The Chinaman bows automatically, his greasy queue slipping over the heavy ivory and yellow silk of his robe. He addresses his words to the floor. "Ladee, well-come, well-come, pretty ladee, have pipe, velly good, have what you wan..."
"I think you do," her tone is acerbic.
He looks up at her then, obsequiousness faltering as he recognizes who is stood in the doorway. Victoria Regina may be an Empress, but London has many petty kings and queens, people of note and influence who have nothing to do with titles or money and everything to do with territory. St Giles is a patron to beggars, outcasts and lunatics, which made the woman who rules in his name thrice-worthy. "You velly well-come in ouh house..." he lisps awkwardly, gamely trying to play the fool.
She isn't buying it. "Don't piss me about, I know you can talk proper. I ain't here for your yen an' you know it."
His deferential air vanishes along with the lisp and he straightens up. "Why you here?"
"On th' gander f'someone."
A sly look suffuses his smooth features. "We have boys, nice boys, girls too," he leers.
"Fuck off, Lung," she tells him shortly, trying to move past him.
"You not welcome if you not smoke."
Her pale eyes are focused, dangerously so. "Chen's got brighter hoke t'play than puttin' my nose outta joint," she warns. "Ain't gonna be pissin' in his pie, so you leave me be."
The queen of St Giles is mad, everyone knows that. But she is loved more than she is feared – against all Machiavellian principle – and still holds fast the crown. The waifs and strays she protects are fiercely loyal despite her weakness – maybe because of it – and crossing her is just as inadvisable as squaring off against the Rook, Marmalade Jack, or Jago himself.
"Chen busy man. He not..."
"Suits me, I don't need Chen," she says with a sweetness bordering venom. "I need you t'shut y'trap least I say an' leave me be least I ask. Got it?"
A moment's hesitation and he bows, with real courtesy this time. "Lady," he mutters.
She pushes past him and into the den, Charlie following unhappily in her wake. She walks with strange and pointed step, like one of the Royal Ballet rats practicing chorus paces, booted feet placed with the utmost care. She skirts the rooms, fingers twitching as if following an invisible string only they could grasp, glancing at shadows and prone figures briefly before moving on. It is like a perverse sort of faerytale: that room is too crowded, that one too bright. The next room's too loud, that one too... female. Her head tips for a moment as she notes the women present at the Sapphic symposium, those highborn and low, squirreling the information away for later. The corridor turns and turns again, the rooms smaller now, more secluded. Her fingers point like a neurotic weathervane, and a grim smile graces her mouth. One of the rooms has a worn damask curtain in hues of red and gold drawn across the door. She suddenly stops. "Charlie," she hisses, her voice strained.
He is at her elbow immediately, a lanky and dirt-begrimed Mephistopheles.
But he's not the only one who answers her summons. Lung has haunted her wake, and now hovers; an anxious and ineffectual guard dog. If she needed proof – which she doesn't – that provided it. "He pay good money to be left. No one visit. I refill pipe. You not to..."
Her attention skitters away from burning a hole in the curtain and back to him in irritation. Her voice is a hod of bricks tipped haphazardly from on high to break skulls where they will. "I don't give a fuck if he paid with the Maharajah's diamonds. Hop it."
An expression of panic flashes through his narrow eyes and is discarded as swiftly as he is able. "Chen, he not pleased if..."
"I call in my debt," she says with cut-glass clarity. "The first an' least of 'em at any rate..."
Behind her Charlie bites his lip to hide his smile.
"So quit fuckin' me about. I'm goin' in 'ere. An' you ain't. Clear?"
Lung's face curdles - an amusing little pantomime of his thoughts - before he admits defeat. Chen would not thank him for starting a war with the ngong baht-paw hai. Reluctantly he bows again, backing away. "Hou sei la lei," he murmurs politely.
"Hm ga tsan."
"'Ere, when you learn that yellow jaw?" Charlie demands, keeping half an eye on the retreating Lung.
