21 Dear Mary (2)

Dear Mary,

I think perhaps you chastised me in my dreams last night. It began with Holmes. I was searching for him throughout the shabby field hospital, amongst the wounded – and finally, amongst the dead. I looked at that long row with their feet all exposed because their meager blankets had been pulled up to cover their faces. I felt a deep, anxious, certainty that Holmes was dead. A wealth of fear and premature grief as deep as when I ran up that steep path at Reichenbach, having found my errand a hoax. But when I pulled down that first rough woolen shroud, it was your wide mute eyes that accused me. My unthought-of wife lying on the damp ground looking as you did in your coffin. Wasted and worn by illness as those boys were from war. Those whip-thin and haunted youths that I had all but forgotten. Why was I looking for Holmes and finding you? Perhaps I am finding the depth of my love for you at last. Like Hamlet, finding it too late.

I lay abed thinking on the matter until an hour past my usual hour of rising. Then I thought on Holmes' pernicious habit, and of one of my own. I went down to the living room to find Holmes had not yet risen to notice my own unusual sloth. I took my cheque-book from the drawer and a few other things and went out to the track. I was determined to indulge my own vices, in some kind of spiteful revenge. To be fair it was only I who tried to moderate my gambling, but if Holmes wished to damn himself the least I could do was accompany him.

It was a cold and joyless day in which I got little enjoyment from my old vice but sacrificed a great deal of money to it. I had a short conversation with an American gentleman and his sister during which she made her interest known, and I my disinterest. I came home with the dark of the falling dusk.

Holmes stood at the bay window; baleful as a gargoyle but as beautiful as an angel. The balance of those two perceptions allowed me to seem almost unperturbed.

"I did not know where you were," Holmes said – implying either that he might have needed me or that he had worried.

How I have needed him. How I have anguished over his absences. How inadequate would be any reply I could have made, and he knew very well where I had gone taking my cheque-book and my binoculars with me. I made no reply and came up here, to write to the one who understood me best and go to what rest I am capable of tonight, or deserve.

Always yours,

John