fic for graycardinal: Art in the Blood
Title: Art in the Blood
Recipient: graycardinal
Author: rachelindeed
Characters/Pairings: Gen; Mycroft Holmes, John Watson, Sherlock Holmes
Verse: Murder By Decree (1979 film)
Rating: G
Warnings: Major spoilers for the movie (the fic gives away the film’s ending)
Length: 4,700 words
Summary: After the events of Murder By Decree, Mycroft Holmes leaves the British government and tries to decide what to do with the rest of his life.
Author’s Note: Thank you, garonne, for a fantastic beta. Readers familiar with the film might recall that Mycroft does not appear in it at all, which I felt was a missed opportunity. This fic explores the aftermath of the film’s events from his point of view. His characterization is based on that of the ACD stories. For readers unfamiliar with the movie, I think you will be able to follow the fic without much trouble. However, I’m providing a plot summary under the spoiler cut for anyone who might find it helpful:
[Murder By Decree summary]In Murder By Decree, Holmes (played by Christopher Plummer) and Watson (played by James Mason) try to stop Jack the Ripper, who is murdering women in Whitechapel. They ultimately discover that the Prime Minister and other high government officials hired this killer as part of a plot to silence all the women who knew about a royal scandal. Prince Albert Victor had secretly married a working-class Catholic named Annie Crook, and they had a daughter together. To eliminate this embarrassment, high-ranking political conspirators forced Annie into an asylum and tried to hunt down her child. But, with the help of Annie’s friends - the women who were targeted for murder - the child was safely hidden away. In a confrontation with the murderer, Watson is stabbed in the shoulder with a hot poker and Holmes has to defeat Jack the Ripper alone. In an emotional closing sequence, Holmes confronts the Prime Minister and the other conspirators about their murderous crimes, but agrees not to reveal what he knows to the public as long as they leave the surviving young child in peace.
Also on AO3: "Art in the Blood"
I gave a moment's thought to clearing my desk, but there was no need. The flurry of information that regularly passed through the office had already been pruned to its essentials and appropriately filed. Everything was up to date down to last evening's telegrams. The multitudinous connections between subjects could not be so easily captured, but anyone who studied my organizational system might begin to intuit the most important lines of intersection.
My successor would not be able to keep the system running, of course. But the existing record could provide a foundation for the next few years of policy, should he have the wisdom to apply it. All the better for him if he realized within the first fortnight that he would need to hire a staff to handle the daily queries. It would take six or seven men to fill my place as best they could.
The desk itself was walnut, its lines and surface largely free from scratches. I had always been careful of my keys. A square of sunlight positively blazed off the polish, and I found that I was absently running a finger across the familiar scrolling.
There came a gentle tap at the door. "Come in," I said, leaning heavily on the desk to maneuver myself out of the chair. If I were to be fired, it was best to meet the news on my feet.
However, the door swung open to reveal an unexpected visitor. Dr. Watson lifted his cane in distracted greeting whilst attempting to nudge the door closed behind him with his foot. His right arm hung limp and useless in a white linen sling.
"Doctor Watson, I had taken you for a man of sense!" In truth I had taken him for no such thing, but the reproach rose unbidden. He must know it was far too soon for any man with his injuries to be travelling across town. I rounded the desk and offered an arm of support, which he accepted with a wry, near-silent laugh. After assisting him to the wingback chair nearest the fireplace, I poured a strong brandy. It was clear from his eyes that he had declined narcotics, at least for today, and the jostling ride to Whitehall had drained the colour from his face. I knew too little about the effects of a hot poker stabbed through flesh to be sure whether he was blistering or bleeding, but I eyed him sternly as I deposited the glass in his hand. "My dear sir, if you collapse on my carpet neither I nor my brother will be quick to forgive."
"Duly noted," he nodded, and the languid drawl of his voice lengthened and lowered as he winced. He downed my restorative with a smooth flick of the wrist, then settled back in his chair with a sigh. I lowered myself into the chair opposite and regarded him, bemused. So far as I could recall, we had never exchanged so much as a word in private.
"You dressed hurriedly," I observed. "And enlisted your page to help with the buttons. I take it, then, that you remained in your bed and shammed the willing convalescent until Sherlock let you out of his sight?"
"Mr. Holmes," he waved a hand, politely tabling the topic of his health. "We haven't much time. As best I understand it, your brother is in a private meeting with the Prime Minister, vigorously denouncing him and several of his colleagues in the highest echelons of this government. Given their abominable cowardice and villainy, he has my complete support in doing so, and doubtless yours as well. That is, I assume you are now in possession of the facts?"
I blinked at his directness, then nodded my assent.
His head canted backward, sunk into the chair, but his tired eyes held mine. "I'm afraid he has not stopped to think of what will happen once the blackguards turn on you. I fear they will destroy your career simply because it lies in their power to do so. Holmes holds cards enough in his hands to protect the poor child at the heart of this conspiracy, which is the essential point. But they are not men to be crossed without consequence, and I think we must endure whatever petty revenge they choose to indulge.
I fear they will strike back at him through you. I could not let such a blow fall on you without warning. I confess I can't see any means of averting it, but perhaps you can. I know that Holmes would never have wished to leave you unguarded. But he failed those valiant women, you see." Dr. Watson paused briefly, pained. "The guilt is tunneling his vision."
Regret rose sharply within me, for I deserved an equal share of blame. How many horrors might have been prevented had I recognized the corruption around me before it was too late? My grief made little outward show, save for a fine tremor that passed through my hand where it lay on my knee. Dr. Watson had been too long in my brother's company to fail to observe it.
Quietly, he said, "My dear fellow. I know what your work must be to you, for I know what his is to Holmes. That the nation should lose a great and honest mind to this dirty business, just when such qualities are most needed in Whitehall, is a damned injustice."
