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I remember that day as if it were yesterday, and yet I know that I can not recall even a scintilla of the detail that Merridew retained. But even that tiniest amount, even that small iota of recollection, is enough to haunt me to the end of my days.
Doctor Rhys regarded John Watson, his eyes wide with sympathetic horror.
"I can't help but think of all those young men," John continued, waving towards the door and indicating the whole of Holloway Sanatorium beyond, "those tending the garden, or around the snooker table, or else just lounging in the corridors. So young, with so much life ahead of them, and yet their minds are fixed on the horrors of the trenches, their attentions forever fixed on the Great War."
John leaned forward, meeting the doctor's gaze.
"If it were up to me, doctor," John went on, "you would spend less time studying how it is that we remember, and marveling over the prodigious memories of the past, and instead devote your attentions to discovering how it is that we forget."
John closed his eyes, and eased back in his chair.
"Memory is no wonder, Dr. Rhys, nor is it a blessing."
John pressed his lips together tightly, trying to forget that awful day, and the smells that lingered beneath the scent of bleach and lye.
"Memory is a curse."
Commonplaces by Naomi Novik
Naomi Novik is the bestselling author of the Temeraire series, which consists of His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, and Victory of Eagles. The series as a whole has been optioned for film by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. The first volume of the series, His Majesty's Dragon, was a finalist for the Hugo Award, and Novik also won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the Locus and Compton Crook awards for best first novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails, and is forthcoming in the anthologies The Naked City and Zombies vs. Unicorns.
In 2009 a young millionaire named Marcus Schrenker leapt from his single-engine plane and parachuted to the ground, leaving his auto-piloted aircraft to crash just fifty yards from a residential neighborhood in Florida. Schrenker, who apparently intended for the plane to fly into the ocean and be lost forever, was attempting to fake his own death in order to escape from a mounting pile of personal, financial, and criminal problems. Many of us were astounded by Schrenker's reckless disregard for others, but we also had to grudgingly admit that his plan had a certain panache, however badly he ended up botching things. Of course, when it comes to faking your own death with panache, nobody beats Sherlock Holmes, who spent several years traveling the globe after his apparent death at Reichenbach Falls, and who managed to keep the fact that he was still alive a secret even from his good friend Dr. Watson. But many readers have wondered, why couldn't Holmes have found some secret way to set the good doctor's mind at ease? Our next tale, in which we get an old acquaintance's view of Holmes during the Great Hiatus, suggests an answer to this mystery.
"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence."
– Sherlock Holmes, "The Red-Headed League"
The newspaper in Lisbon came at eight and went to Godfrey first, before he should leave for his office. "My wife is that treasure who does not require entertainment at the breakfast table," he liked to say of her to his friends; it would have been a little more accurate to say, Irene did not require the sort of entertainment she was likely to get out of Godfrey at the breakfast table, which did not very well meet the name.
She would have liked to take a section of the paper, but while Godfrey naturally obliged any such request, he would interrupt her in asking for pages back, that he might finish those items begun earlier. It was easier in the end to be patient, to let Godfrey keep the pages in neat order until he was done, while she spent her own breakfast sitting quietly in contemplation of her day and the small square of garden their cottage boasted. Her mornings when he had gone did not lack leisure.
"Sherlock Holmes is dead," he told her, before the maid had brought out the eggs, "at Reichenbach Falls."
She made absent expressions of dismay and shock, and when he had gone to his office, she read the story over three times: a bare paragraph describing the famous detective lost, a criminal mastermind claiming a final victim, his old companion left behind to give the report.
It was not much, and reading it over again did not make it grow longer. She already could have told the story over verbatim-years of practice from studying librettos-but even so she did not like to leave the paper on the table to be swept away; instead she carried it into the bedroom and put it into her bureau, and went outside to tend the roses. In twenty minutes she came back inside and read it once more, and then went out to the front stoop.
The street boys knew her, courtesy of a ball returned after a broken window without more than a calm request they should aim away from her house in future. They were happy to take a few pe
At breakfast the next morning, she read it over and over again, while across the table Godfrey placidly read a fresh newspaper, full of different news.
There was no reason it ought to have cut up her peace. She had not seen the man in two years and then had known him not at all: that he had once invaded her house in guise to rob her was not much foundation for affection, except what one might feel, she supposed, for a satisfying opponent one has bested. The story-of course she had read it-the story had been very flattering, but she had enough of admirers to discount the value of another, even one who put her photograph above emeralds. And in any case, now he was dead.
The magazine went into the drawer with the newspaper, however.
Her mornings were of a settled round these days: what little management the little house needed, a trifle of work in the garden, a handful of calls received and returned. If her marriage had not made her wholly respectable, it had made her sufficiently so to permit her neighbors to excuse an acquaintance which so satisfyingly allowed them to partake of just the least bit of notoriety, indirectly; to mention in whispers, at assemblies and balls, yes, that is her, the famous-
Irene tried not to think in such a way of them, those kind and stupid ladies who came visiting. Ordinarily she did not. She could not begrudge anyone a little excitement at so little expense to her, and they were kind: when she had been ill, last year-so wretchedly inadequate a word for that hollowed-out experience, tears standing in her eyes because she would not, would not let them run, not in front of the businesslike doctor speaking to Godfrey over her head, telling him prosaically they must be cautious, warning against another attempt too soon, while he washed his hands of the blood-
They had been really kind then, beyond polite expressions of sympathy: food appearing in those first few days when she could think not at all, and clean linen; Mrs. Lydgate and Mrs. Darrow coming by in the mornings with embroidery, sitting in perfect silence for hours while the window-squares of sun tracked a pathway across the sitting room. They had asked her to sing, a week later on, and when she had stopped halfway through Una voce poco fa, drooping over the pianoforte, they had taken up without a word a conversation about their unreliable maidservants, until she had mastered herself.