Sitting room, at the bar with brandy
One did not need to be so endowed with the awesome gift of observation lauded only to the famous, late Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, to note London had changed. And how. It was not the sooty stacks puffing into gray clouds along Marylebone Road, nor, indeed, the paperboy's cry on the corner—shrill in the dew of morning. It was not the violent pitch of brougham over broken streets. No, that all remained as a nagging constant. It was in the details, the background. It was in the mundane—constant or variable, so Holmes had said. If the quotidian remained as ever, then one must begin a search more thorough. One must bend at the knee and inspect. For where roads remained the same, there was but something more sinister in the air. Where bricks lay mortared together and stone steps wore in the middle from passage of time and feet, shadows seemed to linger longer than they ought.
Dr. Watson was not one prone to mysticism nor the grip of spirituality, and yet, it cut through the wool broadcloth of his frock cloth as the unforgiving arrowhead of one of Holmes' facts might: it was there, whether he chose to believe it or not. It was objective truth. The city had changed. It chilled the blood to think on it too long and it sallied in the wind, a howl high, that died on the doctor's heels as he entered Murray House—a place, it seemed to him, even darker than the world without.
He repressed a shudder beneath shaw collar waistcoat and fine, pearl-buttoned dress shirt as he was announced, unaccompanied, and as he passed through the yawning, foreboding manor. He had his hat, neatly brushed, well-kept as the man himself, tucked to his waist as he leaned his weight onto his walking stick, his distinctive gait echoing, before seeming to be swallowed up by brooding tapestries and cold, rich rugs.—The doctor asked himself for the third time since he'd departed his practice, why he had come to this merry gathering, when the names of the hostesses were foreign to him. He asked for the fifth time why he had received an invitation at all.
One might blame the disease of loneliness, or perhaps the more twisted possession of curiosity, for Watson's attendance at such a place at such a time. A more astute man might suggest it was a bit of both. But the doctor did not trouble himself with astute men much these days. He retired with some immediacy, expedient as he was with his walking stick, to the bar in the sitting room. Glass of brandy in his palm, his hat on the wood beside his elbow, and the prim tips of his mustache doused, he tried to observe the party with the dissociation for which his old companion was famous. Perhaps, he thought to himself with no small amount of deprecation, success wasn't in the cards for him this evening.