"Not at all, Dr. Watson." I smiled at his surprise. "As soon as the facts of the case became clear to me, lamentably late though that was, I saw that there remained no future for me in this government. I sent in my letter of resignation this morning, though I expect it to be overlooked. After Sherlock is done with them, they will want to fire me directly. When I heard you at the door, I expected someone had come to give me my notice. But I am most grateful that you took such pains to put me on my guard. And your visit has not been wasted, for you have greatly relieved my mind."
"Oh? I'm delighted to hear it," Dr. Watson said, "though I can't see how."
"I was afraid that Sherlock had not spoken with me about this case because he feared to find me complicit." The doctor's puzzlement intensified to shock; plainly the thought had never crossed his mind. I drew a deep breath, startled to feel my fatigue recede for a moment like sand beneath a tide. I had not known what a weight of uncertainty lay upon me until it lifted.
Sherlock could not have hidden such painful suspicions from his friend, I felt sure. However imperfectly Dr. Watson followed my brother's thoughts, of his heart he kept a firm command. Had Sherlock feared so intimate a betrayal as mine, Dr. Watson would have sensed it. That I had merely been forgotten during the crisis was the best news I could have hoped for. "I am a solitary man, Dr. Watson. More so even than my brother. For the sake of business I have cultivated patrons and colleagues as any civil servant must. But my reputation in their eyes is little enough to lose. I have need of no man's praise, but my brother's trust I could not do without."
"You have it, sir," Watson said simply.
"As for the work, this is one of many areas in which Sherlock and I are of opposite tempers. He lives and dies by his profession. It was a terrible struggle for him to find anything that could hold his interest and channel his energy, you understand. I have considerably less energy, but compensate with far wider interests. There is little, in fact, that does not fascinate me. The government offered me the chance to cast my nets wide, and I have feasted for many years on information of all types. But the advantage of an omnivorous curiosity is that it may feed itself anywhere. Her Majesty's government may cast me out, but I shall not starve, Dr. Watson. Neither in the streets nor in my head."
Dr. Watson smiled, his broad face creasing in every direction at once. "Excellent. Shall we wait here together for the vultures, then?"
"I should be most glad of the company."
I refilled his brandy, helped myself to the port, and we spent an amiable quarter hour in silence. I had no cigar to offer him, for I did not smoke, an eccentricity that drew more comment than any of my mental feats. Dr. Watson's eyelids gradually drooped, and he had nearly drifted off when a knock sounded again at the door.
He was on his feet before I managed to rise, standing firm with the self-possession that good soldiers never lose. The door swung open without any pause for invitation and my brother swept into the room. He was subtly marked by recent distress and already mid-speech.
"…truly sorry to have dragged you into this wretched affair, Mycroft, but I trust you will for - Watson, what the devil are you doing here?"
"I wasn't sure you would think to alert him," Dr. Watson said, dropping his careful stance and leaning more openly on his cane. "You know you don't always remember such things."
"Sit down before you fall down, for God's sake! What do you take me for?"
They immediately began talking over one another, Sherlock's reproachful patter overlaying Dr. Watson's muttered protests. There was something indefinably funny about it, and their fussing reached a crescendo when they managed to invoke the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers in dramatic, irritated unison.
I was leaning against the open door, amused despite myself, when Stevenson of the Home Office discreetly touched my elbow and delivered the missive dismissing me from my country's service. It was not a moment in my life that I would have expected to remember fondly. Which only goes to show that there remained much of importance that, even at the height of my powers, I could never predict.
My brother has often, and with some justification, called me an unambitious man. Nevertheless, it did feel odd and rather disheartening to wake at seven the following morning without any employment to draw me from bed. Breakfast, however, soon served the purpose, and happily coffee flowed for the provident and improvident alike.
In fact my fiscal state was not so bad as that. Having no wife or family to support, I had attained the elusive dream of many a government clerk - a hefty savings account - and stood in no immediate need of income. It did cost me a pang to be displaced from my well-worn groove, but I still had my rooms and my club, my meals and my mind. It would be best, I decided, to set the question of occupation as a puzzle to myself, one that would be solved in good time and most likely from my armchair.
When attempting to form an opinion on any conundrum, I have always found it best to busy my mind as entirely as possible. At work this was never difficult. Even in leisure, my observations latched onto passing crowds just as naturally as my brain might, on another occasion, occupy itself with ontological philosophy or international rates of exchange. As our celebrated sentimentalist Mr. Dickens once wrote, 'mankind was my business.' In London, such business was easy enough to pursue.
The Diogenes Club subscribed to twelve English-language weeklies and dailies as well as ten continental newspapers, and reading through them carried me to teatime. For the afternoon I installed myself in the library department of the British Museum and only surrendered my post for the sake of a cold supper.
All in all, it had been the most refreshing Tuesday in memory.
My subconscious mind, however, was less sanguine, if my nightmares were any indication. They added a fresh layer to the fatigue ingrained in me, but I paid them no heed once awake. All my life I have been followed by anxious dreams, and these tend to grow worse in times of uncertainty or change. I have not generally treated them as subjects of complaint since, as ailments go, there are many worse I might have attracted. The black moods that harried both Mother and Sherlock have never fallen to my lot, thank God.
Years of practice have taught me to fold my worries into the back of my mind as I might tuck a nightshirt into the wardrobe, both being too worn and formless for the daytime. My brain cannot be dissuaded from picking new holes in old fabrics, but it can be trained, at least, to wait for the dark.
I walked to the Diogenes but took hansoms on my newly adopted circuit between the British Museum and my rooms in Pall Mall. The increased expense would not be sustainable for long, but I trusted I would form my conclusions before more than a week or two had passed. There were, it is true, cheaper conveyances I might have tried, but crowded train cars and hackneys were not designed for men of my size. Where space was at a premium I was as much a nuisance to my fellow travellers as they were to me.
