Archive of Our Own

Surprise.

Perplexity.

Astonishment.

I was well-acquainted with those emotions after thirteen years as ‘friend and partner’, ‘biographer’, ‘Boswell’(what a rapscallion he was - as Holmes knew full well, often twitting me with it) and enraptured acolyte of the Great Detective. His habit of concealing the more arcane of his deductions until just the right moment to produce the greatest effect, his extraordinarily swift changes of mood and conversation and, lately, a distinct tendency to rise from the dead, may, I submit, have furnished me some excuse.

It was familiar ground. The same old Baker Street, the same yellow fog, the same creak of the sitting-room door which sang to me of home quite as it used to. Should I then have been surprised at a surprise?

Our client – that word our had not lost its savour, now seven months after a certain fainting fit in my own consulting room – turned towards me where he sat in my - my - chair by the fire. I stared open-mouthed at him and at Holmes in turn, trying to determine if this was some prank.

It was like looking inside the Hall of Mirrors on a seaside pier, except it was not my face I saw reflected back, doubled and altered subtly, yet still undoubtedly mine, but my friend’s. For the young man so resembled Holmes that he might have been his revenant from the early days of our acquaintance, save that his eyes were brown instead of cloudy grey and his dress not that of a gentleman but a struggling clerk.

Holmes made no attempt to explain, even to address, this startling similarity for my benefit. If this was a young cousin come to beg financial help from his now-prosperous relative, it would indeed have been churlish of him to mention their connection and allow me to infer the rest. However, as I made haste to withdraw, Holmes sprang up from his own seat and introduced me. He plunged straight into a narrative of the case, such as it was.

“Mr Charles Vetch here seeks my assistance in the case of his aunt, who is indisposed but sends him in her stead. A great wrong has been done her, and in his eyes I am apparently “the servant of justice, not the slave of the law”. A poetic turn of phrase: I wonder if it originally sprang from your pen, Watson?”

Since, despite his frequent protestations of the romanticised inutility of my stories, I knew him to have committed each and every one to memory, I indulged him in teasing me, just as I indulged his obvious pleasure at being described so.

“It is a pity that Mr Vetch’s mother cannot be present.” Vetch tried to protest at this but Holmes waved him into silence with one scolding finger. “It is always preferable to hear a tale direct from the victim’s own mouth. Ah, Mr Vetch, you have too honest a nature to lie well. That slightly too-much care as you said the word “aunt”; the fact that you have come all the way from...” - he cocked his head and ran his eye over the figure before him - “Hither Green, and must return thence, on foot, saving the train fare but not sparing yourself, and in the middle of the working week: it would be a rare nephew who showed such devotion.”

“Lewisham, Mr Holmes.”

There was more than mere correction in the young man’s voice. It was very important to insist that he came from the ‘right’ side of the Bromley Road. His starched collar, which even I could see had been turned many times until the threads strained to separate, held his head up in a slave-yoke of respectability and pride.

“As the house agents have it, Lewisham fringes, perhaps?” suggested Holmes with unusual tact. Vetch coloured even as he nodded stiffly.

“My...mother has lost something inexpressibly precious to her. However, it is not at all a recent loss. Yet I am confident that you, Mr Holmes, will be able to set matters right.”

“I should prefer to interview the lady myself. Is she well enough to receive visitors?”

“I regret to have to say that she has expressly declined to be interviewed by you.”

Holmes bristled, but persevered.

“Then, what has been lost?”

“She would not tell me, precisely.”

Holmes, who had stepped up to the mantelpiece to stuff his pipe with shag and cast about for a match, burst out in frank irritation.

“Would not...? Mr Vetch, you present me with an all but insurmountable task. I am to find a culprit, retrieve some stolen possession that was lost years ago, all without laying eyes of my actual client or even knowing for what it is I am searching? I may well have unique mental powers: if my friend here has written so, who am I to demur? But I am not a sorcerer. I must have some facts on which to bite.”

I admit a part of me could not resist the idea that the face in front of him might be a very considerable fact. I was starting to imagine an even greater surprise than all the ones he had served up to me so far, not excepting the old bookseller’s unveiling. Sherlock Holmes was at this moment just over forty years of age. Vetch was twenty or twenty-one at most. It was not absolutely impossible. Surely Holmes had not sprung fully formed from an egg, or a test tube, as the person I had met in 1881: many a man in his youth might be unrecognisable to the friends and acquaintances of his maturity. So many things I knew about Holmes, so many things he had said, stood against it... yet a man may ‘dislike and distrust’ women as a sex, but have need of them all the same. For him, the mind was supreme: often, he had declared open war on Nature’s inconsiderate demands for food and sleep; yet for all his triumphs in a two- or three-day skirmish, Nature must ultimately always have the upper hand in a long campaign...

“Watson.”

I jumped. So lost was I in my forest of improper speculation that I had missed my own name being spoken, as well as more conversation between Holmes and our guest.

“You are not averse to dispensing a little free medicine, under an alias?”

I replied that I would gladly do so under my own name, but he would have it that I went incognito to ‘Lewisham’, and at the earliest opportunity.

“To catch a shy jenny-wren, one must hold out a nice plump beetle and hide the cage behind one’s back. Mr Vetch, at what hour do you return home from your employment?”

My appointment thus being set for seven o’clock the next evening, Vetch was dismissed politely and without so much as a word from either man on the matter that in my mind fairly screamed to be addressed.

“Holmes!” I hissed as the noise of footsteps grew fainter, down the hall, onto the stairs. “Do you mean to absolutely ignore the remarkable physical resemblance that Vetch bears to you? Did he say nothing about it himself?”

My companion gazed into the fire without the smallest cloud visible in his expression.

“It is curious,” he agreed mildly, and there, for the rest of the evening, he left the subject, preferring to commune in peaceable silence with his old clay pipe.

I sat on the horns of a dilemma, and my chair was scarcely more comfortable. ‘Holmes, I really must know: do you by any chance have occasion to suspect you might have fathered a son out of wedlock?’ As I turned the very idea of posing such a question this way and that in the privacy of my own head, it mocked me. This was Sherlock Holmes, for heaven’s sake. Besides, we were gentlemen.

