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Sherlock Holmes had known this day would come.
He and John Watson had lived in Sussex for nearly as long as they’d been together in Baker Street. This new century was well underway; its first horrid war now in the past and another horror loomed on the horizon. Watson had spent years haunted by his second and final military service, and to this day he never spoke of those years to his spouse.
Both men were old, physically bent and lamed by the weight of their years as well as the damage done by their lives. Worse, the man who’d once lived by his precise brain now faced the loss of his mental faculties. (“Darling, it’s nothing! Why does it matter that you didn’t remember the grandson of Peterson our old commissionaire when you met him once as a babe thirty years ago?” “Because it’s the first sign, John!”)
“I cannot bear this much longer, dearest,” Holmes confessed over breakfast one overcast September day. “More and more, I wish to be the author of my fate.”
The man who’d shared his life for four decades bowed his head. “It is the same with me, with my memories. I am weary. Come with me to the shore one last time. Not here. Poldhu.”
The site of madness and murder; without Watson, both would have died. Remote, rocky shores. No witnesses. “Agreed.”
For the trip, only a day’s worth of garments; there would be no need to plan for the return. The old man pulled out the old, dusty Morocco case that still held his last unused dose of cocaine, and stowed it in his bag. He had been free of the drug for so many years that a full-strength dose from that vial would be instantly and painlessly fatal.
He left the cottage door unlocked and joined Watson in the car for the drive.
The Cornish coast was the same beautiful and fierce locale he remembered from years ago. John beckoned him to join him in a path down to the shore. Precarious, but fear of death seemed foolish now. Both old men made their way down.
A sailing ship floated just offshore, a pearl-gray craft with a swan’s head at the prow. A tall beautiful man with long silver hair and a sleek black beard stood by a small rowboat. “You are both welcome aboard. Where we are to go, your wounds of mind and spirit as well as flesh will heal at last.”
Holmes gaped. Watson smiled. “One of my old trenchmates, Lt. Tolkien, told me what to do. So I told the bees. And they passed the word.”
They boarded.