Free My Dear Watson by L.A. Fields

them,” I say with a nod.
    Looking at the wall clock Watson says, “We’ll be having dinner soon.” He is trying to veer the conversation, but he tries for nothing.
    “You know, with seven brothers I’m not surprised that no one ever trained you in the culinary arts.”
    “Oh, yes, and I feel very deprived.”
    The detective’s hawk-like features, still sharp even in his old age, shift all together slightly, as though he were hiding some discomfort; he doesn’t like me either, it’s clear. I’m glad of that.
    Dinner is announced. I make my way into the dining room first, leaving the men to murmur and chuckle secretly behind me. Here they are, both in their sixties, acting like children whispering behind mother’s skirts. I do realize why Watson continues to associate with Holmes—it makes him feel young again, brings back the heady feeling of their golden moments together. I myself am only forty-six, but I already value anything and anyone which can take me back to my youth, or remind me of the world we lost.
     

1887: The Noble Bachelor
     
    A truce was established soon enough. When the reality of Watson’s marriage became clear to Holmes as an inevitability, he decided to make the most of the time they had left together. What didn’t help matters was that one of the first cases they worked after this involved a wedding and a missing bride, but Holmes can often be a creature of great control, when he wants to be. He managed to hold his tongue.
    It’s quite a different side of Holmes, an affected Holmes, that appears in this story. He gets rather Wildean in his comments, letting out clever barbs and, despite Watson’s observations early in their relationship that Holmes knew nothing of literature, alluding quite easily to a notion from Thoreau. I would submit that he was feeling somewhat sentimental, and we all turn to literature for that.
    It started right away. Watson, who was trapped at home because of the pain in his injured leg, sat drowning himself in newspapers in an attempt to imagine anyone’s life but his own. As if they drew from the same well of energy, as Watson became depleted, Holmes bubbled over. Holmes returned from a morning outing to find Watson yearning for his attention, remarking on a fashionable bit of correspondence that had arrived for the detective.
    “This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie,” Holmes quipped, but it ended up being the case of a missing bride, one which he quite enjoyed, possibly because it tickled him to imagine a wife just disappearing and making everyone’s lives much simpler.
    When the Lord St. Simon arrived at Baker Street to tell his story and began to presume that he was of a much higher class than Holmes usually deals with, he was put into his place. Holmes had the delightful pleasure of informing his client that he was actually descending, from the King of Scandinavia to a mere moneyless domestic title, and this was only the first dressing-down Holmes got to deliver that day. Lestrade too came in too proud, sure that the missing bride had drowned because her gown had been found in the water: “By the same brilliant reasoning, every man’s body is to be found in the neighbourhood of his wardrobe,” Holmes said to him. He was in a rare and playful mood that day.
    My goodness, he was even kind in his opinion about Americans, assuring the found bride and her American husband who was once presumed dead, that someday the children of Britain and America would be “citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.” Hardly; and Holmes had a rather caricatured view of America that I doubt he altered even after spending a considerable amount of time there during the war. But nothing seemed to upset him once he had decided to be pleasant, for he did possess an iron will when he chose to employ it.
    This was a neat