Remix of cherrytide: “Do Your Research” (2/2)
Original Story:
Author: cherrytide
Title & Link: Proxy
Pairings & Rating: none & mature
Warnings/Content Notes: Contains descriptions of illness, assault, drug use, infidelity and abuse.
Remix Story:
Author: dioscureantwins
Title: Do Your Research
Pairings & Rating: none & mature
Warnings/Content Notes: Contains descriptions of rape, drug use, infidelity, suicide attempts and abuse.
Beta: swissmarg
Britpicker: swissmarg
Summary: Why I did it? The explanation is perfectly simple, if only you’d do your research.
Part 1
Until the evening, when, intending to brush Sigur’s jacket before hanging it in the airing closet, I spotted the blonde hair on the left shoulder, close to the collar. It was quite thick and smelled faintly of that horrible cheap hairspray women of the lower classes used to create the unflattering hairdos that were all the rage those years, mingled with Sigur’s (outrageously expensive) cologne.
Oh god, the hackneyed tediousness of my predicament. Loving mother and industrious housewife and career-builder discovers her husband is cheating on her. I could have starred as a soap opera heroine. At least I didn’t lower your father and myself by creating a scene. No, I put the hair into a box on my vanity, brushed the jacket and hung it in the closet.
We had resumed full relations as soon as my gynaecologist allowed me to. Too numb with shock I didn’t resist when, half an hour after my discovery, Sigur drew me to him and began dropping kisses along my throat. Our coupling that night felt as insensate as that of the beasts in the field. Sigur mistook my shivers of horror for those of pleasure as I endured his hands pawing my body. For the first time in our marriage, I faked an orgasm just to have the torture over and done with. Soon after Sigur fell asleep. I left the bed and went to look at our child, who requited my stare with a steady gaze as if he understood the world better than I ever could.
At breakfast I informed Sigur of my discovery and consecutive decision of spending some time with Mama and Mycroft at my aunt’s to weigh up the marital consequences. Your father had the decency to nearly choke on his toast. If only he’d actually done so. Except, that would have meant you would never have been born, so perhaps it’s better Sigur managed to bring up the offending piece and spit it rather indelicately into his serviette. You might hold another view on the matter. In fact, you seem to; oh well, it’s your life now and I can’t stop you.
Later, at aunt Tilda’s, the ensuing scene replayed itself in my head, like a snippet of music struck up time and again until the needle is lifted out of the scratch and lowered into the next groove. It slowly dawned on me the sheer inanity of Sigur’s reaction to my revelation might be my salvation.
You’ve already guessed what he did, haven’t you, like the clever boy you are?
Oh yes, he began denying my accusation, the glib lies spooling from his mouth as smoothly as liquid honey from the back of a spoon. His arguments harped on two themes mostly; that of declaring the notion preposterous as he was the happiest of men and would be a fool to risk his felicity for the sake of a quick fuck, while the other concerned itself with praising my beauty, no doubt in the hopes of tickling my vanity.
I endured the palaver for five minutes, all the while studying the movements of his face, the knot of his tie, the surge of his jacket over his shoulders, the way those long fingers of his played with his fruit knife. He had such beautiful hands, your father, so slender and mobile and soft with just a faint smattering of fine blonde hairs close to the wrist. The knife’s ebony hilt highlighted their almost luminescent paleness. Thanks to a single hair lodged in soft cashmere those hands, whose touch I’d craved on my skin, reminded me of an octopus’ tentacles, and I recoiled at the idea of their cold, slimy suckers slithering over and gluing themselves to my flesh.
With the veil ripped away from my eyes those five minutes sufficed to fill in the few blank spots left in the sordid tale of Sigur’s adultery. First in the troupe had been a brunette, fished out of the typing pool when I was in my seventh month. As advised by my gynaecologist we’d ceased having vaginal intercourse two weeks earlier (I will never forget the look on the man’s face when I asked him whether it was all right for Sigur to continue to pleasure me. The answer was a strangled ‘no’). Of course I’d been keen and happy to service your father through other means, but, well, as I explained earlier, his interest lay in a different aspect of the game.
Should Sigur have chosen not to prevaricate I might have listened to whatever defence he built for himself, perhaps, in an outlandish fit, have elected to forgive him. His instinct to try and feed me fibs - me, the woman whose analytical intuition he’d so often laughingly praised - sealed the lid firmly on that end.
Halfway through a fresh panegyric on my plethora of charms I raised myself from the table to advise him he was welcome to screw the whole of London as he would no longer be screwing me. Coarse language does have its advantages. The look of surprise on Sigur’s face sparked the adrenalin jolt I needed to propel myself out of the breakfast room and that blighted house with my head raised high.
Oh, the crying I did once we were at aunt Tilda’s. Naturally, my sweet mother couldn’t make head or tail of my sudden impulse and I didn’t care to enlighten her. However, our stay provided her with a breather from my father’s fists so rather than asking me questions I’d have to answer with lies she seized the chance to bounce Mycroft on her lap until he looked positively green around the gills. Grandmother and grandson enjoyed the happiest time of their lives, gurgling at and eying each other in a sickening manner that sent everyone flocking from the room.
Meanwhile, I spent my days either roaming the countryside, leaving the house before dark and returning well past suppertime, or locked in the guestroom. I won’t bore you with the bitter self-reproach I flogged myself with, nor the hateful invective my mind hurled at your father. That my options were limited was already clear to me as I fired my parting shot in the breakfast room. I could either swallow my pride and revulsion and return to your father or ask for a divorce and return to my parents. Both recourses held little appeal. A third alternative flitted through my brain and I spent one long afternoon perched on the top of the cliffs and staring at the surging crests perpetually pounding themselves into a spray of oblivion against the rocks a hundred feet below me. It was the closest I came to killing myself, but in the end I resolved I’d rather murder Sigur and spend the rest of my days in prison than grant him such an easy way out of my troubles.
I probably should have written the regard for my young and helpless child kept me from such desperate measures. Well, we both know better, don’t we, sweetheart? Besides, most people would claim I’m not exactly an advertisement for motherhood so why add insult to injury and confess to a consideration that didn’t once enter my head. It might have - if Mycroft hadn’t been constantly hungering after love and attention.
At last, the thirst for revenge was what made me sit down at the small escritoire in aunt Tilda’s drawing room and pen a truce offer to Sigur. I needed him to keep myself and Mycroft fed and clothed, but Sigur needed us for something far more important; his prestige, that coveted Knighthood, and - once that was in the bag - that most magnificent jewel in the Holmes’ family crown… the Order of the Bath.
My terms were short and to the point: separate bedrooms, no touching except in a public situation that warranted a demonstration of affection and absolute discretion on his part with respect to his whores. I didn’t want to find so much as a flake of their plebeian skin on my upholstery.
In exchange, I offered my tireless devotion to the cause, with Sigur, obviously, as the principal beneficiary of my efforts. The cause’s nature, as well as that of my efforts I left open to interpretation.
The reply came by telegram. Like I said before, Sigur did have a love of dramatics.
Thus, to your grandmother’s mortification, off our little train went to London again. Your father awaited us at Victoria station, hastening to assist Mama on her descent from our compartment. Mycroft beamed up at him, nearly delirious with the excess of kisses showered all over the top of his bald skull. I proffered my cheek for a chaste peck before striding off to leave Sigur dealing with our luggage.
Back at Grosvenor Square I had our former bedroom stripped bare and redecorated and the third guestroom revamped into a walk-in closet and private bathroom for Sigur. I didn’t skimp on expenses, giving in to the perverse thrill that coursed through my veins as I ordered fabrics and furniture by virtue of the hefty price tags they carried rather than their inherent aesthetics. Several times I caught Sigur pursing his lips as he read the bills, but he footed them all without complaint. Neither did he upbraid me over the loss of the Boodles ruby, which I flushed down the toilet on my first night back in London. Who has ever heard of a fighter wearing jewels when he enters the arena?
