Work Text:
"Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly;
"'Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you may spy.
The way into my parlor is up a winding stair,
And I have many curious things to show when you are there."
"Oh no, no," said the little fly; "to ask me is in vain,
For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again."
Mary Howitt - The Spider And The Fly
Benjamin Bathory's interment is a sober and proper affair. The church is simply built but made of stone ancient beyond memory. Grave markers are worn smooth or cracked open by the weight of centuries, and soft moss mats the slate roof. Well-dressed mourners gather under the wide-reaching branches of an oak tree as the young man is lowered to join his ancestors in the family plot. Élisabeth, his fiancee, causes a stir among the relatives when she arrives looking like an Easter lily in a white dress. Poor thing, the elderly aunts murmur. If he had lived only a week more they would have been married.
Élisabeth hides her tears beneath a black hat and veil, occasionally bringing a handkerchief to cover her mouth. She's every inch the grieving bride.
“I knew he'd catch some dreadful disease abroad,” the girl sniffs onto her would-be mother-in-law's shoulder.
Mrs. Bathory hugs her. They'd never been especially fond of one another, but stand united now in the face of sudden tragedy. She takes the girl's hand, engagement ring glinting beneath lace gloves. “Ben loved you very much, dear,” she says. “I'm so sorry it ended like this.” Mrs. Bathory guides her away from the crowd. “We weren't going to bring this up today, but it seems that Ben met with solicitor a few weeks ago. He drew up a will.”
Élisabeth stares at her with wide, pale eyes.
“He left you quite a sum,” the woman says. “I know it's hardly any consolation-”
“Oh,” Élisabeth says. Her voice breaks a little. “Dear Ben. He was always thinking of me.” Tears well up in her eyes and she lets Mrs. Bathory embrace her again.
She lingers in the cemetery after the service, heels sinking into the soft earth around his grave. Siger Holmes, Benjamin's cousin, offers her a ride home in his Rolls and she accepts with a smile.
Sherrinford Holmes lives for sixty-two days. Élisabeth shows him off to everyone. Her sisters coo over the little boy, arguing over whether he looks more like Siger or like her. The beleaguered mother is much petted at first – the labor is long and difficult, and mother and child's health is fragile.
The baby is taken home for the first time. Certain that his wife and son are healed, Siger goes back to work or stays out late to drink with friends. Élisabeth's smile grows brittle.
The baby cries and cries.
Sixty-two days after Sherrinford Holmes' birth, the house is awakened by screams. Siger finds himself in bed alone, and the live-in nanny races up the stairs. Élisabeth is hunched over her son's crib, rocking the tiny, motionless body in her arms.
SIDS, the doctors say. Tragic. We're so sorry for your loss.
Élisabeth's grief disappears quickly under the sympathy showered on her after her baby's death. Such a strong woman, her family says. She smiles through the funeral.
Mycroft remembers Father. Sherlock is very young when he dies. Mummy always wanted her youngest to be hers and hers alone.
Father is tall, aristocratic, and distant. He's Mycroft's role model in every way. Well, except for his choice in romantic partner.
Siger Holmes always has business overseas, more and more frequently as his son grows older. Mummy always terrorizes the household staff twice as much as usual when he's gone. She keeps Mycroft by her side as she paces, ranting about her suspicions over whom her husband is spending time with while he's out from under her watchful eye.
“At least you love me, dear,” she says, enveloping him in her arms. “You'll always love your Mummy most of all, won't you?”
Even at six years of age, he knows that there is only one acceptable answer. “Yes, Mummy. Of course.”
Sherlock, like Mycroft, is another of Élisabeth's attempts to keep Siger home. For a while, the family is complete – Mother and Father and two little boys, all happy and together. Mummy glows.
But Daddy leaves, as always.
When he comes home, finally, to his wife and a warm meal, he gets sick. Mycroft's memories of his father are all tarnished by white hospital walls, the smell of disinfectant, and the feeling of his mother holding him in front of the nurses, promising that Daddy will get better soon.
He doesn't.
For Mycroft, the choice is easy. His brother is born, and he is no longer only responsible for himself. He has Sherlock to think of. Before, his life would have led far away from the secrets and darkness of his mother's house. Now, he'll never do anything that will risk Sherlock being left alone.
It's possible the choice was never his to begin with. He doesn't have the temperament that they do. Mummy and Sherlock are terrifyingly alike – intelligent and proud and fragile and so utterly convinced that the rules do not apply to them. Mycroft is aware of the rules, always; he just uses them for his own gain. He takes after Mummy, too. They both have a talent for pulling strings.
Élisabeth Holmes is an intelligent woman. Mycroft likes to think that he has always understood and appreciated that, but it's truly driven home when he's twelve years old and his brother lays dying under his mother's gentle hands.
(On Tuesday, Mummy is in a temper and slaps him. Mycroft snaps and threatens to tell the police that Robert Minetree did not die of illness. Wednesday, Sherlock is too sick to get out of bed.)
“He must have caught it from Robert, poor dear,” Mummy says, stroking his hair and looking back at Mycroft with steady eyes. She lifts Sherlock onto her lap. His fingers curl weakly into her blouse as she holds him close.
