It was not until tea-time that Holmes broke off the lessons, when my tongue and my fingers were both about to stutter to a halt. We went up to the salon for tea, and the genial drink coupled with the fresh Mediterranean air soothed me as if I’d been granted an afternoon nap. Afterwards, we bundled up and strolled the decks, where at last Holmes began the story of his meeting with the young Kim O’Hara—in Hindi alternating with English translations, a broken narrative rendered yet more difficult to follow by the necessity of switching to something innocuous whenever another set of ears came near. It was a method of discourse with which, by that time, I had some familiarity: I had known the man at my side for just under nine years, been his partner for five, his wife for three.

“It was in the spring of 1891 that I encountered Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, an encounter from which only I walked away. Watson, as you know, thought I had met my death there, and made haste to inform the rest of the world. I was indeed dead to the world for three long years. When I finally returned to London, I told Watson that my absence had been due to the ongoing investigation of the Moriarty gang, but in truth, my heart had grown weary of the game. When I set off for my meeting with Moriarty, I anticipated that our final confrontation might well cost my life. To find myself still standing on the edge of the Falls while Moriarty was swallowed by its turbulence—it was as if the sky had opened up and a shiny Christmas parcel had been lowered into my waiting hands. All it required was for me to tug at its ribbons.

“The temptation was enormous. I had by that time been working out of Baker Street for ten very solid years, and although many of the cases were of interest, a few of them even challenging, I had reached a point at which the future stretched long and dull ahead of me. I was, remember, a young man, scarcely thirty, and the thought of returning to the choking fogs and humdrum crime of London was suddenly intolerable. I stood with the Falls at my feet and gazed down the path leading back to Watson and duty, then up at the steep cliff that was my other option, and my hands reached for the cliff.