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eponymous_roseThis takes a bit of explaining - over on Holmesian.net, being the young and terribly impressionable little newbie-goose I was, I sort of stumbled my way into accepting a challenge given by a certain
vampire_cookies, who was obviously on some sort of horrendous mission to corrupt the spendiferously innocent youth of the world. Namely, me.Said challenge? A Mrs. Hudson crack!fic. Only literally.
Yes, our favourite detective's landlady is evidently concealing a sekrit life of drug-dealing. This is trufax: the brilliant Cookiefied illustration partway down this page proves it.
So I wrote a story about Mrs. Hudson and all the drugs in her life. But it came out serious (with anvilicious T.S. Eliot references and everything). Oops.
Without further ado, I give you:
Title: A Wilderness of Mirrors (or: Five Things That Might Have Happened to Martha Hudson)
Author:
eponymous_rose (Unimpeachable Goose on Holmesian.net)Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Contains a fair bit of drug use and violence, but somehow manages to have no profanity whatsoever. Good ol' Victorians!
Characters: Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock Holmes, John Watson
Spoilers: Well, if the word "Reichenbach" doesn't send a chill down your spine, you may want to steer clear.
Word Count: 2,113 (a prime number! /geek)
With Much Loff, Dedicated to: Cookies! This may be nothing like what you wanted, but it was hella fun to write.
Long before she was Mrs. Hudson to the detective and the doctor, she’d been Martha to her Henry. He was tall, and passably handsome, and the gossips always crooned about how she was a fortunate woman to marry a man with such good prospects.
He worked hours that were unusual for a banker’s clerk.
She knew the truth, by the smell that clung to his clothes, by the way his eyes gleamed unnaturally and his voice faltered when he spoke of his work at the bank, by the singular mannerisms he’d acquire when a particular den was no longer to his liking and he’d scrounge for another. She never questioned the crumpled and wadded pound notes he piled on the table at odd intervals, never argued when he left for the office on a bank holiday, and eventually she stopped waiting up for him and he stopped making the pretence of coming home at a reasonable hour.
She was nearly certain that she no longer loved him. Perhaps she hadn’t in the first place, and perhaps it had merely faded over time, and perhaps she had stopped the night when he had stood in the doorway and smiled at her and the reek of the den had tainted their embrace for the first time.
They coexisted in an odd sort of harmony while the neighbours murmured about the scandal that was surely happening, and wasn’t it a shame for dear Martha, and they’d both seemed so happy, and sometimes you never could tell. But she was independent, and had the money she needed to survive, and Henry still loved her from time to time, and the neighbours had no right poking their noses where they didn’t belong.
One day, she bought herself a small brooch, stood on the bank of the
She prepared Henry’s dinners and pretended to converse while he pretended to eat. She knew that his appetites lay elsewhere, and some part of her railed at the thought of another woman on top of it all, but the rest of her commented on the weather and the gossip she invented to keep his mind at ease. Sometimes his eyes were sad and he held her without a word, and she knew that he was contemplating telling her what she’d known for so long. Very occasionally, he came home angry and powerless and sobbed in her arms while she ran her fingers through his hair.
It was on the days when he came home silent and stoic that she shuttered herself in the kitchen and waited for the sounds of his disturbed slumber to begin her morning ablutions.
When the constable came to her door with his murmured apologies and deepest regrets, she prepared him a warm cup of tea and listened to her husband’s obituary.
Sometimes, when she lies alone at night, she remembers to mourn him.
II. Sudden in a Shaft of Sunlight
He stands before her, appallingly young and sure, with his long fingers tapping a reflexive tattoo on the brim of the hat in his hands. “Good evening,” he says, “I trust that I have not terribly inconvenienced you by calling at such a late hour.”
“Not at all,” she replies half-heartedly. He seems to expect her to open the door fully, and she feels her face flush. “You must excuse my rudeness, sir, only they’ve been speaking about burglars-“
“And, after the recent and suspicious death of your husband, you are quite nervous about the chance of inadvertently providing a means of entry for these desperate criminals after nightfall. Most commendable.” She bristles at something in his tone and straightens sharply. He winces, as though berating himself for the slip, and pulls from his pocket a calling-card, which he places in her hand with a mechanical movement. “My apologies. I shall call in the morning.”
She is left standing in the doorway with the small slip of paper in her hands, watching the man stride off into the guttering lamplight. It takes her a moment to recollect herself enough to close the door behind her, and she turns the card over in her hands several times. It is printed on expensive paper, but worn at the corners. His name figures in the centre, but the rest of the card is blank.
It is, she reflects, an excellent representative of the young man himself. Even in the street’s variable light, the seamstress in her had noticed the flaws in his otherwise well-coiffed and arresting persona – the loose threads on his right sleeve, the visible stitches in his left glove, and the slightly worn knees of his trousers. A young man with little in the way of financial means, then, but making no great pains to hide the fact beyond the semblance of respectability.
She looks again at the “Mr. Sherlock Holmes” standing boldly in print in the centre of the ridiculously empty card, and smiles faintly. Here, then, is a man who expects his name to be known; she has little doubt that when he calls the following day, he will introduce himself and wait for the spark of recognition in her eyes.
When he calls the following day, all furtive glances and preternaturally bright eyes, she suspects that she recognizes something in him, after all. And when he sends back her breakfast untouched a week later and snaps at the young doctor and retreats into himself, she knows.
