Holmes sat in the parlor looking out the window for several days. Only once did he speak.
"You knew, didn't you?"
"That your affection had very quickly become worthy of the word love? Yes."
His gave me a look full of scorn. "That he would leave."
"I knew he gave you no promises," I evaded.
"What promises were there for us to give? They don't exist for us, Watson, don't toy with me now with promises of a map upon which to plot my unhappiness. You knew I would somehow not be up to the challenge. That was why you gave such a start every time we laid our hand on each other. Not prudishness."
"If it hurts a great deal, then you're doing it properly, old man," I murmured. "And yes, I grew to think that it was not mere discomfort that made it so difficult to witness your intimacy. In some part of myself I knew—he's a revolutionary, Holmes. It's a breed you can find all over Europe, fighting for various causes. In his case, his heart beats for church and country which are one and the same. and I worried that Bruno would decide that his first love, the church, was stronger than his desire to be a full man with you."
My friend's face went dead. He stared out onto the street.
"Has he broken it off definitively?" I finally dared to ask. "Perhaps he needs some time in Rome, and he will be back. There is probably little left for him there, but then, after all, what is London to him? It was not his choice of homes."
"I would have gone anywhere he asked. What is London to me now?" and my friend lapsed into silence.
Several days later Holmes sat staring at his morning egg as if it were the nucleus of all evil and he were merely deciding how he would obliterate it.
I was eating my own and reading the paper, when Holmes said, without looking up from the egg, "Mycroft has sent a dog cart."
In due course the hooves stopped their clattering under our window.
"How on earth?" I asked, glad to see him prognosticating again.
"Because his letter mixed in with the post is addressed to you in his crab-like penmanship." I snatched it up while he brought his packed bags from his room.
By the time I had come to an end of it, there was a knock at the door. Holmes had his hat, coat, stick and the traveling-case was in his hand when Mrs. Hudson entered all in a fluster.
"The driver outside has come to collect you, Mr. Holmes, but he was most high-handed when I asked who he sent him or where he might intend to take you."
"Mrs. Hudson, never fear, it is my brother's doing. I ask you both to put your trust in him as I always have." In obedience to this direction, I stood there at the window watching him get in the vehicle and drive off.
The landlady sniffed. She told me once she realized she got the lesser of two evils with Holmes as her tenant, and consoled herself, "At least it's not Mycroft!" every time she was vexed by the Holmes she was charged with.
These days I asked few questions of my friend, and moreover, his brother's letter forbade it. The text had been sparse, as befitted a man who tolerated no discussion:
"Sherlock will be taking a rest in an unnamed establishment in France. Please know that it is the best and you have nothing to worry about, Dr. Watson. They will send him home at the opportune moment. – Mycroft."
Somewhat dazed, I read the letter over again while finishing my now-solitary breakfast. Holmes' normal state of mind fluctuated wildly from melancholy that prostrated him to the point of inanition, to avoiding sleep and food for days when focusing on a problem. Not this pattern, nor his brother's wild lifestyle, the risks Holmes took and his commerce with thieves and murderers, not to mention the drugs—none of that had ever been reason enough for Mycroft to send his younger brother to a sanatorium. But love, that faculty which surely had missed the elder Holmes altogether, was cause to abscond with Sherlock without telling the latter or myself the destination.
There were only three institutions in France I would qualify as the best. I wrote to each of them, saying I had a patient who was distraught over the loss of a lover of an inconvenient persuasion. What sort of treatment would they offer, should I send him there? Each of the three wrote back with a programme involving standard rest and proper diet, in addition to some of the more experimental free association and hypnotic techniques, assuring me that in any case my patient will be assured the most complete confidentiality and understanding.
One physician from a spa in Nantes said he was making a special study of such cases, which were by no means as rare as some would think. It was to this sanatorium I hoped Holmes had been sent, and nine weeks later, the man himself was standing over my bed in the middle of the night to confirm it.
"Nantes had nothing more for me." The calm voice started me awake.
