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“Who are you?”
“Cockaigne.”
For one stunned split second Sherlock had heard it as “cocaine.” Even now he wasn’t sure what had allowed his mind to flip the word, the sound, and recall from some distant corner of his mind palace another word and another meaning he’d learned years before from Lestrade. Not cocaine, but Cockaigne—an old nickname drawn from fantasy and dream and hope. Cockaigne: the Good Land, the Gracious Land. The land of heart’s desire.
Then the man who was a city had kissed him.
“I’m Cockaigne.”
“London.”
The man smiled and handed Sherlock a cock’s feather from his mask—and disappeared into the crowd.
Sherlock remembered the first time he’d visited London. He’d been fifteen. The family had made a frantic trip down to the city by train, Mummy snapping all the way and Father silent and still, hands folded on his knees, looking down but seeing nothing. The train had rattled through what appeared to be a labyrinth of track and the hind-ends of buildings and miles and miles of retaining walls and chain-link fence and grafitti; it had dodged through tunnels as dark as hell and loud with the roar of their passage, only to burst out into sunlight again. Then the tumble from the train to the station, from the station to the cab, from the cab to the hospital, where they plunged into rooms silent but for the squeak of nursing trainers and the gasp-wheeze-click-ding of mysterious machines all hooked up to a Mycroft who was far too still.
Mummy had fallen as silent as Father then. The two had sat, uneasy in the boxy furniture reserved for those waiting outside the ICU, unsure if their loved ones would live or die.
At least they didn’t cry, Sherlock had thought, looking squeamishly over at another little group who sobbed and wailed and honked into limp tissues. Mycroft would have been so uncomfortable if Mummy and Father had cried like that. Sherlock had drifted away, though, unable to look at Mummy and Father and their not-crying faces. He found a chair by a window and twisted himself up in a knot, legs hooked around the frame of the chair, arms crossed and locked over the back, chin resting on his wrists, face staring out into the grey city.
Father came and sat near.
“What are you thinking?”
“It’s ugly.”
“It’s not all ugly,” Father said. “It’s just—old. She’s an old, old city—roots all the way back to the Romans. Maybe before. Once we know Mike’s going to be all right, I can take you around. See some sights.”
Sherlock had said nothing; kept his face still as he stared out onto pavement and congested avenues. He didn’t want to know there was anything good to be said about the city then. He didn’t want to know for years after…and then in all the wrong ways, for all the wrong reasons.
“It’s ugly,” he said again. “I hate London. I will always hate London.”
oOo
“Sherlock, I can’t cover for you.” Mycroft’s face was prim and panicked at the same time. “I can’t. One of these days they’re going to make you pee in the cup. Or take a blood sample. Or just put two and two together. I’m pretty sure Lady S. has a clue. I’m less sure about George, but… I can’t cover this up.”
“Cover what up?” Sherlock had snapped.
Mycroft had leaned close, even though they were alone in Mycroft’s flat, in a room Mycroft himself checked regularly for bugs. “You’re high, little brother.”
“Fancy that,” Sherlock drawled. “How long are they going to keep me out of the field, Mike?”
“Mycroft. And as long as they’re worried about your mental state. And I can’t say your repeated…binges…are helping.”
“Blah-blah-blah.” Sherlock turned, eyes narrow, and glared at his brother. “You said you’d help.”
“That was before you started making it this difficult.”
“I’m bored.”
Mycroft growled. “You’re a petulant brat.”
“It wasn’t my fault I got cornered in Belgrade.” It was an effective move; Mycroft’s eyes got that lost, shocky look they got when he thought he’d made a mistake in his analyses and someone else had paid the price.
Sherlock wasn’t going to absolve him. Not now or ever. It hadn’t exactly been Mycroft’s fault the Serbs had found him, but Mike hadn’t predicted it, either, or given him a backup plan. Or…not one that had worked.
Let him suffer a bit of guilt, Sherlock thought, angrily. He wasn’t the one placed on leave for psych evaluation, and even if he had been, Mycroft liked London.
Sherlock liked that London was dangerous, and filled with options dear brother Mikey didn’t approve of.
“I’ll see about finding you something to do while you wait,” Mycroft said.
And, three days later, much against his will, Sherlock found himself in the hands of an embedded MI5 agent doing anti-terrorist work in London while serving as a detective for the Met. He had a soft voice that rooted deep in London soil, and a heart that seemed much the same. The man had dragged Sherlock to the Golden Gallery almost at the top of the dome of St. Paul’s. The man had shot Sherlock a sly glance out of dark sloe eyes. Then he’d opened his arms wide, like a conductor, and dawn had come.
