第 37 页

“Darling, I believe you, I promise. You are my wife, I trust you whole heartedly and I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” he said, kissing my wet forehead. He turned to Mrs Hudson and asked about contractions and timings, then held my wrist to take my pulse.

He examined me then started to give instructions, telling me when to push and how to breathe. I did as I was told, submitting completely to his expertise. He threw off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. Mrs Hudson held my hand.

I pushed, pushed through the terrible pain. Then with the help of a few well-placed incisions and forceps, my husband was able to successfully deliver our child. A bloody, sticky, wet little creature was finally placed in my arms. It was the ugliest and most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

“We have a son,” John announced joyously.

“Is he...? Is everything...?”

“He’s perfect, absolutely perfect.”

Mrs Hudson wrapped my son in a blanket and returned him to me. I held the tiny form in my arms and suddenly it was as if my whole life made sense. All that had happened to me, all I had done had brought me to this moment, everything was for a reason and that reason was now safely in my arms. I would have lived my life again ten times, endured everything that had happened to me, just to have that moment.

John sat on the bed beside me as I cradled our child.

“I love you,” he whispered, kissing my cheek softly and I knew he meant it with every fibre of his being.

And so my son was born at two fifteen in the morning at 221B Baker Street and weighed seven pounds exactly. He had ten little toes, ten fingers, was perfect and healthy in every way. We named him Nathaniel; Nathaniel John Jude Watson.

Holmes had waited quietly out of sight until he heard my son bawl lustily then hurriedly packed a bag, scribbled us a brief note and left for his newly-acquired cottage on the Sussex Downs. The note simply offered us his sincere and heartfelt congratulations, the use of his rooms for as long as we needed, and explained that he would be away for a while but would return to London to call upon us in the hope of finding friendship and meeting our child.

I was unable to move for a few days, tired and sore but elated and besotted with my baby son. Visitors came and went. Ronnie and Tilly arrived together and brought Sandy with them, so very fat that he had to be carried up the stairs.

Finding out that the man he had held at gunpoint was actually the famous Sherlock Holmes after all, had been the shock of my brother-in-law’s life. Though he didn’t entirely accept or believe John’s explanation of the events of that evening, he knew better than to interfere. John had told him that I had known Holmes through his work and believed as everyone else did that he was dead, therefore the shock of seeing him alive again would have been dangerous to me in my condition, that’s why he wanted Holmes to be kept away until I was well again.

This posed more questions than answers for Ronnie but he kept them to himself.

I don’t know which Ronnie found the most exciting; his new little nephew or being in the actual room he had read about in John’s detailed accounts of Sherlock Holmes and their adventures together. He kept picking up things like the Persian slipper containing Holmes’ tobacco, his Stradivarius, while letting out little cries of excitement. Tilly remonstrated with him for poking around other people’s belongings. He looked at her with such a delightful expression that I decided it was wrong of me to stand in the way of their growing relationship.

I was very moved by Tilly’s concern and affection for me as I had never been particularly liked by my own sex. The warmth with which she held me upon seeing me for the first time since the birth brought tears to my eyes.

Edith brought flowers from our garden, Doctor Roy’s wife brought a fish pie and half of Kensington seemed to make its way up the stairs of 221B at some point over the few days immediately after Nathaniel’s birth. I was so touched by my celebrity.

Returning home with my child was wonderful. To be back in my house with my family around me filled me with so much contentment that I knew I would never live anywhere else. I had found my home, my family and my life.

The only shadow over all this happiness was when John had to explain that Mycroft had known all along that his brother was alive. I felt so completely let down by someone who I had trusted as if he was my own father.

Mycroft had now returned to London and wanted to see us, to see Nathaniel, but I refused to have anything to do with him and nothing John could say would persuade me otherwise. I didn’t care when John said he had probably just acted out of loyalty to his brother. It took me a long time to fully understand that actually he had acted out of loyalty to me.