The cab rides to and from the museum carved out twin sections of the day in quarter-hour intervals, and it was only during these times that I focused directly on my future prospects. It had been twenty years since I had first committed the course of my career to the government. I had known that an office job would be essential for my comfort, and my natural proclivities leant themselves to bureaucracy. My head held vast reserves for storing facts. From these, I could draw inferences and predict patterns of cause and effect on a large scale among myriad variables.
But my less esoteric qualities also proved useful. A great deal of my success boiled down to the simple fact that I was not easily bored. I found monotonous work soothing in its way, and my attention to detail did not flag amid mires of nonessential data. A piece of knowledge did not have to be interesting for me to remember it; it was knowledge all the same.
Armed with this peculiarly inglorious but useful genius, I amassed a great deal of power. I did not set out to do so. I simply became a short-cut for one department after another. Most ministers wanted to be told what was likely to happen in this case or that, without doing much by way of reading reports first. I was able to tell them, with a high degree of accuracy, and the more information they authorized me to view, the greater my accuracy.
I was soon very highly authorized indeed. My office grew in size and elegance, more for the comfort of visiting Secretaries than for my own, but both were well-served. It is hardly a revelation in the world of modern statecraft that a mid-level bureaucrat may exercise more practical influence than a Prime Minister. But even such a bureaucrat is limited by the information he is given, and I had never sought to uncover more than was offered to me. The same complacency that enabled me to master vast amounts of mundane information had blinded me to the lurid conspiracy unfolding under my nose - or perhaps it would be truer to say, just over my head. As a result I had spent my talents in the service of a morally bankrupt syndicate no better than any of the other violent criminals Sherlock has devoted his life to hunting.
Evidently, I was not well-suited for positions of power.
What, then, should I do? Given that public service was closed to me, some branch of private enterprise seemed the only alternative. My needs were few. I must be allowed to work from a chair, I could not spend the day on my feet, and I must earn a sufficient salary to keep my meals and my club, if not my current address. With my aptitude for figures and familiarity with market trends, I could surely be useful on the accounting side of some international trade. Perhaps that avenue was the first worth exploring.
By Friday I had made a few tentative inquiries, and as I ascended the stairs to my parlor I was pondering whether I might find a place keeping the books of one of our larger ceramics companies, or possibly managing the credit of a textile firm. Dr. Watson might have some words of advice or caution regarding the latter, I thought. His father had made a fortune running one of the great Yorkshire wool mills.
I was hesitant to broach the subject with him, however, as it was likely a sensitive topic and whatever insights I had on the matter were based on unsolicited deductions. His upbringing was audible in the buried remnants of his northern accent, noticeable only to a well-trained ear. The family’s wealth spoke for itself in the more cultured tones he had absorbed from boarding school all the way through his officer’s training. The indicators of fortune, and its loss, he carried with him in his pocket; a glance at his watch, beautifully engraved yet scored with careless scratches, told the story of an older brother’s inheritance and dissipation. Surely any remaining Watsons in the doctor’s branch of the family were long out of the textile business now.
Mildly distracted, it took me a moment to glance around the flat and notice that a visitor had come and gone in my absence. As only one man in London besides myself possessed the key to my door, it was not hard to see my brother’s hand behind the package set atop the sideboard. It was an oblong box wrapped in brown paper, the string tied with a selection of sailor’s knots that I had taught him during the pirate summer of ’61. I spent an enjoyable few minutes working the ties loose, then pulled the paper back.
It was Grandmother’s watercolour box. She had painted a self-portrait on the lid the year after her marriage, 1817, and her young face regarded me with the same quizzical look it always had. I had never known her well, our acquaintance being limited to the odd holiday, but Sherlock spent a few summers at her home outside Paris - just the two of them. He had always got on best with those a generation or more ahead of himself. Even now, his closest friend, Dr. Watson, was fully twenty years his senior. Perhaps Sherlock felt instinctively drawn to those with great depths of experience. They could anchor him in a way that I, only seven years distant, could not.
I lifted the clasp and opened the box. Sherlock had stocked it with fresh paint and a variety of brushes. He had also tucked a new pen, nibs, holder and ink pot into the assortment. Grandmother’s hand mirror was nestled safely in the corner, its face wrapped with a few handkerchiefs. It was the central tool of self-portraiture, and practice was cheapest when no model save one’s own reflection was required.
I had no training in drawing, but my eye was observant enough to guide me in matters of proportion and colour. The large window of the Strangers’ Room at the Diogenes sprang to mind. I could easily sit there with a sketchpad on my knee. It might add an enjoyable diversion to my daily routines, busying my thoughts and hands while I continued to work out the best solution to the problem of employment.
I did not yet realize that Sherlock, in rare form, had in fact solved the problem for me.
Though natural talent is helpful, artistry depends primarily on practice. Being something of a prodigy in the realm of repetitious and technical tasks, I took to sketching with aplomb. My hands were clumsy at first, unable to recreate angles, shades, and shapes with the accuracy my eye demanded. But the body could be taught, and the flow of my pen across paper produced a steady stream of experimental images.
I began with Grandmother’s hand mirror tilted to show my face in one-quarter profile. It was not a handsome subject, and at first I found it rather hard to look at myself too long or closely. But soon my features rearranged themselves into a sequence of contrasts in light and shadow. Shapes emerged, too organic and delicate to be termed geometric. I mapped the folds of my skin with the same diligence a good cartographer would apply to an intricate coastline, tracing out the shallows and depths. I moved my lamp to change the light and discovered a second face, wholly different, peering back from the mirror.
