Fic for what_alchemy: The Bricks o' the "Might 'Ave Been.”
'Follow me on by the paths o' pain,
'Seeking what you 'ave seen,
'Until at last you can build the "Is,"
'Wi' the bricks o' the "Might 'ave been."
from: “Well?” a poem by the Revd. Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, MC, known during the Great War as “Woodbine Willie”
Recipient: what_alchemy
Author: tweedisgood
Rating: PG 13
’Verse: ACD canon
Pairing: background Holmes/Watson established relationship
Wordcount: 3378
Warning: for references to war violence, death and injuries, period appropriate homophobia and racist language
Notes: beta thanks to mad_with_july, thanks also to flawedamythyst for permission to use the character PC Mason from her story “A Case of Discovery” written for the recent acd_holmesfest . Do read it if you haven’t yet.
“Doctor. Do you believe in Angels?”
The old wounds, older than the soldiers who lay wounded in beds around him, pulled savagely at his leg and shoulder as he twisted toward the voice, some far-off alarm sounding in his memory. He grabbed at the iron bedstead nearest his good hand and hissed a lurid curse in Pushtu. A bearded face two beds down turned; its owner coughed discreetly, pointing with what remained of his right hand to heaven. But the English doctor’s hearing was not what it had been.
“What an extraordinary question. I…”
He stopped and peered into the face of the man who had approached him, a civilian with neatly oiled, grey hair parted straight down the middle, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and a beaten expression.
“I know you…”
The other man frowned, began to shake his head; then he paused. His fingers worked in front of him, a Parkinsonian tremor and roll provoked by the effort of recall. When it came to him, he started and plucked off his eyeglasses, breaking into an uncertain smile.
“Bless me; can it really be Doctor Watson? I’d never have thought to see you here; nor never again in this world, if the truth be told.”
The thought did not seem to have troubled him overmuch - and no wonder. That last evening they had spent together he had nearly brought with him disaster on hobnailed boots: ruin to the doctor; ruin to a name that had only grown more illustrious in the years since. A man flees, on his feet and in his mind, from what he has only nearly wrought: flees, indeed, all the faster and farther than from a settled deed.
“I am long past being surprised by chance, Sergeant - or I suppose it must be Inspector now?” It was to be expected that Mason was out of uniform today, a grey spring Sunday on the south coast and all around them the soiled cast-offs of war; but there had always been a quiet authority there, more than his age, than the unforgiving creed of his Chapel.
“Sergeant, as was. I gave it over in the end: couldn’t reconcile seeing preferment given to those who could turn a blind eye to the crimes of ‘our betters’.”
The hand being held out to him wavered and withdrew with the pull of memory. Drat Holmes, to have imagined the man would not, on reflection, return to the idea that he had been bribed. He’d returned to it himself too often in the years between.
Mason sighed. “I mean to say, crimes anyone would see as such, even... That was years after I came here. Look, Doctor, sorry to have troubled you; I’m sure you’ve things to do - I know they called up all the retired medical men for home service.” He turned away.
“No! Wait. Mason, what you asked me: if my answer would be worth anything, my shift ends in fifteen minutes. Find someone to fetch you a cup of tea and sit out in the grounds - there is a bench this side of the main entrance. I can meet you there.”
**************************
He was there, after all. No cup of tea but a warm coat, hat and gloves against the brisk sea winds as they were whipped across the road from the racecourse opposite and galloped in under the arch of painted iron announcing the Kitchener Indian Hospital and spanning the front of two stone-faced lodges. Store-rooms now, but better known to the poor of Brighton as the Spike, the wards for casual paupers in need of a night’s lodging. Once, this place had been not a monument to the generosity of Empire towards its loyal subjects, but the Elm Lane workhouse and someone’s idea of generosity to the destitute. Separate and not equal.
The doctor sat down on the bench, keeping a respectful distance. Three off-duty orderlies exchanged dirty postcards in a quiet corner. Carts and motor trucks trundled back and forth. No-one paid two grey and ordinary men any mind.
