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“HEAVE!”
With a massive call of effort, the two deckhands pulled their burden over the edge of the ship. The oiler last popped his head over the deck, and used the rope to scramble over. I was relieved to see that he, more accustomed to the toil of the engine room, had not hurt himself in his adventure down the side of the ship. Truthfully, it was a dashing brave thing to do, and I hoped the captain took notice. To go down to a small dinghy bobbing about in the waves, to throw a lone stranded survivor over your shoulder, and to carry him back up? Extraordinary. Without the oiler’s aid, the fellow would have surely perished.
He may have perished anyway.
Calls, lights, and a horn had been unable to rouse the fellow in the dinghy. Even now, he was held limply between the arms of our two deckhands. I could make out no details on him; indeed, he had some form of waterlogged… cloak, I imagine, except the cloak would suit a giant. Otherwise, I could see only a dark mass of hair extrude from an opening.
“Doctor?”
“Does he breathe?” I requested, already approaching. My fingers brushed along his skin: supple, but cold to the touch. They pressed with more insistence on the underside of his jaw. Only there could I find the steady lub-dub-lub-dub that promised life, though it beat so quietly and so timidly that it almost seemed to apologize for its presence.
It would not do to examine the man out here. For one thing, the sky had darkened with the arrival of a storm. Many of the men were nervous already. And for another, there is a great deal of nautical illnesses and injuries that simply cannot be helped. To see a man perish from the wrath of the sea might be foreseen as an omen, amongst our more superstitious men.
They were all sailors—they were all superstitious men.
“To my quarters,” I commanded. Though not an officer, doctors—whether on sea or on land—are often afforded some manner of respectability. Many of the sailors are simply grateful that I had prior medical experience. The deckhands retreated with their dripping bundle in tow.
I made to follow, only to be stopped by the noble oiler. He took my arm. “He had this on him, doctor,” the lad said, thrusting a small sack into my hand. It could not have been much larger than an apple. “Wrapped around his waist with a rope, ‘cept it frayed when I lifted him.”
“I’ll make sure it gets to him. Thank you, William. That work of yours out there was masterful. And—mind you get yourself back down to the engine room. If only to warm yourself,” I amended. “It’s damned cold out here, and I haven’t just tossed myself into the ocean.”
The smile he flashed me was bright, like words from God himself couldn’t have done better, and he darted back into the engine room with no further quibble. A rather foreboding gust of wind sent me to stumble a few steps backwards. Scowling, I stuffed one hand into the sack as I retreated back into the narrow hallways of the ship’s interior.
My fingers wrapped around something small and smooth, like the fellow had stuffed a fistful of river-rocks in there. Curious, I withdrew several—
And gawped at the sight of four glittering gemstones in my hand.
A pirate, I thought to myself. A pirate thrown overboard for mutiny. They were rather common around these parts, I’d been told, though hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting any myself. Seaborne pirates were not frequent meddlers in Her Majesty’s Army. Without another word, I stowed the gems back into my pocket.
What would be done with them, I haven’t the faintest idea. The most straightforward route would be to return the pirate’s plunder to him, with no further inquiries. He might enact violence on me or one of the crew if I thieved his jewels, after all, and while I prided myself on being a decent ship’s surgeon, I tried to avoid massive blood loss at all costs.
However…
However, I could not wonder as to their provenance. As to his motives. As to why, for that matter, he had been thrown off the ship at all. Perhaps the gems were in better hands with him, perhaps he planned to use them for acts of terrible wickedness. It was not that I was hopelessly cynical or hopelessly naive, I think. Rather that you are only permitted so many books aboard a ship.
Whatever the case, they were not my highest priority. I pressed open the door to the surgeon’s quarters to find that my deckhands had placed the survivor rather unceremoniously on the bunk. There were two bunks outside that were also used to house the infirm, but this one was in line of sight to my bedroom. I’d only had to use it once in the year-long voyage, for a fellow terribly sickened with tuberculosis. We'd had to leave him in port; I knew not the result of his condition.
