Sherlock Fanfiction: Homo Faber (Part II)
May. 2nd, 2014 07:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saki101Title: Homo Faber
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saki101
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Mrs Hudson, Mike Stamford, Victor, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Slash
Word Count: ~13.1K total (posted in two parts due to length)
Disclaimer: Sherlock is not mine and no money is being made.
Summary: What if Dr Frankenstein had had Dr Watson to keep him right? A story in which Sherlock's mother's maiden name is Frankenstein and Dr Watson has been invalided home towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars...
Notes: A stand-alone AU fusion fix-it fic written for the Springlock Exchange 2014 for swimmingbirdrunningrock's great prompt: John's the detective, Sherlock's the doctor. AU, fic or ficlet? Go wild. This connected to a thought I had had upon seeing Frankenstein with Mr Cumberbatch in the role of the scientist: every genius needs a John Watson.
Part I on LJ
On AO3
Homo Faber
Part II
A brief entry to note that the vicar paid me a courtesy call. I am relieved to report that we have not needed to call for him. He brought apples with him again, golden ones this time that were crisp and had a fine taste. He thanked me for putting an end to the vandalisation of his graveyard and expressed a wish to see me more often sitting in a pew in his church. This was a very delicate way to put it as I have not sat in his church at all, except on the day I visited him at the vicarage to be shown the damage to the tombstones and he gave me a tour of the inside of the church afterwards and would recite the history behind each of the stained glass windows of which he is very proud. My leg was paining me and I accepted his invitation to sit while he made his orations.
I expressed my great satisfaction that his concerns on that score had been allayed. I decided there was no point in explaining that I had had nothing to do with this turn of events in any manner whatsoever as I feel certain that he is the type of man who will maintain his own view of things whatever anyone else may say.
I thanked him for his gift and we parted as amicably as I could hope in light of the fact that I had not promised to sit in his pews on a regular basis. I believe he still has hope for my soul and imagines it will just take more time and possibly more apples.
***
It is madness on several levels, I suppose, Harry, but I’ve moved out of my rooms. There’s a complete floor above the infirmary now, not just my rooms on one side and the operating theatre on part of the other. The operating room remains, but my rooms are gone and another open ward built. We’ve thirty-two beds on the ground floor, a station by the stairs for the four orderlies we have now and a small office for Dr Hooper and me. Upstairs, in addition to the operating room, we have beds for eighteen more. There are shelves along one of the side walls with books of fiction, history and travel for the patients who can read; those who cannot often listen to those who can read aloud. We have enough patients who can manage the stairs, fortunately. We have established a routine of moving those who are soon to be discharged to the upper floor. Ethan is among them. The scars on his face are certainly visible, but they are very fine and pale. They are healing well and the eye on that side is not distorted. Sherlock followed the course of Ethan’s convalescence most carefully and I derived enormous pleasure from it. I know I should only care that Ethan is so much better than he might have been, but to you, Harry, I can admit that Sherlock’s admiration of my work is something I hold very dear.
My new rooms are old, but not far away. They still overlook the physic garden; I only have to cut across it to reach the infirmary. From the small bedroom balcony, I can see Sherlock’s tower. That hasn’t stopped me from walking there nearly every evening. Yes, it rains here sometimes, so I walk in the rain if it isn’t too much of a downpour. If it is, I stare out my balcony doors as though the tower might disappear if I don’t keep watch.
This vigil feels all the more important as he is spending more and more time there. He still comes to the infirmary once a day, but his visits are brief. I see him sometimes in the garden collecting flowers and leaves and berries. In the past month, he’s joined me once for dinner after I practically cornered him in the garden. He ate nothing and was so ill at ease that I have not done it again.
His fresh colour has faded. The skin around his eyes looks bruised and the little weight that he gained over the past few months has melted away.
Mrs Hudson is anxious. I’ve asked her if he’s ever done this before. She said he has, but never for so long.
I feel I need to know what he is working on in the tower.
As I say, madness.
***
I can’t write for long right now, Harry, but you would be proud of me. I saved a life tonight and although that is not an unusual statement for a doctor to make, I am certain no other doctor ever saved a life like this one. Most accurately I have saved two, because I do not think Sherlock would have lasted much longer without my care. He may expect others to know when they need to ask for help, but he doesn’t know it himself. Yes, for small things he’ll ask for assistance, hold this flask, shift this box, but he doesn’t think anyone can help with the big things. I was happy to prove him wrong tonight, not for the petty satisfaction of it, but because if I hadn’t been able to help, two extraordinary beings would have been lost to the world. I understand why he doubted I could help though.
I don’t know whether Lestrade will ever know, but if he were to know, he would be happy. The great thing has happened at Castle Frankenstein. If anyone had told me of it, I would not have believed them. Even holding him in my arms, it was hard enough to believe.
I have to go back now. I have left them sleeping to bring some food. Everyone needs to eat and rest. I will write eventually.
***
There is a new patient in the infirmary named Victor. He is on the ground floor because the stairs are too much of a challenge for his level of coordination and I do not wish to see him crawl. He is a big man and he will be commanding when he has learned control of his limbs. I cannot be certain, but I think he will achieve it. I have seen injuries that produced similar shortcomings, forcing men to relearn the simplest tasks. Of course, Victor, is learning them for the first time, but the others need not know that. I chose his name. He is alive and it is a victory.
I found them both on the floor when I opened the door. I was surprised it was unlocked. I had brought various keys of Mrs Hudson’s to try. Perhaps Sherlock had intended to leave and changed his mind at the last moment. He was pressed against a wall as far as possible from the body that appeared to have fallen from the operating table. He didn’t look up at me, but pointed, arm shaking, across the room. He said something; his voice hoarse from disuse or shouting, I could not tell. Perhaps he had called for help. He tried again, without success. His head dropped onto his drawn up knees, he curled his arms about them, his back heaving. The sound of his weeping tore at something in my chest.
I shut the door, turned the key that was in the lock and knelt by him. I rested my hand on his hair. I had thought of touching those curls, wondered whether they were coarse or fine. They were snarled and damp. I reached around to touch his forehead. It was burning.
“I failed,” he mumbled. “I failed, I failed, I failed.”
“No. No,” I said. “You are ill.”
I looked around the room for water. Nothing seemed obvious. There was broken glass on the lab table and the floor in front of it, something blue was dripping down onto the flags, an upturned metal bowl sat in the midst of the debris. I stood to retrieve it. I heard a sob.
“I’m not leaving,” I said, my hand back in his hair. “Just getting water.” I stretched to catch the edge of the bowl and pulled it towards me. Shards of glass scraped against the stone. “Is there water?” I asked.
His head moved slightly side to side. “Gone,” he said.
That didn’t make sense, but it was no matter. The rain continued to pour down outside. My coat was soaked from my walk. I took it off, unwound the sodden scarf from my neck and wiped his brow with it.
“Wrong,” he muttered and turned his face so I could wipe more of it. His lips were chapped. “All wrong.”
I opened the window nearest us, legs splayed so that one nudged against Sherlock’s side as I leaned out the window. Rainwater gushed past me from gargoyle spouts. I held the bowl away from their streams. I could hear the rain pinging against the metal until the sound of thunder rolled over it. Rained gushed from the gargoyle spouts. I held the bowl away from their streams. I could hear the rain pinging against the metal until the sound of thunder rolled over it. I had enough. “Can you sit up a little?” I asked, kneeling again. He lifted his head a bit. His eyes were red. From lack of sleep or from drink was another question I didn’t have the answer to. I held the bowl to his lips. He lifted his head higher and drank it all. He sighed when he finished and looked up at me. “I didn’t get it right,” he said more clearly, head falling back against the wall.
I told him to wait and collected more rain water. He drank again, pushed the last of it away. Another clap of thunder sounded. I set the bowl down. The rain was blowing into the room. I closed the window. Around us the room lit up. A sound like stone splitting echoed above our heads. “We’ve been hit,” I shouted.
“It didn’t work,” Sherlock replied. “It hit before, but it didn’t work. He just fell off the table and lay there like that.”
It was seeing the lightning strike from my balcony that had sent me out in the rain.
Sherlock pointed across the room.
I saw a cobweb of blue light slither down from the ceiling. The candles in their glass chimneys along the lab table seemed dim. A few sparks sizzled along the floor and under the body. My eyes were adjusting to the relative darkness again slowly. I thought a spasm ran through the heap on the stone. The thunder growled again. The candlelight grew brighter. An arm flopped out to the side.
Sherlock gasped and scrambled forward. He dragged a finger along the bottom of the nearest foot. It kicked.
“John?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied. “I saw that.”
