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It has been many years since the events of this account were first set out in printers’ ink in 1903, and even more years since they actually occurred. For all that he cast aspersion at my romanticising in converting his—occasionally dry—cases into stories I thought readers of The Strand Magazine might like to read, he was absolutely complicit in the production of this one.
The story published under the title of The Empty House had a great deal of truth in it. Ronald Adair was shot through a window by Sebastian Moran wielding an air rifle. Holmes sprung a trap to catch him in a vacant building that overlooked 221B Baker Street. But I was not by his side in that silent, brooding darkness. Indeed, had it not been for the diligence of the British press, I may have been none the wiser. For Holmes, in his haste to conclude that dreadful business, had not seen fit to inform me of his return.
Reading my old diaries from the Spring of 1894 brings me a strange concoction of emotions. I recall my ever-present grief at having lost my dearest friend. There is guilt that I did not remain by his side at that dreadful waterfall. Anger at his lack of consideration for my feelings was—as always—pointless, yet I felt it all the same. And, dancing on top of all the potentially crushing negativity, relief and joy at his return.
And fear—the immediate fear that my emotional reaction to his unexpected resurrection was too extreme.
We have come so very far in the intervening decades: to Sussex and a cottage; to a (mostly) peaceful old age; to a thorough understanding of our deep and lasting friendship. As I turn the fragrant, yellowed pages with their fading brown ink, I get the distinct feeling that the events of late March and early April of 1894 happened to someone else. A different John Watson and a different Sherlock Holmes.
I suppose, in a way, they did.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the Park Lane Mystery captured the imaginations of the London public. Ronald Adair’s death under shocking circumstances drew crowds of onlookers to Park Lane and stirred up a viper’s nest of gossip about motive and method.
As for myself, I cared not a whit for any of it. Holmes’s death had robbed me of my interest in crime. I still followed the papers and attempted to put his methods into practice in the days after his tragic end, but the memories of him were too close to the surface for me to see clearly. For my own sake I turned away from anything that reminded me of Holmes. I threw myself into my work as a doctor. When Mary took to her bed I devoted myself to her care, and when I stood at her grave for the first time I knew I’d lost everything.
The yarders called to pay their respects but only Lestrade continued with the occasional visit. I gave him no reason to return, but return he did– that stubborn demeanor forcing me to keep up some pretense at society. There is no way to repay him for what he endured in my lowest moments. I can only try to be a friend now that it’s in my power to give something of myself away again.
To my credit, I was as good a doctor to myself as I ever was to any of my patients, and like a good patient I followed my doctor’s advice. I kept a tantalus for occasions when Lestrade might drop by to ask if I had any thoughts on a current case, or (less predictably) one of my medical neighbours to ask if I would exchange a favour by looking after their patients for a day or two, but I never unlocked it alone. If tempted, I went for walks where, inevitably, I would find myself ambling up Baker Street on my way to Regent’s Park, and I would feel the ghost of Holmes’s arm linked with mine as I strolled around the rose garden.
On some days, these walks occurred rather late at night, at times when any sane man would be advised to remain by their hearth. But I had no control over what time of day or night I would be beset by visions of Holmes, memories of Mary, and feelings of how I had let them both down. Walking was not a cure, but it was a more effective distraction than lying in bed with nothing else to occupy my senses. On these occasions, I would get up, dress, and wander around gaslit streets—often with a silent nod to the plodding constable on his nightly beat—before the clattering carts and newspaper sellers fully woke the city up.
I was never bothered during these nightly excursions. Beyond the occasional unfortunate asking if I desired company (I did not) and the street urchins whose beseeching eyes often parted me from any small coins I might have in my pocket, I walked uninterrupted. My feet were so habituated to my route that I could allow my mind to wander where it will. I was, therefore, sometimes unaware of my immediate surroundings and at the mercy of our city’s more unscrupulous characters. I have no doubt that were I to take my night-time wandering to the area east and north of The Strand, I would have been violently robbed. Fortunately I never met such dire threat in the main thoroughfares of Kensington and Marylebone. I also reasoned that I was safe enough if I slipped into the utter darkness of Regent’s Park through a gap where one of the many gates did not quite close, as for a successful robbery the criminal would surely have to be able to see that his victim was worth the trouble before undertaking a crime that might earn him a hempen collar.
