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Chapter Text

Sherlock Holmes had been gone three days when the cat made its first appearance. He’d left Baker Street in the middle of the day, dressed as himself, with barely a nod and without eating lunch, and did not appear again for supper. Rarely am I privy to his movements, especially in the middle of an investigation, so I’d not been worried until the morning after without word from him. I spent the following days tamping my anxiety down, keeping an eye out for his return.

It was a little after midnight on a cool, clear, autumn night, and I had left my window open to let in the breeze. I was awoken from a light slumber by the rattle of glass on my dressing table, and sat up in time to see the small, black form alight on the floor like a shadow. I had barely opened my mouth to exclaim, when the creature hopped up onto my bed. All I could see in the light from the moon were its ears, the curve of its back, and its long tail waving in the air.

“No,” I said aloud, “absolutely not.” I threw the covers back and snatched the cat up by the middle. It gave a yowl of complaint and squirmed like an eel, nearly slipping my grip. I took it downstairs two flights to the front door, unlocked the door with one hand, and ejected the cat into the street. It landed on its feet and darted away into the night.

I closed my bedroom window when I went back upstairs, and slept fitfully the rest of the night.

In the morning, a note from Holmes awaited me at breakfast. It was dated the day before from a little hamlet outside London, and indicated he was nearly finished with his case and expected to be home by that afternoon. I put it aside, quietly pleased to anticipate my companion's return, and was perusing the morning paper when I heard a great commotion and hallooing coming from the kitchen downstairs.

I leapt up and hurried down, to find Mrs Hudson waving a broom at a skinny black cat, while the maid, Jenny, begged her to stop and leave the poor creature alone. My entrance into the kitchen caused an uptick in the amount of general noise, at which point the cat, apparently objecting to the ruckus, darted up the cupboards, onto the table, and out the window into the back yard.

"Oh, no!" Jenny cried, thrusting her head out the window after it, "it's vanished! Mrs H, that cat might be starving!"

"Better it do that out there," Mrs Hudson said, putting the broom in its corner and adjusting her apron, "than think it's going to get fed in here. We've got it sorted, Doctor, thank you very much." She shooed me out and shut the kitchen door in my face. I was no more welcome in there than the stray cat was, so I went back upstairs to finish my paper and my cup of tea.

I thought about the cat a few times that morning, but eventually forgot about it in anticipation of Holmes coming back. He'd want a fresh batch of his tobacco, I thought, after a journey to the countryside. Although I could never predict him, I knew his habits well. I checked his Persian slipper on the mantle, and made up my mind to go out for a fresh supply.

When I opened the street door, I nearly tripped over the cat. It had been sitting on the top step, but the moment the door was open it darted inside. I chased it up the stairs to our sitting room, and found it curled up in Holmes' armchair, watching me with one silver eye.

"You," I said to it, "are not moving in."

It closed that eye and ignored me.

"Here, kitty," I said, creeping closer, "kitty, kitty, kitty. Here, puss puss."

The cat lifted its head and yawned extravagantly. I grabbed it, but it squirmed out of my grasp, leaving deep gouges in my hands with its claws, and ran under Holmes' desk. It would have been impossible for me to reach it under there without moving the desk, which was laden with books, papers, and volatile glassware.

"Why, you little," I muttered, rubbing at my knuckles and coming away bloody. "Sooner or later, you're coming out," I told the cat. "Holmes is not going to put up with you living under there."

The cat meowed loudly, and I saw its tail swishing. It crept forward to peek out from beneath the desk. Its silvery-grey eyes were big and the pupils were wide, and I shook my head at it.

"Absolutely not," I said. And then, "Listen to me, talking to a damn cat. I'm getting the broom."

Mrs Hudson was happy to hand over her instrument of cat removal, but when I went back up to the sitting room the cat was gone. I should have known better than to leave it unsupervised. I looked everywhere for it, sweating in my coat and hat, peering under furniture and stretching to see the tops of things, but it had completely vanished.

Holmes was due home in an hour. Damn it all, I thought, and went out for the tobacco.

That night, I sat up as late as I could, but there was no sign of Holmes— or of the cat. I wondered if it had slipped back outside again. At eleven o’clock I went upstairs and dressed for bed, washed my face, and read for a little while, listening for the sound of the street door. It never came. At midnight I turned out my lamp and tried to calm the worry in my stomach long enough to fall asleep.

The cat woke me. It was still full dark outside, so I had no idea how long I'd been asleep nor how long till dawn. All I knew was that there was a weight on top of my blankets, just beside my knees, keeping me from turning over. When I reached for it, my hand came up against the soft, warm body of the cat, and I sucked in a breath in surprise.

"Bloody hell," I hissed, and it stirred and made a little rumbly noise, halfway between a purr and a meow. I started to push it off the bed, but it began to purr intensely, butting its head against my hand and rumbling like an Underground train. Reluctantly, somewhat against my will, I scratched at its narrow little face, and the purring increased. The cat got up, stretched its long back, and climbed up onto my chest where it settled down in a tight little curl, directly over my sternum. "No," I said weakly, "oh, for heaven's sake."

The cat laid its tail over its nose and blinked at me slowly, the gleam of its eyes just visible. It was very soft, and very warm, and had pinned me quite entirely.

It wasn't that I didn't like cats; I had simply never been in proximity to a cat long enough to really appreciate them. My family had owned dogs when I was growing up, and I had bought a bull pup when I'd come back to England after the war, to keep me company. I couldn't keep the pup at Baker Street—it wasn't fair to the poor creature to be cooped up as I'd had it—but Stamford treated the creature so well I didn't regret giving it away to him. A cat had never entered into my consideration.

Despite the scratches decorating my knuckles, it appeared this one had taken quite a liking to me. Or perhaps I was merely a warm place to sleep.

I pushed the cat off my chest and got up. The cat followed me, purring, out into the hallway, whereupon I spun around and closed the bedroom door in its face. I heard it yowl and begin to scratch at the wood, but I locked the door. No strange cat was sleeping in my bed.

***

The cat was still in the flat in the morning, curled up on Holmes' chair, but Holmes was not. As I sat down to breakfast alone, I began to feel the anxiety creep in. He might be in trouble, and I hadn't the slightest idea where to begin. He hadn't confided in me the details of this particular case, exclaiming that it wasn't going to be printable, and therefore not worth my time. His little puzzles were always worth my time, but it was no use arguing with him on the matter.

"Oh, Doctor," Mrs Hudson scolded when she spotted the cat asleep on the chair, "you know you can't keep that creature."

"I'm sorry, you're right," I said, getting up from the table. "I'll put it outside."

The cat would have none of it. It clung to the chair with all of its claws, and was apparently made of soft noodles, slipping from my grasp. No amount of tugging or pulling or coaxing would free it from the fabric of the seat. It glared and hissed and swiped at me, and I eventually gave up, fearing for the state of the furniture.

The moment I let go of it, the cat hopped down from Holmes' chair, crossed the room, and sprang up onto his desk.

"No," I said, "absolutely not."

The cat sat down carefully among a maze of beakers, flasks, and tubes. It looked me directly in the eye, daring me to come any closer, and knocked a rack of test tubes to the floor.

The resulting crash brought Mrs Hudson upstairs again, and the cat hissed and crouched, glaring and threatening us with the destruction of another piece of Holmes' chemistry set.

"Mr Holmes will be so upset!" Mrs Hudson exclaimed, wringing her hands over the pool of fragments of broken glass.

At her exclamation, the cat opened its mouth and meowed loudly. It had gone rigid, back arched, its hair standing on end. Its tail had puffed up like a bottlebrush, and its eyes were fixed upon me. It meowed again and jumped down from the desk, coming straight over to me and reaching up with both front paws for my knee, warm and heavy. It stood up on its hind legs, surprisingly tall with its back stretched, meowing as though beseeching me for something.

“What on earth,” I muttered, and shook the cat off my leg. It butted up against me again, rubbing its long body against my shin, and stood up once more, this time setting its claws to my thigh like little pin pricks. I swatted it away, cursing, and it darted back up onto Holmes' chair. It made a few deliberate laps, turning in circles, and then lay down in a tight curl, silver eyes locked on me over its haunches.

I cleaned up the glass under its scrutiny, muttering about how annoyed Holmes would be to distract myself from my worry. It wasn’t like him to be so long without a word. If he’d only told me where he was going, I might be able to help, or send the police in his direction, or something.

The cat was on the edge of the desk when I looked up, and I almost dropped the dustpan full of glass in surprise.

“Christ,” I hissed at it, “warn a man.” I pushed myself to my feet, feeling the effects of a few days of inactivity, and turned away to dispose of the glass in the bin. When I turned back, the cat was pawing through Holmes' recent correspondence.

“Get out of there!”

The cat ignored me, using both paws to dig through the papers, spreading them across the surface of the desk. A few sheets drifted to the floor, and I scrambled to pick them up. That such a small creature could make such a mess, I never would have considered.

“Get away,” I said, rolling the papers up and whacking the cat on the rump. It jumped, making a noise of indignation, but turned right around and kept at the papers. I grabbed it around the middle and it twisted in my hands, claws extended, reaching for the thin skin at my wrists. To my surprise, it stopped just short of tearing my radial artery out and patted my wrists with soft paws instead.

We stared at one another for a moment, then I dumped the cat on the floor.

It landed neatly in all fours and darted away across the room.

Turning back to the desk, baffled as to how I would recreate Holmes’ original stacks, I hesitated. The cat's frantic pawing had unearthed a letter on Holmes desk dated earlier that week. I picked it up for a closer look.

Mr Holmes, you were recommended to me by a colleague, who’s little problem you cleared up some years ago. I hope you will have time for mine, although I am of the opinion that murder is not such a little problem. I will call tomorrow at—

The cat bumped up against the back of my leg, purring.

If he'd kept his appointment, the writer would have been at our door four days ago. I seemed to remember Holmes hosting someone while I’d been out, and feeling annoyed that he hadn’t waited for me. I had assisted him and taken notes for several years now; I thought myself a trusted friend and useful companion.

“Hardly worth your time,” Holmes had said, waving my protestation away with one long hand. “I’ll tell you about it if it amounts to anything.”

If his four day absence was any indication, it had amounted to something indeed. I would call upon this fellow, I decided. I would follow Holmes' footsteps and find out where he had gone. If he came back while I was on his trail, then he could wait on me for once.

I turned, and found the cat on the mantle, its nose stuck deep into the Persian slipper.

“Get down!” I hurried towards it and the cat jumped to the floor, evading my swipe. It had crumbs of tobacco sticking to its small black nose.

“I’m leaving,” I told it, “and so are you.”

The cat meowed in agreement and waited by the door, grooming itself while I packed a valise and put on my coat. Perhaps this was strange, but as I’ve admitted, the behavior of cats was not familiar to me. I was only glad I didn’t have to chase it around the sitting room again.

