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holmestice2017-12-04 07:45 am
holmesticemods) wrote in holmestice2017-12-04 07:45 am
fic for miss_violet_hunter: A Scandal in Britannia
Title: A Scandal in Britannia
Recipient:![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
miss_violet_hunter
Author:oldshrwesburyian
Verse: A Study in Emerald
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Irene Adler, Wiggins, Kitty Winter
Rating: T
Warnings: Some Lovecraftian violence (canon-typical levels of detail)
Summary: A sequel to Neil Gaiman's brilliant "A Study in Emerald," this explores the development of Holmes & Watson's relationship as they begin their work as Restorationists in a London ruled by the Old Ones. Holmes flouts the law gleefully; Watson becomes his accomplice in high treason, and of course, as always, his partner.
Also on AO3: A Scandal in Britannia
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” — H.P. Lovecraft
“If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are too heated, it will cool you. If you are depressed, it will cheer you. If you are excited, it will calm you.” ―William Ewart Gladstone
Even after the brutalities of Afghanistan, I had been unprepared for the Shoreditch Horror. Afterwards, Holmes (for so I may call him, in these pages) made us both tea. He stirred too much sugar into my chipped mug, and very civilly pretended not to see that my hands were shaking. Our partnership then was not what it has since become.
“You did splendidly,” said my friend.
“Don’t.” The word was almost a groan. “And don’t tell me it was necessary or that it was justified, for I believe those things as devoutly as you do.”
Holmes’ only response was a meditative hum. My bad temper was, you may think, unpardonable, and a strange symptom of reaction from one who had done what I had that night — but I had looked into the thing’s eyes before I had killed it. Him. The Prince.
“What do we do now?” I asked; I myself was surprised by how weary my voice sounded.
“We go to ground,” responded my friend, without hesitation. “We have been hunters; we must become the prey.” He laid one hand gently on my shoulder. “But not for long.”
I was sorry to leave the Strand Players. Their community was the first I had known since the war, and I feared our departure would not guarantee their security. To the second lead I said as much, later that night; my concern was met with her pealing laughter.
“Oh, doctor!” exclaimed Kitty, “don’t fret so! It ain’t as if we were law-abiding!” She winked broadly at me. “No, we’ll do fine. We’ll have your plays to remember you by — and after all, you’re not going far.”
I tried not to show my pique at being left out of my friend’s elaborate schemes. It was, after all, my role to play the innocent expert. Our shared work required me to be above suspicion. When I bound myself to the Restorationist cause, I pledged also that I would remain officially unremarkable. I would be nondescript, anonymous, and lethal. For that night and the nights that were to follow, we had crafted a persona more elaborate than those worn by my friend when he trod the boards, and yet with a kernel of truth at its heart. Were I to be discovered by a policeman on his rounds while lying in wait for one of our targets, I would live to tell the tale in freedom: an honorable doctor who had fought in Their wars, called out by a hoax, a pretended accident. The police would not know enough of knives to disprove my story. It is no mere vanity to say that I have always been good at crafting stories.
My belongings were few, and soon packed. Entering Holmes’ dressing room after a perfunctory knock at the door, I found him handing a note to Wiggins.
“Look sharp, mind,” he advised the boy.
“What, will ‘e give me the fearful frights?”
“Nothing like that,” said my friend severely, “for you are to be cheerful and polite to him, and entirely ignorant of the identity of the man who gave you this.” Remarkably, the lad departed without further irreverences.
“Ah, Watson, you are ready,” said Holmes without looking at me. “Capital — the chase is on!”
It was a strange chase indeed that he led me on that night. To enter the rookery of St. Giles, in those days, was to forsake the ordered world that They had made. Indeed, we aspired to nothing else. Before an injustice can be unmade, it must be abandoned. And so, long after the chimes had told midnight, after even our fellow-actors had retired — whether to their homes or to gin palaces and public houses — we vanished.
I know not how Holmes navigated that world: not by scent, like the hunting dog he took for his alias. The stench of poverty and its attendant decay was everywhere overpowering, yet more wholesome than what we had experienced in the presence of Prince Franz Drago. If Holmes found his way by sight in the falling darkness, then he saw landmarks I was powerless to pick out among rotting timbers, crumbling brick, peeling paint. I was careful to stick close to him, to lift my feet, and not to examine too closely our surroundings. He would reproach me for that, of course, but I had seen more than enough destruction, more than enough filth. I had seen — in Afghanistan and again that very night in Shoreditch — what was beyond seeing, what could not be described. Yet when They chose to reveal Themselves in Their true forms, it was a revelation that compelled belief. And that belief might well drive any man or woman to insanity.
“Almost there now, Watson,” said Holmes. He always seemed to know when my wound was paining me. Had it not been madness to suspect such a thing of a Restorationist, I would have deemed him to have more than mortal powers himself.
When he brought us to a halt, at a narrow, eyeless house, I did not hear the first of his exchanges with the woman who unlocked the outer door to us. Entering, I all but stumbled on the threshold; Holmes caught me firmly under the arm.
“Tea, I think, Mrs. Hudson,” said he, and I began to laugh. Whatever horrors preyed on the night, and whatever monsters walked in the day, tea remained a panacea. As implicitly trusted as any patent nostrum, remedy for grief, for shock, for confrontations with that which could not be understood and could not be unseen…
“With whisky in it,” said Holmes grimly, and got his arm around me. I did my best to choke down my hysterical laughter, but only managed to reduce it to a stifled whimpering against his shoulder.