When there is only one burning question in a room, which manners – and, in all honesty, a contrariwise wish *not* to know the answer - will not permit to be asked aloud, it scorches every other topic of conversation into ash. I tried to amuse myself for a while, by finding fault with my fellow author Mr Hal Meredeth. His heroic but, to be frank, poorly written, fictional detective for the penny papers, ‘Sexton Blake’ (an odd coincidence of prosody, that) had begun to appear in serial form not long after The Strand published ‘The Final Problem’.

Meredeth seemed especially fond of corralling all the stray exclamation marks he could lay hands on and distributing them liberally about his work. Far from adding drama and excitement, the effect was oddly comic. Blake himself seemed to me merely a clean bed sheet hung up on which to project magic lantern slides of derring-do. I had long ago decided there was really nothing to beat writing about a real person, with all his real eccentricities and quirks. No need for artificial drama with Holmes around. One never knew what he might do next.

Or have done in the past and never so much as hinted at.

Blast. It was no good. Not even the joys of superiority – rare enough to treasure, given the company I usually kept – could distract my incurably busybody self. There was nothing for it but to retire for the night, and hope that meeting Vetch’s mother might enlighten me where Holmes had drawn down the shades.

Ladywell station, Lewisham, where the young man stood waiting, his head haloed by gaslight from a hanging streetlamp, opened onto a road like so many others on the fringes of the growing metropolis. What had once been a country village with its own ancient church, its healing well now run dry, was becoming a suburb. Tired men trudged homeward all around us as we headed for Lewisham High Street, then east along the Hither Green Road.

We passed some newish red-brick public baths, a patch-work church representing a dozen ages of architecture, the Union Workhouse (Vetch seemed to shrink under its shadow), a street of tall, gracious houses with servants’ basements and attic rooms, then terraces of lesser dwellings with coal cellars under the front windows and pretentious names: ‘Kensington Villas’; ‘Parkway Mansions’. As we went I began, by dint of the sort of gentle questions one employs in a consulting room with a patient whom embarrassment renders hesitant or prickly, to learn more about Mr Charles Vetch.

He worked as a clerk in a counting house behind a warehouse in New Cross Gate: long hours of tedium in poor light for scant wages, but he aimed at “steady advancement” through “diligence” and “showing willing”. As he reported setting eyes on his employer only twice or thrice in a week, and had already toiled there for five years in the same position, he must have not only will but vast reserves of hope.

Yet, without hope, how could that narrow, dark little office be anything more than hell?

A man of keen intelligence, his learning scraped together in whatever hours he could spare at Free Libraries and amateur institutes, Vetch had something of the breadth of esoteric knowledge I had noticed in the young Holmes, though without his social advantages. Without, too, it must be said, his cutting tongue, his demonic energies and enervations, or his contempt for the ordinary relations of common (“vulgar” “tedious”) humanity. Vetch was devoted to his mother and spoke tenderly of his sweetheart, whom he might hope to marry in “a few years, once I am established”. I warmed to him quickly: I liked him.

Holmes is a man hard to like. Not for the reasons his enemies – and some of those who would be his friends if he let them nearer than a long arms’ length – would adduce. The pleasant, the sweet, the balanced, the nice: they are likeable. But does one ‘like’ the last air one breathes before drowning; the spice that makes rottenness bearable even as it sears the tongue; the oncoming storm of Monsoon that makes the paddies fertile and hillsides fall down onto whole villages? They are needed almost without thought, yearned for without taste, feared and worshipped in the same moment.

Vetch, I liked. Holmes? Holmes, I loved. Against better judgement and manly pride, I followed him wherever he willed- and he ruthlessly exploited that, as he exploited his own fearlessness and wiry strength. That is not to say I had nothing out of the bargain: as to friendship, he gave of himself what he decently could - more than he had ever given another, I am certain.

In those days, I expected nothing more, whatever dark, fleshly wishes sometimes clawed their way to the surface of my waking mind or swam in the depths of my dreams. I adored him far beyond, far above ‘decency’. If the reader wonders exactly what I mean by those last words, let him think of the Garter motto. Think ill of love, of friendship, of joy that harms none and delights the joyful: think ill of those, and your own thinking shall lie ill upon you. Decency and virtue are not synonyms, and I have never repented loving him, no more than I should repent having loved my wife.

***********************************************
They lived above a fishmonger’s.

As we mounted the rickety wooden stairs behind the mean little row of shops, Vetch‘s wordless apology reeked higher than the pile of fish-heads in the bucket below: an apology for bringing me here; to his mother, that he could provide nothing better; to the world, for committing the unpardonable sin of being poor. I had seen far worse absolute poverty in the receiving room at The London during my studies: poverty with desperation, with anger, with dull resignation, even with an odd, careless gaiety. Yet their lives were alien to me - another Nation, as Lord Beaconsfield has written. This man’s voice was mine; his face was my friend’s; this was the abyss near at hand.

This was poverty with shame. A door at the top of the stairs led directly to two small rooms and a makeshift scullery. Faded rag rugs covered bare boards grey with age and wear. A bed was set in the corner of each room, and in the nearer one a deal table and two chairs. One fine, heavy sideboard and wardrobe in the far room spoke of finer tastes, but I daresay Holmes would have found the remnants of paste from auction tickets on the back of them.

Vetch’s mother existed in a shame deeper and more personal. I do not speak of her son, of her unmarried state. Such things are older than Solomon and I would be the grossest hypocrite to blame a woman for an act I myself have indulged in freely as both bachelor and widower. Her misery lay in the smell that not even constant use of carbolic could entirely mask – the smell not of infection, which is tragically brief in many cases, but of fistula, described in the writings of the late Herr Docktor Dieffenbach. Medical men will understand.

Distress made me clumsy. “Madam, I will do what I can, but such surgery as I know cannot answer your need. You require a specialist,” I blurted out even before Vetch had finished introducing me under the name of Hamilton.

“...whom I cannot afford, and may not be able to cure me in any case. I have been to the Charity wards; I have seen specialists. Like the woman with an issue of blood spoken of by St Matthew, I have spent every penny I had on doctors. I have been humiliated enough by their hands and their words. Charles is a good son, he means well. He is still young, and has not yet learned that not all may be mended. My dear...” she addressed him directly, and he withdrew, as on an old signal, closing the door behind him. The privilege – and burden – of my profession is that instant trust which a patient must give to a stranger in the most private matters. She allowed me to assist her in changing the wet towel and rinsing and drying her reddened skin.

