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Thin bands of morning sunlight fell across the sleeping body of Sherlock Holmes. His graying hair gleamed above his high forehead, whose lines were softened by slumber but never erased, dug too deeply by sorrows and joys he had encountered long before I knew him. His lashes rested delicately upon sun-browned cheeks dusted faintly with freckles whose genesis I had witnessed, every summer for the past three years. There would be more, soon, as it was June and the promise of warmth and further sunshine hung in the still air. Sherlock’s lips were thin but, I knew, surprisingly yielding, especially when sweetened with honey or kisses. His was a face I treasured more than I could possibly express, a face whose proximity to mine upon our shared pillow still seemed a small miracle, a dream I half believed I would blink away as I awoke. I reached out a hand, gently smoothing a stray lock of hair across his temple, and sent up a silent prayer of thanks that as 1907 drifted lazily into summer and both of us moved rather more steadily toward old age, I had found such a marvel as him to share my bed and my life.
Sherlock’s eyes fluttered open at my touch. The corner of his mouth quirked upwards in a sleepy smile and he stretched out a hand to pull me into his chest. I went gladly, burrowing against him until he chuckled softly, tangling his long fingers into my hair.
“Good morning, Morgan,” he said, his voice low and rough with sleep. It sent languorous tendrils of desire spreading through my body, slow and unhurried.
“Good morning, Sherlock,” I murmured. I brushed my lips against his, and he opened his mouth for me, soft and warm and gentle. We kissed for what seemed like an age—we had an age, after all, I thought blissfully; late breakfast, then the garden and the bees, and perhaps a walk into town later… He ran his hand through the curls of hair on my chest and my thoughts dispersed, floating into the air as I savored the touch of his gentle fingers dipping lower, my desire pooling in one place and yet still expansive and unrushed. We took as much time with this as we did kissing, coaxing little hitches of breath from each other’s lips and letting ourselves drift on the honey-slow currents of pleasure until they crested into waves and the world spun with shards of sunlight. After all, neither of us were young men, and we had all the time in the world.
I dozed off afterwards, quite involuntarily, as is my wont, and when I awoke once more I was alone in bed, clean and naked, and I could hear his footfalls in the kitchen and the clanging of pots and pans. I slipped into my dressing gown and walked barefoot down our long corridor. Sherlock was at the counter, wearing trousers and nothing else, a lithe form moving amidst light wood and golden sunshine. He was breathtaking, and he was making me breakfast: there were eggs on the stove, bread and butter on the table, and water bubbling in the kettle. I leaned back against the doorframe, content to simply watch. He was humming something he often played on his violin—possibly Bach, or Beethoven, or Handel, or any of the other numerous composers in his repertoire; I knew music only through him, through his fingers and his bow across the strings. It was another of those small, improbable miracles, those extra graces I had been granted after so many years alone.
The kettle hissed and then whistled, and he hurried to remove it from the stove, all fluid lines and flurrying movement. As he took it off the heat, all that liveliness came to an abrupt and unexpected halt, and something happened.
It might have been anything that triggered it—the precise weight of the kettle in his hand, the drifting of dust motes in the sunlight, a sudden scent of eggs or of morning; I could never tell what set these moments off. Now, as always, he simply stopped. He stood immobile in the middle of the floor, his eyes glazing over as he stared at something that wasn’t there—not in Sussex, and not in 1907. For a long moment, Sherlock Holmes was somewhere deep in his past.
I am not a jealous man. I had other lovers and fifty-three years of life before I met him. There are parts of me he can never know: my parents, both kind and both dead too soon; the years I spent in India as a young man, and the office up north where I filed papers for a decade until I returned to my native Sussex; the smell of the since-felled trees near my childhood home and the slow ticking by of afternoons in the schoolroom and the taste of wild rain during monsoons so fierce I thought I knew what it was to balance on the edge between life and death. I know that in many ways I have more access to his past than any late-in-life lover should dare to hope for—I have read all the stories, after all, have known him through them since long before we ever met, and I can picture with perfect clarity what he must have been like as a young man, all sharp edges and dark depths and cold brilliance. I have read of him ardent over evidence, dreamy over music, passionate over injustice and burning to right the world’s wrongs. I have as complete and, I must add, as loving a portrait of his younger self as I could possibly wish for—and yet, when he slips away from me into the past, as he did that sunny Sussex morning while making me tea, I feel a sharp pang of loss and a slow, sad onslaught of loneliness.