I hardly had to encourage the cat to follow me downstairs; it positively led the way, and meowed at the street door as if I had done it the inconvenience of keeping it inside this whole time.

Fortunately, Mrs Hudson didn’t see us on our way out, and I was spared another disappointed look and lecture on how to keep control of stray animals. I expected the cat to run off as soon as the door was open, but it kept in step with me, twining around my feet and getting in my way as I left the house and started down the pavement.

It followed me to the corner, where I waved down a cab, and waited beside me on the kerb. I looked down at it, frowning. It looked back up at me and blinked, as though following a chap around the city was a perfectly normal thing for a cat to do.

The cab pulled up and before I could object, the cat jumped into the hansom with me. I don’t think the cabman even noticed.

The cat tried to get on the seat, but the jostling of the cab as it rumbled down the street made it unsteady, so it slithered down into the footwell and stood up instead, paws on the closed door flap to watch the city go by. Its ears poked up above the door of the cab, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine how silly we looked together. I was very nearly resigned to it. My day felt ridiculous already; what was one more feline antic?

Then the cat followed me into Liverpool Street Station.

Chapter Text

“Is that your cat?” the clerk at the station asked me, as I bought my ticket to Billericay.

I looked behind me, as if surprised to see the sleek, black cat sitting on the platform with its four paws together and its tail curled around its feet. “No,” I said honestly.

The clerk raised an eyebrow, and I slunk away before he could ask more questions. The cat followed me down the platform, probably ensuring the clerk thought I was a liar as well as an eccentric.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” I said to the cat, when I was mostly sure no one was paying us any attention, “but you can’t come on the train with me.”

The cat lifted its hind end in the air, tail curling up into a question mark, and walked deliberately over to rub itself against my trouser leg. I am coming with you, it seemed to say, and bully if you think you’re doing anything about it.

When the train pulled out of the station, the cat was right beside me in second class, taking up the seat and glaring at anyone who hesitated to stare at it. Needless to say, no one sat beside me for the duration of the trip. It wasn’t doing anyone any harm, I reasoned with myself, and did not argue.

As the journey continued, the cat sank from its defensive posture into a warm puddle of fur pressed against my thigh. It began, very quietly, to snore. Every so often I caught myself reaching down to pat it, sinking my fingers into its plush black fur, and had to pull my hand away. No one would believe it wasn’t my cat now, especially if I did that.

An hour later in the town of Billericay (Borough of Basildon, Essex), I made my way to the office of Charles Fitzsimmons, solicitor. A secretary greeted me and asked me to wait, but the man himself came out of his office only a few moments later.

“You’re Mr Holmes' assistant?” he asked. He was a short, prim man with round glasses and sleek brown hair. His dress and demeanor were all very tidy and correct, and I wondered if he pressed his collars twice before he put them on. His cuffs, however, had faint ink smudges on them. Holmes would have made something of that.

“Ah, his associate,” I corrected. “My name is Watson.”

“I was starting to think Mr Holmes had abandoned the case,” Fitzsimmons said, ushering me into his office. A fire blazed merrily in the grate, but the window behind the desk was cracked open to let some of the heat out again. “Sorry, is that your cat?”

“No,” I said after a moment’s hesitation.

I felt its reproachful glare on my back as the secretary herded it out onto the street, and stifled a moment’s guilt.

“He hasn’t abandoned it,” I said, taking the seat that was offered to me. Over his shoulder, I saw that the cat had found a perch outside on a nearby fence. It managed to make an awkward seat look comfortable, hind end on the post and front paws below on the top rail. Its ears were perked forwards at attention, as though listening intently. To us? “No, er, he’s sent me to provide a… new perspective. I am a doctor, after all.”

“Does he have any idea what happened to my brother?”

“Mr Holmes keeps his theories to himself until he comes to a conclusion, but he does like me to examine the facts fresh, and unbiased. Why don’t you tell me what you told him?”

Fitzsimmons hesitated. “May I ask to see your credentials, sir? I mean no offense, but this is a very personal matter, and I want it to be taken seriously.”

“Of course,” I said, fumbling around in my pockets for something to prove I was Holmes' friend. I came up with the telegram he’d sent, telling me he was coming home, and handed it over.

“He went back to London without--”

“No,” I said quickly, “he summoned me, actually, to consult with him. Things were not as clear as he thought they were. Please, start from the beginning.”

Fitzsimmons was frowning. He didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me. But he must have been desperate, for he sighed and sat back in his chair. Beyond his shoulder, the cat sat up and was watching me through the window.

“Right, well, I suppose, if this is the only way,” Fitzsimmons said, and began his story. “I asked Mr Holmes to come look into the disappearance of my elder brother. Harold has been missing for almost a month, and no one seems to have any idea what happened to him. His wife does not seem overly concerned, which Mr Holmes confirmed was suspicious. She says Harold is on a trip, but my brother was not one to take trips without announcing his intentions.”

His brother, who lived in the nearby village of Little Burstead, had apparently gone out one morning and simply not come home. I resolutely did not let my thoughts stray to Holmes, gone as well for four days now, and counting. Mr Fitzsimmons the younger was a busy man, his business extending beyond the town to several surrounding villages, and had not noticed until his brother did not appear for their usual drink at the pub in Billericay, several days later. His wife insisted the elder Fitzsimmons had gone on this mysterious trip, but couldn’t say where he had gone, nor how long he would be, only that she was entirely confident that he was safe and well. To Fitzsimmons, this seemed the most suspicious proclamation of it all.

“If he was well, why would she be so adamant about it?” he asked me.

I couldn’t see the logic of his concern myself, but perhaps that was why Sherlock Holmes was the detective, and not I.

“And that’s all you have to go on?” I asked. “How long have they been married?”

“Long enough for her to bear him a child. Their daughter is almost a year old.”

“How was their marriage?”

“How is any marriage?” Fitzsimmons demanded. “I don’t know, I wasn’t in the bedroom with them.”

Annoyed by his crudeness, I said, “But surely you noticed how they were together? Were they happy? Dissatisfied? Did they bicker?”

“Newlyweds bicker, do they not?” Fitzsimmons sat back in his chair. “My sister-in-law is impertinent sometimes, and it is my brother’s responsibility, as head of the house, to keep her in line. Make sure that she is fulfilling her marital obligations, and such.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but I didn’t like the implication. It wasn’t how I hoped my marriage would be described.

Perhaps the wife had done her husband in for ill-treatment. That was the simplest solution. But Holmes would never allow himself to theorize about that, or about anything, until he had more information.

“Holmes would talk to the wife,” I muttered.

“He did talk to her. Eliza said she talked to a detective three days ago, the same day I spoke to him. She was sure to tell me she thought I was sticking my nose in where it didn’t belong, and that I ought to trust her that my brother was well.”

“Have the police been involved in this at all?”

Fitzsimmons shook his head. “They won’t take the case. Forgive my frankness, Doctor, but without a body they seem to think there is no crime.”

***

I left Fitzsimmons’s office feeling despondent. Holmes would have known what to do next. Holmes would no doubt already have some idea of what happened. I had assured Fitzsimmons I would get to the bottom of this-- to assist Holmes, of course-- but I was certain at that moment that I wouldn’t be able to do it alone. Could Holmes have gone the same way as Fitzsimmons’s brother? It wasn’t exactly against his character to disappear mysteriously without a word, but surely he would have said something to me.

The cat reappeared, trotting to catch up with me and almost tripped me, winding between my feet.

“For heaven’s sake, cat,” I scolded it, and it meowed at me. “What is it you want, anyway?”

The cat stopped in the road, sitting back on its haunches. It blinked up at me. I glanced around, then crouched, stretching my hand out to it. It sniffed my fingertips, and butted its head up against my knuckles.

“Fine,” I said. “Come along if you like.”

The police station was the next logical stop. Holmes would have consulted with the local constabulary. Even if Fitzsimmons said they hadn’t taken his complaint seriously, Holmes would check up on that. The cat fairly led me there, darting ahead of me and then waiting for me to catch up.

There was an older woman at the front desk, which made me pause. But she looked up and greeted me very cordially, and introduced herself as Mrs Griffin, the wife of the chief constable.

“He’s just in his office, sir,” she said, when I asked to see the man himself. I breathed out a sigh of relief. Mrs Griffin picked up a pen. “Do you have something to report?”

“No,” I said quickly, “no, I just… Mr Charles Fitzsimmons, the solicitor, has asked my friend, Sherlock Holmes, to look into something for him.”

“That business about his brother, eh?” Mrs Griffin had a knowing look on her face. “I think I remember a Sherlock Holmes. He came to talk to Mr Griffin as well.”

“He did?” My heart was in my throat. Finally.

“Yes, oh, two or three days ago, I suppose.” She peered at me. “You said he was your friend?”

“He is,” I said, taking an immediate dislike of her use of the past tense. “We work together. I sometimes assist in his investigations, following up on work. Does Mr Griffin have time to discuss the concerns Mr Fitzsimmons has about his brother?”

She didn’t roll her eyes at me, but she almost did. “One moment, please.”

I waited at the desk while she went into the office and consulted with her husband. She came back out a minute later and said, “Mr Griffin has ten minutes, just now.”

“Thank you,” I breathed, and hurried past her into the office.

Mr Griffin was a stout man whose uniform buttons strained on the front of his jacket. He had a thick grey moustache that matched the hair on his head, and heavy brows and jowls that gave him a perpetual frown.

“What can I do for you, Mr…?”

“Watson, John Watson,” I said, sitting down across from him. “I understand my friend Holmes was here.”

“Yes, a few days ago he came by to ask me questions about Mr Harold Fitzsimmons.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ve-- he’s--” I hadn’t shared my fears with anyone yet, but I was going to have to now. “I’m worried he’s missing.”

“Missing?” The constable’s eyebrows went up, revealing keen blue eyes.

“He left our flat in London nearly a week ago and hasn’t been back since. He sent a telegram from Little Burstead two days ago, saying he was on his way, but he never arrived.”

“And you think his disappearance and that of Harold Fitzsimmons are related?”

“Yes.”

“Mr Fitzsimmons’s departure has not been determined to be suspicious, I must say.”

“I’ve heard that.”

Griffin’s eyebrows went down again as the constable scowled. “Mr Charles does not have the highest opinion of us here in Billericay. He comes from London, and they have quite a bit more crime there than we do here. We see very little trouble out of Little Burstead, it’s just a quiet little hamlet. My wife is from there, in fact.”

“You don’t find his disappearance suspicious?”

“What’s suspicious about it? His wife says he left one day without a lot of explanation, and we haven’t found any evidence to the contrary. His body isn’t under the floorboards, Mr Watson.”

“You checked?”

“Have you ever smelled a corpse?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Then you know they’re hard to miss, if they’re close by.”

This was true. I grimaced at the thought.

“People walk out on their wives,” Griffin said gently, as though I might not have thought of it.

“You believe that’s what happened?”

Griffin shrugged. “I believe it’s the most plausible explanation.”