All of this is to say that on one particular night in early April of 1894 I was beset by bad dreams, and utterly riddled with feelings of shame that I had fallen for a ruse that took me from Holmes’s side at the Reichenbach Falls and guilt that I had not been able to save the life of my wife. I recall that it must have been around four in the morning: too early for sunrise and the bustle that accompanied it, too late for unwanted invitations to purchase companionship in the arms of a stranger. I walked my familiar beat, taking note of the sounds and scents of the still-slumbering city. At one point I half-imagined that I could hear the rattle and clatter of printing presses producing the early editions from which vendors would shout headlines in an hour or two.
I did not hear my attacker until his long, sinewy arms were around my upper body, pinning my arms to my sides, and his hand was over my mouth to stifle my yell of surprise.
I would have bitten down on those thin fingers had he not shoved a handkerchief between my teeth. For one terrible moment I feared chloroform but I only registered the taste of rough cotton as I threw my weight backwards and sent him skidding across the cobblestones. I spat out the makeshift gag and would undoubtedly have reached for my revolver if I still carried it. The figure melted back into the shadows but the attack activated some long dormant part of me. Without considering what danger lay ahead I gave chase to the fleeting shadow, half tripping over my feet in the process. Some interminable time later my legs burned and my heart hammered in my chest, but I was close enough to see his coat flapping as he dashed through an alley. I lunged forward, tackling him to the ground. We rolled this way and that, breathing hard, grappling at one another on the cold cobblestones. During our struggle, a mass of thick hair came loose in my hand. I discarded it in horror– what sort of monstrous shedding could have produced such a thing? I only had a moment to notice the head beneath it was not bald but capped with thin fabric and I knew I had removed a wig. Strange thoughts raced through my mind– was he an actor, had someone hired an actor to play a dreadful prank on me? Or was he simply mad? But now the face of my assailant turned towards me and the black satin mask was crooked across it and I recognized the nose and the grimace and the sharp glint in the eyes and I shouted as I scrabbled away from the haunting figure like a hand flying from a burning stove.
Shock robbed me of my voice as the apparition shoved the satin mask roughly into a coat pocket and regarded me warily from where it lay. A line of blood ran from the corner of its mouth, giving my heart another faint jolt. The ghost bled.
Not a ghost, then.
For several seconds I could not comprehend the information supplied by my own senses. Put simply, I did not believe my eyes. The apparition slowly got to his feet and reached down to me.
“My dear boy, I ought to have known better than to accost an old campaigner.” He smiled, uncertainly. “Will you allow me to help you to your feet?”
The doubt in his voice, and the hope beneath it, spurred me to accept his offered hands. I gripped tightly—no phantom could be so solid—and pulled myself upright, head spinning with far more than just the physical effort.
I looked into those familiar, grey eyes. “Holmes! But you’re dead!”
“I am pleased to assure you of the contrary.” He flashed me an ephemeral grin then his face turned serious. He stroked my cheek and I was surprised to feel that there was dampness there. He spoke quietly. “A thousand apologies! I had no idea you would be so affected.”
To this day I have no idea what came over me. I believe I babbled words such as you’re alive and you’re not dead and other such statements that would have a different Holmes chastising me for wasting breath by stating the obvious. Once my reeling brain had caught up with the evidence presented to it, I was overtaken by the sudden terror that this was all in my imagination and that Holmes would vanish, dissolve back into roaring mist, and I would be once more bereft.
I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him.
He froze long enough for me to be aware of the taste of blood in my mouth and how horribly, dreadfully thin he was beneath the shapeless disguise. I expected to see shock on this face when I pulled back but his eyes were squeezed shut and tears pooled freely at their corners. He drew me back in and pressed his lips against my forehead, likely smearing blood on my face, and I did not care except that he was in pain.
Then I remembered the preceding events and a shaky exhale escaped me.
“You attacked me, Holmes.”
“Forgive me,” he murmured against my temple. “Having done worse by you than attempted kidnapping I... well, in for a penny, in for a pound.”
“I don't understand.” I managed, voice thick with tears. Were we really clutching one another and crying on a dark London street? “Are you in trouble? Is there danger?”
“Yes, at least there was, on both counts.” Holmes pulled away until we were at arm’s length, His hands rested firmly on my shoulders and he looked deep into my eyes. “You must believe me when I say that I saw no other course of action: first to keep you safe from Moriarty’s most loyal supporter; then to reveal myself to you in a manner that would not shock you.”
