I lit my pipe, buying time to think before I spoke. This was not the listless, friendless invalid I had first known, but an accomplished man who had built a life which I had not always deigned to share. Charity was out of the question. So too was a position of servitude, for all that we had joked about his being my amanuensis not so long ago. That left me only one inducement, as difficult as it would be to swallow my own pride.

"Recent events," I began, meeting his eyes, "have proven to me that I require a partner..."

"Work!" I cried, stung by the return of my own words. "The kind of work that drives you into an early grave? You said yourself that every pestilential child was a hazard."

"That's the same risk every doctor takes," he protested.

"Every doctor hasn't had pneumonia twice since the year began!" I said. "Anstruther all but ordered you to rest for a month at least."

"I need hardly sell out my livelihood to take a holiday," he asserted angrily. "And besides, I hate sitting idle and useless, you know that, Holmes. At least my patients need me."

I need you.

"Move back to Baker Street?" I exclaimed.

"You have to admit that Mrs. Hudson's table far outshines your present housekeeper's," Holmes said, making himself busy with tobacco and pipe the way he often did when he had suggested something outrageous.

"How would my patients find me?" I protested. "It isn't as if they're never struck ill in the middle of the night."

"So sell the practice to someone else," he continued, far too casually.

I didn't have the energy yet to be indignant. "Holmes," I said, in my most reasonable voice. "Whatever happened to 'work is the best antidote for sorrow'?"

"You wish me to buy a medical practice in Kensington?" Henry Verner scowled at me. "Perhaps your side of the family is willing to take foolish chances, but we have more sense in mine. It will be three years at least, more likely five, before I can afford anything in that district."

"I'm not asking you to pay for it," I said. "I can do that. Just to answer the advertisement and take over the care of the patients."

He hesitated, then asked, "How soon would I begin?"

"I don't know yet. I've still got to persuade him to sell."

Once Watson's fever had finally broken and he began to rally, I went down to Scotland Yard to clear up the remaining details of the Friesland matter with Lestrade. From there I travelled to Barts, in search of some youngster among the newly-minted physicians who might be willing to spend the weeks of Watson's convalescence in Kensington. Much to my surprise I saw the family nose stuck into a copy of the Lancet, back in one of the corners of the library. That necessitated a visit to the Diogenes, to pry three years worth of news out of my brother.

"I didn't tell you I'd been deathly ill because I wasn't deathly ill anymore," Watson explained hoarsely, and then had to stop to pull more air into his lungs.

"I had no idea I was risking your health," I said stiffly.

"Just my life, hey?" Watson said, grinning despite the effort that it cost. "I take more chances being sneezed upon by sick children any day of the week. In any case, I'd far rather have been there to pull you off that ship before it exploded than to be sitting in Kensington reading in the papers about your demise."

I knew I had them worried, though it was Mrs. Hudson who was left to do all the fussing my condition demanded. Holmes showed his concern in other ways, as he had always done. I admit I relished the chance to listen to him play his violin, even when he thought I was asleep and reverted to the wandering scales and scrapings that had once irritated me so. In my dreams Mary waltzed with me as he bowed, but at the end of the dance she stepped away and told me that my presence was still needed in Baker Street.

Complete bedrest and a plethora of medicines: paraldehyde to help him sleep and cannabis to quell the cough so that he wouldn't wake too soon; camphorated oil on his chest and eucalyptus scenting the air. Belladonna too, which eased him, but left his mind wandering back to the wretched day when I had used it against him in a pretense I now regretted. The huge dark pupils twinkled as he studied me. "All I need is a crust of beeswax and some rouge and vaseline, right? And I'll mutter about oysters, too."

I couldn't chide him. Turnabout is fair play.

When I heard the shout I thought it best to go up and inquire whether or not Dr. Anstruther would require hot water. A feminine presence generally moderates the language used, if not the vehemence expressed, and I knew our doctor's nerves were already scraped raw. But it was Dr. Anstruther whose patience had flown. "I didn't let you follow Mary to the grave in February and I'm damned if you'll go because you nearly drowned," he told his patient, while Mr. Holmes watched white-faced from his place by the mantelpiece. "Don't you know I promised her that you'd live?"

"No, I can't," I told him angrily. "If he wants to go skiving off with you to play detective he can find someone else to cover for him. I've been up all night for three days in a row and I'm tired."

"Dr. Anstruther," Holmes began, just as angrily, and then perhaps he saw what I hadn't told him, that those three nights vigil had been in vain, for he cooled. "Perhaps you can recommend an alternative. And someone nearer Baker Street, who can tell me whether Watson has pneumonia."

"Not again," I groaned, and reached for my coat.

My own aches foretold interrupted sleep, it was true, but listening to Watson's small coughs deepen into the kind of painful barking which was more common to winter than the milder weather guaranteed that I would lie completely restless on my pillow. At last I heard him stumbling down the stairs and abandoned any consideration for his pride. I found him in the sitting room, fumbling with kindling and coal. "I just need to get warm," he told me, though his face was flushed, and his eyes feverbright.

"Of course you do," I said, and knelt to build the fire.

follows this series

"Do you really need to go back to Kensington tonight?" Holmes asked diffidently, as Mrs. Hudson came to collect our plates. "I'm sure Mrs. Hudson could have your old room ready in a trice."

