Fic for rachelindeed: Particular Debts
Title: Particular Debts
Recipient: rachelindeed
Author: sanguinity
Source: Nicholas Meyer, The Seven Percent Solution; ACD, “His Last Bow”
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Non-explicit discussions of sexual assault and medical abuse
Summary: “And for another, Dr. Freud has saved my life. Had I not come to Vienna, and had your cure not been successful, sir, I should doubtless have missed this and every other intriguing little problem that may ever chance to come my way. And,” Holmes added, taking up his glass once more, “had you, Watson, not contrived to get me here against my will, Dr. Freud would never have had the opportunity to save a doomed addict. To both of you, in fact, I owe my life. To Watson, here, there will be a lifetime to repay the debt, but to you, Doctor, I confess I am at as loss.”
- The Seven Percent Solution
Read it on AO3
Having consigned the German spymaster to Whitehall’s tender care, Watson and I returned to my room at Claridge’s Hotel. It was late, nearing midnight, and I instructed Watson to pour himself a drink while I set about to dispose of the last traces of the Irish-American. Altamont had been a useful sort of fellow, but two unremitting years of a persona has a tendency to wear. I was looking forward to recovering my own skin, what I remembered of it, and I could think of no surer method than spending the evening in Watson’s company.
Watson, however, turned down the drink and followed me to the dressing room, his fingers working their steady way down the buttons of his chauffeur’s jacket. I watched him in the glass as he exchanged the chauffeur’s costume for his own, and finally noticed what I had been too preoccupied with Britain’s business to observe earlier. Something was weighing on Watson, and had been since at least Harwich. It was more than the nascent war, I thought, although that cast its own pall. We had both hoped this war would not come to pass.
“Well, out with it, man,” I prompted him, removing my collar and setting it aside. “What is troubling you? Does it perhaps concern your morning’s urgent business in the City, from which I so rudely dragged you?”
He flashed me a startled look, then laughed. “The mud on my shoes or some such, I take it?”
“Some such,” I agreed. I was out of the habit of voicing my deductions, and more interested in hearing what preoccupied him.
“It’s a delicate question,” he ventured, “but while pretending to spy for the Germans, did you by chance meet anyone you trust?”
I looked at him askance. “Trust? A German agent?”
“Mm,” he confirmed. “Perhaps someone you chose to let go, rather than implicate with the rest.”
“My dear boy.” I turned to face him in frank astonishment. “You have just asked whether I committed treason.”
His skin went dark with embarrassment. “Treason doesn’t need to come into it,” he insisted stiffly. “There can be sound strategic reasons to leave a known agent in place.” I let my eyebrows climb higher, amused in spite of myself at his discomfiture, and he shot me a reproving look. “Oh, come, Holmes, I know you too well for this. To exactly how many murders now have we been accessory after the fact?”
I laughed and turned back to unpacking my shaving kit. “More than the Yard would enjoy knowing, certainly.” He was correct: there had been one or two agents whom I had let go. I trusted Watson implicitly, but I also preferred to keep him as far from potential treason charges as possible. “It’s true, I’ve always been unorthodox in my judgments. I have no doubt, Watson, that Mycroft would happily extend his protection to you, in light of his debts to you, but...”
“Holmes,” Watson protested. He disliked being reminded that my brother and I owed him my life. Watson laboured under the error that the debt went in the other direction, but I refused to count dragging him back out of scraps that I myself had gotten him into.
“But, you must admit,” I continued, “treason is a very different subject from murder. I am not so charitable a brother as to fail you with respect to my own debts, Watson, in order to permit Mycroft to pay his.”
“I beg of you,” he protested again, genuinely pained. I sighed.
“Very well. Perhaps we should come at this the other way around,” I suggested, by way of making peace. “Why do you wish to know? You can’t be thinking of putting it in those cursed chronicles of yours.”
The set of his shoulders in the glass confirmed that this was more comfortable territory for him, but he refused to rise to the bait.
“Indulge me a moment, and let me ask you a different question then,” he countered, failing to answer my own. “Do you, by any chance, have your violin with you?”
I studied him, puzzled by the shift. For an answer, I showed him the fingertips of my left hand.
He examined the softened calluses and shook his head. “I take it that the prospect of two years of Irish reels was more than you could stomach?”
“Quite.”
“So the violin is still in Sussex? I suppose it can’t be helped.” He smiled to himself, touching his moustache. “But I’ll have to ask that you put your collar back on and your razor away, Holmes. We may yet need Altamont.”
“Whatever are you on about?” He was not usually so peremptory with me, nor did he dictate strategy.
“I’m taking you to see an old friend.”
“Yours or mine?” I asked. Nearly everyone I would willingly grant that title was already standing in front of me.
He grinned, some kind of deviltry clearly afoot. “No, no,” he chided me, “you’ve already had the opportunity to play the dramatist today. Permit me the role, for once.”
Watson refused to say a further word about it. When I had dressed to his satisfaction - it seemed that he wanted to keep Altamont in posse but not in esse, as I was permitted to be an English gentleman in every respect but the lingering goatee - he led me only as far as another wing of the hotel. There, after finding the floor and room he wanted, he knocked on a door.
“It’s Dr Watson,” he called, keeping his voice low. “Forgive us the late hour.” I frowned. The honorific suggested that the individual on the other side of the door was more an acquaintance than a friend.