She doesn't look round, but doesn't answer until the Chinaman has gone either. "Didn't," she says shortly. "Can spit a right storm though."
One hand pushes the curtain aside, the other grasps the handle, movements mechanical like someone dreading an outcome already foreseen. She takes in the dim room in an instant, eyes perceiving everything despite the scant light cast by the single lamp flagged by joss sticks. Whatever air remains in her lungs is expelled in a single ragged breath. "Send word," she says.
Charlie nods, although her interest isn't for him, it is only for the slight man lain upon the daybed.
"Fetch the Crow. Tell the Ketch. Now. He's here." She steps forward, curtain falling back and door swinging closed, cutting Charlie loose to follow her instructions and contracting her world to a single room of shabby Eastern decadence.
The space is small, containing two carved bunks at either side and a chaise lounge at one end. A low table is positioned beside the chaise, set up with a lacquered tray on which sits all the apparatus necessary for an addicts tea party. Light comes from the spirit lamp on the tray from which the pipe can be relit each time the resin cools, and the glowing tips of two joss sticks scenting air already saturated with the golden mist of poppy smoke.
A man reclines amidst cushions on the daybed, one hand lain across his chest, palm against his heart, the other curled around the end of a pipe balanced against the table. He wears waistcoat and shirtsleeves and an intense expression as if he seeks to glean meaning from his dreams. A heavy cord frockcoat that has seen better days is cast carelessly across the arm of the chaise, one sleeve trailing on the floor beside a silk-lined fedora. His skin is pallid, his dark hair sweat-mussed into disarray giving him a younger, more vulnerable appearance.
His dark eyes close and open slowly, as if they are machinery he is operating and not a true part of himself. Thoughts are unwinding through his head, unspooling like ribbon from a bobbin. So many ribbons. He wonders how long it will take to wind them back again – wonders if they can be wound back again. He realises he doesn't much care. He plucks at this ribbon and that to see what it is made of, to read the words wrought in their stitches. Most of the colours are muted shades of dun and grey of inferior weave telling of crimes and punishment pertaining to people many of which he has never met. But some threads of colour stand out.
There is a lush plum velvet band that snakes away into the darkness, going who knows where and leaving the faintest trace of Parisian perfume in its wake. There is a dark hunter-green, cheering and sturdy which is at pains not to tangle itself with anything else. A black silk of the highest sheen lies in fat coils and gives the impression of being smug. A russet of just the wrong hue and width and an aura of scaevity ensuring it will never be quite as fashionable or useful as it wishes to be however much it tries. (There is a silk corbeau and a length of tarnished military braid lying in a discarded and rotten heap – he gives them as wide a berth as he is able although he'd swear they move, always seeking to sidle near and tangle about his feet.)
Through the centre of it all is a ribbon of blue, dark and bright, the stitched letters upon it spidery and golden. He does not want that reel to unwind or the bobbin to become lost because it is precious to him, more so than the others. He reaches out and tries to grab it, but his fingers snag a different length instead - one made of a rag-tag of many colours. The light changes and he struggles to read the words so that he might remonstrate with the owner of that particularly individual piece of lacing for getting in his way... He is not fast enough.
Sherlock Holmes blinks slowly, awareness awaking in clouded eyes, seeking to find what has roused him. Gliding towards him is a ragged creature with a disconcertingly piercing gaze; raindrops glinting silver in the wildness of her hair and the joss-smoke wreathing into curlicues and wings at her back. She looks like a fairy-queen born of city grime and London smog.
"Emmaline Lindhurst," he drawls. "How have you been, dear girl? Thought I saw your ribbon."
Her mouth is a thin line of displeasure, both at the state of him and his naming of her.
"Have you managed to stay out of Parkhouse?" he enquires solicitously.
"Have you?" she bites back.
He smiles uncertainly, unsure why out of all the things he could hallucinate he is hallucinating her, and why she looks so annoyed about it. Why would she be annoyed? Ah yes, because he is about to say – "You should go back to your family."