For the Sherlock Holmes described in Dr. Watson’s masterful tales is not my Sherlock. He does not much resemble the man I fell in love with, the beekeeper, the sunlight-dozer, the tracer of patterns on icy windows after long winter days and the gentle, considerate bedmate who has never once held back his heart from me. He holds nothing back, my Sherlock Holmes, although he never speaks of his past: he tells no little tales of adventure by the fire, makes no references to London outside the evening papers, and I have never heard the name John Watson cross his lips.
He came back to himself with a start, that morning in June. The eggs were about to burn, and he saved them, and then he saw me standing in the doorway and padded over on bare feet to give me a kiss. I inhaled his scent, clean and bright and familiar, and thought that I ought simply to be grateful for what I had, for he was good and beautiful and he loved me.
I left him pottering over his bees in the early afternoon and set off for town. It was a mile and a half walk—our cottage was far away for a reason, as we were none too careful with our kisses and although the village loved me as its own son and loved him for his brilliant past, it was asking too much of them to overlook our eccentricities more than they already did. As it stood, they accepted our bachelor friendship with good grace and averted eyes.
I lingered in the butcher’s and then the baker’s, chatting with aged men and women who had known my parents in their youth, and then meandered to the post office, just to see if anything had come in. We rarely received mail—unsurprising on my part, as most of my relations were nearby or deceased, and quite an impressive feat on his, given how many people must have wished to consult him on their mysteries, retired or no. Somehow he had managed to conceal his address from the wider population, aided, I suspect, by the villagers, who had adopted him proudly as a sort of black sheep of their own.
“Any post for me today, Evanston?” I asked the fresh-faced man behind the counter, the grandson of the stooped postmaster and a member of that generation to which my children would have belonged, had I been of the child-producing kind. He blinked amiably, meandering over to take a look at our postbox, and let out a murmur of surprise.
“As a matter of fact, there is. Well, that is, not for you, Mr. Garrett—but there’s a letter here for Mr. Holmes.”
Curiously, I took the long white envelope, battered slightly from its journey and addressed in a neat, square hand. I read the return address and the breath froze in my lungs.
“Are you all right, sir?” young Evanston asked, sounding very far away. The room was swimming, a bit, everything blurred except for the sharp black lettering on the envelope.
Dr. John H. Watson, 31 Queen Anne St., London.
“Sir?” Evanston looked quite anxious now, I noticed hazily. I blinked, and everything came back into focus.
“Ah,” I said. “Yes. Sorry. Everything is perfectly fine.” I gave him a smile, which I could tell from the strange way it sat on my face did not much resemble a smile, and turned to walk swiftly out the door.
I nodded hello to a few people as I left the village, the letter clutched in my hand, my footsteps oddly loud on the narrowing dirt track. I passed through fields of sheep and over several gates without really noticing, my head buzzing with thoughts that were decidedly incoherent.
I had wondered, of course I had wondered, about John Watson. How could one not, reading his stories? He had loved Sherlock, undoubtedly—my dear Holmes, he had called him—but had they been lovers? Had his wife, Mary Morstan, torn them apart? Had she even existed outside his tales at all? What had happened between the two friends that Sherlock, to my knowledge, had not so much as dropped the doctor a note in the past three years? When I met Sherlock, Watson was still publishing his stories from far away in London, but he had stopped soon after, around the time Sherlock and I had moved in together—but I doubted very much that I had anything to do with it. I doubted that Watson even knew of my existence.
What did he want with Sherlock now? I confess that this question, more than any of the others, frightened me down to my bones. I think I understood for the first time, on that endless walk home, how afraid I was of Sherlock’s past—not of what had happened, but of what might still happen: that someday his past might come calling, and that he might answer.
