The Adventure of the Empty Heart: Chapter 1
Regent Street was its usual evening scrum of souls, the wheeled traffic moving at a noisy clip, the costermongers and newsagents hawking their wares to the business men returning home, a red sun setting sullenly in the late March sky. Watson had gone out to purchase the evening papers, and was making his way home again to Cavendish Place with the weariness of a full day's work on his shoulders and the deadly weight of another long evening stretching endlessly before him.
His leg was bothering him more than usual, and he watched idly as his cane plashed into the cold puddles of the day's earlier rain. His eyes fixed on the sidewalk, he vaguely and mechanically registered the bodies of passersby, saw their feet, mud-spattered and leather-bound, hurrying past him.
He felt, more than ever nowadays, that he was living in some sort of slower universe, less colorful, less interesting, less alive for him than for anyone else in the world.
A flower-girl sat on the corner with the last few vases left of her daily wares; a few yellow bunches, he half-noted, and some wilted purple ones. He moved to step around a container of straggly yellow forsythia, as the dirty-faced waif wheedled, "Flowers, sir, to take home for the little wife? Flowers so cheap you can put them on your mother-in-law's grave?"
He grunted and moved sharply away as the urchin reached out to him – and slammed squarely into another body hurrying the other way. He dimly registered it as a white-haired, elderly gentleman carrying an armload of books – before the gentleman went down in a heap and the books went flying in every direction, some landing face-down on the damp sidewalk, others ending up open and ruined in a nearby puddle.
Shocked back into present reality, he helped the old man to his feet.
"What…what…why don't you watch where you are going?" the ancient codger wailed in a quavering tone, scrabbling furiously to get out of Watson's grasp and rescue his treasures. Watson murmured his abject apologies and bent to pick up the wettest book of the bunch, shaking it as he removed it from the oily puddle. He rotely noted its title - "The Origin of Tree Worship" – and wondered for a moment if the gentleman were a book-seller or a collector of obscure volumes.
The old gent hurriedly gathered up the other books from the sidewalk, abjuring any further help from Watson and pulling away abruptly, with a snarling "Leave off!" when Watson tried to help him balance his teetering burden. Watson helplessly watched his curved back and white halo of hair disappear into the twilight throng.
He sighed and put the incident out of his mind as he continued home.
As he opened his front door, he could hear a low murmur of female voices in the front parlor. Mary's sister Elizabeth had come to visit for the day, and the two had been talking quietly most of the afternoon as Watson had seen a few patients in his surgery.
Watson was fairly sure the main subject of their conversation was himself, and he was also fairly sure he didn't much care. He knew he had probably seemed distant to Mary lately; he WAS distant, and he just could not seem to shake the feeling that he was moving through each day like a fly through treacle.
There was the strange matter of the package that mysteriously had arrived at Cavendish Place, shortly after Holmes' funeral. (It was still strange and terrible to think that Holmes was gone; that they'd held his funeral, for God's sake – it still seemed like a dark dream that Watson wished, more than anything, that he would awaken from.) He recalled his astonishment when, upon opening the small wooden box – postmarked from Berne – he had found it contained a mountaineer's oxygen delivery device. His stunned mind had flashed back to Reichenbach, at the chalet rented for the duration of the peace summit by Holmes' brother, Mycroft. Mycroft had owned a similar device – Holmes had come into the room wielding It, until Mycroft demanded sharply that he put it down. Watson had thought no more of it then. Now he wondered who could possibly have sent him the device, and what it meant.
He'd written to Mycroft, and Mycroft, actually deigning to reply, had written back curtly - as was his fashion - that he had no knowledge of the package. Watson wondered if it was some crony of Moriarty's, taunting him over Holmes' death. In a dim corner of his brain, he had almost seen the package as a ray of hope – it would be just the sort of jape that Holmes would make, if he had survived.
But now two weeks had passed since the package's arrival, and there had been no further messages. If Holmes had somehow survived – and Watson had looked down into the maw of those terrifying falls, had accompanied the search parties as they fruitlessly combed the icy waters – he was silent as the grave now. Surely there would have been some further word if his friend, indeed, lived. Watson's meager hope had faded and died. He counted it as merely wishful thinking, as when a man fatally ill sees each tiny improvement as a sign that he will, in fact, live. He could not solve the mystery of the package, and he found he felt no burning desire to try – it, like everything else, slipped like a falling leaf into the endless ennui of his days.
He was a doctor; he knew very well that he was slipping into that black-minded state that he had seen many of his own patients suffer: an ongoing depression of the brain and actions, a neurasthenia. It was like a suffocating snake had curled itself around his soul and gone to sleep there, worse even than the melancholia that had dogged him when he first returned from the Afghan war. At least then he had drowned it out, fairly effectively, at the gaming tables and boxing rings.
Now he had no outlet, no interest, no animus. Watson wondered if it was, perhaps, chemical in nature, but couldn't muster the energy to pursue that mildly interesting theory.
It was not interesting enough. Nothing seemed to much interest him any more.
It was all terribly unfair to Mary, of course. This time in their lives should have been their happiest – they had been married only since November; just two and a half months since the church and the bagpipers and the flowers and his pounding head and his naïve and utter happiness. The sad adventure of Reichenbach had blown all of that apart. Watson knew he had returned to England – and to Mary – a shattered remnant of his former self.