"Ain't got family."
"That's odd, I could have sworn the Lindhursts had a son, two daughters, a country estate, a sizable income, three dogs, two horses, a town house in Chelsea, a..."
"If they wanted me they shouldn't have sent me to Parkhouse." Her voice is cold, like broken mirrors and shattered trust. The asylum had been genteel, as such places go, but they'd dosed her on laudanum and she's spent two months shivering, throwing up and hallucinating. She'd been methodically sharpening a spoon in her more lucid moments, until a man calling himself 'Sheridan Hope' had arrived and taught her how to avoid or dispose of the medicines forced upon her. He'd also given her his waistcoat and socks as protection against the chill and – glory of glories – turned out to be a rorty split in lay with the Miltons. He and his had caused enough chaos at Parkhouse that she was able to disappear down to the Thames mud and away into the city.
It's not a debt he has ever acknowledged, nor is it one she's ever forgot.
"You're looking well."
She raises an eyebrow. "You look bleedin' awful."
"I like what you've done with your hair." He waves a hand at her. "Very... very..." Words dance beyond his grasp. "Sanguine," he settles at last.
She looks at him and continues to look at him. He begins to fancy that her eyes are lit from within by blue stars that have the power to transmit her thoughts across the aether, written in some strange and unknowable script that is filling his brain line upon line making it impossible to think clearly... She doesn't appear to be too happy about the situation either. But it must be rather uncomfortable to have blue stars in one's eyeballs – itchy no doubt... He scrubs at his eyes with the back of his hand, surreptitiously checking for star-seeds. His eyes don't feel like they contain stars, although when he presses upon them he is able to see the sparks of light that must be Emmy's thoughts – fascinating... He also sees a mourning band tied around the upper left sleeve of her coat, fashioned out of a gentleman's black silk cravat. He scowls, his thoughts colliding as past present and future skew. "Am I dead then?"
She follows his line of sight and her lips twist in a fit of acrasia. "Not wearin' it for you."
"Oh." Which meant either he isn't dead (but he is) or she doesn't care (Emmy always cares) or – "Who died?"
Her eyes narrow slightly into an unkind look. "I didn't think the Don Jack gave a shit anymore what happened in his city, after all, he's been gone three years, never even wrote..."
Her words mask pain, an abyss of grief she has yet to fully bridge. "Emmy..." He needs to know what has happened before her railing at him tips her off her narrow span of spider-silk control. "Emmy the bridge!" he mutters. "Please..."
She sighs. "Harry died. Last winter. Caught a chill – lodged in his lungs an' ate him up."
"My sympathies," he says, because somewhere in amongst the smoke part of him recognises loss is pain. He notes by the easing of her expression that it is the right thing to say. "I was dead at the time," he confides, wanting to make sure she knows – it seems important.
The stars behind her eyes flare and the lightning-blue script of her thoughts becomes jagged and bright with displeasure. Ah. The wrong thing to say. The stars bore into him and, "You're a fine piece of work, ain't you?" she tells him, somehow sounding both contemptuous and disappointed. He isn't used to disappointing people, it is a novel, wholly unpleasant sensation he vows to repeat as little as possible in the future.
A stray thought reminds him that he'll be dead by dawn. Ah good, not much time at all in which to disappoint anyone. He isn't an advocate of resolutions, they, like rules seem designed to be proved until broken, but if he does have them he likes resolutions he can keep. Which reminds him... With a supremely unsteady hand he fumbles towards his coat pocket and pulls out the dark cerulean bottle that rests there. The glass is narrow, faceted and ridged across alternate faces in the manner of poison vials and apothecary bottles.
Emmy's eyes widen, pupils swallowed whole in a sea of stormy blue. "Don't you fuckin' dare," she breathes.
He un-stoppers it, losing the cork somewhere.
"I'll knock out your bleedin' brains 'fore I watch you down that," she vows.
