The Watches of the Night Read online

  There was a smile curving around his pipe. 'It does,' I agreed, surprising myself. 'How easily time does seem to pass us by.'

  'Strange,' I said to Holmes, as we waited together in the dark for Helen Stoner's signal, 'Until now I don't believe I've been out of London since I came back from India.'

  'Stoke Moran is hardly a resort town. Perhaps next time we shall take a case by the sea, Watson. What do you say?'

  'I say wherever it is you have a case, I am your man.'

  His eyes glinted in the dark; his voice was thick with satisfaction. 'I didn't realise you had such interest in the detective business.'

  'I daresay it breaks up the monotony of life.'

  'Do you think we lead a monotonous life?'

  'I certainly don't think you do.'

  'Is your own life too monotonous?'

  'It could do with a little shake-up now and then.'

  'Once you told me your nerves could not withstand a row. Can they now withstand the difficulty of a case like this? The tension? The waiting? The dangerous crossing of the land at night?'

  'I daresay it would do them some good, in fact, and sometimes we row anyway.'

  He laughed brightly, his long fingers pressing lightly upon my wrist. 'Good,' he said firmly. 'Now look – there's our signal. Let's see if we can put an end to Dr. Roylott's terror, and finally solve the mystery of this supposed speckled band.'

  Following the Roylott case, Holmes did hold true to his word, and I did find myself now involved in a series of fascinating little problems. Of course most of Holmes' cases he solved from the comfort of our sitting-room, and I either listened in or kept to myself, depending on how interesting they were.

  Sometimes, however, a simple case became something much more dire, and led to Holmes banging up the stairs to my room sometime past midnight. 'So sorry to disturb you,' he said breathlessly, slumping into my chair as I hurried from my bed into a dressing gown. 'But there are certain conveniences to having a doctor in the house, and I'm afraid I must call upon them.' And he took his hand from his forehead, revealing a bloody gash.

  'Holmes!' I cried, and immediately set to work. The blood had pooled along his hairline, and once the gash was clean, I set two stitches in, cursing at the poor light. 'It will serve you right if it scars,' I told him. 'You must be more careful, Holmes.'

  'I promise,' he said soberly, his fingers catching on my wrist. He did not cry out, but I could see the pain in his eyes, and I gentled my touch as well as I could, into barely more than a brush.

  As I was creeping up the stairs a week later, I hoped Holmes would have already gone to bed, that I might be able to slink into our rooms with him none the wiser, to lick my wounds in peace.

  But Lady Luck had already proved she was not on my side tonight, and Holmes was still sprawled out on the sofa where I had left him earlier. What was worse: he'd been joined by a syringe, which was on the floor beside him.

  'You can't say you wish I wouldn't,' he said softly, barely opening his eyes to study me, 'when you yourself have been out engaging in your vices.'

  'There's not so much danger at the tables as there is in that bottle,' I said, but I knew he was right. There was nothing wrong with a card game or the occasional bet, but some weakness in me made it difficult to walk away even when my chances of winning were next to none.

  I had resisted the tables for years, with my occasional locum work and Holmes' cases to distract me. It seemed the distraction was no longer strong enough.

  'You are the pot,' he sighed, his head falling back. 'And I am the kettle. We have both been in the fire, Watson, and we are both black.'

  Other nights, we laughed.

  'Hush!' Holmes scolded, pulling me up several steps into a doorway halfway down some foul alley. I struggled against the laughter in my chest, but Holmes' plea for silence would have been easier to manage had he himself not been shaking with mirth.

  I didn't try very hard; I needed the laughter.

  Footsteps echoed throughout the alley behind us. Our pursuer snarled and growled, but the sound was too high and thin to be threatening, and I had to bury my face into my arm so that my giggle would not be heard.

  Finally the footsteps retreated, and I could safely look up, but one glance at Holmes' face again and I fell back into laughter. 'I'm sorry,' I said, trying to catch my breath. 'I hardly know what came over me.'

