Fic: Writ in Water
Gosh, it's been nearly a year since I posted anything here. But with all the LJ nostalgia floating around, I figured it would be a good time to drop in. And I come bearing fic! I finished this last year, and then RL descended on me and I never did get around to posting it. Until two days ago, when I posted it at AO3. Apparently it still feels a little strange to me not crossposting fic to LJ.
Title: Writ in Water
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler (gen)
Rating: PG
Word Count: 8,300
Warnings: Violence, but nothing beyond what occurs in canon.
Notes: Thank you so much to my excellent beta-readers, thekumquat, garonne, and tripleransom, and my apologies for maintaining radio silence for far longer than I should have. An AO3 link is posted above if you prefer to read/comment there.
A note on pairings: This is essentially gen, although there is some discussion of Irene’s relationship with Godfrey Norton, and it doesn’t take a very strong prescription of slash-goggles to read Holmes/Watson into it, even though Watson doesn’t actually make an appearance on-screen. The idea of Holmes/Irene is discussed but ultimately dismissed by the characters in question.
My dear Watson,
How did one begin such a letter?
Thank you for writing such a moving account of my death. For once I cannot fault you for your habitual sensationalism, as it was entirely my intention that you should write the tale just as you have. I am sorry if I have caused you any great inconvenience…
It would be a very foolish thing to write such a letter, let alone to send it. Even if he were able to set that paltry concern aside, every time he allowed himself to contemplate the task he could not conceive of anything suitable beyond the first three words.
And yet, even here, surrounded by the exquisite marbles of old Rome, jostled on all sides by a flock of perspiring tourists and finally feeling a slow burn of hunger in the pit of his stomach - when had he eaten last? - it was those three words which reverberated in his skull, refusing to be drowned out by the cacophony of languages pressing in on all sides.
A fellow Englishman - a left-handed banker with a dying wife, whose accent indicated he was pretending not to be from Lancashire - was telling his young son a wholly inaccurate story about a statue of a 'dying gladiator.' The statue actually depicted a dying Gaul, as evidenced by the torc around the unfortunate's neck, his lime-stiffened hair, and even his nudity, but there seemed little point in correcting the poor fellow.
Watson would no doubt have waxed poetic about the tragic nobility of it, the poignancy of the man's expression, the exceptional craftsmanship that the ancient pagans so often displayed. He would not have mentioned the solidarity he felt with this fictive soldier, but Holmes would have read it in his expression as he examined the man's fatal wound. Perhaps they would have discussed pathos as they strolled down the Capitoline and through the Forum Romanum, before taking an early supper on their way to Teatro Costanzi.
Holmes glanced from a wounded Amazon to the entwined forms of Cupid and Psyche, and found that he had no more appetite for ancient sculpture than he'd had for food in the past few days. He could almost hear Watson's reprimand for that. If anyone noticed the haste with which he fled the hall, he did not take note of it.
(He was getting sloppy, after all this time. A year ago no one had scrutinized him without being scrutinized by him first.)
A Roman summer was unpleasant to anyone acclimatised to a British one, and by now even the locals were beginning to flee the city for the cooling breezes of the seaside. Without the press of bodies in close quarter, the warm air settled thickly over Piazza del Campidoglio was less stifling than that in the palace-museum behind him. Marcus Aurelius on horseback dominated the square, staring down the distant dome of St. Peter's, like the last knight of a cause long lost. At his feet, an adolescent street urchin sang an old Sicilian love song with sweet earnestness, a hat full of coins at his feet. Tourists picked their way slowly up the steep cordonata, the women cooling themselves with elaborately decorated oriental fans.
A group of them clustered, panting, beneath the statue of Castor at the top of the hill. An American expatriate in her late twenties wearing a hat that appeared to have lost a battle with a large bird of multi-hued plumage - heiress of a good but not exceptional income, newly married, inclined to a forgetfulness that was mostly feigned - clutched the arm of her English husband, a middle-aged man, hair greying at the temples, diplomat, former soldier, inclined to opium mania. Beside them: a second middle-aged gentlemen, lawyer, secretly harbouring lust for his friend’s wife, badly in debt.
He felt a strange, unprecedented, absurd affection for them and their absurdly simple little problems, and turned abruptly away.
He did not so much stroll as meander his way over to the little garden overlooking the Forum of Julius Caesar, pausing by the honourable Marcus Aurelius to toss a few lira into the singing guttersnipe's hat.
The few columns remaining from the Temple of Venus the Mother failed to excite anything in him, and nothing in the museum save that damnable wounded Gallic soldier had left any impression. It occurred to Sherlock Holmes that wallowing in the past in order to avoid wallowing in the past was a transparently foolish enterprise, and surely unworthy of his much purported genius.
Oh, the past had its uses, certainly. His knowledge of the history of crime had proved invaluable on numerous occasions. Individual history was equally illuminating, and could be used both to interpret human behaviour and to predict it. He read history everywhere he looked, whether on a writer's sleeve or a weaver's tooth. And yet, to dwell on one's own past, not for the sake of edification or demystifying some problem of the present, but simply for the sake of it? Reminiscence, for its own purposeless pleasure or wallowing anguish, seemed a morbid activity, and he avoided it. Unless there was some point to be made, he spoke of his own past rarely and warily.
He stroked his chin thoughtfully, somewhat dismayed at the feel of the auburn goatee he was currently sporting. He took a pipe from his pocket, noting as he lit it the ways in which it was not his pipe - brown not black, a five degree difference in the angle of the stem, which was nearly a centimetre shorter - and wondered whether that pipe still sat on the mantelpiece in Baker Street. The spectacles he was wearing didn't fit properly, and were now on the verge of slipping right off his nose. All things considered, his disguise wasn’t much of one. There was no character in it, that was the trouble. He wasn't anyone in particular today; he was merely Sherlock Holmes in a beard that didn’t suit his bone structure.
It hardly seemed to matter anymore.
No. It hardly felt as though it mattered. Presumably it still did.
It had been nearly twelve weeks since the last attempt on his life. The circumstances had required him to make a hasty retreat from Athens. It was a welcome change, on the whole, aside from the unfortunate loss of a rather fine top hat, and his Italian was infinitely better than his Modern Greek. Rome was as good a place as any to disappear, and if he had disappeared properly, as he'd intended, then he wouldn’t need to chastise himself now for the laxity with which he had prepared today’s costume. But he’d done something very foolish here, shortly after his arrival, out of careless habit.
He’d solved a case.
Over the last two and a half years, he had been many different people. Given the limitations of his current wardrobe, it was safe to say that he had worn more identities than he had suits. He had spent time as a chemist, a librarian, an actor, a cabbie, a sailor, and on one memorable occasion a lion-tamer - and many more besides. Not one of them had been a consulting detective.
The body had turned up, quite literally, on his doorstep. That sort of thing is very difficult to ignore, no matter how committed one is to avoiding involvement with any crime not directed at one’s person. The police were dedicated to rushing off in precisely the wrong direction.
(He’d known at a glance that the woman was no prostitute, no matter that she had been tricked up like one. The state of her skin had provoked his suspicions, and the odour of her hair made it perfectly obvious, even if one did not bother to examine her fingernails.)
It had been so easy to insinuate himself into their investigation. Not that it was himself in any real sense. It was that famed criminologist Jacques Vernet, a jovial brown-haired Frenchman with a jocular, self-deprecating manner and a disfiguring scar across his left cheek. Oh, haven’t you heard of him? No matter. He will prove his worth soon enough.
The exhilaration of the enterprise shocked him. It was not a case he would have refused had he been operating from Baker Street, but it was hardly the most intriguing or complex problem he had ever been presented with. Yet it set his pulse racing. He was loquacious to the point of babbling. He fairly threw himself to the ground whenever he spotted a speck of suspicious dust. He might have been twenty years younger.
Three times he had turned to make a scintillating observation to the empty air. The air gave no sign of being impressed.
It was not like him to be so-
So…
And there he faltered. Ordinarily he was so good with words. He was good with several languages worth of words. That wasn't the problem. Nor did he lack self-awareness, nor the capacity for self-examination, as many people did. But putting words to this-
It was not worth the trouble. Naming it would lend it too much clarity, in the end.
When the case had ended, and he had tied together the last remaining threads, a young constable had clapped him on the back and said, “Sherlock Holmes - God rest his soul - couldn’t have done better.”
It was such a lovely joke. The universe might have handed it to him for his pleasure, knowing that it was the sort of thing he was apt to appreciate. Dramatic irony was so difficult to manufacture off the stage; one had to appreciate it when it arrived by happy chance. But the words had not tugged the corner of his lips into a knowing half-smile, nor did they elicit the soundless chuckle he generally employed in place of outright laughter. Instead dull, affable, obsequious Jacques Vernet fled the scene, and there was Sherlock Holmes standing in the middle of a hive buzzing with jabbering Italian policemen, all of whom wanted him to say something or do something or be marvellous for them. All the fierce energy which had driven him for the past few days immediately ceased, like forcing a train to a sudden standstill by dropping an impenetrable wall in front of it.
When he finally re-emerged from his squalid little rooms in Trastevere this morning, after two weeks lying in the miserable stillness of his own mind, only then did he realize how badly he had blundered.
Throughout the case, he had been very careful to behave as someone else, and he had been politely vehement on the subject of newspapers and public recognition. The Roman authorities, however, showing all the delicacy and perspicacity typical of their profession, had been rather free with details in the press. They had cited their “anonymous benefactor” no less than seven times, and if anyone in Moran’s network of agents and allies read it, it was all too likely that they would recognize his hand.
He had finally reached a point in his life where he could no longer recognize the difference between sensible precaution and outright paranoia.
Moran had returned to England, of that much he was certain. Moriarty’s connections on the continent, beyond the reach of Scotland Yard, were beginning to dissolve their associations with each other, now that their master was gone. They were tiring of Moran. They had no desire to play his games, not when they had their own crumbling empires to worry about. They were beginning to doubt his claims that Sherlock Holmes was alive, at large, and dangerous.
