A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [29]
“Russell, I am hardly the man to impose sobriety on another, save perhaps by my own wicked examples. Besides which, even discounting my unfitness for temperance work, I refuse to act as the world’s nursemaid. If young men wish to inject themselves with heroin, I can no more stand in their way than I could stand in the way of a Boche shell in the trenches.”
“And if he were your son?” I asked very quietly. “Would you not want someone to try?”
It was a dirty blow, low and unscrupulous and quite unforgivably wicked. Because, you see, he did have a son once, and someone had tried.
He rotated his head slowly towards me, eyes cold, face rigid.
“That was unworthy of you, Russell,” was all he said, but the intonation of it brought me to my feet and to his side, and I laid my hand on his arm.
“Dear God, Holmes, I am sorry. It was cruel and thoughtless of me. I am so very sorry.”
He looked at my hand, covered it briefly with his own, and turned away to his chair.
“However,” he said, “you are right. It is irresponsible of me to say that I can do nothing, without having reviewed the case. If you would be so good as to give me the information on the young man, I shall think about what possible courses of action might be open.”
“I…” I stopped, at a loss. “His name is Miles Fitzwarren,” I began weakly, but broke off at his gesture.
“I know him,” he said, and corrected himself. “Rather, I knew him. I shall see what can be done.”
I might have been some tediously importunate client being dismissed with a scrap of comfort.
“Thank you, Holmes,” I said miserably, and went back to my chair.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him, slumped down, chewing at the stem of his empty pipe. My red herring had performed its function, but I knew that this particular old hound would not be misled for long before backtracking to the main scent. For the moment, he sat staring blindly past the mended toes of his woollen stockings, into the glowing coals. I knew him, however. I knew every movement and gesture of the man, the lines and muscles of his face that were more familiar to me than my own, the mind that had moulded mine, and I knew that when his thoughts returned from the contemplation of that particular byway, he would fix me with his all-seeing gaze and with a few deft words unearth the topic I’d been trying so desperately to divert him from. It would happen in a minute, and when it did, the peculiar chilling awareness, a presence almost, that had already passed through the room would return tenfold, and it would not be dismissed.
I waited tensely for him to look up, feeling the quivering silence build in the space between us, and it was a shock, as if an adder had appeared in the bathwater between my toes, to realise that for the first time in my life I was uncomfortable in the presence of Sherlock Holmes. He did not look at me, and I took it as a judgement, and I was sore afraid.
But in the end, he did not fix me with a steely eye; he did not even glance at me. Rather, he moved, with a calmness that in another person would have meant a total unawareness of any untoward currents in the room. He bent forward and placed his cold pipe on the table, then reached for the salt-stained boots drying on the hearth and began to put them on.
“I must go out,” he said. “I shall be back in three or four hours. You get some sleep, and I’ll wake you by eight if you’re not up already. It’s good to be out of the building by nine, when the office workers begin to arrive.” He finished tying his laces and stood up.
“Holmes, I—” I stopped abruptly, lost. What he said then made it apparent that he had not been unaware of the silence.
“It’s all right, Russell. I do understand. The bed is in the next room. Sleep well.”
He rested one hand briefly on the back of my chair as he went around it to the ventilation shaft, and one long finger brushed my shoulder. I wanted to reach up and grasp his hand and not let him leave, but I held myself still and allowed him to fold himself out through the wardrobe door. Then I sat and listened as a very different