The absurdity of his words pushed me out of my overemotional condition. I blinked away my tears, fumbled for my handkerchief, and I laughed.
“Well, Holmes, you may have succeeded at the first but your tactics on the second point are sadly lacking.”
I felt rather than saw or heard his laughter—the slight vibration of his chest and shoulders conducted down his tense arms to his firm hands, and thus to my shoulders.
“Indeed. I miscalculated more than once today.” He looked around us. “The sun will be up soon and the newspapers will literally hit the streets. Let us away somewhere I can explain myself.”
I nodded. He linked his arm with mine and we walked out of the alley. Many questions presented themselves in my mind, but I was still so overcome with events that I could not find the words to ask them. When we turned the corner into Baker street, I felt like I was reliving a dream. When Holmes fitted his key into the door of 221B and unlocked it, my head spun and he had to assist me over the threshold.
“What about Mrs Hudson? We’ll need water from the kitchen,” I added, thinking only to clean our faces and tend his wound.
“Mrs Hudson has gone to stay with a friend. Mycroft pays her to keep our old rooms in working order; clean them once a week, air them out, and change the bedding.”
I had many questions about this, not least what a terrible ordeal that would be for poor Mrs Hudson, keeping up the pretense of her dead tenant’s occupation, but they died on my tongue when he lit the lamps.
I saw his face clearly in the low light and struggled not to let out a sound that would betray my despair at his changed countenance. The Holmes returned to me was older than the toll of three years upon the body. His cheeks were hollow, and the bags beneath his eyes more pronounced, giving his hawkish nose a sharper appearance. Blood pooled and clotted at the corner of his mouth and I excused myself to the kitchen to fill a washing bowl with water from the hand pump. Holmes preceded me up the stairs, practically twitching with nervous energy. He perched on our settee, gazing up at me with something akin to worry. Or fear.
“Close your eyes,” I ordered, slipping into my old habits like a comfortable pair of gloves. We were the detective and the doctor once again, and I was patching up my dearest friend after the night’s adventure. I washed his face with my handkerchief and found that the cut on his lip was not as deep as I feared. Before I washed myself I took care to clean his hands, though his bony knuckles nearly moved me to tears.
“When did you last eat?”
He waved my concern away. “I find I can’t stomach more than a little at a time these days. Tea and bread this morning.”
“You must have regular meals starting tomorrow.”
“Yes, John,” he said quietly.
If he noticed my shock at his method of address he said nothing, merely stared at me with those keen grey eyes that looked too large in his gaunt face. I brought his hand to my mouth and kissed his palm.
“Tell me tomorrow will come– that I won’t lose you again.” I could not look at him then for fear that once I began to weep I would not stop.
“You will never lose me again.” He swallowed audibly. “I’ve wronged you terribly, haven’t I? I let you believe I was gone. How can you… How can you still…”
I pushed the basin away, left the handkerchief wrung out on the side, and reached for him.
He reclaimed my mouth before I could grasp the gravity of this new development. I breathed against his lips and then his tongue slipped out to touch mine so tentatively– as though he did not know what he sought, only that he had to have a taste. I sucked on the tip with a shameless moan and he buried his face in my shoulder immediately after.
Without further ado we busied ourselves in lovemaking in the most carnal sense of the word, I feared I might hurt him in my ardor but he was as strong as I remembered, despite his slight form. We did not undress but groped at one another through our clothes. When his hands gripped the curves of my buttocks and squeezed I understood that he meant to have me and I whispered “By God, Sherlock, you scintillate tonight.”
His laughter was a balm to my heart.
We rutted like dogs; hips thrusting in tandem until I slipped a hand down to caress his trapped erection and silenced his cries with another kiss. I cannot bear to write more without blushing. Suffice to say we pleasured one another twice over because I could not get enough of his smell, his heat, and the taste of his skin.
Eventually, exhaustion took us and we stumbled as far as Holmes’s bed, and we slept. I awoke several hours later confused, with the feeling of having had a dream that was as vivid as it was affecting, and I tried desperately to cling to its gauzy remnants like a drowning man grasping at seaweed, but wakefulness chased it from my mind. I blinked at the ceiling: where was my chipped plaster cornice? Why was the paint yellowed? I closed my eyes and suddenly understood that I was in 221B Baker Street. The scent of Holmes’s favourite tobacco was a warm and welcome assault on my senses, and with the recognition came a flood of memories of the previous night.
