Archive of Our Own

“The relations between us in those days were peculiar. He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me — many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead — but such was my humble role in our alliance.”

Once upon a time, I wrote those lines. I wrote them in honest good humour, yet when I re-read them the wistful note strikes clear. I had long wished for a tie to him more than habitual — more tender by far. I’d wanted him for my own, in fact, since I had understood that such a thing was possible; since I had first met men in the course of our work who loved and lived with one another and were proud to say so. I had watched as Holmes treated them all with the same abiding decency he treated anyone who truly needed him. I had taken real comfort from that.

Yet he had given me no reason to think he might feel what they felt, not for me, nor (thank Heaven) any other. He’d made it perfectly clear that he wanted no one’s wooing, though he minded not at all what others did. And though I thought he might have guessed my heart, I could not tell myself he had left room for me to hope. I had borne my love alone when he’d died. I’d kept my wild joy quiet when he’d returned to me and called me back to our home. Ten years on, I had become so used to the wanting that I wrote out my wistfulness without a thought, and looked up from the words without embarrassment at the sound of his step on the stair.

“What ho, Watson,” he called out, coming in windblown and carelessly smiling, but there was a gleam in his eye like a falcon sighting prey. “There’s trouble in the offing. Are you free?”

“Of course I am,” I said at once. That look roused my blood as it always had. I felt my breath deepen, my spine straighten. He saw it too and smiled wider.

“Get your coat, then. I’ll explain on the way.”

We set off together in double time. He was flushed with hurrying, and left his coat open to the spring air, though he’d waited while I’d buttoned down my own. A rain-scented wind moved through the budding green which softened bare branches above us, and carried to us the songs of the swifts darting above in the lowering sky. Holmes cut a striking figure always, but amidst the dark and dun of a London street in April he glowed like a struck match.

“There’s a mugging about to go off in Regent’s Park,” he explained as we marched. “Three men, two hired fresh off the Row, and a third rather more experienced in this sort of thing.”

“You don’t generally go after muggers,” I said, surprised. “What is it about these?”

“Well, the man they’re meant to mug is my client’s uncle,” said Holmes, “and she gives me to understand she regrets having asked them to handle him. It appears some family misunderstandings have given rise to an excessive animosity. I’ve relieved her of the misunderstandings, but the consequences have yet to be quelled.”

“She’s repented at the eleventh hour, then?”

“The very last minute of it. And since she’d promised the fellows a significant payoff taken from his pocket — ”

“They may be difficult to dissuade.”

“I’m certain they shall be. I’ve asked Lestrade and the rest to meet me there, but I thought you and I might want to see to it ourselves. If we spot him before the miscreants do, we may be able to stop things kicking off.”

We were by then inside of Regent’s Park, and while Holmes spoke to me he was looking all about us. His stride was long, his head up. He showed no fear, and while I let my hand drift toward the weapon in my waistband, I felt no anxiety, only a fierce, private pride in being the man beside him.

There was a weak shout; the sound of a scuffle off the path in a stand of trees. Holmes took off at a run. With my old wound aching at the approaching rain, I could not match his pace full-tilt. It was a few headlong moments before I plunged into the copse behind him. There: one slight and frightened man, down on his knee; Holmes, just raising his walking stick to strike the men holding him; another, turning on Holmes with a great, gleaming knife.

He caught Holmes with it across the chest. Holmes cried out. But he had twisted away from the downstroke; the blade did not strike true. I was on the villain at once. I had his arm and was forcing him down by it. Holmes had kept his feet. His walking stick flashed round again and came down upon the head of one of the others, and as he fell Holmes shouted again. The frightened gentleman down upon the ground startled and seemed to rouse his courage. He flailed out, broke free of the hold the last man had on him, and ran — straight into the arms of the Yard.

They had found us. It was over in moments. The Yard had never equalled Holmes’ eye for prevention, but once a crime was in progress they were quick enough on their feet. Before my heart had regained a calmer pace, all three would-be muggers had found themselves fast in the hands of the law.

Holmes, though pale with exertion, was congratulating the trembling gentleman for escaping unscathed, and ordering him cheerfully to visit us in Baker Street once he had recovered himself a little. I dropped back against a tree. I had been in real peril with Holmes any number of times, but till then I'd not watched a knife aimed at his heart. We were not old men, but for a few long moments I felt aged and weary and weak down to my bones.

But we had won. And Holmes was smiling; he was turning from the Yard to say to me, "All right, Watson?" I managed a nod. "Home, then," he said, and took my arm firmly in his own. "Lestrade has allowed us the use of the hansom he came in."

The warmth of him at my side settled me a little. My nerves eased by his nearness, I noticed nothing amiss. It wasn’t until we were seated opposite one another in the cab that he slumped over, pressing both hands to his breastbone. “Lord,” he said, almost laughing, “that hurts.”

I’d jolted forward as he drooped, catching him by the shoulders. My pulse beat double time again, but he looked up at me smiling, so near to me his breath was on my face.