“There she is, Sherlock. London—the Land of Fair Cockaigne.”
oOo
The Chelsea case involved no less than eight dead goats, a liter of scrumpy, five boxes of licorice allsorts, and a runaway accordion-playing hair dresser determined to audition for “Britain’s Got Talent.” None was directly responsible for the murder. All, nonetheless, had an effect on the evidence and on the chain of events leading to an elegant locked room murder. Sherlock should have been fixated—obsessed. Instead his mind kept wandering.
“That a piece of evidence?” Donovan asked. “Here—bag it.”
“It’s not evidence,” Sherlock snapped, tucking the feather safely in his laptop case.
“Staring at it so hard, I figured it had to be,” she said, suspicious.
“It’s not,” Sherlock insisted.
John, nearby, glanced at him, intrigued. “Something you’re researching, then? A lead?”
“No,” Sherlock said again, frowning. “Just something I was given.”
John looked at him askance, clearly curious. “Huh. May I see?”
Sherlock met his eyes, face still—his “Mycroft” face, all ice and silence. John hesitated, muttered, “Um, yeah. Never mind, then,” and turned back to reviewing the medical examiner’s report.
Sherlock closed his eyes and called back the memory of the man, Cockaigne. Calling him back, he knew his memory was askew, forced out of shape by a magic and a charisma that had nothing to do with pure observation. He tried to force himself to mere fact, yet some overwhelming sense of presence kept intruding, turning memory into melody, facts into fantasies.
He’d been shorter than Sherlock, but had seemed taller. He’d been slim, cobby, but somehow something about him had seemed vast and weighty, like a great brown bull on a green field, horns like an aurochs’, shoulders promising power. Sloe-dark brown eyes had lit with delight, glowing in a black mask that gave him a tumbled mane of feathers. He had been mythic.
In the press they’d danced together, packed body to body, turning, and the man had laughed, straight teeth flashing white in a merry smile. From what Sherlock could see, it was a face Sherlock thought of as Celtic, with a slight snub nose, a strong jaw, a mouth almost too sweet, and eyes dark and canted.
He’d kissed like cocaine. The rush had been intoxicating. Sherlock had felt it for hours after—
No. He felt it still. His fingers brushed his lower lip, and he frowned.
He didn’t do sentiment, or sex, or subjective thinking, or any of a number of other silly and insidious things starting with S. He was Sherlock. This was not…how did Lestrade put it? “Not my division.”
“Sherlock?”
He looked up into John’s eyes—alert and worried eyes. “Mmmm?”
“Are you all right?”
Sherlock shrugged. “Fine.” He stood, then, and grabbed his laptop case. “Time to get out to the site again. I want to work out the order of events, before that new catastrophe who’s replaced Anderson manages to mangle everything.”
Sherlock was no longer the man Lestrade had gifted with a London dawn. He was no longer the man Lestrade had dragged from the highest peak of the tallest tower down to the sub-basements of the city.
Even then Sherlock had his own dark knowledge of London that defied the light and shining beauty of Lestrade’s beloved town. If Lestrade’s London was dawn seen from St. Paul’s, Sherlock’s was Highgate Cemetery at midnight, and the streets where Mad Jack had run riot with his blade. If Lestrade’s London shone with the old town’s better angels…
Sherlock’s London did not.
Sherlock had taken both pleasure and pride in those days in playing Hades to Lestrade’s Apollo. He still did, though John’s arrival had changed things, and Mary’s had changed things more. A step at a time they’d drawn him into something softer and more human.
He’d held John’s daughter. He’d stood Godfather at her christening.
It changed things.
When Sherlock and John got to the Chelsea sight, Lestrade was already there, sloping around with his team, moving a bit slowly, aching a bit.
“Getting old, Lestrade,” Sherlock said.
“He laughed, softly. "Just like London herself. Comes to all of us.” He smiled--but Sherlock could see his dismay at the crime. “Better than the alternative, right?”
“Hardly original.”
“Doesn’t need to be. Consider it an heirloom quip,” Lestrade shot back, grinning. “Take good care of it, it’ll be good for generations to come.”
“Oh, good one, boss,” Donovan chirped, smirking at Sherlock. “Keep him in his place, why don’t you?”
“My place,” Sherlock snarled, “is where the evidence is. Which means not here at the perimeter wittering around with dolts and twa—“
Lestrade managed to “accidentally” step on Sherlock’s foot, then growled under his breath, “Stow it, sweetness. You don’t use that word on my site, and you don’t use it on Sally.”
Sherlock sighed gustily. “Very well, Lestrade. But avoiding a truth doesn’t alter it.” He swept away, leaving Lestrade behind.
It took Sherlock a week to solve the case, and by the time he was done he was exhausted, along with the rest of Lestrade’s team. It only concluded after a chase that carried them into the small hours of morning…and ended in spite of all efforts with three dead, including the killer.