The grief and loneliness he spoke of on that night he visited John and I for the first time was totally genuine. He really did feel alone in the world and truly believed that it was too late to ever understand the brother who he had spent so little time with since childhood.

Learning of my existence and relationship with Holmes tore at his conscience. After much thought, he came to the conclusion that to tell the truth might put me in danger knowing that I would chase off around the world looking for someone who had clearly abandoned me and was therefore not worthy of such devotion. He was ashamed that his brother had left me penniless and decided to offer money and whatever support he could to try to make up for Holmes’ actions and his own retention of the truth.

He decided that I was better off without Sherlock Holmes and continued to keep his brother’s secret for my sake, to protect me. However, when he knew of John’s intended proposal of marriage he felt that it would not be right for me to enter into a union with another man if my heart still yearned for my first love. Especially as there was a chance that he might one day return.

If I had not convinced him on that afternoon as we sat together in the park that John was the man I wanted beyond all others, then he would have finally revealed the truth even though he knew that John would make a much better husband.

I was never mentioned in any of his infrequent correspondence with Holmes and as his brother had never inquired after me or indeed mentioned me in his letters, Mycroft concluded that he did not deserve to have the opportunity to break a happy union.

All this I learned not from Mycroft in person, but from the letters he wrote to me. I didn’t read any of them at first but could not quite bring myself to destroy them.

Nathaniel was three and a half months old when Mycroft suffered his first stroke. One of his staff informed me what had happened and implored me to visit and told me how much his master had suffered from the forced separation, how he asked for me constantly. That afternoon I sat alone in my study and opened his letters for the first time, reading and re-reading each one.

I suppose you could say that learning to forgive was the final step on my journey into maturity. Learning to understand someone else’s reasons in spite of my own anger and hurt was something I would not have been capable of five years previously. Life itself had humbled me. I had learned grace and humanity through its many twists and turns.

I went to see Mycroft, ordered his staff to pack his things and brought him home to Wisteria Gables where he has remained in the loving care of his new family.

It is a beautiful midsummer’s afternoon, August 1913, with the heat and breeze in perfect equilibrium. The sky is as blue as an ocean and butterflies are dancing over the flowerbeds while the birds chirp merrily in the lush green trees of our garden. I have been writing my memoirs for six years now. I have filled four journals with my intimate memories of a life lived outside of the normal.

I have written bits here and there, in-between the very business of living my life, raising my son, family duties, work commitments and friendships. It seems fitting to be writing the final words now, while sitting in my lovely garden with the smell of the wisteria floating through the warm air on an idyllic summer’s day surrounded by those who I love.

My son is now nineteen years old and playing cricket on the lawn, joyously sending the ball crashing into the trees while his uncle and godfather try to catch it. He has my confidence and determination but this is mixed with, and tempered by, his father’s kindness and sensitivity, blending together to make a perfect young man of whom I am most proud.

Ronnie bowls again, a little harder this time and the ball knocks down a stump. It hits Holmes in the knee as he is crouched down behind it playing wicket-keeper.

“Do be careful,” Ronnie’s wife Tilly chides, affectionately rolling her eyes at her ever-playful, childlike husband.

She is sitting on a blanket under a parasol with their ten-year-old daughter, sipping lemonade. They also have five year old twins, a boy and a girl, who are playing noisily on the blanket beside their mother. Tilly sometimes feels as if she is responsible for four children but is secretly rather pleased that fatherhood hasn’t dampened her husband’s exuberant nature.

They own the pub together now. It was our gift to them on their wedding day. I taught Tilly accounting, ordering and the generally mundane but vital management side of things. This has left Ronald free to do what he loves best, which is to be the friendly, entertaining character behind the bar always ready to dispense advice or a witticism when required.

Mycroft is sitting in his chair under the shade of our huge old oak tree contentedly watching everyone at play. He is paralysed down one side of his body and his speech is badly affected by the second stroke which he suffered a few years ago, but he is at peace with himself. We ensure that he is as comfortable as possible.