“Holmes,” I gasped, and he did laugh.

“I’m quite all right,” he said through white lips; and then the carriage lurched and his clear bright eyes closed in a wince.

“He had a knife,” I whispered.

“He barely grazed me,” he murmured back. “It’s superficial, Doctor. An annoyance, nothing more.”

The hansom had stopped: we were home. I sprung up to help him, but he waved me off and stepped down on his own, thanking the driver cheerily, one slender hand still pressed hard to his chest. I watched him up the stairs, but his steps didn’t waver.

But when we were inside our own rooms and I realised that, far from stopping where I could see him, he was going straight toward his bedroom — “No,” I cried, and he stopped in surprise.

“No?”

“I want to help.”

“It’s nothing. I can tend to it myself.”

“Holmes. Allow me.” I was trying not to plead. Against my will, my voice shook. I don’t know what he saw in my face; I don’t know if he remembered the way he had startled me some months back, tearing open my trouser leg in search of my gunshot wound with tears in his eyes. He had not been able to believe that I was safe till he had seen it.

He was studying me, silent, and all at once something shifted in his expression. “All right,” he said, decisive, “in my room, please.” He was already turning away.

“Close the door behind you,” he added softly when I had found my bag and followed him in. He came up to my room often enough in search of me, but I was rarely in his sanctum. On any other day I would have looked around me with more curiosity. Now I was only watching the way he lowered himself down onto the narrow bed, and the way his fingers trembled in the low light from the curtained window while he undid his waistcoat and started on his shirt-front. There was a gash across it. Through it a dark stain was spreading.

He shrugged the ruined shirt off. I helped him remove his undershirt, and then he was bare. I saw first the wound: superficial, as he had said, but long and bloody; a cruel rough cut across his breastbone, curving down over his ribs, between his breasts.

Holmes had breasts. Small and soft on his angular frame, the hairless nipples pink, tender as the curve of his navel, and as new to me.

I raised my eyes to his. We stared at one another. His thin chest rose with each quick breath.

“Thank you,” I said at last, and saw his expressive brows lift, his lips part, as I bent again to my task.

One minute’s exam relieved me of my fear. Ugly as the wound looked, the cut was clean. He made no sound while I washed and stitched him, though when my needle pierced skin he jerked and clutched at the bedclothes. When the wound was bound up I went to his nightstand to wash my hands.

When I turned back he was still watching me.

“All right?” I said, and he nodded once. His fingers clung still to the coverlet, twisting and smoothing it.

“Brandy?” I asked, and he said, half-whispering, “Please.”

I went out to the sitting room to fetch the decanter; left him to put himself together, while I put my own mind in some semblance of order. He had not surprised me so thoroughly since he’d returned living, hale and fairly hearty from the very grave. 

He appeared, colour returned to his face, buttoned up and wrapped in a heavy dressing gown of blue velvet; took the drink I offered, settled himself into his chair and drank it in silence, staring into the fire. Outside our windows, the heavens had opened at last. The rain fell in curtains between us and the world.

When his glass was nearly empty Holmes said suddenly, “I am not an impersonator.”

“I know,” I said.

“What do you know?” The tone sharp, unsparing.

“My dear fellow,” I said in surprise, and gestured to the familiar length of him. “I know you. I have known you full twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-six,” he murmured, and I laughed.

“There, you see. Twenty-six years, and you have only ever been yourself.”

He looked at me, eyes wide and dark and beautiful. “Yes,” he said, and then at last he tipped his head and smiled.

At any other time the next few days might have been a bit of a trial: the case was settled, the lull setting in, and Holmes was still injured. He has always been a poor-tempered patient. He’d have lain about grumbling, denied the solace of the violin and the boxing hall, while the wound healed. But now he rested in seeming contentment, draped sideways in the settee with his feet over the edge, his head nestled deep amid the pillows — reading, sketching out notes and diagrams upon a series of scrap-papers, and thinking, his gaze somewhere far beyond our walls. I worked on my own notes of the case. I asked him nothing; my mind was also rather full of simple astonishment. I had lived with him so long to learn something entirely new about him.

It was the fourth day, when Mrs. Hudson had cleared away dinner and the last birdsong drifted through the front window, when Holmes said suddenly from among the cushions, “Why did you thank me?”

“What?”

Holmes’ injury was healing, but he winced against his will every time I cleaned his stitches, so I had set aside my case notes for a medical journal. I was by now elbows deep in a fairly interesting review of Bayer’s new aspirin powder and its effects on pain. I had some hopes that with it I might be able to help him obtain a little relief without tempting the return of his particular foible. But his voice returned my attention to the darkening room. I looked over to find him hoisting himself up from the depths of the settee, his hair tumbled over his pale, earnest forehead.

“When I let you see me. Why did you thank me?”

He was right. I had thanked him. I remembered the sensation of gratitude quite clearly. I felt it fiercely now. “For your faith in me,” I said.

