the story of my greatest deception masking as my greatest triumph, he eulogized me. He called me—I am ashamed even to quote him—“the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.” Had he known I was still alive to read those words, I would have suspected him (wrongly, uncharitably, unforgivably pessimistically as always) of writing them to wound me, perhaps fatally—another shot from my army doctor that hit its target dead on. For nothing could have hurt me more than those words, not even the most damning condemnations or scathing insults. I was not good, and I was not wise, and however earnest my desire to protect him had been, I had destroyed his chance at happiness. He might have literally shot me and it would not have been nearly so painful.
But he thought I was dead. He had not written those words to wound me. In my haze of agonized confusion, I assumed his stories must have been a way for him to re-imagine our lives at Baker Street as he wished they had been: all easy companionship and careless pleasure, the simple manly excitement of the chase followed by nights smoking by our sitting-room fire. It was the life Watson should have had; it was a life I would have despised. Oh, perhaps if I had not loved him, it would have been pleasant enough, but knowing him as I did, it was torture to read of the condescending amusement with which my literary counterpart treated him—he who truly was the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.
That terrible eulogy was the final line of the final story. He wrote me a good and brave and selfless man, and then he wrote me dead. No, that was not quite fair, as I had written my own demise before that, in the letter I had left for him at the Falls. But his stories stopped after that; and a part of me wondered if they had worked as he had surely intended them to. Perhaps he had managed with his pen the thing that I had failed to do even with my death: purged me from his system. Had he successfully written me out of his life, and out of his heart?
I could not know whether Watson had ceased to love me, but the twin reliefs of morphine and sodomy—both now obviously more destructive than helpful—could not make me forget the possibility. In fact, it was the only thing I did not forget, as I was fast losing myself, ravaging my body to its limits. If I had not stumbled across an old orchestra mate from university while in Paris, I believe I would have eventually killed myself, properly this time, with self-abuse.
He did not recognize me—I was dead, after all—but I remembered him, and from the wrecked library of my formerly infallible brain, a fact about him emerged. It gave me a shock, and brought me as close to awake and self-aware as I had been in months. I recalled that he had played the oboe—and possibly still did—in the same theatre where Eloise Lyons, Miss Morstan’s lover, was an actress.
Breathlessly, as deftly as I could, I steered the talk towards London, towards Chelsea, towards a certain well-known and not-quite-respectable leading lady. And, miracle of miracles, the man was as much of a gossip as any musician, and I was a willing ear, and he had news, and—well, he told me.
“Oh, yes, Eloise Lyons,” he said, nodding eagerly. “You haven’t heard? She’s left the company. Gone to New York.”
So Miss Morstan’s affair had failed, too, I thought with an unkind flicker of satisfaction. Now she and Watson really were perfectly matched.
“But,” the oboist said, leaning in confidentially, “that’s not the who story.” He paused impressively, and could have pinched him with impatience. “The fact is, Miss Lyons had a lover. A woman. As a matter of fact, the lover was married to that man—John Watson, that’s his name—” (my heart nearly stopped) “—who wrote all those accounts of Sherlock Holmes. I knew the detective once, would you believe it? Back at university. The man was quite a violinist. Shame about his passing, wasn’t it?”
The irony of the situation was not lost on me, but I was fixated on one word. “You say she—she was married to him?”
The man blinked. “Hm? Oh, Miss Lyons’s lover. Yes, well, I suppose she still is, legally, but that’s just it. They ran off together, to America. Miss Lyons and Mrs. Watson. Just couldn’t take the secrecy anymore. Not that it isn’t frowned upon in the States, of course, but I guess there are places in New York—good God, man, are you all right?”
I had nearly fainted. I gasped out an apology, collecting myself as best I could, and left the poor fellow staring after me, baffled, as I rushed out of the pub.
I staggered, reeling, back to my dingy rented flat. So she had done it. Mary Morstan, the soft-featured, petite woman whom I had known first as a confused client desperately in need of assistance, had run off to America, abandoning home, country, prosperity, safety—and Watson.
What must he think now? A five-foot-tall, rose-cheeked girl had done for her lover what I had refused to do for him. And I could not believe she had made the wrong choice.