Desperate to see Holmes, to reassure myself of his solid presence under my hands, I sat up. Light slanted through the curtains and fell on clothing strewn across the floor. Holmes was nowhere in sight and I could not hear the familiar rustle of newspaper or tapping of his pipe upon the hearth. I got out of bed and retrieved the items of clothing I had hastily shed. As I dressed, I mulled over the miracle of Holmes’s return. I had not given him the chance to explain the mystery of his existence, or the fact that he had taken so long to reveal himself to me—or the ungentlemany manner of this revelation.
As I went to the sitting room in search of a few still-missing items of my wardrobe, I half expected to see Mrs Hudson rattling through the sitting room door bearing a breakfast tray of coffee and boiled eggs. But I was halted in my tracks by a sight that in my fatigue and delirium in being reunited with Holmes I had missed: in the window stood a wax effigy of Holmes himself. Upon closer inspection, it was irretrievably damaged by what looked like the small entry wound of a bullet just above the right eyebrow, and the untidy exit wound above where the left hand side of the occipital ridge would be.
The implication that Holmes’s precious life may still be endangered made me shudder. I turned my attention to the rest of the room, and my eyes alighted on the morning edition of the newspaper.
Sherlock Holmes Returns From The Dead!
“Ah! My dear, I see you have found the rather lurid report that only the very best of British journalists could churn out within an hour or two of the actual event itself.”
Holmes stood in the doorway. I chuckled at the delightful sarcasm in his voice. How I had missed his acerbic wit!
“Should I read it to find out how your resurrection was accomplished, or will you tell me? I would rather hear it from you first.”
Holmes looked down and to the side, giving him the demeanor of a convicted man in the courtroom. ”In truth, I would far rather you heard it from me than read it in some sensationalist report.” He took the hand I held out to him, but dropped it. “John, I am sorry to confess that it was the threat of exactly that occurrence that prompted my drastic actions last night.”
I put one hand on his shoulder and the other on his cheek to turn his face towards me. I held his gaze steadily. “Sherlock, are you telling me that you kidnapped me to prevent me from reading this morning’s headlines?”
He nodded slowly. His eyes held wariness, as if he anticipated the need to flee. I schooled my expression, but he sensed how close I was to laughter and his features softened.
”I think,” I said firmly, “you ought to explain.”
“I owe you an explanation but I need more time than we have.”
“Oh?”
“Mycroft made sure that our Mrs Hudson would be away these past few nights but the moment she sees this newspaper she will hurry back. We must prepare for her arrival.”
He then told me briefly the truth of what had happened at the falls and the details in the death of Ronald Adair; how he had run afoul of Moran and how his terrible murder had given Holmes the opportunity required to set a trap in Camden house on the other side of Baker Street. Holmes had not been entirely alone. Help had been enlisted from a contact in London who didn’t know his true name to come to our old rooms and move the wax bust of Holmes in order to make it appear as though he were back in residence.
“I thought about asking Mrs Hudson,” he later admitted, “but I couldn’t bear to bring either of you so close to Moran. And there would have been questions and explanations I didn’t have time for.”
He explained how Moran had been fooled long enough for Scotland Yard to capture him. I faltered at this.
“Lestrade knew you were alive and in London?”
“Only at the last moment. They were given orders to appear at the right time. Sherlock Holmes wasn’t involved.”
I nodded but a gnawing doubt rose in me. Holmes seemed to sense it for he rushed to explain the rest.
“I admit I had not quite worked out the particulars of the plan to reveal myself to you. Only that you must be rescued swiftly by me after an abduction by some mysterious assailant.”
“You thought I would be so relieved to be rescued that I would not be angry.”
“No!” Holmes insisted. Then he paused to consider. “Well… now that you mention it I suppose that was a factor in my method.”
Our shocking reunion and the ensuing demonstration of our mutual feelings had left no room for me to consider the implications of Holmes’s plan. Nor had I cared at that moment where he’d been all those years, only that he was alive and I was the most fortunate man in the world.
Now I had questions, each one more demanding than the next. The hazy joy of my waking moments was spoiled by his confession. It took me a moment of silence between us to realize that it wasn’t anger that squeezed my heart and stoked my desire for answers; it was the devastating pain of certainty that I was not good enough for Sherlock Holmes to put faith in. Perhaps I never would be.
