Stanley rowed us over to his boat and ceremoniously brought me aboard, and then the picnic. Dougan had loaded us down with a real feast, so we broke our usual habit of alighting some distance away from where he accessed the canal.
He served me with great gentility and we ate the smoked meats, fine cheeses and fruits with more drink and a particular kind of bread that Stanley favored. Dougan thought of everything.
All the while Stanley was talking. "I come to London wanting to do just this, to perform," he said. "I feel very good, John. Maybe next time I will try to play in the orchestra with the others. If I could endure everyone looking at me, I could take a small part, a waiter or a butler, someone who doesn't speak."
"From what I have seen of you tonight, you could do many things," I said fondly, accepting the bit of pear he placed in my mouth. "You were this commanding presence in the theater lobby as well. I saw what you did with Adam Fairlie. He was shooting his usual daggers at me with his eyes, and you cowed him with just a look. And Adam always has to be the master of any situation."
The moment with Dougan's official lover had been short but significant. Stanley was always easygoing when we crossed paths with Dougan and Adam, no doubt because he had a great respect for the impresario.
This night, Stanley was haughtily dismissive. "Fairlie? A weakling at heart like all bullies. I endeavor not to heed his presence if I can help it. But tonight, I do not wish him to spoil your evening away from all cares."
He got up and fetched a pen along with some papers from his coat. "So you will always remember tonight."
They were playbills from the show. He wrote on both and presented them to me with a bow. On one he had written "Violinist" along with his entire long royal name. The other he wrote "Violinist: Stanley."
With this gift I began to understand how many things had come together that night for my lover. His hidden past and his present, his desire to act and some natural authority I'd not glimpsed before.
"Come," he said with a voice that would be obeyed. My hand disappeared in his and he led me the short distance to the bed. We might as well have crossed over into another world.
"Be mine," he said with his new confidence.
He laid me on the bed. Stanley began arranging my body for our pleasure. While he removed my clothing I had the unusual sensation that he was removing all my doubts. Up until now I had thought it was my allegiance to Dougan that had me keeping some small part of myself from total surrender to this love that would never demand anything.
Now I saw that it was merely fear. Fear of giving myself completely to someone who was ready to do the same to me. Mackie would only wish for me to follow my heart and tell him about it at some point. Our link was established. That night my passion for this beautiful man finally overran my internal dams.
"Make me yours," I whispered, my hands already doing their part to make him mine.
It would seem there would be no more to be said, because our bodies attained some type of transcendent state where nothing was lacking except the need to experience it again and again.
But we talked during much of it. At points we talked a great deal. Stanley often lapsed into his mother tongue that needed no translation because I felt what he was saying to me deep in my heart. Me, I was overrun with plans about the new future I could now envision for us.
"Let's go away, Stanley," I gasped into his hot ear. "You have the means to do anything, and there is only sorrow for me in London now. I can show you India! You've always wanted to go. Or we could go someplace else. Perhaps someplace like Morocco, where we wouldn't have to hide so much. Or else we could take turns playing at being each other's manservants from city to city. You've proven you are a performer."
Stanley stopped what he was doing. I was afraid he was offended at my mentioning the fortune he never touched, slowly growing in a bank somewhere.
"You would do this with me?" he asked, his eyes glistening. "I never think of this day. Or I do, but I think I am mad."
We joined with such congruence that we said nothing except the everything that is love.
It was a sacrament. what we achieved, two retiring men together. So many years of fumbling, and then together realizing that we were at last free of the meanness of life and our own clumsiness. With each movement, we were building something. The idea that what we had long known in private might be brought into the world and change the rules, even if only slightly, blazed around us. I had never thought fleeting pleasure could leave a permanent mark.
"I want to be stupidly happy with you," Stanley said with a gloating look at my spent satisfaction twined in his arms.
"Mackie will be looking forward to our letters from the moment I tell him," I replied.