"My good man. I am overjoyed to see you," I said, peering into the dark. "It was truly a restful time for you, I hope?"
My eyes could now discern a face that was neither that of the old Holmes, with his many faces, nor the one he wore with Bruno. It was some other thing altogether, and I found nothing to either comfort or concern me in it, thus far.
"Forgive me, Watson. As part of my cure I have been so busy writing all these weeks that I could not write you until it was all done. And by then they said I could leave. You should go back to bed and we can talk at length in the morning. I merely wished to assure us both that I am still myself, and you, yourself."
When I woke up again the next morning, there was a book by my bedside. It was a handsomely bound large leather volume, but when I looked closely, I saw the long edges of the pages had been tinted with red ink. A "red-letter" case is what we would call it. This was the way Holmes and I distinguished our records that could not be released to the public, and in most cases, ought to be kept under lock and key, else confidences come out and cases are forced back open.
Intrigued, I began reading.
"The Case of the Second Slipper" had been inscribed at the top in a purplish ink written with a strong hand, but the first third of the book had been scratched out with a disorderly and uneven script, scarcely recognizable as Holmes' legendarily bad writing. I struggled through the first few pages, finding them even more disjointed collections of thoughts than the detective's usual shorthand. They were bits floating in the air after an explosion, I grasped, and began to make some sense of them when I heard a thump in the next room.
A few minutes later when I emerged dressed, there was my friend with several enormous piles of paper surrounding him. He looked very thin, but there was still a pulse of life left, I fancied.
"I had thought that when I put our records in some kind of order, we can send the latest red-letter volumes to the bank, and review those in safe-keeping to see if some have passed the threat of any scandal." He looked around the room. "It will take some time, no doubt," and went back to sorting.
In this way, my friend told me that he did indeed share the journal of his most intimate sorrows with me, and I should take my time reviewing it, though we may never discuss the matter.
While Holmes had been away, I had ample time to compile my own account of this chapter in his life, but this new information made it more complete, I did make a point of perusing the volume in front of him while taking notes in my well-advanced notebook, and he made no objection. With time, it seemed to me that Holmes shifted only a few papers every day, giving me time to read his ramblings and then re-form them into some kind of sense to complete the chronicle I had started to make sense of the mysterious priest.
When I was finally done, I daubed the ends of my own journal with red ink, and presented the two volumes to Holmes.
"Capital, Doctor. Today is a fine day to stop by the bank and then have a luncheon of good, strong English food, which is now a delicacy to me."
Together, we boxed up our most sensitive records, took the dog-cart to Cox & Co. Bank, opened up the tin box labeled "John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army," and spent some time looking over the records that had been languishing in the darkness of the vault. We found a few dealing with people who had since died or been exonerated, and these I took, while Holmes shut our new contributions in without a second look.
With several volumes under our arms, Holmes and I strolled to his chosen dining place. I felt his decision was wise: we both returned to the usual rhythms of our friendship during that meal, and I was able to put out of my mind the painful disappointment that had partly driven my friend out of his senses for a short time.
I will not share with you the occasion for releasing this new batch of records, or why the reddest of the red-letter cases was included. Whosoever shall read this singular chronicle from the life of Sherlock Holmes will find a fragment selected from the man's rest-cure notes, as well as two addenda from me.
August 15, Nantes
This writing-cure offends my scientific sensibilities, but there is nothing else to do except fill these accusingly blank pages.
After several attempts, I know how to explain what happened. Or rather, certain guideposts to my ruination.
At first I thought it was the onset of a sudden illness. After all, my habits are none too salutary. And I had no reason to think I should ever use the word "fever" to describe anything except an increase in body temperature.
Usually in interviews I find myself having to soften my voice into a murmur, or else huff and puff and act the part of the harsh inquisitor, for those who respond best to these postures.
The first inkling was when, within 15 minutes of meeting this visitor, I realized I'd not once assumed a role. For 15 minutes, I had been merely myself.
This put me on alert. The rhythms of my thought felt slightly different on that fateful evening.