“You do not work here, then?” As an opening move it might do: polite small talk, no attempt just to tackle head-on that very odd question back on the ward.
“I run a tea-shop just off the Promenade, me and Mary both. Have done these past ten years. It brings in enough to be respectable. We’re not…that is, we weren’t a big family.”
Watson had grown too used to that in the past year: to talk of things past as present, severed in mid-sentence by the serrated knife of loss. He had learned to wait, never to correct a mistake. For those who could bear it, realisation came in a heartbeat. For those who could not, who insisted in speaking of the dead as only ‘missing’, who made trips to photographers to have a lost soldier’s likeness pasted onto a model, who went to séances, speaking up made no difference.
“I came here to find Shaukat Khan of the 40th Pathans,” Mason told him. “They fought at Aubers Ridge; so did my lad Harry. He was with the Royal Sussex there and I heard from one of his comrades that they last saw him up by a great gang of wog- I mean to say, Indian soldiers. I’ve been up here every day since, asking around, trying to find anyone that knew what became of him. An orderly - you know, they all speak their lingo, or near enough - put me onto Khan. What he told me: well I don’t know what to make of it.”
Watson made an encouraging noise. One did not spend years with a man who appeared to regard one as three parts ear and not learn from the experience.
“He told me that he remembered Harry - described to me his flaming red hair and how he spoke, with a funny bit o’ halt to his voice; he had done since he was in skirts. They’d been down in a shell-hole together, them and… bits of men and horses, stinking mud and blood like the Devil’s soup. Then the story turns queer. The way Khan tells it, a shadow, a shadow made all of smoke in the shape of a crouching man, crept around the edge of the hole. They kept well down, thinking it might be one of the Hun, some trick of theirs. But the shadow put out its hand, reached down to them, and it seemed to both that it spoke in their own tongue as a native.
“Harry was first to get up. He pitched over the edge of the hole as if going overboard a ship, holding fast to this shadow’s hand. Came to Khan’s turn and a flash of shell blinded him sudden, threw him back into the crater. They’re still picking bits of that shell out of his chest and arms, and as for his face: don’t suppose there’s any more call for a one-eyed soldier back where he’s from than there is anywhere else. The will of Allah, he said.”
God’s will that he should be maimed and, in maiming, saved? A harsh sort of mercy: but then, the doctor thought, how many mercies are.
“As for Harry, the War Office sent a telegram. You see the sender - you don’t even need to read the rest.”
It is my painful duty to inform you…missing, presumed dead.
“Mary won’t have it. Until she hears it from a man who was there, who saw him fall, she won’t believe it. Every morning up at dawn, praying for his safe return. If I tell her about this it’ll make matters worse - smoke and spirits and whatnot.” He plucked off his hat and twisted it in his hands. “I tell you, Doctor, I wish…”
That he could turn back time, could lose this knowledge, would not have to carry it in his breast as he had carried other secrets - dangerous, unbelievable, unspoken, unspeakable. Mason did not have to say it, not to this man. Not when first among all the secrets had been his, had been theirs. He seemed to struggle for a moment, the swollen burden of unborn words pushing outwards until he burst with it.
“For years, I wondered if I did right that day. If I had done better to have upheld the law, and turned the both of you in. If I wasn’t somehow punished for holding my tongue. Then, after so long waiting, so many tears for Mary and shame for me, along came our Harry. All we had, all we wanted. I never thought on it after that. Now - I can’t help but fall to wondering all over again.”
“If fate, or God, denied you your son because you let two people alone who loved each other, more than twenty years ago…” Watson had to stop, had to bite his lip. A universe in which cause and effect were as predictable as a detective’s deduction: it was a seductive thought. To believe that what you put into life could be calibrated, measured out in a precise dose to make the patient well, that his sickness could be pinpointed to this event or that. He had always argued with Holmes about it, maintaining that life was not a science: that it was irreducible, unpredictable.
