'He's not well,' I confided in Mary when I returned home the following weekend. 'I shall have to go round more often, if you aren't too bothered by it.'
'Not at all,' Mary said, with a sympathetic smile. Not for the first time, I counted myself very lucky to have as a wife someone that had known Holmes as a mercurial detective before knowing him as my friend. 'You do think he'll be all right?'
'It's gotten worse,' I admitted, 'swinging back and forth wildly between activity and apathy, taking cases without rest and then drugging himself into oblivion. But he's made it through these periods before. I've no cause to think he won't again.'
But I was worried. He refused outright to be roused, and I somehow felt that I had lost my right to manhandle him around the flat, to force him to the breakfast table or out for a brief walk. It was a strange, helpless feeling, being closer to him than I'd been in months and yet too far away to make a difference.
'Then he will,' Mary said, 'if only because you believe it of him.'
I kissed her then, and let myself be comforted, but I knew the truth: if it even could be his cure, it would have to be a mighty strong belief.
What relief there was for me, when next I saw Holmes! – he was not only tidy and upright, but energetic, with a gleam in his eye. Once again he turned that eye upon me, so reminiscent of our first night at Baker Street, deducing an incorrigible servant girl as well as a walk through the wet country, and I laughed in pleasure, no longer afraid of his deductions.
There was a case on, which I had suspected, and I had no sooner inspected the letter that had begun it, than we were receiving the King of Bohemia himself.
'I hadn't realised that you were in the habit of receiving royalty,' I remarked, as soon as he'd gone.
Holmes laughed. 'I confess, not usually in these rooms,' he said, 'though perhaps once or twice by post. What do you think of the problem then?'
'Rather a foolhardy indiscretion for a man in such a position.'
'Indeed, but it's also a foolhardy indiscretion for the lady. Her revenge would come at quite the cost to herself.'
'She must think the cost is worth paying.'
'Or perhaps we simply haven't the full truth yet. Will you come tomorrow?'
'Holmes,' I vowed, easily, 'I wouldn't dream of missing it.'
'Good,' he said. 'Then we will get to the bottom of all the scandals in Bohemia.'
I could hardly concentrate on the words beneath my pen, even as Holmes began reciting his deductions about the King of Bohemia with a flourish. The very idea of it, a photograph of Irene Adler, hidden away somewhere in our rooms, made me feel unreasonably hot and irritated. That he would ask for it, and then squirrel it away, less a keepsake than a secret –
'If you were thinking any harder,' Holmes said suddenly, 'I imagine they would hear it all the way down in Parliament. It bothers you.'
My pen blotted as I started in surprise. 'What bothers me?'
Holmes raised a sceptical eyebrow in my direction. 'The photograph I kept of Mrs Norton.'
'You're perfectly entitled to keep what you choose,' I said, a bit more defensively than I'd have liked.
'I am,' Holmes agreed, 'yet it bothers you. I don't understand.'
'It doesn't,' I began firmly, but he interrupted with an exasperated, 'Watson,' and I knew I was caught. The blot on my paper grew, blacking the words I'd written. 'I don't know,' I finally admitted. 'You admire her.'
'You're jealous,' he said, in wry surprise. 'You needn't worry, Watson. My admiration for you, old boy, still remains unsurpassed.'
I grumbled, gratified and embarrassed. 'I'm not jealous,' I managed, but I could feel him watching as I blushed.
The accusation stuck with me long after our evening had drifted into other conversations: jealous. I wasn't sure whether to be more embarrassed and alarmed at having been jealous – despite my denials to Holmes – or at having been so easily caught out.
Since my marriage I'd thought my affections for Holmes had mellowed, but suddenly I was not so sure. Were my feelings still so strong that I was in danger of being indiscreet? Could Holmes read that old inclination in me even now, when I returned each night to home and wife?