Elsewhere in the house, the cracked grandfather clock tolls the hour.
“You should get some rest, Mummy,” Mycroft says, sitting next to her on the bed. “You've had a trying week.”
She gazes at him over Sherlock's curls.
Mycroft holds his hands out to take his brother from her. “I can afford to miss a few days of school to look after Sherlock,” he says. “It would be good for us to spend time together.”
For a moment she simply regards him. Her face morphs into a warm smile and Sherlock is passed safely into Mycroft's arms. “You're a good son,” Mummy says. She touches his cheek and stands.
“Oh,” Mycroft says as she turns to leave. “You've left Sherlock's medicine.”
“So I have.” She plucks the little bottle from the bedside table. The glass is a burning amber in the light streaming in through the window. There is no label.
“I think perhaps a – different prescription would suit him better.”
The bottle is turned this way and that in Mummy's long fingers. Finally, she pockets it. “You may be right, dear,” she smiles. “It doesn't seem to be making him better at all, does it?”
Sometimes Mycroft wakes up at night to find his mother in Sherlock's room, standing over his bed.
“Just checking,” she whispers when he flicks on the light.
Sherlock does not like Mummy's gentleman friends. Most of them are stupid and boring and only won Mummy over because they buy her things. He doesn't understand why she needs to keep them around for that – she always has plenty of money after they're gone. The ones that are smart and nice to him all leave eventually, so they're hardly better.
Henry Castle is easily fifteen years Mummy's senior - short, grey-haired, and gruff. He's a banker and lasts somewhat longer than Élisabeth Holmes' usual men. He drapes her with jewels and whisks her off on long trips overseas. Sherlock is bored being left home with Mycroft and Nanny and is happy when Mummy finally comes home without him. He sits at her feet, playing with his train as she sighs at her eldest sister Carole.
“Another one leaving, Carrie. What's so wrong with me, I wonder? Siger was the only one worth my love.” She sips at her tea as her sister murmurs condolences. A new ring glitters on her right hand, an oval ruby red as blood.
He remembers the mouse, sometimes. It makes a nuisance of itself in the kitchen for almost a week before Mycroft and Sherlock finally trap it under a box. They had fun trying to build cleverer and cleverer mousetraps, but that isn't what makes the incident stick in Sherlock's mind.
It's Mummy, never squeamish, taking a box of tiny, precise blades and showing him: “See, Sherlock, here's its heart, and look at the little lungs! Perhaps we could save the bones and make you a little skeleton to study.”
Sherlock tells one of his school acquaintances about the adventure and he gets sent to talk to the counselor.
“No matter,” Mummy says. “They're just jealous because you're so much better than all of them.”
She's always amused by his scientific pursuits. They spend many of her good afternoons dissecting frogs from the pond, stringing together bird bones, and carefully sliding pins through butterflies, decorating the walls with their bright wings. Mycroft, usually a great supporter of learning, purses his lips but says nothing.
It's not until Mummy starts giving considering looks to the neighbor's cat that Sherlock starts to wonder if this is entirely normal.
Mycroft goes to university like he's going to his execution – or his brother's execution. He hugs Sherlock before getting into the car, holding the squirming eleven-year old tight. “Be good,” he says.
Sherlock pulls away, making a face. He alternates between delight at being the only child in the house and distress at losing his forever-rival and sometimes best friend.
Mummy hovers nearby. She's bragged to all of her friends about how eager Oxford was to accept him, but as the first term draws nearer, she clings to him. Mummy has trouble letting things go.
He doesn't want to think of Sherlock alone under her influence. There's no use hoping he'll find a father in one of Mummy' boyfriends. Empty heads and full wallets. Almost worse than Mummy in treating Mycroft and Sherlock like dolls. Children should be seen, and not heard.
Besides, a wedding ring would hardly stop Mr. Smith or Isles or Bradford from joining his predecessors in the garden.
“Do call me,” Mycroft says, taking his brother's shoulders and drawing their heads close together. “If you ever need – anything.”
What's there to keep Mummy from tiring of Sherlock? Mycroft managed to restrain himself during that tempestuous beginning of young adulthood. He was never known to misbehave or talk back. The household staff, before they all wearied of Élisabeth's moods and quit, were occasionally unnerved by how adult he acted for his age.
Sherlock, though, has never learned self-control. Like Mummy he acts and acts and damn the consequences. Whether she slaps him or locks him in his room or forbids him supper for days he never changes his behavior. Why bother, he tells Mycroft. Whatever makes her angry today makes her laugh tomorrow.
“I won't.”
He gives his Sherlock a twisted smile. “I hope not.”
Chelsea Redgrave is a neighbor girl Mummy hires to do work around the house. Her hair is short and blonde, and sometimes she has a pair of glasses balanced on her nose. She spends most of her time carelessly folding towels while chattering on about her many boyfriends. With her quick smiles and loud laughter she couldn't be more unlike Mummy if she tried.