Had that day come?
He was tending to our roses when I walked up to the cottage. Never once have I heard him rattle off a list of deductions about friends or acquaintances or innocent bystanders, nothing about shoes and stains and the secrets they revealed, and yet I often got the sense that he could see deep into my mind. There were a number of reasons I wouldn’t even have contemplated hiding the letter from him, love and honesty not least, but even if I’d wanted to it would have been impossible. His face as it rose to meet mine said as much.
“Morgan, you look entirely unwell,” he stated, brow furrowing with concern. “I can see you’ve been to the butcher’s, and the baker’s, but perhaps the post office is more likely—”
“You’ve had a letter from London,” I said, cutting him off before he reached the inevitable conclusion. “From Dr. Watson.”
His eyes widened with shock. For a long moment, he did not take the proffered letter, but stood there staring at me, as though I had begun to speak in tongues.
Then his face grew quite impassive, and he took the envelope and turned to walk inside. Feeling quite hollow, I followed him in silence. When he reached the sitting room, he hesitated, his glance flickering briefly to the corridor and his study—he was considering taking the letter somewhere private, to read it alone. Even though he abandoned the idea a split second later, sitting calmly in his armchair, it stung. Not that it mattered, really: he would be far away from me when he read it, whether or not his body was in the room.
He worked his fingernail under the flap and withdrew a single folded sheet. I could not see what it said from my place in the doorway, but I would not have tried to read it if I could have. Instead, I watched his face—it was as I had anticipated. He was gone, gone from the very first words, lost in a fog-filled Victorian world of revolvers and footprints and heroic adventures. I stood in Sussex, in 1907, and felt utterly alone.
He came out of his trance at the end of the letter. He folded it back up and slid it into his envelope, taking perhaps more care and time than he needed. He looked up at me, and for the first time I could remember there was hesitation in his gaze.
“He wants to know if he can come and visit,” Sherlock said. His voice was as unexpressive as I had ever heard it. I could not tell what he hoped I would say. Did he want me to refuse? Did he want me to leave?
I thought of the doctor, penning his tales year after year, immortalizing the man I loved, and it was not quite so difficult as I expected to bring a smile to my face.
“That’s wonderful news, Sherlock. Did he say when?”
The impassiveness of his face blurred into uncertainty. “Next week, if it’s all right.”
Next week. My stomach turned over. I kept on smiling, and I hope at least a little of it was sincere.
“That’s wonderful,” I said again. “We’ll make up the spare room.”
He looked startled, as if the thought of John Watson in our spare room—physically in our cottage at all—was something he hadn’t quite gotten around to considering yet. “The spare room,” he reflected. He smiled up at me, tentatively; his eyes were still half far away, watching bullets arc and waterfalls roar. “Yes. Yes, we will.”
I wanted to touch him, to kiss him until he landed back in the sunny English countryside and in my arms; but I didn’t want to be jealous, and petty, and anyway a small secret part of me worried that I wouldn’t be able to bring him back if I tried.
The next week and a half passed in a blur of preparations. Sherlock dispatched himself to the post office the next morning with a wire to London; it wasn’t long before Dr. Watson wired back, setting his arrival date for Wednesday of the following week. The days zoomed by, full of washing and cleaning and baking, spare sheets billowing in the breeze, windows open to air out the house, every surface scrubbed clean. I couldn’t tell if Sherlock was doing it all out of excitement or nerves, and for once I felt too shy to ask about his feelings. I know that for myself, I was a mix of inchoate, incoherent sensation—euphoric one moment at the thought of meeting a man I had long admired, terrified the next at the thought of what it might mean for my life with Sherlock. As the day grew closer, I grew more nervous. Questions kept rising up that I was too worried and too embarrassed to ask, feeling myself a nuisance and self-centered to boot. But then again, was it really too much to want to know whether Dr. Watson was aware of my existence? There had been no suggestion of my sleeping anywhere other than beside Sherlock, but I was not at all certain whether I ought to be keeping quiet about the true nature of our relationship once Watson arrived. The doctor had been married, after all—in fact, according to his stories, he had taken a second wife the year before Sherlock moved to the countryside, though where she was now I hadn’t the faintest idea. But at any rate, it seemed possible that Dr. Watson might not know Sherlock for a homosexual. Or, my brain countered, the two of them might have been lovers all along. Who knew?
