TWENTY-NINE
Watson did not dream of human gargoyles or of foraging honeybees. Instead, his exhausted and overworked imagination took him back to their final meeting on the Downs. It was more like one of the popular newsreels than a dream, almost a verbatim account of what took place, apart from the colours. The green of the Sussex grass was of a far more intense hue than usual and the sky looked like a storm straight from Turner’s brush, dashed with livid purples and scarlets. The order of the conversation was jumbled, too, but the sentiments intact.
On the day in question, Watson had called at the cottage. There had been a cold lunch accompanied by a glass each of Montrachet. Watson had given Holmes a present, a leather-bound, heavily illustrated treatise on the morphology of bees by René Antoine Ferchault de Réamur. Holmes had presented him with a handsome magnifying glass with a touching inscription. Then, a walk was proposed.
In the dream, as in reality, Holmes had stopped within sight of Firle Beacon and turned to face Watson. It was the first time the detective had spoken since they had left the cottage.
‘I must say, you look quite dashing, Watson.’
‘Thank you. Aquascutum does wonders for a man’s figure. And you look well. A little thinner, perhaps.’ Gaunt might be closer to the truth, he supposed. Holmes’s skin had a chalky quality, as if minerals had leached out of the soil. He was dressed in a rough tweed jacket, with a matching hat that sported thick earflaps, and breeches with buttoned gaiters atop a pair of stout shoes. In his hand was the dark walking stick with a bulbous head known as a Penang lawyer.
‘I am lacking Mrs Hudson’s breakfasts, Watson. I have a girl but, alas . . .’
‘And you are sufficiently busy? In the mind?’
He laughed, for he knew what the doctor was getting at. ‘Fear not, Watson, the puzzle of the bees, and the extraction of the honey – remind me to give you a pot – are more than enough distraction from the seven per cent solution. You may search my cottage—’
Watson hooted. ‘I have just seen your cottage. It would take a week to tidy the newspapers and the old files.’
‘Ah, we have a routine. Once I can no longer make the front door unimpeded, my girl throws out whatever is on the floor. Now, Watson, I have a little proposal for you.’
He felt a frisson of the old excitement, those moments when the detective would look out of the bow window and announce a very curious visitor, or gather his flap-eared travelling cap and ask him to bring along his service revolver. But he sensed this would be something more prosaic. ‘And that is?’
From now on the dream encounter followed exactly the real thing, the only addition by his unconscious being the broiling, rapidly darkening sky.
‘If you tell me where your offices will be in Wiltshire, I shall endeavour to come across to that county once a week. Breakfast, lunch or dinner. A venue of your choosing.’
A gloom fell on Watson. It was an attractive offer. ‘But I won’t be based in Wiltshire.’
‘No?’ Holmes looked surprised. ‘Aldershot, perhaps? That’s not too far. Or London?’ He sounded excited at the prospect.
‘I have asked to go overseas. As part of a front line Medical Investigation Unit.’
The reaction was unexpected. His friend threw back his head and roared with laughter, his bony shoulders shaking. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Watson,’ he said at last.
‘I am, as you have said before, an old campaigner.’
‘With an emphasis on the old. Why, you were limping and wheezing before we were half-way here.’
Watson pointed at Holmes’s Penang lawyer. ‘I did not have a benefit of a stick.’
‘This? An affectation. I have all my old energies and appetites intact. Come, Watson, you cannot be serious. Do you really want to go over there?’ He pointed south with the stick and repeated a popular phrase from the current headlines. ‘To rescue plucky little Belgium?’
Watson became aware of a crackling sound. There was a restless kite above their heads and, at the other end of it, a young lad looking disturbed at their cross words. Watson raised a hand in greeting, to show there was nothing to be concerned about, but the boy ignored the gesture and returned to wrestling with his aerial charge. Watson turned back to Holmes. ‘You once said that this war would bring us a cleaner, better, stronger land.’
‘And I believe that to be so. But war is a young man’s business, Watson. And when you were young, you took two bullets for your country. Debt paid. In fact, you are very much in the black. You belong behind a desk.’
‘If I were to spend the war in some stuffy Whitehall office, it would be me reaching for a seven per cent solution.’
‘You never had that much imagination, Watson,’ he said, somewhat cruelly. ‘Let me tell you, as a dear friend, that you have never been the same since the death of Emily—’
‘Of course. I loved her. It was a terrible waste. I grieved—’
‘And grieve still. Oh, I know time is the great healer, and I bided that time. And bided. You became rash. Distracted. Sentimental. You wrote poetry, Watson. Poetry. And I tell you, this army nonsense is all too soon. I was worried about you at the time of that Von Bork business. How you moped those two years I was away. Oh, when you come to write it up, what will it be? His Last Case? I am sure you’ll gloss over your own condition at that time. Let me tell you, it was cause for concern. And I am not sure the balance of your mind has yet recovered.’
‘Because I wrote poetry?’
He pursed his lips. ‘Not entirely. Although it isn’t your forte.’
‘Because I want to serve my country?’
He hissed his answer and banged his stick on the ground to back up the words. ‘Because you want to put yourself in harm’s way. Deliberately.’
‘Now who is being ridiculous? For once your analytical powers fail you,’ Watson declared. ‘I am not hoping for release from this life. I am a doctor. I want to save lives. The lives of our soldiers.’
His face drained of blood, as if he was shocked at his skills being slighted. ‘For goodness’ sake, Watson, you were always the practical one in the partnership. You told me your surgical skills had slipped. You even put it in writing when reporting the Godfrey Staunton case.’
His memory was slightly faulty; Watson had admitted his once assiduous habit of keeping abreast with the very latest medical developments had fallen by the wayside somewhat. He had since remedied that. ‘That’s as may be, but there is more to being a medical man than the knife.’
‘You told me there was a position at the War Department Experimental Grounds. Wiltshire, you said.’
‘I did not like the type of work.’
‘Well, I forbid it. I forbid you to go to war.’
This re-emergence of the old, infuriating high-handedness stunned Watson. ‘You cannot.’
‘Can’t I?’ The arrogant matter-of-factness of his next statement was even more exasperating. ‘I shall write to the Director-General of Medical Services. I shall explain my misgivings about your mental health.’
Watson felt his vision cloud, and he was suddenly viewing the world down a long, dark tunnel. A hammering began in his temple. ‘Should you do that, it would be the end of our friendship.’
A brittle silence thickened around them, save for the whistle of the wind off the sea and the snap of the kite.
‘Very well,’ Holmes said at last. With that, he turned and walked off the way they had come, stabbing at the ground with the Penang lawyer with each stride.
Watson was struck by the enormity of what had just happened, how a few cross words had escalated to the kind of impasse that could strain a relationship for years. For ever.
‘Holmes!’ he shouted at the retreating figure. ‘Holmes! Come back, man.’
The kite-flyer was standing watching him, something like sympathy in his young eyes. Watson took three steps along the path and tried one last time, filling his lungs for a final bellow. ‘Sherlock Holmes!’
But the long legs had done their work, the wind gusting across the Channel from France snatched at his words and the now distant detective showed no acknowledgement that he had heard.