My bride had changed her dress during the day, and was beautiful in a silk evening gown on our wedding night. Gems glittered at her throat and wrist: her mother's, she had told me, given to her on the occasion of her first marriage. She had asked my permission to wear heirlooms with such strong associations to her last husband, and naturally I had allowed it. The man was dead, and though I did not want his ghost to haunt our life together, nor did I wish to make him a forbidden subject – I could think of nothing more unfair. For my part, I had told her what I could of Mary, and, though she could not possibly have understood that it was in the same category, of Holmes. I felt I must do this, to try to retain some integrity – my stocks of which seemed sadly diminished.

I took her hands, and slowly removed the fine gloves she still wore. I pressed her fingers to my lips, trying to banish from my mind the comparison of these dainty digits with the elegant, but so much more substantial fingers of my great friend.

We walked to the bedroom and I held her close and kissed her, bringing her up onto tiptoes, and wishing that I was unaware that she was now in the self-same position I was obliged to assume when I kissed Holmes. I ran the backs of my fingers down her cheek, her neck, across her clavicles. She sighed and tilted her head, cat-like away from my touch. I kissed her again, softly, on the mouth, then lightly on her cheek, barely across her ear, a little more firmly on her neck. I felt her swallow, saw the flush rising from her chest, and pushed her gently back to look into her eyes. She closed them as our gazes met, and nodded calmly, putting her arms around my neck for a brief instant before she let go and turned her back on me, holding a few stray ringlets of hair away from the fastenings at the top of her dress.

I undid the hooks, kissed her naked back on each vertebra as I unfastened my own shirt and left it open for her to remove. Then I turned her to face me, and she pushed her hands lightly under my shirt, letting it fall from my arms, before a gentle shrug allowed her own dress to slide down. I cursed the day such complicated undergarments had been created for women, but helped her remove them, thinking, or rather trying not to think, of the ease with which Holmes' underthings could be discarded.

She let me press her down onto the bed, remove her slippers and stockings and run a hand fleetingly across her thighs. I turned away to take off my trousers, something in me did not want her to watch, or help. The feeling passed, and I came to her, lying myself down next to her on the counterpane and resting one hand on her belly, the tip of my thumb pressing into the soft, lower curve of her breast.

She was indeed a lovely woman. Not lovely with the glow and freshness of youth, but charming in her contentment and still firm enough to be a pleasure to gaze upon. I rolled carefully on top of her, taking my weight on my elbows to either side of her. I had lain like this with Holmes on too many occasions to count, but then I had not supported my weight, but merely crushed him until he grunted that it was too much, and had rolled me off him, or turned us all the way about so that he could reciprocate.

I shook my head. I would not think of Holmes when in bed with my wife! I simply would not.

We kissed for a long time, and I did not let myself contrast her small, sweet mouth with his tobacco-sour, pressing, pulsing one; nor the light, fluttering touches of her hands on my back with his frantic grasping of my ribs: his fervid clutches that were only matched in their intensity by my own arms, wrapped firmly about him.

I laughed softly as she blew a ticklish breath across my shoulder on purpose, and was thankful that at least we were both experienced. I did not think I could have behaved myself enough to take a virgo intacta to my bed in a gentlemanly fashion any more.

Her experience was undoubted. Her smiles and teasing vanished as the heat began to rise in her, and she ran a hand down my belly, between us, sliding her nails into the curls of my pubic hair and letting them run up the side of my member. I was hard enough to take her. Maybe not so rapidly aroused as I had been on occasion in the last year or so, but nonetheless, quite anxious for further stimulation.

Shifting my weight onto one arm, I followed her hand down, brushing across her fingers, and rubbing my palm across the soft curling hairs on the mound below her belly. She moved her hips, straining into my touch, and I slipped my fingers down between her thighs, letting a single finger trail between folds of flesh slippery with the proof of her readiness. I stroked her there, gently bringing her further into the abandonment of full arousal, supposing that even with her past experience, none of it could have been recent enough to make my way as easy as it might be in future.

She moaned and the fingers of one hand dug into my shoulder. I positioned myself above her, and pressed in, letting my weight carry me down and into her.

Her long breath of acceptance was truly sensual, a feminine sound of pure satisfaction. I gave her a moment to adjust, then moved, delighted as her hips began to move in time with mine, tugging on me enough to increase my pleasure.

We moved slowly, I was unsure of the extent of her fragility – feared I might forget myself and begin to assault her with the force and vigour of the thrusting I had permitted myself with him.

'Harder, my love, I shan't break,' she breathed. I smiled, glad to be directed by her, glad not to have a purely passive body beneath me, but a woman who knew what she wanted. There, at least, she could compete with Holmes.

I shook myself, trying to stop this. The constant comparison was wearing, it was unfair, and it was most definitely unwise. But there was nothing I could do. You cannot simply forget someone with whom you have been so intimately involved. The physical differences I could allow myself – they were merely instructive and interesting; but I vowed I would not compare the emotions in which they each wrapped me. I would not compare what I felt for Holmes with what I felt for my wife. I would not do it.

Her legs came up around me, pulling me into her more deeply. The warmth and the sensation made me groan, though it was not as intense as the tightness to which I had grown used, and I increased my pace, which only made her grip the tighter, her hands pressing firmly into the flesh of my back.

I rose up over her, rubbing against her pubis with each stroke, remembering how Mary had always loved that. She gasped and arched into me, trying to increase the speed and the pressure of her own accord. I thought that maybe next time I would see if she might take charge. Not this time though. Not when she was already so close, the flush on her chest rising further, her hands running rampant over my skin, her belly sucking away from me, legs suddenly gripping me tightly as she spasmed around me, head thrown back on her long neck.

I kissed that neck as she came down, her breathing irregular and desperate, making high little sounds in her throat. She tilted her head down, seeking my lips, and I gave them to her as I resumed my movements inside her, making her twitch in my arms. The tight, coiling pressure had brought me close myself, and I pulled out of her, rolling off to the side, and finishing into my own hand, all the time thinking that if I had done that in Holmes' bed, I would have found myself on the floor. My mind wandered to imagining how it would have been if we could have shared a double bed.

I dragged my mind back to the present in shock, disgusted with myself. I had just climaxed with my wife, my WIFE. And now I was thinking of him. That hurt me.

The problem was not that I was thinking of the wrong person, but that I was thinking at all. An orgasm with Holmes had always left me too weak to string thoughts together; too emotionally wound up to do anything but cling to him, desperately, so that he could not leave me, never leave me... and, oh, God help me, I had left him, and now there was nothing to be done.

'John?' Caroline was bending over me, still prettily pink in her cheeks, but with an expression of deep concern on her face. She stroked my chest and I pulled myself together, gave her a genuine smile and caught her hand in mine. It fitted inside it perfectly.

Her scent was sweet, floral, alien to the masculine world from which I had escaped.

And where was he tonight? Alone in his bed? Or spending it sleeplessly in the front room of Baker Street, or drowsing in his chair, or playing the violin until the neighbours screamed and Mrs Hudson came to tell him off... All were intolerable to think of. Tomorrow we would leave for our honeymoon on the coast (I had been determined to steer well clear of moorland, with its many memories, and she had been pleased with the idea of the seaside,) and it would be just like the many times I had taken myself off without him. There would be no call to think of him. Just a week of newly-wed bliss with a woman who made me very nearly as happy as he did.

I kissed the woman lying half on top of me, as lazily as she kissed me, and listened to her fall asleep on my shoulder, while I lay awake, wishing for oblivion and feeling more caddish than I had ever felt with some six-penny whore in the darkest days of army life.