"What sort of things do you plan on telling him?" Stanley nuzzled in my neck.
"Everything. I plan on having such purple tales that we shall have to concoct a cipher to safely post them," I confided.
Our long night was promising one more bis when we heard the shouting.
My host rushed around, throwing my own clothes at me while struggling into trousers and one of his regular peasant blouses before throwing his evening jacket over.
As the more undone and less agile one, it took me longer to dress. The whole time I was struggling to tell myself that what had sounded like a domestic dispute from a neighboring boat was coming towards us to end our wonderful night.
"Hulloa! Hulloa!" Someone was shouting over the sound of a boat that was approaching. Since it was not unheard of for boats to move around at night, particularly those delivering fuel to the canal inhabitants, these maritime sounds became background noise, a picturesque tableau that made Stanley's floating refuge so charming. But as a permanent resident, he must have been alerted before I by the sound of a craft coming our way. Or by the shouting, which was not usual at night from boat to boat.
"Hulloa!" "Doctor, Hulloa!" "Doctor!" The addition of my title had me even more surprised, and I had myself dressed by the time Stanley shouted back, "Hh-here!"
I popped my head out to see who could possibly be calling for my services away from shore. When I saw—the indefatigable Mr. Limstock, very much in charge of the boat he had induced to carry him to Stanley's floating home. With my most professional face on, I was cursing him internally for raising such a fuss across the water, for now many people were craning out of their boats to see who was visiting the silent Slav.
Mr. Limstock's grimly set mouth twitched when he darted a glance at my feet and Stanley's, neither of us wearing shoes.
"Hhhe—ii-iis ver-very ss-ick?" Stanley asked, the return of his impediment snapping me back into my medical mode.
"I am sorry to bother you," Mr. Limstock said, as if he cared not a whit about anyone's bother, "but your patient is doing poorly."
I skittered on bare feet inside the boat and Stanley laced one boot while I did the other. I drew him up by his undone hair. "We'll make our plans soon, my man."
He drew me up off the floor with such force that my feet left the ground while he kissed me. "My Jon, don't call me that unless you want me to prove it to be true."
It ached to separate from him, but he pushed me ahead. My social mask in place, I strode outside. "I don't have my bag. I was at the theater this evening."
"it was a nice evening, I trust."
Mr. Limstock was using those clever eyes to construct his own version of my magical evening. A little of the princely Stanley returned as my friend loomed over the slim young thing. Jack cast his eyes downwards.
"Th-th-thank you for the-the-el-el-el-eloc—eloc—u-tion—les-lesson, doc-tor." My love bowed formally.
Since this is the way Stanley talked with everyone but me, our torrid evening became our private affair, and I was brought over to the larger and faster boat where Mr. Limstock was standing, completely himself among the canal family whose boat he had commandeered. I willed myself not to look back at Stanley, whom I felt watching from his boat.
The boat operators talked for a few moments about the best street for us to be let off, I suppose, while I was only thinking about what possible tragedy could have befallen Holmes where he was. Only then did Mr. Limstock regard my worry. "We'll be at the hospital before you know it."
Dougan's play came rushing back. What if Holmes, really died, as Doreen did in the play? "But will it be in time?" I demanded. "What did he do to himself? How could you let something happen?"
"I don't know, Doctor. I can't understand it. His room is a few mattresses and nothing else. We only let him have one crayon at a time." His voice was so pleading I relented.
"It's all right, Jack. He might merely be ill. He's had some stomach upset and periods of lethargy since he's been taking Dr. Barnett's remedies, but they've helped somewhat so it seemed a good trade."
I launched into a torrent of technical medical questions that of course the lad couldn't answer, but which at least served to distract the rest of me that was overwhelmed with concern over our mutual friend.
My learned speech must have impressed our hosts, and they transported us to the point on the shore indicated by my companion, their faces serious.
By the time we came ashore, I had taken refuge in my doctorly persona, which does not indulge in sentiment. Mr. Limstock gave a liberal tip to the boat owners, who wished my patient well.
