The Stormy Petrel
by R. Porlock
Author's Note:
Several important things. For one, if you're going to read this story, you may want to briefly glance over The Adventure of the Family Honor, into which I wrote some of the characters who appear in this one, and which speaks at length of Mycroft Holmes' engagement to Miss Fairchild. If you don't want to read the other, you'll make do, but it couldn't hurt.
This story will very likely contain SLASH, or male/male relationships I am never sexually explicit in my writing, so you don't have to worry about that, but there will be hints, telling conversations, and physical affection of a romantic nature between two men, as well as significant innuendo of behind-the-scenes doings. If that's not your thing, do me a favor; don't read. Reviewing with nasty comments about homosexuality is really just not okay. Thank you!
The title of this story comes from the original Holmes tale, "The Naval Treaty," in which Sherlock Holmes says to Watson; "You are the stormy petrel of crime."
I would like to particularly thank amalcolm1, who told me I should post this, and who repeatedly points out the typos that escape me, and all of the other stupid little errors that I make. Read amalcolm1's Holmes fics, especially "A Scandal of No Importance," which is, as Holmes says here, "capital, capital."
Chapter One : Love and Memories
My friend Sherlock Holmes once said to me, in the greatest earnest, that he believed I would be a much happier man, had he never sprung his eccentricities upon me. I told him at the time that what he said could not be farther from the truth, and I hope that the reader will believe me when I say it, even if Holmes himself could not.
In order to give some background to my denial of Holmes' self-deprication, I will have to start around the time that my companion had returned from beyond the Reichenbach falls. It was not long after the death of my beloved Mary, and we soon found ourselves, Sherlock Holmes and I, living together for the second time in his rooms at Baker Street, as if nothing had changed between us during the years of my marriage, and of his abscence from my life.
We took up a life which was much as it had been before, a life consisting of hunting down criminals, forestalling and preventing murders, and solving the most baffling of disappearances. It was comfortable and stimulating, and provided us with no end of entertainment and topics for conversation. As a pair of middle aged men, we felt that we were doing very well for ourselves, and were contented with our lot, or at least, we were as content as Holmes would ever allow himself to be for long.
It was around that time that Mycroft Holmes, the brother of Sherlock, became engaged to a Miss Anne Fairchild, and she lived very near him at Pall Mall. We saw very little of the lethargic genius after that, and Holmes spent some days in gloomy disappintment at the loss of the only man he knew who could challenge his own mental faculties. As I had few close companions of my own, and Holmes himself had none, we were left to a solitary and secluded, personal life, in which we had each other and our own thoughts for company. I felt then that I should begin again to write down the accounts of our adventures, and this particular account is of a kind that perhaps Sherlock Holmes himself will never be permitted to read. I am not sure if I could bear his expression upon reading my memories of all that followed Mycroft's engagement. There are some things, perhaps, that are better left unsaid., and yet I feel as though if I were to keep it all bottled up in my soul, it would ultimately destroy me from inside. And so, against perhaps the better judgment of both my friend and I, you are to be privileged to this singular narrative.
Our tale begins at the same place in which very many of my adventures begin; with the arrival of a visitor whom I had not heard from in some time. Mrs. Cecil Forrester had been a friend of my wife's long ago, and the two of them had resided together in the time of "The Sign of the Four," before Mary and I were married. It was to my great surprise, then, that she arrived on my doorstep at Baker Street, on a Monday morning. Her arms were filled with a bundle of papers, which were all tied together with a long red ribbon.
"Good morning, Doctor Watson," She said, sounding as if she felt somewhat unsure and awkward about seeing me after so long a time. I had not seen her since only two days after my wife's death, and we' had not corresponded, as if she found any exchange with me too painful to continue. "I trust that you're well," she continued, glancing around the room at the new furnishings that we had been forced to purchase when a fire had destroyed most of our abode only weeks before.
"Very well, thank you," I returned, trying to keep myself from eyeing her packet of papers with the curiosity that was flaring up within me. "And yourself?"
Apparently feeling that the formalities were finished, Mrs. Forrester did not respond to my question, but instead laid her bundle down on the breakfast table, next to the eggs that my friend and I had not yet started on. "I don't mean to intrude upon your time, or that of Mr. Sherlock Holmes," she started quietly, "but I wanted to bring you something."
