Work Text:
The house was an anomaly in that slum of a neighbourhood, a once-grand place that had fallen into disrepair when the family, fallen on hard times, had left and the creep of city life encroached. The exterior of the house was mostly shabby, but the front was stunningly clean and tidy, as if an indifferent char had ensured that the ground floor and steps were pristine but let the rest go to seed. A long line of people, breath smoking in the winter cold, trailed from the door and down the steps and along the street.
The house's interior carried on that same theme – most of the upper reaches and far corners bespoke filth and squalor, but the main parlour and kitchen areas were cleaner and better, if shabbily furnished. The odour was a mixture of onions, unwashed people, carbolic soap and the sickening-sweet tang of infection.
"Next."
The man who had spoken stood by a cot and a chair, his profession spread out on a heavy oak table that had been valuable many tallow-candles and bored jackknife-owners ago. Another man, whose cough and clothes marked him as an indigent refugee from a workhouse, tended two large pots over the hearth, doling out boiled medical instruments from one and beef-vegetable soup from the other.
The line never lessened. Men quarreled and cursed heedless of the many grimy runny-nosed children present, women wailed and laughed depending on the conversation, children bawled and bit the man who applied soaped rags and carbolic to their exteriors and nasty medicine to their interiors. Older children screamed as the man pulled half-rotted teeth; adults screamed as antiseptic and scalpels were applied to putrefied factory injuries.
The man did not retreat in the face of this overwhelming brigade; stoic as the workhouse-man at the hearth, he stitched and dressed wounds, dispensed headache powder, poured out a syrup to a miner with a bad cough and a mistletoe brew to a haggard woman surrounded by a dozen children. All of them got soup, or a lump of bread and slice of ham; they bolted down the food with rarely a word of thanks, eyes wild.
The doctor's aides consisted of a lad of twelve and a cigar-smoking girl of the same age, who dressed and spoke much like the people in line but were a trifle cleaner and better-fed; they swore at the patients and chivvied them into line, helped hold down screaming kids for vaccinations and yelling adults for stitches, ladled soup into proffered containers.
"That will do," the doctor said, looking out the window. "I will come back a week from to-day."
Groans and cries from the people still in line, profane shouts.
The boy banged the ladle on the empty cauldron. "Shut yer bloody mouths you ungrateful rat-bastards!"
"Mac." The doctor's voice was as level and quiet as it had been at the beginning of the day; the boy pinched his lips shut, face mutinous. "I am sorry to end my day at this time, but among other reasons the food is all gone. Next Thursday I will be back, at nine o'clock."
Grumbling and cursing (but already beginning to vanish at the announcement about the food), the paupers and factory workers and slumdwellers and their children moved out, till the only people left in the parlour were the workhouse-man, the two youths and the doctor. Only when the last straggler left did the doctor sink into a chair and exhale like a venting steam-engine.
"Not a cough." The workhouse-man sounded pleased. "You are indeed fully recovered, Watson."
"As I have told you and shown you for the past six months, Holmes," Watson retorted. "And I have managed to work here without getting kidnapped or beaten once in that same time."
Mac and Bobbie (the girl with the cigar) snickered.
The detective retained his haggard workhouse costume, but now bore himself with his usual confidence; the cough and hangdog look had both vanished with the queue. "Nevertheless, Doctor, prudence is still called for, as we are foreigners in this land despite the able assistance of our young guides. Twilight falls far earlier this time of year. As some people seem to need to be reminded." Mac and Bobbie were still grinning when Holmes gave them each a half-crown.
Both Irregulars insisted on escorting the two gentlemen from a building that had once housed a vicious local gang, until they were well out of the slum alleys and amid the gas-lamps of a thoroughfare to hail a cab; only then did they turn toward their homes with their own portion of ham and bread under their arms. Sherlock Holmes was right; the clocks had not yet chimed four and dusk already lay over the winter city.
#
A bath, a meal, and a snifter by the fire later.
"This work, John. This is what saved you when I was away?"
"When you were dead." Watson stared into the glass. "It brought me comfort to ease others' suffering a little." He looked up and met the other man's eyes. "But I should not have made you suffer needlessly. Lesson learned, mon cher."
"Tres bon, mon Jean," his spouse replied; they were alone in their parlour but habit kept them to speaking words of love in French. "If you ever again delay returning to Baker Street from that locale before sunset – though you must end your day earlier – I shall once again chaperone you for the entire following day as punishment for your having affrighted me so."
Watson shook his head. "Sherlock, I am well healed of the pains I took in April. The leader of the gang that beat me and kept me prisoner is himself in prison, and the others caught or scattered; my oubliette is now my clinic. Yes, that neighbourhood is still not safe. But mon garçon brilliant [my brilliant boy], you knew what I was when you pledged your troth to me."
Holmes fixed Watson with a fierce glare. "However. You, mon brave soldat [my brave soldier], may not endanger my heart now that you have coaxed it out of hiding. It is commendable that you comfort the afflicted all year round. But I desire comfort myself, John – and there is none for me when you are late from your practise. Please. Be a little heartless to your patients until the days lengthen once more."
Watson smiled, and drew a deep, untroubled breath, which never failed to brighten those beloved grey eyes. "Je suis d'accord, mon cher mari." (I agree, my dear husband.)