Sherlock did, of course, but it didn’t seem to occur to him to tell me anything at all. I had been respectful of his silence regarding his past before, but now that it was about to manifest itself in our own house his continued reticence did seem rather unfair. I tried not to be frustrated with him, but it was very difficult at times—and a certain distance did seem to have arisen between us since the letter. We still made love, in that week and a half, but it was nothing like the slow and lazily endless pleasure of that sunny morning the day it all began. We no longer seemed to have all the time in the world.
I was out in the garden when Dr. Watson arrived. I had intended to send Sherlock to meet him at the train, so they might reunite without my intrusive presence, but the doctor showed up three hours early and on foot. I saw him approaching over the low rise some quarter mile away, and my breath caught dizzyingly in my throat.
He saw me, too, with bright, intelligent eyes set in a broad, decisive face beneath a thick head of grizzled hair. His gaze passed over me mildly at first, as he took me, I think, for some sort of hired help, but then he saw my expression and the way I was setting myself to greet him and his brow furrowed in mild puzzlement.
My head swam—he had not known of me at all, I saw, and I did not know what on earth I ought to say—and I drew in a deep breath. But then his gaze jumped behind me, over my left shoulder, and as I heard the door open I turned to watch John Watson looking at Sherlock Holmes for the first time in almost four years.
There were no words, in those first seconds, and yet so much was said. They took each other in with broad gazes, which narrowed sharply as they fixed on each other’s eyes. Pale blue met steel gray and something jumped between them, something as quick and invisible and full of silent meaning as the whiz of a message along a telegraph wire. The past rippled around them, a bubble of color and light that expanded to envelop them and to shut out me: I was in nearly physical pain from the awkwardness of being in their proximity, in witnessing something so sacred and private, something I had no wish to see.
“You made it out of London just before the rain, I see,” Sherlock said, his voice tinged with a dryness I had never heard. The doctor looked startled, then grinned ruefully. Sherlock’s lip twitched in a ghost of a smile—nothing like the full, easy ones he gave me—and he raised his brows ironically.
“Perfectly simple, of course. You’re carrying an umbrella, but the dust in the folds indicates that it hasn’t been opened today. I am sorry, by the way, that you had to sit next to such an insufferable gentleman on the train—what an irritating habit, picking at one’s teeth like that—but I am glad to see that the tea at the station was more than usually drinkable. And you made the right decision, replacing your maid last week. The old one was really quite careless with the china.”
The doctor looked astonished, then burst into laughter. My astonishment was not so mirthful: Sherlock never made such deductions for me, I thought resentfully, and immediately felt ashamed.
“You are quite unchanged, my dear fellow,” Dr. Watson said with a smile.
Perhaps it was the sentiment, or the fond epithet, but both of them seemed to remember my presence at the same time. Sherlock hesitated for a split second—or else I imagined that he did—and then he stepped over to me, and placed his hand on the small of my back.
“Watson, this is Morgan Garrett,” he said simply, and it was clear by the way Watson’s eyes slid to his hand and then widened, stunned, that he understood precisely what Sherlock was telling him.
“I,” he fumbled, “oh. Well. I—good gracious, Mr. Garrett, I’m very pleased to meet you.”
He stuck out a hand, and we shook. We looked into each other’s eyes, and saw the same things reflected back at each other: wariness, uncertainty, and, on his part, lingering surprise.
“I have read all your stories, Doctor,” I said, the words tumbling unbidden from my mouth. I had never even confessed such a thing to Sherlock. “I have long been an admirer of yours.”
“Oh,” he said, blinking. Then the lines around his eyes softened, and he smiled. “Thank you very much.”