She bore it with grace and courage, this life sentence without a crime. Her dark eyes were dulled from trying to starve herself of liquids, and from hearing the same advice from me as she must have had a hundred times, not to do so. She stopped me before I could go and fetch her son back.

“Doctor Watson.”

I turned, without at first realising that I had given myself away.

“I know who you are, who you must be. I know that my son went to see Mr Sherlock Holmes last night, though he would not admit it. Where the famous Detective is, can his Doctor be far away?”

There was neither mockery nor bitterness in her voice: only a great urgency that I should not see her as a helpless victim, not try to rescue her.

“Your son spoke of a loss, a theft?” Though what they might have had worth stealing was a mystery.

She waited, I think, to test me: to see if I would give her hemmed-in pride its space. I had a unique advantage – years of living and working with Holmes, an experience that surely teaches patience above all things. At last she leaned forward in her chair, shuddering as her body betrayed her again.

“Imagine your life, Doctor, lacking one meeting: one particular person.”

There were mornings I had woken in those three years that flowed dull as dishwater– yes, even with Mary still by my side; forgive me, dearest sweet girl - from dreaming that I had conjured Holmes out of my fancies: that there could never really have existed such a paragon of reason, such a model of coolness and dispassion. I had simply invented him out of my longing for an Other, for completion: strong where I was weak, poor where I was rich. Each time I turned over, back to sleep and a better dream, a dream of real memories, of true sorrow.

“You see:” broke in the lady, “your loss would have been never to meet, or never to meet again. My loss was to meet at all.”

She watched me carefully, her cracked lips parted; her perfectly oval face framed in what must once have been a crowning glory of raven hair, now lank and streaked with grey: watched me as I stepped through the gate her words had opened for me.

What is a meeting, especially one that changes a life forever, but the confluence of a crowd of seeming coincidences – of place, of person, of chance and time, of need and supply? What is a deduction, if not the same? Holmes was not there to warn me about jumping to premature conclusions, and I was though the fence and onto the tracks, staring at an oncoming train without being entirely sure how I got there. Our meetings, mine and Mrs Vetch’s: suppose they had both been with the same man? Suppose that in the callousness and experimentation of youth my friend had condemned her to this existence by a single thoughtless act? She had given birth to a fatherless child without proper care and suffered for both those facts ever since.

Three sharp raps on the door and Charles Vetch’s concerned enquiry from the other side, reminded me of the third party in the unfolding drama. I promised to make what enquiries I could of colleagues on the lady’s behalf, and followed her son into the front room

“You must think me sly to have brought you here without warning, to have concealed from you that which I – and now you - suspect to be the truth,” he began. “My mother was born and brought up in Cambridge. Twenty and more years ago, her father owned a large bookshop much frequented by students at the University including, I must assume, your friend. She was nineteen years old at the time of my birth. Mr Holmes was, I believe, living in London by then. I know enough to understand that her sufferings are the direct result of my existence. I have tried to make it up to her – she has never laid blame, but I feel it my fault nonetheless. Yet what could ever be sufficient?”

“It was only last week that I first saw a photograph of Mr Holmes, taken impromptu in the street with a box camera secreted under the arm. I suppose it is a disadvantage in his line of work to have his face known; it has not been reproduced in any papers. I stood pole-axed on the spot, seized with shocking recognition.” His voice was thin with contempt. “Mr Paget’s drawings idealise him, smooth off the corners, hint at secret benevolence. They render him unlike me to look at. In a photograph, and how much more in the flesh as it turned out, he resembles me. But he said nothing, said nothing to the very mirror of his face held up to him! He was quite as heartless to me, as he has been to Mother. Little wonder she told me not to see him. And you, Doctor, who thought him dead all those years...”

He seized my wrist; both of us were trembling. I looked away, ashamed by proxy, and my eyes lit upon the sole object of decoration on the cheaply papered walls – a fine pencil sketch of a woman’s head and neck, framed in dark wood. At nineteen, or near enough, she had been not merely young and fresh but herself a work of nature’s art. Vetch had followed my gaze.

“Yes, and think of her now. “

***************************************************************

“I perceive,” Holmes announced without preamble as I made my weary entrance into the sitting room at Baker Street, hoping against hope (and the evidence of a lamp burning at the window) to find him gone to bed, “that both you and Mr Charles Vetch have put one and one together and made three.”

He raised one eyebrow in a way so familiar, so loved that I loathed myself for doubting him even as the smugness in his voice grated on my ear. He had not seen what I had seen, smelled what I had smelled, in that dismal, desperate set of rooms above the fishmonger’s.

“Let me review the plot of the melodrama you have composed in your mind – for your ideas in this case cannot be dignified with the term ‘reasoning’. You observe the similarity in two faces. You do some straightforward mental arithmetic. You meet a damsel in distress and your white steed and suit of armour fly in through the window ready for you to ride to her rescue. You speak with a young man at the end of his wits from trying to find justice and reparation in this vale of tears where there is none to be had. You come to the highly moral, yet entirely false, conclusion that a certain Mr Sherlock Holmes has ‘done those things he ought not to have done and left undone those things which he ought to have done’. Lastly, once you have extracted a reluctant confession, you intend to beg me to set about my penance without delay."

He made it – me – sound utterly foolish and ridiculous. What, then, had he expected me to think?

“I expected you to think, my dear Watson,” he chided, reading my thoughts from my face in that way he had, the mountebank of quack devices and his chief customer. “To think and to observe. For thirteen years, has that not been my constant advice?”

“Ten years.” The correction - short, sharp, ground to a razor edge by the grey granite of those subtracted years, filled with deception, empty of news - made Holmes put aside the commonplace book in which he had, whilst rehearsing my failures in logic, continued to write steadily. He sighed softly.

“Ah. That sin I do acknowledge; although, I had thought myself forgiven?”

I had thought him forgiven, too.

“What of the lady, Holmes? Am I to doubt her word as well?”