(Holmes’ lips did quirk up at that last.)
Watson’s tale had been most beneficial, in that respect.
Still, Moran had not yet exhausted his list of assassins, and assassins were not a class of men prone to asking questions, so long as they received payment.
These were the facts, as far as he knew them. But where did that leave him, when all was said and done? Of that he was not certain. Never before had the story of his own life been so far off kilter. He had no sense of linearity anymore. He merely rambled. Once, his life had existed as a series of episodes, each with its own beginning and middle and end, and now the grand finale had been written and he was still here, making a hash of the epilogue.
"Excuse me, sir," said a youthful voice behind him.
He turned, rather startled at the boy's silent appearance, but careful not to let any of that show on his face.
The urchin took off his grubby hat, the coins having presumably disappeared into the lad's innumerable pockets. "I think you dropped this," he said, holding out a British sovereign in his unwashed hand, with a glint in his sharp grey eyes.
Her hand. Her sharp grey eyes.
"Thank you," he said, switching to English. "I would have been quite vexed to have lost that. It was a souvenir of a most peculiar adventure."
“You are supposed to be dead, Mr Holmes,” said Irene Norton, née Adler.
“And you are supposed to be a woman, Mrs Norton,” said Sherlock Holmes.
She grinned, unabashed. “That is the second time that you have walked right past and failed to see me. I had such faith that you would recognise me this time.”
“I'm afraid being dead does little for one's acumen.”
"You got there in the end," she said, patting his arm.
“Your Italian is impeccable.”
“I was an opera singer. Of course my Italian is impeccable.”
She pulled out a cigarette which had been tucked behind her ear and hidden by the unruly black hair that currently graced her head. He lit it for her without a word.
She took a long drag and expelled a perfect ring of smoke. “I’m beginning to suspect that all the disaffected artists of London wind up in Rome, Mr Holmes.”
“You are not from London, and I am not an artist, Mrs Norton.”
She raised a wiry black eyebrow at him. “I am a Londoner by marriage, and you are every inch an artist,” she said, in a perfect imitation of his accent.
Holmes let the subject drop.
"I fancy a walk, and the Theatre of Marcellus is just on the other side of the hill. What do you say, Mr Holmes? Would you like to spend your afternoon haunting me?" she asked, offering him her arm. He took it, and they walked arm-in-arm like old school friends reunited on their Grand Tour.
“Five o’clock in the afternoon is not a time at which one is supposed to be at risk for hauntings,” he said.
“Well, I’ve never met a ghost as solid as you,” she said, squeezing his arm.
“I daresay ghosts are better company than kings," he said.
“Most people are,” she said. “And many animals besides.”
As they crossed back through Piazza del Campidoglio, Mrs Norton said, conversationally, "I went back for your funeral. Evidently there was some effort to keep it a small, quiet affair, but in the end it was quite the spectacle. Your friend was quite flustered by it all." She paused. "He's very handsome, your Doctor Watson."
“Such is the common consensus among my female clients.”
“Somehow I wasn't expecting that. He says so little about himself in that literary shrine he's constructed for you. I suppose it goes without saying that he gave you a lovely eulogy. He speaks as eloquently as he writes.”
“Full of the usual failings of his craft, no doubt: romanticism and sensationalism.” Their pace slowed as they reached the cordonata, and began making their way down the steeply inclined stairs.
“No, there was very little craft in it, in fact. He left his prepared speech sitting on his chair, and spoke entirely from the heart.”
Holmes allowed himself to envision the scene, and for a moment he could scarcely breathe. “That he has in abundance.”
“Either he is an actor of a much higher calibre than you or I, or he has no idea that you are still alive.”
“Watson, for all his many fine qualities, has no talent for deception.”
Across a cobbled thoroughfare crowded with carriages and hansom cabs, the ancient theatre loomed up before them. They stopped, silent for a moment, watching the smoke from his pipe and her cigarette swirl around them like the fogs of Baker Street.
Mrs Norton turned her attention to the theatre's façade, gazing at it with unfeigned rapture. "I performed in an amphitheatre in Verona once. All that pink limestone clashed hideously with my gown, but the acoustics were magnificent. What a place this must have been. What a venue. What a pity so little of it is left. Theatrum Marcelli," she mused. "Named for a man full of promise, who died too young."
"Murdered by the emperor's wife, if Cassius Dio is to be believed," said Holmes.
She studied him from the corner of her eye. "If you're looking for recriminations, you've got the wrong man," she said. "I'm sure you had your reasons."
"Indeed," said Holmes. They had seemed perfectly sound, at the time.
Without warning, Mrs Norton began to laugh. It was a decidedly girlish noise, which quite spoiled the perfection of her ensemble. "I am sorry, but here we are, going on about an ancient theatre, and all the while we're going about in costume ourselves. Isn't it a charming joke?"
"I suppose," he said evenly.
"Though I must say, you haven't put in much effort today. That beard doesn't suit your bone structure at all."
"Neither time nor supplies are on my side."
"That's a pity. You have a great talent for it. I never would have guessed that the wastrel who bore witness to my wedding and the kindly vicar who fell injured upon my doorstep were one and the same."
He doffed his hat, and offered her an appropriately theatrical bow.
“As diverting as this little outing has proven, I do think it's a great shame that we have never conversed as ourselves," she said. "What do you say to that? Come with me, and I'll be Irene Norton and you can be Sherlock Holmes.”
“Sherlock Holmes is either dead or a very dangerous person to be around."
"But what is danger to any conversation worth having? I have a mind to visit Keats and Shelley, and the grounds of their current residence are lovely for an evening stroll. Then dinner, perhaps, anywhere you fancy."
Holmes raised an eyebrow. "How would your husband feel about this?"
"I assure you, my intentions are entirely honourable. And besides, my husband is not here at present, so his thoughts on the matter are irrelevant."
*
They took a hansom across the river, and weaved their way through the narrow, winding cobble-stone lanes of Trastevere, eventually coming to a stop before a well-maintained medieval façade.
"Is your husband in?" asked Holmes. Mr Godfrey Norton, about whom he knew little, intrigued. One could hardly fail to be curious about a man who had chosen to wed such a woman.
"I'm afraid not," she answered. "Godfrey had some urgent business to attend to and I'm afraid he won't be returning for some time. You can understand how frightfully lonely our little flat is without him."
Mrs Norton's top floor rooms overflowed with a hodgepodge of knickknacks and assorted memorabilia, none of which came together to form any sort of aesthetic cohesion. She gracefully kicked a Chinese fan and an old playbill out of her path as she entered, sending them careening into a vacant birdcage in the corner, and then flipped her urchin's hat onto a dressmaker's dummy. Two empty bottles of whiskey perched precariously on the edge of an elegantly carved side-table. An evil-smelling tortoiseshell cat was curled up on a bright red feather boa on the settee, and it meowed some feline accusation as the door slammed shut behind them.
The only surface in the place that was free of detritus was an old roll-top desk sitting beneath the window, open, but coated in a layer of dust.
"Go and divest yourself of that appalling goatee," she said, waving him in the direction of one door while she exited through another.
Even without the beard marring his features, the face staring back at him in the mirror scarcely resembled his own. Watson would have been distressed to see him in his current state: gaunter than suited even his wiry frame, skin sallow, eyes sunken and dark, hair-line receding, lines that had not been etched across his face three years ago now growing deeper by the day. He was starting to resemble the corpse he had not left at the bottom of Reichenbach, in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam.
(Holmes, you must relinquish this absurd notion that digestion has an adverse effect on your mental faculties. Humour me and eat one of Mrs Hudson's excellent sausages, there's a good fellow.)
Mrs Norton took her time, leaving him ample opportunity to study the contents of her sitting room while he waited for her to return. The layer of cat fur that lined the surface of the settee was causing his eyes to water; no doubt sensing this, the animal yawned, stretched, and sauntered over to rub up against his knee. He lifted the creature and deposited it on the ground, where it whined piteously at him before stalking off to whine even more piteously at the bedroom door.
At this, Mrs Norton finally emerged, returned once more to her full feminine glory. As if to emphasize the point, she was wearing a decoration on her head that must have been produced by a florist instead of a hatter. The cat darted around her ankles and disappeared behind her.
She tossed him a handkerchief embroidered with her initials. "You look rather ill, my dear fellow. I'm sorry about Theodora; she's over-familiar with strangers."
Taking after her mistress, thought Holmes wryly.
Unlike the grimy adolescent urchin who had walked home with him, the resplendent middle-aged woman who stood before him now was undeniably beautiful. Women and their beauty had never held much interest for Sherlock Holmes; he could recognize and assess and even appreciate a woman's beauty, as he might a fine painting, but it stirred nothing deeper in him. He had never met one who could move him the way an exquisite violin sonata might, even the incomparable Irene Norton. Which is not to say that she did not intrigue him in other ways. Everything about her was performance; her current ensemble might not be a costume in the strict sense, as her earlier garments had been, but that did not mean there was no calculation in it, no artifice.
"You look an absolute fright," she said, casting the same critical eye on him that he had been casting on her. "It's a good thing the night is balmy - one good gust of wind and I'm afraid you'd be carried off."
"I am in perfect health, I assure you," he lied.
She flashed that crooked little half-smile at him once more. "Shall we?"
***
The pyramid of Gaius Cestius loomed up before them, a striking and somewhat ironic landmark.
"A Roman who wished to be a foreigner laid to rest beside foreigners who wished to be Roman," as Mrs Norton put it.
The weatherworn stones bore an inscription with the inhabitant's name but little else. Still, much could be deduced about a man who would leave such a monument. Holmes had travelled through Egypt a year previous and toured Giza and Saqqara and Dahshur, and this poor grey ghost did not compare favourably to that which it sought to imitate. Nevertheless, it dominated the landscape here, towering over the old city wall which it bisected and the cemetery which lay beyond.
The cabbie left them at a gate bearing the inscription Il Cimitero Acattolico di Roma. A young women with a black lace parasol was just leaving, dabbing her eyes on her handkerchief. The sound of a carriage stopping across the street caught his attention, and he spied out of the corner of his eye a stooped old greybeard, shuffling towards the entrance leaning on an ebony cane.
