Work Text:
From the Journal of Dr. John H. Watson
Sussex, October 2nd, 1920
It is curious, the things that come back to one after a life mostly lived. Just yesterday, Holmes mislaid his walking stick in the herbaceous border and spent a full twenty minutes alleging that I had borrowed it for some nefarious purpose, though what a man might accomplish with a walking stick, a folding chair, and a tray of watercolours, he did not specify.
At the time, I was positioned several yards away, attempting to capture a rather fat blackbird who had taken a liking to the clover near the eastern hive. The bird, I might add, was far more cooperative than my usual subject, and did not once complain that I had rendered its features too round or its posture improbable.
Holmes eventually located the stick precisely where he himself had left it; that is, wedged at an angle behind the honeysuckle, as though placed there for some quiet druidic rite, and he returned to the garden looking rather pleased with himself. I did not press the matter. After a certain number of companionable decades, one learns that the satisfaction of rediscovery is often sweeter than the satisfaction of having been right all along.
Still, something about the angle of the stick, or perhaps the light in his hair as he stood there squinting into the sun, brought an old memory abruptly to the fore.
What returned to me in that moment was a scene from long ago: the case of the Musgrave Ritual. I was struck by the recollection of that high, dim library, oak-panelled and solemn, and Holmes, young and irritable. He was hunched over a yellowed scrap of verse with dust in his hair and ink on his cuffs. He had solved the matter, of course—brilliantly, infuriatingly so—but what lingers in my mind now is not the logic or the climax, but the way the morning light had touched his profile when he looked up at me, triumphant and exhausted.
I believe that was the first time I thought, This man will be the story of my life.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in these latter years with our cases behind us and our lives now given over to the quieter rhythms of bees, brine, and the occasional garden dispute, I have taken to painting Holmes.
Not only Holmes, of course. I began with humbler subjects. The roses along the south wall, bent under the weight of midsummer. The sea, grey and full of bite, curling against the shore like a thing reluctant to sleep. The little window that faces west, where the robins gather in the morning and quarrel, inexplicably, with their reflections. I have painted the cat (which is not ours, but visits often enough to assume joint custody). The broom by the kitchen door. The bees and their hives. The neighbours’ sheep, who regard me with either deep suspicion or none at all. The bluebottle that expired, rather dramatically, on the veranda step and was, for a time, the most vibrant shade of iridescent green I had ever attempted.
But Holmes, inevitably, appears more than any of them.
It began unconsciously. A shoulder, hunched in thought behind the lavender. The slope of his back as he bent to examine a frame. The unmistakable silhouette of him with his hat in one hand and a coil of smoke rising from the other. He crept in like he always has—gradually, and then entirely.
At first, I was abysmal. My early efforts were unkind to both of us: too many sharp angles, muddied colours, and expressions of unearned severity. I could never quite capture the line of his mouth without making him look either deeply irritated or on the verge of sneezing. The hands were the worst—broad, awkward, and shaped rather like root vegetables—nothing at all like the precise, elegant tools I had seen perform surgery on both watch mechanisms and human lives.
Holmes, to his credit, took it all in stride. He once glanced at a particularly unfortunate rendering of himself—done on a windy afternoon when he’d been inspecting bee activity near the southern hives—and remarked, with the studied detachment of a man reviewing a statistical error in someone else’s handwriting, “It is comforting to know I may have work as a circus attraction should apiculture fail.”
And yet, he said no more when I propped the painting on the mantel. He did not suggest I move it. Nor did he glance away when I caught him looking at it again the next day.
Over time, my hand grew steadier. I found something in the quiet repetition of colour and light: in the way the lavender stems catch the wind beneath the west-facing window, or how the late sun turns his sleeve a burnished gold as he leans against the fencepost. I learned, eventually, to stop painting the idea of him—the detective, the logician, the famously inscrutable mind—and to simply paint the man who stands in our garden, pulling off his gloves with his teeth and muttering about drone ratios.
I learned how best to hint at the peculiar softness that inhabits his expression when he does not know he is being watched. A tilt of the head. A furrow, not of frustration, but of thought. The corners of the mouth, when relaxed, reveal more about a man than all the portraits painted in high society parlours.
He never sits for me. Not truly. But he lingers, now, in a way he never would have in London. He’ll pause a little longer near the rosemary if he sees me with my brush. He’ll take his tea on the garden bench, just within view, pretending to be occupied with some correspondence. He knows I am watching.
He knows I am trying to get it right.
Not all of them are successes.
There was one—done early in the season, on a morning when my hands ached and the light kept shifting through the clouds—that I could not bring myself to finish. The lines were awkward, the colours uncooperative, and Holmes’s face, in particular, had taken on a pained grimace that gave the impression he was about to sneeze or deliver a sermon. I abandoned it half-done, tucked it behind the bureau, and told myself I’d reuse the paper.
A week later, I noticed it was gone.
I said nothing at first. Thought perhaps it had fallen behind a cabinet or been tidied away in one of Holmes’s fits of merciless organization. But a month on, while searching for a ledger in the study shelves, I found it—quietly slipped behind his monographs on tobacco ash, between a well-worn notebook and a tin of bee salve.
It was still unfinished. Still terrible. But it had not been thrown away.
Holmes never mentioned it. He only raised an eyebrow when I returned to my better brushes that afternoon and asked if we still had any of the thick paper left.
“We’ve paper enough,” he said simply, as though it had nothing to do with the picture now tucked behind his books.
It was not praise. But it was not indifference, either.
And perhaps that was the turning point. Not the painting above the mantel, not the paints or the teasing remarks—but that silent act of keeping something I had been ready to throw away.
From that day on, he lingered more often when I worked. Not intrusively, not quite. But I could feel him in the room, behind the page, in the slow shift of his approval from silence to something nearly tangible.
