Observations From an Open Doorway
by Joanne K. Seward, a.k.a. "a prim bun"
(With thanks to "imp/imp" for her excellent editing.)
Sherlock Holmes stood, silent in the dimly lighted passageway. The sea had been rough this evening and Russell's door, not quite latched when the ship rolled, stood three-quarters open. With his keen dark-vision, he was just able to discern her sleeping form in the narrow bunk. "Child" he had called her upon his return from the docks when she inquired as to the stench emanating from his clothing. "My dear protected child" had been his words--he recalled them as though it were only a moment ago. From this vantage point she looked a child, her long limbs sprawling limp and boneless under the lightweight blanket, her blonde plaits snaking across the pillow.
But that very same day--mere minutes later--he had called her "woman." In his mind, he could still hear his exasperated voice--"For God's sake, woman, we must be on the docks in thirty-five minutes! We've no time for a tea party." Her body, faintly delineated by the light from the passageway, bore testimony to the truth of that appellation. Slim, though she was, hers was no longer the body of a child. It was a woman's body--a woman in the first flower of youth, but a woman. Though she kept her comeliness hidden most of the time, he had witnessed the evidence more than once--first, on her eighteenth birthday when she'd arrived at the cottage with that glorious hair piled high on her head, a green velvet gown bringing out her delicate features, most recently the evening after her shopping trip, clad in evening gown, heeled shoes and sheer silk stockings. Yet each time this truth was borne in on him he experienced a moment of shock, an instant, when he wondered how he could have missed this bit of information, overlooked this particular datum.
Russell sighed and murmured something in her sleep and Holmes took a step deeper into the shadows, not wishing to wake her from much needed slumber. How many nights, he wondered, had he watched over her sleep? And for how much longer would he have that privilege? Through some fluke, their relationship had escaped censure but one couldn't expect things to continue that way now the war had ended and life was returning to some semblance of normalcy. The night they came aboard he'd spoken of ending her apprenticeship, of granting her Mastery, but had she understood? Had she seen beyond the matter of their working relationship, beyond this particular case, to their personal relationship? Did she even realize there was more than one aspect to their relationship?
"Sometimes you have to sacrifice a queen in order to save the game," she'd said. Had she seen what he was thinking, how those words had stricken him? Did she yet comprehend that she was his queen in every sense of the word?
And what of that kiss--it was not the first time he'd kissed her, certainly, but it was different, and she had felt the difference, had collapsed back into the chair behind her. Naturally, she'd later ascribed it to his manipulative nature--she knew him too well, knew he would do anything it took to attain an end.
He, however, knew the truth--knew it had been the kiss of a man who feared his queen felled, and then discovered she lived still. Certainly, he had not been above making use of her reaction, but it had not provided his initial motivation.
Which left him... where?
He was a man who had lived almost sixty years--almost three times her age. His body, though not true to his age, was definitely that of a man who had used it, sometimes abused it. Would she turn away in shocked disgust if she were to learn he'd wanted nothing more than to follow up that gentle kiss on the forehead with a truer one, a lover's kiss and all it promised?
And yet, what else but to stay the course, give her time, keep her safe and wait until she came to the same conclusion he had already reached. Despite the disparity of years and experience, their hearts and minds were as one. Surely, she would come to the realization there was no other for her, as he had realized there was no other for him.
Again, Russell sighed, and turned onto her side, the moonlight now seeping through the porthole highlighting her golden plaits.
Holmes resisted the urge to echo that sigh, resisted the urge to enter the cabin, to release her hair from its bindings, to bury his face in that wondrous silken mass.
He would wait. He would bide his time. And he would pray she came to him of her own volition.
Sherlock Holmes praying for the love of a woman.
Now there was a morsel for Watson's scribblings.