In her corner, Emmy hugs the shadows, keeping low. Christ have mercy, she thought the Ketch'd have more brain than this. Letting the Don Jack talk, all the while as he slips further and further away. She'd stand up and give the idiot what for but she doesn't want to be recognised. He'd seen her at Parkhouse when the Jack was there; such remembrances could make her life difficult. Damn do-gooders always thinking they know what's best for her, unable to understand that for all its squalor the Rookery is the place she chose over a family too embarrassed to mention her. A family who would rather lock her away than have her taint their name.
She battles with herself, biting her lip as she struggles to see the possible outcomes and the likelihood of each. There are six ways this could play out without the deus ex machina of divine intervention. In three of them he's already dead. In the remaining three his chance of survival is linked inexorably with who takes action and when. In only one is his survival mostly assured.
She bites her lip harder; if this causes her trouble – which it will, it always does - then she'll kick it all to his door – but at least he'll be alive for her to shout at.
There is a hiss, a feral noise such as a cat might make, and a pinched pale face surrounded by rat-tails of blood-red hair looms out of the darkness, darting forward to snatch the bottle from the detective's hand. She ignores his feeble murmurs of protest and glares at the constable. "Are you blind you can't see?" she scolds. "He's killin' himself."
Clarky resists the urge to rub at his eyes and confirm they aren't playing tricks on him; the honey'd poppy fumes are making him feel somewhat drunk. He stares at her stupidly for a moment, his mind struggling to order itself after the shock of the girl's appearance and revelation.
"Step short - get 'im out of here, f'the love o'god."
"How long have you..."
Damn Ketches and their stupid questions. She slaps the detective's hand as he reaches for the blue bottle, her accusing glare never leaving the constable. "He needs his Crow – I sent word but..."
"Crow?"
"His bloody Crow – the sawbones with the limp..." Mentally she changes gear – where'd he been holed up he couldn't understand a touch of cant? "The doctor. Watson."
Holmes flinches at the name and reaches again, fingers hooked and insistent.
She gives him a vicious look and tips the bottle so the contents pours onto the floor, splashing against the hem of her skirts. "Shut it," she snaps at his complaint. "I'll give you what for when you ain't lushed!" There is annoyance in her tone but an absence of true spite.
"Athanasian bitch!" That on the other hand is nothing but spite.
Her eyes harden at the insult.
"Little bleached-mort blowsabella..."
She huffs out a short breath, determined not to lose her temper, but unable to keep her words free of sarcasm. "Real sharp voker, well done. When you ain't glock an' coopered, I'll tell you what you said," she warns. "It'll kick your hykey rotten."
He hadn't finished, has in fact still been slurring invectives as she speaks. "Dirty twist Tom-puzzle in a bunter's benjy," he rasps unpleasantly. "On the mag n' pull for a quid. Slum toffer, macing the lot, put the down on you, wench, raise beef t'that an..."
"An' tellin' you're drake to a mallard would put you in Chancery an' all," she says blandly, "ain't we both content? Quit mouthin'..."
"Judas," he snarls. "Judas bitch!"
"At least he kept good company," she says quietly.
His head jerks back against the pillows and his eyes show hurt bemusement. There is a hidden sting in her words, more painful than the earlier bruising of his cheek – perhaps because his mind is dulled and the true bite of her words unfurl with the slowness of a deliberate knife-cut and not the swift jab of a strike. Her words implied an acceptance – almost an insouciance of his slur. But beneath that acceptance lay an elevation of himself to the status of fellow disciple or – even worse – a Christ figure. He frowns, momentarily uncertain whether he is in the process of embracing death or rising from it. Both states were equally hazy and martyrdom he recalls, hurts.
She rounds on the constable, her expression still keeping its twist of displeasure. "Gimmie a lick o' card an' ya lead," she demands, holding her hand out.
Clarky takes an instant to untangle her words and divine their true meaning – she's after his notebook. "Miss..."
"Only need a leaf of it," she explains impatiently. "Give."
He obliges, taking out notebook and pencil and turning it to a fresh page before handing it over. She crouches at the low table, licks the tip of the lead and starts to write. Clarky peers to catch the words that flow across the page with a grace that surprises him – he hadn't expected her to know her letters and certainly not with such precise confidence.
She hunches a little. "Leave off," she admonishes as she scratches out her list. "Ain't for you." She finishes, tears out the page and returns both book and pencil to him, folding the scrap into the back of one of her mismatched gloves. She rises, and looks critically at her charge, lying supine and griseous amidst the cushions.