I scarcely heard them, nor paid attention to the young man giving directions to the cab driver he had cannily enough located after a short walk. We rode in silence until we approached the hospital gates. I didn't even wait for Mr. Limstock to pay the driver or to make his way through the sentry.
As a doctor I knew my way into all of London's hospitals well enough, and the sentry either recognized me or my purposeful gait, while the winsome Mr. Limstock was left to argue his right to be let in at that hour. After less than two minutes that felt like an age, I was standing in the doorway of the room indicated. The attending nurse looked up in annoyance and then must have recognized me.
She drew me out into the hallway and said, "I'm so glad it's you, Dr. Watson. We can't figure out what he's done to himself, only that he's nearly died doing it."
She let me come to his bedside. His eyes were closed but he was still weakly trying to keep up that incessant murmur that was the mark of his madness. Over the course of his illness, Holmes had gone from sinewy to gaunt, but now it was as though those very sinews had been unraveled in some secret place. It was the look of frailty that needed but one more knot undone to reach death.
He smelled ill, what I knew to be the secretion of a body that had switched tracks to follow some unnatural end. I had noted the signs it many times, either in the old or those who had a sudden, severe fever that could halt the breath and stop the heart without anyone ever understanding what secret commerce had allowed them to do so.
"There's not a mark on him," the nurse said as I picked up the slack, swollen hand that now seemed devoid of all wisdom, that had never played a violin at three in the morning or detected a forgery by sliding across a painting.
My hand touched the sheet and found it drenched. Holmes' tongue darted out to try and catch the saliva leaking out of his mouth and then he bent forward to retch before we could place the basin.
"Oh dear," the nurse said as I helped her to change the sheets. Or I started to, before I stood still.
"That's all right, I can manage. He's in a messy way, and not keeping nutrition always bodes ill," she began.
"Is it just me or is his tongue an odd color?" I asked, prizing Holmes' teeth open. His tongue seemed to look odd, but I couldn't pinpoint why. My friend had been known to put many things in his mouth. Inattention to this habit was the cause for my removing him from one of his clinics.
Mr. Limstock was as vigilant as could be, however, and I only knew about the occasional crayon being gnawed on. I'd seen Jack going over his helpers looking for potentially dangerous items before they were allowed in with Holmes.
"Dr. Stanbury, at your service," said the doctor who had come up behind me. "Do you know what ails Mr. Holmes?"
"It's as I feared," I said grimly. "He's found a way to do himself in, though how he obtained poison is beyond me. He's watched constantly."
"We didn't find any puncture marks, so it couldn't be a drug he administered to himself that way. I thought he might have some type of cancer. It would explain the wasting symptoms, though I can't palpate his abdomen well enough to look for marks. I get near his stomach and he vomits. See if you can manage it."
I murmured soothing phrases and once, was rewarded by the eyes flying open and wheeling around in their sockets. My hands were under the bedclothes and had barely touched his belly before Holmes flailed and vomited. The nurse was ready for him.
"Do you smell that?" I asked, in the way practitioners can be frank about such things.
"He had something aromatic for dinner," Stanbury said. "He was brought here from a neighborhood full of immigrants. The ambulance drivers were scared for their lives when the alarm was raised. Who knows what kind of unwholesome stuff he'd been living off of in that nest of tenements."
"I thought the same. It could only be a thin soup or broth," the nurse added. "Though I think it would be gone by now."
"He has had no such thing," a furious Mr. Limstock said, extricating himself from the orderly who I suspect had been dragged all the way to the room. "Mashed potatoes with a little chicken mixed in. The same went into my meal, and you can see I am quite well."
"This is Mr. Holmes' hired carer," I said firmly. "Mr. Limstock has been providing impeccable assistance, which is why I am so confounded by how a very ill detective who never left the flat could have acquired arsenic."