“Why would he go without telling his brother?”

“Your friend wondered the same thing,” Griffin admitted.

“You didn’t look into it at all?”

“What would you propose I investigate, Mr Watson? A man leaves town, his wife and brother have no information, the trail stops there. Who else am I to ask?”

Holmes would have taken this man apart, I thought. Perhaps that was why he was so reticent.

There was a commotion in the other room, and as Griffin and I turned towards the door in confusion, Mrs Griffin came in with the cat held around the ribcage, its legs dangling down. It had a folder in its teeth.

“Bloody hell, what is that?” Griffin demanded.

“This little bugger was in the records, sniffing through them.”

“How very unusual,” I put in, pretending to be shocked. The cat would.

Mrs Griffin tried to pull the folder out of the cat’s mouth, which meant she had to let go of its ribs, at which point it dropped to the floor and ran underneath my chair. The folder fell open and spilled papers all over the floor. Several of them had teeth marks in them. At a glance, I couldn’t tell if they were relevant or not.

“Thank you for your time,” I said to Mr Griffin, standing up and hoping to give the cat a chance to escape. “I’ll see myself out.”

***

The cat disappeared as I was negotiating with a driver to take me the rest of the way to Little Burstead, where Holmes' telegram had originated. I felt an unexpected pang of disappointment, thinking for a moment that we had parted ways. It was a reasonable place for a cat to vanish. Surely it would have a fine time surviving out here with the sheer quantity of mice it could eat.

Then the cat climbed out from under the seat and seemed to smirk up at me with its large, silver eyes. The driver never noticed.

Little Burstead was a modest village a few miles south of Billericay, with a small church whose green was filled with uneven gravestones. The autumn wind rattled in the empty branches of the trees overhead. The street was mounded on either side with piles of brown, dry leaves. This short, central stretch of the village was surrounded by cottages, and these cottages were in turn surrounded by farmland. Holmes had a horror of the countryside, with all its open space. So much could happen in the silence between the farmhouses, he said. A chill went down my spine, and I pulled my coat tighter around myself. The cat leaned against my leg, providing some warmth.

It was well past midday at that point, encroaching on evening, and my growling stomach insisted I stop for a meal. I reasoned that the local public house was a grand place to stop in for food and local gossip. Perhaps I’d find a hint as to where Holmes had gone, if he’d spent the night. I turned aside, mind already fixed upon a full stomach.

The cat, who had been preceding me down the street with a jaunty spring in its step, took only a few moments to realize I was no longer at its heels, and came hurrying back with an accusatory yowl.

“Now, I’m certain you can’t come in here,” I told it. It ignored me, swiping at the hem of my trousers with outstretched claws. One claw held and for a moment it was as if the cat was tugging me away from the pub. I pulled back, dislodging the claw, and muttered, “Holmes doesn’t believe in stopping for meals either.”

The cat meowed insistently.

“Oh, come off it,” I said. “I’ll send out a saucer of milk or something. Don’t follow me.”

The cat followed me. The pub was mostly empty, a little late for the luncheon crowd, so the cat went unnoticed as it slunk around my feet and sat leaning against my shin as I stood at the bar to talk to the landlady.

“Good afternoon,” said I. “I don’t suppose you have any rooms open.”

“We have two available,” the landlady said. “Just yourself?”

I almost said no, since usually I’d be travelling with Holmes. “Y-yes, just me.” It made my stomach turn over. He ought to be here with me. I ought to have been with him in the first place. I hated not knowing where he was.

“That your cat?”

“Er,” I said. The cat had wandered away and was exploring the fireplace, where the fire was burning merrily. The cat sniffed at the hearth in front of the fire, investigated the chairs on either side, and then sprang up into one, as light as a bird.

“Only we’ve already got a cat,” the landlady went on. “My daughter’s. Big fat grey sod. Bit territorial.”

“It’s, er, it’s not my cat, exactly. I just can’t seem to shake it. It won’t cause any trouble, I assure you.” I hoped.

The landlady chuckled. “My daughter said the same thing. Lots of strays in this town, I suppose. Spot of lunch, for you?”

“Thank you,” I said, and went to join the cat at the fireside. It blinked slowly at me, now curled up into a neat circle in the chair. I took the other chair. The cat closed its eyes and put its head down on its paws. I stared at it absently, with nothing better to look at. Why was it so intent on me? What was interesting about me that would make it follow me all the way here? I hadn’t even fed it.

The landlady brought a cup of soup and a piece of bread over, and she also laid down a bowl for the cat. I didn’t look too closely at what was in it, but the cat perked up immediately, jumped down from the chair, and went to investigate. It sniffed around the bowl twice as I watched, and then settled down to eat. I probably ought to have fed it before we’d left that morning, but at no point had I actually decided that the cat was my responsibility. It had simply inserted itself into my day, and apparently my life.

We ate in companionable silence, the cat and I. It finished its meal more quickly than I did, and went to lie down in front of the fireplace, stretched full-length upon the hearth. I found myself smiling at it. It had a little white patch between its forelegs that hadn’t been visible before, where a gentleman’s shirt would show above his waistcoat. When I reached out to scratch that spot, the cat stretched further and rolled onto its back, plainly enjoying the attention.

I wondered if, once I found Holmes, I might convince him we needed a cat at Baker Street. Were they all this attentive? I doubted it. This one certainly seemed unique.

I had to rouse the cat from a nap before we set off again. At first it yawned and stretched, drowsy and annoyed at having been woken, but the moment it saw the door open it dashed out ahead of me.

Chapter Text

Mrs Eliza Fitzsimmons was young and lovely, and not particularly happy to see me once I had introduced myself. She was in her garden, taking the washing down, a baby sitting in the basket at her feet.

“I’ve already told your friend,” she said, “I don’t know where my husband went.” She was a short woman who filled out her floral dress, and her gleaming auburn hair was pulled back from her face into a bun, soft red curls spilling out to catch the light. She seemed surprisingly hard, for having such a lovely face.

“He didn’t tell you?”

“He said he was going north on business. I didn’t need all the details. I assumed he’d be back.”

“It doesn’t worry you that he’s gone?”

The baby whined, so she bent down to tickle under its chin and put its wooden teething ring back in its chubby hands. A large brown tabby cat came slinking out of the house and wound its way around the basket, making the baby coo and clap. Mrs Fitzsimmons gave the cat a pat too, and gentled the baby’s hands as it pulled on the tom’s thick patterned fur.

“No,” she said simply. “I’d know if something had happened to him. I’m his wife, after all.”

A chill crept down my spine. Perhaps it was the cold autumn air, fresh and crisp out here in the country. Beside me, the black cat that had become my shadow was standing alert, its back slightly arched, eyes fixed on the tabby.

The tabby paid us no mind, lolling about with the child in the basket.

“Do you know if anyone might have meant your husband harm?”

Mrs Fitzsimmons’ gaze was cool and calm. “My husband is very well respected by the men of this community. He is an important man, and well regarded. No man here would have dared.”

No man, indeed. Working alongside Holmes for so many years and cases had taught me one thing at least: a woman, no matter how lovely, was not to be underestimated.

“How long have you and your husband lived here, Mrs Fitzsimmons?”

“We lived in London until we were married. My daughter was born here. The city air treated me poorly. Not quite two years, perhaps?”

“You are fairly new to the community, then.”

“Everyone here was very welcoming. I’m a proud member of the Village Improvement Society, as a matter of fact. Now, Mr Watson…” Mrs Fitzsimmons picked up the basket with the baby in it and balanced it on her hip. “I don’t know anything more. I’m sorry you’ve made a trip for nothing.”

She closed the door without letting me get another question in. Damn and blast. Holmes would have pried an answer out of her, probably would have convinced her he was doing her a favor by looking into it.

***

I returned to the inn discouraged; the bitter cold that had crept into Little Burstead only added to my foul mood. Night had come early, the town grown dark around me as I walked the quiet, lonely country lane. I could barely see the cat darting beside me in the falling dusk, like a shadow come to life.

Houses along the road to the village high street had Hallowe’en jack o’lanterns in their windows, hollow faces grinning out at the darkening evening. The cat’s eyes gleamed gold with the reflected light.

I was no closer to finding my friend than I had been before I’d decided to take the case. If he’d been there, he’d have had a thousand ideas, and would probably spend the night sitting up and smoking, thinking them all through to their logical conclusions. I was just going to go to sleep.

So was the cat, apparently. When I turned my back on it to wash my face and change into my nightshirt, it made itself comfortable right in the middle of the single bed, curled into a ball on the coverlet.

“No,” I told it, picking it up and dropping it gently on the floor, where it landed on its feet, indignant. “The bed is for me.”

As soon as I was under the covers, however, the cat jumped up on top and settled down almost exactly where it had started, only now it was sitting up against my ribs. It was warm and heavy, and purring before I could push it away.

I muttered, “Fine,” letting my hand rest upon its warm flank. The fur under my fingers was soft and thick, and the cat butted its head against my hand. I scratched its narrow face, causing the purr to increase in volume. Holmes would find this whole situation perfectly ridiculous. He’d have thrown the cat out yesterday and never tolerated it sneaking back in. But now the cat was the closest thing I had to a companion, at least in this moment.

***

I woke, surprisingly well rested, for all my thoughts had kept spinning around Holmes and the case in the dark. The weight of the cat had kept me from tossing and turning, its warmth seeping into my side a steady comfort. It had tucked itself between my knees some time in the night, stretched out longways, and peered at me with one sharp silver eye when I tried to sit up. I had to haul my knees up and around its lanky form, caught between the sheets and the cat, refusing to budge.

The cat slipped around my ankles as I left to head downstairs, and straight for the room across the hall to my surprise. It ducked down and stretched one paw beneath the door, scratching away at something.

“Psst,” I scolded, glancing up and down the corridor. “Don’t go in there, that’s not for you.”

I tried to wrangle it into my arms and carry it downstairs, but it climbed my jacket, digging claws into my shoulder, and vaulted off my back. It returned at once to its scrabbling at the door.

When I tried again to coax it away from the door, it squirmed vigorously enough to throw my balance off. I fell into the frame, and my shoulder knocked into the door. It creaked open, not latched properly.

“Ah, my apologies,” I called out, looking around again for any witnesses to my undignified squabble with the cat. This time I could not stop the cat from sliding out of my grasp as though it was utterly boneless. It dodged my hands, and slipped into the darkness of the room beyond.

“Drat you,” I hissed, and knocked at the door to apologize more profusely.

No sound greeted me.

I called again, nudging the door open to let some light in, but again, there was no response. A sudden sound of scratching and rustling made me jump, and I stepped fully into the room to see the rear end of the cat sticking out from underneath the bed, tail flicking wildly back and forth.

The room was empty and unoccupied, the bed made tidily and the luggage rack empty.

“Now what are you up to?” I said, grabbing the cat around the middle and hauling it out from under the bed. It came out with a hiss and a piece of paper with a jagged edge, dragging along the floor.