"Il cimitero degli Inglesi," said Mrs Norton. "There are rather a lot of you in here."
They crossed the threshold. Aside from the old man and the weeping woman, the graveyard appeared quite deserted. The glow of the sunset cast the tombstones in light and shadow, painting the white wildflowers a dusky orange. She reached for his arm and made as though to move forward, but he stood his ground. The eyes she turned on him were narrow, suspicious - and filled with a depth of sadness that no other emotion could quite mask.
"You are not here for Keats or Shelley or even for me. You are here for Godfrey Norton."
She gave him a brittle smile. "I suppose you've been waiting for the dramatically appropriate moment to stage that revelation. I must say, you chose well. A hansom lacks the correct atmosphere and if you'd waited until we were standing in front of the tombstone it would have been rather farcical."
"I am… sorry, for your loss," he said, feeling rather ashamed of himself.
"Thank you."
He waited for her to lead the way to their inevitable destination, but she didn't move.
"Well," she said, "aren't you going to tell me how you deduced it?"
"It was a simple enough matter. You are not wearing mourning, but you have been known to defy convention when it suits you. The layer of dust on Mr Norton's desk indicates that it has not been used for some time, far longer than a mere business trip. That this and his other possessions are still present suggests that he did not abandon you, since he would either have taken his things with him or you would have thrown them out. And frankly, a man who would marry you in spite of your past is unlikely to prove so faithless. Then there are the flowers in your hat, the design of which allows them to be easily removed: marigold for grief, cypress for mourning, even periwinkle for the pleasures of memory - these could indeed be meant for a poet admired from beyond the grave. But the heliotrope stands for devotion and faithfulness, the gillyflower for bonds of affection, and forget-me-nots for true love, all of which suggest an attachment more than merely literary."
“Is there any language you don’t speak, Mr Holmes?” she said. “I confess I’m surprised that even le langage des fleurs is within your purview.”
"Floriography is the language of lovers, my dear Mrs Norton, and love is a most common motivation for crime."
Mrs Norton gave him a crooked smile. "Is that really the only use you have for the softer passions?"
"My esteemed biographer has written it, so indeed it must be true."
"Your logic is perfectly sound, Mr Holmes. Although you are wrong about the periwinkle: only the white stands for the pleasures of memory. The blue is simply friendship.”
She plucked a small blue flower from the bushel gracing her pretty head, and handed it to him with an air of solemnity.
He held the stem between his thumb and forefinger for a moment, turning it to catch the fading sunlight. “There’s nothing simple about that,” he said, and tucked it into his buttonhole.
It seemed that Mrs Norton, ever the dramatist, intended to leave her late lamented husband for last. They meandered their way around angels and crosses and impressive marble tombs, going up one path and down another, tracing some strange pattern of the woman's devising, devoid of any discernable logic. At long last they stopped in an area less densely populated, where the ancient pyramid loomed large behind the modern tombstones.
Beneath a relief of a lyre with broken strings, were inscribed the words:
This Grave
contains all that was Mortal
of a
Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone:
Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water.
Feb 24, 1821
"John Keats, of course," said Irene Adler.
"So much for anonymity," said Sherlock Holmes.
"Do you care for Keats, Mr Holmes?"
"He is no particular favourite of mine," said Holmes.
"No, I suppose you would have little room in that magnificent brain of yours for trifles like Romantic poetry," she said. Her habit of smiling out of the corner of her mouth was beginning to vex him. "I'm quite fond of him myself."
She carefully placed a selection of marigolds and periwinkles above the carved lyre, and then began, "When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain…"
She recited the sonnet in its entirety, and from her lips it might as well have been a song.
"Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, Till love and fame to nothingness do sink," she concluded, and then turned to him with a theatrical bow. A few loose petals trickled from her hat.
"I warn you, my dear lady, that if you start wandering lonely as a cloud-"
She laughed. "Heaven forbid. No, if I'm to be a cloud, I think you'll find that I am the daughter of earth and water, and the nursling of the sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores, I change, but I cannot die. Keats and Shelley may be interred here, but Wordsworth, I'm afraid, is not."
They moved on. "Would you think it impertinent," said Mrs Norton, "if I asked you whether your metaphorical pen had gleaned everything it could from your teeming brain, before you ceased to be?"
"I would think it very impertinent," he said.
They were heading back towards the cemetery's centre, but the route she chose carefully avoided all the paths they had walked before. They passed the old man again, who now stood hunched over his cane before a statue of a weeping angel.
"Well then," said Mrs Norton, in humorous tones, "in that case I shall answer for you. Professor Moriarty was your magnum opus. No pretty puzzle or petty crime, or murder most foul, could ever match such an achievement. Curtain closed, and a standing ovation from all England. It was the performance of your career, and for a man like you, your career is your life."
"Are you an alienist now, as well as an opera singer? I fear you may be in danger of stretching yourself too thin."
"Some performances," she continued, "can only be spoiled by an encore. I understand why you might feel that way about that one. I don't agree, mind, but I do understand it."
"I have not 'given an encore,' as you put it, because there is more at present that I can accomplish backstage. There is more to all of this than Watson saw fit to include in his romantic little adventure."
"But of course," she said. "And what about your friend, Dr Watson?"
"I have no wish to cause him pain. But he had his own life to return to - a young wife, a new practice. By now I suppose there may be children."
"That's not a trace of bitterness I hear, is it?"
"Don't be absurd," he said. "I could hardly have taken him with me, and if I had told him the truth, he would never have allowed me to leave him behind."
John Watson's devotion was single-minded to the point of lunacy; he had needed to divest himself of that, too, lest he become as dependent on it as he was on his puzzles and his cocaine.
They had reached the back of the cemetery now. Percy Bysshe Shelley's plaque lay on the ground before them, ensconced in the remains of one of the old guard towers that lined the Aurelian walls.
"There will be no children," said Mrs Norton, quietly.
Holmes could not speak, for a moment; he wondered if she noticed that brief half second he required to collect himself, to steel himself to ask the question he did not wish to ask, to ready himself for the answer he did not wish to hear.
"What happened?" he said.
"Mary Watson died in childbed, one year ago. I thought you would have known."
"I did not." Mycroft, who was even less concerned than he with any softer emotions, had never bothered to update him on Watson's personal affairs. "May I ask how you came by this information?"
"He told me," she said, simply. She reached into a voluminous pocket and pulled out a small stack of letters. "Since we were never properly introduced during our shared adventure, I took the liberty of making the introductions myself at your funeral. He and Godfrey got along rather splendidly. We struck up an occasional correspondence. I professed myself an avid reader of his work, and he has been kind enough to send me new issues of the Strand, which can be difficult to come by when one lives abroad. In recent months, I find that we have a good deal more in common than we did when our acquaintanceship began. He is very well acquainted with loss, your Doctor."
"May I--?"
She handed him the letters. "He speaks of you often. 'Holmes once…', 'Holmes used to say…' 'If Holmes were here I'm sure he…' That sort of thing. You are never very far from his thoughts. You may keep the letters if you like - though I would like them back again the next time our paths cross."
Holmes placed them in his own pocket.
Mrs Norton waved a hand at the inscription on Shelley's marker. "Cor Cordium would seem a fitting description for your Dr Watson as well."
"It seems an ironic inscription for Mr Shelley, since it is believed that his heart is not entombed herein."
If his companion thought that this change of subject was more than a little transparent, she did not say anything.
"And where is Mr Shelley's heart, if it is not here with Mr Shelley's ashes?"
"St Peter's Churchyard, in Bournemouth. It is said that Percy Shelley was cremated upon the sands of Viareggio, where his corpse washed ashore, and that his dear friend, Edward Trelawny, snatched his yet unburnt heart from the funeral pyre, and returned the grotesque memento to Shelley's grieving widow."
"Thence to the annals of sensational literature, of which you are a well-known connoisseur."
"My dear Watson has advertised all my bad habits, it seems."
Mrs Norton took a more direct route this time, giving up her game of artful meandering. A broken column on a square base greeted them at their destination, framed by a pair of young cypress trees. In Loving Memory: Godfrey Norton. A pair of Greek theatre masks framed the inscription on the base.
The woman stared in silent contemplation for a long time.
"As you can see, the Eternal City is a charming place to be English, artistic and dead. You are in good company," she said at last, her voice as steady and composed as any voice could be. "Now, true, my poor Godfrey wasn't an artist, but he did have the keenest appreciation of art that I have ever known. He couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but he knew operas by heart that I had never heard of. He was one of the few men I've known who appreciated my talent more than my beauty. More than that, he was good, and honourable, and untainted, and he loved me even when he'd seen what I was offstage. And I married him because I realized that even if I never set foot on another stage, I could be happy performing for him alone. He was all the audience I needed. I know that some would say I was selfish, pulling a man like that down to my own sordid level, and perhaps they're right. Perhaps he deserved better. Perhaps he deserved someone with a more conventional sense of morality. But I did everything I could to fill his life with joy, and frankly, I think I'm beyond caring what people think of me."
She had delivered her monologue to the column, but now she turned to face him, grey eyes clear and dagger-sharp. "I was famous long before our paths ever crossed, Mr Holmes. Infamous, many would say. 'Of dubious and questionable memory.' But though our stars may burn bright, we women of the stage, they do not burn for long. Now your Dr Watson has granted my name immortality by linking it with yours, and I confess that I am not sure I will be satisfied living eternally as a bit-player in your legend. Do you find that petty, Mr Holmes?
"I think you do yourself an injustice defining your role as that of 'bit-player.'"
"No, I suppose you are right," said Mrs Norton, her eyes flashing, "As evidently I play the only female part worth having: the Woman. She who eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. You must not hold womankind in high regard, if you consider me chief among them."
"It is nothing to do with me; I did not write it," said Holmes. "Watson does allow these little literary flourishes of his to get the better of him, at times."
