The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

4

During my first year in consultancy, I came to understand the necessity for responsive and reliable assistants to enhance my awareness of activities and persons and efficiently conduct searches throughout the teeming boroughs of London. A young boy of the streets, then about twelve years of age, often undertook errands for me as needed. He conveyed orders and parcels between me and my tobacconists, Shervington’s, in High Holborn Street and could be relied upon to place my notices in the agony columns or send telegrams at any hour. Arthur Wiggins became essential to my effective functions. As he rose in rank, Wiggins became my Sergeant-Major, commanding a squad of Irregulars who regularly took the equivalent of the Queen’s shilling in our private war against crime, ranging across the chaos of London, going everywhere, seeing everything, overhearing everyone. The Irregulars were each paid a shilling a day plus expenses with a guinea bonus for the boy who ran to ground the object of the search.

Wiggins went on to a successful military career; indeed, rising to Colour-Sergeant during the Great War where he served with distinction in France. He retired from the Blues and Royals and, as one might expect, entered upon a long third career of service as a Commissionaire in his old haunts in Holborn. From time to time, I continue to rely upon his good and trustworthy character for my most important needs. Even Mrs Hunter has come to welcome Wiggins’s visits, and he her sumptuous afternoon teas.

Another lasting association of my formative early years in practice included that of Mr Morris Angel, the Shaftesbury Avenue bespoke costumier from whom I learned the intricacies of disguise and theatrical makeup. Mr Angel and his son Daniel supplied the costumes and related goods to many of the London theatres and music halls, having begun over thirty years previous with a small clothing rental service in Seven Dials. Over the many years of our association, Mr Angel conveyed the techniques for changing my appearance quickly and effectively, including the manner in which height and age could be altered and, as needed, even gender. The Angels were generous, giving me access to their numerous storerooms in the scattered theatre districts where I was able to fix up small ‘bolt-holes’ into which I could disappear and reappear as a totally different person or go into hiding for a day in order to avoid detection. I also kept an assortment of old clothes and a box of make-up, facial appliances, crepe hair and spirit gum in the lumberroom of my lodgings, and within a few minutes, could leave from the entrance of number 47 as a ship’s carpenter, a green-grocer, an antiquarian, a country vicar, or an ostler as required.

An odd acquaintance—indeed, more than just that—was Sherman, the taxidermist in Pinchin Lane, Lambeth. From time to time, he loaned his brown and white, half spaniel, half lurcher scent-hound, Toby, to me to trace one of my fleeing quarry. In his youth, Sherman had been game-keeper for Maiden Wood and had often accompanied my father in tramps throughout the holding and on many a day’s shooting with guests. He had retired to his bird-stuffing business at Lambeth prior to my going up to university, and I often passed a quiet hour and a pint with him whenever I was near Pinchin Lane. A naturalist by self-training and one acutely aware of the behaviour of mammals, Sherman could be relied upon for shrewd insights into the likely movements of criminals gone to ground. I sought his knowledge on numerous occasions, even more than the service of his incomparable tracking-hound, Toby, particularly for information on the physical and chemical changes in dead tissues exposed to the weather. Sherman died in 1903. It was only due to Mycroft and me settling his affairs after his death that we discovered that he had held the Royal Warrant from the Prince of Wales for taxidermy of royal grouse and pheasant; such was the high regard for his talents. Apparently, many of the birds displayed at Balmoral are Sherman’s work. He also made a good living between 1896 and his death providing scores of displays of preserved red grouse perched on small wood logs to Matthew Gloag, the Perthshire whisky maker who gave the birds to publicans selling his Famous Grouse whisky. I miss him and his connection to the Maiden Wood years and our family.

My banker for thirty-four years, from 1874 to 1910, when he retired, was the taciturn Scot, Mr Ian Tarquin Campbell, of Capital and Counties Bank, 125 Oxford Street, London. Mr Campbell was of great service on various occasions when it was necessary to provide extreme and confidential security within the bank’s vaults for certain priceless royal jewels, government documents, sensitive foreign treaties, and other items central to my cases. He also was custodian of my personal monetary holdings, most of which was converted to gold due to my preference for the portability of bullion should it be necessary.

