A Retrospective of the Partnership
A Mary Russell Story
During the earliest stages of my relationship with Sherlock Holmes I was quite unaware of the reality of his age. I knew that he was, feasibly, (if not likely,) old enough to be my grandfather; I knew that his hair was grey at the temples, and I remembered how I had assigned him to the class of "old people" upon our first meeting. But in those pre-Oxford years of uninterrupted Holmes, before my knee quite fully recovered from the accident in which I lost my family, it was he who often had to check himself from running too far ahead of me in our jaunts, and I who had to take hills with care—even, occasionally, availing myself of Holmes' shoulder at the end of a long day. Holmes took infinite care with me then, never commenting or complaining over my speed (or lack of it) and somehow always steering me away from feats of physical prowess beyond my strength. Even when the task was one he could himself undertake with ease he would not do so in my presence, whether to keep me from feeling self-conscious about my infirmities, or to keep me from being tempted to disregard my limits and injure myself further, I never knew. No doubt this was why later proofs of Holmes' mortality always came as such a shock to me. Our relationship changed and grew over the years but in many ways we never lost the simple, comfortable rhythm that sprung up between us during the Great War, and many of my most enduring notions of Holmes stem from that period as well. I married Holmes some years later, but the fact that in I embraced him as a lover and a husband never changed the fact that once, in the last hours of my childhood, he was a father, and that I first knew him as my safety and shelter, unshaken by war or famine or even the bitter rages of my aunt.
Once in the summer of 1915, only a few months after Holmes and I first met, I met him in the woods early in the morning to begin an experiment on tracking through thick undergrowth. We pushed through from one end of the wood to the other and by the time we emerged to cross the now-sunny Downs and head back for his cottage, it was nearly one in the afternoon, late enough that even the indefatigable Holmes was feeling peckish. I barely had time to receive his proposal of lunch with good cheer before the high, waving grass was suddenly rushing toward my face, and my legs, usually so prone to tangling, became rubbery and useless under my weight. I never precisely lost consciousness, but I began to roll down the hillside like a hollow rain-barrel and the world around me faded to a kaleidoscopic blur. I was limp enough that the unconventional trip to the bottom of the green did me little harm—much to Holmes' relief, when he reached me there seconds later, panting slightly. It too me a moment to focus my gaze through the spectacles which had fortunately, if painfully, been mashed to my face when I first collapsed, and I saw Holmes looking at me, stricken and worried, for the first time since I had known him—although it was far, far from being the last.
"Great Scott, Russell, what was that all about? Are you ill?" His cool hand moved to feel the side of my face and my brow before I could catch my breath to explain.
"No," I managed to gasp, the world still a bit blurry—though I suspect this had less to do with the reason I fell in the first place, and more to do with the rather exciting trip I had just taken. "I'm not ill, I'm just..." I felt myself blush a bit over my pallor. "I'm rather hungry, that's all."
Holmes, still crouched eye-level to where I sat with my limbs sprawling over the grass, rocked back on his heels an inch. "As hungry as that?"
It was a variation on an old theme with me, but at that point I had not, save for a throwaway remark during our first conversation over honey wine, impressed upon Holmes the extent of the deprivation I sometimes endured living in with my aunt. I tried to answer without sounding as though I were pleading for sympathy, although I suspect that my matter-of-fact tone only underlined the barbarous truth.
"I sneaked out yesterday before breakfast, and when I went back for lunch I found that my aunt had locked the bread up. Then I came home late and we had an argument instead of supper, and I left rather early again this morning." I said it that way, as though in the distraction of the argument I had simply forgotten to eat, because I had told Holmes once before that the price of my aunt's food was obedience, and I did not wish to imply that he might not remember the conversation. When I met his even and inscrutable grey eyes, however it was plain to me that he had not forgotten, and that he was not fooled by my Jesuitical evasion.
All he said, though, was, "Why did you not come to us?"
What power in such a simple question! I was torn as I attempted to formulate an answer without letting tears rise to the surface. The demands of dignity warred with the temptation to make a full confession of agony to my one true friend. After a few moments, the best I could manage, through the sandpaper in my mouth, was a lofty, lady-like, "One doesn't like to impose."
I had hoped to provoke his laughter and thus crack the tension of the moment. His gaze, however, remained direct, and his face serious. It was an expression which, I came to discover in later years, veiled both compassion and anger, but he was careful that day to let neither feeling show, save in the gentleness of his voice and manner.
Silently he stood, and after pulling me to my feet he tucked my left arm through his right one and we set off toward the house, rather more briskly than before. We were nearly in view of his bee hives when he spoke, in the manner of one interrupting his own silent monologue.
"You understand, Russ, that your solicitors could intervene on your behalf—possibly even revoke your aunt's guardianship."
I smiled grimly. "I've already explored that option. As an alternative, it is...unacceptable."
"Tell me why."
"My only other relative is my father's brother. He lives in California and he has a family. I would have to leave Sussex and go to him."
I did not say, I would have to leave you, the friend who made my life worth living again. I did not say, I would endure worse than hunger to be close to you. I did not say, you're the center of my life, but I daresay he heard me anyway. Holmes was as perceptive a man as I ever knew.