The thin young woman who opened the door was not more than twenty. Despite the hour, she was alert and fully dressed, although her hair was escaping its pins. Watson would have found a way to call her beautiful, notwithstanding her long nose and wide mouth, but it seemed to me that the quick intelligence in her eyes might serve her better than imagined physical graces.
Her extreme youth puzzled me. It explained Watson’s use of his title, but she couldn’t possibly be an ‘old friend,’ not unless Watson had first known her as a girl. He might have met her through his connection with either Mrs Watson - the latter more probable than the former - except that the young woman clearly wasn’t English.
I was still attempting to precisely place her on the Continent when Watson stood aside to introduce me. “My friend and colleague, Mr Sherlock Holmes,” he said, and then stood there like a bounder. He expected me to be able to deduce her identity, then. I shot him an unamused glance: it was unlike him to risk embarrassing a third party in his games. Regrettably, this young woman was about to be embarrassed, as I had not the least idea who she was.
“Miss-” I began, prepared to apologize for both my own lack, whatever it was, and my friend’s uncivil behaviour.
“Herr Holmes,” she said, her accent immediately marking her as Viennese. More importantly, she smiled, her features lighting with quiet mischief. There was something of her father in that smile, but far more of the five-year-old girl inviting me to take Kaffee with her dolls.
“-Anna Freud,” I finished, bowing over her hand. The littlest and quietest of all the Freuds, she had been, and with the exception of her father, the only one brave enough to enter the sickroom of a deranged Englishman.
I would never have thought to name her such, but little Anna Freud had been a friend during one of the lowest periods of my life, when I was far too sick with shame and misery to turn to the one man I did call friend. Watson’s friendship had been a great and terrible thing in those first bleak weeks after I threw off the drug. Its weight dragged at me constantly, demanding that I be a better man than I was, and according me more honour than I deserved. Watson had forgiven me everything, both my reckless disregard for my own welfare and my concerted efforts to injure his, and had asked nothing of me but that I be well. And yet the implicit demands in his generosity had been nearly more than I could bear.
Whereas little Anna had only wanted me to be kind. She sat at the end of my bed and asked me simple questions, while I clung to the comfort that here was one thing, at least, that I had not poisoned.
Beside me, Watson laughed, low and pleased. “I did say he would remember you.”
“It seems unfair,” she said, her English heavily accented but as excellent as her father’s. “I only remember you a little. You were kind and very gentle, and there was a violin.”
“Which I promised to play for you again someday. No, no, it doesn’t matter if you remember,” I reassured her, pressing her hand. “It is enough that I do. May we come in, Miss Freud?” For I understood now Watson’s earlier questions about German agents, and it was essential that we not discuss her business in a public hallway. As pleased as I might have been to see Miss Anna Freud in other circumstances, it was not a good time for an Austrian citizen to be in England.
Even as a girl, little Anna Freud had shown more interest in her father’s patients than in her siblings’ company; now, at nineteen, she intended to become heir to her father’s legacy. She was already the principal translator of her father’s papers, a task requiring minute knowledge of the finer points of his theories, and while she disagreed with some of her father’s methods, she still wished to go to university and become a psychoanalyst herself. Dr Freud, it seemed, wanted a more traditional career for his daughter: he intended that she become a teacher and apply his theories in the classroom. As a gift to his daughter, however, he had sent her to England to meet with his colleagues here.
Her father’s timing was a wonder to me. Even three weeks ago, when Miss Freud had left for London, Austrian trains had already been filled with soldiers, and yet Dr Freud had misjudged the speed and intensity with which hostilities would oversweep Europe. Now the international cables were cut and the borders closed, and Anna was an enemy alien stranded in Britain. Fortunately, her father had given her Watson’s name as someone she might rely on - I had never corresponded with Dr Freud personally - and she had appealed to my friend for assistance.
“And what of these?” I asked, indicating the bruises on her wrist. They were three days old, if I was any judge, every finger-mark of her assailant distinct. I could not explain to myself the intensity of my fury, neither by my general dislike of seeing a woman brutalised, nor even by the particular debts I owed Miss Freud and her father. In another man, I might have called it paternal feeling, but a few conversations with a girl’s dolls does not make a man a father.
“Those are of no consequence,” she said, retrieving her hand from mine.
“My dear, they are very much of consequence. Whoever he is, there is no need to fear him. You are under my protection, and you will soon be in Vienna.”
“I do not fear him,” she corrected me. Her gaze slid past my ear as she adjusted her sleeve at her wrist. “Please, mein Herr. Do not…”
“Holmes,” Watson warned from behind me, but I was already moving away from her, not wishing to compound the existing offense. Her manner eased, and I cursed again whoever had left those marks.
“It really is nothing,” she repeated. This time she looked at me as she said it. “I only require Wien and home,” she insisted, giving the city its German name. “Bitte, mein Herr.”
“Very well,” I reluctantly agreed. “I will make arrangements. You must be ready to travel on a moment’s notice. No more than one bag- Yes, that one will do. The rest will have to be shipped to Vienna when the war is over, should Providence be so kind to us. Come, Watson.”
Watson lingered behind to whisper some words to her, but caught up with me again at the elevator. I held my tongue until we reached the privacy of my room.
“And what do you make of those marks?” I asked while I retrieved Altamont’s habillement. I was composing plans for removing Miss Freud from England, but the other matter nagged at me.