"I played the respectable wife for Godfrey, and just as I was beginning to feel comfortable inhabiting that character, the curtain fell down upon us. Now I find that without him, I cannot play the part of Irene Norton; that was a role that existed for him alone. But having been her, I cannot go back to being Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory. I am nothing but a prima donna who does not know what she is meant to sing, nor what stage she is to sing it on. Do you know what it is to create a life for yourself only to have it snatched away from you, Mr Sherlock Holmes?"
Throughout her speech, her voice never wavered. She spoke like a metronome, a relentless tick, tick, tick in his ears.
He said nothing. He had had enough of her provocations, her presumptions. This woman was a stranger to him, and he to her, whatever she might think. He owed her no answers and could offer her no solace.
"Just as I suspected," she said, and took his arm in hers once more.
Twilight had fallen. The moon shone as a pale glimmer in the darkening sky. In the row behind them, a shadow detached itself from a vaulted tomb.
Mrs Norton leaned in closer, and whispered. “When are you going to tell me that we’re being followed?”
"There would seem to be no need." The look she shot him would have shattered Perseus' polished shield. "I did not plan to tell you until I was certain of the fact myself."
"Liar. You’ve known for certain since we got out of the cab. Probably since we got in the cab. You didn’t tell me because you know that the climax doesn’t happen in Act II."
"I didn’t tell you because you didn’t need to know," he snapped. "Now kindly remove the pistol from your handbag, and whatever you do don't turn your head in his direction."
For once, Mrs Norton did as instructed, holding the pistol in front of her so that her body blocked it from view.
"He'll have a gun, but I doubt that he is inclined to use it. In such a quiet area, it will attract too much unwanted attention. Our continued existence is evidence of this. No doubt he intends to mark our path and circle around for an ambush."
"I'm not sure I like your plan."
"Our options are limited, and under the circumstances I do not much like the plan in question either. But would you like to hear it before you condemn it?"
"Go right ahead."
He explained his reasoning. Her grimace said everything about her opinion of the matter, but she did not offer any alternative suggestion.
Their path took them between a small mausoleum on the right, and a statue of an angel on a large rectangular base on the left. With a nearly imperceptible nod to his companion, he leapt behind the angel, while she darted around the mausoleum. Peering around the angel, he could see their pursuer pause.
What followed was an almost comical game of hide-and-seek, or cat-and-mouse. Holmes moved from one grave-marker to another, swift as starlight, keeping track of every rustle of a leaf or flash of a coat disappearing behind a cross. The assassin had straightened his hunched back and removed a long sword from his cane. Holmes' own cane was merely a cane, though he was possessed of a small Turkish dagger, which some months previous he had taken to carrying with him at all times. Luckily, the man seemed only interested in pursuing Holmes himself, and was content to ignore Mrs Norton. Holmes hoped that she would stay put until their pursuer was preoccupied with him, but the woman certainly had a mind of her own, and there was simply no telling whether she would heed his advice or not.
Later, he would put down the miscalculation to a moment of distraction. The bustle of a gown in the corner of his eye, an unseasonal breath of wind - whatever it was, he had looked in the wrong direction in exactly the wrong moment, and found himself with a sword at his throat. He elbowed his assailant in the ribs, pushing back hard with his whole body, and in an instant they were both in the dirt, grappling with their bare hands. Holmes had not been able to fully appreciate the man's considerable bulk when he had viewed it at distance. Perhaps such a form could only be properly appreciated when it was sitting on top of him with two hands the breadth of dinner plates wrapped around his neck.
A shot rang out, deafening in the relative silence of their struggle.
Holmes opened his eyes, ears ringing, and pushed the villain off his chest. The man moaned, gurgling low in his throat.
The pistol fell from Mrs Norton's trembling hands and landed in the dirt with a soft thud.
Holmes rose, brushing himself off. “I take it that in this respect, your morals are perfectly conventional,” he said, nudging their assailant with his foot.
“Dear God.” She put her hands to her mouth with a deep intake of breath. “Lord in Heaven, what have I done?”
“What you have done, Mrs Norton, is saved us from a rather grim fate.”
"He's still alive," she said, dropping to her knees before the assassin's quivering body, her mouth still slightly parted.
"Yes. This is not a yellow-backed penny dreadful, where bullets either kill instantaneously or allow the dying the energy and capacity for a dramatic closing monologue. Death in violence can be just as ugly and lingering as death in illness, I'm afraid."
She made as if to tear the hem of her dress - for bandaging, Holmes realized - but stopped the moment she felt his hand pressed firmly against her shoulder.
"The wound is fatal. There's nothing you can do for him."
He watched in fascination as the shock and horror were forced from her expression. He noted a flash of irritation in their wake, directed, perhaps, at herself: that in her shock she had let her self-assured mask slip, if only for a moment. She turned to him with narrowed eyes, resolution cementing itself upon her pretty face. Then she clamped one of her graceful, gentle hands over the assassin's mouth, pinching his nose closed with her thumb. He was too weak to struggle against it.
Holmes knelt beside her and carefully removed the false beard. It was attached by string, rather than spirit gum; no master of disguise, this one. The face beneath it was familiar.
Sherlock Holmes himself couldn't have done better. God, what a fool he'd been.
"You knew him?" said Mrs Norton. She rose, snatching her discarded pistol from the dirt and slipping it back into her handbag.
"He was a Roman police constable. The professor's web stretched far, and his second-in-command still has a hold on many of the threads." He dragged the body off the path and propped it up in a seated position, against a marble mausoleum. From a distance, he might pass for a drunkard in a stupor. It wouldn't buy them much time, on the whole, but any potential advantage was an asset.
"I am sorry, Mrs Norton, but in the present circumstances you cannot risk returning to your rooms. It's likely that they're being watched. I have a well-stocked hideaway not far from here that will furnish us with temporary disguises. I have not been there in some time, so it's unlikely that it has been compromised. It's close to the train station, so we should have just enough time to catch the last train to Naples, if we are quick about it."
Irene Norton's lips twisted into an expression that bore a passing resemblance to a smile. "Are you asking me to run away with you, Mr Holmes? That would certainly add something to our legend. You know that by protesting otherwise your friend has convinced half his readers that you are madly in love with me."
"People are very limited in their outlook if they believe that a man cannot profess an appreciation for a woman's talents without being in love with her."
“We could give it a try," she said, ignoring him. "We needn’t even worry about our reputations. My reputation is already infamous and you, being dead, have no reputation you need worry over. I daresay your friend Watson would find such a tale enthralling…"
Holmes fairly bristled at this. "This is not the time, Mrs Norton."
"I suppose you're right," she said with a shrug. "It would never work. Whatever you think of me, it is nothing akin to love. And besides," she added, "I've always said that one should never become entangled with a man who might be cleverer than oneself."
***
Irene Norton proved to have a remarkable talent for swift tailoring. An onlooker would never have guessed that the outfit currently disguising her feminine curves had been meant for a man a head taller than she.
They stood on a platform at Roma Termini. Mrs Norton snubbed out a half-smoked cigarette and tucked it into the brim of her billycock hat. "I am not coming with you, Mr Holmes."
He wanted to tell her that she was being foolish, that they would be better served travelling together, that he could protect her - but that was far from the truth. She could protect herself well enough, and they were more conspicuous as a pair.
If there was no logical reason, then why did he have such trouble biting the words back? What treacherous emotion was behind it? It was not that he even desired this woman's company - in fact, he found her continued presence disconcerting. She understood him too well in too short a time. She acted as though she could read him like a book - and worse, she wasn't entirely wrong. And he could read her well enough to know that she would never be happy to follow where he led. If she did not take her own path now, she would do so at the next fork in the road.
If it was nothing to do with the woman herself then it must be something in him, something he had overlooked until now. Like a vivisectionist turning the blade on himself, he sought to isolate this foreign feeling that seemed to be having this adverse effect on his system. He was startled to find that it was loneliness.
Companionship had never been something he sought out; friendship, even less so. It was merely an anchor that might weigh him down at best, cloud his judgment at worst, and bore him many other times in between. As a young man he had considered the experiment of Victor Trevor an amusing diversion for a time, but had it not presented him with an interesting problem to explore, it would have caused him no great pain if their paths never crossed again - and indeed, when the case was over, it didn’t.
And yet…
And yet these last ten years had shown him that a trustworthy comrade could be an invaluable asset in many dangerous circumstances. He had found that his theories took shape more rapidly and more accurately when he had a sounding board to voice them to. He had discovered that companionable silence could be as comfortable as the silence of solitude. And he had learned that even his dark moods could be staved off, for a time, by the concern of a friend.
"Where will you go?" he asked her.
"Here and there and wherever the wind takes me," she said. "And you?"
"It is safer for you if you do not know," he said.
"May I give you a piece of advice?" she asked, and then continued without waiting for his answer. "You still have a home to return to, Mr Sherlock Holmes. Go back to it."
"I'm not sure that I can," said Holmes quietly. "It was never my intention to return from Riechenbach Falls."
"I know," said Mrs Norton. "But you cannot wander about Europe like a lost spirit. What purpose does that really serve?"
"Moriarty's network on the continent is not yet dissolved. There are still-"
"I have no interest in your rationalizations, sir. You can think of it as a favour to me, if you like. After all, this is the second time that I have been forced to flee on your account."
"I will… consider it. For your sake." Absently, he fingered the blue periwinkle in his buttonhole.
Mrs Norton sighed. "I hope you do, Mr Holmes. And not only for my sake."
She offered her hand, and he shook it.
"Goodbye, Mrs Norton."
She gave him one final, impish smile.
"Goodnight, Mr Holmes."
Finis
Additional Notes: The Keats sonnet that Irene quotes is When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be. Holmes' quip about 'wandering lonely as a cloud' is of course a reference to I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, and the poem Irene quotes in response is Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cloud.
I confess that while I am reasonably familiar with Rome's current and ancient geography, I don't know much about what it looked like in the late 19th century, so I apologize for any inaccuracies that may have crept into my portrayal of the city here. This fic is in many ways self-indulgent, none more so than in my choice to set the climax in the Protestant Cemetery, which is one of my favorite places in Rome. If you are ever in Rome, I highly recommend checking it out, whether or not you have any interest in Romantic poets. It is truly lovely.