To round off the preparations, I ravaged my wedding dress. Stuffing the shreds of costly shot silk into the trash sent a thrill of unholy merriment crackling down my spine.
My absence was soon glossed over and I threw myself at my duties with renewed vigour, for all the world ceaselessly canvassing on Sigur’s behalf. We sat grinning through dinners and yawning discreetly behind the back of our hands through an endless parade of christenings, weddings, funerals and all those other vapid social occasions invented by the devil himself as a punishment for our sins. Have you ever endured the mind-numbing besiegement of a High Church service in a damp and draughty chapel with nothing but a thin sliver of leather sole and transparent nylon netting between your feet and the freezing floor? Believe me, I frequently desired the ground would split open, toppling the congregation into the eternal flames, to leave me feeling toasty at last.
The sole thought that kept me smiling tranquilly upward as the Minister’s vapid outpourings floated over the top of my head was the image of the tiny teeth steadily sawing away at the chair legs of the fornicating reprobate seated on my left. Oh, I was careful, always careful. Just a quick nod here and a faint blush and lowering of my eyelids there, refraining from a comment where formerly I would have rushed to daub the breach in the ramparts of Sigur’s reputation.
With the patience and determination of a gardener tending his inconveniently situated grounds atop a rocky sea cliff, I tilled the soil and planted my seeds. They were nothing, just the tiniest flecks of doubt on Sigur’s overall character. Most of them were doomed to wither and die instantly; indeed, the stability and trustworthiness of the Holmeses is one of our Realm’s founding pillars.
Sigur considered himself unassailable. His favourite play was Henry V. He would have done better to engage in a comprehensive study of Othello. The years I spent listening to and distributing insipid nonsense had taught me people like nothing better than chancing upon a nugget of slander, however tiny. Their ears will perk up and their tongues start wagging to repeat the information and enhance the tale’s lurid details to smooth along its journey. An idea, once planted, is impossible to remove. Eventually, its roots will burrow themselves into the rock and, slowly but decidedly, dig deeper and deeper until the rock that appeared so mighty and powerful must give way and crumble… and fall.
Yes, such are the wicked ways of this world, darling. Parents are supposed to dispense sound advice to their children and set them a good example. I’m afraid your father and I both rather failed regarding the latter. As to the former the best advice would be to trust no one, except for your mother that is. No one but you yourself and your mother has your interests at heart.
Your father trusted me, even after his betrayal. At the time, I thought his confidence more proof of his arrogance, which may have been an injustice. Perhaps it was closer to a mark of his naiveté. The notion of ill will on my part simply never entered his head. Fundamentally, all his cleverness notwithstanding, he was a profoundly stupid man.
The publication of the Queen’s Honours Lists were my annual highlights, more festive than Guy Fawkes Night and Christmas combined. To all appearances, Sigur bore the bi-annual news of his omission with manly equanimity. Oh, he was such a prime model of the British stiff upper lip. That trait in itself ought to have earned him that damned Knighthood, looming so near and yet proving itself so maddeningly elusive.
Naturally I, the devoted wife, commiserated with him, both in private and at his parents’ home. I was living it up as I sat lamenting and complaining and unreservedly adding my spite and bitterness to the cup that was already overflowing with outrage at the treatment doled out to Sigur. My magnificent rants would have sent Her Majesty herself dashing to right the wrong inflicted unjustly upon my beloved spouse… if only she could have heard them.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. For all his self-absorption, your father wasn’t completely oblivious to his surroundings. One day he returned early from the office and the noise of his key scraping over the front door lock informed me something was off. Mycroft was at Mama’s and I didn’t expect the chauffeur to drop him off for another half hour at least. Two weeks earlier he’d turned seven and he was already such a mature and responsible child I had no qualms about him letting himself in and out of our home with his own key. I shut the book I was reading and attached my customary bland smile to my face.
Sigur’s, when he entered, was livid with rage, his handsome features morphed into a rictus of hate. He zoomed upon me with the determination of a peregrine falcon stooping a turtledove, taking the hurdle of the coffee table in the stride of his long legs. Those beautiful, slender fingers proved to be surprisingly strong as they closed themselves around my throat and he dragged me up from the sofa.
“You bitch,” he snarled. Warm drops of saliva splattered my cheeks. I was so numbed with fear the idea of raising my hand to wipe them off never entered my head. “You vile muckraker, you whore… You promised, all those years ago, promised to honour and obey… How dare you? Sully the name I gave you… The vile slander…”
Each word was a turn of the spanner further tightening the grip of his hands on my throat. Faintly, I attempted to scrabble at his hands with fingers that already felt weakened from lack of oxygen. As sudden as he’d lifted me, he let go and I crashed against the sofa, the back of my head colliding hard with the armrest’s elaborate mahogany scroll. I still believe I must have passed out for an instant.
Sigur’s hands tearing at my underwear revived me. I fought him with my hands and my teeth, I screeched bloody murder, I tried to spit in his face but he was stronger and the sheer length of his body put me at a disadvantage. He wrenched his hips between my legs and, right there on the Aubusson carpet that covered the floor of our drawing room, holding my arms with one hand over my head, he raped me.
That’s how you were conceived, my precious.
Whatever can have possessed Sigur of all men to avail himself of this particular act of aggression would have been a moot point for a psychiatrist, should your father ever have condescended to prevail himself of one’s services. As he considered them all quacks of the worst kind I’m fairly certain he didn’t. Having endured hours of torment in the form of so-called therapy myself, I tend to - reluctantly mind you - share your father’s opinion.
Does Mycroft employ one, though, I wonder? Because Sigur was halfway through leveraging himself and tucking himself inside his trousers again, when the door opened to reveal your brother’s small figure.
“Mummy? Daddy?” he asked, his gaze flitting between us. Sigur leapt up and shoved past him, leaving me to account for the incongruous sight of his mother with her skirts flung up around her waist and his father knelt between her legs and zipping himself up.
Fortune is a faithful mistress, no matter how hard a disgruntled wife may strive to thwart her. The next day Mama died of a heart attack. This occurrence nicely explained my abrupt disappearance from Sigur’s side at public occasions and the time lapse to fabricate a conceivable fairy tale for my social demise.
Because we’d descended into open war. Every so often Sigur stormed into my room to launch increasingly obscene invective at me but all I would do was turn my back on him, take another swig of the whisky bottle I was nursing and screw my eyes shut until he made himself scarce, huffing his exasperation. He knew better than to bring up the threat of a divorce and, even with my mind locked in a dank gaol of despair, I was determined not to grant him one. I’d rather have died first. Although the whisky swilling was more an act of defiance than an actual attempt at doing myself in.
Frankly, I don’t know what became of your brother during those weeks. The poor boy presumably mourned his grandmother, the only person to love him truly and not let herself be disconcerted by his penetrating stares. Our cleaning lady, a Mrs Wilkinson I’d chosen for her trustworthiness rather than her actual housekeeping abilities, kept him fed and clothed probably, as he’s still exasperatingly alive today. I heard the soft padding of his feet in front of my bed multiple times but never deigned to react. He always took care to close the door very softly upon leaving.
I’d rather have died first, I wrote a few sentences back. Oh Sherlock dear, those words were meaningless until the day it dawned on my befuddled mind I was with child. A look at the calendar told me I was in my fourth month.
Are you acquainted with London at all, dearest? I’ve never gone to the trouble of finding out where you went to live after I was whisked out of the hospital straight into prison. Anyway, if you happen to be in London one day, do visit Grosvenor Square and have a look at the terraces of houses standing there. The height of the windows will give you a fair idea of the height of the staircases inside those flats. The instant I realised my predicament I didn’t hesitate and flung myself down ours. I reckoned I’d either break my neck or lose the child. Both options held equal appeal. Instead, I ended up in hospital with two broken legs, several fractured ribs and a broken arm and you kicking me triumphantly in the belly as I clawed my way back to consciousness after surgery.