I smiled back, and found, to my shock, that I very much meant it. “You’re welcome. I’m so glad to finally meet you.”
There was a brief silence, in which the doctor and I continued to smile foolishly at each other, and then Sherlock let out a cough.
“Shall we go inside?” he suggested, sounding rather piqued, and just a little bit baffled.
Dr. Watson made all the right noises over the cottage, which I left them to tour together while I sat at the kitchen table and breathed deeply, feeling very much unmoored and at sea. We ate a light lunch—the doctor seemed flabbergasted at Sherlock’s ability to cook—and then the two of them went out to inspect the beehives. Despite their initial greeting I thought I detected a bit of distance between them, an unease that lingered in the gaps in conversation and in the accidental brush of their fingers as they passed the salt. I wondered what had happened between them, in the end. I could not help wondering what was going to happen to me.
Supper was slightly more relaxed, and they soon drifted into talk of the old days—criminals caught, clients appeased, police aided and fondly lampooned. Their conversation slipped into the half-intelligible patter of very old friends: full of gaps and holes that I, as an outsider, couldn’t fill, references to incidents of which I had no knowledge, inside jokes and phrases that meant nothing to me and everything to them. I felt unbearably lonely, and tried to suppress the sharp pangs of jealousy I felt as I listened. Sherlock deserved this, deserved his old friend and his old life and the memories that lit up his eyes like blazing coals. His past was part of him, just as my past was part of me, and I ought not resent it. True, his past was fuller and faster and altogether bigger than mine—Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street was nearly a legend, more than a man, and he loomed so large that night in our plain wooden kitchen that it was no real wonder I felt diminished in comparison. And yet I had no right to wish him small again.
When they retired to the sitting room with whiskey and their pipes I complained of a headache and took myself off to bed. I lay in the dark, hearing the murmur of voices down the hall, and tried not to worry that I would still be alone come morning.
I felt him slip in beside me sometime well past midnight, but he smelled of unfamiliar tobacco and in my half-dreaming state I was not sure if it was really him, or some younger man, a dashing detective I had never met.
I left them alone as much as I could. For the next several days, I pretended to be shy, reserved, uninterested in long walks and adventure stories. I was none of those things, of course, and at odd moments I could see Sherlock looking at me curiously, as if he wanted to ask what was going on; but he kept his questions to himself, and so did I. When he came to bed after talking to Dr. Watson till the early hours of the morning, I feigned sleep, and while I do not think he was fooled, he never said a thing.
The silences between them grew somehow both more and less fraught. I worried that something was brewing between them, and scolded myself for my paranoia. Anxiety gnawed at my insides, and I smiled wider to make it go away. Sherlock seemed so unreachable now, in that far-off past all the time, where I could never follow.
John Watson, it must be said, was a perfect gentleman. He tried patiently and politely to coax me into joining them on their rambles and in their conversations. I am not sure he liked me, exactly—something in the way his eyes slid away from mine just a bit too quickly—but it was nearly impossible not to like him. Whatever his feelings for Sherlock, he was very kind. I am afraid that only made things much more difficult for me, selfish creature that I am.
“You can join us, you know,” he told me quietly one night, as he and I washed up the supper dishes and Sherlock went into the sitting room to light the fire—the night was unseasonably cold. “I don’t mean to chase you away in your own home.”
I flushed, wiping down a pair of forks. “No, no. Not at all. You and Sherlock have a lot to catch up on, I’m sure. I don’t wish to intrude.”
“You won’t, of course not,” he said, drying a plate and not looking at me. “Truly. You said you have read all the stories—surely you will forgive us if we ramble on a bit about the past.”
“Of course,” I said. “But I—”
“I shall get him to tell you about the giant rat of Sumatra.”
I looked up at him sharply to find that he was smiling. “That is quite a promise, doctor,” I said. “I know a dozen people in the village who would give their right arms to hear that story, after you mercilessly teased us all about it back in—goodness, it must have been 1890, 91?”