She didn't like his chances. The part of her that notices things (everything) - that counts seconds and floorboards, calculates cobblestones and pennies, lists scent and sensation until she wants to scream just to drown it out - has been busy. (The smaller bit of her, the lock box at the back of her head that withstood the cracksmith of her madness, tells her calmly that she'll pay for this knowledge, pay in fits and tears and delusion for three days straight and Charlie will probably have to stash her in the cupboard...) He'd been here for five hours – or more importantly three pipes and six mouthfuls of laudanum. She's been here for an hour and a half. It takes half an hour to get to Gloucester Place half that again if she's missed her guess and the Crow was at Baker Street. (But why would he be? Didn't sound much like the Jack had hooked back up with him. Love-a-mercy...) If Charlie had caught a cab – he has tin and a glib tongue, he should have done it – and had brought the Crow, they both should be here by now. What the hell was keeping them?
The Jack's more than half gone, his lips and nails are blue; she can't wait any more. "Pick 'im up," she tells the constable.
"Miss, I..."
"I ain't bleedin' carryin' 'im!" she snaps.
He looks at her, and she reads a sort of hopelessness in his eyes as he tries to find the correct way to behave, wanting what is best, but having no reason to accept further orders from some chit in rags who'd come from nowhere and snarled at everyone.
"Cool at 'im!" she demands desperately, pointing. "Open y'bloody lights!"
Clarky looks down at the man lying on the chaise and in that moment it is as if her command sharpens his sight, like a telescope adjusted to focus. He had been seeing Sherlock Holmes; a genius, a ghost, an iconoclast of irritation and infallibility who would pay any price in the name of justice. He'd been blinding himself with the legend. Now he sees the man. A man worn thin and cinerious with dark shadows at his back; a man poisoned with opium and self-hate, a Lazarus who wished he'd stayed dead.
The realisation is like a punch in the gut, forcing the air from his chest and making him dizzy and afraid.
"He needs the Crow – his blood's slowin' – we need t'get 'im cared for. Pick 'im up."
The constable nods and does as he's bid, stooping to gather up the semi-conscious detective and heft him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. Emmy snatches up the Don Jack's discarded coat and hat and – for reasons of her own - the ivory opium box, before leading the way out of the den.
The air outside bites cold and damp, coils of river-mist and coal-smoke curling through the rain; harsh, but cleaner than the infected miasma of the poppy-house. "Gotta leg it t'the junction for a cab. Keep y'head down an' keep up..." She sets off at a brisk pace, trusting that Clarky's longer legs can match hers despite his burden. She doesn't want to be out in the cold and rain, doesn't want to be towing a Ketch through territory not her own. But most of all she doesn't want Sherlock Holmes to swap his milltag for a shroud.
A broad shadow looms out of Colt's Cut into her path, one hand low ready to knock her off balance, the other hand masked and hefting a billyclub.
Cat-quick she hops to the left and back, avoiding his gambit. "Fainlights!" she calls. To say thieves never steal from their own would be a lie, but it isn't a habit they indulge in much as it frequently leads to low profits and sharp retaliation of the shiv-in-the-ribs variety.
The shadow pauses.
She silently prays enough of Clarky's glim and brass is hidden by the Jack's body, and lets her madness put words in her mouth. "Ay cove - get 'ere fadded wi'th' ikey over Chapel 'fore darkman's done. Rook'll string me guts if I turn honest!" She grins, tipping him a wink. "Gotta be on the fly - dog's well green but we've a rum lay. Cokum ends swell, Bill Abnay, I'll drop you a deaner o'jenny for bein' right bencull." She gives him an odd salute as if the matter's settled and she doesn't require his permission to leave with her head unbeaten.
It is of course natural in the face of such easy confidence that he gives it. "Bone and benneh," the shadow growls in acknowledgement and retreats.
Emmy's hands are shaking. She doesn't know how she knew it was Abnay, no doubt tomorrow her mind will unsnarl its reasoning in nonsensical flashes that make her sick. It's getting harder to concentrate, to hold it all together, not to get distracted (Three Colt Street: fifth of a mile long, fourteen gin mills, four flashkens, two dens, sixteen people on foot, seven whores loitering, one body decomposing, five cats, two dogs (one rabid), nineteen feet to the corner of Commercial...) Concentrate!
"Emmy!" the shout knifes from the dark like a harpoon, spearing her fragmenting attention and drawing it in.
Thank Christ and St Giles for small mercies.
The tall and narrow-shouldered figure of Charlie pelts towards her out of the rain, boots striking hard on the cobbles. "He's here. Went t'Marylebone first, was what took so long, thought he'd be there. C'mon!"
She grabs his hand, needing the stability of his presence, needing to clasp something real. She casts a glance behind her to check the Ketch is still in her wake and hurries, putting even Charlie's longer legs to work. "You tell 'im?"
"That it was yen poisonin'? Aye."