As the night wore on, the fever had begun to migrate. It was the merest smolder, but it took all I could do to not run away with some books and understand what was happening to me.
The man was clearly not who he said he was, but he was no mere impostor, either.
At first this malady was a challenge, another puzzle to be solved. It was even preferable for me to think that my overweening interest in the man was some delayed piety that had surfaced without precedent in my attitude. For no man could wish himself in my singular intersection of the holy and the profane, with no outlet therefrom.
August 20
When we had run the gauntlet in London's lowest sectors and gained entrance into the hotel that fateful night, it seemed accomplishment enough.
"How can I forget that you still bear the scent of incense about you?" I asked him, rather than ask what two men may get up to together.
He already had his jacket off and unfastened several buttons at his neck.
"You're very brown," I said with some surprise. "Do you sunbathe?"
"A priest could hardly lounge about on the beach," he laughed, "But I do swim."
I sat up so quickly I almost toppled him off the bed, and to keep him there I caught him in my arms. "I would have thought that a priest couldn't do such a thing. On a public beach?"
Bruno laughed, delighted at having finally caught me in a stereotype about men of the cloth. "We don't take a vow against swimming," he said, winding his arms around my waist, something that would be forbidden us in most circles by an implicit vow separating man from man.
We paused that way for a moment and found the posture suited us. The rolling voice continued talking.
"For the top clergy at the Vatican, the authorities close off the beach so they can swim in peace. No one minds—after all, the sea is one of the Father's most wondrous creations, and no Italian will begrudge a cardinal this kind of intimacy. Me, I took off my collar and swam when I liked—usually very early to avoid any talk, but no one ever paid any attention."
"That I doubt very much," I murmured with his hand in my hair.
"You do not understand the Italian psychology. Everyone loves the sea, as is natural for a country blessed with so much coast as mine," Bruno said with a touch of pride.
"Yes, the peninsula is a favored formation," I said with some bravado as I dared one finger towards him to trace the formation he possessed as I did.
His mouth closed on mine and we remained joined while I removed his shirt. His body was so different than mine, browner, yes, but every inch from neck to wrist was covered with abundant dark, curly hair.
"You have a hair shirt," I quipped with a dry throat, referring to the instruments of self-torture monks supposedly used for discipline at one time—perhaps to prevent exactly what we were doing together.
The Italian drew back. "I have always believed that the flesh produces enough mortifications of its own. Mine only started to trouble me recently. Very recently."
He smiled flirtatiously, as if the magnetism we had fought for weeks was the most natural thing in the world.
The narrow hotel bed seemed to grow with our inventiveness. Soon there was not a man of the cloth because there was no fabric nor falsehood between us. We lay down together, our legs intertwined.
"May I tell you something?" he asked very nervously, as if there were any room for shame at that moment.
"Yes, of course."
"I write poetry. I have for years without thinking anything of it except to hide it."
I didn't know quite what to think of this revelation imparted at that critical moment.
"Oh?"
Bruno said many things during that wordless sojourn in the hotel. He took to it as naturally as swimming and drew me into the depths with him. Since he had no more experience than I, it must have been his poet's nature that led him to the warmest coves, though I was not to be left behind.
When it was over, I managed, "Bruno?"
The word hovered in the air like a dewdrop. I suddenly understood that I was looking at the reflection of my entire self in that one name, that from now on the world would be contained in those five letters.
It was terrifying. And I heard my own terror spreading around the room.
"Yes, Holmes."
It wasn't a question from that accented voice. It was an all-purpose affirmation, for any question that might be troubling the man in his arms at this time. Bruno turned me around so we were facing each other.
"I liked this very well," I began again, playing with the curls at the nape of his neck, "So well that I should strongly object to anyone finding out about it. Not because I have regrets, but because I would not like this changed."
"I am not sorry. Even if it never happens again—well, I would be sorry," he smiled, "But no, I am not ashamed." His mouth was hot and vagrant and then he resumed more calmly:
"I would say that this wonderful thing that we have cannot be changed, but even my one sinful kiss had some truth to it, and that was utterly spoiled by the chaos and interrogation that came after."
