Читать книгу The Watches of the Night - Darcy Lindbergh - Страница 6

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. He seemed endlessly amused with each new discovery; I reveled in the details of my life, told back to me.

Yet he insisted this knowledge was only the result of careful observation – the accent in the pronunciation of my consonants, grown lazy with comfort as the night wore on – the significances of the curiosities I had picked up in the subcontinent – a certain text on my shelf – a certain stain on my fingers.

It was not, as one might have supposed, anything like being picked apart: it was like being identified. Not picked apart, but picked out: noticed, for the first time since I had disappeared with my ruined health and devastated career into the drain of London.

It was a test, I realised, of my limitations, a scouting of my boundaries; I found, to his obvious delight, that I had very few.

'You have a keen eye,' I exclaimed. 'Quite incredible.'

'A blessing and a curse both,' he answered modestly, but I could tell he was pleased as he settled back into his chair, having apparently exhausted himself: he could not hide his blush.

The dreams began something like this: the air was heavy and cloying, thick with the smell of bodies and gunpowder. Overhead, the dark Afghani night was a velvet blue, pricked with the diamond white of stars and shrouded in smoke.

The sky was the only thing fantastic or exotic about Afghanistan. There was no magic in that land; there was only the rank and rot of death and fear, the deceptive sweetness of starvation, the sour stench of infection.

Then the dreams shifted, and a voice cried out – not in pain, this time. 'Watson! Come and have a drink with us.'

I looked over: the boys by the fire looked back, exhausted and dirty but whole, complete men, eyes and limbs still in their places, wounds smoothed over by their tired smiles. A bottle passed between them, but I knew it wasn't really whisky they were offering. I sighed and smiled back and heaved myself up to rejoin them.

When I woke, I lay in bed for hours, wondering whether it had been a dream or a nightmare, a blessing or a curse: sitting under that sky with men who never made it home, sharing a drink and a memory that never happened, laughing as though there was still breath in their lungs.

As though I had never left them behind.

Though I had not been on a battlefield in months, I was still not used to silent nights; my thoughts were too free to dwell on things better forgotten. My future, confined by my injuries, suddenly unfolded prophetically before me: a ceaseless parade of quiet and calm, leaving me forever trapped in the memory of war, waiting for a call to arms that was never going to come.

Finally I attempted an escape to the sitting room, but it wasn't empty. Holmes looked up from his chair by the fire, surprised; I drew back, apologetic. 'I didn't mean to disturb you.'

'Not at all,' Holmes said, recovering himself. 'Please, come and sit. I don't mind the company, and you look like you would be better for it.'

I hesitated, but he beckoned me forward and even lit my pipe for me before falling back into his thoughtful silence.

There was an intensely private air about Holmes sometimes, I thought, but there was something else, too, something that seemed to reach out. Perhaps it was not such a coincidence after all, to have found him alone and expectant by the fire. He did not say another word to me that night, nor I to him, but we were there together all the same, and suddenly the silence was much easier to bear.