Free The Marriage of Mary Russell by Laurie R. King Page A

years, until Watson became as much a brother as Holmes’ actual blood relation. (As for Mycroft Holmes himself, Holmes’ older brother did not factor into our debate: it went without saying that Mycroft’s concerns would be less the state of our souls than how my presence might affect his brother’s continued availability.) And although Holmes appeared to have spent much of the last forty years actively thwarting Watson’s expectations, in fact, he was always aware of his friend’s opinions on matters. The thought of that sadly reproving gaze would have been trying even for Holmes.
    As for me, I had neither judgemental friend nor family pressures. What I did have was a housekeeper.
    A housekeeper may not be a young woman’s usual conscience, but I had been orphaned at fourteen. From that time, my life was far too complicated for the easy intimacies of close friendship. As for extended family, my American grandparents lived on the other side of an ocean—literally as well as figuratively—while my English mother’s relations were either dead or estranged from me. I had come into the Holmes household as a fifteen-year-old girl, overtly proud and internally empty. Mrs Hudson had instantly sensed the aching void and stepped in, offering her ears, her arms, and all the forms of nourishment an orphan could need.
    If I had any family, it was she.
    —
    The actual marriage proposal had come when my head was spinning (I having been knocked unconscious, deliberately—by Holmes) and his head was dripping wet, grease-clotted, and thoroughly scorched from the fiery, mid-Thames boat wreck that claimed the life of our most recent villainous opponent. Miraculous survival, one’s own and of one’s most significant attachment, has a way of adding its own spin to the head. Or perhaps it was just, as I mentioned, the concussion. In any case, when Holmes emerged from the filthy surface of the Thames, there followed an astonishing, unexpected, and remarkably…stimulating physical encounter, right there on the docks. Namely, we kissed.
    I believe this reminder of the physical surprised Holmes as much it did me. Certainly, both of us took care, over the next days, to maintain a cool and distinctly Victorian degree of propriety, even—particularly—when we were alone. Although we had addressed the primary negotiations of the marriage contract then and there (Holmes:
I promise not to knock you unconscious again, unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Me:
I promise to obey you, if it’s something I’d planned on doing anyway.
), the next stages were somewhat less straightforward.
    Fortunately, we had other matters into which we could retreat, saving ourselves from awkward silences and intense contemplations of the view out of the window. We returned to Sussex a few days after the Margery Childe case finished, spending the first half of the trip wrestling with the compartment’s heater and the case’s more difficult conundra, then the next twenty miles reaching the delicate decision that perhaps we would not tell anyone quite yet about our change of status. I then made some passing and humorous remark about the ceremony itself. A moment of silence descended, before his cautious question:
    “You wish an actual…wedding?”
    He’d have sounded less dubious had I suggested matching tattoos. My first impulse was to laugh it off, but I controlled myself long enough to think it over. “I don’t know that
I
particularly want one, but marriage is said to be a community event. And there are people to take into account.”
    “You want my brother to walk you down the aisle?”
    “Of course not. Nor do I have any great wish to see Watson standing beside you with a
boutonnière
.”
    “You prefer a Jewish ceremony, then.”
    I had not even considered the possibility until that moment, and allowed myself a moment to dwell on Holmes,
kippah
on head, standing beside me beneath the
chuppah,
signing the
ketubah,
and stomping on the glass, then me