Chapter Text
I have often observed, in looking back upon those years of my association with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, that the most sinister episodes of our lives did not always announce themselves with any suitable solemnity. They did not invariably begin with the hurried ring at Baker Street, the mud-stained telegram, or the wild-eyed visitor shown in by Mrs. Hudson while the London fog pressed yellow and thick against the panes. Some came upon us in sunlight. Some entered quietly, beneath a sky of blameless blue, when the mind had already consented to ease and the body, treacherous instrument, had almost forgotten its old debts.
So it was with the matter which I have elsewhere recorded in my private notes as that of the House of Saint Ursula.
Holmes and I had gone abroad in the early autumn, after a period of exertion which had left even his iron frame more worn than he cared to admit. The journey had not, at first, any object beyond rest. That alone would have made it remarkable, for my friend had always regarded idleness as a species of moral decay, and leisure, unless it were pursued with the same ferocity as chemistry or crime, as a personal affront. Yet there were times when even he could be persuaded, by a judicious mixture of fatigue, weather, and my own professional insistence, to exchange the soot of London for clearer air.
We had taken rooms for some days in a small town lying among the lower foothills of the Alps. The place was little frequented by English travellers. The inn was clean, its wine thin but honest, and its inhabitants, though courteous enough, possessed only the barest acquaintance with our language.
Holmes, who had a talent for making himself understood in any tongue when the matter interested him, conducted our few necessary negotiations with a mixture of French, German, Italian, and imperious gesture which would have been comic in another man. In him it was merely effective.
For three days we lived almost as other men live. We walked in the mornings, when the mist still clung in torn white scarves about the valleys. We took our luncheon under a chestnut tree before the inn, and in the afternoon Holmes would lie upon the grass with his hat drawn over his eyes, only to spring up ten minutes later in pursuit of some beetle, mineral vein, or peasant custom which had caught his restless attention. I had brought books, but read little. There was pleasure enough in watching my companion attempt to be idle.
“You see, Watson,” said he on the fourth morning, as we followed a narrow road between slopes of coarse grass and scattered stone, “there are crimes committed even by landscapes.”
“I confess I do not follow you.”
“This scene, for example, has lulled you into benevolence. You have looked upon those rocks, those goats, and that excellent old woman with the basket of onions, and you have concluded that mankind is, on the whole, tolerable.”
“After some years in your company, Holmes, that is an error I am unlikely to make.”
He glanced sideways at me with that quick flash of amusement which, in him, was often warmer than another man’s smile. “Come, Watson. You are improving. Yet I maintain the point. A pleasant view is one of nature’s more successful deceptions. It persuades the observer that what is remote is therefore innocent.”
“You would find a motive in a sunset.”
“I have found several,” said he.
It was in some such exchange, trivial enough at the time and dear to me afterward for reasons which the reader will soon understand, that the day began. We had set out with no definite plan, intending only to walk to a little shrine which our landlord had indicated by much pointing and repeated invocations of “Santa, santa.” After which, if our strength and the weather allowed, we meant to descend by another path into the valley beyond.
The morning was fine, but of that deceptive mountain fineness which contains a warning to those wise enough to read it. The sky above us was clear, yet clouds had gathered upon the higher ridges, and the wind, when it came down through the pines, carried a sudden chill beneath the warmth of the sun. I remember observing this, and drawing my coat closer across my chest, though I said nothing of it.
For some time I had not been wholly well.
It is an unpleasant confession for a medical man to make, and perhaps a still more unpleasant one for a soldier. The body, once damaged, has a long memory. Mine, which had endured the Afghan campaign, the bullet at Maiwand, and those fevers which creep upon a man in the East and never altogether release him, had more than once reminded me that the past is not so distant as we flatter ourselves. During the weeks preceding our journey I had felt at intervals a heaviness in the limbs and a queer inward chill which no fire seemed able to touch. I attributed it to overwork. Indeed, I was determined to attribute it to anything but what it was.
Holmes, of course, had seen more than I wished.
“You slept poorly,” said he, after we had gone perhaps two miles beyond the last cottage.