He jumped up and paced the room, his movements winding as a watch-spring coils: tighter and tighter, hovering above the balance wheel, time and tension in harmonious competition. His answer when it came was a chime of strident complaint, as if he were the wronged party in all this: in the case, at Reichenbach, in that room.

“It is too bad of you, dear fellow; too bad of you to set fancy against fact, speculation against knowledge in this cavalier and, to speak freely, defamatory way. Did she accuse me outright? Or did she – I see your doubt plainly written now, it is so, is it not: she only allowed you, you and Vetch, to assume? Why, why did she do that?”

He rubbed and wrung his hands as he turned around and about, the knuckles cracking, and he seized his violin from its case and gave it several harsh pizzicato plucks with his sharp, clean fingernails before laying it back down with a mute apology to the gods of music in his bent back. Then he flung himself back into his accustomed chair, drew himself up like a folded sheet, with his heels drawn up behind him and indicated the chair opposite.

I had not lost the habit of obedience to his every wish: I had sat down even before that long hand dropped back to his side. In the rarefied, masculine atmosphere of our sitting room, perspective retreated to its usual horizon point: Sherlock Holmes asking for, and sifting through, the facts.

“Tell me everything you saw and all that was said, down in Hither Green. Let us see whether there is a case to solve after all and not just another small current in London’s great river of unhappiness. Omit no detail whatsoever.”

As I dredged that river for every last cast-off boot he listened, fixed on that mysterious space where our world and the universe in his head spoke to each other in a language only he knew. It was when I mentioned the portrait that he addressed me directly.

“Was it signed? Did you observe anything in particular about the composition?”

“Now you mention it, there was something...a little unusual. In one corner, quite by itself, was a small pomegranate, brightly coloured red where the portrait itself was monochrome. It might have been an ink stamp or a stencil.”

Holmes was not in general a lover of art. Nevertheless, he made it his habit to keep track of artists and dealers: whose work was fashionable and therefore likely to be fraudulently imitated; who had influential social connections or bitter rivalries; who had been known to feed suspect funds through their business. After a second or two’s inner review, however, he shook his head.

“Unfamiliar to me: I will make enquiries. Wire Vetch: tell him I have promised to act, and he is to await news. Nothing more, mind.”

I saw little of Holmes all the next day. According to our good landlady he had left early without breaking his fast, “looking like himself but twice as fine” – a species of disguise he used when blending into society gatherings since, in his own words: “The rich take note first of a man’s clothes, second of his manners, third of his way of speaking and seldom, if at all, pay much attention to the actual content of his conversation.”

Late in the evening the inner door smacked against the wall as he flung it open, waking me from an after-supper doze in my chair. He glowed with success, enlarged with it until the room brimmed with his activity and energy. He talked nineteen to the dozen as he picked up a leg of cold chicken from the table and nipped at it with forensic precision between bursts of talk.

“The Pomegranate is a former public house and coaching inn on the Great Cambridge Road in Dalston, converted entirely to artists’ studios in the year 1876. Some prominent painters and sculptors passed through the doors in its early days. Over the years, those whose principal occupation is to have opinions proclaim it has come down in the world and become a factory of sorts. Toilers of mediocre talent produce indifferent canvases, formulaic statuary and cheap painted glass for new churches, new clubs, new brides and the nouveaux riche. The mark you saw appears on all its output.”

“Two objections present themselves. The date is too late, the drawing too well-done. Even allowing for the soggy cloud of maudlin emotion your brain was wrapped in at the time, I trust your estimate of a picture. That is, a considerable deal more than I should trust my own. You did say it was very fine?”

“Indeed.” And ‘soggy cloud of maudlin emotion’, my backside. I permitted myself a scowl; he would take no notice in any case.

“Further considered, the objections in fact themselves become clues. The Pomegranate last closed its doors to the travelling public in 1870. Who owned it in the intervening six years I have yet to discover, but there is no reason ipso facto to discount the association of mark and place merely on account of that.”

He threw the stripped chicken bone with pinpoint accuracy into the fire basket from six feet away.

“We have an appointment in Dalston at ten o’clock sharp in the morning, Watson. Off to bed with you.”

*******************************************

A street market was in full cry as we alighted. Holmes strode like royalty through the detritus of cabbage leaves and roast chestnut peel, greeting some of the traders by name (I had long ceased to wonder how he knew so many people from such a variety of stations in life). He had continued in the same vein as the day before, dressed that morning in finery I scarcely knew he owned: nothing dandified or to excess, but every thread and cut tailored close to his body and matching his colouring to perfection.

It was artifice and truth together; he was a mannequin and a prince, visiting his London, his own possession. A man who is not accounted handsome by most, he nevertheless contrives to be achingly attractive at such times. Heads turned as he clipped his cane along the pavements: one boldly pretty, rough youth lounging against a barrow looked to left and right, gestured obscenely with his lips and tongue after Holmes had passed him, whistled and flashed a conniving, filthy smile in my direction. I swear some of them can read minds.

We reached The Pomegranate on the hour. It had, once upon a time, been a very grand inn, almost an hotel. An archway, over cobbled pavement, lead to extensive stabling and a small malt house to the rear. Every room, every foot of space, was given over to some species of production. The malt kiln had been pressed into service to fire decorative clay tiles. An old forge rang with the din of hammers upon silver and copper findings instead of horseshoes.

In the main building, its high windows letting in light on several sides, were the painters’ rooms. We posed as private buyers, as connoisseurs, seeking out some gold amongst the dross. Most of the figure work was being done from photographs or crudely copied from sketches of existing masterpieces. Flower paintings for the boudoir or the hallway of suburban houses with a single servant were stacked five deep on the landings.

Only on the uppermost storey did we see anything approaching worthy of the name art. A claw-fingered Irishman with flaming red hair, a glass of gin and a palette in one hand and a brush in the other, essayed the Escape from Troy using life models. A bandy-legged, tattooed sailor draped with a damask curtain stood for the hero Aeneas and a grizzled elder, who was very possibly his actual father, as the noble Anchises, clung anxiously around his neck. I ventured an appreciative word or two about boldness of composition. The young painter chased us away, swearing by all the saints that if he was induced to part with his work for filthy lucre from English rackrenters he would be no better than a whore. The old man grinned, showing us a repulsive set of blackened, empty gums.