“Oh,” he murmured, and went on looking at me. Then, “Of course I trust you. You know I do, Watson.”

“I know now,” I said, and set aside the journal; turned my chair toward him. He blinked at me, clearly working his way toward something.

“No one but Mycroft knows that about me. Mycroft, and you,” he said, and then, “How did you — have you ever met a man like me before?”

“Yes,” I said. I saw at once that he had not expected that. He sat up fully; settled his feet on the floor, leaning toward me.

“Go on,” he said.

“It was in Afghanistan — a boy I tended. Wounded in the first push over the mountains.”

“He let you help him?”

“He was half off his head when I began to work,” I admitted. “He was badly hurt. Amid other things, an arrow had pierced his abdominal wall. I stripped him to stitch him. When he came back to himself and understood that I had seen all of him, he was very afraid. I do regret his fear.”

“But you did not give him away,” said Holmes. His tone was baffling.

“I did not. I didn’t know anything then about a life like his. I had not found the texts I’ve studied since. But I had sworn the physician’s oath when I’d finished my training. I knew my only duty with him was to heal.”

“Of course,” Holmes murmured. His eyes had not left mine. I was beginning to feel rather flayed by the intensity of his gaze. But I had been wondering something myself.

“Why now?”

“Why — what?”

“Why did you show me now? After so many years?”

He was slow to answer. I stood up from my chair, crossed the room to him. Settled myself in my chair opposite him, beside the fire. The dusk was setting in. Amid the play of lamplight and shadows in the room, his gaze was inscrutable.

Finally, “I’m leaving London,” he said. “Permanently.”

For a moment I could not understand him; then the words sank in.

“Not for a while yet,” he added quickly, but I was already very angry.

“Holmes. You thought — it didn’t matter now? Because you meant to leave me behind?”

He flinched; his gaze fluttered away and down.

“No,” he said to his feet. “No. If — if you’d taken it badly, maybe.”

“Good God,” I said, and then, “No, but how else could you have meant it?”

“I had hoped — ”

Silence. He was studying the floor. My patience was rapidly reaching its end.

“What, Holmes?”

“Out with it? Right. I had hoped you might — go with me.”

He said it loudly, boldly, but he did not look up. His hands began to make quick, nervous movements, little brushes up and down his thighs.

“To stay with you?”

“If you wanted to.” Diffident as I’d rarely seen him.

All my anger went out of me in a hot rush. I wanted to take his nervous hands in my own and kiss them. I wanted to kneel before him and lay my heart on his knee. “All right,” I said, when I had command of my voice.

“What?”

“All right. I’ll go with you.”

“All right,” he echoed, startled, soft. The hands stilled.

We regarded each other. I considered what I’d just agreed to.

“Where are we going?”

He gifted me a bewildered smile. “I don’t know. I’ll need to begin looking in earnest. I’ll find us a place. Something small we can care for ourselves.”

“Do you mean — ”

“I mean a house of our own. I mean — retirement.” He was growing radiant, expansive, beginning to gesture. “I mean time to write, for both of us, and experiment, and study — really study, you know, with no interruptions, no obligations. I mean to get out of the way of danger before it becomes fatal — I mean quiet — quiet, Watson, and peace — “

“Peace,” I said. “You want peace.” It was clear that he meant it. “How long have you been plotting this?”

“Since the Garridebs case.” (I sat up straighter at that. I’d been shot on that case. He had been thinking about it.) “Since I realised I’m getting slower; that I’ve been getting slower for a while — ”

“Hardly slow — ”

“Slower, Watson,” he repeated, firm. “This last fight confirmed it. The fellow who knifed me — he’d have never gotten near me, once.”

That hushed me up. He was right. And the rest of it was catching up to me.

“And you let me see,” I said, considering, “what I’d never seen in you, because you knew you wanted me — because you’d want me with you.”

He nodded. The light of the fire made radiant the sensitive lines of his face. I imagined seeing that face regarding me across the hearth of our own cottage, somewhere safe, well away from the world.

“You wanted me to know you.”

“I wanted you to know me,” he said. “I wanted us to be — sure of each other.”

“Well, then.”

When at last I went up to bed, I could not sleep. I could not forget how he had looked, the smile playing at his mouth, the sudden strength in his voice; the way he had sprung up and returned to me with his hands full of the notes he had been making from his place on the settee for days. He’d laid them on my lap; knelt there beside me to show me. There’d been lists of subjects he wished to study, folios to write, experiments to assemble, equipment for an expanded chemical array, hopes for a sort of self-sufficiency we had not had before. He wanted a kitchen garden, apple trees, hives of honeybees. He’d suggested dogs rather emphatically.