“Sir,” I greeted firmly. “My name is Dr. John Watson. I’m the ship’s surgeon for this vessel, and I’ll need to have a look at you. For the first, we need to get this ungainly thing off you. It might have been plenty warm when you were first foisted into that terrible raft, and I imagine a wonderful cover from the sun, but now, I daresay it…”
As I spoke, I wrestled with the thing. It was not a cloak at all, I realized—it was a woolen blanket, utterly saturated with seawater, that he had wrapped himself in. It took a great deal of obnoxious tugging and maneuvering before I finally managed to wrench it free of him. With a huff, I grew the great sopping sheet on the floor, and then looked down onto my patient for the first time.
The face of Sherlock Holmes stared back at me.
My first reaction, I confess, was not that of a gentleman. I let out a damnable string of curses as I stumbled backward, overturning a tin water pitcher. It fell to the ground with a tremendous clatter.
The noise was enough to bring both the steward and the porter to my doorframe, inquiring as to my health. While I stumbled out a quick response, scarcely thinking as to what I was saying, I was sure the state of my skin was enough to betray the truth. Regardless, my position was respected enough that I could hasten them back through the corridor with no further questions.
Then, it was I and Sherlock Holmes again.
I and the dead man.
I had spent two terrible years in London after his death. Two terrible years where every corner reminded me of our time together, two terrible years where every story in the paper had his ghostly apparition chuckling in my ear. Two years of guilt, two years of anger. Two years of feeling as if the world had shut itself upon me.
Worse yet, I had taken comfort in the routine of my marital home. We had briefly discussed children, for a time, though it was mostly a distractible fantasy rather than a solid purpose. Even in my grief, there were multiple periods where I could describe myself as happy. Mary and Holmes were worlds apart as people, united only in that they were good and they loved me.
Then, a third trait: they were both gone from this world. Mary succumbed to her illness after months of terrible decline. I had dissolved my practice in order to render constant care unto her. To be able to hold her as she died provided just as much comfort as being unable to witness Holmes’ own death—that is to say, it was the death of a loved one. Nothing would have made it better. Being apart was torture, being in arm's reach was torture.
I drifted in the world, lost and morose, and headed into steadily darker waters. Ultimately, my dwindling funds (oh, and what a memory that brought! The last time my purse had been so light, I had run into my friend Stamford and—) had forced me to seek employment elsewhere. I had fully intended to find myself a hospitalist position of some kind, before I came upon a post for a ship’s surgeon.
Having not spent much of my time aboard boats, initially I dismissed the offer out of hand. But I found I kept returning to it, thinking of it, dreaming of it.
What I wanted, I think, was to be away from people. To be away from the city that had brought me such felicitation, such grief. I wanted to be away from a place that constantly seemed to demand something of me, my energy, my heart. The world had shut the book on my life, and yet it constantly seemed to prod me with a stick and ask what I was to do next.
I wanted to do nothing. I wanted to be nothing. I wanted to have no further attachments into this world, and if this London steamship sank like so many seemed to do, then—perhaps—so be it.
I could not say for certain whether I had accomplished my goal, as being a ship’s surgeon had been nothing like I expected. What I could say, however, is that seeing Sherlock Holmes’ visage again changed everything.
“Holmes?” I pressed, afraid to even whisper the name.
He did not stir, still. I might even have stared at him forever, had I not seen the edge of a wound from under his waterlogged shirt.
To this day, I do not know how I managed to will my limbs to move. As if my world had not just changed, again—as if something so miraculous and bizarre had just happened, that the far likelier explanation would be a sudden onset of madness. Certainly, I’d had no lingering hope that Holmes had survived, but perhaps I’d grown so accustomed to Holmes’ appearance in unexpected places. Perhaps—as Holmes would likely complain—I was a soldier at heart, far able to temporarily overcome my emotional horror.
Regardless, I stripped Holmes of his freezing clothes to begin his physical examination.
One stood out in particular, but I must digress briefly for the sake of completeness. It is an occasional pitfall of the medical profession to focus on the obvious and miss the subtle. This is something that Holmes knew well. Even if my eyes were continually drawn to the obvious injury, I nevertheless examined the rest of his body.