"You tell 'im who it was?"
Charlie scowls beneath his cap. "He didn't ask."
Emmy isn't sure whether she wants to laugh or cry. She hadn't counted on the Crow's good nature and adherence to duty to roll that far. He'd been pulled from his house – maybe even his bed – told he was needed and to hurry – and he hadn't asked for whom he took the trouble.
She'd assumed that if the Don Jack was in London than the one who would know of it first was Watson. But the confession she had heard showed the crafty bastard hadn't let on. He'd snuck around finishing his business with the Head Hunter and the Yard leaving no one else any the wiser. The Crow was about to get the shock of his life...
She makes an incoherent noise of hissed vexation. "He don't know, Charlie!"
He would have stopped as the realisation jolted him but Emmy is pulling him ever onwards. "Huh. Well," he says practically as he spies the carriage ahead of them, "He'll find out soon enough."
"My eye," Emmy swears at the pavement.
Charlie unlatches his hand from hers and sprints the last few yards to the carriage door, flinging it open. "We got 'im," he tells the man inside. "He's here." Then he steps back, ready to help the Ketch lift their delivery in.
The doctor leans out of the carriage, squinting through the fog and drizzle to see a young woman of the streets hurry up followed by a policeman with a body hefted over his shoulder. The woman rushes towards him, one hand on the carriage, her countenance stern, her eyes frantic. "Here," she says, pressing something into his hand. "Keep it safe – if he looks t'be goin' you'll need it t'call 'im back."
He frowns at the scrap of paper and pockets it – it is a distraction and he needs none if he has a patient to tend to. The young woman throws a bundle of hat and coat she was carrying into the hackney, not caring where they land, and then allows the policeman and the young man room to dispose of their burden.
"Clarky?"
The Constable is unusually grim faced, but beneath that something like pity or apology is writ in the tilt of his features. "Doctor," he acknowledges with strained politeness as if there is a great deal more he wishes to say but is all too aware he's run out of time.
Watson retreats to the far corner of the carriage: Clarky enters awkwardly clasping an unconscious man by the shoulders as the two Street Arabs grasp hold of his feet and all three strive to get the body safely stowed. There is little light in the carriage, illumination comes weakly from a streetlamp outside St Anne's churchyard. Something pricks at the back of the doctor's mind as he opens his bag and shakes out the blanket he brought with him, a familiarity he can't place. "Put him up on the seat, here, across me," he orders. The next moment he has his arms full of the body and is concentrating solely on bracing himself comfortably so he can keep hold of his patient without spilling him onto the floor. "Clarky..."
"Sir?" The policeman is still in the confines of the carriage and has made no move to leave – a clue in itself if Watson had the attention to spare, which he doesn't.
"Lay the blanket over him. I need you to assist me until I reach my surgery..."
The door of the carriage is slammed shut and the young unfortunate calls out clearly to the cabby, "Upper Baker Street. Two-two-one. Shift y'self!"
"Hey-up!" the cabby hollers, flicking the reigns against the horses' rumps and causing the conveyance to lurch into motion.
"My surgery..." the doctor protests, a strange feeling of twined hope and dread taking root in his stomach despite his confusion.
"Baker Street, sir," Clarky corrects firmly.
Watson's heart has began to beat an uncomfortable rhythm of double-time, the hammer of it loud in his ears. With a Herculean effort, he drags his eyes away from the Constable's face and to that of the man he holds across his lap. He doesn't want to look, because he knows who he wishes to see, just as he knows that is impossible and the truth – the disappointment – will be like having his heart shattered all over again.
The hackney rattles apace down the streets heading ever north-west to Marylebone, the roads widening and the streetlamps becoming more frequent as they leave the bounds of the Rookery. It is in the opalescent and ever-flickering stutters of light cast by each lamp passed that Watson beholds the man's face. The cheekbones are a little too pronounced, the jaw stubbled, the eyes long-lashed and sunken in shadow beneath coal-black brows and a shock of snarled black hair, silvered at the temples. It is a face older and worn with greater hardship than he remembers, but it is still unmistakably that of Sherlock Holmes.
He opens his mouth but no sound emerges. He doesn't believe in miracles. There was a time he had hoped, had waited for his friend to appear at his door: battered hat at an angle too avant-garde to be fashionable, dark eyes scintillating with humour and the thrill of some new mystery to be solved. But that time had passed long since. He blinks, but the broken vision before him doesn't fade or change; he was not mistaken.
Holmes.
He feels narrow channels of warmth run down his cheeks and the sting of salt in his eyes. Stupid infuriating maddening idiot – it has been three years! With that the racing of his heart is arrested by a cold wash of fear from his gut that drowns out adrenaline and shock entirely. Holmes was back from the dead, but he'd overdosed on opium and if he wasn't cared for he wouldn't be back for very long.