“Did I?”
“You turned the lamp down at eleven, rose at twenty minutes past one, drank water at the washstand, and remained at the window for seven minutes. At three you coughed twice, though not from the chest. At half-past five you were awake again.”
“My dear Holmes, if you watched me so closely, I wonder that either of us slept at all.”
“I did not need to watch. You are a less secretive patient than you imagine.”
“I am not your patient.”
“No,” said he. “You are much more troublesome.”
There was no sharpness in the words, but something in his tone made me look at him. He was walking with his head slightly bent, his long hands clasped behind him, the brim of his hat throwing his eyes into shadow. To any casual passer-by he would have appeared wholly absorbed in the road before us. I knew better. His attention had narrowed.
“Holmes,” said I, “you are not to make a case of me.”
“I should prefer not to.”
“Then do not.”
“That, unfortunately, depends less upon my preference than upon your pulse.”
I laughed, or attempted to do so, and quickened my pace in answer. It was a foolish action, born of pride rather than strength. The path had begun to rise, winding between outcroppings of pale stone and clumps of low, resinous shrubs. The little town behind us had already vanished from sight. Ahead, the road ran into a country increasingly bare and solemn, where the grass grew thin over rock and the only sound was the wind moving over the slopes with a dry, whispering persistence.
The first true shiver came over me there.
It was not the ordinary chill of a mountain breeze, but that inward convulsion which seems to seize the bones themselves. I set my teeth against it and walked on. A few minutes later there came a wave of heat so sudden that the landscape swam before my eyes. The white road flashed intolerably. Holmes’s figure, black and spare against the hillside, lengthened and blurred as though seen through water.
“Watson.”
“I am quite well.”
The lie was absurd even as I uttered it. My voice had come thickly, and I was obliged to put out a hand against a stone wall to steady myself. Holmes was beside me instantly.
“Sit down.”
“It is nothing. A moment’s dizziness.”
“Sit down.”
There are tones in which argument is possible, and tones in which it is not. This was one of the latter. I sat upon the low wall, angry with myself, angry with the weakness which had betrayed me, and, I am ashamed to say, angry even with Holmes for having witnessed it.
He took my wrist. His fingers were cool, precise, and impersonal in their pressure. His face, when I looked up at it, was not impersonal at all.
“How long?” he asked.
“How long what?”
“Do not trifle with me.”
The rebuke stung because it was deserved.
“A few days,” I said. “Perhaps longer. It is only a touch of fever. I have had worse.”
“Yes,” said he. “That is precisely what concerns me.”
I would have answered, but another shudder passed through me, so violent that my teeth struck together. Holmes removed his coat and placed it about my shoulders before I could protest.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered.
“It is certainly inconvenient.”
“You are enjoying your superiority.”
“On the contrary.” He said it so quietly that I had no reply.
We remained thus for several minutes, I seated upon the wall with my head bowed, he standing above me and scanning the road by which we had come and the empty rise ahead. A more desolate spot in which to be taken ill could hardly have been contrived. We were far beyond the town. The road behind us was vacant. No cart approached, no shepherd passed with his flock, and the few cottages we had seen earlier were now hidden by the folds of the hills. Even had assistance been near at hand, our command of the local speech was so poor that I doubted whether we could have communicated anything beyond the most primitive distress.
Holmes drew from his pocket the little phrase-book which he had mocked the day before and turned its pages with savage speed.
“Fever,” he murmured. “Doctor. Carriage. Inn. Curse these ornamental alphabets of travel. They provide a man with three ways to compliment a dinner and none to describe a relapse of malarial ague.”
“It is not malaria.”
“You will permit me to diagnose the obvious when it is standing in front of me shaking.”
“I am sitting,” I retorted.
“That is the only sensible thing you have done this morning.”
Had I been stronger, I might have smiled. As it was, I shut my eyes, for the light had begun to pierce them with a painful brilliance. I heard Holmes move away a few paces, then return. His shadow fell across me.
“There is nothing behind us within easy reach,” said he. “The town is too far for you to walk back.”
“I can walk.”
“No.”
