First published by Improbable Press in 2020
Improbable Press is an imprint of:
Clan Destine Press
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PO Box 121, Bittern Victoria 3918 Australia
Copyright © Darcy Lindbergh 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data:
Darcy Lindbergh
The Watches of the Night
ISBN: 978-0-6488487-4-5 Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-6488487-5-2 E-book
Cover artwork by © Wendy C Fries
Design & Typesetting by Clan Destine Press
Improbable Press
improbablepress.co.uk
For fandom, for giving me the courage to tell stories,
for the tables of New Orleans, for helping me decide which story to tell,
and for Leslie, for always believing I could tell this one, and for
every comma in it.
'I left Holmes seated in front of the smouldering fire, and long into the watches of the night I heard the low, melancholy wailings of his violin, and knew that he was still pondering over the strange problem which he had set himself to unravel.'
A Study in Scarlet
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887
Preface
Night falls, and London comes alive.
Gas lamps sputter into life, gloomy and ineffective against the fog that descends upon the city. There's something wild about London at night, something swift and ruthless that feeds in the shadows, growing and twining insidiously into the brickwork: intrigue and conspiracy, greed and violence, loneliness and fear and despair.
It was into this darkness that Sherlock Holmes cast his light.
I was not surprised to find that Holmes made his detective's living from deeds so often done by cover of night. The night is a natural hiding place, after all, a refuge where no one sees too clearly nor looks too closely, where everyone sins and so no one's sins are counted. Where people shed their masks and become what they truly are, instead of what they pretend to be.
Men are easier to kill in the dark.
And easier, sometimes, to kiss.
So like a magician revealing an impossible trick, Holmes unveiled the depths the night could hold: the secrecy and the mystery, the terror and the beauty, the peril and the peace. He took me, hand in hand, and led me through the shrouded life that's lived between dusk and dawn, and showed me every wondrous, dangerous thing – except for those things which I showed to him.
Night falls.
The adventure begins.
Chapter One
The first night, I laid awake for hours.
My injuries often left me awake in the months since I had returned to London, exhausted yet unable to sleep – but this felt different. I had never lain awake out of such keen excitement, with such hope for the morning.
It was the first night after I had met Sherlock Holmes, and I felt different.
The offer to share rooms had been unexpected but not unwelcome, and despite Stamford's cautions to me about Holmes' character, I looked forward to meeting him again. He was a curious fellow, with sharp eyes and a quick tongue; his enthusiasm for his experiment had been captivating, and the exchange of our vices both charming and startlingly practical. I found myself quite interested in him, in a way I had been interested in little else since my return to England.
His hands had been bandaged, I remembered; his skin blotched with chemical discolourations. He'd stuck his finger to draw blood – not clumsiness, but carelessness: his physical self subservient to discovery.
I had no idea, that night, what the coming nights might eventually mean to Holmes and I – what we might come to mean to one another. Instead, I remembered his hands, and wondered if my medical expertise may yet be of some use.
I hoped it would be.
It was already well into the evening when Holmes finally arrived at 221B Baker Street with his own possessions. I had spent the day working myself into a state over the prospect of sharing lodgings, being unaccustomed to spending much time in company, and was relieved to finally have my fretting cut short.
I needn't have worried, though. Holmes was genial and accommodating, but after we had spent several hours settling our things, he seemed just as uncertain of himself, just as unused to constant companionship. It set me at ease: we were both unsteady in the society of others, and would therefore have the chance to decide for ourselves how we might best live together.
It was over a late dinner that I broke our tentative silence. 'You knew I had been in Afghanistan, when we met,' I said. 'But I cannot think how you knew to look me up.'
'I didn't,' Holmes chuckled, though he didn't elaborate. 'It's a curious thing – people enjoy hearing things they already know about themselves, when the circumstance is right.' He looked at me from the corner of his eye, as if eager for an invitation, and my interest could not be helped.
'You said yourself we should know each other, if we are to live together,' I said. 'What circumstance could be better?'
Holmes settled himself in front of the fire, settled a pipe between his teeth. For a long moment, he merely looked at me, his eyes sharp and his smile slowly fading into his focus. 'You must tell me if I get anything wrong,' he said, rather sternly.
I readily agreed, but I needn't have bothered – he was right about nearly everything. His declarations ran something like this:
- that I was Scottish by birth, but often spent summers in London; that I had been a lonely child, though he did not comment on my parents;
- that I preferred my tea and liquors strong, and my desserts mild, though before my time abroad it had run the other way around;
- that I had studied at the University of London and at Netley; that I had wanted to be a soldier since I was small;
- that I had been a good student; that I had played rugby somewhat regularly; that I was never in trouble exactly though was not a model of ethics (my breath stopped here, and so did he, without elaborating on the subject);
- that I had landed first in Bombay, before joining the fighting in Candahar; and that I had been shot, but that my actual injury lay more in my mind than in my body.
He continued this way for some time, jumping from my childhood in Edinburgh to my preferences in literature, from my interest in anatomy over chemistry to my inclination toward rereading the papers to calm my nerves.