“You do it,” Sherlock directed.
I crouched near the other foot and did the same thing. The leg it was attached to twitched. There was a groan. It wasn’t Sherlock. The arm flopped again.
“He’s trying to turn over,” I surmised. “Who is it?”
“I haven’t given him a name,” Sherlock said.
I didn’t understand. I studied the figure in front of us. There was something familiar about him. I stared at the incisions on his scalp, the shaved patches around them and what was left between them of his hair. It had been a luxuriant head of hair. I had coveted it. “Sherlock?”
“Yes?”
“Shall I help him turn over?” I asked.
“Yes,” Sherlock answered.
I didn’t ask about the name again, just set to rolling the man over. He was big, heavy like anyone barely conscious and with almost no coordination. I have left many taverns with comrades in a similar state. It wasn’t easy, but there is a science to it. I got him on his back and incidentally off the pair of wires upon which he had been lying. He had burn marks across his chest from them. If I treated them soon, they might not scar. I looked over his chest and arms. He had enough of those already. I looked up to his face, traced a thin scar on the side of his head.
“The lower jaw was dislocated,” Sherlock said.
“Ah.” I hadn’t noticed when I’d seen the head. It had appeared unscathed by the horse’s hooves and I hadn’t studied it closely.
The lightning flashed. Not as bright, but enough to blind me for a moment. The thunder boomed, somewhat off to the west. The man leaned towards me and whined, a high, terrified sound. I’d heard similar sounds when men realised a limb was gone. I reached across the broad chest and rolled him against me, murmured reassuring sounds that weren’t really words.
“What are you doing?” Sherlock asked.
“Comforting him,” I said. “He’s frightened.”
Sherlock sat back on his heels. “He has a doctorate in philosophy. He should remember what a thunder clap is.”
“Ah,” I said again, rocking a little with the burden on my lap. “You thought it would be like waking up. The memories would be in the brain and the other parts would just be transport.” I nodded as I rocked. “Reasonable.”
“I didn’t see any evidence of it, but maybe the horse did injure the brain,” Sherlock said and sighed. “I was right the first time. The experiment is a failure.”
“You were frightened,” I said. As soon as I said it, I regretted the words. He was clearly exhausted, dehydrated, feverish and probably malnourished by that point and he would think I was calling him a coward. I had seen too much suffering, I had no delusions about what bravery looked like.
“He roared when the first lightning hit,” Sherlock said, cocking his head and moving it slightly in time to my rocking. He didn’t seem to have been offended, maybe he agreed with the assessment. “His back arched up off the table. I anticipated strong involuntary reflexes, so I had leather straps around his shins and his forearms. They snapped and he fell off onto the stone. He lay there, still. I thought his life had been that one moment of agony,” Sherlock said and reached out to touch the man’s back. “He’s cold.”
“His breath is warm,” I reported. “I can feel it.” I twisted my neck about, spotted Sherlock’s cloak hanging from the door. “Can you walk?”
Sherlock took a deep breath, rose to one knee. I held out an arm. He grasped my forearm and used it to pull himself up. He swayed.
“Light-headed?” I asked. He looked so tall from my vantage point on the floor.
“Mm,” he said and swayed a little more.
“Come back down,” I said. “I’ll get the cloak.” I held my arm back out and he steadied himself on it on the way down. Once he was kneeling again, he carefully stretched his legs out and sat.
I rolled the man off my lap. He whimpered. I lifted his head onto Sherlock’s lap, put Sherlock’s hand on his head and stepped quickly to the door. In a moment, I had the cloak over the man’s body and tucked partway under him. Sherlock was staring intently down at the part of the man’s face he could see. He had clearly taken something away from his observation of Ethan's operation. The scar was little more than a hair’s breadth wide in marked contrast to some of the suturing on the rest of the man's body. Sherlock traced the scar with a fingertip just as I had. The man nestled into Sherlock's lap, rubbing his face against Sherlock’s waistcoat.
“What happened to the water?” I asked. “You must have a pump up here somewhere.”
Sherlock kept staring down. “It’s below ground. It needs tinkering now and then to come up three floors, but I didn’t dare leave.”
I went to the window and held the bowl out until it felt heavy. The thunder was distant now, the lightning flashes on the horizon, but the rain was still strong.
I got Sherlock to drink more, pulled a silk handkerchief from his coat pocket, dipped it in the bowl and rubbed it across the man’s lips. He sucked it into his mouth. “Thirsty business being struck by lightning and waking up from the dead…” I pulled the cloth out, re-wet it and gave it back. “Definitely thirsty.” I needed to get some clothes for the man, some food for Sherlock at least, but I sat first. “Any chance his consciousness could belong to one of the other parts? The torso, the legs?”
“We don’t think with our torso,” Sherlock said derisively. His fingertip was still stroking the scar. It was healing very smoothly.
“Oh, you could get an argument on that one, Dr Holmes,” I said.
He turned and looked at me, a mix of expressions flickering across his face. He smiled just a little and nodded. “We’ll have to wait and observe, then,” he said.
I stood, hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. “I won’t be gone long.”
“Good,” he said.
I walked around them to pull the two wires out of the way, dragged my coat off the floor. I wasn’t sure if I would be wetter with it on or off, but I settled it over my shoulders in the end, unlocked the door and shoved my hands in my pockets. There was a paper twist of ginger candy in one. “Aha,” I exclaimed and stepped back in. “I hope you like ginger,” I said, “because it’s all I have with me. Open up.” Surprisingly, he did. I popped one onto his tongue and set the paper with the rest on the floor next to him. “Just to keep you upright until I get back,” I explained.
Sherlock rolled the candy to one side of his mouth, pointed with his chin at his lap. “Do you think…”
“I’d feel safer starting with liquids,” I said. “He might choke on that.”
Sherlock nodded and sunk to the side, head stopping when it reached what must have been the man’s hip beneath his coat.
“I’ll bring food,” I said and ran.
Across the marble floor of the infirmary, hands out by his side for balance, Victor made his way to the nearest door. The garden was flooded with sun. The farrier sat on a bench outside the door, face tilted upwards, soaking it in. He saw neither it nor the blooms of the garden, but it was obvious that he felt the one, smelt the other and heard Victor approaching. He slid away from the door, patted the warm space he left on the bench. Victor sat, bumping the old man in the process.
He glanced at me and grinned, happy with his achievement. His expressions are still lop-sided, but he progresses by the hour. Sherlock keeps more formal notes. I write with wonder at what he’s done, what Victor’s done.
“Aye, lad. Sit and soak it up with me,” De Lacey said. He patted the air in Victor’s direction, got his thigh and patted again. “The sun’s ablaze today. The heat of it does my bones good, but don’t look straight at it, lad. Is not good for the eyes. Neither the fire o’ the forge nor the sun is good for the eyes. I should know.” He sighed.
Victor’s smile vanished, he mewled, turning towards De Lacey and began patting his shoulder and arm in imitation of the old man’s gesture, staring as he did at the farrier’s face.
“Don’t fret, boy. Don’t fret,” he said, stroking the back of one of Victor’s hands and forcing a bit of a smile.
Victor took a deep breath, leaned his shoulder against the stone wall and said, “Words. More. Words.”
At this, De Lacey truly smiled. “I know you like to listen to the words, lad, but you’ve got to learn to say 'em, too. They’re good for wooing, don’t you know. The ladies like ‘em.” De Lacey tipped his face towards the sun again. “I’ve got the perfect poem for today,” he continued, settling back on the bench and beginning to recite. “ Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, which I gaze on so fondly to-day, were to change by to-morrow and fleet in my arms, like fairy gifts fading away, thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art, let thy loveliness fade as it will…”
I winced and chastised myself for it. Victor was healing and learning rapidly, and yet the role of successful suitor was hard to imagine. At least Victor was facing away from me. Guiltily, I glanced towards the infirmary, saw the silhouette on the window panes. I looked over my shoulder. Sherlock stood by the fading azaleas. He didn’t take his eyes off me as the old man continued.
“ No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets, but as truly loves on to the close, as the sunflower turns on her God when he sets, the same look which she turned when he rose.
On the last word, Sherlock turned on his heel and was gone. I followed.
****
Oh, Harry, I look at the gap between my last two entries and despair. This, of all things, was worthy of a careful record, but I couldn't write. The days and nights ran together. I don’t know whose needs were greater, Victor’s or Sherlock’s. The forty-nine other patients we had at any given moment continued to mend and be sent on their way under the care of Dr Hooper, who is a treasure. I joined in rounds when I could and operated as needed, although Dr Hooper took on all the more routine surgeries. It was a huge responsibility to put on such a young doctor. Michael spared us a week now and then when too many guests descended on his house, the orderlies were dedicated and dependable and Mrs Hudson made sure we were all fed, but some days I wasn’t sure any of us were going to make it.