“Come in! But proceed slowly!”

The voice behind the farthest door would have put a bittern to shame: so loud and resonant, I imagined the floor underfoot jumping with it. Not as high as I did jump when I entered the room, though. I had not seen such a sight since...well, never mind. Not in England, at any rate.

A midnight blue silk rug, twisted and winding like the skein of heaven, took up all but the very margins of the near part of the room. At the other end, a rough platform had been knocked up from floorboards set on loose bricks and on it danced – positively danced, swaying in front of a great canvas on a stand that threatened to come crashing down on the forms arranged upon the rug – a white-headed, paint-spattered spidery demon of a man, conducting the throng of naked bodies before him in what seemed to me a lush, seductive play of lust and despair.

“Francesca da Rimini and the Second Circle of Hell,” Holmes murmured in my ear before he edged around the group of models and approached the maestro. I saw his gaze flicker coolly over each form, as if they were dissection subjects or remnants of a bloody massacre – order, sex, age, height, position and probably regular occupation, to boot. For a moment or two, I saw him hesitate over “Paolo”, the figure for the damned woman’s lover, a paragon of physical culture with a generous masculine endowment to add to the magnificence of his sculpted biceps, abdomen and thighs. Here, there was no sense of a pedestal, of the untouchability and coldness of marble affected by Sandow and his imitators. His was a form not to be admired but to be enjoyed, an occasion of intoxication to be drunk until there was not a drop left. I doubted the viewers of this painting would be put off from the sin of lust by its contemplation: but then, I imagine that was precisely the intent.

Yet if my companion had hesitated, I reminded myself sternly, it was not on account of the man’s beauty, any more than he feasted, as I did, on the glimpse of creamy flank and the smooth, swelling curve of a buttock as one of the female lost souls reached across to pull the edge of the rug back lest he trip over it - for which courtesy he gravely thanked her, as if she had moved her umbrella on a crowded railway platform. He was not, after all, made as other men. Why had I doubted it? He began to speak to the artist quietly, carefully casual, deep in his role as a worldly sophisticate for whom all this was only to be expected.

It was difficult to hear what they said. I suppose I could have picked it up had I concentrated well enough, but I found that faculty... unusually hampered.

None of the prone figures attempted to rise, to cover themselves, or to avert their eyes. Some of the women stared outright at me, their expression challenging and, if I do not flatter myself, somewhat appreciative. One sent me a saucy wink and another, a swarthy, buxom, Gypsy minx, cupped both breasts, gazing down at them as they nestled like a brace of plump partridges in the net, two little tawny beaks peeking through her spread fingers, inviting a observer to admire without so much as a glance in his direction.

“No! I do not seek to paint beauty. Truth is the soul of art! If a thing is beautiful, well and good, but I would rather ugly truth than sugar-coated falsehood! ”

The painter, who was afflicted with a quite extravagant lisp, was actually frothing with indignation. Holmes tossed his head at the scene before them, angling his cheek adroitly away from the spray and adopted a provocatively neutral tone.

“I wonder, Mr Loganhurst, if il Sommo Poeta would recognise the truth he sought to teach in your representation here.”

“I would rather he recognise the truth I seek to teach! Love is the highest good next to truth, the body and its pleasures the purest. It is not cursed by God but made by him, beloved of him. Francesca and her amanti should be saints in heaven, as I imagine all heaven a great love-feast. No black winds here, sir. Desire: desire and its satisfaction in delight. Ernest, my dear, is it not so?”

‘Paolo’ extricated himself from ‘Francesca’’s perfunctory embraces (she was otherwise occupied, in cleaning out her nails with a broken hair comb) and walked over to his master and their guest, draping himself archly against a wall shelf containing bottles of linseed, turpentine and powder pigment, flexing his muscles as he posed completely naked.

“Undoubtedly, my heart.” There was culture in his voice as well as his form, something I had not expected. He addressed Holmes directly, devouring my friend’s figure with an insolent gaze that made me long to knock him down. “You know, my dear sir, a man cannot truly live by exercising the mind alone. I recommend regular, vigorous physical outlay to all my friends.” An elegant gesture indicated quite clearly that he was always on the lookout for new...friends, and would be delighted to count Holmes amongst their number.

Holmes, who at times constructs rudeness with the skill of an architect, can be a master-mason of tact when occasion demands. He returned Ernest a bland smile and a momentary lift of the brows over downcast eyes, conveying exactly the right degree of polite refusal coupled with regretful acknowledgement of the mutual embarrassment any further verbal exchange might cause.

We left, Holmes skipping down the stairs humming an aria from some Italian opera, myself stumbling behind him, pulling at my stifling, stiff collar and drawing my scattered wits together.

“You all right, Watson? Not too shocked, I hope: that was a little outré, even for the Bohemian set.”

Damn him, he knew very well what was wrong with me, and instead of ignoring my torment, he would rather mock. Damn him for looking down his nose at me even while he appeared to be gazing pensively out of the cab window. Damn him for that profile, one I could gladly wake up to every morning for the rest of my days. Damn him for that cool, amused voice, that I would never, ever hear begging me (“please, Watson, please”) to commit on his person the most deviant, debauched acts my heart could devise. Damn him for not being the least affected by the sight of all that compliant, welcoming flesh, by the thought of abandon to it if only for an hour or two, a night or two... Christ in heaven, a week or two would have done me nicely.

The wheels rattled over the road entirely in sympathy with me. Damn him, damn him, damn him.

So busy was I, wading through a slough of self-pity, resentment and frustrated arousal, that had I not determined at last to take him to task once more over his inhuman disdain for such things, I would have missed the tell-tale sign of his right hand sliding against the inside of the opposite forearm, long fingers feeling for the crook of the elbow. I had seen him do the same enough times to know what it meant, what he was after.

He was thinking of his drug - measuring the fit of the needle prick against the vein, seeking a new spot as yet untouched, or an old scar to be made new, wanting it. It was the first I had ever seen him contemplate chemical transcendence while he was on a case. He saw me watching and tugged his coat sleeve down without a word. I dared not speak to him after that. I think I feared what I might say, and how.