Holmes was tactful enough not to deposit me in the chair. But he stood by me a moment after dropping his arm, before crossing the room to make up the fire. So I sat, and tried to calm my breathing, and to focus on when and where I was. Holmes bent over the coal scuttle; I focused on the movements of his thin back under his threadbare coat. I knew he had given Kitty Winter rent money last week, and the seam at his right shoulder was working itself loose. I rubbed thoughtfully at the upholstery of the chair I was cradled in. I’d have to do up the coat for him sometime. I wondered idly if the chair had come from his student digs; its shabbiness seemed to derive from a poverty more genteel than that which characterized the rest of the room. The table had newspaper wedged under one leg, and there was a chip in the basin. It was with a jolt of anxiety that I took in the double bed in the corner of the room. I had not told Holmes about the dreams.
When Mrs. Hudson brought the tea tray, I did not move. I was trying very hard not even to think. Without question and without hesitation, Holmes seated himself on one arm of the ancient chair and held the mug up as if I had been a sick child. The tea was brewed strong, the whisky was poured generously, and I drank and coughed and drank again, surprising myself with my own docility. There were a hundred things I wanted to say to Holmes, and I could frame none of them into words. We sat together in exhausted silence.
By the time I finished the tea, my hands had stopped shaking. Still in silence, Holmes returned the mug to the table and took up his tumbler of whisky. He drank it off at once; seeing lines of tension smoothed from his face, I marveled at his mastery of the situation and of himself.
“Well, Watson,” said he briskly, “we have done a good night’s work, and have earned our rest.” Upon which Holmes turned his back and began to undress, arranging his clothes with characteristic neatness on one of the spindly chairs.
It is true that I had spent two years in the army, and much of the time since with the Strand Players. Necessity demands that neither soldiers nor thespians be shy of stripping off in the presence of others. But for the Strand Players I was only a scribbler, and Holmes had not yet seen the scars. I moved slowly, my limbs weighed by reluctance more than by weariness. Holmes’ fire was drawing well, and yet I shivered. I forced myself to move steadily, not glancing aside to assess what Holmes was doing, if he was watching me. The bullet that shattered my shoulder at Maiwand had left a mark that had faded to silver and shrunk to the size of a coin. Not so the other.
I still do not know what to call it, the Thing that found me at Peshawar. It loomed up at me from the darkness, sudden as the memory of war, and still more foul. It came as if it knew me, and sought me, with a malevolence that was anything but blind. The last thing I remember is the sound of my own screaming. The encounter left me with scars like living things, twining around my leg like vines, like tentacles, obscenely like the tracks of a lover’s fingers. And with the dreams.
Sharply I shut the latch of my case. When I turned, it was to find Holmes looking at me. He was not staring at the leg, or conspicuously trying not to; he was simply regarding me, half-quizzical, half-abstracted, as if I were a mystery to be solved.
“Which side do you prefer?”
“What?” I had been prepared for any number of questions — What happened? When? Does it still pain you? — but I could make no sense of his.
“Of the bed.” He was smiling a little, now, at my slow-wittedness.
“Oh! I… The wall, please.” I liked to know what was at my back; I liked to know that I could only be attacked from one side. I did not want to confess any of this to Holmes.
“Excellent,” said he, as though he meant it. “Then I think I shall play a little before retiring — that is, if you have no objection.”
“I — no, none at all.” Gratefully I crawled under the pile of quilts. I was tense with cold, and with the fear of what dreams might come. Moreover, if the truth be told, I found myself more than a little shaken by Holmes himself. Comrades we had been since he drew me into the Players, and confederates since the night he had appalled and thrilled me by making his treasonous proposition without even sounding my convictions. He told me afterwards that my Restorationist sympathies were apparent to anyone capable of using their faculties of observation in a scientific manner. Needless to say, this had alarmed me still further. But still: on that night of shocks, perhaps not the least was the matter-of-fact way in which Holmes accepted me as a partner.
Under the weight of the quilts, with Holmes tuning his violin, I began slowly to relax. Mine not to reason why, in the words of the poem; mine not to reason why… here I was, pursued by the law, murderer of nobility, and suddenly the companion of a solitary man’s existence. I exhaled deeply. On the same breath, Holmes began to play, and I drifted into a dreamless sleep.
When I woke in the night, it was to find Holmes’ bony, unequivocally human frame as a strangely reassuring presence at my side. When I woke in the morning, it was to find him gone, though the quilts were still warm.
He returned, to my astonishment, bearing breakfast.
“Holmes!” I exclaimed, struggling upright. “However did you…?”
“Don’t get up,” he responded cheerfully. “Mrs. Hudson has a Scotswoman’s understanding of breakfast, for which I have often had cause to be grateful.” He deposited himself and the tray on the side of the bed, and began to discourse in his comfortable, desultory fashion of conventions of the drama, and the under-representation of breakfast in the modern theatre. By the time I leaned back against the pillows, satisfied that I had let no morsel of toast or kedgeree go to waste, I had agreed that this sad neglect of breakfast would be redressed in my own future work.
“Capital,” said Holmes, moving the tray to the table before returning to swing his long legs under the covers. “Now, Watson: to business.” I forbore to mention that we were sitting under a pile of ancient quilts in an under-heated garret, fugitives from the law, fed only by the charity of a mysterious but pragmatic Scotswoman. It would have seemed tactless in the face of his boundless confidence.
“I have a piece of work for us,” said he, “which, if we can bring it to a successful conclusion, will in itself justify a man’s life on this planet.”
My blood ran cold. “Holmes,” I said, “you are not thinking… you are not thinking of killing Her?”
“Oh, not yet,” said my friend blithely, and I shuddered. I also wondered, not for the first time, what he had seen and done. What made him so ready to confront ideas and realities that would terrify most men of normal experience — that even terrified me?
“No,” continued Holmes, apparently oblivious to my dismay, “we are going to kill the King of Bohemia.”
I put my head in my hands. “Holmes…”
“I do not know the exact date yet,” said he; “it is planned for no later than Saturday week.”