“After all, who could have forseen this?” he would say, stroking back the sweep of silver hair from his lover’s brow, the caressing hand settling at the nape of his neck: cradling Holmes’ head against his own shoulder as they curled around each other like feathers in the wide bed which they’d found, abandoned like a discarded invitation, in the big bedroom at the top of the stairs in the cottage in Fulworth - or, at any rate, a village with some name or other.
“It was obvious to me from the start.”
And he would answer in the voice, the one from the stories, that it beat him to know how Holmes did it, really, it was quite extraordinary, my dear fellow, and get a gentle cuff for his pains.
“I was sorry to hear that he’d died, don’t think otherwise.”
Watson started, pulled back to the present. Mason carried on, oblivious. “But if you’ll forgive me saying so, perhaps it was better that way. Time to put it behind you: find a good woman, while you were still young enough. ”
To stay silent or to speak: the ghostly twin of Mason’s old dilemma. Did it matter if he continued to think it was all long past; or if he found some rhyme, some unreasonable reason for what had happened in the shell-hole, or on Aubers Ridge where young men were reaped uncounted, like blades of summer grass?
“You’ll forgive me, too,” the man was saying, “but I could never again read what you wrote about him, not when I knew the truth. It would always be staring back at me from the page. I stopped reading even the London papers when we came here. But it was on the newsstands as far as the Pavilion, that was. ”
Watson had not been able to leave the house for fear of them, of what would stare back at him from the page. The end of it, of what he thought would never end, days of glory and nights of wonder. He could not read; all he could do was write - the words pouring out, the love unstoppered, the pain slicing at him until all the ink was blood.
The raw drafts hadn’t been fit to be seen by others: besides, the game would have been well and truly up. But Doyle, who believed work to be the best antidote to sorrow and was not above vigorous evangelising for his beliefs even then, had pressed him to turn out tales for The Strand month after month - some of his best, people still told him.
To aid the sick and to bring Sherlock Holmes (carefully edited) to the world: two gifts beyond price. Never before had he had to choose between them. Mason’s wound was as clear as any of the amputated limbs producing pinpricks in vanished fingers and toes. Watson could tell him the truth; show him the stump of his story. Yet if his phantom guilt flared anew, if he learned that his silence had blessed a lifetime of blissful perversion, not merely a few years hastily snatched, was he the better for that knowledge?
“What do you make of Shaukat Khan’s helper made from smoke?” he asked instead.
“It comes down to what you want to believe, doesn’t it, Doctor? To think of Harry still out there somewhere, knocked on the head maybe, forgotten who he is, lost his dog-tag, lying in a field hospital miles from his line, waiting to be found - well, you hear stories.”
Fictions spreading like fire, growing and embellishing in the retelling - like Machen’s patriotic ghost story and the Angels of Mons - and are you not allowing just the same at this very moment, if only by omission? He is thinking of the past even now: thinking less harm done, wanting to believe it, giving his gnawing conscience something it might be able to digest.
“Would you not rather be sure?”
Mason took off his spectacles and wiped them with a handkerchief pulled from up his shirt sleeve. He gazed at the doctor for a long while without replacing them, eyes growing misty from the lack of focus; nothing more of course, at least nothing it would have been polite to remark upon. When he spoke, it was the plea of a man abandoned by old assurances:
“Sure that there are angels, out there in no man’s land, but who will not stop the slaughter, or sure that there are none? And if not there, where they are needed most of all, can they be anywhere?”
“I think…” Watson began, “I think I was saved in battle by an angel once, but his name was Murray, not Gabriel, and he spoke my own tongue because he was made from stout Scots flesh and blood, not smoke. I will not pretend to know what I do not.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Mason’s gratitude was bleached bone: all its juice long gone, only bare form and dry truth remaining - that it is, in the end, the fate of us all not to know for certain, and we have no choice but to submit with whatever grace is left to us and hope for a far-off kind of peace.
**********************************
“Was I right not to tell him, do you think?” Watson asked the friend his heart called spouse as they sat that evening in close communion on either side of their hearth.
Sherlock Holmes, long returned from the dead, but with no more liking for the mystical and subjective (whispered, plausibly deniable endearments uttered in the first light of dawn notwithstanding) than he had ever had, drew deep on his old clay pipe.