After Mr Campbell’s departure, my affairs were taken over by Mr Alistair Threadway in 1910 who continues as my personal banker at Capital and Counties to the present, eleven years now since its merger with Lloyds. These two men managed my financial affairs with scrupulous integrity over a period of now fifty-five years and relieved me of having to intrude valuable brain capacity with the everyday concerns of money. During a period of nearly six years, I even entrusted the management of Watson’s finances (at his request) to Campbell after the good doctor found himself too often a plunger on a limited income. All of my bills are sent to and paid by the bank, and every fortnight a packet containing twenty pounds is dispatched to me via messenger for my cash needs. Any unscheduled expenses that may arise are paid by me using cheques I carry in my bill case. This routine has been followed for nearly fifty years, except during the hiatus when it was managed by Mycroft.

A few others are or were long-time, trusted acquaintances over the years. Bruno Schiava, the Neapolitan chef at Simpson’s has been a valued fixture at twice-weekly dinners for many years. Samuel Cundey of Henry Poole & Co was my tailor when I came to London and Poole continues to make my clothes today. Mr Cundey took over the business from Henry Poole who had dressed my father for many years. Mycroft and Wittrell were also life-long customers of Mr Cundey and Poole & Co and visited their premises at 15 Savile Row twice a year. Like all Holmes males, they were buried wearing bespoke Poole. I distinctly remember Cundey’s admonishment to a rag-tag young man fresh from university, intent upon making a name for himself in mid-nineteenth century London: ‘Dress well, Mr Holmes, and the rest will take care of itself.’

Writing of our family tradition of wearing Poole to the grave, I should like to recount here another Holmes family tradition, one that may seem quite bizarre, but which, I can assure, has great, practical antecedents. The minor squires of Maiden Wood, going back to feudal times, many generations before my father and grandfathers, have followed an ancient Celtic tradition of burial in unmarked, unknown graves. As the relict, I will be the last to be buried in this traditional way. When a Holmes dies, he or she is conveyed to a woodland burial ground known only to the family and laid in a linear line from east to west in rows ranked by the century. There are no monuments or markings of any kind, only gentle mounds of thick, lush, greenwood moss among the ancient oaks. Only our memory remains for those who will live but briefly beyond our own years. When we are gone, it is as if we never existed.

5

Watson and I were much the same age. He was born 25 February 1852, less than a month after I was born. Over the years we spent together, on occasion—often after several glasses of port and the intimacy of a warm fire on a winter’s evening—Watson would recount aspects of his life which gave one a more fully-furnished understanding of this most solitary man.

John Henry Watson was born in Cirencester, Gloucester to Henry and Martha Watson. Henry was Sexton of Church of St John the Baptist, a medieval church dating from 1115. He was christened John for the church and Henry for his father. He styled his name John H. Watson throughout his life.

Henry Watson began service to the church as an Acolyte, rising to Verger after ten years. He was entrusted with the duties of Sexton, a particularly responsible position given the age of the works. After thirty years of service, his name was effaced from the church records for reasons unknown, but apparently due an unfortunate occurrence owing to a debilitating weakness for drink. He died alone, a broken man no longer in control of his mind or his life.

Martha was an embroiderer of church vestments, having talent with both the needle and elegant design. Her work was in demand for many years until her sight diminished to the point of near-blindness in her later years. She died several years before Henry.

Watson’s elder brother, four years older, was Christened Henry John Watson, also named after his father and the church. He read canon law and became a clerk to the doctors of the ecclesiastical courts of the Anglican Communion where he concentrated on probate cases involving the church and inheritance. He inherited his father’s failing with drink and died equally unhappy.

Watson alone was destined to achieve a measure of success and happiness. After significant hardships due to his chronic lack of money, Watson took his degree of Doctor of Medicine from the University of London in 1878. He was a staff surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, but had little in the way of lucrative work and, given the attraction of subsistence and excitement went out to Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, in 1879 after a brief period of Army Medical Department training at Netley.

During the battle of Maiwand, 27 July 1880, whilst attached to the 66
^th
(Berkshire) Regiment of Foot, upon transiting a dry river bed, Watson sustained simultaneous wounds to his shoulder and leg fired from Jezail muskets by a sniper party of Afghans in ambush within a depression in the elevated river bank. He was sent to the rear to a field hospital where his wounds were cared for and then to England where he was convalesced through the autumn of 1881. He was given a medical retirement due to his injuries and debilitation along with a small wound pension insufficient for independent living and lasting only nine months. Soon after, on 15 January 1881, Watson and I would be acquainted and would begin on a long association together.