Before his death, I had seen what Holmes’ body looked like. I had treated his injuries, performed his physicals. I had lived with the man, for heaven’s sake. Though he had more scars than the average person (particularly clustered on his hands, the old alchemist), he was nothing like the man I witnessed before me.
He had a somewhat scraggly beard, along with a scad of dark hair that stretched halfway across the pillow. Worryingly skinny and dotted with old scars of terrible natures. I could spot the tell-tale puckering of a close-quarters bullet wound, burns dotted the length of one arm. He suffered from fractures that had not been allowed to properly heal. I feared that this was only everything I could see. If he had suffered all this, then what else had he suffered through?
It was not worth the time to consider. There was one present injury I could attend to. A gash ripped across his chest on the diagonal. Deep enough to reach the breastbone at its maximum. The laceration bled only sluggishly, but had been allowed to bleed sluggishly for God knew how long, and I feared for the paleness of Holmes’ skin.
I wrapped as much of him as I could in a blanket, warmed over the radiator. We were in a blessed position on the ship; with its steam-powered nature, we were granted a great many of the comforts of home life. Carefully, I cleared away most of the blood, and pulled up a stool that I might engage on a rather formidable stitching.
I had, unfortunately, had occasion to stitch up a few of my fellow shipmen. Most, thank God, had been accidents. A clumsy move here, an inadvertent pinch there. When a brawl had broken out aboard the deck, the first mate had struck such the fear of God unto them that I gratefully had witnessed no more problems.
As I worked, I took special care not to look at my friend’s face. I had to take careful control of my mind. I thought of only his flesh, and how neatly the small black lines stitched it shut, until my patient emitted a soft moan of pain. He squirmed underneath my ministrations.
“Holmes,” I whispered, my resolve lost. Leaving the wound half-tended, I brushed his hair back from his forehead like a worried father. “Holmes, are you awake? Are you in pain?”
His eyelids fluttered. I briefly considered morphine, but his heart had been so weak on the deck. While the medical effects of morphine had not been rigorously studied, who amongst us hadn’t heard of the weak and infirm being carried away forever under that blissful sleep? I returned to the table, where I collected a glass tumbler and a half-bottle of good brandy.
“Here. Here, Holmes. A spot of brandy to numb the pain. I apologize, but I must finish this work.”
With my hand under his head, I managed to coax a few spoonfuls of the stuff into him. He was, to some degree, awake—at least, he swallowed without difficulty. His eyelids ceased their fluttering; I could feel a certain relaxation take over his limbs. I stood there for longer than I ought to.
I had lost so many; I had chosen professions that frequent death. Holmes and Mary were not the first cherished ones I’d lost, but one almost childish point inflicted fresh injury upon me with each loss.
After every death, I had to wrestle with the reality that I would never see their faces ever again. I would have my memory (easily distorted, weak with age) and I might even have a portrait or photograph (a still-life, posed), but I would never ever be able to see their face before me again. Why so much importance on that? I would also never see Mary’s smile, nor hear Holmes’ laugh, and yet it filled me with almost blistering panic to realize I would never see their faces yet again.
And now, I held Holmes’ in my hand. The face of my dear, beloved friend. Alive, after these terrible years. I could not make heads nor tails of it; I lacked the proper information even to be angry with him.
“Good man,” I encouraged, letting his head fall back upon the pillow. “Good man. I’m nearly done.”
This time, I could not have been at my work for more than a minute. Holmes moved again, his spine somewhat arched. I looked towards him.
His eyelids just cracked, I realized that he looked at me just the same.
A thrill shot across the spine. Tears suddenly sprang to my eyes, though I could not fathom the reason, and I swallowed them back down. It was unlikely that he recognized me. Given what he had been through—some of which even I did not know—I doubted he would be in a proper state for conversation.
Instead, I enunciated, as clearly as I could, “Holmes, if you would be still. You are perfectly alright, but I must tend to your wound.”
He must have understood some of what I said, because I could feel the muscles in his abdomen relax. Holmes let me continue until the end, whereupon I affixed some gauze to the injured portion of his chest. That would have to do, for now. I could only pray that fever would not take him; I had very little at my aid in that circumstance.