“Have I not proved myself trustworthy enough that you could have revealed the truth from the beginning? Could I not be counted upon to keep this secret locked up with all the others I have guarded carefully during our association?”
“No.”
The word sounded like a gunshot, and the glint of steel in his eyes felt like the sharpest blade. I stared, jaw slack, then I swallowed, stepped back and looked away. Shame burned within my ribcage.
“I see.”
I turned to pick up my coat and hat so that I could flee, but before I could walk away his hand clasped around my wrist. He impeded my escape with a firm yet gentle grip.
“I promise I had the very noblest of reasons for my deception, and that I hold you in high esteem as the very noblest of men.”
He had begun calmly and quietly, but as he continued, I detected a rising note of concern—perhaps even panic—in his voice.
“I intended no insult! Will you… If you must leave, then you must leave. Only promise me that you will return and offer me the opportunity to explain my actions fully.” He paused. “John?”
The feeling in my chest swelled from shame to anger. I rounded on him and stabbed my finger at his chest. “How could you! Have I not been worthy of your trust? Have I not been your most loyal companion?”
I could think of nothing else to say, or perhaps all the words I might have said tumbled over each other in my head and could find no exit. I glared at his shocked expression, rooted to the spot and unable to speak.
He threw his arms around me and cradled my head against his shoulder, awkwardly turning his head to kiss my cheek and my forehead.
“I wanted to, oh my dear, but I did not dare.”
I softened against him despite myself, too starved for his presence to let my temper overrule my heart.
“You have wounded me, Holmes,” I said, as I gently extricated myself from his embrace, not to flee but to face the conversation and whatever would come of it.
“I know. But I beg you to ask yourself– truly ask yourself, if you knew I was alive would you have let me go? Would you have promised to stay out of danger and let me suffer these long years on my own wits and the occasional funds from Mycroft? Could you have permitted me to live in the shadow of death while you continued your life in London pretending to mourn me?”
He damned well knew the answer and so did I but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Not when he owed me more than the paltry excuse that it was for my own good.
“You could have sent word without revealing your location.”
“I wish to God I had. As the months passed I was sorely tempted to. I missed you dreadfully, John, so much so that I sometimes felt it would have been easier to die with Moriarty.”
“Dying is easy. Everyone does it, eventually. It’s living that’s difficult when everyone you held dear has gone.”
I snapped my words out, and immediately regretted both my words and my tone. I took a deep, slow breath, watching his face, seeing the etched lines—old and new—deepen as the eyes screwed shut.
”Let’s not argue,” I said with a shake of my head and a sigh. “You are right—this discussion is destined to be a long one. I don’t want to be angry with you. I want to be—I am—so very happy to have you back from the grave.”
We embraced once more, and had it not been for the sound of the street door opening and crashing shut, I would have pulled him back to bed, even if just to lie there and look at him.
“Are you really there, Mr Holmes?” The somewhat frightened but sorely missed voice of our old landlady called up the stairs.
He gripped my hands for a moment and then rushed to the landing.
“Yes, Mrs Hudson, we’ll come down to you.”
“I should stay here,” I murmured, “you may be in for the scolding of your life.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “That’s precisely why I need you with me.” He bade me to follow him and we tentatively emerged at the bottom of the stairs to see Mrs Hudson smartly dressed in a walking suit and straw hat, her eyes brimming with unshed tears.
“I knew Mr Mycroft Holmes had not paid me to keep these rooms for sentiment but I did not dare imagine you survived."
She clasped her hands to her chest as she said this and I had the distinct impression that it was to prevent herself from pulling him into an embrace. I understood the impulse.
“How wicked of you both to keep this secret from me. But I will forgive you if you’ll sit and have tea with an old woman. I have so many questions, and I refuse to wait until the doctor writes his story!”
I forced a laugh at her words. The assumption that I must have known the truth was a fresh blow to my wounded heart.
“It is I who is doubly at fault,” Holmes said, carefully avoiding even a glance in my direction. “The good doctor is entirely blameless.”
Mrs Hudson gaped from Holmes to me and back again. “Do you mean to tell me that you kept Dr Watson in the dark, too? Shame on you!”
There was a moment of silence, then dear Mrs Hudson burst out weeping. Holmes, in a rare moment of sentiment, put his arm around her shoulders and murmured an apology. Holmes looked helplessly at me, and as he released Mrs Hudson, I took her other elbow.
