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"It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles."
-- Sherlock Holmes, TWIS
The magazine arrived, tangled with the telegram in the post, just as the final muddy days of July wilted into an intemperate August. He discovered the invaders littered in his rooms when he returned from his morning walk. A current issue, scant weeks old, the y of "July" tucked close to the publishing year: 1891. The telegram had been posted on the day of its release.
The culprit was Mycroft, of course; that much was obvious without examining the letter. His brother's taste for sharp humour ran similar enough to his own that he understood even if he did not approve.
Strand curled over the edge of the small table he utilized to take meals or to work, peeped beneath the debris of week-old newspapers, headlines softened in French and the native Italian, grumbling in German, intriguing in Arabic. He had allowed himself nothing in English these lingering months since Reichenbach, nothing to reveal him or remind him.
He read the papers first, over coffee, as had become his habit, wading through the language like a half-remembered dream. There were delicacies to Italian he could not grasp, the twist on French that left him searching for connections that would not come without study; three months could only give so much improvement. Mycroft himself had written in French, a cipher that was not a cipher, a bow to his request that his identity remain secret at all costs. Moran still prowled the continent, an Englishmen for his prey.
"It seemed an object perfectly designed to appeal to your curiosity," Mycroft had added as a post-script, after the necessary business of funds was cleared. "Or to your ego. I understand he plans to make it a series."
He burnt the telegram presently upon reading it, a small flame of precaution flickering into a pile of ash in the centre of the table, then continued with his day unimpeded: some small manner of bills and an appointment to keep with a agent specializing in monogramming, then to the museums and a late lunch near the Arno, where he marked the low water-line against the dark stain of the banks and estimated when it should rise again. He would be long gone from Florence before it flooded.
The afternoon grew hot as the sun passed it zenith, and he ambled the by-ways and streets in the direction of his lodgings, great Florentine domes and arches stretching towards the sky above him. Fellow tourists, business men and their wives, denizens of the shops and markets rushed passed him on his stoll, lively and voices filled with colour in this metropolis of re-birth, but he was in no great hurry at all: a man without a name or a profession to call him hence.
The magazine still waited for him upon his return, precisely where he left it in the morning, no fellow lodger or house-keeper to straighten his things while he was out. Half-hidden in languages far less harmful to the soul, no threat presented itself as he picked it up and examined the contents, fingers finding the page Mycroft had noted.
A Scandal in Bohemia, it read, ridiculously, the first in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Affixed to the print was an illustration, not a stirring likeness but a passable guess for that strange creature that haunted the pages of Watson's notebook.
He had met this apparition once, when Watson had left a rough copy of Beeton's Christmas Annual scattered about the flat some three years ago. It was two weeks of Watson's imploring stares over the backs of newspapers and fidgeting teacups at breakfast before he had broken and offered an opinion, casually, as if it had only occurred to him that Watson might require one.
The smile Watson had gained made the duplicity worth it. Nothing on Earth was akin to witnessing that particular metamorphosis, the way it lit up each one of Watson's features, fraction by fraction, starting at the mouth and ending with the eyes, crinkled at the corners. That had been a pleasant Christmas, the two of them at Baker Street, one of the last before Watson's marriage.
He skimmed the story from the removed position braced against the settee, magazine held out at arm's length. It seemed a too-easy thing to slip back into his mother tongue, words forming silently on his palette as he read, untarnished without the barrier of translation and tinged with Watson's steady tenor whispering along with him in his ear. Watson put his whole self into his writing, and while he could see in the words a distorted reflection of his own practice, it was Watson who existed, for a moment, next to him, as if bodily in the room with all his strength and devotion.
The case was familiar, Irene Adler memorable, a tale better told in his collection of A's locked in the files in Baker Street. Watson didn't have the key. The facts reflected that, as well as Watson's love for melodrama, but there was something almost charming about it, buried beneath the rubbish. Upon examination, it was a silly story, pleasant perhaps to those who had no training in the sciences, but hardly to Mycroft and nothing to himself.
Under the dark of the evening lights, he wrote a telegram to Mycroft, finding thanks for the funds and irony for the magazine. "I do not require a eulogy of this nature," he wrote, English draining from his pen in toppled dots and scribbles, awkward from abstention. "But should he desire to continue," and here he paused, momentarily struck dumb with something lurid, lucid, like grief, or possibly remorse, though none of it for his own demise. He placed the pen once more to paper and finished, the barest of trembles visible in his long strokes, "If it would please him, you will find the key to my files in the top-most drawer of the desk beneath the window. Have him make use of them at his will."
He set the letter aside for the next day's post, and readied for bed, the grand Renaissance city hushed in the summer twilight outside the window.
In six weeks, he would depart from Florence, travelling east towards the red rising sun. The limited sum of his belongings he would stash into a small valise, the name Siegerson newly printed in thick block letters on the handle.
The magazine fit neatly near the bottom, hidden amongst the clothes and valuables of an explorer. It will appear a trifle in the weak hours of the morning while he packs, easily forgiven, signifying to his fellow travellers little more than a short stop in London some months ago, purchased perhaps while he waited for the train, or else they might suspect him for an affection for sensationalist stories, an irony that will make the corner of his mouth curl with inbedded amusement.
If anyone outside himself were to ask why he kept it, he would explain no more than that. If he turned the question inward, he shall blame long years of habit, travel not being what it is without the hint of Watson's voice in his ear, calling him home, to England.
End