I opened my eyes and found that he was no longer looking at me, but past me, toward the higher road. His whole body had altered. The lounging traveller of an hour earlier had vanished. In his place stood the Holmes whom I had seen in moments of peril: alert, hawk-like, all faculties drawn to a point.
“What is it?” I asked.
He did not answer at once. Then he raised one hand and pointed.
I turned with difficulty.
At first I saw only the slope: grey stone, dark pines, and the broken line of the road climbing toward a shoulder of the hill. Then, as a shred of mist shifted under the wind, a shape detached itself from the rock above us. It was a building, though so coloured by age and weather that it seemed less constructed than grown from the mountain itself. A long wall ran along the ridge, pale and severe, broken by narrow windows set deep in the stone. At one end rose a small bell tower, square and unadorned, with a cross black against the moving sky.
It stood alone, remote from village and field, its walls catching the cold light that had begun to gather before the clouds. No smoke rose that I could see, no figure moved upon the road below it, and yet there was in the sight of that lonely house a promise of human presence, and therefore of aid.
Holmes had already folded the phrase-book and returned it to his pocket.
“Can you stand?”
“With help, perhaps.”
“You shall have it.”
He put his arm beneath mine and raised me with a care that, at another time, he would have disguised beneath impatience. I leaned upon him more heavily than I wished. The road tilted under my feet, and for one dreadful instant I thought I should fall. His grip tightened.
“Steady, Watson.”
“I am sorry.”
“Nonsense.”
“It is a cursed nuisance.”
“Yes,” said he. “But not, I think, fatal, unless you insist upon making it so.”
We began the ascent.
I remember that climb less as a sequence of events than as a series of impressions, sharp and disordered, like fragments of glass. The scrape of Holmes’s boot upon loose stone. The smell of his coat, damp wool and tobacco. The bell tower appearing and vanishing through the mist. The sound of my own breath, harsh and humiliating. A black bird rising from the wall with a cry that seemed, in my fevered state, almost human.
Several times I begged Holmes to leave me and go ahead for help. Several times he refused without bothering to answer fully.
Once, when the path steepened, I felt him take nearly my whole weight.
“This cannot be doing your holiday any good,” I said, in a poor attempt at lightness.
“My dear Watson,” said he, “I have had holidays before. I have not had another you.”
It was said brusquely, almost irritably, and he did not look at me when he spoke. Yet the words went through me with a force for which fever alone cannot account.
At length we reached the outer gate.
It was set beneath a plain stone arch, iron-bound and weather-stained, with a small grille at eye level. Holmes lowered me onto a bench or mounting-stone beside the wall, then seized the hanging chain and pulled.
From somewhere within the grounds, a bell rang.
Once.
Then again.
The sound moved through the stone and into the empty air beyond us, grave, hollow, and startlingly near. It seemed to me, in that moment, less like a summons than an answer.
Holmes stood rigid before the gate, one hand still upon the chain, his face turned toward the grille.
For a long while there was no movement.
Then a panel slid back, and in the darkness beyond it there appeared the pale oval of a woman’s face, framed in black.
She said something in a language I could not understand.
Holmes answered her. His words were halting, insufficient, and urgent. He gestured toward me.
The woman’s eyes moved from him to where I sat shivering against the convent wall. I saw suspicion in them first. Then duty. Then something colder, which I was too ill to name.
The grille closed.
Bolts shifted within the gate.
Holmes came back to me and bent close.
“Courage, old fellow,” he said. “They will admit us.”
I tried to answer, but the mountains had begun to wheel slowly above the convent roof, and the black cross on the bell tower seemed to lengthen until it divided the whole sky. My last clear recollection was of the gate opening inward with a groan of iron, and of Holmes’s hand, firm and unyielding, closing over mine before the darkness took me.
When consciousness returned to me it was not, at first, with any recollection of where I lay or how I had come there. I was aware only of movement, of stone passing beneath my feet, of a pressure beneath my arms, and of voices which rose and fell about me in a language that seemed to belong to the same troubled dream as the bell and the black cross above the gate.