Months passed this way. Victor’s wounds faded to pale pink and shiny white, without infection. Victor grew steady on his feet, walked and then ran. One day I took him to the fish pond and taught him how to swim. By then he could recount the exploit to De Lacey who had a poem for the occasion. His stock seems unlimited and Victor has learned them all by heart. One day I found them tracing letters in the dirt and it seemed but the orbit of a moon before Victor was sounding out poems to De Lacey from a tattered old book of his.
It had taken two weeks to nurse Sherlock back to health. When they woke that first night, I fed and washed them and let them sleep on the floor again for a few hours. I was so exhausted, I joined them.
In the evening, I fetched Mrs Hudson and introduced her to the new resident of the castle. She knelt on the floor at the edge of the nest of blankets and ran her hand over Victor’s scarred and bristly head. She glanced at Sherlock’s sleeping form and up at me and said, “Live and let live is what I say.”
She roused a gardener to summon Billy and supervised the two of them more or less carrying Sherlock to my rooms and settled him in there. It was her idea to get a semi-conscious Sherlock out to the landing before they arrived. I’m sure I would have thought of it, but she thought of it first.
We took turns for a couple days, switching between them with me spending a hour or two in the infirmary and her in the house before we returned to our charges. She is not a young woman and I shouldn’t have let her, but when I suggested she rest, she glared me right into my place. She is also a sparrow of a woman and Victor is a huge man who towers over Sherlock now as Sherlock towers over me. But then, he was just a bundle on the floor that we nursed with sweetened milk and kept warm. When I arrived to relieve her one time, she was sitting on a folded blanket and singing him a lullaby. I thought I might laugh; instead my eyes stung.
More like a colt than a man, Victor attempted to stand after two days. He couldn’t maintain an upright position, but he managed to crawl and that is how we had to let him make his way down the stairs, backwards with me below and Mrs Hudson above cooing encouraging words at him.
At the infirmary, I had to let Mrs Hudson help me bathe him; someone had to keep his head above water. My attempts at protecting her modesty received another glare, so if she hadn’t understood Victor’s origins while tending him in the tower, bundled up as he was, she probably did after that. She tapped near a long scar on Victor’s chest and said that Sherlock’s grandfather would have been proud.
A remarkable woman, Mrs Hudson.
Once Victor was ensconced as our fiftieth patient in the infirmary, I could stay with Sherlock longer. This was just as well because his pain medication is also an antipyretic and once his fever was down he was bored and restless and determined to return to his work. I told him I would be his proxy and related as many details about Victor’s condition in his first few days as I could recall. This was grudgingly accepted for that afternoon after I retrieved Sherlock’s notes from the tower for him to annotate, but the evening brought a renewed insistence on firsthand observation. I bargained for after dinner and won. We made our way slowly down the stairs and across the twilit garden, Sherlock doing his best to disguise the symptoms of vertigo he was experiencing.
At the infirmary, he sat in the chair by the bed and watched Victor breathe, directed me to take his pulse and check for fever. Sherlock didn’t touch him. Victor turned on his side in his sleep. Sherlock rose from his seat. We hadn’t been there long. The stairs to my room never seemed as steep as they did on our way back to my rooms. Sherlock let me help him undress and went to bed without another word. I repaired to the chaise lounge where I had slept the little bit I had slept for the past few nights and tried not to think of the expressions I had watched cross his face by Victor’s bedside.
It became a routine. In the morning, over a late breakfast, I would recount any incidents since Sherlock’s last visit. He would add to his notes and slowly become more animated until he insisted I accompany him down to the infirmary. At first, he was weak and my presence on the stairs was an unspoken necessity, but as the days passed and Sherlock grew stronger, I realised my support was of a different sort. One evening in the second week, I heard Victor’s voice as we approached. Sherlock paused at the threshold. He listened to the slur of the words for a moment, his brows lowered, before he turned back to my rooms. We started to visit later in the evening.
After two weeks, I could have pronounced Sherlock well physically. I could have, but I didn’t. He made no request to return to his own rooms in the main house and I was loathe to have him go. I made some cursory excuses to myself that it was to be sure his recovery was complete, to monitor that he ate three times a day, that he didn’t read all night. As time passed, there was less and less validity to them. We had taken to walking a little in the garden after dinner before visiting the infirmary. Gradually, our walks grew longer and one evening we reached the foot of his tower. He asked me to go up and look for a violin case. I thought perhaps he was avoiding the long flights of stairs by asking me to go. I glanced around the room. It had been cleaned, the broken glass swept up, the blankets taken away, but the copper wires still straggled across the floor by the counter and the torn leather straps hung from the sides of the examination table. Possibly it wasn’t the exertion of the stairs being avoided.
Sherlock stopped visiting. I was given a check list to complete each day with the instruction to write freely on the back of the list about any other impressions I might have. Periodically, I was given lists of books to retrieve from the library in the main house. They grew in stacks about my rooms. Sherlock read and took notes, started collecting flowers and seeds from the garden and repairing to his lab behind the azaleas for short stints. At first he took the long way out to the grounds through the main house. After a while he began taking the shortcut through the infirmary, but he never stopped. Some of the newer patients didn’t know who he was. Some of the others would greet him. He would nod and keep going.
There was the day that De Lacey recited Moore and spoke of wooing. The next day Sherlock started going back to the tower. He didn’t stay long, but he continued to go, now and then. I thought I had retrieved all the notes that had been there, but perhaps he had other places he kept logs or perhaps he was trying out a few modified experiments. He never said, but sleep came more slowly those nights and I’d hear him tossing and turning.
Many of the plants used in Sherlock’s medicines were poisonous. Dosage was crucial. He was always very specific in his instructions and the results were incredible. Supplies had run low while he was ill. He replenished them and kept on gathering. Perhaps he was preparing a batch for Michael. He seemed to be gathering far more than we would need. I listened to his restless sleep at night. I began to watch more carefully.
I told Sherlock about the swimming lesson, about how quickly Victor had grasped the basics of the skill. He remarked on the adequacy of Victor's physical abilities.
As they came into their season, I watched him gathering more poisonous flowers.
I don’t know whether it was something Mrs Hudson said or something that Victor put together from the talk of the other patients and orderlies about Sherlock and his own dim memories of the distracted man he saw striding through the infirmary, but Victor began to ask me questions about Sherlock and to follow him with his eyes. He asked me first about his hair. If I could have predicted that Victor would begin enquiring about Sherlock and his relationship to him, I would never have guessed that would be the first query. Victor wanted to know why he didn’t have long, glossy curls like the impatient man. I thought the adjective interesting as well. I had cropped Victor's hair to even it out and it had grown back enough to begin covering the scars on his head. It didn’t show any signs of curling, but it wasn’t very long yet. I told him if he was patient, his hair would grow long, too. He eyed the shorter style in which I wear my hair and frowned, asking whether I, too, couldn’t have long, shining curls. It’s all the poetry. His vocabulary has increased enormously.
I told Sherlock about Victor’s line of questioning. He looked up from his reading, his eyes shifting from my face to my hair and back to his book. He had a small smile on his face, but made no other comment. Sherlock does have a handsome head of hair. I should have realised that he knew it.
Maybe it grew from that, but I noticed Sherlock walking more slowly through the infirmary afterwards and sometimes stopping to exchange a word with Dr Hooper or the orderlies or one of the patients. He never had these brief conversations near Victor, but if Victor was anywhere nearby, he would stop what he was doing and listen.
“It’s like music,” he said one night to me.
“What is?” I asked, checking his pulse and making a note of it.
“His voice,” Victor said.
I didn’t ask whose voice, because I knew. The way he said it, ‘his’ had a capital letter. For Victor, that was perhaps warranted.
I also didn’t ask how he knew about music because De Lacey had a fife that he played sometimes to show the tune to which some of his poems should be sung. He didn’t sing them himself, but now and again one of the other patients would know the song and sing along with the fife. Victor would clap his hands and stomp his feet if the song was gay and if the song was sad, sometimes he wept.