“What on earth,” I muttered, taking up a scrap as the cat righted itself and began to lick its own spine. As I read, I felt my heart leap.

This was Holmes’ handwriting.

I turned the page over, trying to make sense of it. The back was blank. The left edge was torn, as if it had come out of a journal. Even though Holmes kept most of his investigation in his head and left me to take notes, he still carried a little notebook with him for the more mundane daily requirements, things he didn’t want to keep in his brain attic.

This was a list of names and numbers; the latter, I realized, were years.

John McMillan - 1866

Victor Sandeep - 1871

John Thompson - 1874

Herbert Waite - 1878

Nathaniel Cumming - 1881

Timothy Clayton - 1885

Harold Fitzsimmons - 1887

more?

I squinted at the note. Were they local men? How were they linked? What was the year? Someone who knew more than I about this village was going to have to guide me. Records, I thought. The church keeps records.

The cat wasn’t helpful. Now that it had delivered a clue to me, it was sitting on its haunches, waiting for me to make something of it. I looked up into its silvery eyes.

“I don’t know what this means,” I told it.

The cat’s eyes narrowed. On someone else, it might have been an expression of disappointment. I was projecting my own frustration onto an animal. I needed breakfast.

***

Downstairs, when my breakfast was delivered, I asked the landlady, “Do you run this place yourself, Ma’am?”

“Have done for ten years, now,” she said, wiping her hands on a rag. “I’ve some local boys to help out with the deliveries, and my daughter keeps me company in the kitchen, but the running of it is mine alone.”

“You have done a commendable job, Ma’am,” I said, and peered around for the cat. “Could you tell me, perhaps, about another guest of yours? He’d have come through a few days ago: tall and thin, dark haired.”

Was it my imagination that her eyes had sharpened at my question? She was the very picture of a middle aged country landlady, practical dress, a broad comely face, hair turning to grey at the edges. But her gaze was penetrating in that moment, as the silence extended for an unsettling moment.

Then it broke. “He left yesterday morning, if it’s the same man you’re thinking of,” she said with a shrug. “I can check the register if you like.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said, feeling my spine tingle. “Thank you.”

***

The encounter with the landlady stayed in the back of my mind as I walked to the church.

My attention kept catching on the women out and about. There was a woman driving a cart loaded high with freshly dug potatoes. Here, two women were talking together on a street corner, one of them with a baby on her hip and the other with two small children holding tight to her apron strings.

I walked past a woman up a ladder, her skirts carefully arranged, repairing the window frame on the first floor of a house. Down another street, I encountered two women gossiping over their garden hedge. As I approached, they caught sight of me and went silent, watching me go by.

It wouldn’t have bothered me in any other town, but something about Little Burstead was not quite right.

The number of women was not balanced by an equivalent number of men, it was certainly plain to see.

Mrs Fitzsimmons had described the village as welcoming, but to my eye it only seemed a darker place the longer I spent there. Had Holmes become subject to the women of this town? What in Heaven’s name would they have done to him?

It was Monday, so the vicar was bound to be in the rectory rather than in the church. This sat removed from the church itself, nearer to the town. It was a nicely sized two-story building with a tall hedge separating it from the field next door. As we turned onto the path, the cat leapt ahead of me and trotted along, tail high.

The vicar was a man of medium build, with brown hair and blue eyes behind round glasses. He welcomed my early interruption and offered me a cup of steaming black tea, which I accepted.

“Is this your cat?” he asked.

“Er, yes,” I said, as the cat joined us in the sitting room. “I suppose it is.”

The vicar laughed and bent to give the cat a pat. “Would you like a spot of milk?” he asked it, and went to fill a saucer. The cat and I looked at each other. Then the cat went to sit by the fire and groom itself extensively, only pausing to sniff the saucer when the vicar brought it back.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, seating himself in the armchair that already had his half-drunk tea beside it.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said. “I don’t suppose a man called Sherlock Holmes came to see you in the last—”

“Why, yes he did,” the vicar interrupted, sitting forward. “He called upon me three— no, four days ago on Thursday. He was asking about Harold Fitzsimmons.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, he was investigating his disappearance, and now I’m afraid Holmes has himself disappeared.”

The vicar frowned deeply. “This is very concerning,” said he, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his shirt tail.

Finally! Someone in this blasted village was taking me seriously.

The glasses went back on, approximately as smudged as they had been before. “How do you know Mr Holmes?” the vicar asked.

“He’s— he’s my friend, we work together, and he’s my flatmate.”

“You know him intimately, then.”

“Yes.”

The cat abandoned its saucer to come rub against my leg.

“Then I suppose your fear is founded,” the vicar said. “Have you not heard from him?”

“Saturday I had a telegram, saying he was returning to London. When he had not returned by Sunday, and I had not heard anything else, I decided to follow him. I’m grateful to know he was here.”

The cat stood up on its hind legs and put its fore paws on my knee. When I shifted to look down at it, it jumped up into my lap.

The vicar smiled. “Unusual of you to travel with a cat,” he said.

“I don’t know where it came from,” said I, “but I can’t shake it.”

The vicar frowned, thoughtful.

“Can you tell me about this?” I asked, producing the list of names.

The vicar shook himself and reached out to take the note. He looked at it for only a moment before he said, “Yes, yes, this was Mr Holmes’ list of missing men.”

“Where did it come from?” I almost got out of my chair in excitement, but the cat was keeping me still.

“The parish records,” the vicar said. “I have only been here a few years, but the parish has very good records. Those years there were the years each man disappeared. That was harder to find, as none of them have ever been investigated by the police.”

“Why ever not?” I demanded.

“They’re not usually reported as missing, not formally.”

“Isn’t that suspicious?”

“Very,” the vicar said, “but I admit it isn’t my area of expertise. Marriages, baptisms, funerals; that’s more my line of work.”

“Do you…” I hesitated. The cat pushed its head beneath the palm of my head, demanding to be pet. “Do you think their wives killed them?”

The vicar was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “I don’t know. But I will say, I find it curious that married men are the only ones who disappear.”

“Is that a pattern?”

He nodded. “Each of these men was married; that’s in the records too. Some soon before their disappearance, some for years. Something happened to them, but this is not a town where much of anything happens. They’ve not been found dead, they’ve not been discovered living a bigamous life somewhere else in the country. As far as I or the records can tell, they simply vanished.”

Though the fire was burning, I felt cold. The cat was a spot of warmth in my lap, but it only made me feel unsettled.

“Once, one of the abandoned wives—Mrs Thompson, I think—requested her husband be declared dead several years after he vanished. She wanted to remarry. No one had anything to say against the request, so it was granted. Other than that, I don’t know of anything coming of it.”

“Do you know anything about the quality of the marriages?” I asked. “Were they happy or unhappy?”

“People hide things, especially from the public,” the vicar said, “but they often tell me more truths than they know. I can’t speak to anything that happened before I got here, but Mrs Fitzsimmons was not a happy woman. She was always quiet and sullen, and after she had her little girl she became positively despondent. She asked me once what were reasonable grounds for divorce. I could tell he wasn’t taking care of her the way he ought to, as her husband, but— as I’m sure you know— divorce is not an easy process, and requires proof of several offenses. I told her the requirements, but I fear it wasn’t the answer she was hoping for.”

“You think she took matters into her own hands.”

“Perhaps,” the vicar said with a deep sigh, “but what did those hands do? I can’t say. I am not an investigator, like your friend.”

The cat meowed.

“What advice did you give him?” I asked. “Who did you send him to?”

“He asked me who women go to for advice, in this town, when they want something men cannot provide.”

My heart was in my throat. This was a lead. “And?”

“I suggested he visit Mrs Brannigan, on the edge of town.”

“Who is she?” I had a vision of a lonely cottage, windswept and stark against the sky. In my lap, the cat was quivering.

“Mrs Brannigan is our midwife,” the vicar said. “She’s very good, if a little old-fashioned. I think her mother was a midwife before her. I’m sure there’s a long line of midwives and healers in her family. She takes excellent care of the babies born in the three villages nearest to us, and steps in when the doctor from Billericay is too long in coming. She’s saved more than a few limbs after bad riding accidents, as far as I’ve heard, and the women of Little Burstead trust her implicitly.”

“That’s who Holmes was looking for,” I murmured, partly to the cat. “That’s who solves problems for women who can’t solve them themselves.”

Chapter Text

Mrs Brannigan’s cottage was set apart from the town, but it was neither windswept nor stark. It was a white-washed house surrounded by a stone wall, inside which was an abundant garden, curiously lush at this time of year. The greenery I could understand; the flowers gave me pause. I entered the garden by the front gate, and a twitch of the curtains told me my approach had been observed.

The cat couldn’t decide what it wanted to do; first it ran ahead of me, and then as we neared the front door it slunk away under the bushes.

“Come here,” I hissed at it. I could barely see it beneath the brush. Then I thought, perhaps it would be better to visit a poisoner-for-hire without a cat following me around. But as I reached up to knock, the cat changed its mind again and got in front of me. It was clearly agitated, its back arched and its tail flicking back and forth.

An elderly woman answered the door: she had long, grey hair pulled back from her face, and kind blue eyes in a wrinkled face. She wore a plain blue dress with a white apron over it, and peered curiously up at me.

“Hello,” the woman said, “you must be Watson.”

The cat at my feet hissed. “I beg your pardon?”

“You came sooner than I expected.”

I stared at her. “How did you–?”

She smiled, showing crooked teeth. “I knew who he was the moment I saw him. He’s made quite a name for himself, with your help.”

“Him… you mean, Holmes?”

“Of course, who else?”

I scowled and clenched my fists. “Where is he?”

She stepped back from the door. “Why don’t you come in and have a seat?”

I knew it was dangerous to set foot inside. If this woman were a serial poisoner, there was nothing to say she wouldn’t try her tactics on me. Holmes was a brilliant man, a positive tactician when it came to suspects and witnesses, and it was rare that I could follow his logic perfectly. I could play along, but I could never see the line of reasoning he was drawing. To be without him in a place like this, knowing he might not have made it out safely… it made my skin crawl.

I stepped in, and found myself in a cozy sitting room that smelled of warm bread and rosemary. It was lit by the fire in the grate and candles on every surface: the side tables, the mantle, in wall sconces, and along the window sills. An enormous apothecary chest was up against one wall, full of bottles and jars. On any other occasion, I would breathe in deep and look for ways to settle in for a long visit. Today I only felt unsteady and afraid. The cat was keeping close to me, practically leaning against my legs, its ears back against its head and its tail puffed up like a bottle brush.

“Please, sit,” the old woman said.

“I’d rather not.”

A younger woman came out of the kitchen, making me jump, and put a tea tray down on the table.

“Suit yourself,” the older woman said. “What can I do for you?”

“Mrs Brannigan, I presume?”

She gave a small, ironic curtsey. “‘Tis I. And this is my daughter.”