He’d looked happy. And he’d known what he was about. He’d grown breathless talking of it all, and he'd left me breathless, too, by how suddenly young he seemed in the blaze of possibility. It made me remember him as I’d first met him; it made me feel as young, as wonderstruck. My life could be all new again, after all this time. I’d been fascinated by him from the first, a moth to his flame. I wondered that I was no less dazzled now — that I could think of nothing I wanted more than to follow him wherever he would go.

But he had asked me to. I had believed myself a worn-in habit of his, an aid to his thought and comfort in the vein of his violin, his pipe, his indices. I’d helped his work. But now he proposed to create a new set of habits, a new life entire, and yet he would have me there too. How long had I wished he had taken me with him when he’d ventured into the wilds beyond Reichenbach? How long had I regretted never knowing what he had been like, out there in the world, where he could have been anyone? Out beyond the reach of our growing fame, our familiar duties and dangers? Now I would know. I would see everything.

Of course I would go. I could do nothing else. I would always want to see what he’d become.

Holmes is not a man to sit by once he’s made up his mind. By the time I came down the next day, a little dazed in the daylight, he had been out (it appeared) to collect a dozen papers, and had spread them round the sitting room. Blessedly, he had left my chair and the breakfast table uncovered, so I was permitted to pour myself coffee and supply a plate in peace, before a page was thrust before me and Holmes cried, “What do you think of this one, Watson?”

I peered at it. It looked like an ordinary paper. “It looks like an ordinary paper,” I said, attempting to push it aside, but he persisted.

“The advertisement, Watson.” I peered at it again. There was an advertisement circled in pencil, halfway down the page; I did not have my reading glasses, but I could recognise the lead: AMIDST LOVELY SCENERY IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND, and then a little lower, amid the fine print, For sale, a fine old house.

“My glasses, Holmes, please,” I grumbled. I had not slept enough, and I was only half out of dreamland. Contrition flashed across his face. He went to my desk to get the glasses while I took a long, soothing sip of my coffee. It was very good. It fortified me well enough that when he brought the paper back I found I was able to look at it properly.

“Well, that looks like far too much for us,” I said. It was clearly a rich man’s country home. “We want a bungalow, Holmes, or a cottage.”

“We do?” he said, but he sounded no less hopeful.

“Good Lord, yes. Do you mean to manage a full household’s affairs? Or do you want to sweep all those rooms yourself?”

“I do not,” said Holmes equably. He took the paper away, and for a few minutes I ate my toast and preserves in peace.

“What are you looking at?” I added when I had ventured farther into wakefulness. He was kneeling beside the settee amid the papers, muttering to himself.

“I think they’re all too much for us,” he said, and then, “Perhaps we need some help.”

“Undoubtedly. Might we consider an estate agent?”

“Oh, excellent,” he said, and leapt to his feet. “I’ll just call round at my brother’s for a recommendation, shall I?”

“Certainly,” I agreed, trying not to stare as he caught up his hat and walking-cane at once. He waved them at me, pink-cheeked and beaming, and swung out the door; I could hear him clattering down the stairs and Mrs. Hudson’s little “Oh!” as the door banged to behind him. He was being so precipitously cheerful about involving himself in all this domestic detail — he, the man who on our first acquaintance considered his essential self nothing but a mind, merely conveyed about by what he called the appendix of his mortal form.

Since I had come to stay with him again, I had looked for any change in him. He was steadier, I found, especially since he had given up the needle; less prone to moods of utter darkness, quicker to concede a need to rest, and quicker to praise me. But he had shown no other change toward me. He was still devoted only to truth and its discovery, as he had always been — so I had thought.

Now I found myself recalling the day I had been shot: the way he had rushed to me; the thrill of happiness overtaking my pain when I had found myself supported in his arms, led to a chair with shaking hands — when I saw his keen eyes filled with tears. I had felt that I could see into his soul, then. It would have been enough, I think, to know he could feel for me the way I’d felt when I had lost him; to understand that Holmes would weep for me.

But now he had sat before me bare — offered me his naked trust. And now he wanted something more with me than another adventure. He wanted to make a home together. What if I left with him, now? What would we be, away from the ever-watching eyes of London? I told myself I had settled those questions long ago — had never asked, but had been clearly answered all the same by everything he told me of himself. He had loved his work alone.

He was leaving his work behind, and taking me.

I was still walking round the sitting room in a muddle, picking up items one by one (a book of bad poems I’d bought with my first money from the Strand; an ink sketch of L’Arc de Triomphe he’d scribbled on a news-page; a specimen of iridescent beetle, dried and pinned in a case) and trying not to lose myself in helpless speculation. I was asking myself whether we’d want all this domestic detritus brought wherever we were going, and whether anywhere could feel as much like home after all these years, when I heard his step on the stair.

He returned, rumpled and baffled. He had been running his hands through his hair. His waistcoat was unbuttoned, his cravat disarranged. “Watson,” plaintive, “I need you” — seeming not to notice he’d caught me cradling his cherrywood pipe in both hands, halted at the sound of him. “Where are we going?”