**************************************

Back home at Baker Street, I scanned the room carefully for the Morocco case, holding my newspaper before my face in an inevitably doomed attempt at concealment. As I did so, it occurred to me how long it must be since I had witnessed my friend in thrall to the vile contents of the silver syringe.

“Before Reichenbach, surely; before France, even.”

Inevitably doomed.

“That I was present, or that you used it?” I would not act the part of the comedy foil, not over this.

“As to use, I confess Paris is not an abstinent city. Since I danced with death and Professor Moriarty in London and at the Falls, however, not at all. Neither the Great Himalaya nor the sands of Arabia are well-furnished with chemists’ shops; besides, it would have been a gross insult to the memory of the intrepid souls in whose footsteps I trod, to be ‘bored’.”

I took the remaining seven months as the grace they were, and did not ask for reasons.

We lunched on broth, bread and cheese. My fevered visions of the morning began to fade amid the blessed ordinariness of it all: the ease and interest of our conversation, which Holmes steered so that we avoided the case altogether, the autumn sunlight making shadow panes on the tablecloth and showing how the dust motes danced. We were intimate friends, and this was the heart of us. To grouse for want of more was sheer ingratitude towards a Fate that had brought the man I loved back to me.

“Foolish folk want a lot of fancy gilt sauceboats an’ a Boar’s heid, when a’ they need’s a good brass kettle and a bonny fish wi’ it,” as my Scots grandfather used to say.

It would have been pleasant if the day had continued thus, in the comfortable roles of actor and audience that were our second skins, but Holmes excused himself for the afternoon, saying that he merely needed to satisfy himself on a point of detail, no need for me to wear out my boots and ache my bones in the damp streets.

He was preparing the party piece he so enjoyed trotting out at the end of a case, and was spicing it up with a little secrecy, as was his habit. The glint in his eye told me as much: the way he held his head up, hot on the scent of a solution. I could not help, however, but feel a little like a discarded overcoat on a day suddenly turned sunny.

I read an article about gout in the British Medical Journal, visited a patient in a tearing hurry and delivered a short but pointed lecture on the meaning of the word “emergency”, then returned to Baker Street to help myself to a large brandy. One drink became two, then three. I fell back into brooding on that morning’s excursion, on the cab ride home, on my folly. What good had surrender to desire, to ‘love’, done her, the outcast of Hither Green? What good would it do me to return to the old days of bodily indulgence and hopeless soul’s longing, before my marriage brought me a measure of contentment, a featherbed of tenderness and safety, a refuge of warmth from the chill of Holmes’ determined and oft-expressed rejection of all those things?

I could go with women, with men, even with both together, and it would not be enough. I could spend my days in bachelor comfort at my friend’s side, with the thrill of the chase my headiest sensation, and it would not, for all my real gratitude that it was still possible, be enough. If Loganhurst was all body, and Holmes all mind, I had body and mind – and heart – to feed. Neither extreme would satisfy.

Perhaps I should seek to marry again, walk away from what the Brothers, my schoolmasters, called ‘the occasion of sin’. How they would have approved of Holmes. Oh, not of his rationalism and deism, but of his purity - yes. I imagined him lying in his bed - pristine, starched nightshirt arranged in perfect folds around those long limbs, fingers steepled under his chin, deducing in his sleep - a marble knight atop a grand monument: admirable, impervious, cold.

He never tossed off to memories of black eyes and coffee-coloured skin, women who could do things with their tongue that made a man pant and swear and promise them seed pearls and rubies. Never shivered when a certain perfume wafting from a shop doorway brought back memories of a honeymoon in Suffolk – the discovery of the infinite variety to be had in the arms of the same beloved spouse, week upon week, year upon year. Did not look upon his intimate friend and wonder what it might be like to...no. He preserved his seed, turning his vital energies into brain power, wasting nothing. No wonder I seemed so dull beside him. A clean cut leaves a scar, to be sure: but better that than festering, than the opportunistic infections of longing and betrayal, of loss and confusion. Better simple friendship than this morass.

And here he was now, the true model of the developed man – in from the cold outside, bringing cold reason in with him to solve the riddle, calling out from the doorway in that bright, brisk tone he reserved for issuing orders couched as requests.

“Send a telegram would you, Watson? Address it to, ah, ‘Mrs’ Vetch. Ask if the name Cornelius Loganhurst means anything to her.”

“The libertine painter? I thought it must be...”

“No. Charles Vetch seeks a father, and I have found him one, though he may find this second candidate even less desirable than the first. Better the news come through his mother and he believe it, than from me and be thought a mere stratagem to excuse myself. The Loganhurst we met may be white-haired, but I stood closer to him than you and was not so...preoccupied, I think. He is, in fact, not above thirty years old and his given name is Thomas. It is his father who seduced a foolish girl in Cambridge, that lady who has since had all too much time and leisure to become wise. She sat for him afterward, in London, repeatedly: another humiliation to earn a few shillings for herself and her child. It was he who originally bought the Pomegranate, he whose early work I was shown today in a private collection. In five canvases, the same dark beauty was the model - a beauty with a world of suffering in her eyes. He painted the ‘truth’ he had himself created, just as his son is doing with that... confection we saw today.”

His lip curled with disdain, and I burned suddenly, tipsily, to kiss him: to press that disdain like juice through a winepress and make intoxication out of it. My fists were clenched in my lap, out of his sight as he carried on speaking to the mirror above the fireplace, without minding me.

“It is he whom, were he not two years dead and buried, I would have gladly tied with my own hands to a hurdle and dragged through the filth of the streets. But we live in more civilised times, I am told.”

I am sure I looked rather stupid, blinking away the brandy. He was not the dispassionate detective of my afternoon’s imaginations. If he was cold this evening, it was with fury. And he had caught me thinking again. He swung round to face me and held out his hand, as if to lead me.

“I beg you to remember, my dear Watson, that form is not substance, art may mask truth as well as reveal it, and I, too, must face myself in the mirror every day.”

I sent the telegram. Vetch himself came by return, blustery as a winter storm.

“You, sir: what do you mean by distressing my mother like this, taunting her with your questions and libels, using the good Doctor here as your accomplice? Have you not done enough harm already?”