I refused to eat. They inserted a feeding tube up my nose. I ripped it out. They re-inserted the tube and tied my hands to the bed. Nurses being what they are - and yes, they are a race of inquisitive bitches worse than the wardens at this place - the puzzle of my physical injuries and voluntary fast was soon solved and - for your safety’s sake - I was committed to remaining in the hospital until after my deliverance.
You were far quicker than Mycroft about the tedious business. Two weeks early and in less than an hour the job was done. Your lusty cries rang around the room, the maternity ward, the hospital wing and the whole cavernous building itself. I was the only one deaf to your shrieks, laid out on my side to stare at nothing while biting back the agony of the milk surging painfully against the flesh of my breasts, called forth by your hunger.
During my months as a guest of the NHS I’d become immune to their prattle about having my interest at heart. They had forced their treatment upon me against my will. Now they had got what they had so avidly desired, their valuable babe, never mind I hadn’t wanted it all along, and I, for certain, was not going to deal with their problem, come hell or high water.
When they tried to wrap my lame fingers around a bottle I didn’t grasp it but let the bottle roll down onto the sheets, where it gained momentum and tumbled over the edge of the bed. After the third attempt they gave up and tried to bottle-feed you themselves instead. You adamantly rejected the teat, twisting your head to the side, and when they forced it into your screeching mouth you didn’t grasp it with your lips to start sucking eagerly but hitched your wails up a notch.
Next they tried wrapping my arms around you, which, sav for a quick dive by a young nurse, would have wound up with you following the same course as the bottle as I pushed you away with my eyes screwed shut as tight as my facial muscles allowed.
After twenty-four hours both nurses and doctors were desperate. You were yelling your head off as soon as someone merely looked at you, refused all sustenance, and - having been thin to begin with thanks to your Mummy indulging in a four-month binge after your conception - were losing weight rapidly. Mycroft was the one who saved you. Doctors and nurses had left the room to confer what to do next when he plucked you from the cot where you lay hollering, clambered onto the hospital bed with you screeching in his arms and deposited you onto the mattress in front of me.
“Look, Mummy, the baby really wants to eat,” he said. I opened my eyes to catch his’ verging away from the wet patches on the front of my gown and then my gaze swept down and came to rest on the crown of your head with its adorable nest of black curls. Your tiny fists scrabbled at the cloth of my night gownand the instant your questing mouth found a nipple it began suckling urgently, relieving my breast of the maddening pressure. The whole hospital breathed a collective sigh of relief at the peace and quiet descending over the premises. Behind me, I felt Mycroft slide off the bed. My hand came up to support your head, revelling in the silky softness of your hair, and you opened your eyes and looked at me. From that moment, I have loved you. More fiercely than any mother has ever loved her child.
How Mycroft must have mourned his impulse afterwards; the biggest blunder he ever committed. Perhaps he’d been snivelling in his room over the loss of Mama - I never asked - and that was the rationale behind his impulse of compassion. Whatever his motive, in saving you he cut the last threads of motherly feeling running between us. I had only that much love to give and, inevitably, from the moment I first held you in my arms must give it all to you.
He should have let you rot in that crib. I’d felt no compunction in doing so and I wouldn’t have given in to the personnel’s demands if they’d threatened to have me executed for being the worst mother in the world.
Except, they couldn’t very well do that after Mycroft’s intervention, could they? Not when I had quieted you so effectively and was close to smothering you with my love, looking daggers at anyone who so much as tried to touch you. Being a bunch of interfering nuisances the doctors and nurses next began upbraiding me for breastfeeding you, which was, in those times, not ‘the done thing’ for a woman of my class. I sighed and turned my back on them - over the course of the past months I’d become quite the expert at doing just that. You followed along seamlessly, seeking my other nipple and I could have sworn your lips quirked before attaching themselves to my breast.
Everything became so much easier after that. The next time Mycroft visited his gaze glued itself to the back of your head -the only visible part of you as you lay feeding at my breast - with the tenacity of a barnacle on a tidal rock. A nurse who came in to take my temperature told him off for staring so openly at my breasts, not daring to speak to me after the tongue-lashing I’d given her that morning, and I lazily corrected her.
“You’re just watching your lovely new brother, aren’t you, sweetheart?” Mycroft nodded - what else could he do? - and lowered his lids in a vain attempt to hide his blazing hate.
Over the course of the following days, I tracked his internal struggle. With a resolution almost frightening to behold in a seven-year-old, he willed himself to love you. He had perceived, quite astutely, that you were the turnpike he couldn’t bypass if he wanted to follow the way into my heart. Oh my, you really set a rather high rate. As soon as anyone lifted you out of my arms you’d start wailing with the loud insistence of a siren announcing World War III and the Fall of the Heavens. Nonetheless Mycroft persisted in holding you in his lap for minutes at a time - the longest he managed was half an hour, at the end of which your body was red all over from your continuous crying - with a serene expression on his face. Sigur, the one time he tried to pick you up, almost let you drop, and Mycroft was the one quick enough to catch you, encumbered as I was by the heaviness of my breasts.
During that same visit your father and I determined I’d be more at leisure with the children at the old rectory his family still owned, down in Surrey. A throng of builders and carpenters and painters was sent off to convert the hovel into something inhabitable whither I took off a few months later, leaving London society to their own devices and Sigur to his trollops.
For appearances’ sake, your father stayed with us every other weekend. I don’t know how he kept himself amused through those weekends; slept with the gardener’s wife probably, a cheap tart if ever I saw one. Initially, he tried to engage Mycroft in boisterous father-and-son activities like fishing or clay pigeon shooting but all he drew was a blank. Mycroft was opposed to legwork to begin with and he had firmly cast his lot with ours. The three of us could have passed for the Holy Trinity. However divided internally, we presented a firm front to the rest of the world.
Mycroft went to the village school five days a week. Of course, he didn’t make any friends there - excepting the Headmaster, who gloated at the prospect of commanding a genius’ education. I suspect Mycroft maintained his rank at the top of the pecking order thanks to a crafty employment of snobbism mixed with a hint of danger. His clothes were always clean and his face and hands free from any discolouration evincing the healthy pursuit of fisticuffs with mates. The one friendship he struck up was with the owner of the corner shop. Her kindliness was no doubt heavily motivated by the profits on the ludicrous amounts of sweets she sold him.
Meanwhile you…
Oh, darling. Oh, my precious, darling boy, how I adored you. You were so clever, so quick. At three months - when all Mycroft could do was flash that horrid smile - you flipped yourself from your back onto your belly and back again. At four months, you tigered around the drawing room. I’ll never forget the look of triumph on your face when you first stayed seated on your tiny, wobbly bum for a whole seven seconds. Nor that of hurt dignity when - slowly but inescapably - you toppled over onto your side.
I was your inexhaustible playmate as we progressed from building blocks to tangram to chess . A handyman built you a treehouse on the lowest branch of the beech tree in the back garden and an outdoor swing and another one in the passage between the drawing and the dining room for the rainy days. You sat on those swings hours at a time, always demanding I’d push you harder so you would soar higher, ever higher into the sky.
Your favourite game was hide and seek, which you insisted on calling ‘detecting’. I’d have to go and hide myself somewhere, preferably in a spot where I could lie down as silent as the grave, and you’d go find me and invent a whole ruse to explain why I was lying there and not in any of the other hiding places the house provided in abundance.