It was a process both serene and entrancing to discover that anything might be drawn truly, but nothing definitively. In medieval times, our forebears believed that the King possessed two bodies; in the course of a single afternoon I discovered at least four under my own skin. Every change in angle or ambiance recreated the subject anew.
I fell in love with the medium at first sight.
After spending an obsessive week in my flat using familiar furnishings and features to work out the rudiments of required skills, I began carrying my sketchbooks with me everywhere. My favorite perch was by the bay window in the Strangers’ Room. I worked to develop a sense of anatomy and movement by making rapid, impressionistic portraits of the pedestrians passing below. Architecturally, I tried my hand at everything from the gas-lit intimacy of a small restaurant to the great, glaring dome of St. Paul’s at noon. I observed street artists at work and learned certain simple enhancements in technique - a wash with a wet brush to deepen ink shadows and smooth over pen strokes; white highlights to set off the line of a jacket or the sinister gleam of moonlight.
My reservoirs of memory provided more fodder for development. I sketched old government offices, my university dining hall, and even Sherlock’s nursery room at the country house so many decades gone. I drew my father’s face, which I had last seen at the age of nine. He had never been photographed. I slipped the sketch into a light frame and mailed it to Baker Street. I owed my brother a gift.
Initially these new endeavors resembled a hobby rather than an employment, but by dint of constant effort I developed style enough to sell. Amongst the Diogenes’ periodical subscriptions was The Illustrated London News, which at that time outsold The Times by more than three to one. Though its pages included a little bit of everything, its chief preoccupations appeared to be fashion, disaster, and political theater. Having an insider’s knowledge of the latter, I quickly sold quite a number of pen and ink sketches portraying embassy balls, army officers, and Parliamentarians lounging before elegant mantels in candid poses.
Thinking it best to avoid the attention of actual MPs, however, I adopted a pseudonym in all my published illustrations. “Sidney” seemed innocuous enough as a Christian name, and I borrowed the surname of my erstwhile Latin tutor, Professor Paget.
Armed with patience, skill, anonymity, and a set of habits so regular they gave the lie to the field’s bohemian reputation, I became an artist. As a second career, it was wholly unexpected, but the phenomenal pace of British journalism created a constant demand for popular images. It once again became possible for me to make my living simply by setting my observations to paper.
The joy I took in doing so remained, to my surprise, profound.
After I had spent three years at such employment, in the spring of ’91, Dr. Watson invited me to contribute to a series of short stories he was writing for The Strand. They were tales of mystery and romance, proudly christened “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” Although in many details they resembled pure fiction, none knew better than I that the heroism they lauded was quite real. My brother looked on the venture with mixed feelings, but I offered my sincere endorsement and agreed to undertake the first run of illustrations.
Sherlock would not have thanked me for reproducing his likeness faithfully for the public eye, so I did not attempt to do so. Instead, I created a mixture of fact and fiction in the same spirit as Dr. Watson’s prose. I modeled the Sherlock of these adventures after no single person, although I included elements of both our father and grandmother in his sharp features and wiry frame. Yet I dressed him in my brother’s real clothes and animated him with Sherlock’s own expressions. It was a whimsical and in some ways challenging exercise, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly.
Meanwhile, in his earliest publication Dr. Watson had incorrectly but charmingly described himself as “brown as a nut and thin as a lathe,” and I took these as my watchwords in creating a young and earnest rendition of my brother’s worthy friend. The good doctor laughed aloud upon seeing the result, and Sherlock exclaimed, “My dear Watson, you seem the same blithe boy as ever!” We ended with Dr. Watson foreswearing any future self-description for fear of tempting me to worse. All agreed that the drawings, despite taking liberties with the truth, would serve these mysteries very well.
It was only as I put the finishing touches on my sketches for the very first story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” that a more sober thought occurred to me. I stared down at my drawing of the remarkable Irene Adler as she slipped past the great detective. This was her only appearance in my drawings, and the only feature visible was her pale face, tucked between a black hat and a high coat collar. That face would carry the whole of her story, and I knew in that moment whose face it must be.
Gently, with a few light strokes marking a barely visible eyebrow and one delicate ear, I bestowed upon her the features of Annie Crook. I had only the memory of one photograph to guide me. After that horrible case had ended, Sherlock had come to me with Miss Crook’s hospital file. He was not sure whether to trust the claim that she had ended her own life in the wretched asylum to which she’d been consigned. He thought perhaps she might have been murdered just as the other victims had been, and he obtained copies of her records to investigate the possibility. In the end he had seen no evidence of homicide, but confessed he did not trust his own judgement in the case. I examined the evidence and concurred with his findings, but I would never forget the lovely, haunted face of that noble woman or the crimes that had driven her to despair.
No reparation was truly possible. Nevertheless, it seemed right to see her take her place at the heart of a scandal in which she emerged the victor. Instead of having her life stripped away once she was deemed an embarrassment to her royal lover, within these pages she would find means to protect herself and make her own way into a brighter future.
As the years passed and Dr. Watson’s stories grew in popularity, I continued to offer my small tributes to the women whose wrongs could not be righted and whose courage we could not repay. I knew their faces only through the publicity surrounding their deaths, but they remained indelibly engraved on my mind. Their images flowed through my fingers. I traced Polly Nichols’ strength into the face of Annie Harrison; Catherine Eddowes looked through the eyes of Sophie Kratides in anguish and revenge; Elizabeth Stride stood unbowed in Violet Hunter; Annie Chapman escaped from horrid crime with Helen Stoner; and in Effie Monroe, Mary Kelly received acceptance and love for herself and the child she’d kept hidden.
As a monument these fleeting images were worth little enough. Probably no one except for my brother and Dr. Watson ever understood the private meanings I wove into those drawings or suspected that nearly every woman in the stories had two bodies rather than only one.
Yet, who can say? The impact of art has always proved impossible to predict.