Holmes stepped gracefully out of reach of the crumpled telegram being waved in his face. He stood at a corner of the mantelpiece and waited for the storm to falter. His words in the ensuing silence were quiet as falling feathers, heavy with... yes, with sympathy.

“Mr Vetch. I am not your father.”

Vetch stared hard into his face until the truth of it, the truth which defied the evidence of his own eyes, felled him without a fight. He stumbled to a chair, hands covering his face in a brown study of weariness.

“My mother tried to warn me. No good will come of it, she said. Do not go to Mr Holmes; he cannot restore what is lost. I thought she meant only that you would not. This man, Loganhurst...”

“I regret to say, is beyond our reach. Death’s justice is deaf as well as blind: it hears no appeal. I am sorry, my boy.”

****************************

“Why do you think she kept the drawing?”

We had sent Vetch on his way, fatherless still, the ripple of those words ‘my boy’ washing like an ebbing tide behind his eyes as he thanked Holmes in a grave and hollow vein and vowed in the future not to ignore his mother’s counsels.

The two of us sat in our accustomed chairs and, I supposed, our accustomed attitudes. Holmes would have dismissed the client from his mind and moved on to some abstruse contemplation of the pattern of wear on a stevedore’s boots or the chromatography of annatto. My imagination had followed the young man home, up those back stairs and into that front room with its forlorn icon.

Holmes put down his pipe, putting my question under his narrow-eyed microscope. “A reminder that, as she told you, ‘not all may be mended’? Perhaps instead a relic, no less holy for being fraudulent, indeed very possibly more: there are those who choose to believe in ‘love’ even more firmly because it has disappointed them, on the glory of being deceived even when the actor freely owns the deception. We see it from a child’s stubborn belief in tooth fairies to a supposedly grown man’s belief in toothless ones.”

I held my tongue, knowing very well to whom he referred, and re-filled my glass.

“At least you must admit the reality of Vetch’s love for his mother, and hers for him,” I insisted.

“The survival of our species makes such attachments essential. Doubtless they arise from some definite chemical process, some atavistic recognition, that science has yet to uncover.”

“So,” I dared, “for lack of that ‘atavistic recognition’, you were able to deduce upon meeting him that Charles Vetch could not be your child, that extraordinary visual coincidence notwithstanding.”

“Nature is fickle; it throws up the most singular sports. I might speculate, though I am unsure I would care to claim him as any relation of mine, that Loganhurst may have somewhere in his ancestry the surname Vernet - I was always very like my Grandmother to look at. The impossible I eliminate at once, as you know.”

He tried to make the thing seem trivial, obvious: one of those thought processes that “did not occupy a single second”, but there was something more there: something fundamental. I being myself and not Holmes, it took considerably more than a single second for the thought to crystallise, as I watched him help himself to some of the brandy, deftly swirling it around in the glass and inhaling the vapour with a slight tremble in his breath.

“You knew it to be impossible. Because –”

“You need not say it, Watson. If you had no certain knowledge, you must have long had suspicions. This case only threw you temporarily off the scent. The fair sex is, and always was, entirely your department.”

He could choose to read my next thought or not; could choose to answer, or not. Could choose to treat the whole thing as the grape speaking, as a plea for understanding for habits of my own that I knew he knew of (because he knew everything), as a hundred things it was not.

And the male sex?

I have seen a handful of other men face such a question in their own minds, or that of another. I have seen in their reactions flat denial, outrage, incomprehension, guilt, terror – even relief.

Not, until that moment, bone-dry amusement.

“Would that be a general enquiry, Watson, or has it a tendency toward the specific?”

My God. There it was in his grey eyes. As blatant an invitation as I would ever have thought possible, given the source - that is to say, utterly impossible and undeniably given.

“Would that be a rhetorical question, Holmes?”

We both of us laughed, unsteadily, as if we’d got to the bottom of the bottle of brandy already.

“Forgive me, oh, my dear fellow, but why?” Why now, why at all, why me?

He lit a cigarette and took several draws of it before answering. “Taking the last point first, I should like to know who else you might suppose I would trust with even the theoretical knowledge of my preferences, let alone my entire practical education in such matters.”

“Should I perhaps dispense with speaking altogeth...Holmes?” The import of what he had said suddenly caught me by the throat. No taste for women. No occasion for anything else. No-one.

Not merely chaste, but innocent.

He walked over to the sitting-room door in three strides, listened intently at it for a few moments, turned the key and took it out of the lock. He stood there, turning it over and over in his fingers. The cigarette perched forgotten between his lips until a finger of ash dropped onto his sleeve and he ground the stub out against the doorframe.

“As for the rest,” he continued quietly, still contemplating the key, “a rational man might say there can be no good time to risk everything one has on a leap into the unknown, and if there can be no good time, any time may be as good as another.”

As a declaration, even he must see that it was lacking something. I went to him, then. I plucked the key from his hands, turned the door lock open, and took advantage of his open-mouthed stare to lean in and plant a clumsy kiss on one corner of those firm lips.

“A rational man,” I pointed out, “would hardly trouble to lock the door if all he planned to do was talk.”

“Cocaine.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“For you. I gave it up for you, Watson. At first it was my punishment for deserting you, then a surety, a down payment against our meeting in some far future. One that might never be – you were married, I might die in the wilderness, we might be strangers to each other before we met again. But it was all I could think of to offer. You hated it so, and you know what long use does to a man. If ever there was to be the slightest chance that this moment might come, I had to be ready... today, when I looked at that man, at his form, I was stirred – my body only, but a sign, the tugging of a thread that could attach itself to one man only. If Sherlock Holmes ever had such a thing as a heart, it beats in the breast of John Watson.”

I covered his rambling, desperate words with a gentle hand. His eyes were wide, astonished at himself and he was panting for breath as if he had run all the way from Scotland Yard.

Thinking, reluctantly but essentially, of Scotland Yard, I put back the key in the door. His hand over mine, we shut away the disapproving world in a single movement.

He would have preferred to bathe first, but we knew better than to draw attention by ordering more hot water. The still-lukewarm contents of his washstand basin served us both for a hasty freshening. We stripped as we went, making the task our excuse. When I picked up the sponge and laid it on his body rather than mine, he flinched. My other hand on his shoulder, a familiar anchor save for the missing layers of wool and linen between us, gentled him as I dragged it damp across his bicep, under his arm, then down his side as his ribs laboured under fast, shallow breaths. I caressed him with it, over the dense, smooth skin, making patterns in the wet, curling black hair above his nape and below his navel, breaking him by stages as a fine thoroughbred to be backed, to be in-hand before much longer if I had my way.