“What do you mean?” I put the pipe back carefully; faced his earnest supplication.

He flung himself into his chair. “The house, Watson, the house! Where shall we find it?”

“Won’t the estate agent find it? Or didn’t your brother know any?”

“Oh, no, he gave me three names, of the highest quality, of course. But he says they’ll want to know where we are going, and what acreage we need, and how many rooms, and so forth and et cetera. Do tell me. Or tell them for me.”

I had to laugh. “You don’t know? You were the one who said you’d leave London!”

“Oh, I’d go anywhere; I’ll be happy if you are.” Said artlessly, almost carelessly.

No one had ever said anything so breathtakingly generous to me in all my life.

He did not seem to know he was being astonishing. He sprawled in his chair, long fingers fidgeting with his watch-chain, delicate eyelids drooping closed, and waited for me to think. I am not often granted the lightning flashes of insight which illuminate his mind. But now there sprung into my memory the last time we two had been long alone out of London. I saw in my mind Holmes in Cornwall — full of energy and joy, striding off across the moor, his slender silhouette dark against the heather. It had been too lonely a land for my taste, but though he had been weak and nervous when we’d left London, he’d found his strength there. He’d passed whole days out in the wind and the wild, returning long past tea-time to sit beside me and meditate peacefully over an evening pipe, while the ocean roared against the cliffs in the gloaming.

We needed space like that around us, I thought, for his sake. We needed a broad horizon. We needed a simple place out of the way of society. And I did not want to go back to Cornwall — but I had loved the sea.

“What about the south coast?” I said into the hush.

I saw a smile forming in the corners of his closed eyes.

“Good. Something simple, you said, of the cottage type?”

“Yes, please,” I said, and he opened his eyes to twinkle delight at me.

I did go to speak to the agent, in the end, not alone but with him, though he sat back with arms crossed and let me do all the talking. He kept looking at me indulgently, as though this retirement were a gift to me in particular. Then we went out together to lunch, where he entertained me by sketching on his cuffs the lay of the herb beds he wanted, explaining the virtues, flavours, and medicinal purposes of each of the plants at some length.

I proposed we learn to prepare them for ourselves. He laughed at me and declared that if we did not hire a cook, he should live on sandwiches and coffee for the remainder of his days. I maintained that I had made my own coffee over a campfire in the mountains and could certainly manage toast and tea at the least. I could see it in my mind’s eye, the two of us down on our knees on the hearthrug, burning our fingers on the toasting fork.

I followed the fantasy while we walked home and settled down with it while he cast off his coat, shrugged on a silk dressing gown, and began going through the day’s columns in search of items for his scrapbook.

“What shall I do, I wonder,” I murmured.

“What’s that?”

“While you are managing your studies. What shall I do with myself?”

“Whatever you like. Country doctoring?”

“Perhaps. But there will be an elderly, keen-eyed local fellow there, already in practice, whom all the old folk trust wholeheartedly. I shouldn’t like to tread on his toes.”

“Scribble away, then, I should think. Surely you aren’t done telling your tales?”

I laughed. If I “scribbled away” for the next ten years I might get through half the stories I had to relate. “I thought you didn’t like the way I write about you.”

“Well. I may have grown — reconciled to it.”

“Then of course I will. You know I think the world should know the remarkable things you do.” He scoffed and flapped a hand at me without looking up from his scraps. “And if the Strand goes on printing them, that will do for my spending-money.”

He snorted. “You hardly need that.”

“I’m a doctor who’s sold his practice, Holmes. I’ll be leaving behind the private patients I’ve retained, and I don’t have a great deal laid by.”

“For God’s sake, man, you needn’t lay anything by! All I have is yours too.” He did look up then; held my startled eye. “As it ought to be. You haven’t forgotten how often you’ve helped me? Or how meagre my trade was before you began to write about me? I should not have attempted half of what we’ve done without you. I told you — I have relied on you thoroughly.”

“Oh,” I whispered, moved past words. He took up the pages again and flipped through them in silence. The clock ticked away on the wall.

“And will you tell them you’ve gone with me?” he said suddenly.

“Who?”

“Your readers, Watson, the great British public. The loyal patrons of the Strand. Will you describe to them your writing desk set before a little window in the cottage’s south wall, looking out over the far blue horizon?” Said dreamily, in a clear dig at my style. “Or will you go on pretending that you keep your own rooms and your own company and only look in on me if I ask?”

He’d never mentioned this before. I’d thought we’d understood one another implicitly.

“My dear fellow, it’s hardly safer now than it was when I first wrote the lie.”

“‘My dear fellow,’ what do you mean?”

“Well, you know. The change in the law. The Blackmailer’s Charter. They are still after men like us.”

“I beg your pardon?” His tone sharpened further. I plunged on, in spite of a growing doubt.

“Don’t you remember? The case we took from the Uranian club — with those lovely young men, and the doctor who’d nearly turned them in. After it was through, I told them if they or any of their friends needed care — ”

“To come to you. I remember.”