I took a deep breath. There was no reason to think that Holmes was accusing me of any unusual attachment. So I had been jealous at his admiration of a woman – hadn't he admitted freely that his admiration for me was unparalleled? Yet I doubted he were lying awake in his room, pondering the implications. I was being ridiculous.
Still, it made my heart ache, my stomach sick, to imagine him in love with her, even as terror at my own failings settled as a hard knot of panic in my chest.
She was gone, I reminded myself. The only dangers here were the ones of my own making, and yet I knew that when it came to Sherlock Holmes, I was always going to be coming back.
'John?'
I froze, my glass halfway to my mouth, blinking with the realisation that it was not the first time Mary had said my name. 'Sorry,' I said, putting on an appropriately contrite tone. 'I'm sorry, I lost myself for a moment.'
Mary smiled. 'I was asking whether your dinner was all right.'
I looked down at my meal; I'd barely touched it. 'Oh! Yes – I suppose I'm just not as hungry as I expected,' I said quickly. Mary's eyes narrowed for a moment, as though she was waiting for me to say something more, but eventually she nodded and picked up the conversation again.
I could not follow her words, in much the same way I had not paid attention to the meal. My mind was not at the dinner table; it was back at Baker Street, on the case Holmes had begun that morning. 'A fascinating little problem,' he had called it. 'I should be very glad of your help.'
But the dinner arrangements had already been made, and Mary had already been put off once this week. My hands were tied. Holmes had agreed I ought to go, but his eyes had been downcast as I left him.
I should have stayed, I thought, but I smiled dutifully across at Mary and tried not to appear too bored.
If A Study in Scarlet was met with moderate success in Beeton's, the publication of The Sign of Four made Holmes a minor celebrity. He was furious.
'I am a consulting detective,' Holmes cried, pacing my foyer. I'd rarely seen him so agitated. 'I rely on my ability to pass unseen! How can I go unnoticed when you're publishing this?' He shook a copy of Lippincott's Monthly at me.
'You didn't protest this much the first time! You've always said I could do as I liked!'
He sighed, and his pacing stopped. 'I don't need the recognition,' he said softly, as if it were his last lifeline in a changing world, and suddenly I understood: he didn't want the recognition.
There is, after all, some safety in obscurity. There is some comfort in the shadows, and though Holmes was a gentleman, he did not bother with social expectations. He did not marry; he didn't have a club. He was a Bohemian, isolated by choice, and I had most certainly exposed him.
I stepped forward, easing the magazine from his hand and taking him by the elbow, leading him into the parlour. 'Come with me,' I soothed. 'Come, and we'll have tea, and I shall tell you of all the wonderful letters of praise and admiration I have received on your behalf.'
'I wonder,' Holmes said, picking through the contents of a lady's dressing table. 'I wonder.'
No longer quite so upset with me, he had asked me on an unusual case: a gentleman poisoned at his own dinner table, with only his wife in attendance. The late Mr Charles Mattox was not a man without enemies, by all accounts, but the distance poison gave to a murderer made the case difficult.
'You wonder?' I prompted. I'd been spending more of my evening hours with Holmes of late, and even a few of my days; the doctor next to my practice was quite willing to take on a patient or two when I was needed elsewhere. Though Holmes had been in a bad way for a while, it seemed the more I came, the less he was inclined to lose himself into the fugue of his cocaine; he seemed to make an effort to have some little problem on for me to assist him with. I was delighted.
'I wonder if a poison could have been concealed as a lady's cosmetics,' he said. 'What sort of husband was he?'
I remembered the lady, white with shock but not necessarily distraught. There'd been a bruise around her left wrist, mostly hidden by her sleeve. 'She didn't say, but I would think him a brute.'
'Any idea what this is?' Holmes asked, holding up one of the little cosmetic tins.
I shook my head. 'Mary uses some of these, but I wouldn't be able to tell one from another.'
'I admit I have not devoted myself to the study of cosmetics,' Holmes went on, unscrewing the lid and examining the reddish powder within. 'I shall have to remedy that immediately.'