John looks up casually from the novel he is reading to observe the jollity and smiles to himself contentedly. We are sitting together on a bench; he has a book in one hand while the other rests upon my knee.

We still own our business, but it takes up less of our time since employing another senior practitioner, Doctor Venier, a year after my son was born. John is able to focus on his research, hospital work, and even share the occasional adventure with Holmes. Sometimes I lose him for an afternoon and go round to 221B to find him sitting in his old fireside chair helping Holmes dissect the details of an unusual and perplexing case. However, Nate and I remain his priority and always will.

Jude is here. He is in the warm summer breeze and the scent from the flowers, in my heart and all my memories. We go regularly to Paris and lay flowers on the spot where he died. I know that he is with me, always has been and always will.

John has put his book down now and is holding my hand, resting his head on my shoulder trying to sneak a look at what I am writing. Maybe it’s time I stopped. This interesting, cathartic process has indeed been good for me and laid many things to rest in my own mind, but the present is blissful and the future beckons. I think now is the time to put my journals in their box. Tie it up with ribbon and leave them there for good.

What a journey it has been, both my life itself and the process of living it all over again through this little project. I don’t know if anyone will ever come to read these words, or what they would make of me if they did, but I don’t care. I am happy; I have everything I could possibly want and the love of those who matter to me. What anyone else thinks is irrelevant. What I think, is that I’m the luckiest person in the world.

Epilogue

My mother was ninety-one years old when she died and more than a hundred people attended her funeral. She was buried next to my father in a little church not far from Wisteria Gables, the house which had been her home for seventy years. She died peacefully in her sleep after a brief illness.

I used to tell my mother that she was a feminist but she always protested saying that such women were all talk while she just got on with the job.

She continued to be involved in the family business until a bout of pneumonia caused her to retire finally when she was eighty-two, the same year she visited Paris for the last time. By then our medical and pharmaceutical company which she built up over the years, especially after the death of my father, had become and remains one of the largest of its type in the country.

Mother was always keen to support young women from disadvantaged backgrounds in whom she recognised potential, paying for their education and promoting them within our organisation. She was also passionate about the need for more female doctors and surgeons. She sponsored the medical careers of many bright young women, of which my wife was one, helping them achieve positions within private medicine and the National Health Service. My wife became a cardio-thoracic surgeon at St Bart’s, the very place where my father first met my godfather when he came to settle in London after his military service abroad all those years ago.

My parents were happily married for thirty-two years until my father died. I remained their only child. My mother lived the next thirty-eight years devoted to her growing family including four grandchildren and six great grandchildren, my uncle’s large brood of five children and nine grandchildren, also finding the time to expand the business to meet the seismic changes in the medical profession. She never re-married.

I found her box of memoirs tied up with ribbon and hidden in the attic as I was clearing the house to put it on the market. My wife and I decided that it was too painful to hold onto it now that both my parents had gone. We have always lived in grandfather Mycroft’s large Pall Mall apartment which he left to my parents after his death from a third stroke when I was twenty-two. They gave it to us as a wedding present and we have been there ever since. We decided to sell the Gables and give the money to our own children.

Reading her words astounded me. I did not know about my mother’s early life until I read about it in her memoirs, nor did I know of her involvement with my godfather. I knew that she was born in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields Union Workhouse and I knew that she had done things in her past which she regretted deeply, but her words were a revelation. It took me many years to fully understand what she had written, let alone decide to share her story with the world.

She was a remarkable woman who lived her life through an equally remarkable time in history. Her story is intertwined with that of our very nation. It was simply too epic, too important, for me not to share.

I sincerely hope that having read my mother’s story told in her own words, you can appreciate why I will always remember her as the most incredible person I have ever, and will ever, know.

Dr Nate J. J. Watson