"Indeed?" I asked, gesturing at the papers. "Something you found at home, perhaps?"
Mrs. Forrester nodded. "They're some letters," she said, "of Miss Morestan's; well, Mrs. Watson's, now. Some letters, anyway, that I found when I was cleaning up the downstairs rooms. I was not quite sure what to do with them, but I felt that to throw them away would be a crime, and so I brought them over in hopes that you might want to see them."
My heart sank as I looked down at my wife's correspondence, and a pang went through me when I recognized that they were in fact tied together by the hair ribbon that she had been so distraught about losing when she had left Mrs. Forrester's company. "Thank you," I said, around my thoughts. "It was very thoughtful of you to bring them over."
We sat for several minutes making forced and friendly conversation, until Mrs. Forrester felt that she had done her work, and that it was time for her to leave. I saw her out, and watched her walking down the street in front of us, my mind preoccupied even as I waved my goodbyes with the letters that lay upon the table.
I tried as hard as I could to keep myself from rifling through my wife's remembrances for a long time. I paced the table, I interested myself in some correspondence of my own, I thought of taking a walk in the direction that I usually went when Sherlock Holmes needed to be alone. The clock seemed to have stopped still on the wall, as if it was watching me, and waiting for my resolution to fail.
Of course, fail it did. After numerous valiant attempts to ignore my desires, I finally did seat myself at the side table, and, carefully, with my hand only saved from trembling by my doctor's training, I untied the red ribbon around the parcel of letters. On a whim, I tied the ribbon around my own wrist for safe keeping, and unrolled the first of the letters,
The handwriting was unmistakably my late wife's, just as Mrs. Forrester had promised. There was a certain fantastical curl to her Ls and Ts which implied her extremely delicate, feminine hand, and yet a firmness in the way that she pressed her pen to the paper which bespoke her strong character. Holmes himself had remarked on this long ago, when I had first begun to receive her correspondence, and I noticed it now almost without any effort.
There is really no need for me to recount to you what was in the first letter. I shall suffice it to say that it was a letter addressed to myself, in the days just before our marriage, when our hearts had been so intertwined that we did not have to see each other to know what it was that the other was thinking. She spoke to me of her eagerness for our reunion at long last, and of her desires for me to meet her maiden aunt, who would apparently be coming for a visit in several days, and of all sorts of other small matters which are important perhaps only to myself.
And yet, at the close of the letter, which she signed with an extremely sensitive "Yours always, Mary," I found that there was water in my admittedly time-hardened eyes.
It was of course, at that inopportune moment that Sherlock Holmes chose to descend from his bedroom to join for me a much delayed breakfast.
He did not immediately look up at me as he came in, but began to speak to me without meeting my gaze. "Ah, Watson, an early riser this morning, I see. Thank you for waiting on me for breakfast. I could hear that we had visitors this morning, anyone of particular note?"
He turned to face me, and I saw a slight surprise take hold of him. I had forgotten the tears in my eyes, and, shamefaced, turned from him to dash them away upon my sleeve, wondering how I would cover for my obviously unmanliness. Holmes chose to say nothing, but there was a softness in his expression and gestures which told me that he had taken careful note of my condition, and was in the process of deciding how to combat it.
"Yes, Indeed," I started, gruffly as I could. "But the woman has gone now. I assume she had important business of her own to do in in town this morning."
"Not a client," Holmes said, and it was a statement, not a question. I glanced down at the ribbon on my wrist, and grimaced inwardly at the precautions I had not taken against Holmes deductive ways.
"Not a client," I agreed, and lapsed into silence for some time. Holmes endured the silence with no change in his manner, and helped himself to some eggs off my plate, when it appeared that I had no taste for them myself.
We were comfortably silent at the table for most of the meal, and Holmes kept his eyes off of me, occupying himself entirely with his own breakfast. His curiosity, and something else, a more pressing and permeating emotion seemed to roll off of him as if it were a physical, almost tangible object, and yet he remained respectfully immersed in himself until I chose to speak up.
"I should like," I said, "to go to the club today, I think."
"Very good," agreed Holmes with a nod. "It has been some time since you've been to the club, I was beginning to be concerned that you'd lost interest entirely in leaving our humble abode."
"I should like to have a walk and a few quiet moments to myself," I said. "If you are not too offended by the desire for some solitude."