Much as he enjoyed the songs and the tunes, it was the music of Sherlock’s violin that transfixed him. Often I was with Sherlock in my rooms when he was playing, the music drifting down into the garden from the open balcony doors, but one day I was doing my rounds with Dr Hooper when Sherlock began to play. The day was bright, the doors and windows open wide and the sound came in on the breeze. It was a quiet piece, with high quivering notes that would be lost for a second or two in the rustle of the leaves. Victor had been tying and untying a thin rope, practicing a series of knots another patient had shown him how to make. Such exercises were good for injured hands and Victor’s fingers became more nimble each day. His hands grew quiet though as he strained to catch the notes of the violin. He leaned farther and farther towards the window, the rope slipping from his lap. The pages of my notebook fluttered on a nearby table. Victor stood and walked towards the door to the physic garden. When he reached the threshold, the music stopped. He looked back at me, lips pressed together and I raised my chin at him, knowing it was but a pause between movements. His eyes widened when the playing resumed. I followed him into the garden. He stepped through the flower beds until he was facing my balcony. There Victor stopped, his gaze intent, his mouth agape as though he would speak. I came up behind him, watched with him as Sherlock swayed to his music, sun gleaming off the silk sleeve of his dressing gown, the polished wood of the violin. Victor raised his head and howled. Sherlock lifted his bow. For a few seconds, he stood still and stared over the balcony rail at us, then, in a whirl of motion, he shut the doors and closed the drapes. He had not heard Victor’s attempts at song before. Victor sat down with a thump in the lavender as though his tendons had been cut.
Sherlock didn’t play for weeks and avoided the infirmary. De Lacey taught Victor a few notes on the fife. I watched and worried.
The change came during one of Michael’s visits. Victor was out in the grounds with De Lacey. Victor was steady enough on his feet to lead the blind man on walks and it benefited them both. Sherlock had joined us for rounds, pausing by the bed of a man whose leg we were sure we had saved through the use of iodine on his wounds when he first arrived and subsequent to my surgery to remove wood fragments buried deep in his thigh. As we explained his case to Michael, the soldier looked up at us from his bed with much the same look Victor had directed at Sherlock as he had played on the balcony. I bit my lip lest it quiver. I find my emotions too near the surface these days.
We spent time with each of the patients before adjourning for tea to the orangery. Mrs Hudson had outdone herself and Dr Hopper joined us for the feast. Our talk was an animated mix of medicine and all sorts of news from the city and Sherlock was more engaged than I had seen him be in a long while. Michael remarked that the latest sensation in the capital could not hold a candle to Sherlock on his violin and asked him to play. I drew in a breath and Michael glanced at me. Perhaps it was the champagne, but Sherlock agreed and we filed out, still chatting, heading towards the infirmary to take the shorter route to my rooms, the bright sun and sharp shadows of early evening about us.
Out of the shadows by the infirmary door, a voice spoke as we passed. “’Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me Man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?’” With practice, Victor’s voice had modulated and the words were well-formed, their accent some strange combination of De Lacey’s, Mrs Hudson’s and mine. Sherlock stopped in his tracks, brightly outlined in the sun, and turned to probe the shadows.
Around Sherlock, we fell silent.
“What is it, lad?” De Lacey asked, reaching out to grip Victor’s arm where they sat in their customary places on the bench by the door.
“It is my Maker,” Victor replied, the adolescent truculence of his tone contrasting with both the maturity of his frame and the paltry number of his days.
I don’t know whether it was the aptness of the words or that Victor was flinging Milton at him, but Sherlock tilted his head and narrowed his eyes as he does when he is deeply concentrating and he concentrated on Victor as if for the first time since the night I found them in the tower.
Victor squared his shoulders and tossed his hair back under the scrutiny, his eyes locked on Sherlock’s face. The hair had grown a few inches, beginning to curl at the ends, and Sherlock shifted his attention to it. He reached out, lifting locks and feeling for the scars hidden beneath. The stiffness in Victor’s spine and the tightness around his eyes eased. Sherlock ran a fingertip over the scar along the hairline down to the jaw. He angled Victor’s chin upwards, nudged it from side to side. “The scarring is far milder than I expected,” Sherlock said. He traced the scar on the side of Victor’s face up into his hair, patting the hair into place. “You have Dr Watson to thank for that.”
“I have you to thank for everything,” Victor said, his voice flat, his eyes still on Sherlock’s face.
Anything could have been read into that neutral tone. I saw the corner of Sherlock’s lip quirk upwards at the subtlety of it. His hand passed over Victor’s hair in a stroking motion as he drew it away. “Read Voltaire,” Sherlock said as he turned and strode through the door. "You can use the library," he called over his shoulder.
I shook myself from the spell of that moment and followed. Behind me, I heard De Lacey speak.
“Was that Dr Holmes, lad?” he said.
“It was my Maker,” Victor replied.
***
“You see, I remembered the day John came down from London like it was yesterday,” the portliest among the men said. “The very words we exchanged in that little inn.”
“You’ve been known to embroider the past in your memories, Michael,” said a man who still retained the clipped tones of the military in his speech.
“As though you can talk,” Michael replied. He stretched out on the divan along the wall, put his hands behind his head. “You read me some of your letters to Harry when we were students. Out of whole cloth, John.” Michael gazed up at the blue tiles on the ceiling. Pale streaks of dawn light filtered through the shutters and played over their patterns.
“Still, it was a record, of sorts,” the tall man said.
“The scientific record was in my lab notes,” the man sitting on the floor declared. He crossed his long legs at the ankle and leaned back against the side of the divan. “That’s the important part of the story, Victor.”
“When they could be read, Sherlock,” John said. His hand stroked through Sherlock’s hair and came to rest on his shoulder.
“My lab notes are very neat,” Sherlock asserted.
“When you haven’t been sampling infusions from your garden,” a silver-haired man added and yawned. “The legal history’s in my records, admittedly between the lines for the most part.” He stretched his arms above his head and cracked his knuckles. “I had the devil of a time keeping the vicar placated about his blessed tombstones.”
“His promotion was most opportune,” John agreed. “You are a patient man, Greg.”
“You don’t know the half of it," Greg Lestrade said and held up his glass. "To the parishioners in Mayfair he's redeeming now.” Greg took a drink and winked at John. "I hear some of his flock hope he'll be promoted again soon.
Sherlock waved his pipe. “Hopefully not to Marylebone. We might have to abandon Baker Street altogether.”
John kneaded Sherlock’s shoulder. “You blaspheme. You couldn’t abide being without a place in London.”
“I could become a proper country squire. I’ve already added hives to the garden,” Sherlock said. “I find apiculture most absorbing.”
“Where?” Michael asked.
“South of the tower mainly,” Sherlock replied, “except for the two in the physic garden.”
Michael drew in a breath. “Poison honey.”
“Possibly.” Sherlock smiled.
Victor stood. He towered over the others, seated or sprawled out as they were.
“Are you satisfied?” John asked, tilting his head back to take him all in.
Victor nodded. “I longed for the details.”
“No birth. No mother,” John continued. Sherlock looked up, scrutinised Victor’s expression.
He held out one large hand towards Sherlock and John. The scar around his wrist was white, barely visible beneath the cuff. “Two fathers,” he said. He held out his other hand towards Lestrade and Michael. “Two of my godfathers.” He smiled. “Without benefit of clergy,” he added. “Dr Hooper and Mrs Hudson, an aunt and a grandmother. It’s enough to be getting on with.” He stepped to the corner of the room, crouched over a sack there. “I brought back the coffee with cardamom that you like.”
John's eyes darted around the room. Michael's eyes were half-closed. Lestrade was smiling at the prospect of coffee. They didn’t understand the implication. “You promised you’d bring him more if he…”
“Yes,” Sherlock interrupted. “I thought it over. Sent a message to Victor and told him I agreed.”
“Agreed?” John repeated.
Victor rose, aromatic package in hand. He collected a brass pot and a long spoon from the shelf, brought them to the brazier near the divan, knelt beside it.
“We will gloss over how you’ve done this without informing me,” John said. He took a breath. “You’re all right?”
“Better than,” Sherlock said. “Thanks to you my surgical skills have improved. You lure me to bed and to table. You haven’t let me get lost in it.”
“I didn’t know you were even doing it,” John protested.
Sherlock tilted his head back, caught John’s eye. “You didn’t need to. You kept me right anyway. She’s nearly done,” Sherlock continued.
Victor opened the brazier, stirred the fire, added more charcoal. He was grinning as he filled the coffee pot from the water jug, nestled the pot amongst the hot ashes and glowing embers.
“She?” Michael echoed, opening his eyes and turning towards Sherlock.
Victor peeled away the layers of cloth and waxy paper around the ground coffee and spice, his fingers dextrous, his shoulders relaxed as he bent to the task. John studied him. The worst of the scars were hidden by his clothes and his hair, the clumsiness almost completely overcome.
“The woman for Victor,” Sherlock explained. “The Woman.”
Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms by Thomas Moore, 1808.