"Of course, the garlic smell on his breath," Stanbury said, springing into action. "Call for some assistance, matron, and some charcoal. If you could help control the patient's hands I'd like to rule out an abdominal mass."
While we fought with Holmes, the other doctor remarked casually, "Can you be sure this isn't from the patent medicines that George Barnett has been feeding him?"
Mr. Limstock and I both flinched. "He told you Mr. Holmes was in the city?" The lad asked.
"I knew nothing of the detective's whereabouts until he surfaced in that vile neighborhood. I saw Barnett's hand when I saw the bottles and the note that accompanied the patient. Your doing, I suppose," Dr. Stanbury said to the young man who was having a more calming effect on Holmes than either of us. The detective's hand clung to Jack's while his body tried to retch once more.
"Yes, sir, Mr. Barnett was most insistent his treatments should be respected. I hope he comes presently," Mr. Limstock said.
"Hyoscyamine? Digitalis? One treats stomach ailments and the other causes them," Stanbury said with scorn. "Though Barnett has been saying for years that they will calm specific types of nervous excitation. I've sent word to Dr. Barnett myself to hear exactly how much he'd prescribed and ascertain that this sad pass wasn't caused by these dubious treatments."
The doctor watched the realization that it was all too possible dawn on my face. "His heart rate?" I inquired.
"Neither too fast or too slow," he supplied. "I had thought it wasn't a serious overdose and I could give Barnett a good talking-to for endangering a patient."
"What has your outmoded doctoring done to Mr. Holmes?" Barnett demanded from the doorway.
The two men began arguing. Young Jack watched the matron wiping the detective's mouth, and the look of anguish on his face reminded me of exactly how young he was. Here was his idol and the patient he had nursed for months lying moribund in the bed.
I pushed him out into the hall. "You've done everything right. Let's let the doctors do their work."
"He couldn't have gotten any arsenic. I've been so careful," my young companion sobbed.
"Somewhere in that brain are more secret ways of inducing death than exist in the rest of Britain," I assured him. "Let's return to the flat and see if we can't piece it together."
It was too painful to say aloud that there was very little to do for Holmes, and I'd rather spare the boy from watching any more of his hero's suffering.
We found a carriage and I confess to nodding off on the way there. My friend jostled me awake.
"So you didn't get any sleep, I take it," said the charming lad with a curl to his lip. "I shouldn't, had I the chance to teach that one elocution."
He drew out the word sensually.
My enchanting night would not be profaned by this little coquette. "I don't know about you, but my only concern at the moment is that you teach me every aspect of your daily life, and especially what you know about your hired help."
"None of the boys would give Sherlock poison!" he protested.
Over the next day and a half I was able to determine this for myself. I'm afraid that Jack rousted every chorus boy, theater apprentice and dancer from the most varied haunts. They all vehemently denied being enlisted to hasten the great detective's demise or knowing anything about arsenic.
"You see? I know who can be trusted to care for Sherlock," Mr. Limstock said.
"If you trusted them so much, why did you have so many assistants?" I asked, feeling quite exhausted after so many interviews in the attic flat.
"I didn't want anyone getting any ideas," the lad admitted. "Here, Doctor, you put up your leg and have a nap while I make us some dinner."
The resourceful Mr. Limstock's skills included cooking, but the last many hours had stolen my appetite. I was awoken to eat a little and then dozed on the couch. Jack had made up a pallet on the floor nearby, if he slept at all. He had an iron constitution, and arranged for messages to be sent to Stanley, Dougan and Mycroft, (and Mr. Treacher as well, I suspected) apprising them of what we found on our next visit to the hospital: Sherlock Holmes still lived.
I must admit that Jack stayed longer than I did. My shock had come over me more slowly than my young friend's, and it made me want to sit in Holmes' antiseptic room and consider: Did we deprive him of too much, keeping him locked in here? I read to him when I could, and Jack said he did the same. The boys who could sing would sing. There was an artist chap who would draw with Holmes. What could we have done differently to make him want to stay on this earth?