He smiled more broadly. “Ah, but they do not have the good fortune to be doing Sherlock Holmes’ washing up, do they?”
I couldn’t help but smile back, and I couldn’t help but give in. And the ache of loneliness was admittedly diminished that night, as Dr. Watson endeavored to keep me abreast of the conversation, and when Sherlock and I climbed into bed together I felt more myself than I had in some time.
The following day had a curious quality to it, melancholy and sad, perhaps because of the mist that had fallen over the downs and the rain that drizzled light but steady throughout the morning. It felt as though something was coming to an end.
I think we all sensed it, for Sherlock went out to tend to his bees alone that afternoon and Dr. Watson and I trailed through the house, silent specters of ourselves. I emerged from the study to make a cup of tea around two and found him standing in the kitchen, looking out the window at the tall, slender figure bent over the hives. He appeared uncommonly pensive, and not a little sad, and I dealt silently with the water and the kettle and the tea, breaking the silence only to offer him a cup when it was done.
He took it with an absent thank you and held it at his side, steam rising from it to cloud the windows. We both watched as Sherlock slid a tray from a beehive, nebulas of buzzing insects rising up around his suited body, his netted face.
“Do you ever worry about him getting stung?” Dr. Watson asked quietly.
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Yes. He is always careful, but I can’t help it.” I took a sip of tea, the hot liquid burning my tongue. “I can’t imagine it seems much of a danger to you. A couple of bees. Not compared to the kinds of things you faced together, back in London.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Dr. Watson said, staring out the window. “I’m not sure I will ever stop worrying about Holmes.”
There was a long silence, in which the questions I had never managed to ask Sherlock surfaced in my brain. I surveyed the stolid, broad-shouldered man before me, and wondered until I could stand it no more.
“Dr. Watson,” I said, and something in my voice made him turn to look at me, “may I ask you a question?”
He paused, then nodded his head once.
I swallowed. “Were you and Sherlock ever…”
I didn’t need to finish the sentence. I could see by the way the skin creased around his eyes and the finality with which he set down his teacup that he understood.
“Yes,” he said simply. “From the very beginning, really.”
My stomach grew quite heavy, but I found that I wasn’t surprised.
“He was like no one I’d ever met,” the doctor said, that same far-off look Sherlock sometimes had appearing in his blue eyes. “The most extraordinary man alive. It was…he was…more than I had ever hoped for.”
What happened? I wanted to ask, but was momentarily tongue-tied by the way his words echoed my own feelings. He knew the question was in the air, anyway.
“Certain of Holmes’ habits—no, his addictions—were very difficult for me to witness,” he confessed bluntly, turning away again. “At first I blamed him for them, thought him weak or stubborn or unwilling to change—foolishly, of course. I am a doctor and a military man; I know that the desire for drugs is both physical and psychological, and not at all trivial. I learned better soon enough, saw the darkness both inside and outside Holmes, and I understood that to truly love him, all of him, I would have to love the addict, too.” He sighed, running a hand over his face. “And I think, I hope, I succeeded. In loving him fully. But, even then, I—there are limits, you see, to what I could watch him going through. It was tearing me to pieces. He saw it, and he tried to change, but he could not stop and I could not take it and so I—I broke it off.”
He was silent for a moment. The rain had started up again, tapping against the windowpanes, and outside, Sherlock had moved on to the back garden. I felt half-transported by the doctor’s words, swept into this darker past and the pain and the sadness and I couldn’t have spoken if my life had depended on it.
“I met my wife soon after—Mary,” he said. He turned to me, looking suddenly very earnest. “Please believe me, Mr. Garrett, every word I wrote of her is true. She was good, and kind, and intelligent, and I loved her very much. I have always been—you see, I have always loved both men and women, and she and I had a happy marriage. It ended far too soon.”
He gazed again out the window, and I imagined how he had suffered back then—Sherlock had been away, presumed dead after his encounter with the villainous Moriarty, and Mary’s death would have left Watson twice-bereaved. I felt a flicker of guilt, along with pity and growing respect; I had never experienced anything like that kind of loss.