The air within was colder than the air without.
That may seem a strange thing to record, yet it struck me forcibly even through the confusion of fever. Outside there had been wind, sun, and open space. Within was an ancient chill, the damp breath of enclosed stone, mingled with beeswax, lye, medicinal herbs, and that faint, indefinable odour which belongs to old chapels and rooms where many have suffered in silence. My boots scraped upon flags. A door closed somewhere behind us with a sound of finality.
Holmes’s arm was still about me.
I knew that before I knew anything else. His grip supported my right side, while on my left a woman in a black habit had taken my other arm with a strength that surprised me. A second moved ahead with a lamp, though the hour was not yet wholly dark. Its flame trembled in the draughts which crept along the passage, and threw vast, wavering shadows of veils and shoulders upon the whitewashed walls.
“I can walk,” I muttered, though I was by no means certain of it.
Holmes bent his head close enough that his voice alone seemed clear amid the surrounding murmur. “You have already made that statement, Watson. It has not improved with repetition.”
“I dislike being hauled about like luggage.”
“Then oblige me by remaining conscious.”
I believe I attempted some answer, but it was lost in a renewed fit of shivering. The woman at my left spoke sharply over her shoulder. Another door opened. We passed beneath an arch into a broader corridor, where the smell of herbs grew stronger and the light took on a greenish cast from some enclosed courtyard beyond the windows.
It was only then that I became aware of how many women had gathered.
They did not crowd us. There was nothing curious or disorderly in their presence. Yet they appeared at doorways and along the passage in that silent, sudden fashion peculiar to enclosed communities, their pale faces framed by coifs, their dark garments absorbing the lamplight. Some were old, some young, some with the calm impassivity of long discipline, others unable to conceal apprehension at the sight of two foreign men arriving at their gate, one of them half insensible.
Holmes, who had faced armed ruffians, murderers, and more than one desperate woman with perfect composure, looked for a moment profoundly out of place.
It was not fear. I have never known him afraid for himself. Rather, it was the irritation of a man whose methods had been abruptly made useless. He could observe, deduce, command, and pursue. He could not, in that instant, speak their language with any fluency, read the rules of the house, or keep me from being taken by competent hands into a world where he had no authority.
A small woman, elderly but upright, approached from the far end of the corridor. The others parted for her before she had spoken. Her face was narrow, deeply lined, and almost colourless, but the eyes beneath her white band were dark and remarkably steady. She carried no lamp. She required none. There was in her manner the certainty of one who had long been obeyed.
Holmes straightened as much as my weight upon him allowed.
The woman addressed him in French.
It was a relief to hear a language in which communication, however imperfect, became possible. Her accent was marked, and Holmes’s reply, though rapid, bore the strain of a man choosing each word under pressure.
“This gentleman is ill,” said he. “A fever. He requires rest, warmth, and medical attention. We were told at the gate that your house maintains an infirmary.”
The woman looked at me, not unkindly, but with a professional detachment which I recognised even in my condition. She did not flutter or exclaim. She regarded me as I have myself regarded wounded men brought in from the field: as a problem requiring immediate order.
“You are English?”
“Yes.”
“Travelling alone?”
“With me,” said Holmes.
There was a pause so slight that I might have missed it had fever not made me sensitive to every vibration in the air.
“With you,” she repeated.
“My friend and colleague, Dr. Watson.”
At the word doctor her gaze returned to me with a flicker of interest. “You are a physician, monsieur?”
“I am,” said I, with an effort at civility.
Her expression did not change. “And yet tonight you are a patient.”
“There is no contradiction,” said Holmes, rather shortly.
The old woman’s eyes moved to him. I saw then that he had made, in some small way, an error. Not of fact, but of tone. This house was not Baker Street, nor a London police station, nor the sitting-room of a client grateful to find himself under the command of Sherlock Holmes. Here his impatience had no title.
“I am Mother Verena,” she said. “This is the House of Saint Ursula. We give aid to the sick when God sends them to our door. Sister Elise.”