And then he dipped his finger into the powder, and put it in his mouth.
'Holmes!' I cried, reaching already to draw his hand back, but the effect of whatever was in the tin was instantaneous. He paled, and his next breath stopped short; his eyes widened, his mouth opened, his hands jerked. 'Holmes!'
There is a trick we soldiers learned in the Indian subcontinent, when attempting to determine whether a plant was poisonous, or whether some meat had gone bad. I'll not repeat the details, but suffice it to say that it was the work of a quick moment to induce vomiting, and never mind the lady's carpet.
'You absolute fool,' I declared, even as Holmes was holding out the cosmetics tin for me to take. I shoved it at the chest of the nearest policeman in return for a porcelain washing basin. 'Get it all up, and next time try to hit the bowl.'
'Watson?'
I huffed, turning away from the door of my room so as not to see him standing there, vulnerable in dressing gown and candlelight. It had been too late to go home, but still I regretted staying. My heart had not stopped pounding. 'Not tonight, Holmes.'
'I came to apologise.'
'No, you didn't,' I snapped, unable to stop myself glancing back with a withering look. 'You came to pretend to apologise so that I'd forgive you, and I'm not going to.'
Holmes' face, nearly skeletal in the dying light, remained utterly smooth. 'You're upset,' he said, 'but you must see that it was necessary.'
I glared at him. 'You've rehearsed this, haven't you? You aren't even listening to me.' I could not remember the last time I'd been this angry with him. 'What if it had been me in danger, and you were the one watching me do something so stupid?'
To his credit, Holmes actually seemed to consider it. 'If it were for the case,' he said, 'I'd have understood.'
It was probably meant as reassurance, but it felt more like dismissal: my own unimportance writ large. Resentment flooded me that he could so easily prioritise even a hypothetical case over me while I could never over him.
'Yes,' I conceded, suddenly exhausted. 'That, at least, I can believe.'
It was several weeks before I felt truly comfortable again. Though I'd always known Holmes to be reckless with his own well-being – had I not noticed it, the very first time we met? Had I not known it, every time he had reached for that damned Moroccan case? – it was quite something else to watch him willingly do something that would immediately result in his death.
The space underneath my breastbone ached for days, and I struggled with the feeling of not being able to catch my breath. I should have locked myself away with Mary or with my work, but instead over the following weeks I often found myself heading out well after nightfall, anxious to check on Holmes and see that he'd not poisoned himself again, or fallen into a fire, or taken some grievous injury.
He made no mention of my agitation, if he noticed it. He would settle me in my usual chair by the fire, occasionally offering a pipe, sometimes tea, and recount his latest adventure.
If I had worried before that the distance of my marriage would irrevocably ruin our friendship, in these weeks those fears were laid to rest. Now that we had both settled in our new routines, we were, I found happily, as intimate and devoted as we had always been.
'What are you writing over there? One of ours?'
It was only a matter of time, I thought. Holmes had been without a proper case all week, making do with only a handful of trite, unimportant clients, and had finally reached his intellectual limit for the general population.
That is to say, he was bored.
'You don't mind?' I asked carefully. 'I doubt it'll be printable for many years.'
Holmes raised himself from his supine position on the sofa to peer over at me. 'The Holland family? Not sure you should be writing that one down yet,' he scolded teasingly. 'Things written down are always subject to discovery, as you know.'
'It's only a few notes for myself. I should hate to forget the details before they're beyond use.'
'You're terrible with details.' Another dull thud from the sofa: he'd flung himself back down rather petulantly onto the cushions. 'But – no. I don't mind.'
I smiled to myself. After his protest of The Sign of Four, he had calmed considerably, perhaps soothed by the praise and business recognition it brought, and I already had his permission to publish a few short stories of our lesser cases. 'Recall it for me, then,' I suggested. 'Make sure I have the details right.'
Holmes snorted, but after another moment passed, slowly, theatrically, he began.