The instant you heard the garden gate’s creak you became another child; openly hostile, hiding behind my legs with your little fists knotted into my skirts. At the shops and out on the streets you’d bare your perfect little teeth to anyone bending over to talk to you or pat the mop of curls that reminded them of the reproductions of frolicking Renaissance cherubim so popular in the early eighties. If they persisted and, worse, addressed you, you’d start to howl.
You endured Mycroft’s presence rather than welcoming it. Mycroft was patient however, as patient as a fox guarding the hole the vole must abandon in search of food. Steady and consistently, with little acts of kindness, he won your love, until the day came when you ran up to the garden gate as fast as your small legs would carry you to welcome your big brother on his return from his daily pursuits. Fiery threads of molten lava rose in me as you wormed your way out of my arms and down from my lap to welcome another’s company. Neither you nor Mycroft noticed anything though. At your return to the secluded spot beneath the gnarled old apple tree with your brother in tow the idyll had been restored with a laid tea table and Mummy waiting to serve you your tea and your anchovy paste sandwiches and slices of fruitcake.
That night I cried after a decade of forgoing the activity. The nasty thorn in my side that was your brother had cropped up like a pest in our rose garden to topple my pedestal. Your unwitting response to Mycroft’s relentless manoeuvres drove home the message I’d been ignoring, soothed into a lull by the sweetness of our embraces. Others would follow where he had trodden, to try and draw your love and attention away from me. Sooner or later, the day would arrive when you’d pay heed to one of those calls. You’d leave me, and I would be so lonely I might as well die.
Unless…
Unless I found a means of tying you to me through a bond stronger than that between mother and child.
All through the dark hours I lay tossing and turning between the sheets, my mind whirring away with the speed of a light particle hurtled across the universe while I suffered every emotion between aching solitude, keen despair and faint flickers of hope.
By the time you padded over to my bed to wake me, as you did every morning, I had hit upon the solution to my quandary.
Always, always Mycroft was silently watching me, and Sigur, you, in short, everyone. Over the years, I’d grown a finely wrought hauberk as a ward against his constant scrutiny. The morning after that dreadful day and night I stood preparing breakfast in the kitchen, my back turned to where you were both sitting at the kitchen table, when I felt Mycroft’s gaze sliding through my armour with the smooth ease of a sharpened steel cutter. In corollary, a shiver slithered down my spine, beneath my flowery summer dress that suddenly felt as heavy and unpleasant as a coat of shame.
“Would you like tomatoes with your eggs, sweetheart?” I managed to ask in a perfectly tranquil voice.
“Yes please, Mummy,” Mycroft replied politely while you raised an eclectic chant of No!’s to a percussion accompaniment for fisted cutlery and wooden table top.
I served you both your eggs and brushed my hand over your brother’s shoulder to cast a spell of protection against his evil eye as I poured him his milk. Feigning surprise, he looked up at me. Our eyes locked and we smiled at each other. Our mutual acknowledgement lasted such a long time you recommenced thumping the table, outraged at being disregarded. A slight you, adorable little tyrant that you were, deemed insupportable.
Fair, Mycroft was a disingenuous little bastard. But, unfair, as his parent and by dint of being older, I called the shots. That weekend Sigur visited. I waited until we were seated around the dining table -pretending to be an ordinary family - before I brought up the subject of Mycroft’s education. Your father obliged me by confirming Mycroft - in time-honoured Holmesian tradition - would be sent down to Eton at thirteen. Mycroft’s face took on an aspect of a remarkably unattractive halibut as he sat opening and closing his mouth in obvious discomfit, necessitating me to remind him of his manners. My remark prodded him into action and he began protesting his father’s announcement. Undeterred by my gentle remonstrations to adapt a more lenient attitude towards the boy, Sigur sent Mycroft up to bed without dessert; strawberry Pavlova, if I remember correctly.
Your brother threw me a gander of hate that set the hairs on my neck burning with the rage.
“Good night, sweetheart,” I said. “Oh, don’t fuss so, Sherlock. Regard the situation as a good example instead. That’s what you get for not listening to your father.”
Thus, the groundworks were laid to prepare your innocent little soul for the inexorable shock of Mycroft’s eventual betrayal of your trust, after his ardent professions of love. Really, whom could you rely on but Mummy who knelt down beside you to hush your cries and dry your tears when that sly traitor boarded the Bentley where Sigur sat waiting behind the steering wheel to whisk him off to a new future, overflowing with happy friends?
Mummy was the one who remained with you, who swept you up into her embrace and carried you to the kitchen to pour you some pineapple juice.
You had such a sweet tooth, you loved sugary sweet drinks and pineapple juice was your favourite, which came out advantageous to my plans. Its saccharine sweetness perfectly masked the taste of the strychnine I used. Never too much, dearest. Just a pinch, I didn’t want you to feel too ill. All I sought to create were the symptoms of sickness, a need for you to cling to me, to keep me close to your side, always. The first time I smothered you with your cushion I told you it was a game, our secret for us to enjoy, and let you push the cushion over my face in turn. Your pain was my pain. And always, always, awake and asleep, I was near. I was there to brush your damp curls out of your face when you panicked, it was my hand that held yours throughout all the trials and tribulations they made you suffer in the hospital.
By now you’ll understand those wild accusations your brother threw at me were utterly without foundation. You were the one truly good and precious thing that had happened to me in my life. I’d never hurt you, never killi> you, I’d rather have cut off my own hand. With the knife bloodied from cutting my heart out of my chest first.
Mycroft was a bad loser and rather than giving in graciously to his defeat he sought to drive us apart. But he hasn’t succeeded, now has he, dearest heart of mine?
The warden is rapping on my door, which means it’s suppertime already. The hours have flown by while I sat writing this letter. Perhaps I should pursue the exercise more often for the clock has been ticking even slower than it used to since my transfer to this unit. On the other hand, all the skeletons are out of the cupboard and - upon examining the sorry heap of bones - you might choose to change sides and walk over to your brother.
Oh, that…
No, I won’t contemplate…
Luckily - for me that is - Mycroft, in his stupendous sagacity, has decreed I’m not allowed to receive visitors nor engage in a correspondence - with anyone, so that includes you. That simpleton Philips went out of her way to point out the decree while handing me the paper, as if I would have forgot. No doubt the prison is stretching every rule in the handbook of the European Convention of Human Rights, but, thanks to Mycroft’s careful instructions, no one will snitch on them. He’s so clever, that elder brother of yours.
Though it seems, with his instructions, he’s rather shot into his own foot, wouldn’t you agree? I hardly could contain my glee while I sat confessing my dreary history to you, in the certainty I need not curb myself for I would tear up the paper upon reaching the end. I’m sincerely weighing the pros and cons of eating the scraps in a great show of dramatics and defiance. However, perhaps, I’ll save that for later, when that moronic Philips is spying on me.
For now I’ll enjoy the sweet irony of Mycroft’s predicament. He’s as well aware as I that the ‘Great Mystery of Mummy’ will live on in your mind - at his express injunction. You’ll continue to despise him for rescuing you, no matter how hard he works to regain your love. Should you - which I pray God forbid - indeed do yourself in one day, he will realise that in separating us he has murdered you, as surely and effectively as if he had inserted the needle into your arm himself. After accusing me of the act, he will have to carry the burden of actually having committed it.
The idea carries a modicum of elegance, I think. He should be exceedingly proud for building himself such a devilishly tight cage in his own personal hell. For as long as you live he must submit to the exquisite torture of the horrid scenarios his mind furnishes him with, without a hope of ever escaping them. My death won’t release him but just add to his agony, as will yours. Truly, all in all, as the victims of his manipulations, you and I are better off for our consciences are pure and in our minds we’re together, always.
Oh, that dreadful Philips. I must hurry now.
Sweetheart, dearly precious darling of mine. I haven’t seen your dear, sweet face since that time they took me away from you and marched me out of the hospital but know that I feel as close to you as ever.