Lestrade sighed, and offered to take Sherlock out for coffee after John yawned and called a cab to take him home to Mary. The two men crept into an all-night caff, where Lestrade bought them both a steaming cup of coffee and egg mayonnaise sandwiches
“I don’t know if it’s breakfast or midnight snack,” Lestrade said, “but I do know if you don’t have some you’re going to either fall down on your face before you can get home—or misbehave instead of going home. Rather have you eat your nice egg mayo, if you get my drift.”
“Ever the guardian angel,” Sherlock said, feeling a bit stroppy. “Does it ever occur to you to let me go to hell in peace?”
“Oh, yeah, regularly,” Lestrade said, grinning his friendly, easy grin. “But, hell—one more wasted life. Seems a pity after all we’ve been through, yeah?”
Sherlock ducked his head. He was tired, and disappointed with his slowness on the case, and he knew Lestrade and the team were more broken-up by the bloody ending than Lestrade was making out. He didn’t want to see Lestrade’s tired face, or read the aches and weariness and dejection in his body. Sherlock’s London had collected its blood money, that night. Sherlock knew sunlight Lestrade would carry the weight of it, strong-shouldered, but burdened in spite of that.
They drank their coffee and ate their sandwiches. They stood, and stretched, Lestrade in his dingy, boxy overcoat, Sherlock in his Belstaff. They walked out of the caff.
Lestrade looked around, dark eyes shining like dark stones in the half-dawn. The man was seal-eyed, sloe-eyed, Selkie-eyed…there was something in that dark, weary gaze that stirred Sherlock’s memories, and sent breezes fluttering through the corridors of his mind palace.
“Do you recall when you took me up to the Golden Gallery?”
A sudden, sweet smile and sideward glance was all the answer Lestrade gave. It was enough. Sherlock said, then, “Let’s go again.”
“Locked up for the night, you know.”
“So we get in the same way you got us in last time—“
Lestrade laughed, softly. “All right. Yeah. Abuse of authority, but I’ll warrant-card us in.”
oOo
Sherlock counted years as they climbed the stairs. Ten years, he thought.
He could see it in Lestrade’s joints; he could see it in the hair, gone from streaked brown to silver and steel, a sort of badger-brindle. He could see it in a face that had been boyish when they’d first met, that was uncompromisingly manly, now. He could see it in shoulders and neck and chest, grown deeper and Atlas-strong, bull-strong. He could see it in the slow, steady pace Lestrade tackled the stairs—not weak or failing, but rationing himself, planning for the long haul up and up into the dome. He was like his city--no longer young, no longer innocent, but rooted deep, and strong.
The cathedral was dimly lit—like most public facilities, it was never left in utter darkness, but shadows seemed to crowd the edges of the stairs. Light from the rooms below cast more on the walls of the Whispering Gallery.
They passed the Whispering Gallery, then the Stone Gallery, and came out at last into the little Golden Gallery at the very crest of the dome.
“One thousand one hundred and sixty-one steps,” Lestrade said, voice caught between pleasure and dismay. “I forgot how many steps that really is.”
The looked out over the city, glowing like a backlit agate in the false dawn. The streetlights still glowed, and the morning mist softened everything. A wind came in off the river.
Lestrade leaned against a column, his face in shadow, his arms crossed over his chest. His coat flapped in the wind—lighter than Sherlock’s, without that grace and line. He is a simple man, Sherlock thought, not in the sense of being stupid, or of having no complexity, but in the sense of being ordered, in balance, and centered.
Here at the high peak of the dome was a small viewing port, offering an uninterrupted view straight down through the center of the cathedral, from the top to the ground floor. If Lestrade stood over it, Sherlock thought, you could drop a line like a plumb line from his heart to the very center of the earth, and he would define perfect alignment—with place, with time, with justice, with courage. John is the perfect warrior. Lestrade is something else.
The man looked out over the city, its light shining in his eyes.
“Do you ever want to just stop?” Sherlock asked.
“No. Time will stop me soon enough without my help,” Lestrade said. “You?”
Sherlock swallowed. “I’ve jumped once. It was a long fall.”
The light was pink and grey. Lestrade’s face was older than it had been a decade before, and wore a sadness Sherlock didn’t recall. And yet…
“Wait for it,” Lestrade said, his mood rising, a smile beginning to glow. “Wait for it…” His eyes roamed over the city, brighter and brighter.
Sherlock watched Lestrade; a revelation begged to be brought to light.
“There,” Lestrade said, and his face opened into a smile that challenged the dawn. “Look. Cockaigne. Isn’t she beautiful?”
Understanding arrived.
“Yes,” Sherlock whispered, “he is.”
Then Sherlock and the rising sun together kissed the City of Fair Cockaigne...