He put down the teacups and I turned to face him. How eagerly I welcomed the warmth that sneaked along my skin as he seized my hand and led me swiftly past the kitchen and into a dark room. I pondered what had made his heart of coldness suddenly swell with such eager ardour, but that thought quickly dissolved as he pressed his chest to mine. I was vaguely conscious of the bed and a small dresser. I bumped into the open door of a wardrobe, but, like a cat on the prowl, he seemed to have a remarkable ability to see in the dark. Still holding my hand, he felt his way among the furniture, closed the wardrobe door, and sat down on the bed. Then he pulled me down with him and kissed me again.
I broke away, barely able to catch my breath. “Wait, Sherlock. Before we... before I... we must talk first.”
I didn’t really want to talk. I wanted to relive the night we’d spent in the cottage in Holme-Next-The-Sea, that one night when he had given into his youthful desires. I wanted to enjoy this moment outside the confines of distraction and intrusion. To give into wildness, to push away confusion, to stop dissecting my feelings, and his, and simply devour him. To trace my mind to that happy night, that cheerful ghost of a night when the paroxysms of our bodies expressed every hidden thought and fantasy. When I actually still believed with all my heart that the impossible was possible.
But I could not proceed without receiving some explanation as to why, after four years, he wished to take me to his bed.
“Sherlock, do you love me?”
He pulled back. He pulled away. “Love again. What does that mean?”
“What does it-” I paused to suppress my anger again. Sometimes I truly wondered if Sherlock had suckled poison at his mother’s breast. But I also wondered if I were his Tara, the goddess Archibald and I had seen at the museum, the one whose milk could counteract the poison.
“Sherlock, I am trying to understand you. I know how much your work means to you. I understand that that your intensity has propelled you down this unusual path. I mean, you work as though your life depends upon it. So why now? This, why now? I mean, when you finish a case-”
“When I finish a case, it feels as if I were hanging over a cliff. It feels like I am in a constant dance with gravity. If I do not work, I get socially bizarre and agitated.”
When you do work, I thought, you are socially bizarre and agitated!
“Then why are we here if you have concluded that you cannot make room for love in your life? If you refuse to admit you fell in love with me?”
I felt him staring at me through the darkness. He rose, lit a candle, ran his fingers through his hair and leaned against the wardrobe. There was no mistaking his tortured brow and his regret at the stirrings of sexuality that hammered to the surface when he was with me.
“Falling in love,” he said, “means losing control.”
“Yes. It does.”
“And despite your intellect and your education and your usually very logical mind, you have a strong, natural turn for this sort of thing, Poppy. I do not.”
“You did feel it, Sherlock. At Holme-Next-The-Sea. Why is it that you cannot admit it?”
His eyes betrayed him. I observed that he was suddenly in a thoughtful mood. He was either striving to recall something in his memory - or to bury it away, seal it from his consciousness forever.
Finally, he said, “Love. It feels like you catch your reflection in a mirror and what you see there is not you. Your knees go, your skin is on fire, and you can feel your internal organs, your heart, your kidneys, your lungs, all of them are burning and beating. And the irony is that you want to keep feeling that way! You are awash in the fear that you will be unable to sustain the intimate relationship! It is my belief that you cannot. You cannot sustain love.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I refuse,” he continued, “to find myself in that vast graveyard of human beings with broken hearts. The earth is scorched with the dying embers of their useless feelings - the remainder of them, for they burn out - and it is littered with such fools. Look at your brother, for example. No, I will not join that dead wake.”
I understood, I really did. I had watched my brother go from his exuberant new life to despair. The frenzy of his love for Effie had died; the fiery furnace expired when she did.
But if only I could convince Sherlock that logic and love could co-exist - a theory he had put forth himself the night of Squire Trevor’s funeral. If I could stir him once again to joy, light a flame, make him quiver as he once did, and split his stone heart, I would trade castle for dungeon and mansion for hut.
“My work gives me a similar feeling, and it is one that is sustainable. I am charged with this obligation to solve cases and I must tend to that end at all times.
“With love,” he continued, the pace of his words growing faster and faster, “too much is left to chance. With work, I am the master. I am... I am like a chorus master. I can be the best. I can even benefit from certain factors that are out of my control. I can cultivate voices in the dark, I can manipulate them, rearrange the positioning of breaths in each vocal part so that certain phrases have a richer tone. I can capitalize on nuances. The work... the work is grueling... seeking out the evidence, scattered as it may be, memorizing it and churning it into a set of facts that will hold up in the court