“I love him, so I let him make his own decisions,” she had said to me once, and now, finally, I understood. Yes, I had always acted for Watson’s safety rather than my own—surely my wreck of a life without him proved that—but I had denied him that most precious of all things, the freedom to forfeit that safety for something he believed more valuable. For was that not the true measure of freedom—to be free to risk giving it up?
And there he was now, alone in London, never more deserving of my love, while I, alone in Paris, was never less deserving of his. I knew there was nothing I could ever do to atone for my errors, for the pain I had caused him by my blind arrogance, and my instincts told me to stay as far away from him as possible—to allow him some small chance at happiness without me. Nothing I could offer him would measure up to even a fraction of what he deserved.
And yet was that not, once again, depriving him of his freedom to choose? If I loved Watson—and after all these years, that was the one thing I still knew for certain—then I ought to present myself to him, the wreck and ghost of the man he once knew, and offer myself body and soul for him to take or leave as he would. To do, that his, what I should have done years before, in Grimesby Roylott’s chamber.
I allowed myself two weeks—two weeks to eat, and rest, and purchase a set of clothes that would not raise eyebrows in respectable London society—and then I returned home.
London was almost too much for me. The familiar sights and sounds and smells nearly brought me to my knees, dizzying and cacophonous as they seemed after so long an absence. My first sip of real English tea almost sent me flying back to France, so little did I feel I deserved to taste it again.
I admit that my courage failed me at the last minute, as I walked along Watson’s quiet tree-lined street, and I could not bring myself to climb those even more deeply worn steps to his front door. What if he was happy? What if he had found someone good and whole and far, far wiser than I?
So I dressed myself as an old bookseller, and followed him, but before I could deduce more than a dozen trivial things from his appearance, I staggered in a sudden spell of lightheadedness (I had been steadily and painfully reducing my dose of morphine and was suffering from minor withdrawal) and bumped right into him. I nearly gave it all away. The sight of his clear blue eyes—surrounded by wrinkles, so many wrinkles, and the first spots of age mottling the hollows below them—rendered me momentarily speechless, and I muttered a few unintelligible words of apology before hurrying away. As I caught my breath, leaning against a cool brick wall, I cursed my cowardice. It did not matter, I told myself furiously, if I judged him happy without me, if I feared his rejection or contempt; it was for me to present myself to him, nothing more, and for him to decide what to do about it. So I wrenched myself away from the solid embrace of the wall, the world tilting woozily for a moment, and followed him home.
He had already gone inside. I made some excuse for entering his house; his maid almost did not let me in. Then he and I were alone, and I did not know what to do. So in a moment of desperation, I fell back into old habits—showing off for him again, I realized, helpless to stop myself—and when his back was turned, I shed my disguise. I stood there trembling, broken, much changed, but after three long years, I was Sherlock Holmes once again.
He turned. He froze, entirely, for several endless seconds. He looked, quite understandably, as if he had seen a ghost. Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.
I hurried forward, aghast. I managed to lift him into a chair. Slowly, his eyes fluttered open.
“My dear Watson,” I began, feeling rather faint myself, but determined to come right out with it: to tell him I had come back to him at long last, to atone if he would let me, to offer my life and my love, expecting nothing, giving him the choice, as I should have years before, to take me or leave me. I had barely uttered the first stuttering words, however, before he cut me off.
“Don’t you dare,” he choked out, eyes glittering, “don’t you dare tell me that Sherlock Holmes is standing in front of me, alive—alive, after three years of allowing me to assume he was lying mangled and rotting at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls. No, don’t you dare touch me!” he spat out as I reached for his hand, shocked by the anger in his face.
“Who knew?” he demanded. “Who knew you were still alive?” I did not answer, staring at him in utter consternation. “Did Mycroft know?”
The slightest shift of my gaze told him the truth. He let out a noise that was half snarl, half bitter laugh. “Of course he did. But I, oh, no, I was not to know—”
“Watson—” I do not know whether I planned to defend myself or beg for his forgiveness, but it did not matter, as he did not allow me to continue.
“Was it for my own benefit?” he asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Are you going to protest that Moriarty’s associates were still on your trail, and that an attempt to communicate with me would have sent them with air-guns and pistols to my door? Or merely that you did not wish me to suffer, that you were allowing me the chance to forget you and move on?”