Title: Writ in Water
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler (gen)
Rating: PG
Word Count: 8,300
Warnings: Violence, but nothing beyond what occurs in canon.
Notes: Thank you so much to my excellent beta-readers, thekumquat, garonne, and tripleransom, and my apologies for maintaining radio silence for far longer than I should have. An AO3 link is posted above if you prefer to read/comment there.
A note on pairings: This is essentially gen, although there is some discussion of Irene’s relationship with Godfrey Norton, and it doesn’t take a very strong prescription of slash-goggles to read Holmes/Watson into it, even though Watson doesn’t actually make an appearance on-screen. The idea of Holmes/Irene is discussed but ultimately dismissed by the characters in question.
My dear Watson,
How did one begin such a letter?
Thank you for writing such a moving account of my death. For once I cannot fault you for your habitual sensationalism, as it was entirely my intention that you should write the tale just as you have. I am sorry if I have caused you any great inconvenience…
It would be a very foolish thing to write such a letter, let alone to send it. Even if he were able to set that paltry concern aside, every time he allowed himself to contemplate the task he could not conceive of anything suitable beyond the first three words.
And yet, even here, surrounded by the exquisite marbles of old Rome, jostled on all sides by a flock of perspiring tourists and finally feeling a slow burn of hunger in the pit of his stomach - when had he eaten last? - it was those three words which reverberated in his skull, refusing to be drowned out by the cacophony of languages pressing in on all sides.
A fellow Englishman - a left-handed banker with a dying wife, whose accent indicated he was pretending not to be from Lancashire - was telling his young son a wholly inaccurate story about a statue of a 'dying gladiator.' The statue actually depicted a dying Gaul, as evidenced by the torc around the unfortunate's neck, his lime-stiffened hair, and even his nudity, but there seemed little point in correcting the poor fellow.
Watson would no doubt have waxed poetic about the tragic nobility of it, the poignancy of the man's expression, the exceptional craftsmanship that the ancient pagans so often displayed. He would not have mentioned the solidarity he felt with this fictive soldier, but Holmes would have read it in his expression as he examined the man's fatal wound. Perhaps they would have discussed pathos as they strolled down the Capitoline and through the Forum Romanum, before taking an early supper on their way to Teatro Costanzi.
Holmes glanced from a wounded Amazon to the entwined forms of Cupid and Psyche, and found that he had no more appetite for ancient sculpture than he'd had for food in the past few days. He could almost hear Watson's reprimand for that. If anyone noticed the haste with which he fled the hall, he did not take note of it.
(He was getting sloppy, after all this time. A year ago no one had scrutinized him without being scrutinized by him first.)
A Roman summer was unpleasant to anyone acclimatised to a British one, and by now even the locals were beginning to flee the city for the cooling breezes of the seaside. Without the press of bodies in close quarter, the warm air settled thickly over Piazza del Campidoglio was less stifling than that in the palace-museum behind him. Marcus Aurelius on horseback dominated the square, staring down the distant dome of St. Peter's, like the last knight of a cause long lost. At his feet, an adolescent street urchin sang an old Sicilian love song with sweet earnestness, a hat full of coins at his feet. Tourists picked their way slowly up the steep cordonata, the women cooling themselves with elaborately decorated oriental fans.
A group of them clustered, panting, beneath the statue of Castor at the top of the hill. An American expatriate in her late twenties wearing a hat that appeared to have lost a battle with a large bird of multi-hued plumage - heiress of a good but not exceptional income, newly married, inclined to a forgetfulness that was mostly feigned - clutched the arm of her English husband, a middle-aged man, hair greying at the temples, diplomat, former soldier, inclined to opium mania. Beside them: a second middle-aged gentlemen, lawyer, secretly harbouring lust for his friend’s wife, badly in debt.
He felt a strange, unprecedented, absurd affection for them and their absurdly simple little problems, and turned abruptly away.
He did not so much stroll as meander his way over to the little garden overlooking the Forum of Julius Caesar, pausing by the honourable Marcus Aurelius to toss a few lira into the singing guttersnipe's hat.
The few columns remaining from the Temple of Venus the Mother failed to excite anything in him, and nothing in the museum save that damnable wounded Gallic soldier had left any impression. It occurred to Sherlock Holmes that wallowing in the past in order to avoid wallowing in the past was a transparently foolish enterprise, and surely unworthy of his much purported genius.
Oh, the past had its uses, certainly. His knowledge of the history of crime had proved invaluable on numerous occasions. Individual history was equally illuminating, and could be used both to interpret human behaviour and to predict it. He read history everywhere he looked, whether on a writer's sleeve or a weaver's tooth. And yet, to dwell on one's own past, not for the sake of edification or demystifying some problem of the present, but simply for the sake of it? Reminiscence, for its own purposeless pleasure or wallowing anguish, seemed a morbid activity, and he avoided it. Unless there was some point to be made, he spoke of his own past rarely and warily.
He stroked his chin thoughtfully, somewhat dismayed at the feel of the auburn goatee he was currently sporting. He took a pipe from his pocket, noting as he lit it the ways in which it was not his pipe - brown not black, a five degree difference in the angle of the stem, which was nearly a centimetre shorter - and wondered whether that pipe still sat on the mantelpiece in Baker Street. The spectacles he was wearing didn't fit properly, and were now on the verge of slipping right off his nose. All things considered, his disguise wasn’t much of one. There was no character in it, that was the trouble. He wasn't anyone in particular today; he was merely Sherlock Holmes in a beard that didn’t suit his bone structure.
It hardly seemed to matter anymore.
No. It hardly felt as though it mattered. Presumably it still did.
It had been nearly twelve weeks since the last attempt on his life. The circumstances had required him to make a hasty retreat from Athens. It was a welcome change, on the whole, aside from the unfortunate loss of a rather fine top hat, and his Italian was infinitely better than his Modern Greek. Rome was as good a place as any to disappear, and if he had disappeared properly, as he'd intended, then he wouldn’t need to chastise himself now for the laxity with which he had prepared today’s costume. But he’d done something very foolish here, shortly after his arrival, out of careless habit.
He’d solved a case.
Over the last two and a half years, he had been many different people. Given the limitations of his current wardrobe, it was safe to say that he had worn more identities than he had suits. He had spent time as a chemist, a librarian, an actor, a cabbie, a sailor, and on one memorable occasion a lion-tamer - and many more besides. Not one of them had been a consulting detective.
The body had turned up, quite literally, on his doorstep. That sort of thing is very difficult to ignore, no matter how committed one is to avoiding involvement with any crime not directed at one’s person. The police were dedicated to rushing off in precisely the wrong direction.
(He’d known at a glance that the woman was no prostitute, no matter that she had been tricked up like one. The state of her skin had provoked his suspicions, and the odour of her hair made it perfectly obvious, even if one did not bother to examine her fingernails.)
It had been so easy to insinuate himself into their investigation. Not that it was himself in any real sense. It was that famed criminologist Jacques Vernet, a jovial brown-haired Frenchman with a jocular, self-deprecating manner and a disfiguring scar across his left cheek. Oh, haven’t you heard of him? No matter. He will prove his worth soon enough.
The exhilaration of the enterprise shocked him. It was not a case he would have refused had he been operating from Baker Street, but it was hardly the most intriguing or complex problem he had ever been presented with. Yet it set his pulse racing. He was loquacious to the point of babbling. He fairly threw himself to the ground whenever he spotted a speck of suspicious dust. He might have been twenty years younger.
Three times he had turned to make a scintillating observation to the empty air. The air gave no sign of being impressed.
It was not like him to be so-
So…
And there he faltered. Ordinarily he was so good with words. He was good with several languages worth of words. That wasn't the problem. Nor did he lack self-awareness, nor the capacity for self-examination, as many people did. But putting words to this-
It was not worth the trouble. Naming it would lend it too much clarity, in the end.
When the case had ended, and he had tied together the last remaining threads, a young constable had clapped him on the back and said, “Sherlock Holmes - God rest his soul - couldn’t have done better.”
It was such a lovely joke. The universe might have handed it to him for his pleasure, knowing that it was the sort of thing he was apt to appreciate. Dramatic irony was so difficult to manufacture off the stage; one had to appreciate it when it arrived by happy chance. But the words had not tugged the corner of his lips into a knowing half-smile, nor did they elicit the soundless chuckle he generally employed in place of outright laughter. Instead dull, affable, obsequious Jacques Vernet fled the scene, and there was Sherlock Holmes standing in the middle of a hive buzzing with jabbering Italian policemen, all of whom wanted him to say something or do something or be marvellous for them. All the fierce energy which had driven him for the past few days immediately ceased, like forcing a train to a sudden standstill by dropping an impenetrable wall in front of it.
When he finally re-emerged from his squalid little rooms in Trastevere this morning, after two weeks lying in the miserable stillness of his own mind, only then did he realize how badly he had blundered.
Throughout the case, he had been very careful to behave as someone else, and he had been politely vehement on the subject of newspapers and public recognition. The Roman authorities, however, showing all the delicacy and perspicacity typical of their profession, had been rather free with details in the press. They had cited their “anonymous benefactor” no less than seven times, and if anyone in Moran’s network of agents and allies read it, it was all too likely that they would recognize his hand.
He had finally reached a point in his life where he could no longer recognize the difference between sensible precaution and outright paranoia.
Moran had returned to England, of that much he was certain. Moriarty’s connections on the continent, beyond the reach of Scotland Yard, were beginning to dissolve their associations with each other, now that their master was gone. They were tiring of Moran. They had no desire to play his games, not when they had their own crumbling empires to worry about. They were beginning to doubt his claims that Sherlock Holmes was alive, at large, and dangerous.
(Holmes’ lips did quirk up at that last.)
Watson’s tale had been most beneficial, in that respect.
Still, Moran had not yet exhausted his list of assassins, and assassins were not a class of men prone to asking questions, so long as they received payment.