He pursed his lips. “I have my suspicions. But she is our client as much as our friend, Holmes, and she has asked us not to pursue this.”
“Of course.” Her request was no inconvenience: I had ample experience in protecting my clients’ interests whilst arranging matters to my own satisfaction.
“The man she was staying with is another medical doctor, a Dr Jones, a colleague of her father’s. You wouldn’t have heard about this down in Sussex, but a few years back he was put up on charges of indecent assault on two of his minor patients, neither much younger than Miss Freud.”
“Acquitted?” I asked.
“Never sent to trial. The judge saw no point in putting it before a jury: both girls were under care for mental deficiencies.”
I growled my displeasure. Not even an incontrovertible chain of physical evidence tended to sway a jury in such instances. “And your reasons for supposing this man assaulted Miss Freud?”
Watson grimaced. “Here she is in a hostile and foreign land, in great need of kind friends, and rather than shelter under his roof a night longer, she appealed to me, a near stranger, for assistance.” He sighed. “I admit it’s raw conjecture.”
“Hardly conclusive,” I agreed. There might be any number of reasons she had sought refuge under another roof. Unfortunately, none of them were to her host’s credit.
“I confess that I may be letting my distaste for the man colour my perceptions,” Watson continued. “His legal defence, Holmes, was that those poor girls’ accusations were an expression of their fantasies.” His outrage was palpable. “What they wished he would do to them.”
“What a shining paragon of the medical profession. The more doctors I meet, Watson, the more astonished I am that we are friends. Tell me, do you sincerely propose to ignore this man, instead of giving him the horsewhipping he so clearly deserves?”
Watson laughed. “I’m surprised you’re not scolding me that it’s all circumstantial.”
“Indeed. And yet I find that I strongly dislike the detail where he claimed his patients wished for him to assault them.”
“I’m told it’s a tenet of psychoanalytic theory,” Watson said with a sigh of regret. When I expressed my confusion, he clarified, “That a rape accusation is only an expression of the victim’s wishes.” He blushed even to say it.
I stared at him, attempting to tally the idea with the man who had been so perceptive and gentle with his patients. “That hardly seems the Dr Freud we met.”
Watson shrugged helplessly. “I am at a loss to explain it. I initially chalked it up to the kind of ugly rumour that often follows a great man - Dr Freud was under a professional shadow when we met him, you’ll remember, Holmes - but what I’ve read of his papers seems to confirm it.”
“And these are the papers Miss Freud has been translating,” I said, the fury rising in me again. “No wonder she denied the assault and begged us not to pursue it.”
“And will we pursue it?” Watson asked. “I confess, Holmes, I had thought to make it hot for him once Miss Freud was safely away. I am respected in the profession, you know, and could work it so it would never be traced back to her. My priority, however, was getting her out of England.”
I snorted. From what I could see, he had been doing precious little to that end. “Frankly, Watson, I’m surprised to hear it. Every hour the borders become more difficult to cross, and yet you have delayed three days. Did you think you would secure her passage to Hamburg, if only you searched hard enough? You should have gone to Mycroft immediately.”
Watson blinked at me. “Your brother, may I remind you, is busy with a war-”
“And yet he has a keen sense of his obligations,” I snapped. “He would have found time for you, and for Miss Freud as well.”
Watson’s expression darkened. “And so he did,” he said in measured tones. “Your brother thanked me very graciously for bringing Miss Freud to his attention. He instructed me to put her up at Claridge’s, and assured me that his best agent would contact me soon. In fact, I was to expect to hear from him sometime...” He theatrically consulted his watch, although we both knew midnight was long gone. “...yes, yesterday.” He raised his eyebrows at me.
I winced, briefly covering my eyes. Of course I would have been my brother’s preferred solution. I had the requisite contacts, and Mycroft need not risk entrusting a matter of personal honour to a Whitehall minion.
“I see. One might be moved to doubt my brother’s wisdom, if this is the perspicacity of his so-called best agent. My apologies, Watson.”
“Nonsense,” my friend stoutly replied. “You’ve only been working alone too long.”
It was as good an explanation as any: I had been so absolutely unavailable for all other purposes for so long that I had stopped thinking of myself as having an existence independent of Altamont. I had looked forward to bringing Watson in at the end of the Von Bork case, as a well-earned reward, and then… there was nothing beyond that point. In my mind, it was only merest luck that I was available to take Miss Freud’s case, whereas Mycroft had anticipated and planned for it.
“Fortunately,” Watson continued, “that’s easily remedied. I’m coming to Vienna with you.”
“You most certainly are not,” I retorted. “Your old regiment awaits you.”
“Hardly. They’ve shown no interest in my queries. I’m not surprised, they invalided me out the first time, and I’m an old man now.”
I shook my head. “Have some faith, Watson. Your orders will come. Mycroft knows your worth.”
“Is that so? Then I will expect to receive my orders the day you return from Vienna.”
He startled a laugh from me. I had never fared well against Watson in this particular argument. When he wished to come on a hazardous expedition, he was adept in turning my points against me. I admit I was usually predisposed to allow him to come. The few times I absolutely could not warrant his participation - such as during my two-year stunt as Altamont - I simply never provided him the opportunity to propose it.
“You don’t think it likely?”
“On the contrary, I think it very like my brother,” I conceded. Mycroft enjoyed an understated kind of showmanship, very different in style from my own, and yet driven by similar satisfactions.
