Chapter Text

“Cousin,” Holmes snorted, tossing the letter onto the table. “The old windbag is my mother’s cousin’s son, which makes us scant second cousins. My grandfather and his grandmother were siblings.” Holmes shook his head. “She ended up in an asylum shortly after the birth of Obadiah’s mother, so I doubt he even met the woman.”

“Will you go?” I picked up the Saturday morning newspaper I’d neglected during his reading of the letter, shaking it back open to the cricket, and an exceptional article by Dr Grace. It was a suitable distraction from the possibility of Holmes going away for a spell. Since his return, we had hardly spent a day apart and the idea of him taking a jaunt up to Yorkshire was affecting me more than I cared to admit, even to myself.

“Maybe out of curiosity, if nothing else.” Holmes glanced at the letter. “He says very little of import, whether through lack of actual knowledge or simple circumspection, one cannot tell. I do, however, know that the request isn’t only from him. There is another petitioner for my assistance, the instigator of this letter, and in all truth, it is that which has piqued my interest more than the random tale of ghosts and ghouls.”

“The Precentor for whom he works?” I asked.

Holmes’ warm smile was reward enough for paying attention to his recitation of the letter, and he nodded slowly.

“Indeed, Watson, you noted that small detail also.” He tapped the letter. “Obviously the Canon Precentor has great standing within the Minster, and Humphries wishes us to know that he works for an important man. But whether he is the instigator of this missive, who can tell? Maybe I will have to take a jaunt up to Yorkshire.”

“Four to five hours, give or take, is hardly a jaunt.”

“It’s getting faster day by day, dear boy. They’re pulling out all the stops, literally. One day, they’ll be doing it in three hours, mark my words.”

I wanted to contradict him, just for the enjoyment of a debate, but I knew he was right. As the new century approached, so did the technological advances. As eighteen waned to nineteen, the world around us seemed to be moving ever faster.

Except for me, of course. I was by no means old, but my leg pained me on cold damp days, and even though a scant two years separated Holmes and I in numerical age, the reality felt a great deal more.

“Are you ruminating on the passage of time again, Watson?”

I took a moment to summon a smile before looking up at Holmes, but instead of the amused expression I was expecting, I found him studying me with something a little closer to concern.

“Things change, Holmes, that we must all accept.” I sat up a little straighter. “So when are you off to York then?”

“I see no reason to delay. If I avail myself of the ten o’clock train on Monday morning, I shall be there before tea and have sufficient time to find some decent lodgings in that ancient city. I will send my cousin a note immediately.”

In spite of his protests and the torrential rain, I accompanied Holmes to the station on Monday morning. We had said our goodbyes in the privacy of our own living room before loading Holmes’ bag into the hansom, but I still felt the need to see him onto the train itself.

“I will be back the day after tomorrow,” he predicted, watching the porter stow his bag in the compartment. “I cannot see how much of a mystery someone pilfering from the plate could possibly be.”

“Do not become over confident,” I warned him, mustering up a smile. “Or I shall be sending you telegrams with a single word.”

“Yes, yes, Norbury, I know.” His smile belied the grumpy tone, and then he held his hand out. “I asked Mrs Hudson to obtain a fat pheasant for your dinner tonight,” he told me, and I felt a flush of warmth at his consideration as I clasped his hand in mine. “I thought that without me there to complain at every pellet of lead shot, you could enjoy your favourite bird in peace.”

“I appreciate the sentiment,” I replied. Behind us, the engine’s piercing whistle sounded. “Now, go solve this mystery and I shall meet you from the train on Wednesday. We have tickets to the opera, remember?”

“How could I forget?” With a smile and a wave, he was up into his compartment and I slammed the door for him. “Don’t get washed away on the way home!”

Mrs Hudson served me an excellent dinner that evening, but dining alone had never held any enjoyment for me. I may not have had him complaining every time he came across a piece of shot in his meat, but it still wasn’t the same. Holmes had barely been absent for nine hours, and yet I felt the lack of his presence most keenly. It was quiet, too quiet, for even when Holmes was curled up in his chair thinking, he would be muttering or puffing on his pipe.

I gave up and retired to bed early, and slept fitfully with the rain hammering against my window.

~

The following day improved immeasurably, however, when the second post brought a letter from Holmes himself. I called for tea and settled down to read it.

I put the letter down and sighed. I was being utterly ridiculous, obviously, but the fact that Holmes was so very far away from me at that moment was obscurely painful. Although well in the past, that three year separation still weighed heavily on my mind. He was a little shy of two hundred miles away, I told myself sternly. That was nothing when compared with the distance I had believed between us those years past.

