First Birth (3): The boy’s mother breathed her last
when the full moon lay open in the sky, a round and
luminous door to eternity.
Testimony, I:1

I met Damian Adler on the same day his father did, in August 1919. Damian was twenty-four then, I was nineteen, and Holmes at fifty-eight had only discovered a few days before that he was a father. It was not a happy meeting. At the time, none of us were happy people. None of us were whole people.

Apart from it bringing peace to the world at last, 1919 was not a year one would like to repeat. Its opening had found us in ignominious flight from an unknown and diabolically cunning enemy—we told ourselves we were merely regrouping, but we knew it was a rout. Mycroft, who held some unnamed and powerful position in the shadier recesses of His Majesty’s Government, had offered us a choice of retreats in which to catch our breath. For reasons I did not understand, Holmes gave the choice over to me. I chose Palestine. Within the month, he was taken prisoner and tortured to the very edge of breaking. On our return to England, Holmes’ body was whole, but his spirit, and our bond, had been badly trampled.

When I looked at him that spring, all I could see was that my choice had put that haunted look into his eyes.

Then at the end of May, we finally met our enemy, and prevailed, but at the cost of a bullet through my shoulder and the blood of a woman I had loved on my hands.

When Holmes looked at me that summer, all he could see was that his past had put that drawn look of pain and sleepless nights on my face.

Thus, that August of 1919 found the two of us wounded, burdened by guilt, short-tempered, and—despite living under the same roof while my arm recovered—scarcely able to meet each other’s eyes or bear the other’s company. Certainly, we both knew that the intricate relationship we had constructed before our January flight from England lay in pieces at our feet; neither of us seemed to know how to build another.

Into this tense and volatile situation fell the revelation that Holmes had a son.

Mycroft had known, of course. Holmes might keep his finger on the pulse of every crime in London, but his brother’s touch went far beyond England’s shores. Mycroft had known for years, but he had let slip not a hint, until the day the young man was arrested for murder.

Two unrelated letters reached us towards the end of July 1919. The first was for Holmes; I did not see it arrive. The second followed a few days later, addressed to me, written by a child we had rescued the previous year. The simple affection and praise in her laboriously shaped words reduced me, at long last, to the catharsis of tears.

A door that had been tight shut opened, just a crack; Holmes did not hesitate.

“I need to go to France and Italy for six weeks,” he told me. Then, before I could slam the door shut again, he added, “Would you care to come with me?”

Air seemed to reach my lungs for the first time in weeks. I looked at him, and saw that, in spite of everything, in Holmes’ mind our partnership remained.

Later that evening, sitting on the terrace while the darkness fell, I had asked him when we were to leave.

“First thing in the morning,” he replied.

“What?” I stood up, as if to go pack instantaneously, then winced and sat down again, rubbing my shoulder beneath its sling. “Why the rush?”

“Mycroft always needs things done yesterday,” he said. Far too casually.

“This is another job for Mycroft?”

“More or less.”

By this time, my antennae were quivering. An off-hand attitude invariably meant that Holmes was concealing something of which I would disapprove. However, as I watched him reach for the coffee pot to refill a near-full cup, it seemed to me his discomfort had a deeper source than a need to manipulate me into cooperation. He looked genuinely troubled.

A year before, I would have pressed and chivvied him until he gave it up, but after the events of recent months, I was not so eager to beat my mentor-turned-partner into submission. He would tell me in his good time.

“I’ll write Patrick a note, to let him know I’m away,” I said. Holmes hid his surprise well, simply nodding, but I could feel his eyes on me as I went into the house.

The next day, the train had been crowded with summer merrymakers; the boat across the Channel was so heavy-laden it wallowed; the train to Paris contained approximately half the population of Belgium—none of whom were stopping in Paris. No-one in his right mind stopped in Paris in August.

With this constant presence of witnesses, it wasn’t until we stood in the hallway of our Paris hotel that Holmes slid his hand into his inner pocket and took out the envelope that had been teasing his fingers all day.

“Read this,” he said abruptly, thrusting it at me. “I shall be in my room.” He crossed the corridor and shut his door. I waited for the boy to deposit my cases and receive my coin, then closed my own.

I laid the letter on the desk, eyeing it as I unpinned my hat and stripped off my gloves. Mycroft’s handwriting, the unadorned copperplate he used for solemn business. No postal franking, which meant that it had been delivered by messenger. The envelope had seen a lot of handling. I had an odd image of Holmes, taking it out of his pocket and reading it again and again.

I sat down on the hard little chair before the decorative, unusable French desk, and unfolded the letter. It bore a date six days before—the day, I suddenly realised, that he had disappeared for many hours, to return even more preoccupied than usual.

Dear Brother,

In the autumn of 1894, half a year after you made your dramatic return to the London scene, I received a visit from a French gentleman whom I had met, briefly, some years before. His purpose was to urge me to travel to a village named Ste Chapelle, thirty miles south of Paris. As you well know, I do not travel, and told the man as much. He, however, put before me certain information that convinced me such a trip was necessary.

At the other end of the journey was an American lady of your acquaintance, whose name I shall not put into writing, but with whom, as you had already informed me, you had a liaison. You were led to believe that she tired of your presence after some months, that she resolved to return alone to her native country.

In fact, she did not return to the United States. Although she had become a British citizen after she married Godfrey Norton, after your departure, she moved to the village near Paris. There she bore a child.

It was to Ste Chapelle that I went, there to meet her and the infant. A boy. She named him Damian, appending her own maiden surname. He appeared in lusty good health. Certainly, he sounded so.

The lady wished me to know of the child, on the chance that something happened to her. She also swore me to a promise that you were not to be told while she was alive, and thereafter not until such time as I deemed it necessary. Her concern was that you not be, to use her word, distracted.

The price of my agreement was that she accept a monthly stipend, that the boy might be raised without financial hardship. Reluctantly, she accepted.

I came near to telling you in 1912, when she died, but at the time you were involved in the Mattison case, and that was followed by the Singh affair, and by the time that was over, you were in America preparing a case against Von Bork and his spy ring. There seemed no time when you were immune from distraction.

I did keep a close eye on the young man following his mother’s death. He was then eighteen, attending university in Paris. In 1914 he joined the French forces—he being more French than American—and served honourably, starting as a junior officer and ending up, in the autumn of 1917, a captain.

He was wounded in January 1918, blown up in a barrage. He received a head wound and a cracked pelvis, spent a week unconscious, and was eventually invalided out.

Unfortunately, he did not manage to get free of the drugs used to control the pain. Unfortunately, he fell into hard ways, and among evil people. And now, the reason I am forced to write to you in this manner: He has been arrested for murder.

Stark details, and with your current responsibilities, no way to soften this series of blows. I have begun enquiries into the case against him, but as yet do not know the details—as we both know, the evidence may be so grossly inadequate, all he requires is legal support; on the other hand, it may prove so strong that neither of us can help him. I have arranged for one of the better criminal avocats to assume his case, but in any event, it is no longer my place to stand between you.

I hope you will forgive me, and her, for keeping Damian from you. By all accounts he was a promising young man before the War, and before the scourge of drugs befell him. I should mention that, to go by his photograph, there is little reason to deny that he is yours.

Tell me what I can do to assist you. He is being held in the gaol in Ste Chapelle, the town where he was born, thirty miles to the east of Paris.

If you speak to him, please convey an uncle’s best wishes.

Mycroft

P.S. I forgot to say: Damian is an artist, a painter. Art in the blood …