Much, much love, dearest Sherlock,
Mummy
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Remember to leave feedback for both authors!
Author: cherrytide
Title & Link: Proxy
Pairings & Rating: none & mature
Warnings/Content Notes: Contains descriptions of illness, assault, drug use, infidelity and abuse.
Remix Story:
Author: dioscureantwins
Title: Do Your Research
Pairings & Rating: none & mature
Warnings/Content Notes: Contains descriptions of rape, drug use, infidelity, suicide attempts and abuse.
Beta: swissmarg
Britpicker: swissmarg
Summary: Why I did it? The explanation is perfectly simple, if only you’d do your research.
Part 1
Until the evening, when, intending to brush Sigur’s jacket before hanging it in the airing closet, I spotted the blonde hair on the left shoulder, close to the collar. It was quite thick and smelled faintly of that horrible cheap hairspray women of the lower classes used to create the unflattering hairdos that were all the rage those years, mingled with Sigur’s (outrageously expensive) cologne.
Oh god, the hackneyed tediousness of my predicament. Loving mother and industrious housewife and career-builder discovers her husband is cheating on her. I could have starred as a soap opera heroine. At least I didn’t lower your father and myself by creating a scene. No, I put the hair into a box on my vanity, brushed the jacket and hung it in the closet.
We had resumed full relations as soon as my gynaecologist allowed me to. Too numb with shock I didn’t resist when, half an hour after my discovery, Sigur drew me to him and began dropping kisses along my throat. Our coupling that night felt as insensate as that of the beasts in the field. Sigur mistook my shivers of horror for those of pleasure as I endured his hands pawing my body. For the first time in our marriage, I faked an orgasm just to have the torture over and done with. Soon after Sigur fell asleep. I left the bed and went to look at our child, who requited my stare with a steady gaze as if he understood the world better than I ever could.
At breakfast I informed Sigur of my discovery and consecutive decision of spending some time with Mama and Mycroft at my aunt’s to weigh up the marital consequences. Your father had the decency to nearly choke on his toast. If only he’d actually done so. Except, that would have meant you would never have been born, so perhaps it’s better Sigur managed to bring up the offending piece and spit it rather indelicately into his serviette. You might hold another view on the matter. In fact, you seem to; oh well, it’s your life now and I can’t stop you.
Later, at aunt Tilda’s, the ensuing scene replayed itself in my head, like a snippet of music struck up time and again until the needle is lifted out of the scratch and lowered into the next groove. It slowly dawned on me the sheer inanity of Sigur’s reaction to my revelation might be my salvation.
You’ve already guessed what he did, haven’t you, like the clever boy you are?
Oh yes, he began denying my accusation, the glib lies spooling from his mouth as smoothly as liquid honey from the back of a spoon. His arguments harped on two themes mostly; that of declaring the notion preposterous as he was the happiest of men and would be a fool to risk his felicity for the sake of a quick fuck, while the other concerned itself with praising my beauty, no doubt in the hopes of tickling my vanity.
I endured the palaver for five minutes, all the while studying the movements of his face, the knot of his tie, the surge of his jacket over his shoulders, the way those long fingers of his played with his fruit knife. He had such beautiful hands, your father, so slender and mobile and soft with just a faint smattering of fine blonde hairs close to the wrist. The knife’s ebony hilt highlighted their almost luminescent paleness. Thanks to a single hair lodged in soft cashmere those hands, whose touch I’d craved on my skin, reminded me of an octopus’ tentacles, and I recoiled at the idea of their cold, slimy suckers slithering over and gluing themselves to my flesh.
With the veil ripped away from my eyes those five minutes sufficed to fill in the few blank spots left in the sordid tale of Sigur’s adultery. First in the troupe had been a brunette, fished out of the typing pool when I was in my seventh month. As advised by my gynaecologist we’d ceased having vaginal intercourse two weeks earlier (I will never forget the look on the man’s face when I asked him whether it was all right for Sigur to continue to pleasure me. The answer was a strangled ‘no’). Of course I’d been keen and happy to service your father through other means, but, well, as I explained earlier, his interest lay in a different aspect of the game.
Should Sigur have chosen not to prevaricate I might have listened to whatever defence he built for himself, perhaps, in an outlandish fit, have elected to forgive him. His instinct to try and feed me fibs - me, the woman whose analytical intuition he’d so often laughingly praised - sealed the lid firmly on that end.
Halfway through a fresh panegyric on my plethora of charms I raised myself from the table to advise him he was welcome to screw the whole of London as he would no longer be screwing me. Coarse language does have its advantages. The look of surprise on Sigur’s face sparked the adrenalin jolt I needed to propel myself out of the breakfast room and that blighted house with my head raised high.
Oh, the crying I did once we were at aunt Tilda’s. Naturally, my sweet mother couldn’t make head or tail of my sudden impulse and I didn’t care to enlighten her. However, our stay provided her with a breather from my father’s fists so rather than asking me questions I’d have to answer with lies she seized the chance to bounce Mycroft on her lap until he looked positively green around the gills. Grandmother and grandson enjoyed the happiest time of their lives, gurgling at and eying each other in a sickening manner that sent everyone flocking from the room.
Meanwhile, I spent my days either roaming the countryside, leaving the house before dark and returning well past suppertime, or locked in the guestroom. I won’t bore you with the bitter self-reproach I flogged myself with, nor the hateful invective my mind hurled at your father. That my options were limited was already clear to me as I fired my parting shot in the breakfast room. I could either swallow my pride and revulsion and return to your father or ask for a divorce and return to my parents. Both recourses held little appeal. A third alternative flitted through my brain and I spent one long afternoon perched on the top of the cliffs and staring at the surging crests perpetually pounding themselves into a spray of oblivion against the rocks a hundred feet below me. It was the closest I came to killing myself, but in the end I resolved I’d rather murder Sigur and spend the rest of my days in prison than grant him such an easy way out of my troubles.
I probably should have written the regard for my young and helpless child kept me from such desperate measures. Well, we both know better, don’t we, sweetheart? Besides, most people would claim I’m not exactly an advertisement for motherhood so why add insult to injury and confess to a consideration that didn’t once enter my head. It might have - if Mycroft hadn’t been constantly hungering after love and attention.
At last, the thirst for revenge was what made me sit down at the small escritoire in aunt Tilda’s drawing room and pen a truce offer to Sigur. I needed him to keep myself and Mycroft fed and clothed, but Sigur needed us for something far more important; his prestige, that coveted Knighthood, and - once that was in the bag - that most magnificent jewel in the Holmes’ family crown… the Order of the Bath.
My terms were short and to the point: separate bedrooms, no touching except in a public situation that warranted a demonstration of affection and absolute discretion on his part with respect to his whores. I didn’t want to find so much as a flake of their plebeian skin on my upholstery.
In exchange, I offered my tireless devotion to the cause, with Sigur, obviously, as the principal beneficiary of my efforts. The cause’s nature, as well as that of my efforts I left open to interpretation.
The reply came by telegram. Like I said before, Sigur did have a love of dramatics.
Thus, to your grandmother’s mortification, off our little train went to London again. Your father awaited us at Victoria station, hastening to assist Mama on her descent from our compartment. Mycroft beamed up at him, nearly delirious with the excess of kisses showered all over the top of his bald skull. I proffered my cheek for a chaste peck before striding off to leave Sigur dealing with our luggage.
Back at Grosvenor Square I had our former bedroom stripped bare and redecorated and the third guestroom revamped into a walk-in closet and private bathroom for Sigur. I didn’t skimp on expenses, giving in to the perverse thrill that coursed through my veins as I ordered fabrics and furniture by virtue of the hefty price tags they carried rather than their inherent aesthetics. Several times I caught Sigur pursing his lips as he read the bills, but he footed them all without complaint. Neither did he upbraid me over the loss of the Boodles ruby, which I flushed down the toilet on my first night back in London. Who has ever heard of a fighter wearing jewels when he enters the arena?