Victor recites lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, (Book X, 743–745), which appeared at the beginning of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Author:
saki101Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Mrs Hudson, Mike Stamford, Victor, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Slash
Word Count: ~13.1K total (posted in two parts due to length)
Disclaimer: Sherlock is not mine and no money is being made.
Summary: What if Dr Frankenstein had had Dr Watson to keep him right? A story in which Sherlock's mother's maiden name is Frankenstein and Dr Watson has been invalided home towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars...
Notes: A stand-alone AU fusion fix-it fic written for the Springlock Exchange 2014 for swimmingbirdrunningrock's great prompt: John's the detective, Sherlock's the doctor. AU, fic or ficlet? Go wild. This connected to a thought I had had upon seeing Frankenstein with Mr Cumberbatch in the role of the scientist: every genius needs a John Watson.
Part I on LJ
On AO3
A brief entry to note that the vicar paid me a courtesy call. I am relieved to report that we have not needed to call for him. He brought apples with him again, golden ones this time that were crisp and had a fine taste. He thanked me for putting an end to the vandalisation of his graveyard and expressed a wish to see me more often sitting in a pew in his church. This was a very delicate way to put it as I have not sat in his church at all, except on the day I visited him at the vicarage to be shown the damage to the tombstones and he gave me a tour of the inside of the church afterwards and would recite the history behind each of the stained glass windows of which he is very proud. My leg was paining me and I accepted his invitation to sit while he made his orations.
I expressed my great satisfaction that his concerns on that score had been allayed. I decided there was no point in explaining that I had had nothing to do with this turn of events in any manner whatsoever as I feel certain that he is the type of man who will maintain his own view of things whatever anyone else may say.
I thanked him for his gift and we parted as amicably as I could hope in light of the fact that I had not promised to sit in his pews on a regular basis. I believe he still has hope for my soul and imagines it will just take more time and possibly more apples.
***
It is madness on several levels, I suppose, Harry, but I’ve moved out of my rooms. There’s a complete floor above the infirmary now, not just my rooms on one side and the operating theatre on part of the other. The operating room remains, but my rooms are gone and another open ward built. We’ve thirty-two beds on the ground floor, a station by the stairs for the four orderlies we have now and a small office for Dr Hooper and me. Upstairs, in addition to the operating room, we have beds for eighteen more. There are shelves along one of the side walls with books of fiction, history and travel for the patients who can read; those who cannot often listen to those who can read aloud. We have enough patients who can manage the stairs, fortunately. We have established a routine of moving those who are soon to be discharged to the upper floor. Ethan is among them. The scars on his face are certainly visible, but they are very fine and pale. They are healing well and the eye on that side is not distorted. Sherlock followed the course of Ethan’s convalescence most carefully and I derived enormous pleasure from it. I know I should only care that Ethan is so much better than he might have been, but to you, Harry, I can admit that Sherlock’s admiration of my work is something I hold very dear.
My new rooms are old, but not far away. They still overlook the physic garden; I only have to cut across it to reach the infirmary. From the small bedroom balcony, I can see Sherlock’s tower. That hasn’t stopped me from walking there nearly every evening. Yes, it rains here sometimes, so I walk in the rain if it isn’t too much of a downpour. If it is, I stare out my balcony doors as though the tower might disappear if I don’t keep watch.
This vigil feels all the more important as he is spending more and more time there. He still comes to the infirmary once a day, but his visits are brief. I see him sometimes in the garden collecting flowers and leaves and berries. In the past month, he’s joined me once for dinner after I practically cornered him in the garden. He ate nothing and was so ill at ease that I have not done it again.
His fresh colour has faded. The skin around his eyes looks bruised and the little weight that he gained over the past few months has melted away.
Mrs Hudson is anxious. I’ve asked her if he’s ever done this before. She said he has, but never for so long.
I feel I need to know what he is working on in the tower.
As I say, madness.
***
I can’t write for long right now, Harry, but you would be proud of me. I saved a life tonight and although that is not an unusual statement for a doctor to make, I am certain no other doctor ever saved a life like this one. Most accurately I have saved two, because I do not think Sherlock would have lasted much longer without my care. He may expect others to know when they need to ask for help, but he doesn’t know it himself. Yes, for small things he’ll ask for assistance, hold this flask, shift this box, but he doesn’t think anyone can help with the big things. I was happy to prove him wrong tonight, not for the petty satisfaction of it, but because if I hadn’t been able to help, two extraordinary beings would have been lost to the world. I understand why he doubted I could help though.
I don’t know whether Lestrade will ever know, but if he were to know, he would be happy. The great thing has happened at Castle Frankenstein. If anyone had told me of it, I would not have believed them. Even holding him in my arms, it was hard enough to believe.
I have to go back now. I have left them sleeping to bring some food. Everyone needs to eat and rest. I will write eventually.
***
There is a new patient in the infirmary named Victor. He is on the ground floor because the stairs are too much of a challenge for his level of coordination and I do not wish to see him crawl. He is a big man and he will be commanding when he has learned control of his limbs. I cannot be certain, but I think he will achieve it. I have seen injuries that produced similar shortcomings, forcing men to relearn the simplest tasks. Of course, Victor, is learning them for the first time, but the others need not know that. I chose his name. He is alive and it is a victory.
I found them both on the floor when I opened the door. I was surprised it was unlocked. I had brought various keys of Mrs Hudson’s to try. Perhaps Sherlock had intended to leave and changed his mind at the last moment. He was pressed against a wall as far as possible from the body that appeared to have fallen from the operating table. He didn’t look up at me, but pointed, arm shaking, across the room. He said something; his voice hoarse from disuse or shouting, I could not tell. Perhaps he had called for help. He tried again, without success. His head dropped onto his drawn up knees, he curled his arms about them, his back heaving. The sound of his weeping tore at something in my chest.
I shut the door, turned the key that was in the lock and knelt by him. I rested my hand on his hair. I had thought of touching those curls, wondered whether they were coarse or fine. They were snarled and damp. I reached around to touch his forehead. It was burning.
“I failed,” he mumbled. “I failed, I failed, I failed.”
“No. No,” I said. “You are ill.”
I looked around the room for water. Nothing seemed obvious. There was broken glass on the lab table and the floor in front of it, something blue was dripping down onto the flags, an upturned metal bowl sat in the midst of the debris. I stood to retrieve it. I heard a sob.
“I’m not leaving,” I said, my hand back in his hair. “Just getting water.” I stretched to catch the edge of the bowl and pulled it towards me. Shards of glass scraped against the stone. “Is there water?” I asked.
His head moved slightly side to side. “Gone,” he said.
That didn’t make sense, but it was no matter. The rain continued to pour down outside. My coat was soaked from my walk. I took it off, unwound the sodden scarf from my neck and wiped his brow with it.
“Wrong,” he muttered and turned his face so I could wipe more of it. His lips were chapped. “All wrong.”
I opened the window nearest us, legs splayed so that one nudged against Sherlock’s side as I leaned out the window. Rainwater gushed past me from gargoyle spouts. I held the bowl away from their streams. I could hear the rain pinging against the metal until the sound of thunder rolled over it. Rained gushed from the gargoyle spouts. I held the bowl away from their streams. I could hear the rain pinging against the metal until the sound of thunder rolled over it. I had enough. “Can you sit up a little?” I asked, kneeling again. He lifted his head a bit. His eyes were red. From lack of sleep or from drink was another question I didn’t have the answer to. I held the bowl to his lips. He lifted his head higher and drank it all. He sighed when he finished and looked up at me. “I didn’t get it right,” he said more clearly, head falling back against the wall.
I told him to wait and collected more rain water. He drank again, pushed the last of it away. Another clap of thunder sounded. I set the bowl down. The rain was blowing into the room. I closed the window. Around us the room lit up. A sound like stone splitting echoed above our heads. “We’ve been hit,” I shouted.
“It didn’t work,” Sherlock replied. “It hit before, but it didn’t work. He just fell off the table and lay there like that.”
It was seeing the lightning strike from my balcony that had sent me out in the rain.
Sherlock pointed across the room.
I saw a cobweb of blue light slither down from the ceiling. The candles in their glass chimneys along the lab table seemed dim. A few sparks sizzled along the floor and under the body. My eyes were adjusting to the relative darkness again slowly. I thought a spasm ran through the heap on the stone. The thunder growled again. The candlelight grew brighter. An arm flopped out to the side.
Sherlock gasped and scrambled forward. He dragged a finger along the bottom of the nearest foot. It kicked.
“John?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied. “I saw that.”
“You do it,” Sherlock directed.