  Holmes clapped his hand to my shoulder. 'I'm afraid the problem was,' he said as somberly as possible, 'that the gentleman was ridiculous,' and we burst into laughter again.

  Once we collected ourselves, Holmes leapt from our hiding place and turned to offer me his hand, helping me down. His fingers were warm and strong beneath mine; when he let go, I clenched my hand in my coat to ease the feeling of their heat on my skin before the memory could settle into my bones.

  Chapter Four

  A fist flew and the crowd cheered in unison, an ugly, ferocious jeer that swelled and swooped as the fight went on. Holmes was a blur in the centre, his usually pristine brow flushed and sweaty, his cheeks and chin smudged with dirt, his grin stretched wide and taunting. I could see the joy in his face too, the power and the freedom and the adrenalin pumping through his veins. Through his heart.

  My own beat faster.

  Holmes wasn't the strongest in the circle, but he was likely the fastest and certainly the cleverest. He took on his opponents fiercely, dodging their blows and using their weight and their predictability against them for victory after victory.

  But even Sherlock Holmes was not infallible, and by the time he slipped out of the circle and back toward me, he was bleeding from a cut above his eye and scrapes bloomed across his cheeks. His weight settled unevenly on his hips too, as though favouring a bruised rib or two.

  'I think that's it for tonight,' I said, letting Holmes lean heavily on my shoulder, leading him away.

  'As you say, Doctor,' Holmes allowed, laughing and gasping. He submitted to my prodding fingers, and when I was satisfied, I submitted in turn to watching the remaining matches as he studied the other boxers.

  We were nearly home when we first heard the sound: a high-pitched whimper. A plea of pain.

  Holmes stopped mid-sentence, cutting off our comparison of the night's boxers to the eventual champion to listen carefully. The sound came again, louder, and he was off in a flash, darting down an alley in search of its source.

  He found it tucked behind a jumble of abandoned crates: a grey-brown dog with matted fur and a leg crusted with blood. 'Here, doggy,' he cooed, digging through his pockets for something to entice the creature with and finding half a biscuit. 'Here, boy.'

  The dog shrank back in fear, but Holmes waited patiently, murmuring gentle encouragements, until at last the animal shuffled forward and quickly took the biscuit from his fingers. I watched with not a little awe – I'd never seen Holmes so tender – and finally made my way forward to examine the bloody leg. 'Broken, I think.'

  'Miserable thing,' Holmes agreed. After a few long minutes of quiet petting and cooing, Holmes was able to gather the dog into his arms, heedless of his coat. 'I know a fellow who will be able to fix this up in no time,' he said, hoisting the dog up, trying not to jostle him. 'He'll be able to find a proper home for the poor boy.'

  I admit that I drifted for several years. My constitution, though healed, would never be the same as it had been before the war, and I was an old man already at the age of thirty. Perhaps I should have set up a practice, for my banking-account was never flush, but I satisfied my obligations and myself with odd here-and-there positions whenever the need arose.

  At any rate, my eccentric companion never said a word of my idleness.

  I actually thought Holmes enjoyed having me about the rooms. He was a solitary sort naturally, though good-natured; he was also peculiarly exacting in his habits, and preferred to have them unchanged. I supposed I had simply become a part of those habits – an audience for his ejaculations, a ready
assistant in his myriad experiments. I occasionally sat in on his cases, though I just as often disappeared up to my own bedroom instead; more often, I accompanied him to the music halls, or to dinner, or even once or twice to the laboratories at St Bart's Hospital.

  I was comfortable. More than that, I was content. Holmes kept me on my feet as often as he left me to my own devices, and as we quietly marked the passing of each January, there was nowhere else I would have preferred to be.

  It was nearing midnight, one warm September night in 1887, when there was a furious pounding on the door downstairs. Holmes and I had stayed up late, sharing a brandy and discussing some new philosophical theory of the self – 'Rot,' Holmes had said, and I’d rejoined, 'Rot, but,' not quite agreeing – and so he went to investigate before Mrs Hudson could be drawn out. He returned some minutes later accompanied by a shaking man, struck pale with fright.