These were the facts, as far as he knew them. But where did that leave him, when all was said and done? Of that he was not certain. Never before had the story of his own life been so far off kilter. He had no sense of linearity anymore. He merely rambled. Once, his life had existed as a series of episodes, each with its own beginning and middle and end, and now the grand finale had been written and he was still here, making a hash of the epilogue.
"Excuse me, sir," said a youthful voice behind him.
He turned, rather startled at the boy's silent appearance, but careful not to let any of that show on his face.
The urchin took off his grubby hat, the coins having presumably disappeared into the lad's innumerable pockets. "I think you dropped this," he said, holding out a British sovereign in his unwashed hand, with a glint in his sharp grey eyes.
Her hand. Her sharp grey eyes.
"Thank you," he said, switching to English. "I would have been quite vexed to have lost that. It was a souvenir of a most peculiar adventure."
“You are supposed to be dead, Mr Holmes,” said Irene Norton, née Adler.
“And you are supposed to be a woman, Mrs Norton,” said Sherlock Holmes.
She grinned, unabashed. “That is the second time that you have walked right past and failed to see me. I had such faith that you would recognise me this time.”
“I'm afraid being dead does little for one's acumen.”
"You got there in the end," she said, patting his arm.
“Your Italian is impeccable.”
“I was an opera singer. Of course my Italian is impeccable.”
She pulled out a cigarette which had been tucked behind her ear and hidden by the unruly black hair that currently graced her head. He lit it for her without a word.
She took a long drag and expelled a perfect ring of smoke. “I’m beginning to suspect that all the disaffected artists of London wind up in Rome, Mr Holmes.”
“You are not from London, and I am not an artist, Mrs Norton.”
She raised a wiry black eyebrow at him. “I am a Londoner by marriage, and you are every inch an artist,” she said, in a perfect imitation of his accent.
Holmes let the subject drop.
"I fancy a walk, and the Theatre of Marcellus is just on the other side of the hill. What do you say, Mr Holmes? Would you like to spend your afternoon haunting me?" she asked, offering him her arm. He took it, and they walked arm-in-arm like old school friends reunited on their Grand Tour.
“Five o’clock in the afternoon is not a time at which one is supposed to be at risk for hauntings,” he said.
“Well, I’ve never met a ghost as solid as you,” she said, squeezing his arm.
“I daresay ghosts are better company than kings," he said.
“Most people are,” she said. “And many animals besides.”
As they crossed back through Piazza del Campidoglio, Mrs Norton said, conversationally, "I went back for your funeral. Evidently there was some effort to keep it a small, quiet affair, but in the end it was quite the spectacle. Your friend was quite flustered by it all." She paused. "He's very handsome, your Doctor Watson."
“Such is the common consensus among my female clients.”
“Somehow I wasn't expecting that. He says so little about himself in that literary shrine he's constructed for you. I suppose it goes without saying that he gave you a lovely eulogy. He speaks as eloquently as he writes.”
“Full of the usual failings of his craft, no doubt: romanticism and sensationalism.” Their pace slowed as they reached the cordonata, and began making their way down the steeply inclined stairs.
“No, there was very little craft in it, in fact. He left his prepared speech sitting on his chair, and spoke entirely from the heart.”
Holmes allowed himself to envision the scene, and for a moment he could scarcely breathe. “That he has in abundance.”
“Either he is an actor of a much higher calibre than you or I, or he has no idea that you are still alive.”
“Watson, for all his many fine qualities, has no talent for deception.”
Across a cobbled thoroughfare crowded with carriages and hansom cabs, the ancient theatre loomed up before them. They stopped, silent for a moment, watching the smoke from his pipe and her cigarette swirl around them like the fogs of Baker Street.
Mrs Norton turned her attention to the theatre's façade, gazing at it with unfeigned rapture. "I performed in an amphitheatre in Verona once. All that pink limestone clashed hideously with my gown, but the acoustics were magnificent. What a place this must have been. What a venue. What a pity so little of it is left. Theatrum Marcelli," she mused. "Named for a man full of promise, who died too young."
"Murdered by the emperor's wife, if Cassius Dio is to be believed," said Holmes.
She studied him from the corner of her eye. "If you're looking for recriminations, you've got the wrong man," she said. "I'm sure you had your reasons."
"Indeed," said Holmes. They had seemed perfectly sound, at the time.
Without warning, Mrs Norton began to laugh. It was a decidedly girlish noise, which quite spoiled the perfection of her ensemble. "I am sorry, but here we are, going on about an ancient theatre, and all the while we're going about in costume ourselves. Isn't it a charming joke?"
"I suppose," he said evenly.
"Though I must say, you haven't put in much effort today. That beard doesn't suit your bone structure at all."
"Neither time nor supplies are on my side."
"That's a pity. You have a great talent for it. I never would have guessed that the wastrel who bore witness to my wedding and the kindly vicar who fell injured upon my doorstep were one and the same."
He doffed his hat, and offered her an appropriately theatrical bow.
“As diverting as this little outing has proven, I do think it's a great shame that we have never conversed as ourselves," she said. "What do you say to that? Come with me, and I'll be Irene Norton and you can be Sherlock Holmes.”
“Sherlock Holmes is either dead or a very dangerous person to be around."
"But what is danger to any conversation worth having? I have a mind to visit Keats and Shelley, and the grounds of their current residence are lovely for an evening stroll. Then dinner, perhaps, anywhere you fancy."
Holmes raised an eyebrow. "How would your husband feel about this?"
"I assure you, my intentions are entirely honourable. And besides, my husband is not here at present, so his thoughts on the matter are irrelevant."
*
They took a hansom across the river, and weaved their way through the narrow, winding cobble-stone lanes of Trastevere, eventually coming to a stop before a well-maintained medieval façade.
"Is your husband in?" asked Holmes. Mr Godfrey Norton, about whom he knew little, intrigued. One could hardly fail to be curious about a man who had chosen to wed such a woman.
"I'm afraid not," she answered. "Godfrey had some urgent business to attend to and I'm afraid he won't be returning for some time. You can understand how frightfully lonely our little flat is without him."
Mrs Norton's top floor rooms overflowed with a hodgepodge of knickknacks and assorted memorabilia, none of which came together to form any sort of aesthetic cohesion. She gracefully kicked a Chinese fan and an old playbill out of her path as she entered, sending them careening into a vacant birdcage in the corner, and then flipped her urchin's hat onto a dressmaker's dummy. Two empty bottles of whiskey perched precariously on the edge of an elegantly carved side-table. An evil-smelling tortoiseshell cat was curled up on a bright red feather boa on the settee, and it meowed some feline accusation as the door slammed shut behind them.
The only surface in the place that was free of detritus was an old roll-top desk sitting beneath the window, open, but coated in a layer of dust.
"Go and divest yourself of that appalling goatee," she said, waving him in the direction of one door while she exited through another.
Even without the beard marring his features, the face staring back at him in the mirror scarcely resembled his own. Watson would have been distressed to see him in his current state: gaunter than suited even his wiry frame, skin sallow, eyes sunken and dark, hair-line receding, lines that had not been etched across his face three years ago now growing deeper by the day. He was starting to resemble the corpse he had not left at the bottom of Reichenbach, in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam.
(Holmes, you must relinquish this absurd notion that digestion has an adverse effect on your mental faculties. Humour me and eat one of Mrs Hudson's excellent sausages, there's a good fellow.)
Mrs Norton took her time, leaving him ample opportunity to study the contents of her sitting room while he waited for her to return. The layer of cat fur that lined the surface of the settee was causing his eyes to water; no doubt sensing this, the animal yawned, stretched, and sauntered over to rub up against his knee. He lifted the creature and deposited it on the ground, where it whined piteously at him before stalking off to whine even more piteously at the bedroom door.
At this, Mrs Norton finally emerged, returned once more to her full feminine glory. As if to emphasize the point, she was wearing a decoration on her head that must have been produced by a florist instead of a hatter. The cat darted around her ankles and disappeared behind her.
She tossed him a handkerchief embroidered with her initials. "You look rather ill, my dear fellow. I'm sorry about Theodora; she's over-familiar with strangers."
Taking after her mistress, thought Holmes wryly.
Unlike the grimy adolescent urchin who had walked home with him, the resplendent middle-aged woman who stood before him now was undeniably beautiful. Women and their beauty had never held much interest for Sherlock Holmes; he could recognize and assess and even appreciate a woman's beauty, as he might a fine painting, but it stirred nothing deeper in him. He had never met one who could move him the way an exquisite violin sonata might, even the incomparable Irene Norton. Which is not to say that she did not intrigue him in other ways. Everything about her was performance; her current ensemble might not be a costume in the strict sense, as her earlier garments had been, but that did not mean there was no calculation in it, no artifice.
"You look an absolute fright," she said, casting the same critical eye on him that he had been casting on her. "It's a good thing the night is balmy - one good gust of wind and I'm afraid you'd be carried off."
"I am in perfect health, I assure you," he lied.
She flashed that crooked little half-smile at him once more. "Shall we?"
***
The pyramid of Gaius Cestius loomed up before them, a striking and somewhat ironic landmark.
"A Roman who wished to be a foreigner laid to rest beside foreigners who wished to be Roman," as Mrs Norton put it.
The weatherworn stones bore an inscription with the inhabitant's name but little else. Still, much could be deduced about a man who would leave such a monument. Holmes had travelled through Egypt a year previous and toured Giza and Saqqara and Dahshur, and this poor grey ghost did not compare favourably to that which it sought to imitate. Nevertheless, it dominated the landscape here, towering over the old city wall which it bisected and the cemetery which lay beyond.
The cabbie left them at a gate bearing the inscription Il Cimitero Acattolico di Roma. A young women with a black lace parasol was just leaving, dabbing her eyes on her handkerchief. The sound of a carriage stopping across the street caught his attention, and he spied out of the corner of his eye a stooped old greybeard, shuffling towards the entrance leaning on an ebony cane.