I crouched near the other foot and did the same thing. The leg it was attached to twitched. There was a groan. It wasn’t Sherlock. The arm flopped again.
“He’s trying to turn over,” I surmised. “Who is it?”
“I haven’t given him a name,” Sherlock said.
I didn’t understand. I studied the figure in front of us. There was something familiar about him. I stared at the incisions on his scalp, the shaved patches around them and what was left between them of his hair. It had been a luxuriant head of hair. I had coveted it. “Sherlock?”
“Yes?”
“Shall I help him turn over?” I asked.
“Yes,” Sherlock answered.
I didn’t ask about the name again, just set to rolling the man over. He was big, heavy like anyone barely conscious and with almost no coordination. I have left many taverns with comrades in a similar state. It wasn’t easy, but there is a science to it. I got him on his back and incidentally off the pair of wires upon which he had been lying. He had burn marks across his chest from them. If I treated them soon, they might not scar. I looked over his chest and arms. He had enough of those already. I looked up to his face, traced a thin scar on the side of his head.
“The lower jaw was dislocated,” Sherlock said.
“Ah.” I hadn’t noticed when I’d seen the head. It had appeared unscathed by the horse’s hooves and I hadn’t studied it closely.
The lightning flashed. Not as bright, but enough to blind me for a moment. The thunder boomed, somewhat off to the west. The man leaned towards me and whined, a high, terrified sound. I’d heard similar sounds when men realised a limb was gone. I reached across the broad chest and rolled him against me, murmured reassuring sounds that weren’t really words.
“What are you doing?” Sherlock asked.
“Comforting him,” I said. “He’s frightened.”
Sherlock sat back on his heels. “He has a doctorate in philosophy. He should remember what a thunder clap is.”
“Ah,” I said again, rocking a little with the burden on my lap. “You thought it would be like waking up. The memories would be in the brain and the other parts would just be transport.” I nodded as I rocked. “Reasonable.”
“I didn’t see any evidence of it, but maybe the horse did injure the brain,” Sherlock said and sighed. “I was right the first time. The experiment is a failure.”
“You were frightened,” I said. As soon as I said it, I regretted the words. He was clearly exhausted, dehydrated, feverish and probably malnourished by that point and he would think I was calling him a coward. I had seen too much suffering, I had no delusions about what bravery looked like.
“He roared when the first lightning hit,” Sherlock said, cocking his head and moving it slightly in time to my rocking. He didn’t seem to have been offended, maybe he agreed with the assessment. “His back arched up off the table. I anticipated strong involuntary reflexes, so I had leather straps around his shins and his forearms. They snapped and he fell off onto the stone. He lay there, still. I thought his life had been that one moment of agony,” Sherlock said and reached out to touch the man’s back. “He’s cold.”
“His breath is warm,” I reported. “I can feel it.” I twisted my neck about, spotted Sherlock’s cloak hanging from the door. “Can you walk?”
Sherlock took a deep breath, rose to one knee. I held out an arm. He grasped my forearm and used it to pull himself up. He swayed.
“Light-headed?” I asked. He looked so tall from my vantage point on the floor.
“Mm,” he said and swayed a little more.
“Come back down,” I said. “I’ll get the cloak.” I held my arm back out and he steadied himself on it on the way down. Once he was kneeling again, he carefully stretched his legs out and sat.
I rolled the man off my lap. He whimpered. I lifted his head onto Sherlock’s lap, put Sherlock’s hand on his head and stepped quickly to the door. In a moment, I had the cloak over the man’s body and tucked partway under him. Sherlock was staring intently down at the part of the man’s face he could see. He had clearly taken something away from his observation of Ethan's operation. The scar was little more than a hair’s breadth wide in marked contrast to some of the suturing on the rest of the man's body. Sherlock traced the scar with a fingertip just as I had. The man nestled into Sherlock's lap, rubbing his face against Sherlock’s waistcoat.
“What happened to the water?” I asked. “You must have a pump up here somewhere.”
Sherlock kept staring down. “It’s below ground. It needs tinkering now and then to come up three floors, but I didn’t dare leave.”
I went to the window and held the bowl out until it felt heavy. The thunder was distant now, the lightning flashes on the horizon, but the rain was still strong.
I got Sherlock to drink more, pulled a silk handkerchief from his coat pocket, dipped it in the bowl and rubbed it across the man’s lips. He sucked it into his mouth. “Thirsty business being struck by lightning and waking up from the dead…” I pulled the cloth out, re-wet it and gave it back. “Definitely thirsty.” I needed to get some clothes for the man, some food for Sherlock at least, but I sat first. “Any chance his consciousness could belong to one of the other parts? The torso, the legs?”
“We don’t think with our torso,” Sherlock said derisively. His fingertip was still stroking the scar. It was healing very smoothly.
“Oh, you could get an argument on that one, Dr Holmes,” I said.
He turned and looked at me, a mix of expressions flickering across his face. He smiled just a little and nodded. “We’ll have to wait and observe, then,” he said.
I stood, hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. “I won’t be gone long.”
“Good,” he said.
I walked around them to pull the two wires out of the way, dragged my coat off the floor. I wasn’t sure if I would be wetter with it on or off, but I settled it over my shoulders in the end, unlocked the door and shoved my hands in my pockets. There was a paper twist of ginger candy in one. “Aha,” I exclaimed and stepped back in. “I hope you like ginger,” I said, “because it’s all I have with me. Open up.” Surprisingly, he did. I popped one onto his tongue and set the paper with the rest on the floor next to him. “Just to keep you upright until I get back,” I explained.
Sherlock rolled the candy to one side of his mouth, pointed with his chin at his lap. “Do you think…”
“I’d feel safer starting with liquids,” I said. “He might choke on that.”
Sherlock nodded and sunk to the side, head stopping when it reached what must have been the man’s hip beneath his coat.
“I’ll bring food,” I said and ran.
Across the marble floor of the infirmary, hands out by his side for balance, Victor made his way to the nearest door. The garden was flooded with sun. The farrier sat on a bench outside the door, face tilted upwards, soaking it in. He saw neither it nor the blooms of the garden, but it was obvious that he felt the one, smelt the other and heard Victor approaching. He slid away from the door, patted the warm space he left on the bench. Victor sat, bumping the old man in the process.
He glanced at me and grinned, happy with his achievement. His expressions are still lop-sided, but he progresses by the hour. Sherlock keeps more formal notes. I write with wonder at what he’s done, what Victor’s done.
“Aye, lad. Sit and soak it up with me,” De Lacey said. He patted the air in Victor’s direction, got his thigh and patted again. “The sun’s ablaze today. The heat of it does my bones good, but don’t look straight at it, lad. Is not good for the eyes. Neither the fire o’ the forge nor the sun is good for the eyes. I should know.” He sighed.
Victor’s smile vanished, he mewled, turning towards De Lacey and began patting his shoulder and arm in imitation of the old man’s gesture, staring as he did at the farrier’s face.
“Don’t fret, boy. Don’t fret,” he said, stroking the back of one of Victor’s hands and forcing a bit of a smile.
Victor took a deep breath, leaned his shoulder against the stone wall and said, “Words. More. Words.”
At this, De Lacey truly smiled. “I know you like to listen to the words, lad, but you’ve got to learn to say 'em, too. They’re good for wooing, don’t you know. The ladies like ‘em.” De Lacey tipped his face towards the sun again. “I’ve got the perfect poem for today,” he continued, settling back on the bench and beginning to recite. “ Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, which I gaze on so fondly to-day, were to change by to-morrow and fleet in my arms, like fairy gifts fading away, thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art, let thy loveliness fade as it will…”
I winced and chastised myself for it. Victor was healing and learning rapidly, and yet the role of successful suitor was hard to imagine. At least Victor was facing away from me. Guiltily, I glanced towards the infirmary, saw the silhouette on the window panes. I looked over my shoulder. Sherlock stood by the fading azaleas. He didn’t take his eyes off me as the old man continued.
“ No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets, but as truly loves on to the close, as the sunflower turns on her God when he sets, the same look which she turned when he rose.
On the last word, Sherlock turned on his heel and was gone. I followed.
****
Oh, Harry, I look at the gap between my last two entries and despair. This, of all things, was worthy of a careful record, but I couldn't write. The days and nights ran together. I don’t know whose needs were greater, Victor’s or Sherlock’s. The forty-nine other patients we had at any given moment continued to mend and be sent on their way under the care of Dr Hooper, who is a treasure. I joined in rounds when I could and operated as needed, although Dr Hooper took on all the more routine surgeries. It was a huge responsibility to put on such a young doctor. Michael spared us a week now and then when too many guests descended on his house, the orderlies were dedicated and dependable and Mrs Hudson made sure we were all fed, but some days I wasn’t sure any of us were going to make it.
