Work Text:
John found the poem when he was looking for a recipe for a grease for chilblains, which he'd promised to give Sarai. He wasn't sure why he was digging through this box of old papers, except that she'd asked: she'd probably just ask him where in the vicinity of Brendelhame one was supposed to find a herb that grew only on the dry hills of the Angrian border, and then tell him he'd got the quantities wrong.
And then the paper slipped into his hand. It was not, he immediately knew, a remedy for chilblains. It was an intruder among the pockmarked pages around it. Vellum-smooth to his fingers, inconveniently larger than its companions, cut to that size that the Angrians called a short quarto, with three knife-cut edges and one deckled one, it was as familiar as the tavern-smells and the deathbed stink of the year he'd written it.
He must have sliced it out of the front of one of his anatomies. A blank page was a blank page, and a poor doctor a poor doctor, and paper was precious. He could see the faint shadow of the facing page's woodblock, ghost-written on its back, and the bird-feet marks of some past librarian noting the book's alotted shelf and bay in arcane code.
He turned it over, and read.
Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?
Cold in the earth? He supposed that cold in the vault beneath the precinct of the Cathedral of Saints Augusta and Geraldine wouldn't have scanned half as well. And every Gondal winter brought snow; if it was piled above her on the roof of the Cathedral rather than on some cairn on the moor, it could hardly matter to her now.
As for the severing wave, John doubted he would use that metaphor again, having had experience at a naval dockyard which had taught him about waves and their propensity to bring back the unwanted again and again like a particularly stupid Moors hound. His throat gave a small contraction at the memory of the prison hulk Ambrosine XII making of the calm shallows a slick of its own brown and begreened foulness; he'd been a doctor and a soldier, but had seldom smelled anything worse.
Mostly, though, his eye was drawn to that line, my only love, scratched in the fraught penmanship of a John whose fingers had the luxury of never knowing the beginnings of arthritis or the threat of pilliwinks. His only love. Had that ever been true? Had he ever convinced himself it was?
Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on Angora's shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover
That noble heart for ever, ever more?
There was that northern shore again, when everyone knew that the late Queen Felicia rested in cold state among her husband's forefathers. He couldn't understand it: it was as factually wrong as saying that the great nerve of the spine went by way of the left tibia: and then he remembered, and could not understand how he'd ever forgotten.
I never wanted to leave her there, he thought. I wanted her to be away from her obligations at last, not locked among them for eternity, however one counts that. I wanted her to be free. And that was the freest place I knew.
He didn't ask himself how he could have forgotten why it was the freest place he knew.
His fingers in the coarse silky curls of that hair, his palm cupped around the back of Sherlock's scalp as if that was the way he could learn the hidden secrets inside, and his mouth, God, that mouth on his, like drinking from a cup that only filled you with more hunger…
It had taken iron control, all those years, not to think about any of that. And slowly the iron had become bone, and the years had laid sinew and skin over the bone, until it was as much part of him as the petrified sea-monsters in the cliffs above Glass Town were part of the living rock.
He'd forgotten that he'd imagined her buried in the high passes of Angora, looking down upon the sea. He'd forgotten that it had given him comfort. He remembered no comfort at all from those days. Tavern-lights, yes, clouding and dazzling in his eyes. The lights of ships on the water. Candles in a library, and his fingers rough and urgent turning the pages of a text on the diseases of women in childbed, trying to find something that could have saved her.
Sarai, telling him that fern didn't technically have leaves, as he'd know if he ever looked at it. No, that came later. It must be true, though, he'd never known Sherlock to correspond with anybody about the classification of fern-leaves.
Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers
From those brown hills have melted into spring--
Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!
And there the handwriting changed. It was no longer his own: it was too spiky and angular, with the ascenders formed in the characteristic way of Gaaldine. It was crushed into the deep crevice where the paper had been folded before the lines were written, and which John himself had avoided. It was, in every way, unmistakeable.
John felt a familiar anger, honed over incident after incident of dealing with the man's high-handed ways with other people's dogs, other people's respiratory systems, other people's wall-panelling. He reached out to crumple the paper in his hand, but stopped himself: the habits of years died hard, and paper was valuable.
Besides, it was almost a comfort to know that other people broke out into exclamation marks too. Even if their intent was bitter sarcasm. John could understand how it might feel, to find someone else referred to as my only love in that context. He could only imagine how much more complicated one's feelings might grow, when the only love in question was one's late mother-in-law.
John ran his thumb over the deckle-edge of the page. Now he remembered. He'd bought the book cheap from a book-stall: he'd seen that the inscription was that of the Royal Agricultural Library at Zamorna, but told himself that perhaps they'd had to move their anatomy collections to a smaller room, and therefore got rid of a few.
That year, with all his loyalties compromised and broken and flapping in the wind, such small dishonesties had seemed like a proof to the world of exactly what kind of a man he was inside. They seemed like a kind warning, to any who might approach him.
This is a man who would buy a stolen book. This is a man who would kill a Queen.
So long ago. But not yet fifteen years. Nine, at most, since all the promise of five hopeful months had turned a living woman into a bloody, butcher-shop mess. Nine years since the bells in the Cathedral had rung out a different note, startling the pigeons up into the dust-blue evening sky. John wondered how many of those birds had gone fluttering to the lodgings of the student Pretender.
How James Moriarty would have smiled. The very thought of that smile made John think calm and surgeonly thoughts about the fastest ways to end life, and the slowest.
Fifteen years was… a different thing altogether. Fifteen years ago was a soft night breeze and the scent of hyssop and roses in the gardens; and then, in the next year's spring, King Ambrosine riding out to hunt with a look on his face of a man whose hopes had driven him almost beyond his own endurance, and returning to the sound of all the bells pealing at once in the Cathedral of Saints Augusta and Geraldine – but not to the number of cannon-shots that would have hailed a son.
Fifteen years ago, the Pretender would not have been smiling. John wondered whether he was smiling now.
John unfolded the page.
Sweet Love of youth, forgive if I forget thee
While the World's tide is bearing me along:
Sterner desires and darker hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure but cannot do thee wrong.
His own handwriting again, and more besides, marching down the page. Yet more metaphors concerning tides doing things which, from his observations, tides never did. He must have been thinking about currents. And something about the sun and the moon and memory's rapturous pain, and… enough. Enough. He folded the paper, and returned it to its place in the box.
One part was true, at any rate. She was beyond harm now. The hopes upon which they were about to gamble the fate of two kingdoms could cause no further heart-stirrings to the woman who rested beneath chaste white marble.
Her reputation; well, that was another matter, and a point on which he could only touch with fear. A woman's reputation was a thing to be guarded, to the grave and beyond. Even Sherlock knew that much, or he wouldn't have consented to dance at the All Souls' Eve ball with the young woman with two left feet who was now adjusting herself to changed circumstances, and probably thanking her lucky stars that very few of the people who remarked on it in the street chose to do so in Latin.
He supposed he should say something. Acknowledge that desperately scribbled my only Love in some way, and pluck its sting. Some night or other the right time would come, to say Your Royal Highness, you appear to have been corresponding with me without my knowledge, in verse, and see the look that sparked up in those wide-set blue eyes that were as changeful as the Ancona sea.
But tonight was not that night. John closed the box and locked it. He kicked his stool back and rose to his feet. His leg twinged.
"My only love, indeed," he grumbled to himself. "You know what I say to people with only one person they love to worry about? You lucky bastard."