“But Holmes,” I protested, “you cannot possibly lay a false trail in so short a time, not while remaining out of sight of the police, to say nothing of those whom They may have directed to aid the police.”
“The trail is already laid.” His voice thrilled with the excitement of the hunt; his alias, Rache, was a well-chosen one. “Quiet your fears, Watson; let me explain, if you will, before voicing your doubts. The decision to dispatch the King of Bohemia so soon after the execution of Franz Drago was a strategic one. They are not only both nobility, but they are both foreigners, and it is that latter identity which, it is to be hoped, will be highlighted by the gutter press.
“Now: you know that I was with the Strand Players in Prague. It was an instructive period.” I watched his jaw tighten, and inferred something about the types of instruction he had received there. “It is,” said Holmes, “unlike London, a city that cherishes the pasts moving beneath its surface. What we played there was nothing like the entertainments you have written for us. In Prague we dealt in archetypes. And we gave our performances before crowned heads.
“You are acquainted, of course,” said Holmes, “with Mademoiselle Aiglon.”
“Insofar as a playwright may be acquainted with a leading lady.”
“Hum, yes! Well… it will have become obvious to you that Aiglon is no more her real name than mine is Vernet.” (It was nothing of the kind, but I deemed it bootless to interject.) “Still, she has some claim to it, as I have to my nom de guerre… but I shall not bore you with histories of the first part of this century. Her strength may be partly due to the fact that she carries some of Their blood in her veins. She is, however, as passionate a Restorationist as you or I. The King of Bohemia — what is the quaint phrase? — took a fancy to her. Her response to that alone would have been enough to gain my admiration, but we found ourselves also as comrades in deception, given to walking the streets of Prague in disguise after our official work was done.”
Holmes glanced sidelong at me, to see how I was taking all this. I suppressed both concern and jealousy, and did my best to return his level, neutral gaze.
“Well,” said Holmes again, “we returned from Prague as allies — and it is she who has been laying the scent for the King of Bohemia.”
“Good Lord, Holmes.” As so often, I found myself out of my depth with him, with the reasoning which he thought of as obvious, the data which he thought of as self-explanatory.
“It is this, in part,” continued Holmes, “which has kept her with the Strand Players, when she could so easily have found work with a more prestigious company.”
“Oh.”
Holmes grinned, and there was something savage in his expression. “Mademoiselle Aiglon and I, I fear, are natural hunters. Well, we have found a common quarry.”
“And I?” I confess that I found myself slightly chilled, despite the quilts.
“My dear doctor,” said Holmes, purring like a tiger, “you combine a specialist’s skill with every appearance of honesty and a genuine, fundamental, and apparently indestructible innocency.”
I swallowed. “Thank you,” I said, though the words stung.
“I am not paying you a compliment,” said Holmes acerbically; “I am describing matters as I see them. Your striking lack of duplicity,” he continued after a moment, “is arguably a disadvantage in a Restorationist, but it makes you a very restful companion. And a valued friend.”
I shook my head at him, unable to keep amusement from twisting my mouth. “You’re a strange man, Holmes.”
He twinkled at me. “Is that meant for a compliment? Or only a description of matters as you see them?”
***
Strangely, when I look back on those weeks in the Rookery with him, it is as a time of comparative tranquility that I remember it. Sitting in a nest of blankets, Holmes would describe to me the streets so that I saw them spreading beneath me in my mind’s eye. I had learned to know territory from a map alone — or from a man’s lips — in the army. I had no idea where he had gleaned his knowledge, but it was so precise that under his tutelage, I began to explore the Rookery, to know its places and its people, to walk confidently, to buy oranges and haggle for them, to become known as a fixture of the neighborhood. It would, of course, have been unsafe for us to venture out together. About his own wanderings I never asked him. It was not that I did not dare to do so, exactly. I knew, however, that his response to such a question would be to look me in the eyes and refuse the danger to us both that would come of sharing such knowledge.
Perhaps to compensate for the careful silences between us, I shared unnecessary confidences, and teased them from him. Not even a fateful encounter with a terrier freezing onto his ankle had shaken his fondness for dogs. I told him of my own bull pup. It pleased us both, I think, in those tense days, to imagine a future in which we might survive to middle-age, to the tranquility of two old bachelors being pulled around a park by a dog. Most Restorationists did not live long.
I spent many evenings listening for Holmes’ tread on the stair, which never varied. Whether exhausted or elated — or wounded, as he was in a scuffle with a politician and a trained cormorant, though that is a tale for another time — he ascended the steps with even gait and measured pace.
What first alerted me was his silence on entering. I looked up from sharpening my knives to find his glittering eyes fixed on me, hard as steel; a hectic flush burned in his cheeks.
“When?” I asked.
“Tonight; it must be tonight.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Your knives are ready, I see.”
“Always ready for the work.”
“That’s my good doctor.” He grinned, and again I saw the hunter in him. Woe betide the foes of such a man.
With steady hands I began to replace my knives in their case. “Where?”
Holmes chuckled. “Albion Hall.”
“Holmes! It is madness! We cannot escape undetected…”
“A king commands,” he countered calmly, “and his pleasures will be catered to. We will be quite alone.”
I exhaled deeply. “May I at least know the plan?”
“Of course,” said Holmes, still with the same infuriating imperturbability. “It starts with having a good dinner.”
At a vegetarian restaurant in Soho, he unfolded the outline of a plan beguiling in its simplicity. “Simple crimes,” he opined, “are always the most difficult to solve. They offer no obvious entry point, no tantalizing vision of the outré to engage the imagination of a police inspector. No,” continued Holmes dreamily, “true simplicity is the best of all defenses. Our quarry, who is calling himself the Count von Kramm, has long desired Mademoiselle Aiglon to perform for him.” The line of his jaw tightened. “She has so arranged it that they will meet in the Albion. What Von Kramm welcomes as the prelude will in fact be his last act.” Holmes stretched himself, cat-like, in his chair.