"Il cimitero degli Inglesi," said Mrs Norton. "There are rather a lot of you in here."
They crossed the threshold. Aside from the old man and the weeping woman, the graveyard appeared quite deserted. The glow of the sunset cast the tombstones in light and shadow, painting the white wildflowers a dusky orange. She reached for his arm and made as though to move forward, but he stood his ground. The eyes she turned on him were narrow, suspicious - and filled with a depth of sadness that no other emotion could quite mask.
"You are not here for Keats or Shelley or even for me. You are here for Godfrey Norton."
She gave him a brittle smile. "I suppose you've been waiting for the dramatically appropriate moment to stage that revelation. I must say, you chose well. A hansom lacks the correct atmosphere and if you'd waited until we were standing in front of the tombstone it would have been rather farcical."
"I am… sorry, for your loss," he said, feeling rather ashamed of himself.
"Thank you."
He waited for her to lead the way to their inevitable destination, but she didn't move.
"Well," she said, "aren't you going to tell me how you deduced it?"
"It was a simple enough matter. You are not wearing mourning, but you have been known to defy convention when it suits you. The layer of dust on Mr Norton's desk indicates that it has not been used for some time, far longer than a mere business trip. That this and his other possessions are still present suggests that he did not abandon you, since he would either have taken his things with him or you would have thrown them out. And frankly, a man who would marry you in spite of your past is unlikely to prove so faithless. Then there are the flowers in your hat, the design of which allows them to be easily removed: marigold for grief, cypress for mourning, even periwinkle for the pleasures of memory - these could indeed be meant for a poet admired from beyond the grave. But the heliotrope stands for devotion and faithfulness, the gillyflower for bonds of affection, and forget-me-nots for true love, all of which suggest an attachment more than merely literary."
“Is there any language you don’t speak, Mr Holmes?” she said. “I confess I’m surprised that even le langage des fleurs is within your purview.”
"Floriography is the language of lovers, my dear Mrs Norton, and love is a most common motivation for crime."
Mrs Norton gave him a crooked smile. "Is that really the only use you have for the softer passions?"
"My esteemed biographer has written it, so indeed it must be true."
"Your logic is perfectly sound, Mr Holmes. Although you are wrong about the periwinkle: only the white stands for the pleasures of memory. The blue is simply friendship.”
She plucked a small blue flower from the bushel gracing her pretty head, and handed it to him with an air of solemnity.
He held the stem between his thumb and forefinger for a moment, turning it to catch the fading sunlight. “There’s nothing simple about that,” he said, and tucked it into his buttonhole.
It seemed that Mrs Norton, ever the dramatist, intended to leave her late lamented husband for last. They meandered their way around angels and crosses and impressive marble tombs, going up one path and down another, tracing some strange pattern of the woman's devising, devoid of any discernable logic. At long last they stopped in an area less densely populated, where the ancient pyramid loomed large behind the modern tombstones.
Beneath a relief of a lyre with broken strings, were inscribed the words:
This Grave
contains all that was Mortal
of a
Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone:
Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water.
Feb 24, 1821
"John Keats, of course," said Irene Adler.
"So much for anonymity," said Sherlock Holmes.
"Do you care for Keats, Mr Holmes?"
"He is no particular favourite of mine," said Holmes.
"No, I suppose you would have little room in that magnificent brain of yours for trifles like Romantic poetry," she said. Her habit of smiling out of the corner of her mouth was beginning to vex him. "I'm quite fond of him myself."
She carefully placed a selection of marigolds and periwinkles above the carved lyre, and then began, "When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain…"
She recited the sonnet in its entirety, and from her lips it might as well have been a song.
"Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, Till love and fame to nothingness do sink," she concluded, and then turned to him with a theatrical bow. A few loose petals trickled from her hat.
"I warn you, my dear lady, that if you start wandering lonely as a cloud-"
She laughed. "Heaven forbid. No, if I'm to be a cloud, I think you'll find that I am the daughter of earth and water, and the nursling of the sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores, I change, but I cannot die. Keats and Shelley may be interred here, but Wordsworth, I'm afraid, is not."
They moved on. "Would you think it impertinent," said Mrs Norton, "if I asked you whether your metaphorical pen had gleaned everything it could from your teeming brain, before you ceased to be?"
"I would think it very impertinent," he said.
They were heading back towards the cemetery's centre, but the route she chose carefully avoided all the paths they had walked before. They passed the old man again, who now stood hunched over his cane before a statue of a weeping angel.
"Well then," said Mrs Norton, in humorous tones, "in that case I shall answer for you. Professor Moriarty was your magnum opus. No pretty puzzle or petty crime, or murder most foul, could ever match such an achievement. Curtain closed, and a standing ovation from all England. It was the performance of your career, and for a man like you, your career is your life."
"Are you an alienist now, as well as an opera singer? I fear you may be in danger of stretching yourself too thin."
"Some performances," she continued, "can only be spoiled by an encore. I understand why you might feel that way about that one. I don't agree, mind, but I do understand it."
"I have not 'given an encore,' as you put it, because there is more at present that I can accomplish backstage. There is more to all of this than Watson saw fit to include in his romantic little adventure."
"But of course," she said. "And what about your friend, Dr Watson?"
"I have no wish to cause him pain. But he had his own life to return to - a young wife, a new practice. By now I suppose there may be children."
"That's not a trace of bitterness I hear, is it?"
"Don't be absurd," he said. "I could hardly have taken him with me, and if I had told him the truth, he would never have allowed me to leave him behind."
John Watson's devotion was single-minded to the point of lunacy; he had needed to divest himself of that, too, lest he become as dependent on it as he was on his puzzles and his cocaine.
They had reached the back of the cemetery now. Percy Bysshe Shelley's plaque lay on the ground before them, ensconced in the remains of one of the old guard towers that lined the Aurelian walls.
"There will be no children," said Mrs Norton, quietly.
Holmes could not speak, for a moment; he wondered if she noticed that brief half second he required to collect himself, to steel himself to ask the question he did not wish to ask, to ready himself for the answer he did not wish to hear.
"What happened?" he said.
"Mary Watson died in childbed, one year ago. I thought you would have known."
"I did not." Mycroft, who was even less concerned than he with any softer emotions, had never bothered to update him on Watson's personal affairs. "May I ask how you came by this information?"
"He told me," she said, simply. She reached into a voluminous pocket and pulled out a small stack of letters. "Since we were never properly introduced during our shared adventure, I took the liberty of making the introductions myself at your funeral. He and Godfrey got along rather splendidly. We struck up an occasional correspondence. I professed myself an avid reader of his work, and he has been kind enough to send me new issues of the Strand, which can be difficult to come by when one lives abroad. In recent months, I find that we have a good deal more in common than we did when our acquaintanceship began. He is very well acquainted with loss, your Doctor."
"May I--?"
She handed him the letters. "He speaks of you often. 'Holmes once…', 'Holmes used to say…' 'If Holmes were here I'm sure he…' That sort of thing. You are never very far from his thoughts. You may keep the letters if you like - though I would like them back again the next time our paths cross."
Holmes placed them in his own pocket.
Mrs Norton waved a hand at the inscription on Shelley's marker. "Cor Cordium would seem a fitting description for your Dr Watson as well."
"It seems an ironic inscription for Mr Shelley, since it is believed that his heart is not entombed herein."
If his companion thought that this change of subject was more than a little transparent, she did not say anything.
"And where is Mr Shelley's heart, if it is not here with Mr Shelley's ashes?"
"St Peter's Churchyard, in Bournemouth. It is said that Percy Shelley was cremated upon the sands of Viareggio, where his corpse washed ashore, and that his dear friend, Edward Trelawny, snatched his yet unburnt heart from the funeral pyre, and returned the grotesque memento to Shelley's grieving widow."
"Thence to the annals of sensational literature, of which you are a well-known connoisseur."
"My dear Watson has advertised all my bad habits, it seems."
Mrs Norton took a more direct route this time, giving up her game of artful meandering. A broken column on a square base greeted them at their destination, framed by a pair of young cypress trees. In Loving Memory: Godfrey Norton. A pair of Greek theatre masks framed the inscription on the base.
The woman stared in silent contemplation for a long time.
"As you can see, the Eternal City is a charming place to be English, artistic and dead. You are in good company," she said at last, her voice as steady and composed as any voice could be. "Now, true, my poor Godfrey wasn't an artist, but he did have the keenest appreciation of art that I have ever known. He couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but he knew operas by heart that I had never heard of. He was one of the few men I've known who appreciated my talent more than my beauty. More than that, he was good, and honourable, and untainted, and he loved me even when he'd seen what I was offstage. And I married him because I realized that even if I never set foot on another stage, I could be happy performing for him alone. He was all the audience I needed. I know that some would say I was selfish, pulling a man like that down to my own sordid level, and perhaps they're right. Perhaps he deserved better. Perhaps he deserved someone with a more conventional sense of morality. But I did everything I could to fill his life with joy, and frankly, I think I'm beyond caring what people think of me."
She had delivered her monologue to the column, but now she turned to face him, grey eyes clear and dagger-sharp. "I was famous long before our paths ever crossed, Mr Holmes. Infamous, many would say. 'Of dubious and questionable memory.' But though our stars may burn bright, we women of the stage, they do not burn for long. Now your Dr Watson has granted my name immortality by linking it with yours, and I confess that I am not sure I will be satisfied living eternally as a bit-player in your legend. Do you find that petty, Mr Holmes?
"I think you do yourself an injustice defining your role as that of 'bit-player.'"
"No, I suppose you are right," said Mrs Norton, her eyes flashing, "As evidently I play the only female part worth having: the Woman. She who eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. You must not hold womankind in high regard, if you consider me chief among them."
"It is nothing to do with me; I did not write it," said Holmes. "Watson does allow these little literary flourishes of his to get the better of him, at times."
"I played the respectable wife for Godfrey, and just as I was beginning to feel comfortable inhabiting that character, the curtain fell down upon us. Now I find that without him, I cannot play the part of Irene Norton; that was a role that existed for him alone. But having been her, I cannot go back to being Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory. I am nothing but a prima donna who does not know what she is meant to sing, nor what stage she is to sing it on. Do you know what it is to create a life for yourself only to have it snatched away from you, Mr Sherlock Holmes?"
