Watson:
For a moment I thought that Holmes might remember the remorse he'd felt when we'd found poor Selden's body on the moor. But no, her death had yet to touch him. I groaned and tried to hold still as Dr. Mortimer plied his needle, grateful to Holmes for his hand upon my other shoulder, and angry with him too, for not understanding. It was my fault. Of all men in the world, I should have known that once the distraction of the convict's death had been dismissed Holmes would return to his goal of completing the case against Stapleton with all the merciless force of a needle drawn to a lodestone. By his calculations the woman had been a co-conspirator, however unwilling, and not a victim. But he had never seen the fear in her eyes. He had not seen her corpse.
A thousand different solutions seem to spin behind my eyelids. Instead of convincing twelve stolid jurors we'd had only to convince Henry Baskerville. We could have found a way to steal Beryl from her brother. She could have testified... no, no, not as wife. She couldn't have testified against him. Holmes had made that calculation before me, damn his cold heart.
The needle scraped against a nerve and again my whole instinct was to move away from it. Holmes lay his other hand on my forehead to steady me, and my eyes flew open at the iciness of his touch. It was not only his heart that was cold. "You need to get warm, Holmes," I warned him, realizing only then that the trembling I felt was not all my own. "You're shivering."
"In a moment," he said coolly and looked to Dr. Mortimer. "Have you much farther to go?"
"A few stitches," Mortimer said. "I'm sorry to take so long, Watson, but I've so little catgut left after sewing up Sir Henry that I must make best use of it."
I closed my eyes and forbore telling him that I'd been reduced to using threads teased out of the ragged edges of blankets and soaked in carbolic to sew up the men in my care at Maiwand, that there were probably still knots under my skin from the inexpert job my poor orderly had done on me in my turn. He'd made one of the water carriers hold me down while he sewed, much the way that I was being held now. The poor fellow had been hit in the head by another shot from the Ghazis. For a moment memory twisted and I felt and tasted again the splattered bits of brain and blood.
"Holmes!"