Free My Dear Watson by L.A. Fields Page B

other too well. Holmes and this inspector where still sounding each other’s boundaries.
    I don’t know that Holmes and MacDonald ever went any further than their loaded repartee; I feel there is a chance MacDonald was a lover of women and only amusing Holmes (and himself) by this banter. His admiration of Holmes was so intense that it might have swayed his nature temporarily, but then again, maybe not. We can only speculate irresponsibly on what all this eventually led to:
    Holmes noted that MacDonald had arrived early and said, “I fear this means that there is some mischief afoot.”
    “If you said ‘hope’ instead of ‘fear,’ it would be nearer the truth, I’m thinking, Mr. Holmes.” And he was right of course, for a moment later when MacDonald spotted the now decoded message and exclaimed that its subject had been murdered, everyone first had to stop and consider the curiosity of Holmes’s cold scientific nature. Watson wrote: “Without having a tinge of cruelty in his singular composition,” and please note that I did roll my eyes when I read that, “he was undoubtedly callous from long over-stimulation.” Undoubtedly.
    It was the scarlet thread again, “one of those dramatic moments” for which Holmes existed and could hardly stand to live without. His obsession with Professor Moriarty, though a matter of some giggling for the police and MacDonald who believed Sherlock Holmes had “a wee bit of a bee in your bonnet over this professor,” was as serious a matter as Holmes ever engaged in. This was no mere fixation; without ever laying eyes on the man, right away Holmes recognized in Moriarty the true test of himself. They were so much alike in so many mirrored ways, one of those ways being their profound potential. MacDonald himself remarked that Moriarty would have made a “grand meenister” with his solemn voice and serious appearance. He probably would have made a fearsome consulting detective too, much like Holmes, as Watson pointed out during The Sign of Four , would have made a fine criminal.
    Holmes had in fact already overstepped the law in his study of Moriarty, for though he had never seen the man, he had gone into the professor’s rooms: twice under honest conditions, and once under false. He did not, however, go into great detail of this mission in front of MacDonald. A professional courtesy, I’m sure, so that MacDonald would not be obligated to arrest him.
    Instead they focused on the murder at hand, Holmes warming instantly to the challenge after what Watson describes as “a long series of sterile weeks” which lay behind them. Those were the arctic days after Watson announced his engagement and Holmes returned to cocaine in retaliation, but those days were over. For the moment.
    Now Holmes was feeding from the energy of a tricky case, a dead man whose wife and friend seem to celebrate when they think they’re alone. Suspicious footprints, an inaccurate timeline, a missing dumb-bell. Holmes was naturally stimulated by all the brilliant facets of the mystery. He was a chemist over forming crystals, a botanist before a bloom.
    Keep in mind that this case is in the earliest months of 1888, just before Watson’s own wedding, and you’ll understand all the focus paid to Mrs. Douglas, the dead man’s wife. In questioning her, she seemed sympathetic, at least to Watson. She said she knew her husband was uneasy, that he existed in a “valley of fear” which he never explained to her. When asked how she knew about it then, Mrs. Douglas answered:
    “Can a husband ever carry about a secret all his life and a woman who loves him have no suspicion of it?” No, indeed, I don’t believe so, but the idea rattled Watson at the time; he had secrets he wanted to keep.
    It was not long after marrying Watson that I guessed at his “secret” history with Holmes, and it was not long after that when I asked him about it. I said, “Darling, were you quite in love with Sherlock Holmes?” He