The woman who had been supporting my left side answered at once. She was perhaps forty years of age, broad-shouldered, with capable hands and a face worn less by age than by labour. She and another sister exchanged a few quick phrases with Mother Verena, after which my person became, for practical purposes, theirs.
Holmes felt it at the same moment I did.
He did not release me.
Sister Elise looked at his hand upon my arm. There was no rudeness in the glance. It was worse than that. It was calm, expectant, and wholly assured.
“Monsieur,” said Mother Verena, “they will take him to the infirmary.”
“I shall accompany him.”
“To the door.”
“To the room.”
“This is not possible.”
Holmes’s face sharpened.
“Madam, he is seriously unwell.”
“Yes.”
“I am familiar with his medical history.”
“You may tell Sister Elise what is necessary.”
“I prefer to see where he is placed.”
“And I prefer,” said Mother Verena, “that the rule of this house be observed.”
It was a strange and painful thing to watch, even through the haze that clouded my senses. Holmes’s whole nature rose against opposition. I felt it in the tightening of his arm, heard it in the small silence before he replied. In another place he would have swept aside such resistance by sheer force of intellect and personality. But he was checked by the stone walls, the black veils, the foreign tongue, and by me, swaying between him and the floor.
Most of all, perhaps, he was checked by what he could not say.
Had he been my brother, he might have claimed the right of blood. Had he been my legal guardian, my commanding officer, my father, even my servant, the world would have supplied him with a recognised word. But my beloved companion, he was none of these. He was only, to those cold observing eyes, a gentleman traveller with an inconveniently strong concern for another gentleman’s fever.
The danger of that fact came to me dimly, yet with extraordinary force.
“Holmes,” I said.
He looked down at once.
“It is all right.”
“It is not.”
“Let them do as they must.”
His lips compressed. For one instant I thought he would refuse outright, rule or no rule. Then his reason, that severe jailer of all impulse, reasserted itself. He turned back to Mother Verena. “I shall give the necessary particulars myself.”
“You may speak with Sister Elise.”
“And I shall see him again.”
“In the morning.”
“No.”
The word cracked like a pistol-shot in that stone passage. Several of the sisters stirred. Sister Elise’s grip upon my arm did not alter, but I felt her attention quicken.
Mother Verena did not so much as blink. “After compline,” she said, “men do not enter the infirmary. There are women here who are ill, some who are young, some who have been placed in our care under difficult circumstances. Our rules exist for their protection.”
“He is not a danger to them.”
“Nor are they to him.”
Holmes gave a short, humourless laugh. “That remains to be established.”
It was the wrong answer. I knew it the instant he spoke. Mother Verena’s face became, if possible, stiller.
“You came to us for charity, Mr. Holmes.”
He started slightly. He had not given his name. Even in my fever I perceived the small satisfaction he would ordinarily have taken in that fact, and the larger irritation he now felt at having been observed in turn.
“Our porter understood enough,” she continued. “And your friend said it when we lifted him from the gate.”
I had no memory of doing so.
“You came,” she said again, “for charity. You shall have it. But not command.”
Holmes bowed. It was a stiff, dangerous movement. “I ask pardon,” said he. “My anxiety has made me discourteous.”
The apology was correct. It deceived no one.
Mother Verena accepted it with the faintest inclination of her head. “You may remain tonight. A cell will be prepared for you. At dawn we shall send to the village for the physician, if the road permits. Until then Sister Elise will tend Dr. Watson.”
“I am myself competent to tend him.”
“You are also tired, cold, and angry. These are not always aids to judgment.”
Had I not been near collapse, I might have admired her. As it was, I wished only that the stone would cease rising beneath my feet like the deck of a ship.
Holmes ignored the thrust.
“He has suffered intermittent fever before,” he said, with visible effort to master himself. “The original attack was contracted during military service. He may shake violently when the chill takes him. The heat follows. He must be kept warm during the rigor, but not smothered when the temperature rises. If there is quinine in the house—”
“There is,” said Sister Elise in French.
Holmes turned to her at once. “You have quinine?”
“Yes.”
“How old?”