“I, of course,” said he, as if it should be obvious, “will be Mademoiselle Aiglon’s lowly accompanist. And you will not be visible at all. You know the theatre?”
“Army pension, Holmes.”
“Ah. Yes. My apologies. It is small — a jewel of a place — and designed for the comfort of its artists as well as its audiences. No, Watson, I do not digress; it is free of velvet draperies and similar foolishness. There are, in other words, no obvious hiding places, and this is all to the good. He will suspect nothing. Can your leg manage an hour or so on the floor between the seats?”
“I’ve suffered worse in a lesser cause.”
“Good man. Come along; it is almost time for the curtain to rise on our performance.”
In silence and in darkness we entered the theatre. It was more than eerie to move in stealth, like the criminals we were, around a building clearly designed for crowds. Over the stage loomed a mural of the Queen of Albion herself, Victoria Gloriana, enthroned upon the crimson moon.
It seemed an age that I lay in the darkness. While we waited, Holmes played. I suppose it was only a part of his rôle, but I could not help but feel cheered by the notes of the violin, arising from no need, serving no apparent purpose but to tell me that I was not alone.
At last there came steps, and voices. I heard Mademoiselle Aiglon’s rich contralto laugh, and I marveled at her skill at dissimulation as I had never done in the wings of the Royal Court Theatre.
“No, no, mein Lieber,” said Mademoiselle Aiglon, and directed her companion to the seats several rows in front of me, both her hands in his.
“What have you chosen?” asked the King, and I saw Mademoiselle Aiglon smile.
“Something very special,” she said. “A treat.” I could have sworn that, briefly, her dark and lustrous eyes held mine. And then she mounted the stage. Holmes stood transformed into another man, a poor musician with a hangdog expression and a slouch that only vanished when he took up his violin. At his insistence, I had not mended his coat, and its shabbiness added to the perfect verisimilitude of his disguise. At least until he played — I confess that I didn’t think much of the so-called Count as a connoisseur, if he failed to recognize the quality of this instrument and its musician.
Then Mademoiselle Aiglon sang, and hidden in the shadows, I felt my hair stand on end. Here was all the sorrow of the world, and all the pity of it, and yearning desire for peace after suffering. Holmes met my eyes, and I knew I could not hesitate. Silently I drew forth my knives. On the plush carpet, my uneven stride left its telltale marks, but made no sound. I stood behind the King without his knowledge. Mademoiselle Aiglon reached the end of a beseeching phrase. I saw the King breathe — his body moving under his clothes in ways belonging to no human form.
The violin sang on the cold air of the theatre. And with Holmes’ music hovering over me like a benediction, I struck.
This was the third legacy of my encounter at Peshawar: the uncanny, unlearned, unerring knowledge of how to kill one of Them, how to slice into those Beings, whose anatomy was as darkly mysterious as the rest of Them, and to do so in a way that would both end Their lives and annul Their power. As I had discovered after the Shoreditch Horror, of course, such an encounter was not without its aftereffects. But in that moment, I was free of fear.
I moved as if guided by the music itself, as if my knife carved a pattern in the wake of Holmes’ violin, its intricate turns and grace notes; as if I slashed a line as unerring as that of Mademoiselle Aiglon’s clearly focused contralto. The King of Bohemia tried to stop me, of course, but I eluded him with a balletic control that was mine nowhere else. I was more than a doctor, more than a soldier; I was the judgment of humanity upon its gods, and I was unstoppable. At last, the Thing that had called itself the Count von Kramm was laid open at my feet, an anatomical specimen, hideous indeed, but no longer unknowable.
Holmes sprang down from the stage, abandoning the Stradivarius to Mademoiselle Aiglon. His arm was around me before I knew I was in danger of tottering with reaction and relief.
“Come,” said Mademoiselle Aiglon, “come; the best resource is flight when we are pursued by so formidable an antagonist.”
“Lestrade?” said Holmes. “Pah.”
“Not Lestrade,” said she; “another. I have heard only rumors, but they are enough to compel caution.”
“Very well.” To my astonishment, Holmes, while I cleaned my knives on the dense carpet, was groping in the pockets of the unspeakable corpse. “Ah!” he cried at last. “I have it.” What he held was a photograph of Mademoiselle Adler with the King.
“Good.” Mademoiselle Aiglon laid a hand — surprisingly strong, as well as slender — on my arm. “You were splendid, Doctor.”
I laughed, a little wildly. “Holmes said much the same thing.”
“Your friend is a wise man,” said she, with true warmth in her voice. “Come, gentlemen, away from this place. We must pretend to be a trio of bohemians on a belated romp.”
“Capital,” said Holmes. “I know a place near the docks that makes a fine cup of tea. Shall we?”
The Beginning
Notes:
What Holmes plays for Watson on the first night is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2323zHpROUY. Originally written for voice, the beginning may be freely translated as follows: “My songs softly entreat you through the night: come down to me, beloved, come to the silent grove. The slender treetops rustle, whispering in the moonlight. Do not fear the listening of a traitorous enemy.”
The Albion Theatre and its mural of course belong to Gaiman’s Lovecraftian London, but its architecture owes much to the Wigmore, which has excellent acoustics but no such sinister history.
