Work Text:
On the third Sunday in April in 1892 I made one of my customary trips to Aldershot to visit my friend, Corporal Henry Wood, whose unhappy tale is elucidated in the case I wrote under the name “The Crooked Man.” These regular jaunts had become a great comfort to me in the months after my friend Sherlock Holmes had lost his life in Switzerland; a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved.
Even in my loss, I was happy for Wood. He had come up considerably in the world since his first reappearance in England as a grotesquely bent and broken survivor of years of captivity and torture. He was not rich, but he now had a small pension of his own (his case pressed by his old love Nancy Barclay, widow of the colonel who’d so cruelly betrayed him in India during the mutiny, and who was now his particular friend), which had made a vast difference from his previous impoverished circumstances.
Today we stood at the edge of the parade grounds watching the young recruits as they marched, faced, ‘shunted, presented arms, and all the other manoeuvers under the shouts of their sergeants. The spring sun shone down on us through the scattering of clouds.
I winced and rubbed my shoulder. “Weather’s turning.”
Wood laughed at me. “My whole body tells me that, Doctor.”
I could not doubt that. To quell my own feelings of pity and melancholia I piped up in the same spirit. “I find that a pot of porter in a nice dry corner of a pub, and a story or two, do wonders to cure that ache.”
So it was that we were ensconced at the Musket and Shot (the tavern frequented by the soldiers) and halfway through our strengthening draughts when we heard the first thunderclap. “Bones don’t lie,” Henry Wood said.
“And you know what the best part of this is?” I buried my face in my pot to hide my grin.
Henry matched my grin. “That this time we’re not the poor bastards getting soaked to the skin and marching around in that!”
It was good to laugh again.