“Well, they have. A number of them, for years now. Several of whom are rather caught up in the politics of it — trying to get the laws changed to something simply equitable. Extraordinary fellows. They’ve loaned me the books I’ve learned from, and pamphlets for the public, taking on the question of constitutional inversion from a scientific perspective. An exhilarating perspective, I found it, and liberating, and profoundly human  — ”

“Watson,” said Holmes. “You said, ‘men like us.’”

Of all times for him not to infer. It seemed he truly wanted me to say it. “Yes. Inverts, you know.”

“Us.”

“The Geschlect. Queer fellows. Off the usual course of things. Though Doctor Hirschfeld — he writes a lot of those pamphlets — he argues that there is no usual course. That the masculine and the feminine intermingle in nature, producing as many varieties of expression as there are souls — a manhood like yours, an affection like mine…”

I was running out of words. He was looking at me so oddly. Since I’d taken rooms on a Bohemian block with a bachelor of Holmes’ lax and improper type, he surely hadn’t thought me a man to stand on tradition for tradition’s sake. And he’d sworn off marriage in my hearing; had involved me fearlessly in the case of the poor boys being blackmailed; had allowed my devotion to him, and had given me his faith. Hadn’t he had any inkling of what I was? Had he dared all that without knowing?

“You are ‘not usual,’ either,” said Holmes softly.

I shook my head. My breath was coming a bit quick. Once, in medical school, they had brought in a man from a madhouse to parade before us; thin, shadowed, weary. He could not meet our eyes. They had called him a degenerate. I had carried his memory with me everywhere, long before I had understood anything. And yet —

“I am glad,” I said to his stillness, “not to be usual.”

He dropped his head, braced his hands on the table before him and laughed low, and my heart warmed. “So am I.”

Bravery had returned to me in a rush at that laugh. Bold again, I said, “And I’m glad for you to know it.”

“But?”

“But I will not write any more that I am staying with you. Not while I remain in real danger of the law. You, who’ve made so many enemies, keeping company with me — ”

“And proud to.” It was a murmur, but the accompanying glance was so warm it felt like a caress.

I almost shivered at it, but managed to go on anyway, “You are endangered by me.”

“I am saved by you.”

I could have groaned aloud. I could not let him go on being so terribly kind; I could not withstand it. I allowed some command into my voice. “I will not expose you to blackmail or worse for sentiment’s sake! I will go on pretending in print to visit you on occasion, as a fond old friend, until the chance of anyone being handed several years’ hard labour on suspicion of knowing me too well becomes a distant memory in England, please God.”

He turned his back to me; went to the hearth, took up the cherrywood pipe and fumbled to pack it. The back of his neck flushed and paled. I waited, helpless to ease his distress. I knew he was no stranger to peril. I hated being the source of it no less. I hated equally pretending in any form that I was anything less than devoted to him. How gladly I’d have admitted it to all the reading public, as I had when I was young, when the world was less at odds with me.

He turned back, face schooled into calm, and said, “Well, Watson. As you wish.” Bent with the tongs to take a coal from the fire and touch it to the bowl, and offered nothing more.

It was three weeks before the estate agent summoned us. He had four properties — four possible futures for us, spread across the coast. Holmes bent over them in silence for some minutes, and then he said, “This one.”

“Perhaps,” I said as mildly as I could, “we should see it first.”

“Oh, very well,” said Holmes, and I experienced the peculiar double vision I often did in his company. I knew from the agent’s perspective that I appeared the reasonable man, Holmes the impulsive. I knew he was in fact quite impulsive, and I (so I like to believe) generally reasonable, and yet I knew that in all likelihood Holmes was right. He had very probably seen something in the position and climate of the place, or remembered the arrangement of the area, or considered the square footage described in conjunction with each of our particular needs and preferences — and while unable to tell me what leaps of intuitive calculation had led him to such certainty, he would be proven (as a prophet of old might) quite correct in the end.

Or perhaps he simply wanted to choose and be done with it. At any rate, I thought, a little weekend trip would do us good. So the agent sent a letter, and the lady of the place wrote back with an invitation for us to stay there and see it for ourselves — a tucked-away house on the Downs.

We’d been planning for weeks. Still, lugging my carpetbag onto the afternoon train, I found myself unaccountably nervous. I settled into my seat while Holmes stowed my bag and his valise overhead — he liked to spare my shoulder when he could — and asked myself what on earth I was abashed by. I had ridden cosily beside him a hundred times en route to some strange scene with no trepidation at all.

It was the nature of our aim, I realised, watching Holmes pile round himself a dozen folios on domestic husbandry and the care of hives and herbs. We were not out together on a case; we were simply out together, looking for our happiness. He had not shied away from me since we had talked. He had not appeared to think again whether he would want to be seen with me, or to stay alone with me. He seemed to have simply taken me as I was — as he had always shown himself to me too.