Watson uses practice and professionalism to put steel in his nerve and stop him from falling apart completely. He taps at the man's cheek, lightly at first and then harder. "Holmes? Holmes! Wake up. It's extremely dangerous for you to sleep. Damn it, wake up man!" There is no reaction. "How long's he been like this?"
"Not long sir. He was awake 'til just before we left – five minutes maybe ten at the most."
Watson's mouth turns down at the edges grimly. He prises open one of Holmes' eyelids and leans down, waiting for the next streetlamp to illuminate iris and pupil. A split-second of light shows what he feared: the iris reflects wide and huge, the melanic colour of rich tobacco and treacle. The pupil is nothing more than the tiniest fleck of black, withered and turned inwards to dreams and catatonia. Next he presses his thumb gently against the bruise-coloured lips and notes their colour does not abate. He reaches two fingers inside Holmes' collar and feels on the left of his neck for a pulse. The beat of blood beneath his fingertips is caprizant, an uncertain stutter. Lastly he slips his palm under the open waistcoat and lays it against the sternum; Holmes is breathing, but it's slow and shallow as if his lungs are too tired to fill themselves with air and so labour at quarter capacity.
This was not good.
He reaches across and unbuttons the top tier of the shirt, his brows pinched together in worry. He lays his palm against Holmes' chest again, first against the breastbone, next to the lower right side of the ribs: the skin beneath his palm is cold and clammy. Leaving his right hand as it is he reaches his left into his bag without looking, fingers knowing well their business and able to find his stethoscope without visual aid. Hooking the earpieces in he holds the stem of the apparatus against Holmes' flesh, listening intently. It is both as he expected and as he feared: fluid is starting to build in the lungs. There isn't much, not yet, but the fact it's there at all bodes ill; a surfeit of opiates often leads to a pulmonary edema – a state both dangerous and potentially fatal. He unhooks the stethoscope and drops it back into his bag, his eyes set on the man lain in his lap all the while.
Clarky has watched the proceedings in anxious silence. "Will he be all right, sir?"
Watson swallows, trying to remember how to speak because the world had been spinning so fast on its axis he feels the force of it may well have struck him dumb. He swallows again, reluctant to meet the Constable's gaze; some irrational part of him believing that if he stops looking at Holmes even for a moment, he may disappear or die or prove to have been a nightmare after all.
"I don't know. If we can rouse him enough and get some charcoal into him I believe he'll – he'll..." He finds he can't say 'live' or any euphemism pertaining to the same because that is an admittance there's a real and gaping possibility he may die. Should unconsciousness become a coma then he will not wake up. And should the workings of his lungs become any more hampered or fluid-filled then he will suffocate. Watson knows these things as medical fact, but he doesn't wish to give them any more credence in this situation than he has to.
"We'll be there soon sir," Clarky offers, a sop of consolation but one that they both need to hear; as if getting Holmes safely stowed in Baker Street will prove his salvation.
Watson nods, not trusting himself to speak, and continues to watch, keeping vigil over his all too mortal ghost.
NOTES
Step short – hurry up
Lushed – intoxicated
Athanasian bitch – bitch was the worst insult one could level at a lady, worse than whore. An 'athanasian wench' was a slut who was up for anything. So the two together are likely the most insulting thing Holmes could have said.
Bleached-mort blowsabella – attractive yet ill-presented young woman, a slattern.
Voker – thieves' cant, slang.
Glock and coopered – crazed and worn out, useless.
Hykey - pride
Dirty twist Tom-puzzle in a bunter's benjy – a nasty slut, a lesbian in a beggar-whore's clothes
On the mag n' pull for a quid – screwing everybody over (literally and figuratively) for a little money.
Slum toffer – a rich person of good family 'slumming it'.
Macing the lot – Fooling everybody
Put the down on you, raise beef t'that – Rouse everyone's suspicions, tell everybody
Drake to a mallard - homosexual
Put you in Chancery – put in an awkward and undesirable position
Tin - money
Cool at him – look at him
Milltag - shirt
Fainlights – Peace, a truce.
Glim and brass – insignia on a uniform
Cove – a man
Fadded wi'th' ikey over Chapel 'fore darkman's done – to store something safely with a Jewish receiver of stolen goods in Whitechapel before dawn.
Honest - idle
On the fly – on the move
Dog's well green – my associate's inexperienced
A rum lay – an inspired plan
Cokum ends swell – job goes to plan
I'll drop you a deaner o'jenny for bein' right bencull – I'll give you money for a drink for being a good mate.
Bone and benneh – all good, satisfactory.
My eye – popular curse