That one kiss in Spain separated us. I went very still.
"You see, I have come to think that the young man who gave me up to the police, he offered a necessary kind of sacrament to men like me, who were helpless to understand themselves without it."
Bruno laughed. "In my case it was a literal confession. This young man sat there listening for an hour to this recitation of hidden lusts that I had been mostly unaware of my mind collecting until very shortly before that night. When he kissed me—" Bruno caught the look of pain on my face and ran a hand down my chest, "Amato, it was nothing like us, but he gave me a knowledge that changed me completely. I'm not even angry with him for buying his own freedom with my reputation after the authorities came to that shadowy place. Because I've come to believe that even with that action, he was imparting a truth: the truth of my place in society, which was to never be sure about anything, now that I was sure what made my blood move."
The mouth that fascinated me broke off and spent some minutes wiping away my jealousy.
"Holmes?" he said afterwards. "Sherlock?"
"Yes, Bruno."
His eyes were very wide and dark, with almost none of their usual green. "Many times since I joined the 'Utrimque,' I have dreamed of what it would be like to be myself, and with someone, like the other priests who have taken someone to be by their side. If such a thing were possible in our case, in some fantastic world, would it be a life you could accept for me? That is, I wouldn't ask you to profess something you didn't believe, but would you come, from time to time?"
"To one of your celebrations?" The idea seemed so ridiculous that I feared I would laugh, but I was suddenly very moved that this neighboring continent of skin would ask me to Mass. "Anywhere you would invite me, I would surely be honored to attend." And I whispered the first endearment of my life. "If you were to ask me to accompany you for Matins tomorrow, I would proudly don my best disguise and sit by while you exercise a faith I cannot fathom."
He seemed to have shrunk in my arms. "I do not understand what I am to do now," Bruno whispered, "But I like thinking you might be there, from time to time."
I was there more than Bruno ever knew. I would not insult him by divining all of his business, only that he did maintain contacts with a diverse set of people of various nationalities. Far from being jealous of these meetings, all I wished to determine was that this man who was in some sense mine was constructing a life with its nucleus in London. That he might occasionally travel bothered me not at all, as long as he should center himself here with me, that we might continue our mutual observation of this experiment upon each other.
Now I am left, utterly changed, a specimen of a new species that must never be named or exposed to the light of day. It was not a transformation I thought to bear alone, and it ought to mean little, now that I am alone again forever.
How I long to see Watson and ask him whether I am still myself!
This note I've slipped in at the end of our case-books because it occurred to me that I never explained the reason for Holmes' title, nor one other crucial factor.
First, the reader may be wondering, as I did, why Holmes took his romance to Treacher's establishment at all. The only reason I found out was because I was suggesting ways out of this anguish that was consuming my friend without his lover.
It was a most ungentlemanly thing to say, but I did tell Holmes, "You needn't be alone if you don't wish to. Why don't you go see Madam Yvette, who seems to understand you?"
This earned me a withering glance.
"Surely you don't wish me to spend my days haunting the Treacher's of the world."
Then my long-swallowed question burst out: "Why on earth would you take Bruno to Treacher's, Holmes? Couldn't you go to one of your rooms around town?"
This brought some life to him. "On short notice? I had no real bed! Take me for what you will—I'm not going to subject someone to that experience on any number of my pallets on the floor! Or have myself subjected. We're not animals and won't behave as if we are."
His eyes scanned my face. "And I know what you're thinking: why didn't I buy a bed in that afternoon after I knew about Bruno's letter. Because the idea occurred to me, but think, man—it sends entirely the wrong message, you must agree. Altogether too presumptuous. If the roles were reversed, I should have been repulsed by an obviously new bed waiting eagerly in the corner of my hovel, ready to consume its offering. Try to imagine how grotesque it would have been, Watson."
I did try, but the sort of propriety to which I was accustomed had clear rules that had been drummed into me since birth.
Holmes continued, "So I was left to keep faltering along as we had, and see if we faltered rather more purposefully that night towards a hotel."