"Capital, capital," said my companion, almost absently. "I shall take advantage of my own solitary day to immerse myself in some of those occupations which you find so loud and unneccessarily messy."
And so it was that after breakfast, I took leave of Sherlock Holmes, and 221B Baker Street, and set off down the street towards my club, walking slowly, having no great desire either to linger, or to reach my destination in any particular haste. When I reached it, I read through some papers, and to my chagrin, and I'm sure to that of Sherlock Holmes as well, the country was startling quiet for a Monday morning. I found it odd that, being a devoted and upright citizen as I considered myself, I should be dismayed to find no murders, thefts, or acts of mysterious violence in the periodicals. Holmes' influence, it seemed, had so far overtaken me that I could not separate myself from the life of daring that I had adopted.
Finding, therefore, nothing to sufficiently distract myself, it was only a matter of a few hours before I wandered home again. As I started up the street towards the steps to my own building, I saw, to my surprise, the dark-haired, slight figure of Miss Anne Fairchild, Mycroft Holmes' fiancée, walking away from the door. She smiled at me when she saw me, and inclined her head slightly in polite recognition, before heading off in the direction of her own home. I thought that she was a little more hurried that I had expected, and put it down to an eagerness to to return to Mycroft's side. The incident only caused me more morose thoughts of how Mary had once run to me in much the same way, and all of the good that had been done me by my stay at the club was erased in that moment. With a resigned and frustrated sigh, I entered the house.
Sherlock Holmes was just ascending the stairs when I entered. I stopped him with a greeting, and he turned on his heel and smiled at me, starting back down towards him, clad in his dressing gown, as if he had spent the day just as alone as he had wished.
"No clients, then," I asked, and he shook his head. "I saw," I ventured, "Miss Fairchild coming away from our door as I was approaching. Nothing the matter, I should hope, with her and your brother?"
"Nothing the matter at all," my friend assured him, seating himself in his armchair, and holding out a cigar for me from his jeweled cigar case. "She only wanted to ask me a few particulars about a present she is planning for Mycroft. I told her that, as Mycroft was not really a man to be well known by anyone, her guess was as good as mine on the subject, and so she will really have to fend for herself. I have never been a man for lavish presents."
I shifted in my chair, and waved a hand to decline the cigar, which Holmes put back into the case before lighting his own. He puffed on it thoughtfully for a moment, and then turned his inquisitive eyes back to me. "And how," he asked, "did you spend your quiet day? At the club as you projected to?"
"I did," I said. "It was most refreshing."
"Quite, I'm sure," replied my friend, with a more piercing gaze than he had fixed on me all day. "I can see the signs of the release of tension in your face," he continued, with a wealth of gentle sarcasm. "You look absolutely healed and healthy."
I chose to ignore the doubting remarks, and turned instead, to some bread and cheese which Holmes had left out for me on the table, presumably after his own dinner. "I should like," he said, after a moment of watching me devouring the remains of his meal, "to go to Mycroft's tomorrow, if you wouldn't mind another day of your own time. He has asked me if I'd come to hear some little problem of his, and I should be loathe to turn anything down which provides as interesting a possibility as the case of Miss Fairchild's honor did previously."
"Even better," I said, rising from my seat, "I'll come with you."
Holmes looked skeptical for a moment, and my heart sank. Lately he had seemed to have no desire to invite me on any of his quests, and though I thought that it had been simply a case of his being at odds with my sentiments about his brother's marriage, now he had, for the second time, seemed to me as if he wanted me to take no part in a case.
Apparently seeing my downcast face, Holmes gave me a light clap on the shoulder, and smiled. "Surely," he said, "I would be honored as always to have you along, although I fear the incident may provide little for your personal interests."
I could tell that he was protecting my pride, since his two statements had been so very at odds. How could something that he thought would give him ample amusement be disinteresting to me? It was obvious that he would rather I did not accompany him. "We'll, see," I said, suddenly feeling very weary. "And now, if you don't mind, Holmes, I think I'll go on up to bed. I'm not feeling myself today, perhaps I've caught a bit of a cold after all."
I tramped up the stairs, and flopped into my bed fully clothed. It was a very short time before I fell asleep, with the image of Mary's ribbon playing at the corners of my subconscious mind. Even as I drifted off, I could hear Holmes steadily pacing, as he stalked back and forth in front of the fire.