What Holmes plays while they’re waiting in the theatre is Fritz Kreisler’s “Liebeslied”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jniNETA36Us
What Mademoiselle Aiglon sings is Bach, “Erbarme Dich,” sung here by contralto Kathleen Ferrier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh_1CKyZVSc
On the vegetarian restaurants of Victorian London, which Holmes canonically knew: https://wellcomecollection.org/events/vegetarian-restaurants-19th-century-london
Recipient:
Author:
oldshrwesburyianVerse: A Study in Emerald
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Irene Adler, Wiggins, Kitty Winter
Rating: T
Warnings: Some Lovecraftian violence (canon-typical levels of detail)
Summary: A sequel to Neil Gaiman's brilliant "A Study in Emerald," this explores the development of Holmes & Watson's relationship as they begin their work as Restorationists in a London ruled by the Old Ones. Holmes flouts the law gleefully; Watson becomes his accomplice in high treason, and of course, as always, his partner.
Also on AO3: A Scandal in Britannia
“If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are too heated, it will cool you. If you are depressed, it will cheer you. If you are excited, it will calm you.” ―William Ewart Gladstone
Even after the brutalities of Afghanistan, I had been unprepared for the Shoreditch Horror. Afterwards, Holmes (for so I may call him, in these pages) made us both tea. He stirred too much sugar into my chipped mug, and very civilly pretended not to see that my hands were shaking. Our partnership then was not what it has since become.
“You did splendidly,” said my friend.
“Don’t.” The word was almost a groan. “And don’t tell me it was necessary or that it was justified, for I believe those things as devoutly as you do.”
Holmes’ only response was a meditative hum. My bad temper was, you may think, unpardonable, and a strange symptom of reaction from one who had done what I had that night — but I had looked into the thing’s eyes before I had killed it. Him. The Prince.
“What do we do now?” I asked; I myself was surprised by how weary my voice sounded.
“We go to ground,” responded my friend, without hesitation. “We have been hunters; we must become the prey.” He laid one hand gently on my shoulder. “But not for long.”
I was sorry to leave the Strand Players. Their community was the first I had known since the war, and I feared our departure would not guarantee their security. To the second lead I said as much, later that night; my concern was met with her pealing laughter.
“Oh, doctor!” exclaimed Kitty, “don’t fret so! It ain’t as if we were law-abiding!” She winked broadly at me. “No, we’ll do fine. We’ll have your plays to remember you by — and after all, you’re not going far.”
I tried not to show my pique at being left out of my friend’s elaborate schemes. It was, after all, my role to play the innocent expert. Our shared work required me to be above suspicion. When I bound myself to the Restorationist cause, I pledged also that I would remain officially unremarkable. I would be nondescript, anonymous, and lethal. For that night and the nights that were to follow, we had crafted a persona more elaborate than those worn by my friend when he trod the boards, and yet with a kernel of truth at its heart. Were I to be discovered by a policeman on his rounds while lying in wait for one of our targets, I would live to tell the tale in freedom: an honorable doctor who had fought in Their wars, called out by a hoax, a pretended accident. The police would not know enough of knives to disprove my story. It is no mere vanity to say that I have always been good at crafting stories.
My belongings were few, and soon packed. Entering Holmes’ dressing room after a perfunctory knock at the door, I found him handing a note to Wiggins.
“Look sharp, mind,” he advised the boy.
“What, will ‘e give me the fearful frights?”
“Nothing like that,” said my friend severely, “for you are to be cheerful and polite to him, and entirely ignorant of the identity of the man who gave you this.” Remarkably, the lad departed without further irreverences.
“Ah, Watson, you are ready,” said Holmes without looking at me. “Capital — the chase is on!”
It was a strange chase indeed that he led me on that night. To enter the rookery of St. Giles, in those days, was to forsake the ordered world that They had made. Indeed, we aspired to nothing else. Before an injustice can be unmade, it must be abandoned. And so, long after the chimes had told midnight, after even our fellow-actors had retired — whether to their homes or to gin palaces and public houses — we vanished.
I know not how Holmes navigated that world: not by scent, like the hunting dog he took for his alias. The stench of poverty and its attendant decay was everywhere overpowering, yet more wholesome than what we had experienced in the presence of Prince Franz Drago. If Holmes found his way by sight in the falling darkness, then he saw landmarks I was powerless to pick out among rotting timbers, crumbling brick, peeling paint. I was careful to stick close to him, to lift my feet, and not to examine too closely our surroundings. He would reproach me for that, of course, but I had seen more than enough destruction, more than enough filth. I had seen — in Afghanistan and again that very night in Shoreditch — what was beyond seeing, what could not be described. Yet when They chose to reveal Themselves in Their true forms, it was a revelation that compelled belief. And that belief might well drive any man or woman to insanity.
“Almost there now, Watson,” said Holmes. He always seemed to know when my wound was paining me. Had it not been madness to suspect such a thing of a Restorationist, I would have deemed him to have more than mortal powers himself.
When he brought us to a halt, at a narrow, eyeless house, I did not hear the first of his exchanges with the woman who unlocked the outer door to us. Entering, I all but stumbled on the threshold; Holmes caught me firmly under the arm.
“Tea, I think, Mrs. Hudson,” said he, and I began to laugh. Whatever horrors preyed on the night, and whatever monsters walked in the day, tea remained a panacea. As implicitly trusted as any patent nostrum, remedy for grief, for shock, for confrontations with that which could not be understood and could not be unseen…
“With whisky in it,” said Holmes grimly, and got his arm around me. I did my best to choke down my hysterical laughter, but only managed to reduce it to a stifled whimpering against his shoulder.
Holmes was tactful enough not to deposit me in the chair. But he stood by me a moment after dropping his arm, before crossing the room to make up the fire. So I sat, and tried to calm my breathing, and to focus on when and where I was. Holmes bent over the coal scuttle; I focused on the movements of his thin back under his threadbare coat. I knew he had given Kitty Winter rent money last week, and the seam at his right shoulder was working itself loose. I rubbed thoughtfully at the upholstery of the chair I was cradled in. I’d have to do up the coat for him sometime. I wondered idly if the chair had come from his student digs; its shabbiness seemed to derive from a poverty more genteel than that which characterized the rest of the room. The table had newspaper wedged under one leg, and there was a chip in the basin. It was with a jolt of anxiety that I took in the double bed in the corner of the room. I had not told Holmes about the dreams.
