Author's Note: We're going to start getting into some more pronounced slash around the next chapter. I felt I should warn you.
Chapter Eight: Ever Forgive Me
It was in vain, however, that Mycroft and I promised to meet at the police station. The very next day, on which we had intended to visit him, Sherlock Holmes was taken from under Lestrade's wing, and locked away in prison, so that we had no hope of seeing him further.
I found myself pacing back and forth in Holmes' own bedroom in the middle of the next day, listening to my own footsteps creaking against the floorboards, just as Holmes' had when I had heard him so many times in the night. I wished that I had that same eager energy which my friend used to push himself towards the solution to a case, and yet the more I paced, the more tired and desperate I grew, so that I could neither sleep, or eat, nor do anything of great use, but could only pace, and stare at the adjacent wall.
It was not quite yet evening when there was a knock at the door. I waited, but the bell did not ring, and so I was sure that I had imagined the knock, or that the wind had sent a twig to beat against the door. After several moments, however, the knock did come again, and I walked down the stairs to answer it.
I was expecting Mycroft Holmes, or a sour and pessimistic Inspector Lestrade. I was not ready for the appearance of Miss Anne Fairchild.
Although I instantly tensed at the sight of her, so loathe was I to speak to the creature that stood between myself, and my friend's freedom, I relaxed again when I saw the look on her previously cold and set features. She was ashen, quiet, and almost demure in the way that she addressed me. The lady would not meet my eyes as I silently held open the door for her, and I saw that for some reason or other, a great change had come over her during the night. Perhaps, I thought, she had realized the grave implications of her petty and arbitrary actions, or perhaps she and Mycroft had spoken, and he was finally aware of all that had gone on while he was blissfully ignorant. Whatever the reason, she would not sit on my sofa, but instead stood swaying nervously by my side table, turning back and forth on her finger one of the small gold rings that I had always seen her wear.
"So," I started, trying to peer into her downcast eyes, "you've come to your sense after all, have you?"
Her response came out all at once in a sort of cry. "I'm a wronged, woman. I'm a wronged, woman, sinned against, poorly treated, wronged!"
With no sympathy for her violent ejaculations, I waited in silence, my eyes never leaving her face, until she turned her own eyes up to meet mine. "I will give you the bracelet," she said. "I will give you the bracelet because I have no defense against he who has wronged me, and I wish to be rid of all of you, as soon as I can." This last was said with unfettered bitterness, and even as she spoke, Miss Fairchild pulled a long box out from underneath her coat. She opened it to show me that inside it lay an unclasped diamond bracelet, of just the description that Mycroft had originally given us.
"You'll have to bring it yourself," I said, taking the bracelet from the box and turning it over in my hand. "They will need your evidence, and your testimonial."
She took the bracelet back from me, and thought for a long moment, before meeting my gaze with a jealous, cold fire in her dark eyes. "I will go," she said, "if we afterwards will never speak of this again. I wish to leave this place, and I wish to never come back. I do not want you to be able to say of me that Miss Anne Fairchild was a foolish, duped woman who was associated with the greatest sinners in this horrible little affair. I want my freedom, and I will give you your bracelet and the safety of Mr. Sherlock Holmes for that price, and that price only."
"It is far from me to be able to grant you such a thing," I said, repelled by her animosity and the casual way in which she dealt with this matter of Mycroft's heart. "I assure that I for one have no desire to keep up any acquaintance with you, if it pleases you to hear it."
"It does." Her eyes blazed at me, and she packet the bracelet away into her coat again. "It pleases me very much to know." She paused for a minute, and then laughed a harsh little high pitched laugh. "You're not going to ask me what it is that has turned my heart so. You're too much of a gentleman to ask me such a question. I suppose you see me as a very callous woman indeed, after everything that has taken place between us, and after all you are probably very right in that. But I have learned callousness, Doctor Watson, I have learned it from the way that I am treated! Would you like to know, then, what has become of it all?"
I did not respond. I knew that anything she had to tell me with such bitterness and anger could be of no good to me or to anyone. I was satisfied that she would go to Holmes and bring the bracelet. Miss Fairchild, however, would not be deterred from her biting remarks, and started in on me without needing any response.
"Your celebrated friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes," and this she said with an ironical drawl, "has never had a heart to give me. I am at a loss for ever having his love, and surely was most grossly mistaken and abused in thinking that he could give it to me. He cannot love me, he can never love woman at all. He is incapable of it, it is hopeless, and I have been deceived."
That was too harsh, I thought, knowing my friend much better than I believe anyone else could claim. I knew that he was cold; I knew that he was often abrasive in the course of following his analytical and practical ways. Yet I had seen him recently more gentle and sensitive than most ever believed he could be, and I had seen him in times of trouble, and in times of calm. His heart was as live and beating as my own, no matter how hard he tried to hide it from the world.
"You're wrong," I told Miss Fairchild. "Sherlock Holmes is a wonderful man. He has saved more lives than you have ever considered, he has been entirely selfless in more cases than I have the ability to recall. You, yourself should not be so quick to judge, as I have no great impression of your character."
"You would think so, you would, you would," she almost shrieked. "But for all his preaching of the importance of the truth, of the necessity of honesty, he is as much a liar as anyone could ever be. His very existence is a deception. Oh, I have been so terribly mistreated!"