Picking up the bell, I rang for the boy and asked him to bring lunch just as soon as Mrs Hudson could arrange it. I was in no mood for sitting staring at the walls, and had in mind a brisk stroll to take advantage of the no doubt brief break in the weather. It had been a grim, wet start to October but the day had dawned dry and bright and I posited a trip to the tobacconists and a walk around the park would improve my spirits and distract me from the absence of my dearest friend.

He would be on the first train tomorrow, I assured myself. And next time, I would most definitely be accompanying him.

Wednesday morning, however, brought something entirely different. There was a knock on the door shortly after Mrs Hudson had brought up my breakfast and a minute or so later, the boy appeared with a telegram.

I felt my blood run cold at the sparse text and the telegram fluttered to the table from suddenly nerveless fingers, missing my porridge by a fraction of an inch.

Holmes was injured.

I sat frozen to the spot as my mind ran amok with truly awful images, fuelled by the distance between us and my terrible experiences in Afghanistan. Injured could mean so much to a non-medical man, and to a trained doctor, it meant a myriad more. Lacerations or broken bones? Concussion or coma? A bruised tail bone or cracked skull?

My brief paralysis broke a moment later, however, and I was on my feet and heading to my room before I had even thought through the logistics of the journey. Holmes needed my help, and I had already accepted that I would move heaven and earth itself if my dear friend required it of me. A five hour journey to York was of no moment, even if it should have been him making the return journey that morning.

I threw a variety of items into two capacious bags and sent the boy for a hansom. The train did not depart for another hour but I felt most averse to taking a single chance with the state of the London traffic. The consistently miserable weather over the previous month meant the streets were awash, and where they were not, the surface was degraded to a mish-mash of broken cobbles and potholes big enough to swallow a dog cart.

Whilst I waited for the hansom, I availed myself of a number of things from Holmes’ room, as I knew full well he had gone with little but an over night bag, so convinced was he of his ability to solve the issue in a short period of time. I doubted he had a full toileting kit, and my fastidious friend would be most adrift without a clean collar and set of cuffs each day. I knew full well that I was distracting myself with preparations, but any task which prevented me from dwelling on that which I might find in York was most welcome.

The hansom arrived in good time and I sent my bags down, picking up my satchel and taking one brief moment to double check that I had not forgotten anything. A handful of crowns and shillings in my pocket and some white notes in my billfold, I hurried down the seventeen steps and out into the grey morning,

At least it wasn’t raining too heavily, I thought, gazing out of the hansom window. I catalogued all I could see in an attempt to distract myself from worrying over the what-ifs that attempted to crowd forward. Holmes would be fine, he had to be fine. There was no other outcome I was willing to entertain, and I would enjoy roundly scolding him for worrying me so, when I arrived in the ancient city of York.

It was a quiet train, thankfully, and I had a compartment to myself. Shaking out the first of three newspapers purchased on the platform, I settled back in my seat and attempted to focus on the news of the day, ignoring the miserable gloom beyond the rain splattered windows.

~

The garish headline was the first thing which greeted me as I stepped off the train. I tossed the newsboy a thruppenny bit and folded my copy up to shove it into the satchel for later reading. I had a brougham to find and a Holmes to scold, I told myself. A porter picked up both my bags and enquired whereabouts I wished them taking, and upon my explanation, he led me, not to the front of the station as I had anticipated, but out a door further down the platform, to a neat little turning circle in the lee of the Grand Hotel.

A line of carriages with rain soaked horses stood in the drizzle, and the porter walked unerringly up to a smart little brougham.

“Now then, Tom lad,” the porter called up at the driver, who was huddled in his oil skin. “I’ve got thee a Doctor Watson, for the Minster?”

“Aye, Joseph, that’ll be for me,” the driver replied, and I was instantly transported back to the deserts of Kandahar and the good humoured Yorkshire surgeon I had had the pleasure of working with in those sand blasted wastes. The accent was at once unmistakable and oddly reassuring. Tom was nothing like my old surgeon friend, being of an equal height with me and sturdily built, but the smile he gave me as he jumped down was just as warm. “Let’s get tha somewhere dry, doctor,” he said, helping the porter load my bags. “Tis a god foresaken day tha’ve chosen to visit, that’s for sure.”

“Not by choice, my man,” I told him. “The Reverend Humphries summoned me.”

“For Mister Holmes,” he nodded. “Aye, that was a rum one, an’ all. Get th’self sat down, we’ll be there in no time.”