To round off the preparations, I ravaged my wedding dress. Stuffing the shreds of costly shot silk into the trash sent a thrill of unholy merriment crackling down my spine.
My absence was soon glossed over and I threw myself at my duties with renewed vigour, for all the world ceaselessly canvassing on Sigur’s behalf. We sat grinning through dinners and yawning discreetly behind the back of our hands through an endless parade of christenings, weddings, funerals and all those other vapid social occasions invented by the devil himself as a punishment for our sins. Have you ever endured the mind-numbing besiegement of a High Church service in a damp and draughty chapel with nothing but a thin sliver of leather sole and transparent nylon netting between your feet and the freezing floor? Believe me, I frequently desired the ground would split open, toppling the congregation into the eternal flames, to leave me feeling toasty at last.
The sole thought that kept me smiling tranquilly upward as the Minister’s vapid outpourings floated over the top of my head was the image of the tiny teeth steadily sawing away at the chair legs of the fornicating reprobate seated on my left. Oh, I was careful, always careful. Just a quick nod here and a faint blush and lowering of my eyelids there, refraining from a comment where formerly I would have rushed to daub the breach in the ramparts of Sigur’s reputation.
With the patience and determination of a gardener tending his inconveniently situated grounds atop a rocky sea cliff, I tilled the soil and planted my seeds. They were nothing, just the tiniest flecks of doubt on Sigur’s overall character. Most of them were doomed to wither and die instantly; indeed, the stability and trustworthiness of the Holmeses is one of our Realm’s founding pillars.
Sigur considered himself unassailable. His favourite play was Henry V. He would have done better to engage in a comprehensive study of Othello. The years I spent listening to and distributing insipid nonsense had taught me people like nothing better than chancing upon a nugget of slander, however tiny. Their ears will perk up and their tongues start wagging to repeat the information and enhance the tale’s lurid details to smooth along its journey. An idea, once planted, is impossible to remove. Eventually, its roots will burrow themselves into the rock and, slowly but decidedly, dig deeper and deeper until the rock that appeared so mighty and powerful must give way and crumble… and fall.
Yes, such are the wicked ways of this world, darling. Parents are supposed to dispense sound advice to their children and set them a good example. I’m afraid your father and I both rather failed regarding the latter. As to the former the best advice would be to trust no one, except for your mother that is. No one but you yourself and your mother has your interests at heart.
Your father trusted me, even after his betrayal. At the time, I thought his confidence more proof of his arrogance, which may have been an injustice. Perhaps it was closer to a mark of his naiveté. The notion of ill will on my part simply never entered his head. Fundamentally, all his cleverness notwithstanding, he was a profoundly stupid man.
The publication of the Queen’s Honours Lists were my annual highlights, more festive than Guy Fawkes Night and Christmas combined. To all appearances, Sigur bore the bi-annual news of his omission with manly equanimity. Oh, he was such a prime model of the British stiff upper lip. That trait in itself ought to have earned him that damned Knighthood, looming so near and yet proving itself so maddeningly elusive.
Naturally I, the devoted wife, commiserated with him, both in private and at his parents’ home. I was living it up as I sat lamenting and complaining and unreservedly adding my spite and bitterness to the cup that was already overflowing with outrage at the treatment doled out to Sigur. My magnificent rants would have sent Her Majesty herself dashing to right the wrong inflicted unjustly upon my beloved spouse… if only she could have heard them.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. For all his self-absorption, your father wasn’t completely oblivious to his surroundings. One day he returned early from the office and the noise of his key scraping over the front door lock informed me something was off. Mycroft was at Mama’s and I didn’t expect the chauffeur to drop him off for another half hour at least. Two weeks earlier he’d turned seven and he was already such a mature and responsible child I had no qualms about him letting himself in and out of our home with his own key. I shut the book I was reading and attached my customary bland smile to my face.
Sigur’s, when he entered, was livid with rage, his handsome features morphed into a rictus of hate. He zoomed upon me with the determination of a peregrine falcon stooping a turtledove, taking the hurdle of the coffee table in the stride of his long legs. Those beautiful, slender fingers proved to be surprisingly strong as they closed themselves around my throat and he dragged me up from the sofa.
“You bitch,” he snarled. Warm drops of saliva splattered my cheeks. I was so numbed with fear the idea of raising my hand to wipe them off never entered my head. “You vile muckraker, you whore… You promised, all those years ago, promised to honour and obey… How dare you? Sully the name I gave you… The vile slander…”
Each word was a turn of the spanner further tightening the grip of his hands on my throat. Faintly, I attempted to scrabble at his hands with fingers that already felt weakened from lack of oxygen. As sudden as he’d lifted me, he let go and I crashed against the sofa, the back of my head colliding hard with the armrest’s elaborate mahogany scroll. I still believe I must have passed out for an instant.
Sigur’s hands tearing at my underwear revived me. I fought him with my hands and my teeth, I screeched bloody murder, I tried to spit in his face but he was stronger and the sheer length of his body put me at a disadvantage. He wrenched his hips between my legs and, right there on the Aubusson carpet that covered the floor of our drawing room, holding my arms with one hand over my head, he raped me.
That’s how you were conceived, my precious.
Whatever can have possessed Sigur of all men to avail himself of this particular act of aggression would have been a moot point for a psychiatrist, should your father ever have condescended to prevail himself of one’s services. As he considered them all quacks of the worst kind I’m fairly certain he didn’t. Having endured hours of torment in the form of so-called therapy myself, I tend to - reluctantly mind you - share your father’s opinion.
Does Mycroft employ one, though, I wonder? Because Sigur was halfway through leveraging himself and tucking himself inside his trousers again, when the door opened to reveal your brother’s small figure.
“Mummy? Daddy?” he asked, his gaze flitting between us. Sigur leapt up and shoved past him, leaving me to account for the incongruous sight of his mother with her skirts flung up around her waist and his father knelt between her legs and zipping himself up.
Fortune is a faithful mistress, no matter how hard a disgruntled wife may strive to thwart her. The next day Mama died of a heart attack. This occurrence nicely explained my abrupt disappearance from Sigur’s side at public occasions and the time lapse to fabricate a conceivable fairy tale for my social demise.
Because we’d descended into open war. Every so often Sigur stormed into my room to launch increasingly obscene invective at me but all I would do was turn my back on him, take another swig of the whisky bottle I was nursing and screw my eyes shut until he made himself scarce, huffing his exasperation. He knew better than to bring up the threat of a divorce and, even with my mind locked in a dank gaol of despair, I was determined not to grant him one. I’d rather have died first. Although the whisky swilling was more an act of defiance than an actual attempt at doing myself in.
Frankly, I don’t know what became of your brother during those weeks. The poor boy presumably mourned his grandmother, the only person to love him truly and not let herself be disconcerted by his penetrating stares. Our cleaning lady, a Mrs Wilkinson I’d chosen for her trustworthiness rather than her actual housekeeping abilities, kept him fed and clothed probably, as he’s still exasperatingly alive today. I heard the soft padding of his feet in front of my bed multiple times but never deigned to react. He always took care to close the door very softly upon leaving.
I’d rather have died first, I wrote a few sentences back. Oh Sherlock dear, those words were meaningless until the day it dawned on my befuddled mind I was with child. A look at the calendar told me I was in my fourth month.
Are you acquainted with London at all, dearest? I’ve never gone to the trouble of finding out where you went to live after I was whisked out of the hospital straight into prison. Anyway, if you happen to be in London one day, do visit Grosvenor Square and have a look at the terraces of houses standing there. The height of the windows will give you a fair idea of the height of the staircases inside those flats. The instant I realised my predicament I didn’t hesitate and flung myself down ours. I reckoned I’d either break my neck or lose the child. Both options held equal appeal. Instead, I ended up in hospital with two broken legs, several fractured ribs and a broken arm and you kicking me triumphantly in the belly as I clawed my way back to consciousness after surgery.