The younger woman gave me a look from beneath her eyelashes that could have been coy if I were a stupider man.

“Where is Sherlock Holmes?”

Mrs Brannigan smiled again, folding her hands in front of her. Her eyes went to the cat. “He’s safe,” she said. “He seems to be in perfectly good health.” Her daughter handed her a cup of tea and she took a sip.

“What is that supposed— he seems?”

She raised an eyebrow at me, and then sighed deeply as she lowered the tea cup. “I have several appointments this afternoon, Doctor, so I beg you will make your visit brief. Your friend is well. What else do you want from me?”

“I want to know where he is,” I said, looking around for a place this old lady might have stashed a body. “And I want to know what you’ve been doing to the men of this town whose wives don’t want to be married to them anymore.”

Her lips twitched, as if she were keeping that crooked smile in check. “Only what their wives ask.” The daughter stifled a giggle.

“I suppose you’re fortunate the local doctor is busy in Billericay, and the constable doesn’t seem to mind the odd man disappearing without a trace.”

“Constable Grant and I are very familiar with one another,” she said. “He’s after me for other things he thinks I do for women in need, but we don’t typically discuss husbands.”

She was an abortionist as well as a midwife, I realized. The two roles went very nicely together. I pushed the thought away; that wasn’t what I was here to uncover.

“What do you use?” I asked. “Arsenic is easy enough to get, and difficult to detect. Is that how you punish them?” I couldn’t help picturing Holmes suffering the effects of the poison, alone and unaided. It wouldn’t have been quick; he would have been in agony. My whole body felt as tense as a bowstring.

“I’m not some common poisoner, Dr Watson, boiling the flypaper. Please. What I do is more sophisticated than that. No one gets hurt with my methods.”

Methods. Was it an admission of guilt? “What are your methods, then?”

She laughed outright now. “Oh, you still haven’t guessed! How rich. Well, that’s to be expected. You men are all alike: logical to a fault. Can’t think of anything you haven’t seen with your own eyes, and even then willing to explain away whatever doesn’t suit you.”

I could tell she was on the verge of an admission of some sort. Some people just love to explain themselves so you know how clever they are. Holmes never explained for exactly the opposite reason.

“Men who don’t treat their wives, or their sisters, or their mothers, with respect, are removed from the situation in which they cause harm. I don’t stand for women being hit, or bullied, or insulted in this town. I wish I could do something about the men in every town, but there are limits.”

“What… what happens to them?” What happened to Holmes?

“They’re safe as houses, in their own homes,” Mrs Brannigan said with a smile. “Some of them sleeping in their own beds, no less. Making themselves useful to their wives. Mrs Clayton has a lovely cart horse, and Mrs O’Gill has a bull for her cows that has brought her lots of strong spring calves. And I heard you met Mrs Fitzsimmons’ tom. He dotes on his little daughter, you know. Just see for yourself,” she said, pointing at my feline companion.

I looked at the cat, bewildered. The cat stared back at me, its silver eyes wide, its dark pupils huge. In the low, weird light, they were positively luminescent. The little white patch peeked out between the cat’s forelegs. The cat stood up, arching its back and lifting its tail in the air, and meowed softly.

“He said you were going to find him,” Mrs Brannigan said, “but I think he overestimated you somewhat.”

“No,” I breathed. That was impossible.

“I think he might have, dear,” she said. I could barely hear her for the rushing of blood in my ears. It was ludicrous. Utter madness.

“Holmes?” I addressed the cat, feeling like a fool.

The cat sat back on its heels again, its paws in a tidy row of four beneath its weight, stared me in the eye, and nodded. Then it came to rub against my legs, purring, as if to say, Well done, Watson.

“This can’t be,” I said— to the cat or to Mrs Brannigan, I wasn’t sure.

She shrugged and adjusted the shawl on her shoulders. “If you say so.” She took another sip of tea, deeply satisfied with how she’d shocked me.

Good God. I stared at the cat again. Holmes? He’d been at my side the whole time. He’d come back to London seeking my help. He’d been underfoot, following me, guiding me, for two nights and two days now. He’d been right there, he’d been–

“You watched me dress!” I blurted.

I had let the cat sit on my bed as I’d stripped and changed. I hadn’t minded its silver eyes on my bare arse, given that I’d thought it was a cat. I felt the heat of shame and embarrassment rise in my chest until I burned with it. Who knew what sort of private nonsense I’d done with the cat– Holmes– in the room? Had I lingered too long in the nude? Had I scratched myself in private places? Passed gas? It was almost too much to think about.

Holmes had the decency to duck his head and put his paws over his eyes. By Jove, was I mad? My friend was a cat. I had to sit down.

“It’s all right, dear,” Mrs Brannigan said, and her daughter handed me a glass of water. “It’s a lot to take in.”

More importantly, I scolded myself as I took the glass, was that my friend had been a cat for several days. He was currently rubbing himself against my shins, his long, lean body undulating weirdly.

“Turn him back,” I said.

“I can’t do that,” she said softly.

“You have to!”

“He’ll give us up,” she said gently. “And, I’m afraid, you will too.”

Cold horror gripped me. Holmes jumped up into my lap and meowed loudly. I clutched him to me. “No,” I said, “please, wait. Let’s not do anything rash.” I set the glass down far away from me, not trusting whatever she might have worked upon it.

She shook her head. “I’m sure you’re a nice man, Doctor, and I’m sorry to do this–”

“No, wait, you’ll be making a mistake. You already have. This isn’t going to end well for you.”

“Is that a threat?” Her voice has gone icy, and her face hardened. The daughter had gone still as well, listening.

“A warning,” I said, trying to maintain a calm exterior. “Holmes is a well-known and respected detective; he works with the Metropolitan Police. If he goes missing, and then I disappear, you’ll have the whole of the Met on your tail.” I hadn’t seen Mrs Hudson, but a hastily-written note had told her where I was going, and she had certainly marked my absence by now. Another day and she’d be telegraphing Lestrade. “I may not be as bright as he is, but I’m here, which means the London Inspectors can find you too.”

Mrs Brannigan hesitated. Her eyes had narrowed.

“Turn him back and you’ll be safe. I swear it,” I begged, “Holmes wouldn’t tell a soul.”

“He’s a detective.”

“If you know anything of him, you’d know that he is in the pursuit of justice,” I said. I stood back up, holding Holmes in my arms. “I can’t even tell you the number of people he’s let walk out our front door, guilty in the eyes of the law, but unjustly so. He’d love to tell you he is not retained by the police. If what you’re doing is just, Holmes would turn a blind eye.”

“And do you think what we’re doing is just?” Mrs Brannigan asked. She was smaller than me, but strongly built, and full of a power that itself had a presence in the room. Her shadow looked enormous in the flickering candlelight. Her eyes gleamed.

“Why are you doing it?”

“To protect the women who come to me for help.”

“Are their husbands cruel to them?”

“Not after I’m done.”

“And what of the opposite?”

Mrs Brannigan frowned, her eyes sharp and suspicious. “What do you mean?”

“Are you equal, in your punishments?” I clarified. “Should a man come to you, however he might discover your charms, and tell you a tale of ill-use at his wife’s hands, would you offer him the same ‘solution’ you give these women?”

She thought for a long moment. “No man has ever come to me.”

I looked down at Holmes, who was sitting quiescent in my arms, eyes slitted but ears perked with alertness. “Do they know what’s happened to them?”

She turned away from me and began tidying the top of the cabinet. “Most forget after a while. None of them are as clever as your fellow there.”

The horror of that astounded me. Holmes opened one eye, as if to say, Stay on topic.

I held his gaze a moment, trying to read what I could from his transformed face. I had thought the cat surprisingly expressive, when it was just a cat. Once it was my dear, clever friend, I could no longer seem to decipher his thoughts. I hoped that I could do what he would, without his guidance.

“If you had given him a chance, Holmes would have left you in peace,” I told the witch. “Perhaps he’d have given you a warning. An ultimatum to take no vengeance undeserved. But he would have understood, as I do, the depths of cruelty that men can sink to, and the injustices that women face in their wake. If the law is not just, then the people must be, and Holmes is just to a degree even I cannot achieve. Please, turn him back. He’s doing important work, in London, and he isn’t done yet. I’m not nearly clever enough to fill his shoes.”

Mrs Brannigan regarded me over her shoulder. “You’d swear to his silence?”

I heard her daughter whisper, “Mum, no.”

“On my mother’s grave,” I said.

“That’s a very serious promise.” Her long plait waggled as she shook her head. “Doctor Watson, if you do that, you won’t be able to discuss what has happened here with anyone. Not even him.”

“I’m willing to forget the whole incident, if you’ll give him back to me.”

She turned to face me, a smile growing on her face. It wasn’t a nice smile. “How about this,” she offered, “you swear to me that Mr Holmes won’t divulge anything, and you’ll be the one to suffer if he does.”

“Fine.”

Holmes stood up in my arms and turned around, ungainly and unbalanced, to put his face in my face. He hissed, which made me pull my head back sharply to avoid his teeth. He put both paws on my face, claws retracted, but I pushed them away and let him drop onto the floor, where he circled and looked up at me, his eyes huge.

“I’m doing this for you,” I said to him. “I’ll have you back if it kills me.”

He stared at me for a long time. Then he blinked slowly and folded himself down into a loaf, his feet tucked underneath him. It was as good an agreement as I was bound to get.

“Give me your hand,” Mrs Brannigan said. She was holding a knife. I swallowed around what felt like a bramble patch, and held out my left hand. She took my fingers in hers and very gently and carefully sliced open the end of my index finger. The knife was so sharp, I hardly noticed until the blood welled up.

She squeezed my finger, blotted the first few drops away, and then guided my hand down to press my fingertip into the corner of a piece of paper.

“Hold your hand there, swear that Mr Holmes won’t tell a soul about me, or my clients, or what happened to him here.”

“I swear it. Holmes won’t tell a soul, on my honor, and I’ll suffer the consequences if he does.”

“Write your mother’s name,” she said, giving me a pen. I wrote it, while my blood created a fingerprint that bound my promise. “Thank you.” She lifted my hand up, gave me a plaster, and took the page away. As I was sticking the plaster onto my cut, she dipped the paper in a bowl of oil, rolled it up, whispered through the tube, and then put it in the fire. The oil-soaked paper blazed and was gone in an instant.

“Now, turn him back.”

“I can’t do that.”

“What!” My anger came on as quickly as the paper had burned. “You– I swore to you– on the understanding that he would– is it easy to swear he won’t tell, if he’s never a human again? My God, woman–”

“Calm down, Doctor,” said she, which had the opposite effect.

“You can’t leave him like this!” I yelled.

“I can’t reverse it until the new moon.”

“How–” I stopped, made myself breathe. “How long until then?”

“Two weeks. Tonight’s the full moon.”

“Bloody hell.”

She raised an eyebrow at me, but I refused to apologize for that language.