A month ago, I came down from the attic studio (such as it is—a converted box-room with poor insulation and a suspicious creak in the floorboards) to find Holmes already at work with hammer and wire.
He had moved aside the clutter on the sideboard and laid out his tools with the same meticulous precision he once reserved for his chemistry experiments. A square of felt, a small wooden mallet, the brass eyelets he prefers—“No nails. Nails splinter the grain.”—and, of course, the frame.
He had made the frame himself.
I recognised the wood: it was from the old hickory hive box that finally gave up to rot the year before. He had sanded it, sealed it, and stained it to match the tones of the mantel. He'd even carved a small, almost imperceptible line of notches along the inner edge, five of them, for reasons I didn’t ask. He'd fitted the backing with care, tacked the wire in place with a jeweller’s touch, and was standing on the second rung of the library ladder when I stepped into the room.
My latest painting—the one where he is leaning on his beekeeping frame, squinting into the sun with his sleeves rolled and his hair in elegant disarray—was newly hung above the hearth.
I said nothing. I stood there with one hand still resting on the bannister, unsure whether to speak or to let the moment settle.
He climbed down, slowly, and brushed a fine trace of sawdust from his sleeve. Then he stepped back, folded his arms, and regarded the painting in silence.
He did not take up his book again for some time. He simply sat, as he often does in the late afternoon, angled slightly toward the fire, but his gaze stayed fixed on the painting. There was a small, unreadable smile about his mouth—one of those quiet expressions he wears when some private line of reasoning has come pleasingly to its conclusion.
The day after the frame appeared above the hearth, I came down to find Holmes once again in the sitting room—this time with a folding knife, a length of pine, and an expression of grim determination.
“Is this another frame?” I asked, though it plainly was not.
“No,” he replied, not looking up. “You can’t very well go on balancing your board across your knees like a constable sketching a crime scene in haste.”
I watched as he adjusted a joint, tested the hinge, and muttered something under his breath about “flimsy commercial nonsense.” It took him the better part of the morning. The legs didn’t quite match in length, and it protested audibly when first unfolded, but it stood—sturdy, plain, and unmistakably made for me.
He didn’t call it an easel. Only nodded toward it later and said, “You’ll find the centre of balance easier now. Particularly in wind.”
I have painted every afternoon since.
Some days I only manage a wash or two, a gesture toward a shadow or the arc of a wing. Other days, the hours pass without notice, brush in hand, knees cold from the flagstones and sun creeping from one end of the window to the other. I’ve begun to keep a small notebook beside the easel to track which colours behave and which do not—a habit I suspect Holmes finds privately delightful, as it mirrors his old laboratory logs with almost embarrassing fidelity.
Yesterday, when I opened the drawer by the sideboard to fetch a clean rag, I discovered four new tubes of paint, proper ones, far finer than my own cracked student set, and a folded note nestled beside them:
“W. Winsor & H. Newton assure me these will not produce green skies unless one is determined to paint them so. —SH.”
He had selected the colours with care. A cooler blue, the kind that leans toward shadow without dulling. A cleaner yellow, sharp and bright. And the red I’ve never quite been able to mix true, no matter how often I try, always coming out muddy or too pink by half. He must have noticed.
He had also, discreetly, placed them in the ceramic dish I use for mixing, with the old tubes cleared away and the palette wiped clean. Not a word was said. Not a sigh nor a raised eyebrow.
Of course, Holmes will still complain. He will sigh and groan that I have taken up “yet another enterprise designed to immortalise his allegedly noble brow,” and claim that I have conspired with posterity to render him prematurely grey. He will call the robins “sentimental,” the blackbird “over-familiar,” and the cat “fictional.” (It is not.)
He will mutter these things while walking more slowly past the hall where I hang the finished pieces to dry. He will take his tea at a table with the best light. And he will grumble, with carefully measured disapproval, when I ask him to hold still for just another moment—though he always does.
But I know he sees them.
I know he lingers in the hallway a moment longer than necessary, tilting his head at the one I did of him reading in the garden, bees crawling over his boots and a shadow of sleep tugging at the corners of his eyes. I know he adjusts the frames when he thinks I won’t notice. I know the smallest of them—the robin on the windowsill—is now kept near his desk, propped quietly between his microscope and his annotated copy of The Natural History of Selborne .
These paintings are not really about skill. They never have been.
They are about how I see him. The way he holds the honeycomb to the light. The way he leans into the wind with that same, eternal reluctance. The way the years have softened something in him that once seemed untouchable.
And slowly, to my quiet amazement, he is beginning to see himself there, too.
I caught him last week, alone in the sitting room. I had come in to fetch the Times, and found him not reading, not writing, but standing quite still before the painting above the hearth. The one where he leans on his beekeeping frame, sleeves rolled, eyes narrowed against the sun. My best one, perhaps. He reached out—not to touch it, not quite—but as if steadying something in the air before him.
He didn’t turn when he heard me. Only said, in that low voice of his, “You’ve almost got the hands right now.”
And then, after a pause: “You’ll have to do another. When the lavender comes back.”
So I will. I’ll wait for spring, and for the lavender, and for Holmes with his sleeves rolled up again, complaining about the drones and pretending not to be waiting for me to fetch my brush.
We’ll take the rug out to the far side of the lawn, as we always do on the first fair day. The same spot where, three summers ago, Holmes insisted on setting out a full tea despite the threat of rain. He had spent twenty minutes brushing ants off the jam pot and muttering about the folly of wickerware, but when I asked if we ought to pack it in, he only said, “Not until you’ve done the light on the ridgepole properly.”
It wasn’t a good painting, but it was a good day.
And someday, I suspect, it will return to me just the same.