“I have forgiven him,” I said, and the instant I said it I knew it was almost the truth. “Now, how about that tea you promised?”
“Of course!”
Mrs Hudson bustled off to the kitchen. Holmes looked at me with relief and gratitude.
“Have you?” He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Forgiven you?” I scoffed. “Even if I have, you must expect this matter to resurface occasionally for further discussion.”
Holmes considered this and reached for my hand. As I gazed into his eyes and squeezed his hand in return I knew I would, in time, absolve him of everything. Impossible man that he was, I’d made peace with his eccentricities long ago.
Holmes spent the morning regaling Mrs Hudson and I with the night’s adventures while she supplied hot tea and cold sandwiches of potted beef amongst other treats from her larder. Holmes’s hearty appetite brightened my mood. I surreptitiously patted his thigh under the table when he took another hard boiled egg for himself.
Eventually Mrs Hudson began to tidy. We took a walk to allow her time to put her home in order.
“Will you move back in straight away?” I asked as we rambled down Baker Street arm in arm in our tradition from the old days.
“For Mrs Hudson’s sake, yes.”
“Don't play coy with me, you missed her too.”
“I did,” he admitted. “Besides, I don't have anywhere else to go.”
“You could always come stay with me.”
“Extremely generous of you, considering what I've put you through.”
“My dearest friend has returned to me. However else I may feel about the manner, I have generosity to spare.”
After an hour’s pleasant exercise in the unseasonably fair April weather we returned to find Mrs Hudson on her way down the staircase leading to my old bedroom.
“Everything is made up fresh for you, Dr Watson, in case you’d like to stay the night.”
“Of course,” I stammered, realizing that only Holmes’s bed showed any signs of being slept in.
Mrs Hudson continued downstairs to her rooms, and we closed the sitting room door behind us. We removed our hats and helped each other out of our overcoats. The fire had been lit for us and crackled merrily in the hearth. Holmes walked to the fireplace and lit a cigarette. The familiarity of the street sounds coming through the windows and the scent of the blue-grey tobacco smoke that curled toward the ceiling made my head reel.
“You will,” Holmes said as he turned to face me, an uncertain lilt to his words. “Stay?”
I considered the question, and the patients I might have lost that morning due to my unexplained absence. Holmes turned away, resting one hand on the mantelpiece and waving the other in a brisk arc, the cigarette jammed between his fingers.
“If not tonight, then tomorrow, perhaps. When you have made whatever arrangements you deem absolutely necessary.”
“You want that?” I asked, tentatively. “You want everything back exactly the way it was before…” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes as I imagined a future that looked like the idealised past. “Before Mary? Before your dea— disappearance?”
”Not exactly,” He said quietly. Then he whirled around to face me and spoke louder. “No. Not exactly. While I was in my necessary exile, I had plenty of opportunity to think about what it was that made me so desperate to return as soon as England was safe for me. And, with me in it, for you.”
I sat in my old armchair and waited silently for Holmes to elaborate. He gave me a quick, knowing smile as I automatically reached under the seat for a pair of slippers that was not there.
He perched on the edge of his chair, leaning forwards. “Your behaviour towards me in the early hours of today, when you realised I had returned. Was that merely a reaction provoked by shock, or an indication of a deeper sentiment?”
I sat on the edge of my chair and leaned forwards too. “Can’t it be both?”
He let out a great sigh. “I always prided myself that I was the more rational man and you were the one whose mind was clouded by emotion. But I found within a few weeks that when my thoughts turned to John H Watson, I could not think rationally at all.” He huffed out a laugh and flicked his cigarette end into the fire. “I entertained the most ridiculous fantasies.”
I laughed. “About me?”
He held my gaze and nodded. “Oh, yes. I thought of all the things I had not said, not done, and I imagined it.” Looking away, he added, “Of course, I may have been delirious after expending too much of myself in tracking Moriarty's men.”
“These fantasies,” I said, reaching out to capture his hand. “What exactly did they involve?”
“Hah!” He grinned at me. “You have already helped me to recreate at least two of them.”
I grinned back at him. “Perhaps, then, when I have collected a few essentials from my house and all threat of unexpected callers has passed, we can recreate another.”
”In that case,” he said as he stood up, encouraging me to my feet with a gentle tug on my hands, “you had better fetch your slippers and I had better wait here for Lestrade’s inevitable visit.”