“Ask instead if there was something he was hiding from you,” he said. “I do not believe in angels, nor that my name has quite so thoroughly disappeared from among men even in this shallow backwater. Why, I have written to the Brighton Evening Argus in my own person two or three times.”
Watson favoured him with a tolerant grunt, toiling up the familiar hill of the detective’s piled-up egotism. Once there he planted a small, mischievous flag.
“Were you published?”
Holmes’ lips compressed themselves into a line. He waved the pipe-stem in the general direction of Brighton.
“Apiculture is perhaps not of very general interest. We may one day come to rue it. Nevertheless, local rumour surely…”
“Local rumour has it that I made you up. I was congratulated at the hospital the other day on my ‘immortal literary creation’ with a lament that such a man, such a paragon, could not really exist, but could he only step from the pages of fable and come down to smite the enemies of law and order, what a great day that would be. You have become a legend, dear fellow… a helper formed from smoke.”
Watson batted away a particularly dense puff of it. The clay pipe was working like a pulling locomotive as its owner contemplated his fate. Comfortable retreat was one thing: non-existence quite another. To possess - and be possessed by - the one desired above all others was a gift renewed daily, and nightly: to be nothing but a story in his head was too much like an empty box, however gaily wrapped.
“Hum. I could perhaps give that series of lectures on my method which I once prepared in answer to one of your more febrile flights of fancy. The Literary and Philosophical Society is not quite depleted by… present absences.”
“From twenty-year-old notes? Besides, imagine the flow of curious visitors it would bring to our gate. Your bees would be quite put out.”
Holmes granted that with a sniff. “But to return to your question: a truth which will be used to feed a lie is a weapon better sheathed. It is an offense against reason to connect a bedroom in Baker Street with a field in France.” His voice softened with something very like compassion. “And Mason will go on suffering, no need to feed the monster of his grief. Unless his son is still alive - and none of us truly think that, not even, I daresay, Shaukat Khan - one tale is as good as another. ”
They gave the lost boy a minute of smoke-blessed, sober silence. After, they fell to gentle teasing as to what recompense was owed a man whom another had made into a fictional character. Watson’s proposals ranged from the offer to separate all the honey next season to services of an intimate and filthily-detailed nature which raised that most uncharacteristic of expressions on the face of Sherlock Holmes: a blush. Not to mention a distinct tremor in his entire frame.
“On the other hand I will get far too much pleasure out of that myself to be chastened for my sins,” Watson decided after a little thought. “I tell you what: how about a new set of clothes for the gentleman bee-farmer you have become? Meanwhile, the costume and manners of your invented self will go about in the world, doing and saying all the things you have said and done and more besides, in an even cleverer and more extraordinary way.”
One corner of Holmes’ mouth managed a pithy speech all its own on the likelihood of that. Aloud, all he said was:
“I presume I have entirely free range in selecting the proposed wardrobe?”
“Of course.”
Holmes put aside his pipe. “Then come here, dear boy. My lips are cold and in need of covering: there is a chill in the air.”
Watson, still standing, leaned in and kissed him where he sat.
“I think not, Holmes,” he said, having covered said lips very thoroughly and for an enjoyably long moment. “It is very warm. And you have spent the last several hours inside.”
“I might as well have been naked for all the good it did me, not being warm in the way I really want.”
A sharply indrawn breath from the doctor became a sly smile.
“Both can be arranged.”
They were.
***************************************
In a villa on the Sussex downs, clothed only in each other, two men slept.
In a room in Baker Street, London, a shadowy figure paced on a worn turkey rug and a grousing, thickset, medical man reminded him again that it was long past time he ate. It was, and ever would be, the year 1895.
In a flat above a tea-shop in Middle Street, Brighton, a woman with a gentle face replaced a framed photograph on the mantelpiece and followed her husband to bed. She would not get up to pray tomorrow morning.
In a field in France, a shape like a crouching man made of smoke left the blasted ruins of the town of Festubert and turned in the night wind towards the men who called to it in many languages, wanting only to be delivered out of Hell. It made ready to help them.