These small remembrances may yet outlive us. I hope they shall.
Recipient: graycardinal
Author: rachelindeed
Characters/Pairings: Gen; Mycroft Holmes, John Watson, Sherlock Holmes
Verse: Murder By Decree (1979 film)
Rating: G
Warnings: Major spoilers for the movie (the fic gives away the film’s ending)
Length: 4,700 words
Summary: After the events of Murder By Decree, Mycroft Holmes leaves the British government and tries to decide what to do with the rest of his life.
Author’s Note: Thank you, garonne, for a fantastic beta. Readers familiar with the film might recall that Mycroft does not appear in it at all, which I felt was a missed opportunity. This fic explores the aftermath of the film’s events from his point of view. His characterization is based on that of the ACD stories. For readers unfamiliar with the movie, I think you will be able to follow the fic without much trouble. However, I’m providing a plot summary under the spoiler cut for anyone who might find it helpful:
[Murder By Decree summary]In Murder By Decree, Holmes (played by Christopher Plummer) and Watson (played by James Mason) try to stop Jack the Ripper, who is murdering women in Whitechapel. They ultimately discover that the Prime Minister and other high government officials hired this killer as part of a plot to silence all the women who knew about a royal scandal. Prince Albert Victor had secretly married a working-class Catholic named Annie Crook, and they had a daughter together. To eliminate this embarrassment, high-ranking political conspirators forced Annie into an asylum and tried to hunt down her child. But, with the help of Annie’s friends - the women who were targeted for murder - the child was safely hidden away. In a confrontation with the murderer, Watson is stabbed in the shoulder with a hot poker and Holmes has to defeat Jack the Ripper alone. In an emotional closing sequence, Holmes confronts the Prime Minister and the other conspirators about their murderous crimes, but agrees not to reveal what he knows to the public as long as they leave the surviving young child in peace.
Also on AO3: "Art in the Blood"
I gave a moment's thought to clearing my desk, but there was no need. The flurry of information that regularly passed through the office had already been pruned to its essentials and appropriately filed. Everything was up to date down to last evening's telegrams. The multitudinous connections between subjects could not be so easily captured, but anyone who studied my organizational system might begin to intuit the most important lines of intersection.
My successor would not be able to keep the system running, of course. But the existing record could provide a foundation for the next few years of policy, should he have the wisdom to apply it. All the better for him if he realized within the first fortnight that he would need to hire a staff to handle the daily queries. It would take six or seven men to fill my place as best they could.
The desk itself was walnut, its lines and surface largely free from scratches. I had always been careful of my keys. A square of sunlight positively blazed off the polish, and I found that I was absently running a finger across the familiar scrolling.
There came a gentle tap at the door. "Come in," I said, leaning heavily on the desk to maneuver myself out of the chair. If I were to be fired, it was best to meet the news on my feet.
However, the door swung open to reveal an unexpected visitor. Dr. Watson lifted his cane in distracted greeting whilst attempting to nudge the door closed behind him with his foot. His right arm hung limp and useless in a white linen sling.
"Doctor Watson, I had taken you for a man of sense!" In truth I had taken him for no such thing, but the reproach rose unbidden. He must know it was far too soon for any man with his injuries to be travelling across town. I rounded the desk and offered an arm of support, which he accepted with a wry, near-silent laugh. After assisting him to the wingback chair nearest the fireplace, I poured a strong brandy. It was clear from his eyes that he had declined narcotics, at least for today, and the jostling ride to Whitehall had drained the colour from his face. I knew too little about the effects of a hot poker stabbed through flesh to be sure whether he was blistering or bleeding, but I eyed him sternly as I deposited the glass in his hand. "My dear sir, if you collapse on my carpet neither I nor my brother will be quick to forgive."
"Duly noted," he nodded, and the languid drawl of his voice lengthened and lowered as he winced. He downed my restorative with a smooth flick of the wrist, then settled back in his chair with a sigh. I lowered myself into the chair opposite and regarded him, bemused. So far as I could recall, we had never exchanged so much as a word in private.
"You dressed hurriedly," I observed. "And enlisted your page to help with the buttons. I take it, then, that you remained in your bed and shammed the willing convalescent until Sherlock let you out of his sight?"
"Mr. Holmes," he waved a hand, politely tabling the topic of his health. "We haven't much time. As best I understand it, your brother is in a private meeting with the Prime Minister, vigorously denouncing him and several of his colleagues in the highest echelons of this government. Given their abominable cowardice and villainy, he has my complete support in doing so, and doubtless yours as well. That is, I assume you are now in possession of the facts?"
I blinked at his directness, then nodded my assent.
His head canted backward, sunk into the chair, but his tired eyes held mine. "I'm afraid he has not stopped to think of what will happen once the blackguards turn on you. I fear they will destroy your career simply because it lies in their power to do so. Holmes holds cards enough in his hands to protect the poor child at the heart of this conspiracy, which is the essential point. But they are not men to be crossed without consequence, and I think we must endure whatever petty revenge they choose to indulge.
I fear they will strike back at him through you. I could not let such a blow fall on you without warning. I confess I can't see any means of averting it, but perhaps you can. I know that Holmes would never have wished to leave you unguarded. But he failed those valiant women, you see." Dr. Watson paused briefly, pained. "The guilt is tunneling his vision."
Regret rose sharply within me, for I deserved an equal share of blame. How many horrors might have been prevented had I recognized the corruption around me before it was too late? My grief made little outward show, save for a fine tremor that passed through my hand where it lay on my knee. Dr. Watson had been too long in my brother's company to fail to observe it.
Quietly, he said, "My dear fellow. I know what your work must be to you, for I know what his is to Holmes. That the nation should lose a great and honest mind to this dirty business, just when such qualities are most needed in Whitehall, is a damned injustice."
