• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 339 0

mathematical problems and exercises in logic. I doubt that lasted more than a couple of days, however, before the engine began to run down. After that, I thought of many disjointed things. I recalled with crystalline clarity the first meal I had taken with Margery, the robe she wore. I tasted the honey wine Holmes had served me on a spring day in another lifetime. I thought of the way Watson beheaded his boiled eggs, and Lestrade drinking his beer, and the tea I had sipped with the maths tutor who had tried to kill me. Eventually, hunger, too, passed, and I thought mostly of Holmes.

Of Holmes, whom I loved. Stripped of dignity, sight, and probably life itself, I was stripped as well of self-delusions. I loved him, I had loved him since I met him, and I doubted not that I should love him with my dying breath.

But, was I “in love” with him? Ridiculous thought, instantly dismissed. The doubts and frenzies of a grand passion had by their very nature to wither under the cold, illuminating light of daily knowledge.

Love, though. Comfortable, interested, concerned, reciprocal love; was that perhaps a different matter?

And what rôle the physical? What place the body’s passion?

I could never, I knew then, lose myself “in love.” Margery had accused me of coldness, and she was right, but she was also wrong: For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love.

Since that moment on top of the hansom when the last lingering bubble of romanticism had burst, I had been looking for an alternative: freedom, academia, a régime of women.

Oddly enough, the very considerations that had made marriage impossible for him were mirrored in my own being: a rabidly independent nature, an impatience with lesser minds, total unconventionality, and the horror of being saddled with someone who would need cosseting and protection—the characteristics, come to that, that would have made it difficult for me to join Margery Childe, even without the rest of it.

Perhaps, though, the resemblance was not odd. Holmes was a part of me. Because of my age when we met, neither of us had erected our normal defences, and by the time I came to womanhood, it was too late: He had already let me in under his guard, and I him. Holmes was a part of me, and to imagine myself “in love” with him was to imagine myself becoming passionately enamoured of my arm or the muscles in my back. Yet in the same vein, it is not a part of Judaism to practice bodily mortification, to deny God’s gift of a physical body. One accepts and appreciates this act of creation; one loves one’s body, clumsy, inconvenient, and untidy as it may be. It was in this sense that I could love Holmes: Irritating as he could be, he was a part of me, and yes, I loved him.

Neither of us were domestic creatures. Holmes, by his nature and by the demands of his profession, had remained unfettered by domesticity, had never knowingly given a hostage to fate. The only woman he had allowed himself to love had been as jealous of her independence as he: Irene Adler had loved him for a time and then sent him away. And what of Mary Russell, a young woman as violently opinionated and as fiercely protective of her freedom as Holmes himself, and as competent as he at looking after herself?

It was, intellectually speaking, a pretty problem, and it occupied me for several days. By this manner, continuously interrupted by drugs and sleep and increasing befuddlement, I came tentatively to a point of balance with Holmes in his absence.

When thirty chips had gathered in the corner, I became aware of a new element in the cycle: anticipation. In another day or two, it degenerated into overt restlessness before his entrance, and there was distressingly little acting in the eagerness with which I stood, blinking and cringing at the light, to greet Him.

In the end, there came a third state, between the sweet horror of the poison flooding my veins and the body’s craving for the next, a state of—I can only use the Christian concept