The afternoon was drawing in as we pulled away from the station, but that didn’t mean the grandeur of the great city walls was lost on me. They loomed up out of the mist-like drizzle ahead, and kept pace with us as we turned out of the little side road and headed towards the city. Just as Holmes had said in his letter, there was a great archway in the wall itself, and we went beneath those ancient stones and almost immediately onto a wide spanned bridge. Below, there must have been the river Ouse, but it was hidden from sight in the rain and evening gloom.

The lamplighters had been out though, and cheerful golden light pierced the mist here and there, illuminating the way directly up to the Minster. I was well used to the glory of such places as St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, but York Minster was truly breathtaking. Coloured light spilled from her many stained glass windows, and even with the tops of her towers lost in the lowering clouds, I was struck at the beauty of her symmetry and stonework.

The brougham turned right, just when I thought we were going to trot up the wide front steps into the nave, and pulled up at a much smaller door down the side of the building.

“Strikes th’hard, first time, no matter whence tha came,” Tom said, looking back at where I was still gazing up at the building. “Even a Londoner looks twice. Tis t’heart of York, our Minster.”

“A truly beautiful building,” I said, gathering my things. “Is this where you are to drop me?”

“Lord love tha, no, sir, we’re to wait for the reverend himself. Sit tight, and I’ll fetch ‘im.”

The man who came out of the side door some five or six minutes later with Tom was not whom I was expecting at all. As a cousin, albeit second cousin, of Holmes, I had anticipated someone tall and thin, very much like the ascetic clerics I’d seen scurrying around the corridors of St Paul’s and other church buildings.

The Reverend Obadiah Humphries was about as far from that image as it was possible to get. He was short and round, dressed in a black hassock and white surplice, and looked as if he had come directly from taking a mass of one sort or another. With an eye honed by years of following Holmes around, I noticed the lines around his dark brown eyes which spoke of laughter more than age, the full lipped mouth which turned up at the corners in spite of the worried expression on the round face, and the close cropped salt and pepper hair which was more monkly than priestly. All in all, my first impression was of a man more used to laughing than frowning, one who enjoyed his food and, going by the deference Tom was showing him, was someone who was held in high regard.

“Doctor Watson, it is an honour,” the little man said, hurrying forward from under the umbrella Tom was holding. I stepped down from the brougham to take the offered hand, and found the handshake firm and dry, not at all the wet fish I’d imagined.

Preconceptions, Watson, I heard Holmes’ voice in my head, can cloud your judgement. Keep an open mind at all times.

“Reverend Humphries, I wish we had met on better terms. I got your message and came with all haste.” I watched the round face do something complicated, and then the lurking smile appeared, briefly.

“Please, I go by Obadiah, as we should all be humble before God. And I am so very grateful you have arrived. Mr Holmes was insistent that you should not be bothered, but I thought it best that his own physician should attend him.” Obadiah turned to Tom “The Manse, please, Tom.”

“Aye sir.”

Once back in the brougham, I found myself being closely scrutinised in turn. Those brown eyes, the polar opposites of Holmes’ pale grey, belied an intelligence that had been, if not lacking, then hidden in the letter which had started this whole business.

“Forgive me for staring.” Obadiah suddenly looked down at his hands. “Curiosity is most unbecoming of a cleric, but I have been forever fascinated by the exploits you write so eloquently about.”

“You read the Strand?” I asked, unable to fully hide my amusement and Obadiah’s laugh was short but welcome.

“My grandmother was a Holmes, and although my mother never spoke of her once we relocated to York, I have been forever keen to know more of my family history. Mr Holmes himself has said he will gladly furnish me with all the knowledge he has on our shared lineage.”

I hope I kept my surprise in check, but that little tidbit of information was sufficient to confirm my initial impression of a very genuine, personable soul. Holmes would never have agreed to do such a thing with someone he had little time for.

“But forgive me, Doctor Watson, I do ramble on at times.” Obadiah pressed a hand to his chest. “I must seem so rude. How was your journey? Not too taxing, I hope?”

“This new train is a great deal quicker than the last one,” I replied. “And truly, I do not take offence at a lack of social niceties. I have lived with Sherlock Holmes for far too many years for that to happen.”

Another smile and a surprisingly light giggle was my reward for my confidence.

“I found the new carriages a vast improvement on the old ones, too,” I added, “They have a very personable young man who pushes a cart along the entire length of the train and back, and he sells hot tea, sandwiches and slabs of some unidentifiable but rather good cake. I was well fortified en route, I can assure you.” I looked out of the window as the brougham rattled to a stop. “Are we here already?”

“This part of the city is what you would call compact,” Obadiah said. “We could have walked in about the same time, except for your bags and the appalling weather.” He brushed the front of his cassock down and took a deep breath. “Right, please, let us get inside before the rain begins anew.”