For one whose career rests so heavily on the fine art of dissimulation, she reflects, he really has been quite careless.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------III. Trilling Wire in the Blood
It is late at night, and I have just laid down my needlework and resigned myself to an evening of anxious tossing and turning.
Mr. Holmes doesn’t worry me terribly when he disappears in his singular fashion – if I lost sleep every time he was late in coming home, I should long since have become a ghost of my former self. Certainly, I fret when his absence extends for days on end, but Dr. Watson’s nervous glances and apologetic smiles remind me that I am no longer alone in my anxieties.
On this particular evening, however, the doctor and the detective had marched out into the bitterly cold evening with an air of purpose, pale and resolute. I know, with all of the intuition for which I have been credited over the years, that they had been striding into danger.
Deciding to postpone the idea of sleep for as long as possible, I move to the kitchen with the intention of setting a pot of water boiling for tea, but pause before the front door. Though I cannot swear to a distinct sound, there is something that draws my attention, and I approach the door slowly, warily. There are burglars about, my mind cautions swiftly, and Mr. Holmes has surely made his share of unscrupulous enemies-
A key scratches against the lock once, twice, then connects. The door swings open, and I spring back as though galvanized, my nerves all on edge.
The first thing I notice is the wildness in Mr. Holmes’s eyes, and for a dizzying moment I see Henry before me, desperate and pleading and-
“Mrs. Hudson, please try to focus!” snaps Mr. Holmes, and I stumble back a step. He is staggering, gripping tightly to an arm thrown round his shoulders, attempting to support a man with ashen features whose feet are dragging-
“For the love of God, move!” Mr. Holmes snarls, and pushes past me to the sitting-room with his insensible load. I mechanically move to shut the door, but pause at the sight of blood on the handle, and for a moment I can feel the pulse in my temples and the blood is his, and Henry’s, and mine all together-
“Mrs. Hudson!”
It is the quaver in his voice rather than the imperiousness of his tone that permits me to fight off the shock of the thing. I close the door and turn in one swift movement, noting absently the smears of blood on the carpet, and meet his eyes.
I barely register the extremity of his pallor, the dishevelled mess of his hair, the blood on his shirtsleeves, for my gaze is immediately seized by the impressive bruising on his forehead, punctuated by a gash above his eyebrow. I step forward with a half-formed notion of stopping the bleeding, but the motion brings into view the figure he has laid on the settee.
Doctor Watson’s eyes are tightly closed, his white face covered in a sheen of perspiration, and another timid step forward reveals the trembling that shows him to be conscious despite his terrible wound. The leg of his trousers is already darkened with blood.
“They knew we were there,” Mr. Holmes murmurs, crossing the room in long strides and rummaging through the Doctor’s bag. “I was careless.”
“Surely-“ I begin, and then realize that I do not know how to finish the reassurance.
Mr. Holmes returns with a phial and syringe of morphine, and my limbs finally gain a measure of their previous fluidity as I stumble to the kitchen to fetch warm water. I return to see the detective position the syringe above his friend’s arm with his characteristic grace and ease of motion. A curious, twisted smile flits across his lips.
“Medice, cura te ipsum,” he whispers, and thrusts the needle home.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------IV. While the World Moves in Appetency
I sat, half-conscious and staring, at my window to the world.
Passers-by had long since stopped their instinctive, cheerful greetings as they strolled down
I imagined the gentlemen now pacing the streets to be ghosts, phantasms of an age where I’d worry about the dust on the doorstep. “Here, then,” they’d whisper, shades of black and grey made translucent by their forced mourning, “is where he lived.”
I touched the window pane, fancied that I could feel the cold, that I could sense the whirling eddies of mist gambolling through the quiet street. For some time, I occupied myself in a futile attempt to discern patterns in their movement, fancied I saw a face in the darkness, a mouth gaping endlessly in a silent scream.
The wind, as though inspired by my fevered imaginings, howled in the chimney.
I reached for the bottle of laudanum, marvelling at how easily I could lift the tincture that nevertheless squeezed through my veins like sludge. It numbed my fingertips.
I thought of Henry, and the bottle slipped from nerveless fingers to shatter on the welcoming ground below. The liquid formed tangled streams, running, and we’d all fallen from such great heights.
I turned my gaze to the ceiling, listened to my heartbeat echo in the empty house.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------V. The Still Point of the Turning World
There is a ridge that overlooks the Sussex Downs, with dizzying heights fading into the rolling waves of hillside, where the sunlight sweeps down effortlessly, bearing spring’s heady scent.
And there is a point, near the edge of this ridge, where the east wind carries the contented churning of bees from somewhere below.
This constant hum tells a story, for anyone who cares to hear, about a bohemian detective who unravelled the gnarled skein of darkness and evil in his fellow men. It tells of a young doctor, late of the army medical department, who found his salvation at the Criterion Bar.
It tells of a woman who has known death more intimately than either doctor or detective could fathom – a woman who has made her peace with a world that stole everything from her, because it deigned to give something back.
The cottage is a solitary place, far from the hounds and nobility of the civilised world, but sometimes there is a restlessness to it, a headstrong spark of electricity that rattles through the otherwise silent air, drawing in death and danger. There are echoes here, of grief and pain and loss, that never quite fade, that splinter on and on through the hills and valleys until they reach the sea and float from there to eternity.
Martha Hudson stands with her back to the wind, bowed with age, squinting into the sun.
She wouldn’t have it any other way.