For the how concerned me not so much after a while. Holmes would manage to die if he was determined to—I had never doubted that. But I wished so much that there was something worth living for, even with the gaping absence of Bruno. But his closest friends had not been enough.
That night I lay back in his room and thought of better days—the many cases we'd solved. Even the arguments and danger seemed precious. My memories seemed to match the wallpaper of a cheerful blue, the only artistic touch that could be added to the patient's prison. The entire flat had been redone by the attentive Mr. Treacher before Holmes was brought here.
The little businessman had told me himself on one of the occasions Mackie brought me out for enforced time off. The attic had lain empty for years, which may have been a blessing. Old plumbing was due to be replaced, floorboards rewaxed. The stove was new. The icebox was of the latest design. Whether it mattered to him or not, my dear friend had been living much better than his poor neighbors.
There were noises I'd never heeded from the neighboring buildings that all clustered together around a courtyard. Holmes' flat was the top level of a narrow building that housed the several floors of the hatmaking factory that went quiet at night. In that silence the noises of the adjacent lives and the smells of their cooking seemed to amplify at night. I wondered if these people had miseries greater than this room had seen, and how they managed to survive them.
Finally, I must have slept.
"There now, Doctor, you can't sit in here mooning about," Mr. Limstock said in the doorway.
"Forgive me. These sad months have taken their toll on me. I'll come to the hospital presently. It's Mr. Holmes?" I could only think that his last moments were approaching.
Jack pulled me up out of the bed. "Mr. Holmes said you must come at once. For me to carry you out of this place if I must."
"Holmes said? He's awake?" I stood there stupidly for some moments until Jack propelled me out of the room.
"He insists upon revealing the mystery of his almost-death, and he says we must come as quickly as possible." Jack equipped me with my coat, hat and stick and pushed me out onto the landing.
"I really am out of form. Those stairs get worse and worse," I complained at the bottom of the stairs.
"Perhaps," was the only answer I received on the cab ride to the hospital. I was overjoyed at being able to talk to a sensible Sherlock Holmes for the first time in so ages, so much so that I didn't pay attention to my young companion's unusual silence.
The detective looked physically the same, but everything was changed by those intelligent eyes in place once again.
"Come closer, Watson, my voice is not yet recovered," he whispered. "You sit there, and my loyal Jack, there." A weak hand reached for the lad's sleeve and kept a few fingers on the cloth.
"First of all, I want you both to know that I did not initiate my own death." Mr. Limstock's face lost some of its strain. "I merely did not stop it. Perhaps I hastened its progress a little."
His listeners looked confused.
"You must understand that I was not thinking with my normal faculties. I don't know how to describe what that state of being is like. Every idea exists as a separate mote. Some things are irresistibly attractive, and others cause an intense loathing. One is completely at the mercy of these impressions, but they are not without beauty or interest. The sheen of milk in a cup of tea could contain the whole universe. The best alphabet in the world, one that could contain all languages, could be chased by my crayon."
He smiled when he saw my look of shame at depriving him of writing implements. "You did what you had to, to keep me safe. I begrudge you nothing, neither of my dear friends, for what you've done to help me."
"Have you come to yourself because of Dr. Barnett?" I interrupted. "You seemed to be doing so much better when he started caring for you. Until you got worse."
"Yes, there might be something to his methods. The clinics must have given me something that slowed me down but couldn't bring me to fully sleep. That was an anguish with no escape, dear Watson, and for my scant sleep I am much indebted to Dr. Barnett. One day I woke up and attained something closer to normal awareness, but the tempo was wrong. I couldn't communicate."
"If only I'd tried harder to understand," Jack put in.
"That is what you must comprehend, my lad: everything in me did not want you to. I had actually woken up out of my lethargy a few days before you noticed, but saw nothing to speak about. Life was still agony. I did note that I felt unusually weak, and found no will to get out of bed. Over the space of these days my mind struggled to make sense of what I was feeling. I was ill.