She answered, and he questioned her further, sharply and minutely. To her credit, she did not appear offended. Indeed, as the exchange continued, I saw something like professional recognition pass between them. Holmes might not command the convent, but he could assess competence when it stood before him. Sister Elise knew the infirmary, its medicines, its linen, its fires, its thermometers, and the signs by which fever should be watched through the night.
He was forced, step by step, to understand that she did not need him in order to keep me alive.
I think that knowledge was nearly intolerable to him.
“There is also the old wound,” he said.
“I am aware of my own wound,” I murmured.
“Doctor,” said Sister Elise, with unexpected dryness, “patients here are encouraged to obey.”
Holmes shot me a look which, had I been well, would have amused me for a week.
Mother Verena gestured, and the matter was decided.
They began to draw me away from him.
It is a curious thing, the weakness of the body. A man may pride himself on courage, discipline, and all the habits of self-command; yet when fever has him by the throat he becomes absurdly dependent upon small certainties. The hand beneath his arm. The voice at his ear. The familiar step beside his own. As Sister Elise and the younger nun took more of my weight, Holmes’s support fell away.
I had not expected the absence of it to frighten me.
I looked back. He stood very straight in the corridor, his travelling coat thrown over one arm, his face pale from the cold and from something which was not cold. His eyes were fixed upon mine with an intensity that made me lower my own, not from shame exactly, but from the instinctive knowledge that others were watching.
That, too, was a wound of our condition. Even fear must be moderated. Even tenderness must pass in public as courtesy.
“I shall be near,” said he.
The words were ordinary enough. The tone was not.
“I know,” I answered.
Mother Verena heard. Sister Elise heard. Perhaps they understood only what the words permitted. Perhaps more. It was impossible to tell.
The infirmary lay beyond another passage and a turn through a low arch. I remember white beds, narrow and severe, arranged with military precision along one wall, though most were unoccupied. I remember a tiled stove, unlit but prepared; shelves of brown bottles; a crucifix above the central table; a basin of water; folded linen; a row of small windows looking toward a courtyard where the last light had turned the stones the colour of ashes.
They placed me in a bed near the far end of the room.
I protested, naturally. A man does not surrender his boots, coat, dignity, and medical authority without some token resistance. But my protests were feeble things, and Sister Elise managed me with the impersonal firmness of one accustomed to more difficult patients. My coat was removed, then my collar loosened. A blanket, coarse but warm, was drawn over me. Someone placed a heated stone wrapped in flannel at my feet.
A young sister brought a lamp and set it upon the small table beside my bed. In its light I could better see the infirmary. Most of the beds were empty, but not all. An old woman slept beneath a grey coverlet near the stove, her face turned to the wall. Farther away, half concealed by a screen, I heard a low cough. Across the corridor, visible through an open door, was another chamber, smaller than the rest. Its window faced the outer wall, and its bed was occupied by a broad, heavy figure whose features I could not distinguish.
“Who is there?” I asked.
Sister Elise followed my gaze.
“A traveller. He was brought in this afternoon.”
“Is he ill?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“That is for God to know and the doctor to discover.”
“A convenient division of labour,” I muttered.
She surprised me by smiling faintly. “You are fevered, Dr. Watson. Sleep first. Ask questions after.”
She moved away, and I heard her speaking with Holmes in the corridor beyond the infirmary door. His voice was low, controlled, and rapid. Hers answered steadily. I caught only fragments.
“Quinine…”
“Pulse every hour…”
“No draught unless I know…”
“Door…”
Then Mother Verena’s voice, sharper and closer: “Enough, Mr. Holmes.”
A silence.
I turned my head upon the pillow, though the effort cost me. Through the half-open door I saw them: Holmes in the passage, tall and dark among the pale walls; Mother Verena facing him; Sister Elise between them, not as mediator exactly, but as the practical person to whom both must eventually yield.
“The rule has been explained,” said Mother Verena.
“And I have understood it,” Holmes replied. “Understanding is not agreement.”
“Agreement is not required.”
“Madam, if his condition worsens—”
“You will be sent for if there is need.”
“I am the judge of that need.”
“Not here.”