He spoke to me intently: "For Watson, almost anything can be accomplished anywhere, but I trust the anonymity of these networks run by men who require that same anonymity, more than the most famously discreet five-star hotel. One more extravagant rumor about me shouldn't hurt, but I have heard of several blackmail attempts because of chambermaids and porters seeing someone sneaking into the wrong room."
He sank back down and began the process of becoming one with his chair.
"Besides, they send you where there is a safe haven that evening. We could have ended up at the Ritz."
As for the title, that leads us to a less comic interlude.
One day, not too long after they had cemented their liaison, the two men were back at Baker Street while we discussed a case.
Bruno was watching Holmes retrieve some tobacco from the toe of the Persian slipper which he so Bohemianly used for that purpose.
"Why do you use that?" the Italian asked.
The detective smiled and launched into some tale of a fire at the harem of some sultan, and how a silver bracelet had been hidden in the curving toe of the slipper and not discovered by authorities until the slipper was safely out of the country.
"Yes, yes," Bruno interrupted impatiently, "But what of the other one?"
"The other one? There is only one slipper rescued from the harem fire," Holmes said.
"How often is one shoe made without another, detective?" the other man teased. "No, no, such things have always been important to me, I will tell you why.
"When I was a young child of about five, we went to the seaside and suddenly a storm came. In the excitement of gathering our belongings and one very active little boy, my parents left behind one of my shoes.
"When we arrived home and the loss was discovered, it horrified me—the one shoe I retained seemed forlorn, ugly, even. I hated it but I would not abandon it either."
Our storyteller paused as if to ascertain that we were listening to such a simple tale. Naturally, the trivial always held a great fascination for Holmes, and I enjoyed listening to our new friend's stories. He continued:
"This was the point in life when I began to pray. It seems a slight thing to launch the career of a priest—perhaps you would say too slight, looking at my failure in that area."
Holmes laid a hand briefly on his arm.
"But children see the entire world in a trifle, and any person only sees a small sliver of what the divine comprehends, so I feel no shame that my life as a penitent started with the loss of my shoe.
"My mother, who was a wonderful woman, encouraged me not only to think about the shoe that attained a special place before my statue of the Madonna, but of the one that had doubtless been swallowed by the tide. She told me stories of the second shoe visiting with the fishes, or of being picked up by sailors and taken to strange lands.
"Still, I felt as though the real business was to be done with the Blessed Virgin and the rest of the pantheon that soon collected at my bedside altar to help watch over the shoe that waited to be reunited with its mate.
"I was just a child, but the concept I struggled with was real. This trivial incident was my first idea that the world was broken. And that it, my shoes, that many broken things, could not be mended by human hands.
"As I grew older, the shoe was put aside like all childish fancies, but the quest it had instilled in me had a place assured for me in the seminary at an early age.
"I was only reminded of the shoe when my middle brother died. I was comforting my mother as best I could after this second loss so soon after my youngest brother.
"'If Pietro or Gianni had a child, one child, it would be enough,' she sobbed.
"'It was a tragedy to lose both of them so close together, Mama,' I whispered.
"She turned on me with a sudden fervor. 'You are the only shoe I have left. By the Virgin, there will be no more!'"
"'The Lord makes whole that which is not whole—you told me so yourself, mother, long ago.' I told her.
"And then she cursed the God that would deny her a grandchild. I was in shock. My mother, my gentle mother, began screaming obscenities at me, and she continued to do so from the funeral I helped officiate and for some time after.
"My mother would not look at me until my father suggested that I visit her without a priest's clothes. You see, he had determined that my mother was not angry at me, but at the priestly role that had made me different, rendered me unable to have children.
"Then I was horrified to find out that when she did talk to me, my Mama spoke no sense. She retreated into a world where she did have grandchildren. They had different names depending on the day, and no one could approach her without first greeting the children my dead brothers would never have.