I refused to eat. They inserted a feeding tube up my nose. I ripped it out. They re-inserted the tube and tied my hands to the bed. Nurses being what they are - and yes, they are a race of inquisitive bitches worse than the wardens at this place - the puzzle of my physical injuries and voluntary fast was soon solved and - for your safety’s sake - I was committed to remaining in the hospital until after my deliverance.
You were far quicker than Mycroft about the tedious business. Two weeks early and in less than an hour the job was done. Your lusty cries rang around the room, the maternity ward, the hospital wing and the whole cavernous building itself. I was the only one deaf to your shrieks, laid out on my side to stare at nothing while biting back the agony of the milk surging painfully against the flesh of my breasts, called forth by your hunger.
During my months as a guest of the NHS I’d become immune to their prattle about having my interest at heart. They had forced their treatment upon me against my will. Now they had got what they had so avidly desired, their valuable babe, never mind I hadn’t wanted it all along, and I, for certain, was not going to deal with their problem, come hell or high water.
When they tried to wrap my lame fingers around a bottle I didn’t grasp it but let the bottle roll down onto the sheets, where it gained momentum and tumbled over the edge of the bed. After the third attempt they gave up and tried to bottle-feed you themselves instead. You adamantly rejected the teat, twisting your head to the side, and when they forced it into your screeching mouth you didn’t grasp it with your lips to start sucking eagerly but hitched your wails up a notch.
Next they tried wrapping my arms around you, which, sav for a quick dive by a young nurse, would have wound up with you following the same course as the bottle as I pushed you away with my eyes screwed shut as tight as my facial muscles allowed.
After twenty-four hours both nurses and doctors were desperate. You were yelling your head off as soon as someone merely looked at you, refused all sustenance, and - having been thin to begin with thanks to your Mummy indulging in a four-month binge after your conception - were losing weight rapidly. Mycroft was the one who saved you. Doctors and nurses had left the room to confer what to do next when he plucked you from the cot where you lay hollering, clambered onto the hospital bed with you screeching in his arms and deposited you onto the mattress in front of me.
“Look, Mummy, the baby really wants to eat,” he said. I opened my eyes to catch his’ verging away from the wet patches on the front of my gown and then my gaze swept down and came to rest on the crown of your head with its adorable nest of black curls. Your tiny fists scrabbled at the cloth of my night gownand the instant your questing mouth found a nipple it began suckling urgently, relieving my breast of the maddening pressure. The whole hospital breathed a collective sigh of relief at the peace and quiet descending over the premises. Behind me, I felt Mycroft slide off the bed. My hand came up to support your head, revelling in the silky softness of your hair, and you opened your eyes and looked at me. From that moment, I have loved you. More fiercely than any mother has ever loved her child.
How Mycroft must have mourned his impulse afterwards; the biggest blunder he ever committed. Perhaps he’d been snivelling in his room over the loss of Mama - I never asked - and that was the rationale behind his impulse of compassion. Whatever his motive, in saving you he cut the last threads of motherly feeling running between us. I had only that much love to give and, inevitably, from the moment I first held you in my arms must give it all to you.
He should have let you rot in that crib. I’d felt no compunction in doing so and I wouldn’t have given in to the personnel’s demands if they’d threatened to have me executed for being the worst mother in the world.
Except, they couldn’t very well do that after Mycroft’s intervention, could they? Not when I had quieted you so effectively and was close to smothering you with my love, looking daggers at anyone who so much as tried to touch you. Being a bunch of interfering nuisances the doctors and nurses next began upbraiding me for breastfeeding you, which was, in those times, not ‘the done thing’ for a woman of my class. I sighed and turned my back on them - over the course of the past months I’d become quite the expert at doing just that. You followed along seamlessly, seeking my other nipple and I could have sworn your lips quirked before attaching themselves to my breast.
Everything became so much easier after that. The next time Mycroft visited his gaze glued itself to the back of your head -the only visible part of you as you lay feeding at my breast - with the tenacity of a barnacle on a tidal rock. A nurse who came in to take my temperature told him off for staring so openly at my breasts, not daring to speak to me after the tongue-lashing I’d given her that morning, and I lazily corrected her.
“You’re just watching your lovely new brother, aren’t you, sweetheart?” Mycroft nodded - what else could he do? - and lowered his lids in a vain attempt to hide his blazing hate.
Over the course of the following days, I tracked his internal struggle. With a resolution almost frightening to behold in a seven-year-old, he willed himself to love you. He had perceived, quite astutely, that you were the turnpike he couldn’t bypass if he wanted to follow the way into my heart. Oh my, you really set a rather high rate. As soon as anyone lifted you out of my arms you’d start wailing with the loud insistence of a siren announcing World War III and the Fall of the Heavens. Nonetheless Mycroft persisted in holding you in his lap for minutes at a time - the longest he managed was half an hour, at the end of which your body was red all over from your continuous crying - with a serene expression on his face. Sigur, the one time he tried to pick you up, almost let you drop, and Mycroft was the one quick enough to catch you, encumbered as I was by the heaviness of my breasts.
During that same visit your father and I determined I’d be more at leisure with the children at the old rectory his family still owned, down in Surrey. A throng of builders and carpenters and painters was sent off to convert the hovel into something inhabitable whither I took off a few months later, leaving London society to their own devices and Sigur to his trollops.
For appearances’ sake, your father stayed with us every other weekend. I don’t know how he kept himself amused through those weekends; slept with the gardener’s wife probably, a cheap tart if ever I saw one. Initially, he tried to engage Mycroft in boisterous father-and-son activities like fishing or clay pigeon shooting but all he drew was a blank. Mycroft was opposed to legwork to begin with and he had firmly cast his lot with ours. The three of us could have passed for the Holy Trinity. However divided internally, we presented a firm front to the rest of the world.
Mycroft went to the village school five days a week. Of course, he didn’t make any friends there - excepting the Headmaster, who gloated at the prospect of commanding a genius’ education. I suspect Mycroft maintained his rank at the top of the pecking order thanks to a crafty employment of snobbism mixed with a hint of danger. His clothes were always clean and his face and hands free from any discolouration evincing the healthy pursuit of fisticuffs with mates. The one friendship he struck up was with the owner of the corner shop. Her kindliness was no doubt heavily motivated by the profits on the ludicrous amounts of sweets she sold him.
Meanwhile you…
Oh, darling. Oh, my precious, darling boy, how I adored you. You were so clever, so quick. At three months - when all Mycroft could do was flash that horrid smile - you flipped yourself from your back onto your belly and back again. At four months, you tigered around the drawing room. I’ll never forget the look of triumph on your face when you first stayed seated on your tiny, wobbly bum for a whole seven seconds. Nor that of hurt dignity when - slowly but inescapably - you toppled over onto your side.
I was your inexhaustible playmate as we progressed from building blocks to tangram to chess . A handyman built you a treehouse on the lowest branch of the beech tree in the back garden and an outdoor swing and another one in the passage between the drawing and the dining room for the rainy days. You sat on those swings hours at a time, always demanding I’d push you harder so you would soar higher, ever higher into the sky.
Your favourite game was hide and seek, which you insisted on calling ‘detecting’. I’d have to go and hide myself somewhere, preferably in a spot where I could lie down as silent as the grave, and you’d go find me and invent a whole ruse to explain why I was lying there and not in any of the other hiding places the house provided in abundance.
The instant you heard the garden gate’s creak you became another child; openly hostile, hiding behind my legs with your little fists knotted into my skirts. At the shops and out on the streets you’d bare your perfect little teeth to anyone bending over to talk to you or pat the mop of curls that reminded them of the reproductions of frolicking Renaissance cherubim so popular in the early eighties. If they persisted and, worse, addressed you, you’d start to howl.