Months passed this way. Victor’s wounds faded to pale pink and shiny white, without infection. Victor grew steady on his feet, walked and then ran. One day I took him to the fish pond and taught him how to swim. By then he could recount the exploit to De Lacey who had a poem for the occasion. His stock seems unlimited and Victor has learned them all by heart. One day I found them tracing letters in the dirt and it seemed but the orbit of a moon before Victor was sounding out poems to De Lacey from a tattered old book of his.
It had taken two weeks to nurse Sherlock back to health. When they woke that first night, I fed and washed them and let them sleep on the floor again for a few hours. I was so exhausted, I joined them.
In the evening, I fetched Mrs Hudson and introduced her to the new resident of the castle. She knelt on the floor at the edge of the nest of blankets and ran her hand over Victor’s scarred and bristly head. She glanced at Sherlock’s sleeping form and up at me and said, “Live and let live is what I say.”
She roused a gardener to summon Billy and supervised the two of them more or less carrying Sherlock to my rooms and settled him in there. It was her idea to get a semi-conscious Sherlock out to the landing before they arrived. I’m sure I would have thought of it, but she thought of it first.
We took turns for a couple days, switching between them with me spending a hour or two in the infirmary and her in the house before we returned to our charges. She is not a young woman and I shouldn’t have let her, but when I suggested she rest, she glared me right into my place. She is also a sparrow of a woman and Victor is a huge man who towers over Sherlock now as Sherlock towers over me. But then, he was just a bundle on the floor that we nursed with sweetened milk and kept warm. When I arrived to relieve her one time, she was sitting on a folded blanket and singing him a lullaby. I thought I might laugh; instead my eyes stung.
More like a colt than a man, Victor attempted to stand after two days. He couldn’t maintain an upright position, but he managed to crawl and that is how we had to let him make his way down the stairs, backwards with me below and Mrs Hudson above cooing encouraging words at him.
At the infirmary, I had to let Mrs Hudson help me bathe him; someone had to keep his head above water. My attempts at protecting her modesty received another glare, so if she hadn’t understood Victor’s origins while tending him in the tower, bundled up as he was, she probably did after that. She tapped near a long scar on Victor’s chest and said that Sherlock’s grandfather would have been proud.
A remarkable woman, Mrs Hudson.
Once Victor was ensconced as our fiftieth patient in the infirmary, I could stay with Sherlock longer. This was just as well because his pain medication is also an antipyretic and once his fever was down he was bored and restless and determined to return to his work. I told him I would be his proxy and related as many details about Victor’s condition in his first few days as I could recall. This was grudgingly accepted for that afternoon after I retrieved Sherlock’s notes from the tower for him to annotate, but the evening brought a renewed insistence on firsthand observation. I bargained for after dinner and won. We made our way slowly down the stairs and across the twilit garden, Sherlock doing his best to disguise the symptoms of vertigo he was experiencing.
At the infirmary, he sat in the chair by the bed and watched Victor breathe, directed me to take his pulse and check for fever. Sherlock didn’t touch him. Victor turned on his side in his sleep. Sherlock rose from his seat. We hadn’t been there long. The stairs to my room never seemed as steep as they did on our way back to my rooms. Sherlock let me help him undress and went to bed without another word. I repaired to the chaise lounge where I had slept the little bit I had slept for the past few nights and tried not to think of the expressions I had watched cross his face by Victor’s bedside.
It became a routine. In the morning, over a late breakfast, I would recount any incidents since Sherlock’s last visit. He would add to his notes and slowly become more animated until he insisted I accompany him down to the infirmary. At first, he was weak and my presence on the stairs was an unspoken necessity, but as the days passed and Sherlock grew stronger, I realised my support was of a different sort. One evening in the second week, I heard Victor’s voice as we approached. Sherlock paused at the threshold. He listened to the slur of the words for a moment, his brows lowered, before he turned back to my rooms. We started to visit later in the evening.
After two weeks, I could have pronounced Sherlock well physically. I could have, but I didn’t. He made no request to return to his own rooms in the main house and I was loathe to have him go. I made some cursory excuses to myself that it was to be sure his recovery was complete, to monitor that he ate three times a day, that he didn’t read all night. As time passed, there was less and less validity to them. We had taken to walking a little in the garden after dinner before visiting the infirmary. Gradually, our walks grew longer and one evening we reached the foot of his tower. He asked me to go up and look for a violin case. I thought perhaps he was avoiding the long flights of stairs by asking me to go. I glanced around the room. It had been cleaned, the broken glass swept up, the blankets taken away, but the copper wires still straggled across the floor by the counter and the torn leather straps hung from the sides of the examination table. Possibly it wasn’t the exertion of the stairs being avoided.
Sherlock stopped visiting. I was given a check list to complete each day with the instruction to write freely on the back of the list about any other impressions I might have. Periodically, I was given lists of books to retrieve from the library in the main house. They grew in stacks about my rooms. Sherlock read and took notes, started collecting flowers and seeds from the garden and repairing to his lab behind the azaleas for short stints. At first he took the long way out to the grounds through the main house. After a while he began taking the shortcut through the infirmary, but he never stopped. Some of the newer patients didn’t know who he was. Some of the others would greet him. He would nod and keep going.
There was the day that De Lacey recited Moore and spoke of wooing. The next day Sherlock started going back to the tower. He didn’t stay long, but he continued to go, now and then. I thought I had retrieved all the notes that had been there, but perhaps he had other places he kept logs or perhaps he was trying out a few modified experiments. He never said, but sleep came more slowly those nights and I’d hear him tossing and turning.
Many of the plants used in Sherlock’s medicines were poisonous. Dosage was crucial. He was always very specific in his instructions and the results were incredible. Supplies had run low while he was ill. He replenished them and kept on gathering. Perhaps he was preparing a batch for Michael. He seemed to be gathering far more than we would need. I listened to his restless sleep at night. I began to watch more carefully.
I told Sherlock about the swimming lesson, about how quickly Victor had grasped the basics of the skill. He remarked on the adequacy of Victor's physical abilities.
As they came into their season, I watched him gathering more poisonous flowers.
I don’t know whether it was something Mrs Hudson said or something that Victor put together from the talk of the other patients and orderlies about Sherlock and his own dim memories of the distracted man he saw striding through the infirmary, but Victor began to ask me questions about Sherlock and to follow him with his eyes. He asked me first about his hair. If I could have predicted that Victor would begin enquiring about Sherlock and his relationship to him, I would never have guessed that would be the first query. Victor wanted to know why he didn’t have long, glossy curls like the impatient man. I thought the adjective interesting as well. I had cropped Victor's hair to even it out and it had grown back enough to begin covering the scars on his head. It didn’t show any signs of curling, but it wasn’t very long yet. I told him if he was patient, his hair would grow long, too. He eyed the shorter style in which I wear my hair and frowned, asking whether I, too, couldn’t have long, shining curls. It’s all the poetry. His vocabulary has increased enormously.
I told Sherlock about Victor’s line of questioning. He looked up from his reading, his eyes shifting from my face to my hair and back to his book. He had a small smile on his face, but made no other comment. Sherlock does have a handsome head of hair. I should have realised that he knew it.
Maybe it grew from that, but I noticed Sherlock walking more slowly through the infirmary afterwards and sometimes stopping to exchange a word with Dr Hooper or the orderlies or one of the patients. He never had these brief conversations near Victor, but if Victor was anywhere nearby, he would stop what he was doing and listen.
“It’s like music,” he said one night to me.
“What is?” I asked, checking his pulse and making a note of it.
“His voice,” Victor said.
I didn’t ask whose voice, because I knew. The way he said it, ‘his’ had a capital letter. For Victor, that was perhaps warranted.
I also didn’t ask how he knew about music because De Lacey had a fife that he played sometimes to show the tune to which some of his poems should be sung. He didn’t sing them himself, but now and again one of the other patients would know the song and sing along with the fife. Victor would clap his hands and stomp his feet if the song was gay and if the song was sad, sometimes he wept.