He gives her an oddly disarming look. "Would you?" he invites. "Much obliged."
Dry desperation is sparked to rage by the smallest ember of anger. She lunges forward, intent on slapping some sense into him and grabbing the bottle before he has a chance to recover or make good his stupidity. She gets as far as the slap, a ringing backhand across his cheek that snaps his head to the side and strikes a further note of pained confusion into his already dream-addled eyes. "Bastard," she accuses, trying to reach across him as he curls away from her, difficult to the last.
The sound of boots, heavy leather in smart step, marching along the corridor outside. Gentlemen may have the pace, but not the nailed heels. Dockers have the heel all right but not the pace: only the Law or the Army have both. She retreats into shadow, slipping down and back into the lee of a bunk, far from the spirit-lamp's eye.
Sensing his figment has left him, Holmes uncurls slightly and takes a swig from the bottle he still clasps. His cheek – across the orbital bone beneath his right eye - tingles. He hadn't previously been aware that hallucinations possessed such weighty hands... No matter. He relaxes once more against the cushions that shelter him and waits for the ceiling to turn into oblivion.
The door opens, the draught sending disruptive waves against the soft-curling smoke and causing the lamp flame to flicker. Holmes rolls his gaze heavily away from the ceiling; since it's not time for either lamp, brazier or pipe to be replenished he supposes it must be another dream come to visit him. Because has he not expressly forbidden all but Lung to come here? And his orders are followed, his wishes in the imperative hard to disobey however inconvenient – Watson has often commented upon it in his fanciful recounting of their adventures, so it must be true. Watson doesn't lie about such things, he's useless at prevaricating... Unless it's fiction, he lies quite entertainingly in fiction.
Is his inability to prevaricate only a fiction? Holmes suddenly cannot remember, his thoughts are being pasted over with a thousand pages of Watson's stories, falling thicker and faster, becoming a torrent – a typhoon – a waterfall for Holmes to drown in. And he did, didn't he? Dragged down to the depths, battered and broken and crushed against the pale rocks, lungs saturated past capacity with water (or is it words?) and so heavy that his corpse never rose again. His limbs feel heavy now and he can sense the weight of words (or is it water?) settling on top of him like six feet of earth beneath a headstone.
Time, like everything else, is fluid. He dreams of sweeter moments and a better place...
Sunlight was falling lazily through the window, the slow golden variety that came in autumn towards the end of the day. He stopped playing and dropped his violin abruptly onto a cushion at the side of his chair but kept hold of the bow. "What are the chances that the next person we see will have an above average number of arms?"
Watson looked up, he hadn't been listening and took a moment to replay the question in his head. "What?"
Holmes flicked the bow through the air and pointed the tip at him, demanding an answer.
"Nil, I would have thought, unless you know something I don't." He didn't put it beyond the realms of possibility that Holmes had engaged a case with the denizens of an Eastern freakshow including the Striped Tiger Man of Jaipur and Kali the Dancing Goddess of the Many Arms.
"I know numerous things you don't." His jibe was out of boredom more than spite.
"Well I know a lot of things you don't too."
He grinned lop-sidedly signalling he found that unlikely, although Watson's childishness amused him.
"You are so full of yourself," he complained without rancour.
Swish went the bow. "Answer the question." Flick-swish.
The doctor sighed; he's sure that most people did not have these sorts of conversation. "Nil," he said.
"Are you willing to bet?"
He rolled his eyes. "Yes." Of course he knew there was some flaw, some twist that meant the obvious answer was not the correct one, but there's nothing for it but to take the obvious answer as he was supposed to and wait for Holmes to explain.
The bow traced a triumphant figure of eight in the air. "You owe me dinner."
Of course he did. "Fine." He waited. No elucidation was forthcoming. "I find myself none the wiser," he prompted.
The detective flashed up a smile, bright and with a hint of mockery in it. "Indeed, but you are remarkably better informed."