“He’s supposed to stay… like this… for two more weeks?”

“It doesn’t hurt, does it?” Mrs Brannigan asked Holmes, who hissed at her, baring his teeth, the fur along his spine standing up. “He’s being silly, you’d know if he was hurting. Just take care of him: feed him, give him water, brush his coat.” She was enjoying this; I could tell by the smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth.

“This is outrageous,” I said. “Why can’t you just fix him now?”

“These things take time, Doctor. The right ingredients. The right mood.”

“M–” I was stammering in indignation. “Mood!”

“Tell you what,” she said, patting me on the cheek in the most condescending way possible, “if he’s not back to himself by the new moon, you come and see me.”

“But you will put him right, won’t you?”

She looked at me archly, offended that I would doubt her. “Yes, Doctor. We had an agreement. I intend to honor it.”

Chapter Text

As soon as we reached the road beyond the garden wall, I cursed myself for a fool. The cat jumped up on the wall and tilted his head at me, watching with curiosity as I muttered and cursed, trying to decide whether or not to march back up to the house and demand more answers.

“Black magic!” I snarled. “Stark nonsense. If that woman thinks she can put me off my investigation by telling me she’s turned you into a cat, she has another thing coming. I’ll go back to the vicar— I’ll go demand the innkeeper tell me where—”

The cat jumped down and rubbed against my legs, interrupting my furious pacing.

“Fine,” I said, “how does a man prove his friend is a cat? How does one prove anything? Holmes would perform tests.”

Thank God there was no one around to hear me or witness my descent into madness.

I addressed the cat: “Holmes, if it really is you, turn around in a circle.”

The cat stopped to glare at me. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to do as I asked, but then he did, turning in a neat circle and then sitting on his haunches to look up at me. He looked resigned, as if he knew I was going to put him through the paces. One conveniently-timed trick was not proof.

I could walk back into town and test the validity of the old woman’s claims at the same time. “Come on,” I said.

The cat obliged.

For the next test, I asked the cat to run ahead of me to a certain point, stop, and wait for me. He did, darting ahead to where two fences came together in a T beside the road, and jumped up on top of the post. As soon as I reached him, he meowed loudly and jumped down again.

There was a puddle in the road. If this were a normal cat and not a London detective in disguise, it would avoid the puddle. I pointed to it and said, “Get your feet wet,” and the cat went reluctantly over. He stepped delicately in the puddle, one paw at a time, and came out again as quickly as he could, vigorously shaking his paws off.

“You’re really him, aren’t you?” I said finally, coming to a stop in the middle of the road, my hands hanging at my sides. A great, invisible weight felt like it was pressing down upon my shoulders.

Yes, he seemed to say, coming back and twining around my ankles. He looked up at me and meowed plaintively. You blundering fool.

“All right,” I protested, “but you can’t blame me for being skeptical. It is a lot to take in.”

The village itself was really quite small, and not much remained between us and the inn. I would have to ask for a cart to take us back to the train station in Billericay. Holmes seemed rejuvenated by my finally understanding the situation, and was dashing and bounding along the road in feline excitement. I thought about what Mrs Brannigan had said about the men forgetting sooner or later who they had been when they were still men. I knew Holmes would be able to maintain a hold on his humanity longer than most, but two weeks felt like an awfully long time for someone to stay trapped in an unfamiliar form, self-awareness leeching away day by day.

Holmes went still, crouching on the side of the road.

“What?”

He was looking over my head, eyes fixed on something up in a small tree. His pupils grew huge and round, and as I watched he waggled his backside in preparation, then took off at a run and went straight up the tree. With a riot of affronted noise, a small flock of birds burst from the upper branches of the tree.

“Holmes!” I cried, hurrying after him. “Holmes, get down from there this instant.”

The birds had alighted on a neighboring tree, still chirping and chattering in alarm.

Holmes meowed, staring at them. His lean, black body swayed on the branch as he tried to find a solid place to put his feet to climb farther up. The birds were very nearly in reach. Holmes was making a chirruping noise at them, his little mouth open and his sharp teeth showing.

“Get down at once,” I scolded, trying to reach into the tree to get him. He evaded my hand, climbing a little higher. I found a rock to stand on, and stuck my head in among the lowest branches. Holmes, distracted by the birds only a short leap away, did not see. This time I was able to grab him by the armpits and lift him; he clung onto the branch with all his claws.

“Holmes!”

He let go and twisted to grab onto my arm, claws still extended. I lowered him out of the tree, pinpricks of blood running down my hand. I was lucky the coat I wore protected me from his strong back feet. I scruffed him and cradled him in my arms as I stepped off the rock. He looked up into my face.

“I need you to remember who you are,” I said earnestly. “You can’t forget Sherlock Holmes.”

I released my grip on his scruff and he at once started to clamber up my shoulder. I thought he was going to jump down again, but stopped as soon as he could see over it. He allowed me to carry him down the road once more, satisfied with looking around from the elevated vantage point.

We passed a few houses on the way to the inn, and I couldn’t help but stare at the large draught horse standing in one of the yards. It stared back with its huge black eyes. It sent a chill down my spine, to sense no humanity in it. This felt like madness indeed. It was just a horse! Or was it? Wasn’t it?

The innkeeper was very accommodating, and had her own daughter harness a cart to take us back to Billericay. We rode in silence, the cat having taken up residence inside my coat. I gave the girl a shilling as we reached the train station, and she left us behind with a cheerful wave.

“Good luck with everything!” she called over her shoulder as she left.

Bloody hell.

I purchased a first-class ticket to Liverpool Street Station, and when the train arrived I managed to find an empty compartment. I put my valise up in the rack and sat down as the train began to move. Holmes climbed straight into my lap.

“No, hang on,” I said, giving him a gentle push onto the seat beside me. Holmes glared at me reproachfully. “You’re a grown man, Holmes, you can sit in your own seat.” I picked up the newspaper that had been left by a previous occupant. Even as a cat, my friend demanded no less than my full attention, which he was not, in fact, entitled to.

This, of course, did not last. We were joined at Shenfield by an older couple who looked with concern at the cat curled up on the seat beside me. I shifted him into my lap after all, which he settled into with a look of obvious pleasure and spent the rest of the ride alternately purring and snoring. The couple did not make eye contact with me after that.

“But where is Mr Holmes?” Mrs Hudson demanded as soon as I was inside Baker Street once more.

I watched the cat dash up the stairs to our flat. “He is in the countryside. He is learning a great deal about… er… bees. From a local… bee-keeper.”

“But bees are not active in the autumn,” she protested. “Was that that dratted cat again?”

“Er, I suppose the off-season is perfect for learning the basics. I don’t know. I’m not a bee expert.”

“Dr Watson, the cat…”

“I have taken a liking to it,” I said haughtily, nudging my way past her and following Holmes up the stairs. “It won’t cause any trouble. I’m sure it’ll make itself scarce soon enough. I’ll be sure it gets fed.”

“Off your own plate,” Mrs Hudson muttered, shaking her head. “What would Mr Holmes say?” But she took herself back to the kitchen and I heard her instructing Jenny to start lunch for me. Bless the woman. Bless the whole household.

The next two weeks were torture. I spent each day filled with a sick, rising anxiety that my friend was not sitting on the sofa beside me, meticulously grooming each of his toes for an inordinately long time, but was instead dead in a ditch somewhere, slowly rotting away. It was a more logical explanation for his absence than the cat beside me was. Sometimes I was certain I had made the wrong decision and it was only a matter of time before a country constable knocked on our door, asking me to identify his nearly-skeletal corpse.

But then the cat did something like sit on Holmes’s desk for an hour, staring at his open notebooks and occasionally pawing through them. Or get up on the table and try to drink out of my teacup. Or insist on being served eggs and rashers off the breakfast plate when Mrs Hudson had left the room. A natural cat would not have had such an interest in his tobacco slipper on the mantle, or spend the evenings curled up in his empty violin case by the fire(the violin having been abandoned on his bed before his departure).

For the three nights after our return to Baker Street, Holmes tried to sleep in my bed. I kept putting him out into the hall, instructing him to go down and sleep in his own perfectly good bed. He meowed and scratched at my door for a few minutes, and then went away. The fourth night, he hid under my bed until I turned the light out, thinking he had finally learned his lesson. I was mistaken. As soon as I had settled down under my covers, he snuck up and curled up at the end of the bed, where my feet wouldn’t find him. For the next several nights he did this, until I finally felt his warm, furry weight pressed against my calves in the night, and realized the perfectly round patch of black cat fur on the coverlet could not be attributed to a shadow after all.

I let him stay. Keeping him close to me was comforting, and I could reach down and pet him when I was feeling particularly nervous about my choice to wait out the witch’s curse. What if Holmes was never coming back? What if he did come back, but came back changed?

Several times I had to give excuses for his absence from the flat to prospective clients. After I let the first one go with apologies, the cat ran over to where my notebooks lived on a low bookshelf and tore them all out of the shelf by the spine with his claws.

“What on earth!” I cried, leaping up to stop him.

He went and got a pen off my desk and brought it back to me in his teeth. He dropped it contemptuously at my feet.

“Holmes, I’m not taking these people’s stories down for you to solve at a later date.”

The cat narrowed his eyes, an expression of distaste on his face. He stood up and dug his claws in as high up my thighs as he could reach.

“Fine, I’ll get more details on the next one. Get off me.”

After that, I took down notes from several more prospective clients: a young woman whose mother had gone missing; an elderly gentleman who suspected his nephew and heir of plotting his death; a man who refused to tell me his business and would only speak to Holmes, even though he clearly recognized me as the detective’s biographer. I assured them all that Holmes would be back mid-November, but the promises sounded hollow. I hoped there was enough of Holmes in the cat to appreciate what he was missing. Maybe he’d have the solutions by the time he returned to himself.

For his part, Holmes tried to set our guests at their ease by climbing into their laps and making himself comfortable. The young lady pushed him off; the old man crossed his ankle onto his knee to make his lap larger. Lestrade, unexpectedly, spent ten extra minutes cooing over the creature and carrying him around the room as we spoke, holding him up to look out the window and stroking him gently between the ears. I could hear Holmes purring from across the room.

Lestrade’s case was a dockyard murder that at first blush I knew Holmes would have loved the chance to unravel. I made the by-now rote apologies, but as Lestrade was leaving, the cat hurried over to me and pulled my slippers off my feet with his teeth.

“Feisty, isn’t he?” Lestrade laughed as I tried to get the slipper back. “Does Mr Holmes know about this?”

“Oh, he knows,” I said through my teeth. “Will you stop—!”

The cat took the slipper and ran across the room to drop it on my boot. He sat down and looked at me expectantly.

“Oh, no,” I hissed. I got up from my chair and crossed to the cat. Lestrade was standing beside me, in the doorway, looking at the cat with amusement. “We are not going,” I told the cat in a whisper.