Watson’s constancy with me in our adventures together belied his essential peripatetic nature. It is not a disservice to say that, while competent as a doctor, medicine was not Watson’s passion; indeed, it can be said that his later literary endeavours, the extensive body of published works retailing the cases that came our way, was a passion greater than his chosen profession. Watson, to my certain knowledge, never achieved significant financial success as a doctor. He set up or purchased three practices and earned a fair living, but he was not of the cut to become a Harley Street name and earn a large income. His practice in Paddington began in mid-1888 and he was back in residence in Montague Street in late 1889. The second practice was located in Kensington beginning in late 1890 and continued until he sold it in mid-1893. During these years, he continued to share rooms with me, as the small practice consisted of an examining room and waiting room only with no lodgings above. His final practice was in Queen Anne Street from 1902 through 1905. Again, he continued in residence in Montague Street during these years. The only years when Watson maintained his residence elsewhere during our long association of forty-eight years, from 1881 until his death this year, were the fourteen months in 1888-1889 when he resided in Paddington and the three years following on the Moriarty business when I was
in absentia
.

It is not entirely accurate to say that Watson and I shared the same rooms all those years. When he began his final practice in 1902, we had the third floor converted to private rooms for Watson. The larger bedroom became a sitting-room and he moved his sleeping and dressing room to the smaller bedroom. Over the course of the years 1905-1929, Watson and I lived together, but apart, much as lodgers in separate rooms in the same house. There were months—indeed, years—when we did not see each other, only hearing the other come and go on our vastly different timetables. Even during Watson’s return to the Army Medical Department from 1913 through 1918, he remained in his rooms, as his duties were those of Senior Medical Officer at the London Recruitment Centre that processed young men joining the army and the navy to fight in the Great War.

Watson married in 1888, just a month before he began his Paddington practice. His wife was, in his words, ‘An intoxicating, wild Welsh girl with a voice like a golden harp.’ Her name was Tegan Astley, from Llanwddyn, Montgomeryshire. She was a cytologist who prepared and interpreted microscopic tissue specimens at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Watson had made her acquaintance when he was a resident surgeon in 1879 and they walked out together for several years after his military service prior to their becoming engaged in 1886 and, subsequently, wedded on Saturday, 18 June 1888, on an auspicious, symbolic full moon that was to be of short duration. Watson asked me to be his Best Man and, of course, I agreed. The wedding supper was at Simpson’s and the next day Watson and his bride left for a week in Wales. Upon their return, he set up his practice in Paddington in a modest house with the examining rooms on the ground floor and their lodgings on the first and second floors. Ms Watson assisted with the patients in his surgery and Watson was happy and content.

Watson’s happiness would end eleven months later with the death of Ms Watson and their baby son during childbirth. He was never quite the same afterward and, in desolation, returned to the comforting familiarity of our rooms for the rest of his life.

Watson’s deep sorrow manifested itself, as one would expect, through his writing. When he set down the final version of
The Sign of Four
, he veiled within his narrative a romance and subsequent marriage to Mary Morstan, another of Watson’s fictions that was meant for every good reason; in this case, for his own emotional preservation. He was paying homage to the great love of his life, Tegan, now lost; creating, as it were, a wispy period of happiness as a balm for his sorrow at the loss of his family. Watson was never married to Mary Morstan, or any woman other than his beloved Tegan. For Watson, she was The Woman.

Watson possessed valour, loyalty, integrity, and tenacity in great measure. No matter the turns our adventures together took, I could rely on Watson absolutely and without fail. I sometimes regret, especially since his death, that I never gave him proper credit for his steadfastness. Watson would positively beam at the smallest compliment, and I never paid him enough of those human utterings that mean so much to so many.

As Watson was also the relict of his family, I took care of his final arrangements following his graceful death from old age and, both breaking with and upholding the traditions of an ancient and honourable people, laid him among the mosses, next to my future resting place, in the peaceful Maiden Wood grove.