“And then Holmes returned from the dead,” Dr. Watson said, and even then, so many years later, I could hear the echo of awe and thanks and pain for that wonderful, terrible miracle. “And I moved back to Baker Street. I could not stay away, not then. And Holmes made certain—promises. Which he strove very hard to keep, and succeeded, too, for a time. Until—well. Until he couldn’t, any longer.”
Watson sighed deeply, and that pain was sharper and more immediate than the slow melancholy that had imbued our conversation up till now. Our eyes followed Sherlock’s progress along a row of bean sprouts, and the doctor’s voice was, for the first time, touched with bitterness when he spoke again.
“I married once more, and moved out of Baker Street. It was necessary to leave, but…” His gaze darkened. “I ought not to have married again. It was not fair to her.”
“Is she…” I ventured, after the silence spun out darkly.
“She is, I believe, somewhere in America now,” he replied, “but I do not know for certain. As I am sure we both feel is for the best.”
There seemed nothing else to say. A deep sorrow had settled on my chest, slightly uncomfortably, for I was aware that the doctor had been denied a happiness that I now possessed. He shifted after a moment, rubbing a hand against his knee, and cleared his throat.
“I would like to ask you a question now, Mr. Garrett,” he said, trepidation coloring his voice. I felt an answering thrill of fear, dread rising hot and fast in my stomach.
“Yes,” I answered, trying not to choke out the word.
He was silent for an excruciating moment longer.
“How bad is it?” he asked finally, in a rush. “I often fear that, without cases to keep him occupied, he must turn more and more often to the drugs—is he—is it very bad?”
I stared at him, stunned. “I—I don’t—”
“Please tell me,” he said, a note of desperation in his voice. “I need to know.”
I said nothing. My brain was awhirl. Certain facts fell into place for the first time, certain understandings—why there had been an undercurrent of unease between them all week, why Sherlock had seemed so unsure at first of their position—and the consequences of telling John Watson the truth spun out before me, sharp as knives and just as deadly. To do so would be like setting in motion my own destruction.
But I could not lie. Not to him.
“He does not use them anymore,” I said quietly.
The doctor’s face grew blank with shock. Then, suddenly, he looked wild with anger. That passed, too, as he tamed his expression, but the urgency and the threat were still present in his next words. “Are you—are you certain?” he demanded.
Are you lying? was what I heard, and what he really meant, and for the first time I felt anger rise within me, too. “I may not be a doctor,” I said heatedly, “but I can recognize a fresh puncture wound when I see one—and believe me, I would see it. At any rate, if you will think about it for more than a moment you must see that I have no reason to tell you that particular lie.”
He looked affronted, and then as he comprehended my last words his shoulders drooped, and his eyes flickered away from mine.
“Of course,” he said to the tabletop. “It is merely that—well. I see I must congratulate you.” There was as much regret as bitterness in his voice. “You have achieved—or rather, inspired him to achieve—what I never could.”
In the time it took for his words to sink in, he had collected his teacup and put it on the counter, then moved to go. My brain stuttered into motion and I fumbled for words.
“Dr. Watson,” I said. He looked back at me, pain and resentment clear in his eyes. “You misunderstand me.” I took a deep breath. “I have never known him to use the drugs. He smokes like a chimney, of course, but nothing worse. I promise you that this is true. When I met him three years ago, he was perfectly clean and sober, and I believe he had been for—for a year or so at least before that.”
A year or so before would have been when Watson left Baker Street for the second time. The doctor stared at me, something complicated and uncertain flickering in his eyes. There were questions that arced in the air between us, questions, this time, without answers. I wondered many things about Sherlock Holmes in that moment; and I wondered about Dr. Watson; and I wondered what I was doing there, in the lives of those two great men, at all.