The words fell quietly, but with such finality that even Holmes did not immediately answer.
I wished then, with a bitterness I cannot fully describe, that I had strength enough to rise and end the matter myself. It was intolerable to be the cause of his humiliation, and more intolerable still to know that he endured it because the alternative was to expose us both to scrutiny we could ill afford.
He must have felt my gaze, for he looked past Mother Verena and met my eyes through the doorway.
The change in his expression was slight. To another observer it might have been nothing. To me it was as plain as speech.
Be still. Endure. I am here.
Mother Verena saw the look pass between us. I am certain of it.
She turned toward me, and her face revealed nothing. That blankness troubled me more than disapproval would have done.
“Dr. Watson,” she said, “you are safe in this house. But you are under our care while you remain in this room. You will rest. You will obey Sister Elise. Mr. Holmes will be given a cell in the guest wing.”
The panic that rose in me was irrational, and for that reason all the more humiliating. I was no child afraid of the dark. I had lain wounded among strangers in Afghanistan. I had faced danger in London rooms far more terrible than that clean, cold infirmary. Yet the thought of Holmes shut away beyond stone passages, forbidden to come if I called, filled me with a dread I could neither defend nor confess.
Holmes saw that also.
“Very well,” said he.
The surrender was quiet. It cost him more than any outburst would have.
Mother Verena inclined her head again and withdrew. Sister Elise followed after giving some instruction to the younger nun, who remained near the shelves of medicine. Holmes waited until they had gone several paces down the corridor before he entered the infirmary.
Only to the threshold.
Even then, he observed the limit. I hated him for it for perhaps three seconds, and loved him for it after.
“You heard?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I shall be in the guest wing.”
“So I gather.”
“If you require anything, send for Sister Elise. She has sense.”
“High praise.”
“She has more sense than her superior.”
“Holmes.”
“She has.”
“You must not antagonise them.”
“I have been politeness itself.”
“By your own standards, perhaps.”
He came one step farther into the room, then stopped, as though the invisible rule had taken physical shape before him. His hands closed once at his sides. “I do not like leaving you here.”
“I am in an infirmary, not a dungeon.”
“The distinction remains under review.”
I smiled despite myself, but the effort dissolved into another shiver. In an instant the levity went out of him. He moved toward me, then checked himself again. The restraint was worse to witness than any display of agitation.
“Watson.”
“It will pass.”
“Yes. It will.” He said it with the fierce insistence of a man stating not a prognosis but a command.
From somewhere deeper in the convent a bell began to sound: slow, measured strokes, each one rolling through the stone like a footfall in a crypt. At the first note the young sister crossed herself. Holmes glanced toward the corridor.
“Compline,” I said.
“So it appears.”
“You had better go.”
“I have several minutes.”
“You had better go while you can do it civilly.”
His eyes returned to mine.
The bell continued. The young sister had begun moving toward the door, not quite looking at us. Holmes heard her step and drew himself up. When he spoke again, his voice had resumed something of its ordinary tone. “I shall return at dawn.”
“If they permit it.”
“They will.” That was Holmes again.
He took one more look around the room, noting, I have no doubt, every bottle, latch, screen, bed, and window. Then his gaze came back to me and remained there a moment too long.
“Sleep if you can.”
“I will.”
He turned and left.
The sound of his steps receded along the corridor. I counted them until I could no longer distinguish them from the bell.
Then the door of the infirmary was closed.
Not locked, so far as I heard. Only closed.
Yet I remember lying there, shivering beneath the coarse blankets, staring at the darkened panels, and feeling with an absurd certainty that something more than a door had been set between us. The convent breathed around me in whispers: cloth moving, water poured into a basin, the old woman sighing in her sleep, the wind pressing faintly at the narrow windows.
Across the passage, in the small chamber they had called the East Cell, the unseen traveller stirred and muttered something in his own tongue.
The lamp beside my bed guttered once.
I closed my eyes and told myself, with all the authority I could summon, that I was safe.
But even then, before death had crossed that threshold, before the name of Saint Ursula had acquired for me its later and darker significance, I did not believe it.