It was a late afternoon in December, and the coldest winter of recent memory was full upon us. A dense white fog and the promise of snow had settled over the streets of London, the chill penetrating to the bone.
Mary had been called away once again to a friend’s sickbed, and without her wifely comforts, I did not hesitate to return to visit my singular friend in our old haunts at 221B Baker Street, now occupied by him alone.
My overcoat hung dripping in its usual place, and as I stood in our formerly shared quarters awaiting the appearance of Holmes, I thought fondly of my first days in this room. Just prior to first encountering Holmes, I had been in a sorry state. Discharged from the army, alone in London and short of funds, my nerves and health had been shattered by my recent service in Afghanistan. Of that ghastly campaign and its consequences, I have written elsewhere.
The lingering effects of my wartime experiences had been threatening to get the better of me. But my new life with Holmes had sent those demons hurtling back into darkness.
I stood, taking in the familiar sights – the homely clutter, Holmes’s Stradivarius carelessly deposited in a corner, the alphabetised notebooks and files cramming the bookshelves – and found myself wondering about Holmes’s own past. Despite our friendship, he had shared little of his early life with me.
Yet I was certain Holmes had ghosts of his own.
In Paris the previous year the remarkable French artist Lautrec had called my friend ‘a haunted man.’ But then, artists see things that others do not. The rest of us require more time.
A loud, clanking noise drew me from my reverie. Off to one side, on Holmes’s chemistry table, a complex apparatus of tubes and flasks steamed and bubbled, shuddering in some kind of effort. I approached to examine it.
‘Watson! How good of you to stop in!’ exclaimed the familiar voice, and I turned to see the thin figure of my friend bounding into the room in a burst of energy. He clapped me on the back with enthusiasm, drawing me away from the equipment and towards my old chair.
‘Sit, Watson! Give me a moment.’ He moved to the chemistry equipment and tightened a small clamp. The rattling subsided. Gratified by the result, he favoured me with a smile, then dropped into his usual chair opposite mine. Despite his typical pallor, he seemed unusually happy and relaxed, his tousled hair and purple dressing gown giving him a distinctly Bohemian look.
Holmes rooted for his pipe on a cluttered table nearby, stuck it in his mouth and lit it, tossing the match aside. It landed, still smouldering, on a stack of newspapers.
‘Are you well past our ghostly adventure, Watson?’ he asked with a grin. ‘Not still suffering from nightmares?’ A tiny thread of smoke arose from the newspapers.
‘Holmes—’
‘Admit it, Watson, you thought briefly that the Hound was of a supernatural sort, did you not?’ he chided.
‘You know that as a man of science, I do not believe in ghosts.’ I paused. ‘But I do believe in hauntings.’ A wisp of pale smoke rose from the floor next to his chair. ‘Look to your right, Holmes.’
‘Is there a dastardly memory in corporeal form there, Watson, waiting to attack?’
‘No but there is a stack of newspapers about to give you a bit of trouble.’
He turned to look, and in a quick move, snatched up the smouldering papers and flicked them into the grate. He turned to me with a smile. ‘Hauntings? Then you do believe!’
‘You misunderstand me. I am speaking of ghosts from our past, memories that will not let us go.’
‘Come, come, Watson!’
‘Surely you understand. I refer to things not said or left undone, of accidents, violence, deaths, people we might have helped, those we have lost. Vivid images of such things can flash before us, and these unbidden images act upon our nervous systems as though they were real.’
Holmes snorted. ‘Watson, I disagree. We are the masters of our own minds, or can be so with effort.’
‘If only that were true,’ said I, thinking not only of my wartime memories but of Holmes’s own frequent descents into depression.
The clanking from his chemistry table resumed, loudly.
‘What the devil is that?’ I demanded.
He did not answer but instead jumped, gazelle-like, over a stack of books to the chemistry apparatus where he tightened another small clamp. The clatter lessened and he looked up with a smile, before once again sinking back into the chair opposite mine.
‘Holmes, you are leaping about the room as though nothing had happened a year ago. Only last month you were still limping. How on earth did you manage such a full recovery?’
The grievous injuries he had suffered in Lancashire the previous December in the adventure I had named Art in the Blood had plagued him throughout 1889, and even in Dartmoor only weeks earlier. But he had forbidden me to mention his infirmity in my later recounting of the next several cases. Had I described him as ‘limping about with a cane’ (as in fact he was, at least part of the time) his reputation would have clearly suffered.
But now any trace of such an impediment was gone.
He leaned back in his chair, lighting his pipe anew. ‘Work! Work is the best tonic for a man such as myself. And we have been blessed with some pretty little problems of late.’ He flung the match carefully into the fire.
‘Yes, but in the last month?’
‘I employed a certain amount of mind over matter,’ said he. ‘But ultimately, it was physical training. Boxing, my boy, is one of the most strenuous forms of exercise, for the lower as well as upper extremities. Only a dancer uses the legs with more intensity than a boxer.’
‘Perhaps joining the corps de ballet at Covent Garden was out of the question, then?’ I offered, amused at the mental image of Holmes gliding smoothly among dozens of lovely ballerinas.
Holmes laughed as he drew his dressing gown closer around his thin frame. Despite the blaze, a deep chill crept in from outside. A sudden sharp draught from behind the drawn curtains made me shiver. The window must have been left open, and I got up to close it.
‘Do not trouble yourself, Watson,’ said Holmes. ‘It is just a small break in the pane. Leave it.’
Ignoring him, I crumpled a newspaper to stuff into the gap and drawing back the curtain I saw to my surprise – a bullet hole!
‘Good God, Holmes, someone has taken a shot at you!’
‘Or Mrs Hudson.’
‘Ridiculous! What are you doing about it?’
‘The situation is in hand. Look down at the street. It is entirely safe, I assure you. What do you see across and two doorways to the right?’
I pulled back the curtain and peered down into the growing darkness. There, blurred by the snowfall, two doors down and receding, spectre-like into the recesses of an unlit doorway, stood a large, hulking figure.
‘That is a rather dangerous looking fellow,’ I commented.
‘Yes. What can you deduce by looking at him?’
The details were hard to make out. The man was wide and muscular, wrapped up in a long, somewhat frayed black greatcoat, a battered blue cap pulled low over his face. A strong, bare chin protruded, his mouth twisted in what looked like a permanent sneer.
‘Bad sort of fellow, perhaps of the criminal class. His hands are in his pockets, possibly concealing something,’ Here I broke off, moving back from the window. ‘Might he not shoot again?’