"Indeed I could, sir," she agreed promptly. "And I've a nice bit of bacon set aside for breakfast. Plenty enough for two. We'd have you on your way well before your surgery hours begin."

My shoulder hurt, my eyes burned with weariness, and the weight of our close call lay heavy on my chest. "Thank you both," I said. "I'd be more than happy to stay."

They came home that morning looking like two schoolboys who had fallen out of a tree. Mr. Holmes could hardly see out of one eye for the swelling, and the doctor had his arm in a sling, and their suits would take hard work to put back in order, if it were possible at all to remove the stains. But I found myself smiling all the same, as I shooed them up the stairs, for they'd come back alive, the both of them, and were bickering cheerfully over whether or not an amanuensis should be better paid than a biographer.

"My dear fellow," I began, and faltered, for it would take a dolt not to see that my words had caused him more pain than his injured shoulder. I would prefer a thousand years of obscurity for my methods if fame meant endangering him unnecessarily, but I could not expect him to take the same view. "You have done so, and admirably. But as I am not quite dead I would prefer that we labour in relative obscurity for a time."

"You like an audience, Holmes," he grumbled.

"Yes. But as long as you are with me, I have one."

"Lestrade takes the honors this time," Holmes grumbled.

"Well, he did save our lives," I replied. "And you won't let me write the matter up for publication in any case," I added, for that restriction rubbed against me nearly as uncomfortably as the crusted salt in my hastily dried clothing.

"And you see why!" cried Holmes. "Thanks to your wretched scribblings Johannes set out to destroy the very evidence he knew I would be looking for!"

"I had no intention of betraying your methods," I said stiffly. "I thought only to make certain that they would live beyond your death."

I assured Holmes that my shoulder was not dislocated, merely badly wrenched, but he laid into Lestrade for not taking me straight back to a physician regardless. The little Inspector only smiled the weary smile of a man who has been up working all the night. "We couldn't leave those Dutchmen in the water, anymore than we could leave you two to drown," he pointed out mildly. "And last night you were both of you too blue for the bruises to show. But I do wonder one thing."

"And what is that?"

"How did you get that shiner, Mr. Holmes?"

Hopkins bobbed back up before I'd even managed to get myself back to the gunwale, but the other two were too waterlogged to do the same, and it was a long haul on the line before we got them safe aboard. We prised them loose of each other, got the water out of them and the wet clothes off of them, and then bundled them (and Hopkins too!) into blankets before stowing them like early Christmas parcels in a corner of the warm boiler room to sleep themselves out.

I knew they'd be all right when I heard the snoring.

I tumbled at the end of my tether, deaf in the air from the echoes of the blast and deaf under the water from the silence of the sea, distantly aware that I had failed to keep Holmes from harm.

In a tale our seeking hands would have met through some sweet serendipity, but in truth when something brushed against my leg I thought not of Holmes, but of sharks, and used my knee to the best of my ability. I struck out with my good hand as well, but what I caught, I clung to.

Sharks don't have hair.

As soon as we'd managed to secure Hopkins' rope around Watson's chest I waved to Lestrade to start backing the boat away. He misinterpreted the motion, however, and began to draw in the line instead. As a result, we were all still entirely too close when the illicit cargo of the dying ship proved its volatility. The concussion was disorienting; the percussive wave that followed far too powerful to resist. I lost my grip on Watson as it swept me under and for a quiet eternity I twisted in the dark, trying to find my way back into the air.

Stanley Hopkins began stripping off his coat and shoes, knowing it would be safer to take a rope to the men in the water and pull them aboard than for the helmsman try to manoeuvre the patrol boat too close and risk overrunning the swimmers in the dark. There was a strange, irregular thumping noise coming from the crippled Friesland, and the echoes lent an urgency to his movements.

"What did Holmes think they were smuggling?" he asked Lestrade tensely.

"Coal tar derivatives," Lestrade answered. "Casks of chemicals and dyes."

"Things that burn, in other words," Hopkins said.

"Or explode."

I saw the questioning tilt of his head but I hadn't breath to explain. It was one thing to paddle idly in the calm waters of the pool at the Turkish bath, another thing entirely to try to survive in a rough cold sea. I couldn't swim overhand at the best of times, and as my bad shoulder had hit the water wrong, my left arm wasn't much better than a useless slab of meat. My revolver weighed down one pocket, the evidence against Captain Johannes the other. But none of that mattered. Holmes was alive, and he could swim.

The roar of the flames sounded like a waterfall. Distantly, I could hear the screams of the Friesland's crew as they fought to escape into lifeboats, or jumped blindly, as we had, into the abyss. But I was numb to anything but the need to get Watson away before the fires reached the cargo compartments. He was struggling, frightened. The stern of the ship passed us, the great propeller still turning fitfully, sending great gouts of water to slap against our faces.

Watson went under. I grabbed for his collar; pulled him back to the surface.

"Can't you swim?"

"No!"

"No!" Lestrade groaned when the explosion shook the fleeing steamship before the policeboat could catch up to it. "We only just got him back alive!"

Hopkins, whose eyes were younger, pointed. "There, sir! On the foredeck."

A tall thin figure was being dragged to the rail of the crippled ship by a second man with a limp both policemen recognized. They were silhouetted against the flames momentarily before diving together into the cold water of the harbor.

Lestrade saw two dark heads bob to the surface and breathed again. "And that, gentlemen, is why you never leave your partner alone."






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