You endured Mycroft’s presence rather than welcoming it. Mycroft was patient however, as patient as a fox guarding the hole the vole must abandon in search of food. Steady and consistently, with little acts of kindness, he won your love, until the day came when you ran up to the garden gate as fast as your small legs would carry you to welcome your big brother on his return from his daily pursuits. Fiery threads of molten lava rose in me as you wormed your way out of my arms and down from my lap to welcome another’s company. Neither you nor Mycroft noticed anything though. At your return to the secluded spot beneath the gnarled old apple tree with your brother in tow the idyll had been restored with a laid tea table and Mummy waiting to serve you your tea and your anchovy paste sandwiches and slices of fruitcake.
That night I cried after a decade of forgoing the activity. The nasty thorn in my side that was your brother had cropped up like a pest in our rose garden to topple my pedestal. Your unwitting response to Mycroft’s relentless manoeuvres drove home the message I’d been ignoring, soothed into a lull by the sweetness of our embraces. Others would follow where he had trodden, to try and draw your love and attention away from me. Sooner or later, the day would arrive when you’d pay heed to one of those calls. You’d leave me, and I would be so lonely I might as well die.
Unless…
Unless I found a means of tying you to me through a bond stronger than that between mother and child.
All through the dark hours I lay tossing and turning between the sheets, my mind whirring away with the speed of a light particle hurtled across the universe while I suffered every emotion between aching solitude, keen despair and faint flickers of hope.
By the time you padded over to my bed to wake me, as you did every morning, I had hit upon the solution to my quandary.
Always, always Mycroft was silently watching me, and Sigur, you, in short, everyone. Over the years, I’d grown a finely wrought hauberk as a ward against his constant scrutiny. The morning after that dreadful day and night I stood preparing breakfast in the kitchen, my back turned to where you were both sitting at the kitchen table, when I felt Mycroft’s gaze sliding through my armour with the smooth ease of a sharpened steel cutter. In corollary, a shiver slithered down my spine, beneath my flowery summer dress that suddenly felt as heavy and unpleasant as a coat of shame.
“Would you like tomatoes with your eggs, sweetheart?” I managed to ask in a perfectly tranquil voice.
“Yes please, Mummy,” Mycroft replied politely while you raised an eclectic chant of No!’s to a percussion accompaniment for fisted cutlery and wooden table top.
I served you both your eggs and brushed my hand over your brother’s shoulder to cast a spell of protection against his evil eye as I poured him his milk. Feigning surprise, he looked up at me. Our eyes locked and we smiled at each other. Our mutual acknowledgement lasted such a long time you recommenced thumping the table, outraged at being disregarded. A slight you, adorable little tyrant that you were, deemed insupportable.
Fair, Mycroft was a disingenuous little bastard. But, unfair, as his parent and by dint of being older, I called the shots. That weekend Sigur visited. I waited until we were seated around the dining table -pretending to be an ordinary family - before I brought up the subject of Mycroft’s education. Your father obliged me by confirming Mycroft - in time-honoured Holmesian tradition - would be sent down to Eton at thirteen. Mycroft’s face took on an aspect of a remarkably unattractive halibut as he sat opening and closing his mouth in obvious discomfit, necessitating me to remind him of his manners. My remark prodded him into action and he began protesting his father’s announcement. Undeterred by my gentle remonstrations to adapt a more lenient attitude towards the boy, Sigur sent Mycroft up to bed without dessert; strawberry Pavlova, if I remember correctly.
Your brother threw me a gander of hate that set the hairs on my neck burning with the rage.
“Good night, sweetheart,” I said. “Oh, don’t fuss so, Sherlock. Regard the situation as a good example instead. That’s what you get for not listening to your father.”
Thus, the groundworks were laid to prepare your innocent little soul for the inexorable shock of Mycroft’s eventual betrayal of your trust, after his ardent professions of love. Really, whom could you rely on but Mummy who knelt down beside you to hush your cries and dry your tears when that sly traitor boarded the Bentley where Sigur sat waiting behind the steering wheel to whisk him off to a new future, overflowing with happy friends?
Mummy was the one who remained with you, who swept you up into her embrace and carried you to the kitchen to pour you some pineapple juice.
You had such a sweet tooth, you loved sugary sweet drinks and pineapple juice was your favourite, which came out advantageous to my plans. Its saccharine sweetness perfectly masked the taste of the strychnine I used. Never too much, dearest. Just a pinch, I didn’t want you to feel too ill. All I sought to create were the symptoms of sickness, a need for you to cling to me, to keep me close to your side, always. The first time I smothered you with your cushion I told you it was a game, our secret for us to enjoy, and let you push the cushion over my face in turn. Your pain was my pain. And always, always, awake and asleep, I was near. I was there to brush your damp curls out of your face when you panicked, it was my hand that held yours throughout all the trials and tribulations they made you suffer in the hospital.
By now you’ll understand those wild accusations your brother threw at me were utterly without foundation. You were the one truly good and precious thing that had happened to me in my life. I’d never hurt you, never killi> you, I’d rather have cut off my own hand. With the knife bloodied from cutting my heart out of my chest first.
Mycroft was a bad loser and rather than giving in graciously to his defeat he sought to drive us apart. But he hasn’t succeeded, now has he, dearest heart of mine?
The warden is rapping on my door, which means it’s suppertime already. The hours have flown by while I sat writing this letter. Perhaps I should pursue the exercise more often for the clock has been ticking even slower than it used to since my transfer to this unit. On the other hand, all the skeletons are out of the cupboard and - upon examining the sorry heap of bones - you might choose to change sides and walk over to your brother.
Oh, that…
No, I won’t contemplate…
Luckily - for me that is - Mycroft, in his stupendous sagacity, has decreed I’m not allowed to receive visitors nor engage in a correspondence - with anyone, so that includes you. That simpleton Philips went out of her way to point out the decree while handing me the paper, as if I would have forgot. No doubt the prison is stretching every rule in the handbook of the European Convention of Human Rights, but, thanks to Mycroft’s careful instructions, no one will snitch on them. He’s so clever, that elder brother of yours.
Though it seems, with his instructions, he’s rather shot into his own foot, wouldn’t you agree? I hardly could contain my glee while I sat confessing my dreary history to you, in the certainty I need not curb myself for I would tear up the paper upon reaching the end. I’m sincerely weighing the pros and cons of eating the scraps in a great show of dramatics and defiance. However, perhaps, I’ll save that for later, when that moronic Philips is spying on me.
For now I’ll enjoy the sweet irony of Mycroft’s predicament. He’s as well aware as I that the ‘Great Mystery of Mummy’ will live on in your mind - at his express injunction. You’ll continue to despise him for rescuing you, no matter how hard he works to regain your love. Should you - which I pray God forbid - indeed do yourself in one day, he will realise that in separating us he has murdered you, as surely and effectively as if he had inserted the needle into your arm himself. After accusing me of the act, he will have to carry the burden of actually having committed it.
The idea carries a modicum of elegance, I think. He should be exceedingly proud for building himself such a devilishly tight cage in his own personal hell. For as long as you live he must submit to the exquisite torture of the horrid scenarios his mind furnishes him with, without a hope of ever escaping them. My death won’t release him but just add to his agony, as will yours. Truly, all in all, as the victims of his manipulations, you and I are better off for our consciences are pure and in our minds we’re together, always.
Oh, that dreadful Philips. I must hurry now.
Sweetheart, dearly precious darling of mine. I haven’t seen your dear, sweet face since that time they took me away from you and marched me out of the hospital but know that I feel as close to you as ever.
Much, much love, dearest Sherlock,
Mummy
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