  'My friend and colleague, Doctor Watson,' Holmes introduced. 'Watson, Mr Terrence Hesse.'

  'My apologies for the hour, sir,' Hesse said, terribly politely. 'It's only that I'm afraid for my life.'

  'Let me pour you a brandy for the nerves,' Holmes said, his voice low and soothing. 'You are quite safe here. Now tell us your story.'

  Hesse told an extraordinary tale about a job he'd taken laying tile in the hall of a large Kensington home, being paid far too much, and how the master of the house had been violently killed. Hesse, working just outside the gentleman's study, had heard nothing at all, but the entire household staff had accused him of the crime.

  'They pointed at me!' he cried. 'Though each should have known I was in the hall all the while, by the noise I was making. Even the butler!'

  'And you ran?' Holmes surmised.

  'What else was there to do? My wages don't care for just my own upkeep, sir. I share rooms with another fellow, a tile-layer like myself, though he's been out of work from an accident these past weeks. I went out the back as quick as I could and rushed home to him, but I could hardly stay where they'd have found me. I'd heard your name, sir, from the street Arabs, and thought I'd see if you could help me.'

  A lesser man might have thought that Hesse's story was an obvious lie intended to save himself, but Holmes' caution in meting out justice was firm, and he was staunch in his refusal to jump to conclusions.

  'And you say you heard nothing from the study?' Holmes asked, putting his fingers to his lips in thought.

  'None, sir.'

  'And each of the household staff accused you, to a man?'

  'All of them, sir, even those I had not seen. But tile-laying – it's fine work, you know, but there's a fair amount of tapping and other noise that goes on. They must have heard me at it.'

  Holmes hummed, muttering to himself for a moment, then went for his hat and coat. 'Come, Watson,' he directed. 'We must get to the bottom of this grotesque business.'

  The Hesse case had led Holmes and I on a chase through the slick dark streets of London, ending with swift fists and Holmes' triumphant cry rising into the night. He'd been panting with excitement, disheveled and bruising beautifully around the eye, and I'd been drawn in, transfixed by his energy.

  By the time I fell into bed, the adrenalin in my veins had transformed into something hot and golden in my spine, in my belly, my groin. It bloomed insistently, where there had been nothing for years – not since the Jezail bullet. Not since the fever.

  There was definitely something there now: something novel and unexpected and so very missed.

  I struggled against my nightshirt and closed a hand around my prick, somehow surprised to find myself hard even though I felt the demand, the eagerness. I wanted to take my time, to enjoy it, but as soon as I touched myself, urgency slid into desperation. My hand rushed along my shaft, twisted at the head in an old familiar fashion; my pace quickened, rising to the edge; I thought about running, and about fighting, and about the crook of Holmes' smile, the shine of his eyes, his face as he turned to me, breathless and victorious – and I came, I came hard, and my mind went completely, blissfully blank.

  Simpson's was busy on the next evening, the late-night wanderers drawn toward the promise of a hot cup of coffee or a sandwich. Across the table, Holmes seemed to revel in the noise, his eyes glowing and his hands fluttering as he recounted some story of his youth.

  I was barely listening to him. Instead I was watching, following Holmes' fingers as they moved from his coffee spoon to his mouth, to settle on his leg before wandering off again. His cheeks were flushed, first from the excitement of the case – a tawdry little bit of counterfeiting, but a thrilling arrest nonetheless – and now from the coffee and the heat of the room, and I wondered how warm those cheeks would be to the touch. Would he turn his head into my hand, if I reached out?

  The thought took me off-guard and I sat back, suddenly realising how far I'd leaned forward. It had been a long time since I had had a thought like that, and I knew it was not one of a devoted friend. It was a thought of gentleness, of intimacy. It spoke of an affection that ran too deep in places that ought to have been reserved, set aside for someone else.

  Of – attraction.

  When I sipped at my coffee again, it had gone bitter.

  Fog rolled in.