“So, there you are. The only remaining question is whether I’ll be accompanying you, or spending the interval sitting here doing nothing. Of course...”
“Yes?” I prompted. Strictly speaking, I had no business encouraging this conversation unless I intended to permit him to come along, but the possibility tempted me. Watson’s inclusion would necessarily limit how much I could employ Altamont, thereby constraining to some degree what contacts I could use, but there were points in his favour, as well. If nothing else, Watson’s presence would permit me the freedom to move independently, comfortable in the knowledge that Miss Freud was well-protected in my absence.
“I could always spend that time bedevilling Dr Jones,” Watson proposed.
“And deprive me of the pleasure? I forbid it, Watson.”
“I fail to see how you’ll be in a position to prevent it, occupied as you’ll be with smuggling an Austrian national through France.”
“I see you intend to leave me little choice. Would you be very put out if we bypassed France entirely, and came at the problem from Malta, instead?”
He grinned. “Not at all. Although the war will be in full swing when we return, with a trip that long. We may miss the opportunity to serve Dr Jones.”
“Our client requested that we let him be,” I reminded him. “If need be, we can catch up to Dr Jones after the war is over. Returning Miss Freud home is the priority.”
“I did hear something about the borders becoming more difficult to cross with every passing day,” he teased me. Abruptly, he sobered. “I thank you for the opportunity to assist, Holmes. I was doing the best I could for Miss Freud-”
“Of course you were,” I murmured immediately. “I never should have implied otherwise.”
He shook his head, dismissing either my apology or the need for it. “The truth is that I owe your life to Dr Freud. No, don’t interrupt me, Holmes. He was able to help you when I could do nothing.”
When he seemed to pause there, I said quietly, “That is very far from the truth.”
“No,” he insisted, “It is the bare truth, unvarnished and unadorned. I was unable to help you during the worst of your addiction, I was further unable to help you throw it off, and after you finally were clear-” Watson choked slightly. “I was unable to help you after, as well. No, you know it to be true, Holmes. Little Anna was able to help you when I could not.”
“That is not how it was.” I was at a loss to explain to him the terrifying enormity of his devotion, and how little of me there remained, after the drug had finished with me, to rise to meet it. The fault had never been in Watson; it had always been in myself.
“That is exactly how it was,” he insisted. “I do not resent that they could do what I could not. In fact, I am intensely grateful to them both. There were times, those first weeks, when I wondered if you would live to see England again.”
“Watson,” I said, pained. I could not give him the lie; I only wished he had not seen the truth so clearly.
“But there was Miss Freud. And then the violin, of course, and the case.”
And then I had fled for three years, rather than face my friend surreptitiously examining me for signs of the drug every time we met. It had required a tragedy of Watson’s own for me to muster the courage to return. There was very little in this story that I was proud of. “I beg you.”
“But she was first,” he said firmly. “I have long owed them both a great debt, Dr and Miss Freud, and I have had no way to repay it. So thank you, Holmes, for permitting to assist in this.”
“Of course,” I said, faintly ashamed that I had first thought to keep him from it.
He nodded. Then, with false brightness, “One bag, I believe you said?”
“And your revolver, if you please,” I agreed, seizing upon the offering. “I shall need you to stay here today, I am afraid. I am expecting Martha with papers that will need to be forwarded to Whitehall, if you would be so good? Excellent.”
“And where will you be, Holmes?”
I grinned, grabbing for my coat. “I’m off to see if I can beat the news of Von Bork’s betrayal to the ears of a certain river-man. With luck, we’ll be able to catch the evening tide.”
Editor’s note: One oft-disputed detail of the Swingline-Dobson manuscript is the inclusion of Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, seemingly an only child and five years old in 1891. Inconveniently, the historical Anna Freud was born in 1895, the youngest of Freud’s six children. Some scholars have proposed that Watson, who was eighty-seven years old and working without notes when he composed his manuscript, simply confused Mathilde, the oldest Freud child, with Anna, the youngest, who due to her close companionship with her father was in all the newspaper reports of Sigmund Freud’s death. While it is true that Mathilde, born in 1887, was approximately the correct age for the Swingline-Dobson manuscript (and her brothers Jean-Martin and Oliver might have been young enough to have been confined to the nursery, leaving Mathilde the appearance of an only child), others have found the conjecture unsatisfying.
This new manuscript, however, allegedly penned by Sherlock Holmes himself, suggests that both men agree that the Freud child who befriended Holmes was Anna, the youngest, and not Mathilde, the oldest. Not only do they agree on the child’s name, but the historical Anna Freud was stranded in London at the beginning of WWI, and was approximately nineteen at the time, as this newer manuscript relates. If the child in the Swingline-Dobson manuscript was indeed Anna Freud, then the events related therein did not occur in 1891, as Watson claimed, but approximately ten years later, when Anna Freud was about five.
Unfortunately, the apparent confirmation that the child in the manuscript is indeed Anna Freud, and thus that Holmes was treated for cocaine addiction in 1900 or 1901, raises a new difficulty. “The Final Problem,” published in 1894, could not possibly have been a written six years before the events it was intended to conceal. Whether Watson was having some private joke in the Swingline-Dobson manuscript, implying that two of his best-known stories never happened, or whether Watson wrote FINA to conceal some third, as yet undiscovered event, remains an open problem.
Additional Source: Some details were adapted from Rebecca Coffey’s fictional biography of Anna Freud, Hysterical.