'Seeking what you 'ave seen,
'Until at last you can build the "Is,"
'Wi' the bricks o' the "Might 'ave been."
from: “Well?” a poem by the Revd. Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, MC, known during the Great War as “Woodbine Willie”
Recipient: what_alchemy
Author: tweedisgood
Rating: PG 13
’Verse: ACD canon
Pairing: background Holmes/Watson established relationship
Wordcount: 3378
Warning: for references to war violence, death and injuries, period appropriate homophobia and racist language
Notes: beta thanks to mad_with_july, thanks also to flawedamythyst for permission to use the character PC Mason from her story “A Case of Discovery” written for the recent acd_holmesfest . Do read it if you haven’t yet.
“Doctor. Do you believe in Angels?”
The old wounds, older than the soldiers who lay wounded in beds around him, pulled savagely at his leg and shoulder as he twisted toward the voice, some far-off alarm sounding in his memory. He grabbed at the iron bedstead nearest his good hand and hissed a lurid curse in Pushtu. A bearded face two beds down turned; its owner coughed discreetly, pointing with what remained of his right hand to heaven. But the English doctor’s hearing was not what it had been.
“What an extraordinary question. I…”
He stopped and peered into the face of the man who had approached him, a civilian with neatly oiled, grey hair parted straight down the middle, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and a beaten expression.
“I know you…”
The other man frowned, began to shake his head; then he paused. His fingers worked in front of him, a Parkinsonian tremor and roll provoked by the effort of recall. When it came to him, he started and plucked off his eyeglasses, breaking into an uncertain smile.
“Bless me; can it really be Doctor Watson? I’d never have thought to see you here; nor never again in this world, if the truth be told.”
The thought did not seem to have troubled him overmuch - and no wonder. That last evening they had spent together he had nearly brought with him disaster on hobnailed boots: ruin to the doctor; ruin to a name that had only grown more illustrious in the years since. A man flees, on his feet and in his mind, from what he has only nearly wrought: flees, indeed, all the faster and farther than from a settled deed.
“I am long past being surprised by chance, Sergeant - or I suppose it must be Inspector now?” It was to be expected that Mason was out of uniform today, a grey spring Sunday on the south coast and all around them the soiled cast-offs of war; but there had always been a quiet authority there, more than his age, than the unforgiving creed of his Chapel.
“Sergeant, as was. I gave it over in the end: couldn’t reconcile seeing preferment given to those who could turn a blind eye to the crimes of ‘our betters’.”
The hand being held out to him wavered and withdrew with the pull of memory. Drat Holmes, to have imagined the man would not, on reflection, return to the idea that he had been bribed. He’d returned to it himself too often in the years between.
Mason sighed. “I mean to say, crimes anyone would see as such, even... That was years after I came here. Look, Doctor, sorry to have troubled you; I’m sure you’ve things to do - I know they called up all the retired medical men for home service.” He turned away.
“No! Wait. Mason, what you asked me: if my answer would be worth anything, my shift ends in fifteen minutes. Find someone to fetch you a cup of tea and sit out in the grounds - there is a bench this side of the main entrance. I can meet you there.”
**************************
He was there, after all. No cup of tea but a warm coat, hat and gloves against the brisk sea winds as they were whipped across the road from the racecourse opposite and galloped in under the arch of painted iron announcing the Kitchener Indian Hospital and spanning the front of two stone-faced lodges. Store-rooms now, but better known to the poor of Brighton as the Spike, the wards for casual paupers in need of a night’s lodging. Once, this place had been not a monument to the generosity of Empire towards its loyal subjects, but the Elm Lane workhouse and someone’s idea of generosity to the destitute. Separate and not equal.
The doctor sat down on the bench, keeping a respectful distance. Three off-duty orderlies exchanged dirty postcards in a quiet corner. Carts and motor trucks trundled back and forth. No-one paid two grey and ordinary men any mind.
“You do not work here, then?” As an opening move it might do: polite small talk, no attempt just to tackle head-on that very odd question back on the ward.