When Mrs. Hudson brought the tea tray, I did not move. I was trying very hard not even to think. Without question and without hesitation, Holmes seated himself on one arm of the ancient chair and held the mug up as if I had been a sick child. The tea was brewed strong, the whisky was poured generously, and I drank and coughed and drank again, surprising myself with my own docility. There were a hundred things I wanted to say to Holmes, and I could frame none of them into words. We sat together in exhausted silence.
By the time I finished the tea, my hands had stopped shaking. Still in silence, Holmes returned the mug to the table and took up his tumbler of whisky. He drank it off at once; seeing lines of tension smoothed from his face, I marveled at his mastery of the situation and of himself.
“Well, Watson,” said he briskly, “we have done a good night’s work, and have earned our rest.” Upon which Holmes turned his back and began to undress, arranging his clothes with characteristic neatness on one of the spindly chairs.
It is true that I had spent two years in the army, and much of the time since with the Strand Players. Necessity demands that neither soldiers nor thespians be shy of stripping off in the presence of others. But for the Strand Players I was only a scribbler, and Holmes had not yet seen the scars. I moved slowly, my limbs weighed by reluctance more than by weariness. Holmes’ fire was drawing well, and yet I shivered. I forced myself to move steadily, not glancing aside to assess what Holmes was doing, if he was watching me. The bullet that shattered my shoulder at Maiwand had left a mark that had faded to silver and shrunk to the size of a coin. Not so the other.
I still do not know what to call it, the Thing that found me at Peshawar. It loomed up at me from the darkness, sudden as the memory of war, and still more foul. It came as if it knew me, and sought me, with a malevolence that was anything but blind. The last thing I remember is the sound of my own screaming. The encounter left me with scars like living things, twining around my leg like vines, like tentacles, obscenely like the tracks of a lover’s fingers. And with the dreams.
Sharply I shut the latch of my case. When I turned, it was to find Holmes looking at me. He was not staring at the leg, or conspicuously trying not to; he was simply regarding me, half-quizzical, half-abstracted, as if I were a mystery to be solved.
“Which side do you prefer?”
“What?” I had been prepared for any number of questions — What happened? When? Does it still pain you? — but I could make no sense of his.
“Of the bed.” He was smiling a little, now, at my slow-wittedness.
“Oh! I… The wall, please.” I liked to know what was at my back; I liked to know that I could only be attacked from one side. I did not want to confess any of this to Holmes.
“Excellent,” said he, as though he meant it. “Then I think I shall play a little before retiring — that is, if you have no objection.”
“I — no, none at all.” Gratefully I crawled under the pile of quilts. I was tense with cold, and with the fear of what dreams might come. Moreover, if the truth be told, I found myself more than a little shaken by Holmes himself. Comrades we had been since he drew me into the Players, and confederates since the night he had appalled and thrilled me by making his treasonous proposition without even sounding my convictions. He told me afterwards that my Restorationist sympathies were apparent to anyone capable of using their faculties of observation in a scientific manner. Needless to say, this had alarmed me still further. But still: on that night of shocks, perhaps not the least was the matter-of-fact way in which Holmes accepted me as a partner.
Under the weight of the quilts, with Holmes tuning his violin, I began slowly to relax. Mine not to reason why, in the words of the poem; mine not to reason why… here I was, pursued by the law, murderer of nobility, and suddenly the companion of a solitary man’s existence. I exhaled deeply. On the same breath, Holmes began to play, and I drifted into a dreamless sleep.
When I woke in the night, it was to find Holmes’ bony, unequivocally human frame as a strangely reassuring presence at my side. When I woke in the morning, it was to find him gone, though the quilts were still warm.
He returned, to my astonishment, bearing breakfast.
“Holmes!” I exclaimed, struggling upright. “However did you…?”
“Don’t get up,” he responded cheerfully. “Mrs. Hudson has a Scotswoman’s understanding of breakfast, for which I have often had cause to be grateful.” He deposited himself and the tray on the side of the bed, and began to discourse in his comfortable, desultory fashion of conventions of the drama, and the under-representation of breakfast in the modern theatre. By the time I leaned back against the pillows, satisfied that I had let no morsel of toast or kedgeree go to waste, I had agreed that this sad neglect of breakfast would be redressed in my own future work.
“Capital,” said Holmes, moving the tray to the table before returning to swing his long legs under the covers. “Now, Watson: to business.” I forbore to mention that we were sitting under a pile of ancient quilts in an under-heated garret, fugitives from the law, fed only by the charity of a mysterious but pragmatic Scotswoman. It would have seemed tactless in the face of his boundless confidence.
“I have a piece of work for us,” said he, “which, if we can bring it to a successful conclusion, will in itself justify a man’s life on this planet.”
My blood ran cold. “Holmes,” I said, “you are not thinking… you are not thinking of killing Her?”
“Oh, not yet,” said my friend blithely, and I shuddered. I also wondered, not for the first time, what he had seen and done. What made him so ready to confront ideas and realities that would terrify most men of normal experience — that even terrified me?
“No,” continued Holmes, apparently oblivious to my dismay, “we are going to kill the King of Bohemia.”
I put my head in my hands. “Holmes…”
“I do not know the exact date yet,” said he; “it is planned for no later than Saturday week.”
“But Holmes,” I protested, “you cannot possibly lay a false trail in so short a time, not while remaining out of sight of the police, to say nothing of those whom They may have directed to aid the police.”
