The Old Lodger's Visit

Author's Notes: Thank you Silverthreads and Susana (I always thank my reviewers – you keep me going!). I should perhaps make clear for this and the previous chapter that I don't think 221B is a street address, but the enumeration of an internal flat or suite of rooms in a building. That is, there would be a 221A, and perhaps a 221C in the same building, 221 Baker Street. This is certainly common practice now, and I suspect that the postal service, with its usual drive towards bureaucracy, would have insisted on some similar arrangement to keep track of individuals living in rented accommodation. So I think Mrs Hudson herself resides in the ground-floor rooms, 221A, and Holmes has 221B on the first-floor, which in a Georgian house (I'm getting the Georgian thing from the Granada series) would have been the best rooms with the highest ceilings and biggest windows. The cellar is the kitchen and scullery, and the attic is for the servants. There may be a 221C, but that's inspiration for a different story altogether! (winks)

After a leisurely lunch at Selfridge's renowned tearoom, Dr Watson emerged onto the intersection of Bond Street and turned north. Walking briskly down the familiar route through Marylebone past Portman Square toward Regent's Park, he suddenly paused, filled with a heart-stopping confusion. Was this Baker Street? Was he in the right place? The bow-fronted terraces with black ironwork grilles he had happily passed on this exact route for years seemed strange suddenly. Another pedestrian brushed past him, and he was forced to keep walking. Little by little, he grew more comfortable, seeing that his feet were leading him of habit, and soon he was beneath the familiar white arch of 221, the brass letters gleaming in the early afternoon sunlight. He shook off his previous anxiety, straightened his waistcoat, and rang the bell.

There were muffled sounds from the other side, and presently the door swung open.

"Dr Watson!" exclaimed a surprised Mrs Hudson from the interior gloom.

"Good afternoon, Mrs Hudson," Watson greeted his former landlady jovially as he removed his hat and stepped inside.

"What a wonderful surprise! Fancy you stopping by!" Mrs Hudson bustled to take the doctor's coat, hat and gloves. Suddenly, she stopped short of arranging them on the coat stand, and looked at the doctor again, clutching his discarded overclothes tightly. "I can't let you upstairs, of course," she said. "You'll have to go through to my front room. I don't remember ever receiving you in there."

"Always good to try something new," Watson smiled reassuringly. He waited for the older woman to hang up his things and to let him into her little sitting room. She bustled out again to the kitchen to fetch the tea things, and by the time she returned bearing an enormous tray with a kettle and creamer and cups and cakes, he had sat down in the same rosewood armchair occupied by Mycroft Holmes only a few days earlier.

"You must be busy now, with all your patients, and your wife," Mrs Hudson began, as she set down the tea service and began pouring.

"There's always a steady stream at this time of the year," assented the doctor jovially, as he reached for a slice of poppyseed cake. "No epidemics, thank Jove."

"So kind of you to stop by," Mrs Hudson repeated.

"It's nothing, really. I was having lunch with my wife as she was shopping just down the street, and I thought I would drop in and see how you were. Are the new lodgers keeping you busy, then?"

Mrs Hudson hesitated a little, the teapot hovering in mid-air over the sugar bowl. "I haven't had the heart to take in new lodgers, to tell the truth. Not since… You know." She trailed off and put down the teapot.

"No," murmured the doctor, swallowing his cake. "No. None of us have had much closure." He paused, biting the corner of his lip. "Someone asked me the other day, you know – one of my patients, who knew of Holmes, had read some of my stories – he asked me, why there had never been a burial or a public memorial. I answered that his friends preferred to remember him in private, and that he had been a private man who would have preferred to go without ostentatious public lamentation. You know how opposed he was to public sentiment."

Mrs Hudson nodded, but then shook her head, as in regret. "But some memorial would have been only appropriate. All those things he did for people – it's not right to just let it go quietly. It's shameful! Yes, it was his profession, but I know how much he helped people! You wrote those lovely words in that magazine, but one really feels – wishes – there was more!"

"I suppose it was his wish not to. He left all his disposition to his brother, and the final decision must lie with the family," reflected Dr Watson tactfully.

At the mention of Mycroft, Mrs Hudson stole a glance at the ceiling, as if seeing through the fabric of the building to the shuttered rooms upstairs.

"This building, this very address is enough," said the doctor. "It will be remembered by those who wish to recall it, I think. I always think of the days I spent here fondly." He set the teacup down on the saucer with a clink of finality. "I'd best go. I have patients waiting in the surgery. Take care, Mrs Hudson." He shook her hand warmly as he retrieved his coat and hat from the front hall. She let him out and closed the front door behind him.

As he walked down the Marylebone Road to Paddington, his thoughts turned to the cricket that some young men were playing on the Green, and then to his wife, and then to the supper that would wait for him at home after he finished with his patients for the day. Bells from some nearby clock tower rang two as he stepped back into his surgery. It was as if the afternoon had never happened. His heart was strangely light, and the past seemed too distant to recall. As he washed his hands in the basin, the gleam of Holmes' cigarette case caught his eye, and he smiled indulgently, almost wistfully.