I fear I was growing angry myself now, though with no justification other than that I had been trying to apologize for the very behavior he was now, quite reasonably, shouting at me for. “Watson, I—”
“I mourned you, Holmes!” he burst out, anguish ripping his beautiful baritone voice to shreds. His chest was rising and falling mightily as he stared at me with the look of a hunted animal, cornered now and with no other choice but to fight. “For three years I mourned you, waking and sleeping—the nightmares, Holmes, do you have any idea—it’s me you’re wrestling with atop the Falls, and I push you over, always, and then we’re both falling and I hold your head underwater and when I wake up I can’t breathe. I tried to writeyou out of my life, and had it not been for Mary’s intervention I would have tried to drink you out of it—but none of it worked, Holmes, and do you know why?” He was panting heavily. I stood paralyzed with horror.
“Because I blamed myself.” He sucked in a great breath. “I believed it was my refusal to see you again that left you vulnerable to Moriarty. That you allowed him to pull you down with him because you had lost the desire to live. I believed your death was my fault.” His eyes grew small and hard and blazing with fury. “And now—now I discover that I have lived with that guilt for three agonizing years because you purposely allowed me to think you were dead—because you gave me no word, no sign, didn’t bother to send a telegram or a letter or a bloody carrier pigeon—”
“You left me!” I broke in, unable to stop myself. I was gripping the back of a chair, knuckles white, head ringing. I couldn’t take it, this barrage of rage and hatred, not when I had suffered so much for him, not when he seemed to think me as cold and uncaring as the tin Holmes of his stories, not when that was the one, the only accusation he could not justly fling at me. “You got married, Watson, and you said you never wanted to see me again—what could I do, after that?”
“You left me!” he cried. “After all this time, do you still not understand that? Back in Grimesby Roylott’s chamber, when I tried to touch you and you pulled away—that was when it happened. When I offered myself to you, and you refused to take me. The day I learned you loved me was the day you left me.”
He was right. I had not understood it before, but he was right. The world was spinning as I looked at him, his anger undimmed as he hurtled away from me, his just rage propelling him further and further out of my reach. It was with helpless horror that I saw that I was losing him.
“I have loved you beyond all reason,” he confessed, voice trembling, “and whatever I do, it seems that I am destined to love you for the rest of my life.”
My heart leapt with unexpected hope, but as I reached for him he repelled me with the coldest look I have ever seen on his face, before or since.
“But if you think you can come back here, now that Mary, God bless her, is gone—oh, I know you have heard somehow, do not try to deny it—if you think you can come back here, and take advantage of my loneliness and misery and lead me back like a tamed puppy to Baker Street, to admire your cleverness and follow you on your adventures and behave myself like a proper upright English citizen, content to bask in your mere presence, useless and impotent and cursing myself for my own cowardice, then, Holmes, you had better take your disguises and your excuses and just—”
And then I kissed him. God forgive me, for he had not given his consent, and I had not risen from the dead to force John Watson to do anything he did not wish to do. But I knew no other way to declare my intentions, not now that words and reason—my lifelong companions—had passed irrevocably beyond the realm of usefulness.
He froze under my touch, though his heart was racing and his lips against mine were burning hot. I pulled back. I had stunned us both into silence. We stared at each other, as the world stopped turning and balanced precariously on its axis, poised to hurtle off into the depths of space if either of us so much as breathed.
“Holmes,” he uttered, voice breaking.
“I am sorry,” I said, heart in my throat. “I did not know how else to tell you.”
He buried his face in his hands and began to cry.
I have never known Watson to lose control before, but three years of pent-up grief and many more of unexpressed misery before them, followed by the shock of my resurrection, were more than enough to prompt the most severe fit of hysterics I have ever witnessed. There was nothing remotely foolish or effeminate about it; in fact, it was frankly terrifying. Only the necessity of remaining calm in order to help him through it prevented me from losing my head as well. He thrashed about frighteningly as I held him as steady as I could, cursing myself for bringing on the fit. Was there nothing I could do that would not hurt him?
After a time, I managed to bring him back to himself a little, allowing him to grip my hand until my fingers were numb and whispering soothingly into his ear. Finally, we made the brief journey to his bedroom, where I removed his shoes and settled him under the covers. He fell immediately into a deep sleep.
I sat beside him, anxious about his health and full of dread and terror at what he would say to me when he awoke. I have sat through many a long vigil in my life, often with Watson at my side, but the two hours I watched over him that day were unequivocally the longest I have ever spent.