Much as he enjoyed the songs and the tunes, it was the music of Sherlock’s violin that transfixed him. Often I was with Sherlock in my rooms when he was playing, the music drifting down into the garden from the open balcony doors, but one day I was doing my rounds with Dr Hooper when Sherlock began to play. The day was bright, the doors and windows open wide and the sound came in on the breeze. It was a quiet piece, with high quivering notes that would be lost for a second or two in the rustle of the leaves. Victor had been tying and untying a thin rope, practicing a series of knots another patient had shown him how to make. Such exercises were good for injured hands and Victor’s fingers became more nimble each day. His hands grew quiet though as he strained to catch the notes of the violin. He leaned farther and farther towards the window, the rope slipping from his lap. The pages of my notebook fluttered on a nearby table. Victor stood and walked towards the door to the physic garden. When he reached the threshold, the music stopped. He looked back at me, lips pressed together and I raised my chin at him, knowing it was but a pause between movements. His eyes widened when the playing resumed. I followed him into the garden. He stepped through the flower beds until he was facing my balcony. There Victor stopped, his gaze intent, his mouth agape as though he would speak. I came up behind him, watched with him as Sherlock swayed to his music, sun gleaming off the silk sleeve of his dressing gown, the polished wood of the violin. Victor raised his head and howled. Sherlock lifted his bow. For a few seconds, he stood still and stared over the balcony rail at us, then, in a whirl of motion, he shut the doors and closed the drapes. He had not heard Victor’s attempts at song before. Victor sat down with a thump in the lavender as though his tendons had been cut.
Sherlock didn’t play for weeks and avoided the infirmary. De Lacey taught Victor a few notes on the fife. I watched and worried.
The change came during one of Michael’s visits. Victor was out in the grounds with De Lacey. Victor was steady enough on his feet to lead the blind man on walks and it benefited them both. Sherlock had joined us for rounds, pausing by the bed of a man whose leg we were sure we had saved through the use of iodine on his wounds when he first arrived and subsequent to my surgery to remove wood fragments buried deep in his thigh. As we explained his case to Michael, the soldier looked up at us from his bed with much the same look Victor had directed at Sherlock as he had played on the balcony. I bit my lip lest it quiver. I find my emotions too near the surface these days.
We spent time with each of the patients before adjourning for tea to the orangery. Mrs Hudson had outdone herself and Dr Hopper joined us for the feast. Our talk was an animated mix of medicine and all sorts of news from the city and Sherlock was more engaged than I had seen him be in a long while. Michael remarked that the latest sensation in the capital could not hold a candle to Sherlock on his violin and asked him to play. I drew in a breath and Michael glanced at me. Perhaps it was the champagne, but Sherlock agreed and we filed out, still chatting, heading towards the infirmary to take the shorter route to my rooms, the bright sun and sharp shadows of early evening about us.
Out of the shadows by the infirmary door, a voice spoke as we passed. “’Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me Man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?’” With practice, Victor’s voice had modulated and the words were well-formed, their accent some strange combination of De Lacey’s, Mrs Hudson’s and mine. Sherlock stopped in his tracks, brightly outlined in the sun, and turned to probe the shadows.
Around Sherlock, we fell silent.
“What is it, lad?” De Lacey asked, reaching out to grip Victor’s arm where they sat in their customary places on the bench by the door.
“It is my Maker,” Victor replied, the adolescent truculence of his tone contrasting with both the maturity of his frame and the paltry number of his days.
I don’t know whether it was the aptness of the words or that Victor was flinging Milton at him, but Sherlock tilted his head and narrowed his eyes as he does when he is deeply concentrating and he concentrated on Victor as if for the first time since the night I found them in the tower.
Victor squared his shoulders and tossed his hair back under the scrutiny, his eyes locked on Sherlock’s face. The hair had grown a few inches, beginning to curl at the ends, and Sherlock shifted his attention to it. He reached out, lifting locks and feeling for the scars hidden beneath. The stiffness in Victor’s spine and the tightness around his eyes eased. Sherlock ran a fingertip over the scar along the hairline down to the jaw. He angled Victor’s chin upwards, nudged it from side to side. “The scarring is far milder than I expected,” Sherlock said. He traced the scar on the side of Victor’s face up into his hair, patting the hair into place. “You have Dr Watson to thank for that.”
“I have you to thank for everything,” Victor said, his voice flat, his eyes still on Sherlock’s face.
Anything could have been read into that neutral tone. I saw the corner of Sherlock’s lip quirk upwards at the subtlety of it. His hand passed over Victor’s hair in a stroking motion as he drew it away. “Read Voltaire,” Sherlock said as he turned and strode through the door. "You can use the library," he called over his shoulder.
I shook myself from the spell of that moment and followed. Behind me, I heard De Lacey speak.
“Was that Dr Holmes, lad?” he said.
“It was my Maker,” Victor replied.
***
“You see, I remembered the day John came down from London like it was yesterday,” the portliest among the men said. “The very words we exchanged in that little inn.”
“You’ve been known to embroider the past in your memories, Michael,” said a man who still retained the clipped tones of the military in his speech.
“As though you can talk,” Michael replied. He stretched out on the divan along the wall, put his hands behind his head. “You read me some of your letters to Harry when we were students. Out of whole cloth, John.” Michael gazed up at the blue tiles on the ceiling. Pale streaks of dawn light filtered through the shutters and played over their patterns.
“Still, it was a record, of sorts,” the tall man said.
“The scientific record was in my lab notes,” the man sitting on the floor declared. He crossed his long legs at the ankle and leaned back against the side of the divan. “That’s the important part of the story, Victor.”
“When they could be read, Sherlock,” John said. His hand stroked through Sherlock’s hair and came to rest on his shoulder.
“My lab notes are very neat,” Sherlock asserted.
“When you haven’t been sampling infusions from your garden,” a silver-haired man added and yawned. “The legal history’s in my records, admittedly between the lines for the most part.” He stretched his arms above his head and cracked his knuckles. “I had the devil of a time keeping the vicar placated about his blessed tombstones.”
“His promotion was most opportune,” John agreed. “You are a patient man, Greg.”
“You don’t know the half of it," Greg Lestrade said and held up his glass. "To the parishioners in Mayfair he's redeeming now.” Greg took a drink and winked at John. "I hear some of his flock hope he'll be promoted again soon.
Sherlock waved his pipe. “Hopefully not to Marylebone. We might have to abandon Baker Street altogether.”
John kneaded Sherlock’s shoulder. “You blaspheme. You couldn’t abide being without a place in London.”
“I could become a proper country squire. I’ve already added hives to the garden,” Sherlock said. “I find apiculture most absorbing.”
“Where?” Michael asked.
“South of the tower mainly,” Sherlock replied, “except for the two in the physic garden.”
Michael drew in a breath. “Poison honey.”
“Possibly.” Sherlock smiled.
Victor stood. He towered over the others, seated or sprawled out as they were.
“Are you satisfied?” John asked, tilting his head back to take him all in.
Victor nodded. “I longed for the details.”
“No birth. No mother,” John continued. Sherlock looked up, scrutinised Victor’s expression.
He held out one large hand towards Sherlock and John. The scar around his wrist was white, barely visible beneath the cuff. “Two fathers,” he said. He held out his other hand towards Lestrade and Michael. “Two of my godfathers.” He smiled. “Without benefit of clergy,” he added. “Dr Hooper and Mrs Hudson, an aunt and a grandmother. It’s enough to be getting on with.” He stepped to the corner of the room, crouched over a sack there. “I brought back the coffee with cardamom that you like.”
John's eyes darted around the room. Michael's eyes were half-closed. Lestrade was smiling at the prospect of coffee. They didn’t understand the implication. “You promised you’d bring him more if he…”
“Yes,” Sherlock interrupted. “I thought it over. Sent a message to Victor and told him I agreed.”
“Agreed?” John repeated.
Victor rose, aromatic package in hand. He collected a brass pot and a long spoon from the shelf, brought them to the brazier near the divan, knelt beside it.
“We will gloss over how you’ve done this without informing me,” John said. He took a breath. “You’re all right?”
“Better than,” Sherlock said. “Thanks to you my surgical skills have improved. You lure me to bed and to table. You haven’t let me get lost in it.”
“I didn’t know you were even doing it,” John protested.
Sherlock tilted his head back, caught John’s eye. “You didn’t need to. You kept me right anyway. She’s nearly done,” Sherlock continued.
Victor opened the brazier, stirred the fire, added more charcoal. He was grinning as he filled the coffee pot from the water jug, nestled the pot amongst the hot ashes and glowing embers.
“She?” Michael echoed, opening his eyes and turning towards Sherlock.
Victor peeled away the layers of cloth and waxy paper around the ground coffee and spice, his fingers dextrous, his shoulders relaxed as he bent to the task. John studied him. The worst of the scars were hidden by his clothes and his hair, the clumsiness almost completely overcome.
“The woman for Victor,” Sherlock explained. “The Woman.”
~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~
Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms by Thomas Moore, 1808.
Victor recites lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, (Book X, 743–745), which appeared at the beginning of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