  London drifted through the hazy sea for days, damp seeping drearily into the corners of Baker Street, settling an uneasy silence over everything like a thin coating of dust. My leg and shoulder ached constantly, but no matter how high the fire was built, I could not shake the chill.

  The sober atmosphere seemed to set Holmes on edge as well, and he was in and out of our rooms at all hours of the day and night with barely a word to me. His long absences left me feeling as alone as I had been before moving into 221B, and I could not help but wonder whether he had been driven out into the night by something he had seen in me – something I was only barely starting to see in myself.

  It would not have been the first time Holmes had known something about me before I knew it myself, after all. He knew so much at a single glance – there was no telling what sharing rooms with someone might reveal to him.

  Outside, the fog curled thick and yellow against the windowpanes, and finally I took myself to bed to escape from it. I would find no resolutions that night anyway, no answers: the darkness was too impenetrable, and the future, I feared, too bleak.

  Chapter Five

  I was going to call it A Study in Scarlet, I had decided, but now as I flipped through the pages, I wondered whether it was fit for publication after all, even with an offer to print already on my desk. Each of my exclamations of awe and admiration now seemed illicit, written proofs of a prurient curiosity. As filthy and felonious as the murderer Holmes had brought to heel.

  But it hadn't been like that, I knew. Whatever new thing had sprung into my chest, it was a young, weak thing, and it had nothing to do with the impression Holmes had made upon me when first we met, nor anything to do with the healing I had undergone at 221B Baker Street, nor with the decision to write our adventure down. Was I now to let this callow thing paint my memories with so red a brush?

  No.

  There was no danger, I told myself, because A Study in Scarlet was not about me in any way. It was about Holmes, and Holmes deserved it: the credit, the understanding. I would not allow my cowardice to take that from him now.

  I would accept this offer to publish; I was determined. I put aside my fears and, swallowing hard, instead picked up the letter from the publisher at Beeton's.

  Yet, haunted by my own mind, I could not sleep. Every muted clink of glass from the sitting room resonated along my nerves; every hint of Holmes' presence beyond my bedroom door left me straining to glean something from the clues and impressions his quiet movements gave me.

  I could imagine him, still sitting exactly where I'd left him hours before, still tense and silent at his microscope. His hands would be careful, his long fingers graceful and gentle with his delicate instruments. His great working mind would be a
palpable energy in the room, vibrating with white-hot intensity as he built and connected and deduced and understood.

  My imagination slipped away from me then, into an onslaught of images that left me choking for air: my hand on his shoulder, warm; his eyes lighting with recognition, with response. Those extravagant fingers, entwining with mine, pulling me closer. Arousal slid heavily into my veins.

  And then: the soft strains of a violin melted through the door. Holmes had heard my breath stop, I realised, had been keeping part of himself wary for sounds of distress. Had mistaken my gasp of arousal for one of fear, of a nightmare. Had abandoned his work to soothe me.

  I lay awake, listening to the sound as though it were a penance. My eyes burned.

  Holmes' breath blew a visible plume into the night air. 'Soon,' he promised, unprompted, and I did my best not to grumble. The rooftop we had made our seat was not a comfortable lookout, exposed as it was to the wind; I was exhausted from a lack of sleep the night before and longed for the warmth of Baker Street.

  'If it isn't soon,' I returned, 'you'll be taking home a frozen statue instead of a man.'

  Holmes did not answer, but his lips twitched – a smile he wasn't ready to give in to but couldn't help. I reminded myself forcefully that whatever I felt to see that smile, it was a feeling I alone experienced. That Holmes had noticed my discomfort was only indicative of his nature as a detective. He was a friend to me, a good one – and I was not a very good one in return.

  Perhaps I had simply grown too used to Holmes' company, I thought; perhaps I had grown too unused to the company of women. Perhaps I ought to apply myself to finding a wife, to building a separate home and a separate life.

  Yes, I resolved. A wife.

  I was leaning into Holmes, I realised, seeking protection from the cold. I flushed, embarrassed, and shifted away, sliding further down our makeshift bench.