"Most of the time she seemed well enough to cook and carry on with the house, but my father was in anguish over her transformation. The doctors could do nothing for her except offer to take her away. And that's how they lived until three years ago, when my mother must have gotten distracted while cooking. There was a fire and my father died trying to save her. She had albums made of pictures she had torn from the newspaper, pictures of babies and little children, and these, along with baby clothes belonging to my brother and me, christening dresses and the like. I can imagine she wouldn't leave the house without all of them."
Bruno looked at our intent faces. He resumed, "And so you see, Sherlock, whenever I see one half of a pair like that, I think about how it is alone, without the other, its mate, and I see the whole world."
It was a very moving speech, even more so than other fanciful stories the Italian told from time to time. Usually I thought how the loss of his priestly role had deprived the world of an outstanding preacher and him of his flock. This time, it was not difficult to see in the allegory of the shoe a heart yearning for its match. These two utterly irreconcilable sides existed within the gentle Bruno, who was all peace and little conflict.
As always, I gave a little glance in Holmes' direction, expecting to find the studiously respectful expression indicating he could not follow Bruno to this spiritual realm, but he would never try to hold his lover from it.
On this occasion, I just caught a strange expression on his face before he leaned over and kissed Bruno—one of the only times he broke his self-imposed rule in Mrs. Hudson's house.
At that moment, I thought he was especially moved by the retelling of this family tragedy that had obviously marked Bruno very deeply, ultimately pushing the priest to find some way to resolve his mother's hopes for grandchildren with his vocation.
But now, when I look back at that occasion, I am able to see a morbid fear on Holmes' face right before he distracted from it by the kiss. In his eyes I can now see a terror before the irreplaceable. This man who had fallen into his life, he was not like one case that could be substituted by another, one mental puzzle to be solved and set aside.
Even Holmes' ultimate adversary, Irene Adler, had given way to this criminal—the one with whom he committed a crime every night—who was now the only thing in Holmes' field of vision.
This expression must have been what won Madam Yvette her 50 pounds. What earned the couple a chit from Treacher, good for a few moments of privacy in a complicit hotel.
Holmes went back to the madam's after I told him of the wager. I know that he must have used his considerable dossier on her questionable ethics to impress upon her the need for utter secrecy on his intimate matters.
He also brought back a few pounds which he claimed from her as his share in the matter. We toasted to the madam's health, intoxicated as we all were with the promise of those happy days.
I had never thought of the great sleuth as wanting anything, but he looked different to me after his affair ended. Holmes finally had his other shoe—because there was no other half but one, every shoe with its one mate that had been worn together with the other.
At some point, Holmes must have known that he would be the slipper left behind. And he had no belief in an ordering divinity to make him whole again, or at least soothe the hurt.
And now that Bruno is gone, anyone else will see the same piquant Holmes, the eccentric, the genius with an unending store of anecdotes about great escapes and espionage. But as his close friend, I see a very different story in the fact that there is an empty space at his side. How he lives with this missing half is his own reckoning with the world, his own attempt to be whole as a shattered thing.
He remarked to me once after returning from Nantes, "The only thing more grotesque than a man of my age learning how to love, and how he loves, was developing affection for a man of the cloth who prefers the church that has ejected him. It's like being abandoned by a man who returns to his wife who has married another."
It was a new form of self-deprecation for my friend, and I would come to hear it more often. Something about this affair made him see himself from the outside, and he saw only a caricature. It was as if the post mortem of failures he set up when at his lowest points now included himself. It was terrible to watch.
But then in his temperate days he was milder than ever. He would get caught up in a new case, and I would catch his sidelong glance right in the middle of the interview he was conducting. "How is my performance?" it seemed like some days. Other times he seemed to be very happy to be delivering the great detective's part on cue, and was reassuring me how much he was enjoying himself.
Either way it was wrenching.
To avoid being the yardstick for my friend's resignation, I took on more patients for some time. Though of course, I returned to his side to chronicle many more cases of the great Sherlock Holmes.
How he reached some sort of accord with himself, and with me, I leave for another time. For now, gentle reader, I ask your indulgence for a man whose unflinching service to the truth included suffering knowledge he neither sought nor shirked about himself.