“The trail is already laid.” His voice thrilled with the excitement of the hunt; his alias, Rache, was a well-chosen one. “Quiet your fears, Watson; let me explain, if you will, before voicing your doubts. The decision to dispatch the King of Bohemia so soon after the execution of Franz Drago was a strategic one. They are not only both nobility, but they are both foreigners, and it is that latter identity which, it is to be hoped, will be highlighted by the gutter press.
“Now: you know that I was with the Strand Players in Prague. It was an instructive period.” I watched his jaw tighten, and inferred something about the types of instruction he had received there. “It is,” said Holmes, “unlike London, a city that cherishes the pasts moving beneath its surface. What we played there was nothing like the entertainments you have written for us. In Prague we dealt in archetypes. And we gave our performances before crowned heads.
“You are acquainted, of course,” said Holmes, “with Mademoiselle Aiglon.”
“Insofar as a playwright may be acquainted with a leading lady.”
“Hum, yes! Well… it will have become obvious to you that Aiglon is no more her real name than mine is Vernet.” (It was nothing of the kind, but I deemed it bootless to interject.) “Still, she has some claim to it, as I have to my nom de guerre… but I shall not bore you with histories of the first part of this century. Her strength may be partly due to the fact that she carries some of Their blood in her veins. She is, however, as passionate a Restorationist as you or I. The King of Bohemia — what is the quaint phrase? — took a fancy to her. Her response to that alone would have been enough to gain my admiration, but we found ourselves also as comrades in deception, given to walking the streets of Prague in disguise after our official work was done.”
Holmes glanced sidelong at me, to see how I was taking all this. I suppressed both concern and jealousy, and did my best to return his level, neutral gaze.
“Well,” said Holmes again, “we returned from Prague as allies — and it is she who has been laying the scent for the King of Bohemia.”
“Good Lord, Holmes.” As so often, I found myself out of my depth with him, with the reasoning which he thought of as obvious, the data which he thought of as self-explanatory.
“It is this, in part,” continued Holmes, “which has kept her with the Strand Players, when she could so easily have found work with a more prestigious company.”
“Oh.”
Holmes grinned, and there was something savage in his expression. “Mademoiselle Aiglon and I, I fear, are natural hunters. Well, we have found a common quarry.”
“And I?” I confess that I found myself slightly chilled, despite the quilts.
“My dear doctor,” said Holmes, purring like a tiger, “you combine a specialist’s skill with every appearance of honesty and a genuine, fundamental, and apparently indestructible innocency.”
I swallowed. “Thank you,” I said, though the words stung.
“I am not paying you a compliment,” said Holmes acerbically; “I am describing matters as I see them. Your striking lack of duplicity,” he continued after a moment, “is arguably a disadvantage in a Restorationist, but it makes you a very restful companion. And a valued friend.”
I shook my head at him, unable to keep amusement from twisting my mouth. “You’re a strange man, Holmes.”
He twinkled at me. “Is that meant for a compliment? Or only a description of matters as you see them?”
***
Strangely, when I look back on those weeks in the Rookery with him, it is as a time of comparative tranquility that I remember it. Sitting in a nest of blankets, Holmes would describe to me the streets so that I saw them spreading beneath me in my mind’s eye. I had learned to know territory from a map alone — or from a man’s lips — in the army. I had no idea where he had gleaned his knowledge, but it was so precise that under his tutelage, I began to explore the Rookery, to know its places and its people, to walk confidently, to buy oranges and haggle for them, to become known as a fixture of the neighborhood. It would, of course, have been unsafe for us to venture out together. About his own wanderings I never asked him. It was not that I did not dare to do so, exactly. I knew, however, that his response to such a question would be to look me in the eyes and refuse the danger to us both that would come of sharing such knowledge.
Perhaps to compensate for the careful silences between us, I shared unnecessary confidences, and teased them from him. Not even a fateful encounter with a terrier freezing onto his ankle had shaken his fondness for dogs. I told him of my own bull pup. It pleased us both, I think, in those tense days, to imagine a future in which we might survive to middle-age, to the tranquility of two old bachelors being pulled around a park by a dog. Most Restorationists did not live long.
I spent many evenings listening for Holmes’ tread on the stair, which never varied. Whether exhausted or elated — or wounded, as he was in a scuffle with a politician and a trained cormorant, though that is a tale for another time — he ascended the steps with even gait and measured pace.
What first alerted me was his silence on entering. I looked up from sharpening my knives to find his glittering eyes fixed on me, hard as steel; a hectic flush burned in his cheeks.
“When?” I asked.
“Tonight; it must be tonight.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Your knives are ready, I see.”
“Always ready for the work.”
“That’s my good doctor.” He grinned, and again I saw the hunter in him. Woe betide the foes of such a man.
With steady hands I began to replace my knives in their case. “Where?”
Holmes chuckled. “Albion Hall.”
“Holmes! It is madness! We cannot escape undetected…”
“A king commands,” he countered calmly, “and his pleasures will be catered to. We will be quite alone.”
I exhaled deeply. “May I at least know the plan?”
“Of course,” said Holmes, still with the same infuriating imperturbability. “It starts with having a good dinner.”
At a vegetarian restaurant in Soho, he unfolded the outline of a plan beguiling in its simplicity. “Simple crimes,” he opined, “are always the most difficult to solve. They offer no obvious entry point, no tantalizing vision of the outré to engage the imagination of a police inspector. No,” continued Holmes dreamily, “true simplicity is the best of all defenses. Our quarry, who is calling himself the Count von Kramm, has long desired Mademoiselle Aiglon to perform for him.” The line of his jaw tightened. “She has so arranged it that they will meet in the Albion. What Von Kramm welcomes as the prelude will in fact be his last act.” Holmes stretched himself, cat-like, in his chair.