Holmes had begun to shiver a little. I reached for the blanket and tucked it around him further. At this point, the storm had begun in earnest, and the wind made the porthole glass flinch in its bearings. More than once, the damned thing had popped open on its own accord, despite the latch. I hoped it would not, again. Bad enough to have the entire ship creak and groan like a dying man.
What to say to him? I wondered, shifting Holmes’ hand beneath the wool. What possibly to say to him? Where have you been? What’s happened? I—
“Delirium,” Holmes croaked weakly. I startled.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Doctor, I suffer from delirium.”
The statement was so plainly made that, despite the unsteadiness of my mind, I chuckled softly. “Normally, my delirious patients are not lucid enough to accuse themselves of delirium.”
“You will find that my mind is exceptional.”
It was as if a lighthouse beacon had been lit inside my chest. A warmth surged through me that I had not felt for many months. While I could perform my duty aboard the ship, there was a sense of belonging amidst the crew that I had never felt privy to. Indeed, it felt as if I could open my heart to nobody yet again. I could place a smile upon my face as easily as the next man, but there was nowhere I felt known. Nowhere I felt I knew anyone.
Except here.
“Why do you think yourself delirious?”
“I fear that I do not see the ship’s surgeon before me.”
“Oh? A shame, for I am the ship’s surgeon. Who do you see?”
“A dear friend of mine, an Army doctor by the name of John Watson. I wouldn’t suppose you know him?”
At this point, you see, I had become fully convinced that Holmes was poking fun. It seemed a tremendous effort, given his current state, but—as he himself said—he possessed an exceptional mind. Perhaps I should not have condoned it, but I was so eager to skate upon this pond of amicability yet again. “I fear that we do not receive many Army men aboard a ship, Mr. Holmes. I agree that you may be suffering from delirium, but the treatment will depend on the burden.” Already, I reached for the brandy. Another few swallows might prevent the ache of the stitches from making themselves known. “Tell me, are you pleased to see this Dr. Watson?”
I did not expect a gasp, nor the breathy sob that followed. Holmes’ eyes were wet with tears. When he spoke, it was in a voice I had never heard from him before. The man was inches away from voicelessness; already, his voice had creaked up into a higher register.
“Immensely. Immensely, doctor, I would like nothing more,” Holmes squeaked. “But I fear he would not want the same.”
Ah. In retrospect, I should have put more emphasis on Holmes’ mental state. God knew how long he’d been floating in that treacherous boat, a castaway who had chanced upon a miracle. The blanket he found himself under had protected him from the sun, true, but I could not say for how long he’d held consciousness. How long for the great Sherlock Holmes to think of a plan, in the middle of the Atlantic?
It is not always the best thing to press upon a mentally battered patient, nor should you put much stock in what they claim. Alcohol and bloodloss is not the veritasium some would hope for. However, my fondness for Holmes was such that—even if he were to forget this in an hour, a minute, a second—I did not want him to feel any pain.
I pulled the stool closer to his head. “Why would you think such a thing?”
“Because I lied to him. Oh—” The tears sparkled in Holmes’ eyes. “He thinks me dead. His dear companion. It was too dangerous, too dangerous by ten.”
Only then, did I make the realization. Yes, he did lie to me. He had hidden his life from me for years. Were I not able to see the evidence of it written upon his body, perhaps I would have been angry. However, Holmes presented himself to me with evidence of a terrifically dangerous life. He had been found only by circumstance, and it hurt my heart to think how close he had been to death.
Yes, of course I would want to stay by Holmes’ side, for whatever befell me.
But—I found—I understood. I could not place the blame on his feet. I could furiously hate the people who put each and every scar on his body, and certainly I did, but as Holmes stared at me with such piteous eyes… as I beheld the man, who I held the very utmost respect for, who I thought could shoulder the world…
“And what if he missed you, Holmes?” I asked him. My own voice had gone rough. “What if he missed you terribly?”
“I-should-only-be-so-lucky,” Holmes forced out in one aching breath, before he could speak no more for entire minutes. His head lolled to the side, and his shoulders shook with effort, and I sat there all the while. Only when his sobs seemed to subside did I lean forward again. I’d needed to compose my own strength. I had the benefit of not being half-drowned.
