charleygirl | Fic | Sherlock Holmes | Jottings from a Doctor's Journal 8/?

Title: Jottings from a Doctor's Journal 8/?
Author: charleygirl
Rating: G
Words: 590
Characters involved: Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson
Genre: Friendship, fluff
Disclaimer: These characters, while out of copyright, were created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and do not belong to me.
Summary: A collection of scenes and fragments that are too long to be drabbles and too undisciplined to be 221Bs.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Following Holmes’s spectacularly sudden return from the dead, and when the decision had been made that I should sell my Kensington practice and move back to Baker Street, my friend was overtaken by a completely understandable zeal to see London and discover the changes that had been made in his absence. I was consequently dragged the length and breadth of the city, into odd corners and backstreets, the existence of which I was not even aware until that moment, accompanied by the enthusiastic and knowledgeable chatter of the man I had for three long, bleak years believed to have perished beneath the roiling waters of the Reichenbach Falls. It was a simple pleasure I had thought to never again experience, and I counted myself amongst the luckiest of men.

One morning, after a typically restrained reunion between Holmes and his brother Mycroft at the Diogenes Club, I proposed a drink and then luncheon at the Criterion – my own little marking of the occasion, for it had been my meeting with Stamford in the bar of that establishment which had sown the seeds of the long friendship which had just been rekindled.

We walked from Pall Mall, up St James’s Street to Piccadilly, which was as thronged with traffic as ever, hansoms attempting to dodge between omnibuses and drays without tipping their fares into the road or running down brave pedestrians who took their lives in their hands by trying to cross the busy thoroughfare. We managed to reach the far side without sustaining serious injury, and I was about to enter the Criterion when I realised that Holmes was no longer with me. I retraced my steps to where he stood at the kerb staring across to the island in the middle of the road.

“What,” he said slowly, pointing at the offending object with his stick, “in the world is that?”

I followed his gaze, and saw the relatively new – but by now quite familiar to me – statue, poised atop an elaborate fountain and firing an invisible arrow up Shaftesbury Avenue. It had been put up the previous year, and I momentarily forgot that Holmes would not have seen it before. Children were playing in the basin, splashing each other from the jets of water.

I cleared my throat. “Err…that is the Angel of Christian Charity, Holmes,” I said, and he raised a sceptical eyebrow. Looking again at the naked, winged figure, posed like something from a Valentine card, I could suddenly understand why. As a memorial to Lord Shaftesbury it was unusual to say the least. “It is a new innovation – made from aluminium, I believe,” I added, attempting to make the thing sound more attractive, and of possible interest to him. “They say it is the first statue of its kind in the world.”

“Indeed,” was his only comment, and he turned away, striding towards the entrance to the bar.

It was later, when we had finished our meal and sat back with coffee and cigars, that he mentioned the matter again.

“Angel of Christian Charity, my foot,” he said, nodding in the statue’s direction. “Before long the populace of London will have a new name for it, something much earthier and no doubt more appropriate.”

I recalled his words some years down the line, when the true purpose of the statue had been almost forgotten and Sir Alfred Gilbert’s creation had become universally known as Eros, god of love. Nicknames, once given, have an unfortunate habit of sticking. Just ask Shinwell Johnson…