How had he gained the courage with which he went about his days? I knew he was not always so coolly sure as he appeared. He startled when I praised him, and had been moved almost to tears when Lestrade once added his approval. Holmes had kept his cards close to his chest. He’d worked hard for his place in the world. Yet now he was surrendering it to start again with only me for surety.

“Watson,” said Holmes’ amused voice from behind his book. “Why are you watching me?”

I had in fact been staring at him for several minutes, unaware of myself.

“I was remembering something you said once, and wondering whether you stood by it.”

“That very much depends on what it is. Sometimes I talk utter nonsense to you.”

I had to laugh at that. “I know.”

“Well?”

“You said that a reasoner might perfect his religion by simply considering the flowers.”

“That’s rather a reduction, Watson.”

“Ah, but you do remember saying it.”

“I remember referencing the goodness of Providence, the definition of which might be distilled from a world in which flowers bloom and human minds find them lovely.”

“You see grace in the shapes in which life shows itself.”

“And in our capacity to love them, yes. So you did understand me.”

“A little,” I said, “I think,” and thrilled at his setting aside his book to give me his entire attention. “Tell me, is that where you find the courage?”

“Perhaps,” rather cautiously. “To — ?”

“To witness it — life. To try and defend what is good in it. To look for the honest truth of it, and offer that to all takers.”

“Watson, you’re waxing poetic.” But he was blushing.

“To want a home and a place in a world like this. To try to make one for us.”

“Yes.”

“To go on attempting to show me what you see, in spite of my limitations.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake.” He sounded flustered, almost annoyed, but his eyes — !

“To trust me.”

The steady motion of the carriage under our feet swayed us gently in our seats.

“Yes,” he said. “I think so, yes. If there is a goodness visible in — in the blossoming of things, why shouldn’t we count it worthwhile to claim our place in it? Why shouldn’t we offer what grace we can find to each other, while we still live? Surely if there is something sacred to be done with our little span of years — ”

“Yes,” I agreed, and I did reach out then, as I had been wanting to (for weeks, for always) — laid my hand on his slender knee.

His gaze dropped to it and stayed there; and then his hand crept up to cover mine. We sat in the sunlit silence together, holding on to each other’s living warmth, until the arrival brakes engaged and startled us apart.

Holmes had been quite right. The cottage was perfect: pale stone, thatched roof, front gate needing paint, hardy wild roses run rampant about it. I went up to the door with my heart in my throat. I had the key. Holmes had given it to me as we’d stepped off the train, and now he stood back and watched as I opened it up.

It was cool inside. The rug in the entry bore the marks of many years of comings and goings. I hung the key on the hook; put my hat up, too, and Holmes’, and stood and stared at them hanging there while he went ahead through the narrow hall.

“Aha,” he called, “the kitchen yard, my future fiefdom,” and there was the rasp and scratch of an old bolt being drawn, and he was out and away, leaving me to the house. I went into the front room in search of the fireplace. It was there, a squat old soot-stained affair with ancient iron sundries and an iron grate. I laid the fire and drew back the shutters to let in the light. Then I stood by while the dust shimmered and settled about me. There were bookshelves awaiting his indices and my novels; an elderly couch, its velvet worn thin over years, not too fine for him to kick up his bare heels on; an old-fashioned oil lamp on a table; a nook for my little desk. The hearth would welcome our rug and chairs. Holmes might stand there and play his instrument of a long evening. The window in the east wall showed a bit of deepening blue sky. Soon there would be stars in it.

The house was not yet a home, but it held the possibility of one, as a blank page holds the chance of a good tale, or an untuned violin of a night of music. There was scope enough here for our years.

I went to the kitchen in pursuit of kindling and matches and was waylaid by the realisation that I ought to be looking out for supper, too. We had not engaged domestic help for the few days we meant to stay — my memory of camp cookery was about to be put to the test. The cupboards appeared to be bare. A search of the pantry shelves turned up only tea and sugar and jars of preserves, and some gunnysacks heaped in the corner.

But on further investigation those last proved full of good, dry, earthy potatoes, and rose-cheeked apples, and fragrant walnuts and hazelnuts which must have overwintered there. We would have to go to town tomorrow; but to-night, we might bivouac happily by the fire, and I could prove to Holmes that at least my abilities in toasting were sufficient to our comfort. I could hear him banging about in the kitchen yard. A look out showed me a shed, which by the sounds of it he was turning inside out, and a few raised beds which looked hopeful for his dreams of cultivation. I grinned at them, dropped my eyes, and saw at last a bucket of kindling set by the back door.

I had a grand fire going by the time Holmes came in with cobwebs in his hair and raised his brows at the sight of me, sitting on the hearth-rug, surrounded by nuts and apples.

“Dinner, Holmes!” I said, and gestured broadly, welcoming him to my feast – enjoying the way his eloquent brows raised themselves further in intrigue before he broke into an answering grin.

