Work Text:
"Mary still thinks she is your wife."
I smiled. "I can explain."
My husband was more interested in pursuing a stray dollop of icing that had remained upon my person during last night's extremely intimate sharing of his birthday cake. "You are the writer amongst us. I look forward to your tale."
"'Amongst us'?" I made a show of looking around the bedroom for the rest of these 'us' he'd mentioned. Of course the only other living creature was happily lapping cake crumbs from the floor. For once Sherlock had not let Toby sleep in our bed.
"You're procrastinating, John. Your spouse awaits your explanation for why a woman claims to be your wife."
I sighed. "Writing did have something to do with it, yes. The editor of the Strand. He's the one who told me that the reading public were asking questions about two 'bachelors' maintaining such close lodgings for so long. Not everyone in London is as tolerant of illegal wedlock as are Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson."
"And he just happened to have a candidate in mind, did he?"
I smiled wryly. "Mary Morstan is a very good writer, and a regular Strand contributor herself – under the pen name M.M. Stan. Pirate stories and the like – not at all what one would expect of a lady writer. But this way we could protect each other. She's as fond of my sex as I am of hers."
"Ah."
"Unfortunately, the woman clearly expects more out of our faux marriage than I do. All I wanted was the ability to divert readers with talk of a wife. She wants us to be more visibly a couple out and about, not merely on paper."
Sherlock recreated his 'swoon' from yesterday. "And so I must remind her who your true spouse is."