Watson laughed. "Holmes," he warned.
He relented. "As a doctor you should be all too aware that many of the populace do not have two arms, having the misfortune to have lost one to disease, injury or a malformation of the body. But there are remarkably few individuals born with three. Therefore..."
"The average number of arms possessed by humanity as a whole is marginally less than two."
"One point nine eight seven, according to my calculation."
He nodded. "You know," he said, picking at the side of his thumb, "you could just say you wanted to go out for supper and it was my turn to pay."
"Don't be ridiculous."
He grinned. "Simpsons?"
"Wonderful."
The light has changed, a shadow falling where none lay before, and it jars him towards lucidity again. There is a man standing in the room with him. He should perhaps wonder about that, but he feels pleasantly languid, gently stupefied...
They were both stretched out on the floor like a couple of gypsies amidst a scattering of cushions and the wreckage of a staunchly appreciated meal, a half-drunk bottle of Claret between them.
Watson drained his glass. "This is extremely pleasant. I could do this all day." He reached over and claimed the bottle, refilling both their glasses.
"Mm, what's that charming colloquialism? 'Until the cows come home.'"
He shifted slightly to stop his leg stiffening but was feeling too ruthlessly indolent to move further. "And when they do I should tell the bovine fraternity to sod off and stop interrupting me."
His eyebrows tilted. "Do you find your life frequently interrupted by cows?"
The conversation had taken a turn for the whimsical. "Not frequently, no," Watson allowed.
His smile was sly and sharply amused. "What about Lady Lawrence's ball?" On that occasion Watson had been bothered all night by a veritable herd of cows dressed in silk, frills and diamonds - and not stimulating line of conversation between them.
A snort; Watson had been pestered and bored in equal measure but then as now he was too mannered to pass comment.
He acknowledged no such constraint. "It was lucky they didn't serve beef for dinner otherwise it would have been cannibalism," he muttered and was rewarded by the doctor's laughter.
But no, that can't be right, his stomach feels empty, grinding hollowly to itself. It does not feel like a late summer afternoon at Baker Street, too chilled, too damp, too dark - added to which there is a sensation like nausea and exhaustion twined tightly around him. But Watson is there, isn't he? He's always there.
Waistcoat in disarray and hair far worse, he had collapsed onto the ottoman, limp as a wet rag and just as used up. A pause and then a sigh that was half-way to a growl. "Some days I find it exhausting living up to people's good opinion of me." Such a statement should have been facetious, should have contained bathos, but somehow it skirted both.
A smart reply was on the tip of the doctor's tongue but he swallowed it; his eyebrow raised to the silence that followed. "Has it occurred to you that if people have a good opinion of you it's because you've already proved it?"
There was a grunt in answer, clear Holmsian short hand for 'don't be so bloody ridiculous, dear boy, people are idiots.'
A twist of the lips, not quite a smirk. "So if people are idiots, why do you pay the slightest mind to what they think in the first place?"
A low growl. "I don't."
"Patently," Watson badgered, "you do."
An irritated flick of wrist and finger which would have worked better if he was holding his bow. "I do not. When have I ever?"
"Just now, unless I'm very much mistaken."
"You are," it was as swift rejoinder with a dose of petulant acerbity.
"Very well," he said breezily. "My task in life is to be frequently mistaken despite the fact I'm not, and your task in life is to disappoint those you encounter despite the fact you don't." He sighed, a loud and overly-theatrical gust of relief. "I'm so glad we have that sorted."
There was a mumble from the Ottoman which may or may not have been 'you're a bastard'.
"I beg your pardon, what was that?"
"I hate you."
"Ah. Nothing new there then."
One eye, bright and dark as a blackbird on a winter's morning, opened and gave him a look.
Watson read in its colour and shape a whole letter's worth of annoyed sniping and deep affection, muddled together in a way that no one else could possibly understand but he. "Quite," he said with amusement.