He'd returned to find a Mary newly glowing and confident. Of course she was. Holmes, in his mad wisdom, had recruited her to assist Lestrade in decoding Moriarty's books, and she had excelled. Of course she had. How had Holmes known that, when he himself had not? Scotland Yard, that company of stalwart men, had been impressed enough with her that they'd already hired her twice more to assist them in the ongoing work on the massive Moriarty accounts. "It's surely a pursuit that benefits from a woman's natural craftiness and intuition," Lestrade had explained to Watson, in asking his permission for her to help them.
Watson thought it more likely that it was Mary's natural intelligence, but he'd said nothing except to accede to the request. He'd even let Mary keep the small sums she earned from the code work. It kept her occupied, in some small measure – and it kept her away from the horrid, disintegrating shamble that he had become.
He played out the various scenarios in his mind, it seemed, thousands of times a day.
If I had only been there earlier. If I had just come to his assistance just a few seconds before I managed to, all would have been well. If I had more quickly solved the riddle of Rene, I could have been where I belonged, there at his side, fighting and bringing the enemy to justice. Just as we've done hundreds of times before.
The detective and the doctor, the invincible pair, bloody but unbowed. How many times had they returned together to Baker Street, bruised and hurting and laughing after some pursuit of a felon through the alleyways, or some vicious, punishing fight before apprehending a criminal? Holmes would be in his element, wholly alive, thrumming with adrenaline, savage and beautiful in his glee, eyes alight with the sheer brutal adventure of it all. Watson would luxuriate in the aftermath, swept up in Holmes' wanton, ferocious elation.
It had always been their way. And it had always worked, always.
Until the night Watson was needed. The one night he was late.
He could not forget Holmes' eyes. In that final second, poised on the brink, Holmes had met his gaze for one endless moment – and what had he tried to convey? Watson could not guess. It seemed to him that it had been a look of utter sadness and resignation – as if Holmes, in that glance, had told him, "Too late; sorry, old boy. You're far too late."
He was ashamed that he could no longer remember Holmes' face at that instant.
Only his eyes, because those were burned into Watson's soul.
And then – Watson also replayed this over and over in his mind – Holmes was gone, as soundlessly as if he and Moriarty had never been there at all. Watson had blinked once, stupidly, stupefied; and then it was indeed too late.
Did they scream, he wondered, for the thousandth time today, as he wondered every single day of his life now? If so, they must have been drowned out by the endless roar of the falls; he recalled no screams. How long did it take to fall all that way? Did Holmes' soul escape his body before he hit the rocks below? Did it hurt him; did he suffer; did he live for a while, crushed and broken and struggling to breathe in the glacial depths?
"John? My darling? Are you ill?"
Mary's voice knifed through his consciousness, and he realized he was standing stock-still in his foyer, staring blankly at the wall by the umbrella stand, with its black-framed print of Herring's "The Pharaoh's Horses."
The three white horses, with their muscular necks and streaming manes, glared wild-eyed and feral back at him from under their glass. For some reason he thought again of Holmes.
He shook himself out of it and smiled at her. She was standing in the parlor doorway, Elizabeth hovering behind her. He dully noted that Mary was wearing a light blue gown that suited her figure and coloring.
He didn't know what to do with that thought.
"No, my dear, just thinking about…a case that I had this morning. Nothing to worry about. Elizabeth, I hope you have had a nice visit."
Elizabeth said something polite in reply. He couldn't tell if her gaze was concerned or critical. Were her eyes reddened? The lamps had not yet been lit, and in the dim hall it was hard to be sure.
Elizabeth whispered her farewells to Mary and the two stood talking at the open front door for a few moments before Mary waved her goodbye.
Watson busied himself with the lamps in the parlor, putting the newspapers down on the side table and knowing he was not much intrigued by what was in them. He heard Mary close the front door, and heard her sigh.
Just at that moment, there came a rap on the door.
Had Elizabeth so quickly returned for something? He heard Mary open the door, heard Mary's voice rise in a question, heard a man's voice in reply.
He came out into the foyer as Mary turned from the door. "John, this gentleman says he is here to speak with you."
She looked at him quizzically as she moved away from the doorway.
Out on the front step, back-lit by the streetlamps, Watson was astonished to recognize the figure of the old book-collector he had so rudely slammed into earlier that evening. His sharp, wizened face peered out from under his frame of white hair, and his precious mud-stained volumes, a dozen of them at least, were still wedged under his right arm.
"You are surprised to see me, sir," said the old man in a strange, croaking voice.
And Watson had to acknowledge that he was.
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Author's Note: This is a work in progress – more to come soon. Fans of the Conan Doyle canon will note that some of this is inspired (and in the case of a couple of sentence, lifted directly) from "The Adventure of the Empty House." I did that both as a salute to ACD and to co-opt a little book canon into the movie canon. I hope, in the third movie, that we will get a return-of-Holmes reunion with Watson and that they don't just gloss over it. Part Two (still writing!) of this story will have that moment, in any case. Hope you enjoy, and I love reviews! (Read my other WIP, "Middlegame," which is a prequel to this one and will eventually flow into "The Adventure of the Empty Heart.")