Recipient: rachelindeed
Author: sanguinity
Source: Nicholas Meyer, The Seven Percent Solution; ACD, “His Last Bow”
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Non-explicit discussions of sexual assault and medical abuse
Summary: “And for another, Dr. Freud has saved my life. Had I not come to Vienna, and had your cure not been successful, sir, I should doubtless have missed this and every other intriguing little problem that may ever chance to come my way. And,” Holmes added, taking up his glass once more, “had you, Watson, not contrived to get me here against my will, Dr. Freud would never have had the opportunity to save a doomed addict. To both of you, in fact, I owe my life. To Watson, here, there will be a lifetime to repay the debt, but to you, Doctor, I confess I am at as loss.”
- The Seven Percent Solution
Read it on AO3
Having consigned the German spymaster to Whitehall’s tender care, Watson and I returned to my room at Claridge’s Hotel. It was late, nearing midnight, and I instructed Watson to pour himself a drink while I set about to dispose of the last traces of the Irish-American. Altamont had been a useful sort of fellow, but two unremitting years of a persona has a tendency to wear. I was looking forward to recovering my own skin, what I remembered of it, and I could think of no surer method than spending the evening in Watson’s company.
Watson, however, turned down the drink and followed me to the dressing room, his fingers working their steady way down the buttons of his chauffeur’s jacket. I watched him in the glass as he exchanged the chauffeur’s costume for his own, and finally noticed what I had been too preoccupied with Britain’s business to observe earlier. Something was weighing on Watson, and had been since at least Harwich. It was more than the nascent war, I thought, although that cast its own pall. We had both hoped this war would not come to pass.
“Well, out with it, man,” I prompted him, removing my collar and setting it aside. “What is troubling you? Does it perhaps concern your morning’s urgent business in the City, from which I so rudely dragged you?”
He flashed me a startled look, then laughed. “The mud on my shoes or some such, I take it?”
“Some such,” I agreed. I was out of the habit of voicing my deductions, and more interested in hearing what preoccupied him.
“It’s a delicate question,” he ventured, “but while pretending to spy for the Germans, did you by chance meet anyone you trust?”
I looked at him askance. “Trust? A German agent?”
“Mm,” he confirmed. “Perhaps someone you chose to let go, rather than implicate with the rest.”
“My dear boy.” I turned to face him in frank astonishment. “You have just asked whether I committed treason.”
His skin went dark with embarrassment. “Treason doesn’t need to come into it,” he insisted stiffly. “There can be sound strategic reasons to leave a known agent in place.” I let my eyebrows climb higher, amused in spite of myself at his discomfiture, and he shot me a reproving look. “Oh, come, Holmes, I know you too well for this. To exactly how many murders now have we been accessory after the fact?”
I laughed and turned back to unpacking my shaving kit. “More than the Yard would enjoy knowing, certainly.” He was correct: there had been one or two agents whom I had let go. I trusted Watson implicitly, but I also preferred to keep him as far from potential treason charges as possible. “It’s true, I’ve always been unorthodox in my judgments. I have no doubt, Watson, that Mycroft would happily extend his protection to you, in light of his debts to you, but...”
“Holmes,” Watson protested. He disliked being reminded that my brother and I owed him my life. Watson laboured under the error that the debt went in the other direction, but I refused to count dragging him back out of scraps that I myself had gotten him into.
“But, you must admit,” I continued, “treason is a very different subject from murder. I am not so charitable a brother as to fail you with respect to my own debts, Watson, in order to permit Mycroft to pay his.”
“I beg of you,” he protested again, genuinely pained. I sighed.
“Very well. Perhaps we should come at this the other way around,” I suggested, by way of making peace. “Why do you wish to know? You can’t be thinking of putting it in those cursed chronicles of yours.”
The set of his shoulders in the glass confirmed that this was more comfortable territory for him, but he refused to rise to the bait.
“Indulge me a moment, and let me ask you a different question then,” he countered, failing to answer my own. “Do you, by any chance, have your violin with you?”
I studied him, puzzled by the shift. For an answer, I showed him the fingertips of my left hand.
He examined the softened calluses and shook his head. “I take it that the prospect of two years of Irish reels was more than you could stomach?”
“Quite.”
“So the violin is still in Sussex? I suppose it can’t be helped.” He smiled to himself, touching his moustache. “But I’ll have to ask that you put your collar back on and your razor away, Holmes. We may yet need Altamont.”
“Whatever are you on about?” He was not usually so peremptory with me, nor did he dictate strategy.
“I’m taking you to see an old friend.”
“Yours or mine?” I asked. Nearly everyone I would willingly grant that title was already standing in front of me.
He grinned, some kind of deviltry clearly afoot. “No, no,” he chided me, “you’ve already had the opportunity to play the dramatist today. Permit me the role, for once.”
Watson refused to say a further word about it. When I had dressed to his satisfaction - it seemed that he wanted to keep Altamont in posse but not in esse, as I was permitted to be an English gentleman in every respect but the lingering goatee - he led me only as far as another wing of the hotel. There, after finding the floor and room he wanted, he knocked on a door.
“It’s Dr Watson,” he called, keeping his voice low. “Forgive us the late hour.” I frowned. The honorific suggested that the individual on the other side of the door was more an acquaintance than a friend.