To Sherlock, girls are strange and foreign creatures. Auntie Carole and Aunt Louise are just extensions of Mummy and only drift into his life around holidays. There aren't any girls at his school, unless you count Nurse, which nobody does. Some of the boys in his year have started bringing in magazines with pictures of naked women, hiding them under the desks and peeking at them when the teachers aren't looking. Sherlock doesn't understand their fascination.
In the interest of science, however, he decides that Girls are a necessary area of study, and observes Chelsea carefully. His investigations are cut short, however, after Mummy catches her flirting with Mr. Seymour.
Élisabeth goes into one of her rages, throwing the girl out of the house and screaming at Mr. Seymour in French for hours. When he finally leaves, she storms off to take her pills and spends the rest of the day half-conscious in bed.
Mummy locks Sherlock in his room the next morning. He doesn't mind overmuch; Mycroft's sent him a Chemistry textbook from his university and Sherlock has been looking forward to reading it. Besides, a lock has never stopped him before.
Chelsea knocks on the front door at ten, undaunted by her employer's anger. Her voice floats up the stairs, apologetic, and fades away as she follows his mother into the kitchen.
It takes a few hours, but Sherlock grows bored and picks at the lock on his door. Mummy is still in the kitchen, wearing a dress Mr. Seymour bought her. Her heels clack on the tile as she calmly mops the floor, something Chelsea ought to be doing.
Sherlock is not the kind of person who needs to ask questions, so he just quietly goes outside. He doesn't think about his mother's satisfied smile as she cleans, blood on her hands and black diamonds in her ears.
Mr. Seymour never appears in their home again. Poor Chelsea becomes a local scandal. Such a thoughtless girl. Running around with so many boys, she was bound to end up in trouble eventually. A pity it had to happen at such a tender age.
When Sherlock is thirteen, he comes upon Stephen Morgan's lifeless body in the kitchen. His eyes skitter away from the corpse despite telling himself to be brave. Somehow this is different than the frogs and birds he's dissected. He goes upstairs feeling strangely calm and tells Mummy that her newest lover is dead.
She's brushing her hair, and does not look saddened by the news at all. “I'm sorry you had to see that, dear,” she says, laying down the brush to give Sherlock a hug.
“Shouldn't we phone the police?” he asks.
“Oh, I think we can take care of this by ourselves, don't you? No need to bother them for a trivial thing like this.”
Mummy leads him downstairs and Sherlock perches himself on the counter he's not supposed to sit on. He watches as she puts on a pair of gloves, the yellow rubber utterly incongruous with her expensive dress. Methodically, she removes every trace of the body from the room. Last, she takes the man's favorite box of tea from its place in the cupboard and throws it away, tossing the gloves after it. “Nasty flavor,” Mummy says. “I don't know how he could drink it without becoming ill.”
At night, she comes into Sherlock's room to tuck him in like she did when he was little.
“My baby,” she says. “All these terrible men invading our lives and then leaving, just like that.” Mummy runs her fingers through his hair. “At least you love Mummy most of all.”
Carl Powers.
He calls and calls the police about the shoes, but no one will listen.
“Why do you care so much?” Mycroft asks when he phones to complain. For once in his life, Sherlock can't read the tone of his brother's voice.
“It's so obvious!” Sherlock says. “It wasn't an accident, it was murder. Somebody killed him and it's – it's - ”
Wrong.
Mummy pets his hair and says she believes him. “My little detective.”
Sherlock is sixteen and hates everything. He stares at the bottle of pills Mummy left on the table.
He takes one and doesn't hate anything for a while.
“You never come home anymore,” Mummy says. Sherlock has no idea how she found out where he was staying. The little run-down flat isn't the kind of place she would have picked for her son to live.
Sherlock looks out the cracked window and thinks about how much he wants to be high right now. Let his mother rattle around their old house all alone. Mycroft visits her sometimes, he knows. Checking up. Always has to know everything about everyone, the nosy git. (Sentimental, too. For all his professed detachment Mycroft has consistently destroyed any piece of evidence that would lead the police back to her.)
It's raining outside. London is wet and dreary, but full of millions upon millions of lives.
He leaves his mother fretting on a rickety chair, and walks out into the cold until he's soaked to the bone. When he returns, she's gone.
Sherlock breathes in the neat little lines of powder and feels - off.
His hands shake, but he dials a half-remembered number on his mobile.
The policeman picks up. “Oh it's you.”
“Lestrade,” Sherlock says, calmly as he can muster. He'll be in trouble for possession of illegal substances again, but needs must. “I need you to take me to hospital.”
“Strychnine,” Lestrade says. “In the cocaine. And you have no idea how it got there?”
“I've heard it happens,” Sherlock shrugs, fiddling with his IV.
“Who sold it to you?”
He doesn't say anything. There's no need to set the Yard on his dealer. It was his own stupidity that almost got him killed - He should have known better than to leave Mummy in the flat alone.
John is exasperated. Sherlock has said something that scandalizes him again, no doubt. He's still learning John's definitions of Good and Not Good. It looks to be a lifelong study.
“For God's sake, Sherlock,” John sighs. He sits his cup down next to the skull. “Didn't your mother ever teach you right from wrong?”
Sherlock can do nothing else but laugh.