Write your own The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes story

I had not seen Holmes in three days. When he let himself into the sitting room at half past nine on the fourth evening, he did not remove his hat. He crossed to the mantelpiece, took down the Persian slipper of shag tobacco, and began to fill his pipe with the deliberation of a man who had been running on will alone.

"You have been to Briony Lodge," I said.

He struck a match. "Five times. Once in the guise of a nonconformist clergyman, once as a groom with a lame horse, and thrice as a loitering idler with a newspaper. The last visit I paid at dawn this morning. I was obliged to crawl along the Serpentine on my belly through the laurels."

"You might have told me."

"I might have." He drew on the pipe until the bowl glowed. The smoke took on a blue and spectral quality in the gaslight. "But I wished to be certain before I burdened you with a mission that may demand your pistol."

I set down my evening paper. "What mission?"

Holmes did not answer. He stood at the window, looking down into the fog-shrouded street. A hansom clattered past; the horse's hooves were wet and dull against the cobbles. When he turned back, his eyes held something I had never seen there before. Less like calculation. More like plain human unease.

"Watson," he said, "how much do you know of the King of Bohemia's visit to London?"

I straightened in my chair. "The King of Bohemia? I was not aware—"

"Nor was anyone. He came to me at three in the morning, six days ago, disguised as Count Von Kramm of the House of Ormstein, wearing a mask of his own face. He wished to recover a photograph. A cabinet-sized photograph of himself and a certain lady."

I felt a cold certainty settle in my chest. "Irene Adler."

Holmes's pipe had gone out. He did not relight it. "Precisely. And I have failed, Watson. Utterly, completely failed. She saw through my disguise tonight. She saw through my smoke-rocket, my false fire alarm, my careful orchestration of events. And then she laughed at me from her brougham window as she drove past."

He placed the dead pipe on the mantelpiece, very carefully, as though it were made of glass.

"I have never," he said, "been outwitted by a woman."