I whispered, softly, “Is it impossible? That he might be here? Or is it only improbable?”
Absurdities always seemed to restore Holmes’ spirits. He always laughed gleefully at them, like one might a children’s story, to the consternation of several of our clients and most of Scotland Yard. Even now, he tittered. “Under what grounds?”
Improbable was certainly a word for it. It was difficult to imagine just how much my life had changed in the past year, but such was the benefit for our modern age. No longer were you confined to the village that you were born into.
“Consider a reality in which his beloved wife perished, his practice had dissolved under his grieving neglect, and he was…” A profound weariness overtook me. I huffed. “Left alone in a city of ghosts and stories.”
There were several of Holmes’ and I’s cases that I hadn’t yet written up. I suppose I had plans to do so, someday, if only to provide more insight to the field of deduction. More and more often, the prospect of raising a pen had grown too difficult to bear. Rather than fond memories of my friend, it began to feel like exhuming a corpse. It did not help that letters upon letters came in, mourning the death of my friend—perhaps a conceited and ungrateful reaction, but one that pierced me all the same. Every hour, something reminded me of him.
Holmes’ eyes cracked open to analyze me once again, as if I were a slide under his precious microscope. I stared back at him steadily. Then—
With a shout of joy, Holmes practically ripped himself upwards from the sheets. He threw both arms around me, nevermind the cold of the berth, and squeezed as much as his battered body would allow. Even before I felt his muscles go slack, I knew he had asked too much of himself.
I had to fight down a smile. “No, no. Lay back in bed, Holmes, I demand it,” I ordered, pressing one hand between his shoulderblades to guide him back to the pillow. Holmes stared at me with a wide smile nevertheless. “I will make sure you recover, but you cannot jump and dance about. Rest.”
“Yes, doctor—or is it ‘aye’, now?”
Holmes could be quite amusing indeed, and usually only when the time didn’t call for it. I fixed him with a meaningful look. Holmes did not relent—for a time, regardless. After some moments, the reality seemed to fall upon him. His earnest belief that I would be angry upon his return made his expression meek. Were he in a right mind, I had no doubt that he would return to his usual elegant poise.
As of right now, I could see that even my friend’s defatigable nature had been overwhelmed. He offered no explanation to me, he made no move to defend himself. This was as fragile as I had ever seen him, and I had once pulled him out of an opium den.
And of course I wanted to know everything that had befallen him. All the inner intricacies upon which I had remained fully ignorant over the years. Perhaps if I knew more, I would not feel quite so adrift. If the wind would turn the wrong way, I knew the embers of hurt in my heart could spark into betrayal.
Holmes looked so weak, though, and the past few years so long…
Instead, I reached for the bag at my pocket and withdrew the gem. His eyes flicked down to them, then back up to me.
“What is the meaning of this, Holmes? Furthermore,” I proffered, “What has you out in the middle of the ocean?”
At the very least, the shadows disappeared from Holmes’ eyes. He let his head fully fall onto the pillow, and tilted it towards me. When he held his hand out for a gem, I placed it in his hand. Holmes twisted it between his fingers over-and-over, an action I’d seen him perform many times while deep in thought.
“Consider this, Watson,” he croaked. “A ship captain being bribed by Moriarty’s men with stolen gems—to the ire of their rightful owners. Tracked day and night by hired mercenaries to retrieve their items, and yet, the captain won’t believe me when I insist upon the harm. I stow myself away on their boat, and…”
And just like that, I was enraptured. I had pulled the stool closer to his head as he spoke. Occasionally, I provided him with water—or when he seemed to grow uncomfortable, a tumbler of liquor. I suspected several times that the severity of his injuries would tire him quicker, and that he would pass into unconsciousness before he could finish his story.
But, as he always seemed to, Holmes rallied and continued onward. The narration seemed to do him well. I saw flickers of my old friend in there, and his almost avian-like strut about our old rooms as he lectured on this or that. Even some of the bruises seemed to shrink away from him, while more color poured into his cheeks.
As always, I listened attentively. A storm started to pick up outside the ship, but I could barely hear it. In fact, I only had one errant thought not saved for the particulars of his story—
I should have brought over a pen.