“I run a tea-shop just off the Promenade, me and Mary both. Have done these past ten years. It brings in enough to be respectable. We’re not…that is, we weren’t a big family.”
Watson had grown too used to that in the past year: to talk of things past as present, severed in mid-sentence by the serrated knife of loss. He had learned to wait, never to correct a mistake. For those who could bear it, realisation came in a heartbeat. For those who could not, who insisted in speaking of the dead as only ‘missing’, who made trips to photographers to have a lost soldier’s likeness pasted onto a model, who went to séances, speaking up made no difference.
“I came here to find Shaukat Khan of the 40th Pathans,” Mason told him. “They fought at Aubers Ridge; so did my lad Harry. He was with the Royal Sussex there and I heard from one of his comrades that they last saw him up by a great gang of wog- I mean to say, Indian soldiers. I’ve been up here every day since, asking around, trying to find anyone that knew what became of him. An orderly - you know, they all speak their lingo, or near enough - put me onto Khan. What he told me: well I don’t know what to make of it.”
Watson made an encouraging noise. One did not spend years with a man who appeared to regard one as three parts ear and not learn from the experience.
“He told me that he remembered Harry - described to me his flaming red hair and how he spoke, with a funny bit o’ halt to his voice; he had done since he was in skirts. They’d been down in a shell-hole together, them and… bits of men and horses, stinking mud and blood like the Devil’s soup. Then the story turns queer. The way Khan tells it, a shadow, a shadow made all of smoke in the shape of a crouching man, crept around the edge of the hole. They kept well down, thinking it might be one of the Hun, some trick of theirs. But the shadow put out its hand, reached down to them, and it seemed to both that it spoke in their own tongue as a native.
“Harry was first to get up. He pitched over the edge of the hole as if going overboard a ship, holding fast to this shadow’s hand. Came to Khan’s turn and a flash of shell blinded him sudden, threw him back into the crater. They’re still picking bits of that shell out of his chest and arms, and as for his face: don’t suppose there’s any more call for a one-eyed soldier back where he’s from than there is anywhere else. The will of Allah, he said.”
God’s will that he should be maimed and, in maiming, saved? A harsh sort of mercy: but then, the doctor thought, how many mercies are.
“As for Harry, the War Office sent a telegram. You see the sender - you don’t even need to read the rest.”
It is my painful duty to inform you…missing, presumed dead.
“Mary won’t have it. Until she hears it from a man who was there, who saw him fall, she won’t believe it. Every morning up at dawn, praying for his safe return. If I tell her about this it’ll make matters worse - smoke and spirits and whatnot.” He plucked off his hat and twisted it in his hands. “I tell you, Doctor, I wish…”
That he could turn back time, could lose this knowledge, would not have to carry it in his breast as he had carried other secrets - dangerous, unbelievable, unspoken, unspeakable. Mason did not have to say it, not to this man. Not when first among all the secrets had been his, had been theirs. He seemed to struggle for a moment, the swollen burden of unborn words pushing outwards until he burst with it.
“For years, I wondered if I did right that day. If I had done better to have upheld the law, and turned the both of you in. If I wasn’t somehow punished for holding my tongue. Then, after so long waiting, so many tears for Mary and shame for me, along came our Harry. All we had, all we wanted. I never thought on it after that. Now - I can’t help but fall to wondering all over again.”
“If fate, or God, denied you your son because you let two people alone who loved each other, more than twenty years ago…” Watson had to stop, had to bite his lip. A universe in which cause and effect were as predictable as a detective’s deduction: it was a seductive thought. To believe that what you put into life could be calibrated, measured out in a precise dose to make the patient well, that his sickness could be pinpointed to this event or that. He had always argued with Holmes about it, maintaining that life was not a science: that it was irreducible, unpredictable.
“After all, who could have forseen this?” he would say, stroking back the sweep of silver hair from his lover’s brow, the caressing hand settling at the nape of his neck: cradling Holmes’ head against his own shoulder as they curled around each other like feathers in the wide bed which they’d found, abandoned like a discarded invitation, in the big bedroom at the top of the stairs in the cottage in Fulworth - or, at any rate, a village with some name or other.