Throughout her speech, her voice never wavered. She spoke like a metronome, a relentless tick, tick, tick in his ears.
He said nothing. He had had enough of her provocations, her presumptions. This woman was a stranger to him, and he to her, whatever she might think. He owed her no answers and could offer her no solace.
"Just as I suspected," she said, and took his arm in hers once more.
Twilight had fallen. The moon shone as a pale glimmer in the darkening sky. In the row behind them, a shadow detached itself from a vaulted tomb.
Mrs Norton leaned in closer, and whispered. “When are you going to tell me that we’re being followed?”
"There would seem to be no need." The look she shot him would have shattered Perseus' polished shield. "I did not plan to tell you until I was certain of the fact myself."
"Liar. You’ve known for certain since we got out of the cab. Probably since we got in the cab. You didn’t tell me because you know that the climax doesn’t happen in Act II."
"I didn’t tell you because you didn’t need to know," he snapped. "Now kindly remove the pistol from your handbag, and whatever you do don't turn your head in his direction."
For once, Mrs Norton did as instructed, holding the pistol in front of her so that her body blocked it from view.
"He'll have a gun, but I doubt that he is inclined to use it. In such a quiet area, it will attract too much unwanted attention. Our continued existence is evidence of this. No doubt he intends to mark our path and circle around for an ambush."
"I'm not sure I like your plan."
"Our options are limited, and under the circumstances I do not much like the plan in question either. But would you like to hear it before you condemn it?"
"Go right ahead."
He explained his reasoning. Her grimace said everything about her opinion of the matter, but she did not offer any alternative suggestion.
Their path took them between a small mausoleum on the right, and a statue of an angel on a large rectangular base on the left. With a nearly imperceptible nod to his companion, he leapt behind the angel, while she darted around the mausoleum. Peering around the angel, he could see their pursuer pause.
What followed was an almost comical game of hide-and-seek, or cat-and-mouse. Holmes moved from one grave-marker to another, swift as starlight, keeping track of every rustle of a leaf or flash of a coat disappearing behind a cross. The assassin had straightened his hunched back and removed a long sword from his cane. Holmes' own cane was merely a cane, though he was possessed of a small Turkish dagger, which some months previous he had taken to carrying with him at all times. Luckily, the man seemed only interested in pursuing Holmes himself, and was content to ignore Mrs Norton. Holmes hoped that she would stay put until their pursuer was preoccupied with him, but the woman certainly had a mind of her own, and there was simply no telling whether she would heed his advice or not.
Later, he would put down the miscalculation to a moment of distraction. The bustle of a gown in the corner of his eye, an unseasonal breath of wind - whatever it was, he had looked in the wrong direction in exactly the wrong moment, and found himself with a sword at his throat. He elbowed his assailant in the ribs, pushing back hard with his whole body, and in an instant they were both in the dirt, grappling with their bare hands. Holmes had not been able to fully appreciate the man's considerable bulk when he had viewed it at distance. Perhaps such a form could only be properly appreciated when it was sitting on top of him with two hands the breadth of dinner plates wrapped around his neck.
A shot rang out, deafening in the relative silence of their struggle.
Holmes opened his eyes, ears ringing, and pushed the villain off his chest. The man moaned, gurgling low in his throat.
The pistol fell from Mrs Norton's trembling hands and landed in the dirt with a soft thud.
Holmes rose, brushing himself off. “I take it that in this respect, your morals are perfectly conventional,” he said, nudging their assailant with his foot.
“Dear God.” She put her hands to her mouth with a deep intake of breath. “Lord in Heaven, what have I done?”
“What you have done, Mrs Norton, is saved us from a rather grim fate.”
"He's still alive," she said, dropping to her knees before the assassin's quivering body, her mouth still slightly parted.
"Yes. This is not a yellow-backed penny dreadful, where bullets either kill instantaneously or allow the dying the energy and capacity for a dramatic closing monologue. Death in violence can be just as ugly and lingering as death in illness, I'm afraid."
She made as if to tear the hem of her dress - for bandaging, Holmes realized - but stopped the moment she felt his hand pressed firmly against her shoulder.
"The wound is fatal. There's nothing you can do for him."
He watched in fascination as the shock and horror were forced from her expression. He noted a flash of irritation in their wake, directed, perhaps, at herself: that in her shock she had let her self-assured mask slip, if only for a moment. She turned to him with narrowed eyes, resolution cementing itself upon her pretty face. Then she clamped one of her graceful, gentle hands over the assassin's mouth, pinching his nose closed with her thumb. He was too weak to struggle against it.
Holmes knelt beside her and carefully removed the false beard. It was attached by string, rather than spirit gum; no master of disguise, this one. The face beneath it was familiar.
Sherlock Holmes himself couldn't have done better. God, what a fool he'd been.
"You knew him?" said Mrs Norton. She rose, snatching her discarded pistol from the dirt and slipping it back into her handbag.
"He was a Roman police constable. The professor's web stretched far, and his second-in-command still has a hold on many of the threads." He dragged the body off the path and propped it up in a seated position, against a marble mausoleum. From a distance, he might pass for a drunkard in a stupor. It wouldn't buy them much time, on the whole, but any potential advantage was an asset.
"I am sorry, Mrs Norton, but in the present circumstances you cannot risk returning to your rooms. It's likely that they're being watched. I have a well-stocked hideaway not far from here that will furnish us with temporary disguises. I have not been there in some time, so it's unlikely that it has been compromised. It's close to the train station, so we should have just enough time to catch the last train to Naples, if we are quick about it."
Irene Norton's lips twisted into an expression that bore a passing resemblance to a smile. "Are you asking me to run away with you, Mr Holmes? That would certainly add something to our legend. You know that by protesting otherwise your friend has convinced half his readers that you are madly in love with me."
"People are very limited in their outlook if they believe that a man cannot profess an appreciation for a woman's talents without being in love with her."
“We could give it a try," she said, ignoring him. "We needn’t even worry about our reputations. My reputation is already infamous and you, being dead, have no reputation you need worry over. I daresay your friend Watson would find such a tale enthralling…"
Holmes fairly bristled at this. "This is not the time, Mrs Norton."
"I suppose you're right," she said with a shrug. "It would never work. Whatever you think of me, it is nothing akin to love. And besides," she added, "I've always said that one should never become entangled with a man who might be cleverer than oneself."
***
Irene Norton proved to have a remarkable talent for swift tailoring. An onlooker would never have guessed that the outfit currently disguising her feminine curves had been meant for a man a head taller than she.
They stood on a platform at Roma Termini. Mrs Norton snubbed out a half-smoked cigarette and tucked it into the brim of her billycock hat. "I am not coming with you, Mr Holmes."
He wanted to tell her that she was being foolish, that they would be better served travelling together, that he could protect her - but that was far from the truth. She could protect herself well enough, and they were more conspicuous as a pair.
If there was no logical reason, then why did he have such trouble biting the words back? What treacherous emotion was behind it? It was not that he even desired this woman's company - in fact, he found her continued presence disconcerting. She understood him too well in too short a time. She acted as though she could read him like a book - and worse, she wasn't entirely wrong. And he could read her well enough to know that she would never be happy to follow where he led. If she did not take her own path now, she would do so at the next fork in the road.
If it was nothing to do with the woman herself then it must be something in him, something he had overlooked until now. Like a vivisectionist turning the blade on himself, he sought to isolate this foreign feeling that seemed to be having this adverse effect on his system. He was startled to find that it was loneliness.
Companionship had never been something he sought out; friendship, even less so. It was merely an anchor that might weigh him down at best, cloud his judgment at worst, and bore him many other times in between. As a young man he had considered the experiment of Victor Trevor an amusing diversion for a time, but had it not presented him with an interesting problem to explore, it would have caused him no great pain if their paths never crossed again - and indeed, when the case was over, it didn’t.
And yet…
And yet these last ten years had shown him that a trustworthy comrade could be an invaluable asset in many dangerous circumstances. He had found that his theories took shape more rapidly and more accurately when he had a sounding board to voice them to. He had discovered that companionable silence could be as comfortable as the silence of solitude. And he had learned that even his dark moods could be staved off, for a time, by the concern of a friend.
"Where will you go?" he asked her.
"Here and there and wherever the wind takes me," she said. "And you?"
"It is safer for you if you do not know," he said.
"May I give you a piece of advice?" she asked, and then continued without waiting for his answer. "You still have a home to return to, Mr Sherlock Holmes. Go back to it."
"I'm not sure that I can," said Holmes quietly. "It was never my intention to return from Riechenbach Falls."
"I know," said Mrs Norton. "But you cannot wander about Europe like a lost spirit. What purpose does that really serve?"
"Moriarty's network on the continent is not yet dissolved. There are still-"
"I have no interest in your rationalizations, sir. You can think of it as a favour to me, if you like. After all, this is the second time that I have been forced to flee on your account."
"I will… consider it. For your sake." Absently, he fingered the blue periwinkle in his buttonhole.
Mrs Norton sighed. "I hope you do, Mr Holmes. And not only for my sake."
She offered her hand, and he shook it.
"Goodbye, Mrs Norton."
She gave him one final, impish smile.
"Goodnight, Mr Holmes."
Finis
Additional Notes: The Keats sonnet that Irene quotes is When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be. Holmes' quip about 'wandering lonely as a cloud' is of course a reference to I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, and the poem Irene quotes in response is Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cloud.
I confess that while I am reasonably familiar with Rome's current and ancient geography, I don't know much about what it looked like in the late 19th century, so I apologize for any inaccuracies that may have crept into my portrayal of the city here. This fic is in many ways self-indulgent, none more so than in my choice to set the climax in the Protestant Cemetery, which is one of my favorite places in Rome. If you are ever in Rome, I highly recommend checking it out, whether or not you have any interest in Romantic poets. It is truly lovely.