I pressed the sponge into his hand and turned my back to him, closing my eyes as he worked in broad circles over my marred shoulder, tender and careful there, breathing harder as he stripped down my spine and the planes of my back with all his strength. I thrust back against him, fumbling to grab at his thigh: a little play of force that excited us both until we were pulling at our trouser buttons, opening the flies to give ourselves room to grow and harden.

Yet when I turned again and reached for what remained of his clothes in order to bare all, I saw that he was not ready, not yet. The power of it troubled him, the giving of himself to another, even to one he trusted: he did not know how to submit to desire. I had wanted him to beg, but not like this - pleading silently for me to stop, shaking his head, embarrassment and apology tightening his face.

There was a full-length mirror in the corner by the window. Holmes used it to perfect his disguises. I took his hand and brought him over to it, lifting his old, mouse-coloured dressing gown from the end of the bed as I went. I had an idea.

“Think of this as a role you want to play. Undress for it, inhabit it. Whatever you want, I am at your service, always.” I looked away as he stripped, withdrew for a minute or so and returned to see him standing before the mirror, dressing gown loosely tied at his waist. He had almost recovered his composure, though he inhaled sharply when, reflected with him in the glass, I caught and held his gaze. I was entirely unclothed by this time, still half hard, solid and stocky beside him.

“Have you decided?” I asked him. He turned his face this way and that, assessing the features, tense with deep concentration.

“There is another consulting detective, of moderate fame, who inhabits a set of rooms not unlike these, and whose closest friend has accepted a similarly improper invitation from him. By strange coincidence he quite resembles me, and I believe that, so long as I successfully mimic his habits of thought, I will not need to dress the part.”

I grinned, and he smiled back, his whole frame relaxing into the fantasy of him playing himself: that other Sherlock Holmes who could be John Watson’s lover, the one in the mirror.

“How might this...consulting detective make his invitation more explicit, do you think?”

Holmes positioned himself in front of me and drew my arms around his waist, leaving my hands at the knot of his belt.

“He might indulge his friend in such liberties with his person as he cared to take.”

I slipped one hand under the edge of the dressing gown and traced the pectoral muscle from armpit to sternum, pausing with my thumb on his nipple. From behind one shoulder, I could see him in the mirror too, lip caught between his teeth as I stroked downward across the valleys of his ribcage, to his navel and the sharp crests of his hipbones. I worried at the gown’s knot with my other hand until it came free, so that as it fell open he could see himself become that man, the one who enjoyed touch and sensation as freely as he did knowledge and deduction.

He rose into my hand, swelling and filling my fist as it moved upon the soft skin of his cock, dusky velvet over bone, catching his breath each time I tightened my fingers just a little more, bracing his feet as I pushed at his hip with my own need. He shrugged out of the dressing gown and it fell about us in a tangle as he went to his knees, slipping out of my reach so that I must follow him to the floor.

“Watson, tell me what you know; what more can be done for pleasure by men like us?”

I would have preferred to be silent – I am not much for talking once the business is underway – but I knew that is not the way of all, that for some the words themselves have the ability to rouse and stimulate. Holmes listened fully as much as he looked, and as I caught sight of his face in the mirror, turned from me but tuned to me only, the hunger for more information was as ravenous as the need for more games.

“Well, some would go on to frigging each other, here on our knees, a tug or two on the balls perhaps, my tongue in your mouth, your arse, or sucking on you like a nursing kid, those fiddler’s fingers playing in my hair – on my head, at my groin – I am mad, I confess, for that last thing. I think, not this first time, but men can, with care, have each other like women, if that strikes your fancy, or I could come between your thighs like the Greek masters on those days when the consolations of philosophy were not enough.”

He stared without focus, trembled where I gripped his upper arms, soft groans were all he could manage for answer. The pictures I had conjured for him set a fire at the tail of my spine too; I wanted no more words, only to taste him and eat my fill. I kissed him then, as I had not since I had the sitting-room door key in my hand, coaching him how to kiss me back just as I liked, making him in this as he had made me for his own to hunt down villains and stand at his back.

In the mirror, in this room, he was transfigured, became that Holmes I had longed for but never hoped to see, an apt pupil and always master of me. He took me to his bed, offered himself, filled my mouth, came with a cry of wonder and glory and cradled my face afterward in all the soft places between long thighs and lean belly, brought me off in my turn with those cunning, calloused fingertips playing on every inch of the yard.

Objectively speaking, we did nothing rare, nothing exotic beyond that there were two pricks in the party and not one. But I would rather plain bread with love than an iced petit-four trick from a practised sophisticate without it. Make no mistake, though the words were not said, may never be said. There was love there. Love in his courage, in his surrender to sleep with my arms about him, in his face in the morning, unshaven and wrecked as he was, as we both were, and smiled to see it so.

Outside the places that both of us keep safe – one room at Baker Street, a mansion in our secret souls– he is the same Holmes that he wears for the world. Not only for safety’s sake, but for the truth which remains his watchword. They are both him, you see – it only depends on which side of the mirror you stand.

*******************************************

Let it not be thought that in our bliss we put from our minds the client with whom all this began. A few weeks after that night, I chanced to read of a specialist in Leeds who had performed a number of successful surgeries on women such as Vetch’s mother. A fortnight later, in apparent answer to my offer to ensure that she should go there without delay and be treated at my expense, I received a note from Vetch, postmarked Lewisham. He begged to thank me, to say that they had already been to and returned from Leeds, and that he expected his mother to make a full recovery. He expressed gratitude that he had, through my good offices, secured a position as private secretary to an eminent Harley Street specialist, Dr Henry Porteous. Some small accommodations came with the job, and he would send me his card directly they moved in.

I hardly need add that I had received no bill from Leeds, and that I knew the name Porteous only from one of the old casebooks that threatened daily to fall from the overstuffed shelves behind Holmes’ chemistry table.

He must have read my mind.

END