“It was obvious to me from the start.”
And he would answer in the voice, the one from the stories, that it beat him to know how Holmes did it, really, it was quite extraordinary, my dear fellow, and get a gentle cuff for his pains.
“I was sorry to hear that he’d died, don’t think otherwise.”
Watson started, pulled back to the present. Mason carried on, oblivious. “But if you’ll forgive me saying so, perhaps it was better that way. Time to put it behind you: find a good woman, while you were still young enough. ”
To stay silent or to speak: the ghostly twin of Mason’s old dilemma. Did it matter if he continued to think it was all long past; or if he found some rhyme, some unreasonable reason for what had happened in the shell-hole, or on Aubers Ridge where young men were reaped uncounted, like blades of summer grass?
“You’ll forgive me, too,” the man was saying, “but I could never again read what you wrote about him, not when I knew the truth. It would always be staring back at me from the page. I stopped reading even the London papers when we came here. But it was on the newsstands as far as the Pavilion, that was. ”
Watson had not been able to leave the house for fear of them, of what would stare back at him from the page. The end of it, of what he thought would never end, days of glory and nights of wonder. He could not read; all he could do was write - the words pouring out, the love unstoppered, the pain slicing at him until all the ink was blood.
The raw drafts hadn’t been fit to be seen by others: besides, the game would have been well and truly up. But Doyle, who believed work to be the best antidote to sorrow and was not above vigorous evangelising for his beliefs even then, had pressed him to turn out tales for The Strand month after month - some of his best, people still told him.
To aid the sick and to bring Sherlock Holmes (carefully edited) to the world: two gifts beyond price. Never before had he had to choose between them. Mason’s wound was as clear as any of the amputated limbs producing pinpricks in vanished fingers and toes. Watson could tell him the truth; show him the stump of his story. Yet if his phantom guilt flared anew, if he learned that his silence had blessed a lifetime of blissful perversion, not merely a few years hastily snatched, was he the better for that knowledge?
“What do you make of Shaukat Khan’s helper made from smoke?” he asked instead.
“It comes down to what you want to believe, doesn’t it, Doctor? To think of Harry still out there somewhere, knocked on the head maybe, forgotten who he is, lost his dog-tag, lying in a field hospital miles from his line, waiting to be found - well, you hear stories.”
Fictions spreading like fire, growing and embellishing in the retelling - like Machen’s patriotic ghost story and the Angels of Mons - and are you not allowing just the same at this very moment, if only by omission? He is thinking of the past even now: thinking less harm done, wanting to believe it, giving his gnawing conscience something it might be able to digest.
“Would you not rather be sure?”
Mason took off his spectacles and wiped them with a handkerchief pulled from up his shirt sleeve. He gazed at the doctor for a long while without replacing them, eyes growing misty from the lack of focus; nothing more of course, at least nothing it would have been polite to remark upon. When he spoke, it was the plea of a man abandoned by old assurances:
“Sure that there are angels, out there in no man’s land, but who will not stop the slaughter, or sure that there are none? And if not there, where they are needed most of all, can they be anywhere?”
“I think…” Watson began, “I think I was saved in battle by an angel once, but his name was Murray, not Gabriel, and he spoke my own tongue because he was made from stout Scots flesh and blood, not smoke. I will not pretend to know what I do not.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Mason’s gratitude was bleached bone: all its juice long gone, only bare form and dry truth remaining - that it is, in the end, the fate of us all not to know for certain, and we have no choice but to submit with whatever grace is left to us and hope for a far-off kind of peace.
**********************************
“Was I right not to tell him, do you think?” Watson asked the friend his heart called spouse as they sat that evening in close communion on either side of their hearth.
Sherlock Holmes, long returned from the dead, but with no more liking for the mystical and subjective (whispered, plausibly deniable endearments uttered in the first light of dawn notwithstanding) than he had ever had, drew deep on his old clay pipe.