I was not impressed, and was anxious to get Miss Fairchild and all of her evidence to the authorities so as to release Holmes from his bondage. Nothing she said could stay my eagerness to go. At least, I thought that nothing could. What the vicious woman said next, however, cast everything, for a few moments, entirely from my mind.
"His heart is not his own," Miss Fairchild was saying. "It is not his to give, and it is not mine to take. And you would never guess who it is who has won this singular honor from the loveless detective." She let out a bark of laughter. "Would you like to guess, Doctor Watson? Would you like to think on it for a moment? I assure you, it is a riddle that will tax your very imagination." She paused for a moment, and then, with a bitter smile, she clasped my hand hard in her own.
"It is yours," she said. "You alone are the keeper of the heart of Sherlock Holmes, and it is from you that I have tried to steal it to no avail. I can only congratulate you. I can do nothing else."
Her words worked their way through my mind as it through molasses, each one of them registering itself individually. The import of her shot was slow in coming, and it was several moments before the entirety of the concept took hold of me. I recalled everything that Holmes had said to me, every look he had given me, every instance in which I had seen a yearning, or a longing which I thought had belonged to Miss Fairchild, or to his work, or to some far off fantasy of which I would never be a part. I found myself repeating in my head the last things he had said to me.
"That is well, I think," he had said to me, w hen I professed not to know of his reasons for turning away from Miss Fairchild. It was now painfully clear exactly what he had meant by that. He had not accepted Miss Fairchild's affections, not because of honor, dignity, or for the sake of his brother. He had turned away from the lady because he was absolutely unable to give up what he no longer had.
Miss Fairchild, seeing the conflict flashing in my face, smiled. "I have had my vengeance after all," she murmured.
It was several moments before I could speak again, but I pulled myself together as quickly as I could, and turned to face her, angry and desperate both for to confirm and deny her previous statements. "You cannot prove this," I said. "You are a vulgar, vicious girl, and you have nothing to prove these accusations."
"Oh, on the contrary," insisted Miss Fairchild. "I can prove everything."
She pulled, then, out of the same place in which she had been keeping the bracelet, a long, rolled-up piece of paper. It was held together by a piece of green twine, of the type that my companion occasionally used to hold together packets of his case files, or to mark off different beakers that contained chemicals which I was not to touch. She thrust it out at me with a triumphant look, and I took it slowly, unrolling it and letting it fall into a crumpled scroll, which was written upon in a quick and scrawling hand, a hand which I had no doubt belonged to Sherlock Holmes.
The document read as follows;
November 28,
I believe he begins to know me after all. Fool as I am to have ever agreed to live in such close quarters, I have given myself away. Absolutely no good can come of this, and yet I am loathe to leave. I feel as though my practice, my purpose, my prowess, none of the above could offer me any consolation if I were to take leave of him after everything that has passed between us. Oh god, I am undone. Watson, Watson, I am lost, and you, even in your intrinsically warm and kind ways will never be able to ignore for long the fact that I am lost. Watson, will you ever forgive me?
"It is a journal entry," Miss Fairchild was saying, as I read the paper over and over. I was vaguely conscious that she was talking about the purport of the message, but that I could derive just as well for myself. I ran the final line under my eyes once, twice, three times, feeling as though the more I read it, the more I pressed it into my memory, never to be taken from me. Watson, Watson, will you ever forgive me?
During the time which I spent reading and re-reading the scrap of journal, Miss Fairchild must have taken leave, although she left the bracelet on the side table, so that I could not think she would have a change of heart. Eventually, I folded up the paper, and tucked it into my breast pocket, my mind reeling, flooded with a sort of unimaginable cross between elation and horror. I thought for several minutes that perhaps I had gone mad.
It must have been a good deal later in the day that the front door creaked quietly open, and then shut again. I could hear it from where I lay in my bedroom, on top of the covers, trying the swirling and indistinguishable sea of sentiments that had taken hold of me ever since Miss Fairchild had left. Sitting up, I listened to the patter of footfall on the stairs, and after a moment, I saw Sherlock Holmes peer into my bedroom.
He held himself erect, almost at attention, gazing at me out of bright, eager eyes. He smiled a little, fingers drumming against the wall just outside of my room, so that I could hear the tapping quite clearly right through it.
"After everything, Watson, you've come through for me yet again. Someday I believe that I will have to publish your annals, since there is so little of your own personality in mine. I think that I shall spend several days in enjoying the feel of my own bed, and thanking providence, and yourself, for the luck that I've been graced with,. Well? Has it been so long that you've forgotten me? Have you no greetings for your old convict?"
It was then that his eyes fell upon the rolled up paper in my pocket. I watched the smile on his face fade, dimming slowly until he had read the entire matter in my confused, beseeching eyes. I watched my friend's heart making a slow and painful plummet through the windows of his eyes, and I could not think of what to say to him, so many things were crisscrossed over each other in my mind.
We did not speak for a very long time. He reached out to me, stepping forward, and then, seeming to think better of it, he turned out the light, and left the room. I heard him stumbling down the stairs in the direction in which he had come, and I knew that was aware of everything I had learned. I could almost hear Miss Fairchild's jealous and malignant laughter beating in the background of our quiet rooms, as the two of us sat awake, in separate rooms, in complete silence.