When his eyelids fluttered open, it was all I could to not to burst into apologies and explanations and pleas. I wanted to get down on my knees and beg him not to send me away. But my desires no longer mattered. I had offered him myself, and whatever happened next was up to him. I kept silent and waited for him to speak.
He said nothing, however, only looked at my hand, which was still holding his, in wonder and, I regret to say, distrust.
There were a thousand questions in his eyes, but I knew that he was asking the only one that truly mattered when he placed his hand on my chest, gathering my shirtfront in his fingers, and pulled me gently towards him.
It was a test, and I am happy to report that in all my life I have never passed one so willingly and with such joy. I let him kiss me and, after a moment of his lips against mine, I kissed him back.
He pulled away slightly, my fingers buried in his hair.
“And I can do that any time I wish?” he asked softly.
My reasoning, rational brain jumped in immediately with all sorts of exceptions and caveats—not when there are people around, not when there is the slightest chance of being discovered, not when I am engaged in dangerous chemical experiments or wielding a weapon or tracking a criminal—but I pushed those objections gently aside. My job now was to trust him, not protect him; and after all, I had not returned to give him only part of me.
“Anytime you so desire,” I replied. “And much more besides.”
He sank back into the pillow, sleep overtaking him again, and muttered a few words before drifting once more into slumber.
“Then I shall have you.”
Warmth expanded in my chest. I sat there holding his hand, broken and ruined and somehow far, far luckier than I had ever deserved to be.
It was not, of course, quite so easy as all that; we had hurt each other too deeply to simply put it all behind us, and there were certain confessions I had still to make concerning how I had spent my time during my three-year stint as a dead man. It nearly broke me to cause the man I love more pain, but I resolved that there should be nothing left unspoken between us. He forgave me for it, eventually, for the chemist and all the others, though when I first told him he did not speak to me for twenty-seven hours and eighteen minutes and it was all I could do not to take my morocco case to some dark alley and dose myself into oblivion. But he came back. Miraculously, he always has.
Sebastian Moran still had to be dealt with, the last of Moriarty’s loose ends to be tied up, and soon enough he was. But the events which later came to be known as “The Adventure of the Empty House”—the gambler, the dummy, the air-gun—did not in reality occur until several weeks after my return. Nor did my reappearance at Scotland Yard, nor my reunion with Mrs. Hudson and our miraculous return to 221B Baker Street. I spent the time in between alone with the good doctor—my good doctor—learning how to atone for my transgressions.
I am still learning; my second life, the life that commenced when I rose from the Reichenbach Falls, has been one long promise—at least, I sincerely hope it has—that I belong, body and soul, to John Watson.
It was for him and with his help that I managed, with tremendous difficulty, to wean myself from morphine and replace it with the less lethal cocaine. It was for him that I deflected even the slightest whispers of suspicion about our relationship with a cleverly planted trail of false evidence, designed to fool anyone less intelligent than myself—that is to say, everyone but my brother Mycroft, who has been turning a blind eye on my many abnormalities, such as they may be, since the moment of my birth. And it was for me that Watson once more took up his pen, calling again into being that antisocial, intolerable, incorrigible bachelor-detective to whom the very idea of the softer emotions is an impossibility. For the first time, I was glad that the public saw that tin man instead of the true Sherlock Holmes. And all in all, we managed to get along splendidly for two men who had broken each other apart countless times, who had, for so long, been to each other nothing more or less than a battlefield.
I am an old man now, living in eternally blooming Sussex with the love of my life, still trying every day, every moment, to give him a fraction of the happiness he deserves. The phenomenon of him climbing into bed next to me each night, and waking up soft and warm beside me each morning, has never lost its sweetness; and I shall never tire of the light that appears in his eyes when I offer him honey fresh from the comb. I tend to my bees with a thousandth of the devotion with which I tend to him, and yet sometimes I still wonder whether it is enough.
But he wrote this of me, very recently, in one of his adventure stories; he wrote it and, I, as usual, can only stand back and marvel:
“It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask.”
Does he indeed find it worth the many wounds I gave him to be here now, in Sussex, with roses and honey and a greying old man who loves him more with each new wrinkle and each new sunrise? I can only pray that it is so. For myself, I am far, far happier than I have ever deserved or expected to be; and I hope—on my better days, I even believe—that he, too, has finally found the good and simple life he was always meant to have.