Holmes, stretched out and dishevelled upon his cushions still looked like Hamlet, but Hamlet with a quite uncharacteristic smile.
Watson always did his best to chivvy him out of his moods, using every weapon at his disposal from wry humour to a swift kick. But there are some things that run deeper than ennui and the casual touch of the Noonday Demon. Some fissures which cannot be bridged, stains which prove indelible - Watson knew that, didn't he?
The detective twitches, trying to view events in their proper order; put the words chronologically, the hours alphabetically.
There are things he ought to speak of – a thousand bubbling thoughts – but one memory sits above them all like a maleficent Buddha, fat and tarnished and grinning. He wishes it would go away: he does not care for its expression, its sunken eyes, domed forehead, and its nasty superiority.
"I couldn't beat him," he confesses. The Buddha that is not Buddha tips its head in an oddly serpentine movement. "I followed him, chased every twist and turn, found every hint and tracked every crime. But it achieved little." His voice is bitter, he can feel it turning ashen in his mouth but he forces himself to speak on. "You always said I was brilliant... My brilliance was not enough."
"Sir?"
There is something wrong with the voice, or the word, but turn the shape of it round and round in his hands as he does he cannot slot its angles into a solution, so he discards it and ploughs on. "The files no longer fitted on the desk, you saw how they spilled down the shelf – so much paper, a record of every deed – but not one that could be pinned to him..." He is assaulted by the image of a child's party game – pin the tail on the donkey. He's blindfolded and spun round and round, reaching blindly to impale the shadow with a hatpin, stab the specimen Summum Malum to a board, and he laughs. There does not seem to be enough air: he wonders where it went as the laugh is strangled from him.
"There is a story, is there not?" It takes a moment for him to realise that the thought he can see turning and twisting upon itself in the air like a Jacob's ladder is not easily discerned by anyone else. The light it gives off – an antiqued gold turning copper – must render it too bright to read. "Ten righteous men," he explains. "For those ten, god will save the city." He smiles, sickly and thin, because the ladder is tangling itself, mocking him. "I used to have hopes that I was one such man... I shall not aspire to such vanity again." There is a hollowness yawning inside him and he lifts the bottle to his lips to fill it; a line of the tincture runs down his cheek and soaks into his collar as he swallows.
"I did it on purpose. Being a thorn in his side. Tried to snag and tangle him not because he would trip but because he would eventually have to draw a blade and cut me loose from his coat. Brawls and falling masonry and run-away cabs – I knew I had his attention. He came to visit me – no, I visited him – well, we met in the same locale." A hazy and knowing look because that statement was the tip of a very jagged iceberg that would make an epic telling. But that tale is an adventure – and adventures are for firesides and good humour and the Strand. They are not for here. Not for now.
"His hospitality was impeccable. Received a brandy and two cracked ribs; in exchange he received an adamant refusal to halt hostilities. Case closed." The smile is back, only this time it is like the grimace of a dying fox. "Had to get him away from his home-ground, it didn't matter where... I must have had a reason for Switzerland. Did I?"
Watson does not answer, stands as he has been standing, awkward and to attention but not canted to the right.
"Glad you leg's better old boy," he mutters, a thought tugging at the back of his mind but unable to struggle through the poppy-juice. "Where did I? – Switzerland – yes, Switzerland... Switzerland."
NOTES
Yen – from the kanji for opium
On the gander – looking for
Brighter hoke to play – better things to do
Ngong baht-paw hai – Cantonese: crazy nosey bitch c*nt
Hou sei la lei – Cantonese: drop dead, go to hell.
Hm ga tsan – Cantonese: a curse upon your whole family
Ribbons in Holmes' mind - plum velvet = Adler, hunter-green = Mrs Hudson, black silk = Mycroft, russet = Lestrade, silk corbeau = Moriarty, tarnished military braid = Moran, dark blue = Watson
Rorty split in lay with the Miltons - a dashing detective in league with the police
Summun malum – Latin: the supreme evil