"Not at all, Dr. Watson." I smiled at his surprise. "As soon as the facts of the case became clear to me, lamentably late though that was, I saw that there remained no future for me in this government. I sent in my letter of resignation this morning, though I expect it to be overlooked. After Sherlock is done with them, they will want to fire me directly. When I heard you at the door, I expected someone had come to give me my notice. But I am most grateful that you took such pains to put me on my guard. And your visit has not been wasted, for you have greatly relieved my mind."
"Oh? I'm delighted to hear it," Dr. Watson said, "though I can't see how."
"I was afraid that Sherlock had not spoken with me about this case because he feared to find me complicit." The doctor's puzzlement intensified to shock; plainly the thought had never crossed his mind. I drew a deep breath, startled to feel my fatigue recede for a moment like sand beneath a tide. I had not known what a weight of uncertainty lay upon me until it lifted.
Sherlock could not have hidden such painful suspicions from his friend, I felt sure. However imperfectly Dr. Watson followed my brother's thoughts, of his heart he kept a firm command. Had Sherlock feared so intimate a betrayal as mine, Dr. Watson would have sensed it. That I had merely been forgotten during the crisis was the best news I could have hoped for. "I am a solitary man, Dr. Watson. More so even than my brother. For the sake of business I have cultivated patrons and colleagues as any civil servant must. But my reputation in their eyes is little enough to lose. I have need of no man's praise, but my brother's trust I could not do without."
"You have it, sir," Watson said simply.
"As for the work, this is one of many areas in which Sherlock and I are of opposite tempers. He lives and dies by his profession. It was a terrible struggle for him to find anything that could hold his interest and channel his energy, you understand. I have considerably less energy, but compensate with far wider interests. There is little, in fact, that does not fascinate me. The government offered me the chance to cast my nets wide, and I have feasted for many years on information of all types. But the advantage of an omnivorous curiosity is that it may feed itself anywhere. Her Majesty's government may cast me out, but I shall not starve, Dr. Watson. Neither in the streets nor in my head."
Dr. Watson smiled, his broad face creasing in every direction at once. "Excellent. Shall we wait here together for the vultures, then?"
"I should be most glad of the company."
I refilled his brandy, helped myself to the port, and we spent an amiable quarter hour in silence. I had no cigar to offer him, for I did not smoke, an eccentricity that drew more comment than any of my mental feats. Dr. Watson's eyelids gradually drooped, and he had nearly drifted off when a knock sounded again at the door.
He was on his feet before I managed to rise, standing firm with the self-possession that good soldiers never lose. The door swung open without any pause for invitation and my brother swept into the room. He was subtly marked by recent distress and already mid-speech.
"…truly sorry to have dragged you into this wretched affair, Mycroft, but I trust you will for - Watson, what the devil are you doing here?"
"I wasn't sure you would think to alert him," Dr. Watson said, dropping his careful stance and leaning more openly on his cane. "You know you don't always remember such things."
"Sit down before you fall down, for God's sake! What do you take me for?"
They immediately began talking over one another, Sherlock's reproachful patter overlaying Dr. Watson's muttered protests. There was something indefinably funny about it, and their fussing reached a crescendo when they managed to invoke the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers in dramatic, irritated unison.
I was leaning against the open door, amused despite myself, when Stevenson of the Home Office discreetly touched my elbow and delivered the missive dismissing me from my country's service. It was not a moment in my life that I would have expected to remember fondly. Which only goes to show that there remained much of importance that, even at the height of my powers, I could never predict.
My brother has often, and with some justification, called me an unambitious man. Nevertheless, it did feel odd and rather disheartening to wake at seven the following morning without any employment to draw me from bed. Breakfast, however, soon served the purpose, and happily coffee flowed for the provident and improvident alike.
In fact my fiscal state was not so bad as that. Having no wife or family to support, I had attained the elusive dream of many a government clerk - a hefty savings account - and stood in no immediate need of income. It did cost me a pang to be displaced from my well-worn groove, but I still had my rooms and my club, my meals and my mind. It would be best, I decided, to set the question of occupation as a puzzle to myself, one that would be solved in good time and most likely from my armchair.
When attempting to form an opinion on any conundrum, I have always found it best to busy my mind as entirely as possible. At work this was never difficult. Even in leisure, my observations latched onto passing crowds just as naturally as my brain might, on another occasion, occupy itself with ontological philosophy or international rates of exchange. As our celebrated sentimentalist Mr. Dickens once wrote, 'mankind was my business.' In London, such business was easy enough to pursue.
The Diogenes Club subscribed to twelve English-language weeklies and dailies as well as ten continental newspapers, and reading through them carried me to teatime. For the afternoon I installed myself in the library department of the British Museum and only surrendered my post for the sake of a cold supper.
All in all, it had been the most refreshing Tuesday in memory.
My subconscious mind, however, was less sanguine, if my nightmares were any indication. They added a fresh layer to the fatigue ingrained in me, but I paid them no heed once awake. All my life I have been followed by anxious dreams, and these tend to grow worse in times of uncertainty or change. I have not generally treated them as subjects of complaint since, as ailments go, there are many worse I might have attracted. The black moods that harried both Mother and Sherlock have never fallen to my lot, thank God.
Years of practice have taught me to fold my worries into the back of my mind as I might tuck a nightshirt into the wardrobe, both being too worn and formless for the daytime. My brain cannot be dissuaded from picking new holes in old fabrics, but it can be trained, at least, to wait for the dark.
I walked to the Diogenes but took hansoms on my newly adopted circuit between the British Museum and my rooms in Pall Mall. The increased expense would not be sustainable for long, but I trusted I would form my conclusions before more than a week or two had passed. There were, it is true, cheaper conveyances I might have tried, but crowded train cars and hackneys were not designed for men of my size. Where space was at a premium I was as much a nuisance to my fellow travellers as they were to me.