The thin young woman who opened the door was not more than twenty. Despite the hour, she was alert and fully dressed, although her hair was escaping its pins. Watson would have found a way to call her beautiful, notwithstanding her long nose and wide mouth, but it seemed to me that the quick intelligence in her eyes might serve her better than imagined physical graces.
Her extreme youth puzzled me. It explained Watson’s use of his title, but she couldn’t possibly be an ‘old friend,’ not unless Watson had first known her as a girl. He might have met her through his connection with either Mrs Watson - the latter more probable than the former - except that the young woman clearly wasn’t English.
I was still attempting to precisely place her on the Continent when Watson stood aside to introduce me. “My friend and colleague, Mr Sherlock Holmes,” he said, and then stood there like a bounder. He expected me to be able to deduce her identity, then. I shot him an unamused glance: it was unlike him to risk embarrassing a third party in his games. Regrettably, this young woman was about to be embarrassed, as I had not the least idea who she was.
“Miss-” I began, prepared to apologize for both my own lack, whatever it was, and my friend’s uncivil behaviour.
“Herr Holmes,” she said, her accent immediately marking her as Viennese. More importantly, she smiled, her features lighting with quiet mischief. There was something of her father in that smile, but far more of the five-year-old girl inviting me to take Kaffee with her dolls.
“-Anna Freud,” I finished, bowing over her hand. The littlest and quietest of all the Freuds, she had been, and with the exception of her father, the only one brave enough to enter the sickroom of a deranged Englishman.
I would never have thought to name her such, but little Anna Freud had been a friend during one of the lowest periods of my life, when I was far too sick with shame and misery to turn to the one man I did call friend. Watson’s friendship had been a great and terrible thing in those first bleak weeks after I threw off the drug. Its weight dragged at me constantly, demanding that I be a better man than I was, and according me more honour than I deserved. Watson had forgiven me everything, both my reckless disregard for my own welfare and my concerted efforts to injure his, and had asked nothing of me but that I be well. And yet the implicit demands in his generosity had been nearly more than I could bear.
Whereas little Anna had only wanted me to be kind. She sat at the end of my bed and asked me simple questions, while I clung to the comfort that here was one thing, at least, that I had not poisoned.
Beside me, Watson laughed, low and pleased. “I did say he would remember you.”
“It seems unfair,” she said, her English heavily accented but as excellent as her father’s. “I only remember you a little. You were kind and very gentle, and there was a violin.”
“Which I promised to play for you again someday. No, no, it doesn’t matter if you remember,” I reassured her, pressing her hand. “It is enough that I do. May we come in, Miss Freud?” For I understood now Watson’s earlier questions about German agents, and it was essential that we not discuss her business in a public hallway. As pleased as I might have been to see Miss Anna Freud in other circumstances, it was not a good time for an Austrian citizen to be in England.
Even as a girl, little Anna Freud had shown more interest in her father’s patients than in her siblings’ company; now, at nineteen, she intended to become heir to her father’s legacy. She was already the principal translator of her father’s papers, a task requiring minute knowledge of the finer points of his theories, and while she disagreed with some of her father’s methods, she still wished to go to university and become a psychoanalyst herself. Dr Freud, it seemed, wanted a more traditional career for his daughter: he intended that she become a teacher and apply his theories in the classroom. As a gift to his daughter, however, he had sent her to England to meet with his colleagues here.
Her father’s timing was a wonder to me. Even three weeks ago, when Miss Freud had left for London, Austrian trains had already been filled with soldiers, and yet Dr Freud had misjudged the speed and intensity with which hostilities would oversweep Europe. Now the international cables were cut and the borders closed, and Anna was an enemy alien stranded in Britain. Fortunately, her father had given her Watson’s name as someone she might rely on - I had never corresponded with Dr Freud personally - and she had appealed to my friend for assistance.
“And what of these?” I asked, indicating the bruises on her wrist. They were three days old, if I was any judge, every finger-mark of her assailant distinct. I could not explain to myself the intensity of my fury, neither by my general dislike of seeing a woman brutalised, nor even by the particular debts I owed Miss Freud and her father. In another man, I might have called it paternal feeling, but a few conversations with a girl’s dolls does not make a man a father.
“Those are of no consequence,” she said, retrieving her hand from mine.
“My dear, they are very much of consequence. Whoever he is, there is no need to fear him. You are under my protection, and you will soon be in Vienna.”
“I do not fear him,” she corrected me. Her gaze slid past my ear as she adjusted her sleeve at her wrist. “Please, mein Herr. Do not…”
“Holmes,” Watson warned from behind me, but I was already moving away from her, not wishing to compound the existing offense. Her manner eased, and I cursed again whoever had left those marks.
“It really is nothing,” she repeated. This time she looked at me as she said it. “I only require Wien and home,” she insisted, giving the city its German name. “Bitte, mein Herr.”
“Very well,” I reluctantly agreed. “I will make arrangements. You must be ready to travel on a moment’s notice. No more than one bag- Yes, that one will do. The rest will have to be shipped to Vienna when the war is over, should Providence be so kind to us. Come, Watson.”
Watson lingered behind to whisper some words to her, but caught up with me again at the elevator. I held my tongue until we reached the privacy of my room.
“And what do you make of those marks?” I asked while I retrieved Altamont’s habillement. I was composing plans for removing Miss Freud from England, but the other matter nagged at me.
He pursed his lips. “I have my suspicions. But she is our client as much as our friend, Holmes, and she has asked us not to pursue this.”