“Dr. Watson,” I said, because I had to, because there wasn’t a choice, because even though I might ruin myself I might save someone else, “you—you have to understand.” I drew a ragged breath. “Sherlock is—I thank God every day that I wake up next to him, that I have found such love so late, that somehow I have been granted this latter end of his life. It is miraculous and more than I could ever have hoped for, but I have no illusions that it is anything but that. A—an end, I mean. The part of the play after the audience has gone, and everything is quiet and coming to a close. It—he…”
Dr. Watson’s gaze was riveted to my face, now, and I found the strength, somehow, to meet his eyes. “The Sherlock Holmes I know is not the man in your stories,” I confessed. “The mad, brilliant, daring, enormous man you write about. My Sherlock is gentle and kind and smiles easily and kisses softly and makes wonderful honey. The other one—the hero, the detective—he is the true Sherlock Holmes, I know that, and for me to have met him I would have had to have stumbled into his life when we were both a good deal younger than we are.
“I’m glad I didn’t, though,” I said, knowing it to be the truth. Watson’s head jerked up at that, and I gave him a small, sad smile. “You must know why, Dr. Watson. That young man never would have spared me a second glance. Because Sherlock Holmes—the true Sherlock Holmes—has only ever belonged to you.”
His eyes shone with sudden tears. They didn’t fall, though, only swam like glistening pools, making his blue irises bluer. My eyes were dry, but my throat was tight, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Sherlock outside the window, digging in the dirt, oblivious to the worsening rain.
“I’ve seen glimpses of him, though, this week,” I said, and there it was, the wetness in my eyes. Crying after all. “The old Sherlock Holmes, as he used to be. I think—I think if you wished it—you might, well—he might—”
Dr. Watson turned away with an abortive movement, swift and then suddenly over. He said nothing for a long moment. My hands were almost shaking.
Then he turned to me, and his eyes were clear and his cheeks were wet. “I think I’d better go back to London tomorrow,” he said softly. “I think that would be for the best.”
I stared at him, at a loss for words. “But—do you understand what I—”
“Oh, yes,” he said quickly. “And I—I thank you. I do. But, well, you see…” He gestured to the window, where Sherlock was pottering around with a shovel, sleeves rolled up and a look of contentment on his aging face. “You’re right. He’s not my Sherlock Holmes anymore.”
He meant two things by that, and I understood them both, and my heart burst into flame, sparked by the absolute goodness that was John Watson. It was no wonder Sherlock had loved him—or loved him still—he was worthy of all that love, and more.
“Please know that you will always be welcome in the home of Sherlock Holmes,” I said, meeting his gaze.
He ducked away from it. “Well. It’s your home, too, isn’t it?”
“You will always be welcome in my home,” I said firmly. “In fact, that is true whether or not it is also occupied by the world’s greatest former consulting detective. Is that quite clear, Dr. Watson?”
“Yes,” he said softly, looking at me again. “And it’s John, please.”
“Morgan, then.”
“Morgan.”
I swallowed, and thought of the look on Sherlock’s face when they’d first seen each other in the front garden the week before. “Don’t stay away so long again, if you can manage it,” I entreated. “Please. He misses you terribly.”
John nodded, gazing at his shoes.
“I miss him, too.”
We might have stood forever in silence in that warm little room, the rain beating outside and our hearts beating within, if Sherlock Holmes hadn’t burst into the house, calling down the hallway with some cheerful grumble about the rain and the wet and the need for tea. Both our heads snapped to attention, drawn to him like he held us on a string. We glanced at each other and smiled, then went to go meet the man we both loved.
The next afternoon, Sherlock and I saw John off on the train to London. The beekeeper was silent on the walk home, his arm in mine, and he sat pensively for the rest of the evening, uncommonly quiet, and I began to worry once again. But that night, as we climbed into bed and turned down the lamp, he slid his arm around mine, drawing me into his chest, his stubbly face nuzzling the back of my neck.
Slow warmth spread through my body, all the way to the tips of my fingers. I bent my head around to kiss him, then settled on the pillow, my body safe inside the circle of his limbs.
“I love you,” he said softly, his breath against my ear.
“I love you, too,” I answered, and though we said the words often and easily they felt especially true tonight, and especially powerful, and as he smoothed my silvery hair with his long, thin fingers I drifted off to sleep.