The cab rides to and from the museum carved out twin sections of the day in quarter-hour intervals, and it was only during these times that I focused directly on my future prospects. It had been twenty years since I had first committed the course of my career to the government. I had known that an office job would be essential for my comfort, and my natural proclivities leant themselves to bureaucracy. My head held vast reserves for storing facts. From these, I could draw inferences and predict patterns of cause and effect on a large scale among myriad variables.
But my less esoteric qualities also proved useful. A great deal of my success boiled down to the simple fact that I was not easily bored. I found monotonous work soothing in its way, and my attention to detail did not flag amid mires of nonessential data. A piece of knowledge did not have to be interesting for me to remember it; it was knowledge all the same.
Armed with this peculiarly inglorious but useful genius, I amassed a great deal of power. I did not set out to do so. I simply became a short-cut for one department after another. Most ministers wanted to be told what was likely to happen in this case or that, without doing much by way of reading reports first. I was able to tell them, with a high degree of accuracy, and the more information they authorized me to view, the greater my accuracy.
I was soon very highly authorized indeed. My office grew in size and elegance, more for the comfort of visiting Secretaries than for my own, but both were well-served. It is hardly a revelation in the world of modern statecraft that a mid-level bureaucrat may exercise more practical influence than a Prime Minister. But even such a bureaucrat is limited by the information he is given, and I had never sought to uncover more than was offered to me. The same complacency that enabled me to master vast amounts of mundane information had blinded me to the lurid conspiracy unfolding under my nose - or perhaps it would be truer to say, just over my head. As a result I had spent my talents in the service of a morally bankrupt syndicate no better than any of the other violent criminals Sherlock has devoted his life to hunting.
Evidently, I was not well-suited for positions of power.
What, then, should I do? Given that public service was closed to me, some branch of private enterprise seemed the only alternative. My needs were few. I must be allowed to work from a chair, I could not spend the day on my feet, and I must earn a sufficient salary to keep my meals and my club, if not my current address. With my aptitude for figures and familiarity with market trends, I could surely be useful on the accounting side of some international trade. Perhaps that avenue was the first worth exploring.
By Friday I had made a few tentative inquiries, and as I ascended the stairs to my parlor I was pondering whether I might find a place keeping the books of one of our larger ceramics companies, or possibly managing the credit of a textile firm. Dr. Watson might have some words of advice or caution regarding the latter, I thought. His father had made a fortune running one of the great Yorkshire wool mills.
I was hesitant to broach the subject with him, however, as it was likely a sensitive topic and whatever insights I had on the matter were based on unsolicited deductions. His upbringing was audible in the buried remnants of his northern accent, noticeable only to a well-trained ear. The family’s wealth spoke for itself in the more cultured tones he had absorbed from boarding school all the way through his officer’s training. The indicators of fortune, and its loss, he carried with him in his pocket; a glance at his watch, beautifully engraved yet scored with careless scratches, told the story of an older brother’s inheritance and dissipation. Surely any remaining Watsons in the doctor’s branch of the family were long out of the textile business now.
Mildly distracted, it took me a moment to glance around the flat and notice that a visitor had come and gone in my absence. As only one man in London besides myself possessed the key to my door, it was not hard to see my brother’s hand behind the package set atop the sideboard. It was an oblong box wrapped in brown paper, the string tied with a selection of sailor’s knots that I had taught him during the pirate summer of ’61. I spent an enjoyable few minutes working the ties loose, then pulled the paper back.
It was Grandmother’s watercolour box. She had painted a self-portrait on the lid the year after her marriage, 1817, and her young face regarded me with the same quizzical look it always had. I had never known her well, our acquaintance being limited to the odd holiday, but Sherlock spent a few summers at her home outside Paris - just the two of them. He had always got on best with those a generation or more ahead of himself. Even now, his closest friend, Dr. Watson, was fully twenty years his senior. Perhaps Sherlock felt instinctively drawn to those with great depths of experience. They could anchor him in a way that I, only seven years distant, could not.
I lifted the clasp and opened the box. Sherlock had stocked it with fresh paint and a variety of brushes. He had also tucked a new pen, nibs, holder and ink pot into the assortment. Grandmother’s hand mirror was nestled safely in the corner, its face wrapped with a few handkerchiefs. It was the central tool of self-portraiture, and practice was cheapest when no model save one’s own reflection was required.
I had no training in drawing, but my eye was observant enough to guide me in matters of proportion and colour. The large window of the Strangers’ Room at the Diogenes sprang to mind. I could easily sit there with a sketchpad on my knee. It might add an enjoyable diversion to my daily routines, busying my thoughts and hands while I continued to work out the best solution to the problem of employment.
I did not yet realize that Sherlock, in rare form, had in fact solved the problem for me.
Though natural talent is helpful, artistry depends primarily on practice. Being something of a prodigy in the realm of repetitious and technical tasks, I took to sketching with aplomb. My hands were clumsy at first, unable to recreate angles, shades, and shapes with the accuracy my eye demanded. But the body could be taught, and the flow of my pen across paper produced a steady stream of experimental images.
I began with Grandmother’s hand mirror tilted to show my face in one-quarter profile. It was not a handsome subject, and at first I found it rather hard to look at myself too long or closely. But soon my features rearranged themselves into a sequence of contrasts in light and shadow. Shapes emerged, too organic and delicate to be termed geometric. I mapped the folds of my skin with the same diligence a good cartographer would apply to an intricate coastline, tracing out the shallows and depths. I moved my lamp to change the light and discovered a second face, wholly different, peering back from the mirror.
It was a process both serene and entrancing to discover that anything might be drawn truly, but nothing definitively. In medieval times, our forebears believed that the King possessed two bodies; in the course of a single afternoon I discovered at least four under my own skin. Every change in angle or ambiance recreated the subject anew.