“Of course.” Her request was no inconvenience: I had ample experience in protecting my clients’ interests whilst arranging matters to my own satisfaction.
“The man she was staying with is another medical doctor, a Dr Jones, a colleague of her father’s. You wouldn’t have heard about this down in Sussex, but a few years back he was put up on charges of indecent assault on two of his minor patients, neither much younger than Miss Freud.”
“Acquitted?” I asked.
“Never sent to trial. The judge saw no point in putting it before a jury: both girls were under care for mental deficiencies.”
I growled my displeasure. Not even an incontrovertible chain of physical evidence tended to sway a jury in such instances. “And your reasons for supposing this man assaulted Miss Freud?”
Watson grimaced. “Here she is in a hostile and foreign land, in great need of kind friends, and rather than shelter under his roof a night longer, she appealed to me, a near stranger, for assistance.” He sighed. “I admit it’s raw conjecture.”
“Hardly conclusive,” I agreed. There might be any number of reasons she had sought refuge under another roof. Unfortunately, none of them were to her host’s credit.
“I confess that I may be letting my distaste for the man colour my perceptions,” Watson continued. “His legal defence, Holmes, was that those poor girls’ accusations were an expression of their fantasies.” His outrage was palpable. “What they wished he would do to them.”
“What a shining paragon of the medical profession. The more doctors I meet, Watson, the more astonished I am that we are friends. Tell me, do you sincerely propose to ignore this man, instead of giving him the horsewhipping he so clearly deserves?”
Watson laughed. “I’m surprised you’re not scolding me that it’s all circumstantial.”
“Indeed. And yet I find that I strongly dislike the detail where he claimed his patients wished for him to assault them.”
“I’m told it’s a tenet of psychoanalytic theory,” Watson said with a sigh of regret. When I expressed my confusion, he clarified, “That a rape accusation is only an expression of the victim’s wishes.” He blushed even to say it.
I stared at him, attempting to tally the idea with the man who had been so perceptive and gentle with his patients. “That hardly seems the Dr Freud we met.”
Watson shrugged helplessly. “I am at a loss to explain it. I initially chalked it up to the kind of ugly rumour that often follows a great man - Dr Freud was under a professional shadow when we met him, you’ll remember, Holmes - but what I’ve read of his papers seems to confirm it.”
“And these are the papers Miss Freud has been translating,” I said, the fury rising in me again. “No wonder she denied the assault and begged us not to pursue it.”
“And will we pursue it?” Watson asked. “I confess, Holmes, I had thought to make it hot for him once Miss Freud was safely away. I am respected in the profession, you know, and could work it so it would never be traced back to her. My priority, however, was getting her out of England.”
I snorted. From what I could see, he had been doing precious little to that end. “Frankly, Watson, I’m surprised to hear it. Every hour the borders become more difficult to cross, and yet you have delayed three days. Did you think you would secure her passage to Hamburg, if only you searched hard enough? You should have gone to Mycroft immediately.”
Watson blinked at me. “Your brother, may I remind you, is busy with a war-”
“And yet he has a keen sense of his obligations,” I snapped. “He would have found time for you, and for Miss Freud as well.”
Watson’s expression darkened. “And so he did,” he said in measured tones. “Your brother thanked me very graciously for bringing Miss Freud to his attention. He instructed me to put her up at Claridge’s, and assured me that his best agent would contact me soon. In fact, I was to expect to hear from him sometime...” He theatrically consulted his watch, although we both knew midnight was long gone. “...yes, yesterday.” He raised his eyebrows at me.
I winced, briefly covering my eyes. Of course I would have been my brother’s preferred solution. I had the requisite contacts, and Mycroft need not risk entrusting a matter of personal honour to a Whitehall minion.
“I see. One might be moved to doubt my brother’s wisdom, if this is the perspicacity of his so-called best agent. My apologies, Watson.”
“Nonsense,” my friend stoutly replied. “You’ve only been working alone too long.”
It was as good an explanation as any: I had been so absolutely unavailable for all other purposes for so long that I had stopped thinking of myself as having an existence independent of Altamont. I had looked forward to bringing Watson in at the end of the Von Bork case, as a well-earned reward, and then… there was nothing beyond that point. In my mind, it was only merest luck that I was available to take Miss Freud’s case, whereas Mycroft had anticipated and planned for it.
“Fortunately,” Watson continued, “that’s easily remedied. I’m coming to Vienna with you.”
“You most certainly are not,” I retorted. “Your old regiment awaits you.”
“Hardly. They’ve shown no interest in my queries. I’m not surprised, they invalided me out the first time, and I’m an old man now.”
I shook my head. “Have some faith, Watson. Your orders will come. Mycroft knows your worth.”
“Is that so? Then I will expect to receive my orders the day you return from Vienna.”
He startled a laugh from me. I had never fared well against Watson in this particular argument. When he wished to come on a hazardous expedition, he was adept in turning my points against me. I admit I was usually predisposed to allow him to come. The few times I absolutely could not warrant his participation - such as during my two-year stunt as Altamont - I simply never provided him the opportunity to propose it.
“You don’t think it likely?”
“On the contrary, I think it very like my brother,” I conceded. Mycroft enjoyed an understated kind of showmanship, very different in style from my own, and yet driven by similar satisfactions.
