In the summer of 1889, Mary went to Brighton for several weeks with her good friend Mrs Cecil Forrester, and I moved back into my old rooms at Baker Street. It was a great comfort, to have a companion while she was gone – though I missed her, it was admittedly a relief to go home at the end of a long day knowing that I would be entirely at my leisure.
Holmes himself was a soothing constant; fastidious and energetic, he met with clients, attended a few violin performances as well as the odd lecture, and was quick to recommend me a new book or introduce me to a new restaurant. At first I thought perhaps he was trying to put on a good front, to show me that he too had flourished since my marriage, or to show me the benefits of staying once more with him, but I soon dismissed both ideas as being utterly outside Holmes' character.
The last week of my stay, Holmes burst in with a new client and a plan – we too would take our holiday, with a case besides. 'One last weekend before you must go back again into the ties of marriage,' he insisted, laughing, and so I agreed, and together we packed our things and set off to the countryside around Berkshire.
The manor house in front of us was dark and silent. From our position hidden in the long grasses, watching and waiting, I was beginning to grow stiff and damp. Holmes' ability to weather these lookouts, to stay still and silent for hours at a stretch, was baffling in a man so otherwise prone toward ennui.
'Stop squirming,' Holmes hissed.
'Nothing's happening,' I hissed back. 'Admit it, Holmes – we've missed him. He must've been tipped off.'
Holmes huffed but made no answer. Exasperated, I rolled over onto my back, ignoring the house. Perhaps I could at least manage a little sleep while Holmes watched nothing happen.
After a moment, though, the grasses crackled and shifted, and Holmes' warm shoulder pressed into mine. 'There,' he said softly, pointing with one long, thin finger at a smattering of stars. 'Cassiopeia.'
I grinned. 'Why, Holmes. You've been swotting up.'
'Astronomy - nil,' he quoted, with a laugh. 'It's hardly good business to advertise one's weaknesses. Proving another's misconceptions wrong, however, is. I have taken advantage.'
'Show me, then. What else have you learned to prove me wrong?'
'The constellations,' Holmes murmured. His voice was close against my ear. 'The stars.' His long hands gestured toward the sky, as though directing the heavens, and my heart, having been quiet for so long, leapt into beating.
I could not sleep.
It was hardly the first time Holmes and I had shared a room on a case – it wasn't even the first time we had shared a bed, though we hadn't since I'd married. Space was priced for scarcity in these old country inns, and Holmes was not always flush with cash. Needs must, after all, and nothing suspicious ever had come out of this decrepit manor house.
But something was different tonight, something that left me feeling tense and awkward. The bedsheets never warmed around our bodies; Holmes never seemed to relax in his sleep.
I studied him from across the bed. His hand laid atop the quilt between us, palm up, fingers curled. It looked like an invitation, stretched out like that: like I could reach, and he would accept my touch.
The temptation was overwhelming.
His hand was warm and dry against the pad of my finger. He did not pull away, so I dared to stroke his skin again, tracing the lines of his palm. My heart pounded; my breath caught in my throat.
I wondered what the rest of his skin might feel like.
And then: he twitched, his fingers closing around mine. I went as still and silent as I could, watching his hand around my own, and hardly dared to breathe.
'Marriage is a difficult business,' Nurse had told me once, when I was very small. 'When you are grown, you will understand.'
I had hated when adults said that, and I remembered pouting loudly as she readied everything for bed. My mother and father had been fighting again; it must have been before my mother had gotten ill, before she'd gone away to the country, but I remembered her fighting – red-eyed and furious – more than any other way. 'I shan't,' I had retorted. 'If they don't like each other, why do they live together?'
'Oh, there are many reasons a husband and wife might remain so,' Nurse had said. 'Love is only one of them.'
Had I really already known so many stories, so many romances, as to turn my head? Had my nurse, a woman memory recalled as sensible and shrewd, had a taste for fanciful tales of love? I couldn't recall. I only remembered looking up at her with the outrage only a child can manage and vowing, 'If I ever get married, I'm going to love them forever and ever.'
'I hope you do,' Nurse had answered. 'Now, what story would you like?'
I've broken my vow, I thought, but then, Nurse had been right: marriage was far more complicated than any story at a child's bedtime.
Holmes had pointed out my lack of imagination many times before, but never had I felt the lack so keenly. I should have been able to imagine what might happen, thrown back into close quarters with him for a case in the country, without the usual reminders of Mary. I should have known – but I hadn't, and now I was destroyed by my lack of foresight.
I knew now that I was in love with Holmes.
My feelings had outgrown their fresh spring beginnings and turned into an angry, wild thicket in my chest. Whatever small affection I had thought I could prune back with marriage and distance had run rampant with neglect, and now I was helpless against the need and the fury and the want I felt for Sherlock Holmes. To touch him, to hold him. To love him, in every way I knew how. To know him, in every way I did not know him yet.
The journey back to London was quiet. Holmes' one-sided conversation had long since dissipated into silence; the space between us prickled with everything that I couldn't say and that he, for once, could not guess at.
I sat in that solitude, so close to him and yet so far, and counted every passing second as yet another moment of my unending betrayal.
The fire roared, flicking and leaping over the logs, threatening to overcome the small protection provided by the screen. I sat too close, staring into its furious depths as the heat grew great enough to sting – the first suggestions of a burn.
I had never been afraid of Holmes before.
For years, his mind had delighted and surprised me; it had never occurred to me to fear his deductive powers. I remembered, in fact, our first night together in Baker Street, when he'd told me any number of truths about myself. I'd relished it then, had reveled in it, eager to be seen as only he could see me.
I had been a fool.
Now the things Holmes might see in me could condemn us both, and still I couldn't turn my thoughts from them: the shape of his hands, the curl of his mouth, his face when he slept, his eyes as he woke. His laugh and his smile and his voice, his exuberance and his sincerity. The way my heart blazed when he looked at me. The way my hands ached when he touched me, desperate to touch back.
I sat and watched the fire, wondering how it would feel to be condemned by Holmes' deductions. I imagined it would be as blistering, and as permanent, as a brand.