I fell in love with the medium at first sight.
After spending an obsessive week in my flat using familiar furnishings and features to work out the rudiments of required skills, I began carrying my sketchbooks with me everywhere. My favorite perch was by the bay window in the Strangers’ Room. I worked to develop a sense of anatomy and movement by making rapid, impressionistic portraits of the pedestrians passing below. Architecturally, I tried my hand at everything from the gas-lit intimacy of a small restaurant to the great, glaring dome of St. Paul’s at noon. I observed street artists at work and learned certain simple enhancements in technique - a wash with a wet brush to deepen ink shadows and smooth over pen strokes; white highlights to set off the line of a jacket or the sinister gleam of moonlight.
My reservoirs of memory provided more fodder for development. I sketched old government offices, my university dining hall, and even Sherlock’s nursery room at the country house so many decades gone. I drew my father’s face, which I had last seen at the age of nine. He had never been photographed. I slipped the sketch into a light frame and mailed it to Baker Street. I owed my brother a gift.
Initially these new endeavors resembled a hobby rather than an employment, but by dint of constant effort I developed style enough to sell. Amongst the Diogenes’ periodical subscriptions was The Illustrated London News, which at that time outsold The Times by more than three to one. Though its pages included a little bit of everything, its chief preoccupations appeared to be fashion, disaster, and political theater. Having an insider’s knowledge of the latter, I quickly sold quite a number of pen and ink sketches portraying embassy balls, army officers, and Parliamentarians lounging before elegant mantels in candid poses.
Thinking it best to avoid the attention of actual MPs, however, I adopted a pseudonym in all my published illustrations. “Sidney” seemed innocuous enough as a Christian name, and I borrowed the surname of my erstwhile Latin tutor, Professor Paget.
Armed with patience, skill, anonymity, and a set of habits so regular they gave the lie to the field’s bohemian reputation, I became an artist. As a second career, it was wholly unexpected, but the phenomenal pace of British journalism created a constant demand for popular images. It once again became possible for me to make my living simply by setting my observations to paper.
The joy I took in doing so remained, to my surprise, profound.
After I had spent three years at such employment, in the spring of ’91, Dr. Watson invited me to contribute to a series of short stories he was writing for The Strand. They were tales of mystery and romance, proudly christened “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” Although in many details they resembled pure fiction, none knew better than I that the heroism they lauded was quite real. My brother looked on the venture with mixed feelings, but I offered my sincere endorsement and agreed to undertake the first run of illustrations.
Sherlock would not have thanked me for reproducing his likeness faithfully for the public eye, so I did not attempt to do so. Instead, I created a mixture of fact and fiction in the same spirit as Dr. Watson’s prose. I modeled the Sherlock of these adventures after no single person, although I included elements of both our father and grandmother in his sharp features and wiry frame. Yet I dressed him in my brother’s real clothes and animated him with Sherlock’s own expressions. It was a whimsical and in some ways challenging exercise, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly.
Meanwhile, in his earliest publication Dr. Watson had incorrectly but charmingly described himself as “brown as a nut and thin as a lathe,” and I took these as my watchwords in creating a young and earnest rendition of my brother’s worthy friend. The good doctor laughed aloud upon seeing the result, and Sherlock exclaimed, “My dear Watson, you seem the same blithe boy as ever!” We ended with Dr. Watson foreswearing any future self-description for fear of tempting me to worse. All agreed that the drawings, despite taking liberties with the truth, would serve these mysteries very well.
It was only as I put the finishing touches on my sketches for the very first story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” that a more sober thought occurred to me. I stared down at my drawing of the remarkable Irene Adler as she slipped past the great detective. This was her only appearance in my drawings, and the only feature visible was her pale face, tucked between a black hat and a high coat collar. That face would carry the whole of her story, and I knew in that moment whose face it must be.
Gently, with a few light strokes marking a barely visible eyebrow and one delicate ear, I bestowed upon her the features of Annie Crook. I had only the memory of one photograph to guide me. After that horrible case had ended, Sherlock had come to me with Miss Crook’s hospital file. He was not sure whether to trust the claim that she had ended her own life in the wretched asylum to which she’d been consigned. He thought perhaps she might have been murdered just as the other victims had been, and he obtained copies of her records to investigate the possibility. In the end he had seen no evidence of homicide, but confessed he did not trust his own judgement in the case. I examined the evidence and concurred with his findings, but I would never forget the lovely, haunted face of that noble woman or the crimes that had driven her to despair.
No reparation was truly possible. Nevertheless, it seemed right to see her take her place at the heart of a scandal in which she emerged the victor. Instead of having her life stripped away once she was deemed an embarrassment to her royal lover, within these pages she would find means to protect herself and make her own way into a brighter future.
As the years passed and Dr. Watson’s stories grew in popularity, I continued to offer my small tributes to the women whose wrongs could not be righted and whose courage we could not repay. I knew their faces only through the publicity surrounding their deaths, but they remained indelibly engraved on my mind. Their images flowed through my fingers. I traced Polly Nichols’ strength into the face of Annie Harrison; Catherine Eddowes looked through the eyes of Sophie Kratides in anguish and revenge; Elizabeth Stride stood unbowed in Violet Hunter; Annie Chapman escaped from horrid crime with Helen Stoner; and in Effie Monroe, Mary Kelly received acceptance and love for herself and the child she’d kept hidden.
As a monument these fleeting images were worth little enough. Probably no one except for my brother and Dr. Watson ever understood the private meanings I wove into those drawings or suspected that nearly every woman in the stories had two bodies rather than only one.
Yet, who can say? The impact of art has always proved impossible to predict.
These small remembrances may yet outlive us. I hope they shall.