“I, of course,” said he, as if it should be obvious, “will be Mademoiselle Aiglon’s lowly accompanist. And you will not be visible at all. You know the theatre?”
“Army pension, Holmes.”
“Ah. Yes. My apologies. It is small — a jewel of a place — and designed for the comfort of its artists as well as its audiences. No, Watson, I do not digress; it is free of velvet draperies and similar foolishness. There are, in other words, no obvious hiding places, and this is all to the good. He will suspect nothing. Can your leg manage an hour or so on the floor between the seats?”
“I’ve suffered worse in a lesser cause.”
“Good man. Come along; it is almost time for the curtain to rise on our performance.”
In silence and in darkness we entered the theatre. It was more than eerie to move in stealth, like the criminals we were, around a building clearly designed for crowds. Over the stage loomed a mural of the Queen of Albion herself, Victoria Gloriana, enthroned upon the crimson moon.
It seemed an age that I lay in the darkness. While we waited, Holmes played. I suppose it was only a part of his rôle, but I could not help but feel cheered by the notes of the violin, arising from no need, serving no apparent purpose but to tell me that I was not alone.
At last there came steps, and voices. I heard Mademoiselle Aiglon’s rich contralto laugh, and I marveled at her skill at dissimulation as I had never done in the wings of the Royal Court Theatre.
“No, no, mein Lieber,” said Mademoiselle Aiglon, and directed her companion to the seats several rows in front of me, both her hands in his.
“What have you chosen?” asked the King, and I saw Mademoiselle Aiglon smile.
“Something very special,” she said. “A treat.” I could have sworn that, briefly, her dark and lustrous eyes held mine. And then she mounted the stage. Holmes stood transformed into another man, a poor musician with a hangdog expression and a slouch that only vanished when he took up his violin. At his insistence, I had not mended his coat, and its shabbiness added to the perfect verisimilitude of his disguise. At least until he played — I confess that I didn’t think much of the so-called Count as a connoisseur, if he failed to recognize the quality of this instrument and its musician.
Then Mademoiselle Aiglon sang, and hidden in the shadows, I felt my hair stand on end. Here was all the sorrow of the world, and all the pity of it, and yearning desire for peace after suffering. Holmes met my eyes, and I knew I could not hesitate. Silently I drew forth my knives. On the plush carpet, my uneven stride left its telltale marks, but made no sound. I stood behind the King without his knowledge. Mademoiselle Aiglon reached the end of a beseeching phrase. I saw the King breathe — his body moving under his clothes in ways belonging to no human form.
The violin sang on the cold air of the theatre. And with Holmes’ music hovering over me like a benediction, I struck.
This was the third legacy of my encounter at Peshawar: the uncanny, unlearned, unerring knowledge of how to kill one of Them, how to slice into those Beings, whose anatomy was as darkly mysterious as the rest of Them, and to do so in a way that would both end Their lives and annul Their power. As I had discovered after the Shoreditch Horror, of course, such an encounter was not without its aftereffects. But in that moment, I was free of fear.
I moved as if guided by the music itself, as if my knife carved a pattern in the wake of Holmes’ violin, its intricate turns and grace notes; as if I slashed a line as unerring as that of Mademoiselle Aiglon’s clearly focused contralto. The King of Bohemia tried to stop me, of course, but I eluded him with a balletic control that was mine nowhere else. I was more than a doctor, more than a soldier; I was the judgment of humanity upon its gods, and I was unstoppable. At last, the Thing that had called itself the Count von Kramm was laid open at my feet, an anatomical specimen, hideous indeed, but no longer unknowable.
Holmes sprang down from the stage, abandoning the Stradivarius to Mademoiselle Aiglon. His arm was around me before I knew I was in danger of tottering with reaction and relief.
“Come,” said Mademoiselle Aiglon, “come; the best resource is flight when we are pursued by so formidable an antagonist.”
“Lestrade?” said Holmes. “Pah.”
“Not Lestrade,” said she; “another. I have heard only rumors, but they are enough to compel caution.”
“Very well.” To my astonishment, Holmes, while I cleaned my knives on the dense carpet, was groping in the pockets of the unspeakable corpse. “Ah!” he cried at last. “I have it.” What he held was a photograph of Mademoiselle Adler with the King.
“Good.” Mademoiselle Aiglon laid a hand — surprisingly strong, as well as slender — on my arm. “You were splendid, Doctor.”
I laughed, a little wildly. “Holmes said much the same thing.”
“Your friend is a wise man,” said she, with true warmth in her voice. “Come, gentlemen, away from this place. We must pretend to be a trio of bohemians on a belated romp.”
“Capital,” said Holmes. “I know a place near the docks that makes a fine cup of tea. Shall we?”
The Beginning
Notes:
What Holmes plays for Watson on the first night is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2323zHpROUY. Originally written for voice, the beginning may be freely translated as follows: “My songs softly entreat you through the night: come down to me, beloved, come to the silent grove. The slender treetops rustle, whispering in the moonlight. Do not fear the listening of a traitorous enemy.”
The Albion Theatre and its mural of course belong to Gaiman’s Lovecraftian London, but its architecture owes much to the Wigmore, which has excellent acoustics but no such sinister history.
What Holmes plays while they’re waiting in the theatre is Fritz Kreisler’s “Liebeslied”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jniNETA36Us
What Mademoiselle Aiglon sings is Bach, “Erbarme Dich,” sung here by contralto Kathleen Ferrier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh_1CKyZVSc
On the vegetarian restaurants of Victorian London, which Holmes canonically knew: https://wellcomecollection.org/events/vegetarian-restaurants-19th-century-london
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(Anonymous) 2017-12-05 10:05 pm (UTC)(link)I am thoroughly impressed by your craft and knowledge of canon.
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I really enjoyed this.
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