“So, there you are. The only remaining question is whether I’ll be accompanying you, or spending the interval sitting here doing nothing. Of course...”
“Yes?” I prompted. Strictly speaking, I had no business encouraging this conversation unless I intended to permit him to come along, but the possibility tempted me. Watson’s inclusion would necessarily limit how much I could employ Altamont, thereby constraining to some degree what contacts I could use, but there were points in his favour, as well. If nothing else, Watson’s presence would permit me the freedom to move independently, comfortable in the knowledge that Miss Freud was well-protected in my absence.
“I could always spend that time bedevilling Dr Jones,” Watson proposed.
“And deprive me of the pleasure? I forbid it, Watson.”
“I fail to see how you’ll be in a position to prevent it, occupied as you’ll be with smuggling an Austrian national through France.”
“I see you intend to leave me little choice. Would you be very put out if we bypassed France entirely, and came at the problem from Malta, instead?”
He grinned. “Not at all. Although the war will be in full swing when we return, with a trip that long. We may miss the opportunity to serve Dr Jones.”
“Our client requested that we let him be,” I reminded him. “If need be, we can catch up to Dr Jones after the war is over. Returning Miss Freud home is the priority.”
“I did hear something about the borders becoming more difficult to cross with every passing day,” he teased me. Abruptly, he sobered. “I thank you for the opportunity to assist, Holmes. I was doing the best I could for Miss Freud-”
“Of course you were,” I murmured immediately. “I never should have implied otherwise.”
He shook his head, dismissing either my apology or the need for it. “The truth is that I owe your life to Dr Freud. No, don’t interrupt me, Holmes. He was able to help you when I could do nothing.”
When he seemed to pause there, I said quietly, “That is very far from the truth.”
“No,” he insisted, “It is the bare truth, unvarnished and unadorned. I was unable to help you during the worst of your addiction, I was further unable to help you throw it off, and after you finally were clear-” Watson choked slightly. “I was unable to help you after, as well. No, you know it to be true, Holmes. Little Anna was able to help you when I could not.”
“That is not how it was.” I was at a loss to explain to him the terrifying enormity of his devotion, and how little of me there remained, after the drug had finished with me, to rise to meet it. The fault had never been in Watson; it had always been in myself.
“That is exactly how it was,” he insisted. “I do not resent that they could do what I could not. In fact, I am intensely grateful to them both. There were times, those first weeks, when I wondered if you would live to see England again.”
“Watson,” I said, pained. I could not give him the lie; I only wished he had not seen the truth so clearly.
“But there was Miss Freud. And then the violin, of course, and the case.”
And then I had fled for three years, rather than face my friend surreptitiously examining me for signs of the drug every time we met. It had required a tragedy of Watson’s own for me to muster the courage to return. There was very little in this story that I was proud of. “I beg you.”
“But she was first,” he said firmly. “I have long owed them both a great debt, Dr and Miss Freud, and I have had no way to repay it. So thank you, Holmes, for permitting to assist in this.”
“Of course,” I said, faintly ashamed that I had first thought to keep him from it.
He nodded. Then, with false brightness, “One bag, I believe you said?”
“And your revolver, if you please,” I agreed, seizing upon the offering. “I shall need you to stay here today, I am afraid. I am expecting Martha with papers that will need to be forwarded to Whitehall, if you would be so good? Excellent.”
“And where will you be, Holmes?”
I grinned, grabbing for my coat. “I’m off to see if I can beat the news of Von Bork’s betrayal to the ears of a certain river-man. With luck, we’ll be able to catch the evening tide.”
Editor’s note: One oft-disputed detail of the Swingline-Dobson manuscript is the inclusion of Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, seemingly an only child and five years old in 1891. Inconveniently, the historical Anna Freud was born in 1895, the youngest of Freud’s six children. Some scholars have proposed that Watson, who was eighty-seven years old and working without notes when he composed his manuscript, simply confused Mathilde, the oldest Freud child, with Anna, the youngest, who due to her close companionship with her father was in all the newspaper reports of Sigmund Freud’s death. While it is true that Mathilde, born in 1887, was approximately the correct age for the Swingline-Dobson manuscript (and her brothers Jean-Martin and Oliver might have been young enough to have been confined to the nursery, leaving Mathilde the appearance of an only child), others have found the conjecture unsatisfying.
This new manuscript, however, allegedly penned by Sherlock Holmes himself, suggests that both men agree that the Freud child who befriended Holmes was Anna, the youngest, and not Mathilde, the oldest. Not only do they agree on the child’s name, but the historical Anna Freud was stranded in London at the beginning of WWI, and was approximately nineteen at the time, as this newer manuscript relates. If the child in the Swingline-Dobson manuscript was indeed Anna Freud, then the events related therein did not occur in 1891, as Watson claimed, but approximately ten years later, when Anna Freud was about five.
Unfortunately, the apparent confirmation that the child in the manuscript is indeed Anna Freud, and thus that Holmes was treated for cocaine addiction in 1900 or 1901, raises a new difficulty. “The Final Problem,” published in 1894, could not possibly have been a written six years before the events it was intended to conceal. Whether Watson was having some private joke in the Swingline-Dobson manuscript, implying that two of his best-known stories never happened, or whether Watson wrote FINA to conceal some third, as yet undiscovered event, remains an open problem.
Additional Source: Some details were adapted from Rebecca Coffey’s fictional biography of Anna Freud, Hysterical.