When we reached the house, Holmes walked me to the dinner table, seated me in a chair, and disappeared into the kitchen. He emerged a moment later and Mrs Hudson followed, setting the first plates of cheese and bread on the table before the tea had finished brewing. After tea, Holmes and I went upstairs to commit our attention to a long running experiment with opium derivatives. We did not speak of the incident again, but when Mrs Hudson walked me to the taxi that evening she set an enormous hamper in the seat beside me, filled with easily enough food for three or four days. I had to leave the basket with Patrick so as to avoid my aunt's notice, but I was able to conceal a fine supper beneath my jacket. For quite some time afterward, unless I told Mrs Hudson quite plainly that I intended to pay a visit the following the day, I was sent home with the hamper refilled. If I was ever hungry again before reaching my majority, it was never because I lacked provision.
It sounds so simple when I tell the story that way, as though Holmes and Mrs Hudson were simply fairy god-parents who granted my wishes with their food and their loan-accounts. It is easy to say that when I was hungry, they fed me; that when I needed new shoes, I had them. It is not as easy to say why this began to heal me. Had my aunt provided me with the same necessities I would have gained nothing by them, aside from the obvious. I can only hope to explain by saying that, because their hands were always open, I became accustomed to goodness; and in time, I came to believe in the possibility that I deserved to be well treated—that my aunt's madness had nothing to do with some secret fault in me, contrary to the insinuations whispered by a small voice at the back of my mind. I came to believe that the universe must be ruled by Chance, a blind, lunatic god with fists of thunder, destroying lives in one breath, and gifting graciously in the next. The ravages of the six months before I met Holmes faded, and I was no longer tempted to dream endlessly, profitlessly about my family. When I realized that I was happier with Holmes than I had ever been with my parents and brother, I had a sudden vision of them as they had died, in fire and metal, as though being sacrificed to my new life. These were the years of the Dream, in which I could not disentangle blessing from curse. Time marched on, and I got older, and eventually I stopped trying.
It was a rare thing, was it not? A blessing so large as to erase my need to dwell upon the grief that preceded it. Yet that was the rule of my life with Holmes. The bullet wound I suffered at Patricia Donleavy's hands; the nine days I spent locked in a an Essex basement, sustained on scraps and heroin; even more minor ills, such as subjecting myself to the intensely male scrutiny of Colonel Edwards and his unspeakable son, and traveling, ill and bruised, over Dartmoor in search of clues; all my woes came to look airy and insubstantial against the reality of knowing Holmes, being in partnership with him. And though I could not forget any of my nightmares, they came gradually into perspective: intermittent anguish could not be a serious rival to continuous joy.
My memory sometimes returned to our sojourn in Palestine as though the months we spent there were entirely detached from the terror preceding it, and the misery that followed. The new suffering we endured inside its borders was somehow more forgivable, being honest and impersonal, than the madness from which we had fled in England. One night, while Holmes and I were in Italy in the weeks preceding my return to Oxford, we fell to talking about our time in the Holy Land. Because the night was warm, our case satisfactorily concluded, the wine plentiful, and Holmes in a singular mood, I said to him,
"I often wish that Karim Bey had taken me, instead of you."
The sentence had not completely left my mouth before Holmes had gone very, very still. If there had been less than three glasses of wine in my bloodstream I might have begun to suspect that I had said something quite wrong, but as it was, I simply waited until he replied, speaking in a careful voice.
"And why would you wish that?"
"Because it is easier to suffer oneself than watch the suffering of a loved one."
He caught his breath, so delicately I almost did not hear it, and it occurred to me that we had never referred to each other in quite those terms before. As I look back on it now, I think it is best that I was mildly drunk at the time, because I was able to say the words aloud just as casually as habitual use had caused them to sound in my mind.
I did not say, into the silence that followed, I know what you have suffered since I took her bullet. I did not say, I would do as much for you again, a hundred times, and never regret it. I did not say, I would rather die, or even hover on the edge of death, than live an hour in the fear that I might outlive you. But I daresay he understood me anyway, and when I stood to wish him good night he stood with me and bent to kiss my forehead.
I know that many people suffer losses similar to those of my childhood and push on, without ever finding the kind of serendipitous balance that Holmes brought to my life. I know that the wounds I sustained, the violence and cruelty I endured, may well have come upon me whether or not I had the solace of the partnership to lean upon. And while it would not be true to say that I can't imagine what that would be like—I did, after all, live with my aunt for several months before meeting Holmes, motivated to keep body and soul together only by the hollow pulse of guilt—the memory of that empty time is not one I like to dwell upon. Those six months could too easily have become my entire life, and the narrowness of my escape is still a little horrifying. Why I was allowed respite when others lived long lives of grief and loneliness I cannot begin to imagine, but it guided my life. From the moment I met Holmes, my universe, chaotic though it was, observed one rule without fail: no suffering was ever too great for the solace I found in my partnership with him.
One day, I will look back over the years, and begin to separate curse from blessing. But not just now; not while I have him still.