“I daresay you will have to repeat your story many more times before the week is out.”
He shot me a wry smile.
“You're enjoying this far too much.”
“A bit of penance may do a world of good.”
I wanted to slip my arms around him again, to demand a kiss as further penance, but a sudden and serious thought stopped me in my tracks.
“There is something I must know the truth of. I will never ask you again but I cannot, I will not live with the doubt. It's too great a burden for any man to shoulder.”
Holmes nodded as though he'd been expecting something like this.
“If Moran hadn't returned to London, had never committed a murder, would you have kept up the pretense of your death forever?”
The silence in response wore harder on my heart than any of his prior confessions. After an intolerable moment he spoke.
“I don't know. That's the truth, John. I don't believe I was capable of holding out forever, but I have asked myself the question and I have no answer. Am I selfish enough to jeopardize your life for my own comfort? Would I have sent a message and let you endure my secret with no resolution? Or would I have simply disappeared with the knowledge that if nothing else you were safe? I'm told that love requires sacrifice. Is my love for you stronger than my need for you? My flaws have never been so clear to me as they were those terrible years without you.”
I shut my eyes, overwhelmed by the surge of conflicting emotions.
“Thank you for being honest, however difficult the truth might be.”
His hand stroking my cheek prompted my eyes to open. I leaned in slightly to the gentle touch.
“However hard it is to hear, please know that it is also hard to speak of it. What I put you through was difficult. What I went through—”
”I know, Sherlock.” My hand covered his. I pressed his palm against my face and kissed it. “I will, as you suggest, fetch my slippers.”
He laughed softly. “The painful truth matters, but perhaps it does not need to be revealed all in one fell swoop.”
I smiled despite my inner turmoil. “You love me?”
He vibrated with laughter. “You doubt it?”
“You’ve provided me ample proof over the years though you've never said the words. Perhaps I should have told you first. I love you. I have always loved you. I’m your man.”
I hesitate putting this to paper. I’ve never been shy of my romantic feelings towards men but Holmes is special. Even with the certainty that I alone will read these diaries, I cannot bring myself to record what he told me in return. Those words of devotion are safely in my heart and their spell will not be broken by committing them to something as mundane as ink.
We exchanged a chase but heartfelt kiss and I hurried back to a home that no longer felt like home. Mary’s death had transformed it from a place of security and respite to a mere collection of rooms; indifferent architecture that anyone might inhabit as easily as I.
It took me barely half an hour to pack my essentials and another half hour to arrange for my patients to be seen by a colleague for a day or two, then I was back at 221B Baker Street, putting my own key in the door and walking up the seventeen stairs as if I had never really left. Holmes was not in the sitting room, but there were all the familiar, tell-tale signs of his presence: the newspapers strewn here and there; the rack of pipes and the Persian slipper, the violin left jutting out of its case as if it were the commonplace instrument of a student and not a cherished Stradivarius.
Holmes emerged from his room as I took out the slippers I had left at the top of my valise and placed them under my chair. He watched me from the doorway, a faint smile on his lips.
”I’ll put my things upstairs, then you can regale me with tales of your adventures.” I smiled. “I expect a full account of where you have been and what you have been doing for these three years.”
“You will allow me to help you with your clothing?”
”My dear, I can manage!” I took in his expression, which conveyed far more meaning than his words. I chuckled with slight embarrassment. “I see what you mean. Yes.”
I took his hand and led him upstairs to reclaim my old room and my new lover.
We took our time undressing one another and taking inventory of new scars, freckles, and imperfections. Having spent time with him in bathhouses I knew his form quite intimately and it pleased me that he’d made a similar study of mine. He spent time tutting over a barely healed wound on my thigh where i’d cut myself right through the trousers on a splintered doorframe. I kissed a new spot just under his ear which he blamed on the sun. We tumbled into bed together and took our time learning one another anew.
It was a full hour before I remembered that my open valise still lay on the sitting room floor.
Though my recollection in print stops there my memories do not. The details of those first few days remain clear in my mind and have brought me great comfort since. The man I was in 1894 believed his diaries would die with him. It is Holmes who encourages me to return to them in the hopes that after our death the truth of The Empty House will be revealed to the public. As to how that public will judge our unorthodox relationship, I care not, save that it might reach the ears of those men and women whose sympathies lie with ours.