"You may remember I ever since coming to that room I had spend many hours staring at the wall. It contained some great import that eluded me. And even then it made no sense because you looked so well, Jack."
The boy blushed.
"It is known that some people who have suffered arsenic poisoning in the home live with others who are completely unaffected," Sherlock Holmes stated.
"There's not a green article in the house," I protested. "It was all done in blues."
"Mr. Treacher judged it the most soothing," Jack added, looking confused. "Why?"
"Don't you remember the tragedy of Scheele's green, the arsenic-based dye that was in everything from garments to shoes to wallpaper, and killed many unwary?" Though some scientists disputed the evidence, and the government had not made a ruling on it, the green dye had waned in popularity in recent years, and so had arsenic poisonings.
"You couldn't have known," Holmes' fingers patted the lad's sleeve. "There is nothing green in the flat. Not even Mr. Treacher could have known, and be sure to tell him I said so. The green paper was a muddy brown with caked dust, and the builders must have judged it easier to paper over it than take it up. I myself can attest to how firmly it is affixed to the wall."
"Then how did you discover it?" I asked.
"Other than deducing from my symptoms that the garlic smell was not coming from one of the neighboring apartments? A pin. A single pin dropped off one of your friends' clothes, dear Jack. They're almost all on the stage, so it could have been transferred from a costume," he comforted the lad.
"This pin was my godsend. With it I was assured, not only death, but death of my own design. A quick death. Demise when I desired it. There were so few moments when my night watchers slept, but at some point almost all of them did. Then it took patient work to prize up the blue paper behind the bed and then stick it back with chewed crayon so that no one was the wiser."
"Holmes! Did you eat this paper?" I was scandalized. "You shouldn't be alive. Some of that paper had enough grains of arsenic to kill a child with a nibble."
The detective smiled ruefully. "My mind understood well enough that if I scrabbled at the paper with my fingernails I'd be found out immediately. So I chose to inch towards my own death more prudently. You saw me making ecstatic calculations of, given different concentrations of poison per inch, how many licks it would take to leave my suffering behind once and for all. It was a heady power."
"I hope you haven't done permanent damage to your tongue," was all I could say to fill that horrified silence.
Jack gave a little sob. "You could have died. You very nearly died."
"And that was what I needed, my friend, my friends. The end was close, and in my hazy thoughts something became clear: my mind had been steadily improving once I no longer had to worry about an interminable life stretching before me. Death invigorated me. It made me myself again. In short, I wish to go back to work."
"You will do no such thing," I said, surveying the weakened man in the bed.
"Your order was pronounced with something less than your normal fervor, Watson," came the playful whisper. "You must have been affected by your short stay in my flat—listen to you wheezing—though Jack has been spared."
"Which is why I'll tie you to the bed if I have to. You don't go back to work until I say so," said the indomitable young man.
Holmes lay back and smiled very slightly. It wasn't the smile he wore with Bruno. Nothing would bring that back. But it was a smile nonetheless. One of Sherlock Holmes' greatest pleasures had always been revealing how he solved a mystery.
The next several weeks were busy ones. Mackie's play was a raging success. Stanley was taking his bow every night, and I were happily making plans for a well-deserved holiday after the play closed (with much advice from the Asian aficionado Holmes). The recuperating detective was transferred back to Baker Street, which would soon house only Messrs. Holmes and Limstock while I was away.
It was I who insisted upon this arrangement. "Anyone will accept Mr. Limstock as your secretary and assistant," I reasoned. "He's so efficient as to be quite formidable. I do think Mrs. Hudson is in awe of him."
My dear friend never spoke of Bruno or his loss, and of course no one else would dare mention it.
Life was too good not to focus on the living. My new life with my Stanley was about to begin.
One day, the miraculous man whom I finally found right in front of me—was lost.