“Excellent, Watson,” he returned, “but I believe I ought to wash my face first.”

“There are potatoes baking in the coals,” I returned. “If you hurry, I’ll let you have the first one.”

After we had eaten the potatoes, and hot, sweet apples from the toasting-forks, and nuts roasted at the back of the hearth log, and I had made us a passable pot of tea — after all that, when we were warm and satisfied, we dragged the settee closer to the fire and sat with our backs against it, our stockinged feet against the grate. Holmes’ eyes drooped half-lidded, his contented profile perfect, outlined in fire-glow. Behind the house, an owl called. Another answered him from somewhere out beyond us. The sea wind sung round the house, low and ageless.

Holmes said, “What are you thinking of?”

I had not expected the question, or I might have dodged it; now when I opened my mouth I found myself saying, “Of you.”

“Tell me,” with a shy sidelong glance.

“You are above all a devotee of science. Yet the majority of doctors are against men like you and I. The tide of opinion is only just beginning to turn.”

“Go on.”

“Did you never question your right to yourself? To be the man you are?”

“I did not. If the flowers bloom according to their nature, surely men must. Why, did you?”

“Question my right to — no. Not that.”

A nod — of approval, I thought. “You felt no shame? What, then?”

“Well, grief, I suppose.” As I said it, I knew it was true. “To realise the loneliness of my nature with the joy of it. To be in a crowd, and to know that any men like me must be silent, and I would not know they were with me. To understand that even those who loved me best might not like me if they knew. I grieved that.”

He murmured assent.

“And — I felt fear. For what could be done to me. For the chance of harming you, or losing you.”

Quickly, “You would never have lost me.”

“I know that now.”

“But you have not been sorry to be who you are.”

“I have not.” I looked at his earnest loveliness and felt the truth deserved a word. “Holmes,” I said, “you gave me that. I had been irreproachable. I had done everything my station and my country asked of me, until my usefulness was gone.”

“Hardly gone,” he interjected, but I was not finished.

“Listen. You must know. I was alone. You made me your friend. You let me help you search out the truth, and defend its discovery. And you helped whoever asked us honestly and scorned whoever would stop us, whatever their place in the world, and — ”

“Watson?” he said, when I halted at the words that had come to my lips.

“And I loved you for it. I love you.”

And then my voice was gone. But I had said what I had to say. The homely sound of the hissing coals held me calm while I waited for him.

He said, hoarse, “Do you like it here?”

“Very much.” In spite of my nerves I felt terribly tender toward that rough tone. “You knew I would.”

“You’ll be all right with me? You have everything you want?”

Against all my years of habit, in simple reverence to hope, I said, “No.”

“No?”

“No — I want — ”

“What is it?” he demanded.

“I want to hold you. If you want it too.”

A low sound escaped him. He turned to me, and I took him and gathered his strength against me. He let me take him; held onto me, too. I felt him sink into me and exhale slow into my hair. Felt as well as heard him murmur, “I also — I — feel the same. As you. I do too — love you.”

“Good,” I said, and a shiver broke over him. He held me tighter.

“You’re very warm,” he said, and then, “What else?”

“Mm?”

“What else do you want?”

I considered it, amidst the waves of happiness.

“Could I kiss you? Would you like that?” I pulled back just far enough to lift my face to him, and wonder of wonders, he met me there.

Some time passed in glorious discovery. He was careful at first, and I was gentle in return. But as I yielded to him, he found his mastery, and we were rather far along when he pulled back and said breathlessly, “What else?”

“What?” I felt quite past recollection of anything we’d been saying, but he laughed silently, and tugged at one of my earlobes in gentle remonstrance.

“What else do you want?”

“I thought you wouldn’t — you said you’d never — ”

“With you I would.”

He sounded quite sure, so it was all right after all to rest my head against his and say, “I’d like to have you. I would like to make you mine.”

It was a good thing I had not yet readied the bedrooms. In the end we only needed one. He and I lay wrapped up in one another, deep within a pile of country quilts, while we waited for the air to warm.

He said, “After everything you said, I thought you’d never risk this.” There was a little loving goading in his tone.

“Heavens, no, I said I’d never write about it. Personally, I’ll risk anything you like. I’d risk it all again right now if this room wasn’t so abominably cold.”

He laughed aloud. We were quiet a while, watching the shadows dance on the ceiling. Then, “If I’d known retirement would have this effect on you, I’d have suggested it sooner,” he said, his sensitive fingers playing over my nape, experimenting with the goosebumps he could raise.

“It’s just as well you didn’t. If this is our first day, imagine the effect twenty years will have on me. I’ll be ungovernable.”

I patted his heart, and he caught my hand fiercely; brought it to his lips.

“I hope so,” he whispered into the dark.

Somewhere beyond our walls, the high, bright stars shone over the rolling downs, while the eternal sea shaped the shore to itself. The slow current of Holmes’ breath joined its tidal draw in my imagination, till I surrendered and drifted out.