Holmes blinked, stretched his back, and settled down again on his haunches. He angled his head towards the staircase. Then he stood up and brushed past Lestrade with a friendly rub against his trouser leg, and went down the stairs.

“Come on, Doctor,” Lestrade said with a grin. “Just come and have a look and report back. Himself will know what to do with whatever you find, if we haven’t solved it by the time he gets back.”

The cat meowed urgently from the bottom of the stairs.

I climbed to my feet, feeling the sigh come from deep in my body. “I’ll come,” I said. “The cat might come too.”

“I’d expect nothing less,” laughed Lestrade as he turned away. “The two of you always were a queer sort.”

We rode in a cab to the station, Holmes standing on my lap with his paws on the window ledge. He peered out at the city going by, and Lestrade watched him with a kind of amused curiosity.

“Where did you find this one?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Just showed up.”

“Recently?”

“About two weeks ago.”

He made a considering face.

“You don’t… mind that I’ve brought a cat along?”

“If it were a dog, I wouldn’t say anything,” Lestrade said. “And I always liked cats better. We won’t mix his footprints up with anyone else’s, ha ha!”

The cat turned to regard Lestrade, and if Holmes had had his own face I knew I would have seen his exasperation at the joke.

Lestrade leaned over to chuck the cat under the chin with no sense that it was the great detective, and said, “You tread lightly, don’t you?”

As soon as we arrived, the cat shot out the cab door and darted up the stairs. He went straight in the door as someone on the inside opened it, leaving Lestrade and I on the street.

“But to be honest,” Lestrade said, “I’ve never seen a cat as keen to look at a body as Mr Holmes. Curious creatures, aren’t they?”

I wondered if I should say something.

The body of the murdered man was under a sheet in the coroner’s examination room. It had been pulled from the water in Limehouse, and so far the police had been unable to identify him. When Lestrade pulled back the sheet, I saw that the autopsy had already been completed, and the body had been sewn up again.

“Where are his belongings?” I asked, knowing Holmes would want to start there.

Holmes was slinking around the edge of the room, his tail swishing back and forth. He kept one eye on Lestrade, and was sniffing the air. What he could smell above the carbolic, I couldn’t have guessed.

“They’re in the locker, I’ll go get them,” Lestrade said.

The moment he was gone, the cat leapt up onto the table and began sniffing around the dead man’s head, paying special attention to his ears, his mouth and nose, and his eyes. The face was swollen from having been water-logged for some time before discovery, but the distinctive features were still visible: the thick brows, the long nose, the full mouth, the large ears. One ear was pierced for an ear-ring, but no ring hung from it. Holmes gave this a great deal of time, for behind this ear the skull had been crushed by a blow, and I had to lift the head up so he could get a closer look.

He also walked across the dead man’s chest, sniffing the line of the coroner’s knife with his mouth half-open, as if breathing the scent in too. His pupils were wide and round. I could see the detective behind those eyes, even if they were set in a triangular little feline head.

Lestrade returned in a few minutes, before Holmes had really completed his examination, and certainly before he was able to tell me anything that he had learned. But the clothes were laid out alongside the man, and we saw that they were the rough dress of a dockworker.

“And no one has been able to identify him?” I asked.

“The closest warehouses— their foremen swear they’re not missing anyone, nor do they admit to knowing him. We had a sketch artist do a likeness, of course; no need to subject anyone else to this.” He indicated the water-distorted face.

“What was the cause of death?”

“It was a draw between the head wound and the drowning,” Lestrade said. “I see you found the wound.”

“There was water in the lungs?”

He nodded.

It seemed a simple conclusion: the impact sends the man unconscious into the water, and he drowns as a result. But why? And who was he?

Holmes’s attention was fixed upon the pile of clothing.

“Can you give me a few more minutes?” I asked. “Don’t let me hold you up; I’m sure Holmes would like me to take a few notes.”

“Be my guest.” Lestrade waved his hands at the room. “Take your time. I’ll be in my office.”

He was easier to get rid of than I’d expected, but as soon as the door shut I hurried to set out the clothes on the counter. Holmes jumped up again and began pawing through them, trying to open the pockets. I opened them for him, and we found the pockets had been emptied, their contents stored in a box that had also been brought in.

There wasn’t much to go on: the soggy stump of a cigar, a few coins, a disintegrated piece of bread. I spread the items out with the back end of my pen, frowning at them. Holmes sniffed the items carefully, considering the cigar end at great length. I wondered if his knowledge of seven score types of tobacco would be helped or hindered by a cat’s senses. Then he browsed through the coins with his little black nose: a few pennies, sixpence, a lira, and two shillings.

Holmes suddenly jumped down and began to run around the room, between the counter where the clothes lay and the table where the man himself rested. He jumped up on the body again, looking down into the face, and then looked up at me. His little mouth was open, showing a row of tiny teeth, and he was panting.

“You know who it is,” I said.

He meowed, loud and plaintive.

“Tell me, Holmes. I know you can tell me.” I scooped him up and held him under the arms, letting his long legs dangle and looking into his little pointed face. “Come on, man; if you can figure this out, you can figure out how to tell me who it is.”

He slapped me with a paw in the eye.

“Ow!” It hadn’t really hurt, but it surprised me so much that I dropped the detective. “Holmes, for heaven’s sake. I know this situation is untenable, but—”

He had climbed up on the table again and rising up on his hind legs to reach for my face. I stopped, leaning forward, and he, more gently this time, patted my left eye with the pad of his paw.

Then he dropped down onto all fours and turned around, showing me his backside. As I scowled in confusion, he waived his tail at me a few times, and then turned around once more. Again he propped his front paws up on my chest and touched my left eye.

“Eye?” I guessed.

He meowed. He got down and turned around, rump raised, tail waiving earnestly.

“Tail,” I said, feeling stupid. If anyone saw me playing this game of pantomime with my cat, I’d be locked up in Bedlam before Holmes could solve the case.

Once more he reached up into my face and patted my closed eye. His little cat breath wafted in my face and his whiskers tickled my chin.

“Eye,” I said. “Tail. Eye, tail.”

He looked at me encouragingly, patting my eye again.

“Eye, tail, eye?”

Holmes meowed. He leaned forward and rubbed his angular face on my chin in an undeniable sign of affection from a cat. I could picture the subtle, proud smile the real Holmes would have had on his face.

“Eye-tail-eye,” I said again.

Holmes sprang off the table and ran across the room to the double sinks against the far wall. He jumped up on the edge of one, his black tail whipping back and forth to keep him balanced. When he stepped down inside, I crossed to see what he was up to.

A used teacup sat inside the sink, filled with clear water, the tea bag discarded on the saucer. Holmes looked up to meet my eyes, and then deliberately touched the water in the cup with one paw.

“Water,” I guessed, now fully immersed in the charades experience. “Cup. Tea. Water,” I said again hurriedly, as his eyes narrowed.

He did the movement again, slowing it down, dipping his paw into the cup.

“Er,” I fumbled, “wet, paw, the water, the Thames?”

He hissed at me.

“All right, I’m trying.”

He dipped his paw again even more slowly, and then did it a few times in a row.

“Dipping your paw,” I murmured. He meowed. “Dipping… dip?”

Holmes sprang out of the sink and ran across to the door of the lab, where a rough mat on the floor caught dirt from the shoes of those entering. Holmes dug his claws in, stretched his back, and began to scratch the mat with the enthusiasm of the well-bred feline.

“Scratch,” I said, following him over and watching in confusion. “Tear. Claws.”

Holmes stopped and sat down on the mat, looking at me expectantly, his tail curled around his feet. After a moment, he got up and walked around on the mat, scratched again, and sat down once more. He tapped his foot on the mat.

“Something about the mat. Jute? Rope?”

Holmes hissed and spread his claws out on the mat again. He scratched it again deliberately, dragging the mat clear off the ground.

“The mat itself?”

Holmes meowed.

“Dip, and then mat,” I muttered. “Eye, tail, eye, dip, mat.”

Holmes meowed loudly and ran over to wind around my feet.

“Eye-tail-eye… dip… mat…” Still nothing. I said it faster: “Eye-tail-eye-dip-mat. Eye-tail-eye— Italy?” The lira. Of course! “Italy!”

Holmes rose up on his back legs to put his front paws on my knees, encouraging me.

“Italy, dip… mat. Italy dip-mat. Dip-mat? Italian dip— Italian diplomat!” I shouted, as the answer burst upon me like the sun clearing the horizon over the sea. “The missing Italian diplomat, Sergio Altamura!”

Holmes jumped up my body, claws extended, scoring me in ten places, all to clamber into my arms and rub his whole body against my face in joy. Later, I found more than a dozen tiny scratches all down my front that hurt like the devil, but in the moment I barely noticed them over the sheer exhilaration of having figured it out. I tried to hold Holmes as he clambered back and forth across my shoulders, knocking my hat off, purring like an engine in my ears.

I have set down the details of this particular case in my other notebook, the ones that reside on the lower shelf of our bookcase in the sitting room. I haven’t decided if it shall ever see the light of day, for implying I could solve it alone would be untrue, and writing the truth, that Holmes was there in the room, would make Lestrade suspicious. So I have done neither. I suppose it will have to remain that way.

Chapter Text

The new moon rose in the morning on 16 November. I had forgotten how the lunar cycle worked, exactly, and so had expected to need to wait until that night to have my friend returned to me. How wrong I was.

I was having breakfast a little after seven, the cat in the seat across from me. The newspaper was spread out across the table for him to read. He had his paws up on the table and was bending over the sheet, apparently perusing the agony column. I was eating a piece of toast and had looked down at my watch out of habit. When I looked back up, Holmes—the human version—was back.

He was in the same position the cat had been, more or less: seated at the table with his hands on the newspaper, head bent in concentration. He looked surprisingly well for a man who had spent three weeks in another animal’s body, but I suppose that could be chalked up to the amount of food he’d been eating and the shocking quantity of rest he’d had. Even Sherlock Holmes, chronic insomniac, could not resist the 16-hours-per-day sleep schedule of a domestic feline.

We looked up at each other in surprise. His bright, grey eyes shone with delight as they met mine. My mouth fell open, and I cried, “Holmes!” as I jumped up from the table. He held up his hands, staring at them in wonder, and then opened his arms to embrace me.

“Oh, Watson,” he said, his warm, hoarse voice a welcome rumble in my ear. His arms were tight around my shoulders, and I leaned gladly into his lean body. It was so different from holding the cat against my chest, and I felt his heartbeat against mine just the same.

It was then that I registered that the transformation had left him entirely nude.

He must have noticed at the same time, for we pulled apart abruptly, and he snatched the newspaper off the table for his modesty. I started to laugh, hysterical and weak with relief that my friend was back, and had to sit down in my chair again. Holmes joined in with a chuckle that grew to a full-body guffaw, and it was this cacophony that brought Mrs Hudson up to check on us.