“Ask instead if there was something he was hiding from you,” he said. “I do not believe in angels, nor that my name has quite so thoroughly disappeared from among men even in this shallow backwater. Why, I have written to the Brighton Evening Argus in my own person two or three times.”
Watson favoured him with a tolerant grunt, toiling up the familiar hill of the detective’s piled-up egotism. Once there he planted a small, mischievous flag.
“Were you published?”
Holmes’ lips compressed themselves into a line. He waved the pipe-stem in the general direction of Brighton.
“Apiculture is perhaps not of very general interest. We may one day come to rue it. Nevertheless, local rumour surely…”
“Local rumour has it that I made you up. I was congratulated at the hospital the other day on my ‘immortal literary creation’ with a lament that such a man, such a paragon, could not really exist, but could he only step from the pages of fable and come down to smite the enemies of law and order, what a great day that would be. You have become a legend, dear fellow… a helper formed from smoke.”
Watson batted away a particularly dense puff of it. The clay pipe was working like a pulling locomotive as its owner contemplated his fate. Comfortable retreat was one thing: non-existence quite another. To possess - and be possessed by - the one desired above all others was a gift renewed daily, and nightly: to be nothing but a story in his head was too much like an empty box, however gaily wrapped.
“Hum. I could perhaps give that series of lectures on my method which I once prepared in answer to one of your more febrile flights of fancy. The Literary and Philosophical Society is not quite depleted by… present absences.”
“From twenty-year-old notes? Besides, imagine the flow of curious visitors it would bring to our gate. Your bees would be quite put out.”
Holmes granted that with a sniff. “But to return to your question: a truth which will be used to feed a lie is a weapon better sheathed. It is an offense against reason to connect a bedroom in Baker Street with a field in France.” His voice softened with something very like compassion. “And Mason will go on suffering, no need to feed the monster of his grief. Unless his son is still alive - and none of us truly think that, not even, I daresay, Shaukat Khan - one tale is as good as another. ”
They gave the lost boy a minute of smoke-blessed, sober silence. After, they fell to gentle teasing as to what recompense was owed a man whom another had made into a fictional character. Watson’s proposals ranged from the offer to separate all the honey next season to services of an intimate and filthily-detailed nature which raised that most uncharacteristic of expressions on the face of Sherlock Holmes: a blush. Not to mention a distinct tremor in his entire frame.
“On the other hand I will get far too much pleasure out of that myself to be chastened for my sins,” Watson decided after a little thought. “I tell you what: how about a new set of clothes for the gentleman bee-farmer you have become? Meanwhile, the costume and manners of your invented self will go about in the world, doing and saying all the things you have said and done and more besides, in an even cleverer and more extraordinary way.”
One corner of Holmes’ mouth managed a pithy speech all its own on the likelihood of that. Aloud, all he said was:
“I presume I have entirely free range in selecting the proposed wardrobe?”
“Of course.”
Holmes put aside his pipe. “Then come here, dear boy. My lips are cold and in need of covering: there is a chill in the air.”
Watson, still standing, leaned in and kissed him where he sat.
“I think not, Holmes,” he said, having covered said lips very thoroughly and for an enjoyably long moment. “It is very warm. And you have spent the last several hours inside.”
“I might as well have been naked for all the good it did me, not being warm in the way I really want.”
A sharply indrawn breath from the doctor became a sly smile.
“Both can be arranged.”
They were.
***************************************
In a villa on the Sussex downs, clothed only in each other, two men slept.
In a room in Baker Street, London, a shadowy figure paced on a worn turkey rug and a grousing, thickset, medical man reminded him again that it was long past time he ate. It was, and ever would be, the year 1895.
In a flat above a tea-shop in Middle Street, Brighton, a woman with a gentle face replaced a framed photograph on the mantelpiece and followed her husband to bed. She would not get up to pray tomorrow morning.
In a field in France, a shape like a crouching man made of smoke left the blasted ruins of the town of Festubert and turned in the night wind towards the men who called to it in many languages, wanting only to be delivered out of Hell. It made ready to help them.