“Mr Holmes!” she cried at the sight of him, turning around in the doorway and addressing him over her shoulder. “What in heaven’s name— I didn’t hear you come in! What are you doing—?!”

“Please forgive me,” Holmes managed, catching his breath. “Mrs Hudson, my dear Mrs Hudson. I— I was just playing a sort of joke on the Doctor.”

“Some joke!” she said.

“My supreme apologies,” he said, scuttling sideways across the room and into his bedroom.

I was still hiccuping with laughter, but I calmed down as Mrs Hudson bustled about with the breakfast tray, setting a new place for Holmes from the sideboard.

“Some joke,” she said again. “I suppose it was very humorous?”

“In its own way.” I cleared my throat and wiped my eyes. Moisture due to more than mirth threatened to spill out, and I had to retrieve my handkerchief from my sleeve to pull myself back together. My chest ached from laughing and relief, and I looked over my shoulder at his bedroom door, afraid I’d been wrong.

Holmes returned, his dressing gown flung on over some clothes plucked no doubt from the floor, and he sat down across from me once more.

“Well, it’s good to see you again, sir,” Mrs Hudson said. “You gave the Doctor such a scare when you left, he went after you like he was on one of your own cases!”

“I know.” Holmes smiled at me across the breakfast table. “He was ever so thorough.”

Mrs Hudson scoffed some more, but as she departed her hand lingered on his shoulder in a motherly touch. She’d missed him, too.

I couldn’t stop staring at him. His normally-pale face was flushed with joy and his stormy eyes sparkled. His hair had not been pomaded into place for weeks now, and it flopped irreverently over his forehead. He hadn’t shaved either, but he apparently hadn’t needed to; his chin was as smooth as it had been when I’d last seen him as himself.

“The cases,” he said suddenly, getting up again. He hurried over to my little secretary desk, where my notebooks lay open on the surface. He came back with them and sat down, jotting quickly across the pages.

“I suppose you solved them after all.”

“I had a few ideas,” he admitted. “Is Billy downstairs? Mrs Hudson!” he yelled, his voice a little hoarse with disuse. “Send the boy up, I have three telegrams to send!”

The pageboy came and went with the notes Holmes scribbled for him, and we were alone once more.

“My dear Holmes,” I said softly, “how do you feel?”

He flexed his fingers and stretched his arms over his head. He’d thrown a shirt on under his dressing gown, but it gaped at the neck, and I saw the flex of his muscular chest as he leaned back. His skin was pale and smooth, almost hairless. It wasn’t unusual for him to be in a state of deshabille in our sitting room, but I’d almost gotten used to the cat and his furry belly. I was going to miss the soft, warm flank under my hand.

“Strange,” he said. “A little unsteady. Unfamiliar. You wouldn’t believe the dexterity that the… the other form had.”

“I would, actually,” I countered. “I’d be surprised to find you on the window ledge or the top of the door now.”

He grinned, and then put his hands to his cheeks. He pulled a few faces, feeling the muscles move under his skin. “You look different,” he said finally.

“I haven’t changed, have I?”

“No, I mean… how do I explain? The cat’s visual system is different. You’re brighter, more colorful, than you were before. The night vision was incredible—oh! it was magnificent—but the colors were all muted.” He smiled softly. “It’s nice to see you properly again.”

I felt myself blushing. “It’s nice to see you properly again, too.”

“Are you finished?” He pointed at my plate. He hadn’t touched his own food. “I feel like a walk.”

I wasn’t finished, but Holmes wasn’t dressed either, so we both set to our tasks and in a few minutes we were putting on our coats and hats.

“Shoes feel strange,” Holmes confided to me as we went down the stairs together. “This whole— all my clothes.” He wriggled his shoulders. “I was so unfettered, Watson.”

“I remember.” He’d spent half an hour or more every afternoon grooming his entire body before settling down for a nap in a patch of sunlight. The flexibility of a cat’s body would never translate to a human, except in a professional acrobat. Not to mention his ability to lick his own— anyway.

He clasped my arm with both hands as we made our way up Baker Street to the park, and my heart filled with joy at the familiar press of his shoulder against mine. We walked for a long time, talking and laughing, comparing notes about our experience of the last three weeks.

“You really did do very well on the case,” he said, giving my bicep a squeeze as we crossed over a bridge in the park. “You always take direction beautifully, but last week you excelled.”

“Thank you,” I said, a little sarcastically. “It’s not every day I get ordered around by a little black cat.”

Holmes’s body went rigid for a moment beside me, and I turned my head sharply to see what was the matter. His gaze was fixed upon the great white swans that glided sedately on the pond. I watched as he swallowed and licked his lips, and then began to pull away from me.

“Holmes,” I snapped, gripping his arm.

He blinked at me in surprise, and then realized what he’d been about to do. We both started to laugh again, and had to sit down on a bench nearby. I kept a hold of Holmes’s arm as we regained our composure, and when he turned to look at me, my grip slid to his bare hand, which I held just as tightly, with no objection from him.

“I missed you,” I blurted.

“I missed you, too,” he admitted. His gaze was warm and earnest, and he looked deeply into my face, as if he was trying to take in every detail of it. I’d tried to keep my routine the same since we’d come back, but I was sure there was something he could read there about my state of mind. He reached up and touched the corner of my jaw very gently and I realized I’d missed a spot when I’d shaved that morning.

He smiled shyly and dropped his hand. “It was strange to be with you all day and not able to tell you what I’d been thinking about.”

“You never tell me what you’re thinking about.”

“Pshaw, Watson. Don’t be ridiculous. I tell you all sorts of things.”

“You didn’t tell me where you were going.”

His mouth grew thin. I clenched my teeth. I hadn’t meant to complain about it.

“No,” he said, finally. “And I regret that. You should have been beside me, but of course I thought the whole thing was very simple. And— think, man!— if you’d been there, we’d have both been in a spot of trouble, and we’d have had to convince Mrs Hudson to take us seriously, and…” He started to laugh, but it was a weak sort of chuckle. I didn’t laugh, even though he had a point.

“Promise me you won’t go off like that again,” I said.

He tore his gaze from mine and looked past me at the swans again, but this time his gaze was vacant. “I can’t promise you I won’t dash off,” he said softly. “You know how I am.”

“But surely you’ve learned a lesson from this!”

“Perhaps. I will try, Watson.”

“You know all I want is to be of help to you. As your friend. And your companion. I hope—” I swallowed hard, the feeling of hopeless worry washing over me again. “Even after we— after I knew the truth, I was so afraid I was wrong. What if you’d been dead, and I entertaining a silly cat, waiting for you to come back? Surely you can see how that would be a more logical explanation than… what just happened to you.”

“I know, and you were right to worry.” He squeezed my hand again. “I’m sorry you had to wait like that, without anyone to take into your confidence.”

“No one would have believed it. I’m not sure I believe it.” Now that he was here with me again, the last three weeks felt like a fever dream. Was I dead?

“Whatever remains,” he reminded me, “however improbable.”

I snorted, but I gripped his hand back and said, “I know. Let’s go on.”

We walked for another hour, as Holmes told me all about how a cat’s visual system was different from a human’s, and how his observations would be different now that he’d lived at shin-height for that length of time.

“Amazing what you can see from a chap’s trouser hems. I knew they were worth looking at before, of course, but the smell, Watson! I suppose I won’t be able to make anything of that anymore,” he said ruefully, upon consideration. “You can’t go about sniffing hems if you’re over six feet tall.” His mouth turned down in a little moue of disappointment.

I wanted to laugh and cry all at once. My brilliant detective: he would see the silver lining in the most obscure situation. I squeezed his arm with mine and held on tight, as if that would keep him from ever slipping away from me again.

That night, I found myself lying in bed, alternately staring at the ceiling and gazing out the window. The night was moonless, of course, and it felt like something was missing. I didn’t know what I was looking for out there, but I wasn’t finding it. I heard the clock downstairs in the sitting room chime eleven, and then midnight, and it was ringing one when I finally got up out of bed in a fit of pique, thinking to go downstairs for a brandy.

Holmes was standing outside my bedroom door, a look of surprise no doubt identical to my own on his face.

“What are you doing here?” I blurted.

“I— I’m sorry, Watson,” he muttered, turning away. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Wait.” I caught his wrist. “I think I know.” Maybe he would think me mad or ill or something, but I pulled him with me into the room. I turned back the coverlet on my bed. “Get in.”

Holmes hesitated as I climbed in, oscillating slightly at the edge of my bed, but I patted the space beside me. In the moonless darkness, he moved smoothly, sliding under my blankets with barely a whisper. It was a tight fit for two grown men, nothing like having a cat curled up at my feet, but I turned my back to him and he tucked his knees in behind my own. I felt as much as heard him inhale, and then his soft, slow exhale tickled the back of my neck. He pressed his nose against the nape of my neck and laughed, incredulous. His arm stole across my middle, the weight at once familiar and strange.

He’d only been at the foot of my bed for a fortnight, but having him there again was like coming home. I felt my spine soften and my body unwind, and thought, I can keep this secret, too.

I fell asleep like that within a matter of minutes, feeling Holmes’s chest rising and falling against my back, the length of his body keeping mine warm.

We never went back for Mrs Brannigan or her daughter, or to the town of Little Burstead where the trouble had begun. Holmes sent a telegram to Charles Fitzsimmons, who had hired us in the first place, telling him he had been unable to locate his missing brother and that he was unable to pursue it any further.

A few nights after Holmes had returned to his natural state and we sat in the sitting room in our chairs on either side of the fire, I asked,“What did you learn of the elder Fitzsimmons?”

“He drank and he hit his wife,” Holmes said coldly.

When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “Is that grounds for a punishment like yours was?”

“I believe it was, according to the midwife.”

“She was a witch, Holmes.”

“They don’t burn witches in England, anymore, Watson,” he said, raising his eyebrows at me. It reminded me strongly of the cat that had sat in his chair for three weeks. “Look, it isn’t how I’d have preferred the whole thing to go. She told you herself: the man is still at home, sleeping in his own bed and watching his child grow up, but without the ability to do his wife any more harm. I’ll admit to being a little distracted from my initial purpose, but I—” He hesitated, and scratched his chin. “I’m not going to cross that old woman again.”

“No, indeed,” I said softly. We sat in silence for a while. I thought about what the first few minutes or even hours after his transformation might have felt like, and how even a man as measured in his emotions as Holmes would have panicked. To have had the presence of mind to make his way all the way back to me in London spoke volumes to his mental acuity, even in that feline form.

“You cannot write this one down,” Holmes said.

“I’m afraid I already have.”

“She made you swear!”

“I swore that you would never tell anyone.”

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and groaned. “This habit of yours has served us both well, but sometimes you go too far.”

“I won’t show it to anyone!” I protested. “I swear it. I’ll be put in a madhouse.”

“We wouldn’t want that,” he said, reaching out and squeezing my hand. “You are much too useful to me as a biographer.”

He meant, as a friend.