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What Does the	By : Spike119 Category: Titles in the Public Domain > Sherlock Holmes > Slash > Slash Views: 4476 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work fiction, based on the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Chapter List
- 1-What Does the
- 1
Title: So What Does the “G” Stand For, Anyway?
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don’t own them, although I am beginning to suspect they own me.
Warning: no actual sex, but extreme drunkenness involving mixing drinks. Just say ‘no,’ kiddies …

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“Gabriel,” Bradsteet said thoughtfully.

“No,” Lestrade answered, stifling a yawn.

“Damn,” Bradstreet muttered, and grimaced as he tossed down the contents of the glass.

“Gustave,” Hopkins guessed.

“No.”

We all watched as the poor lad nearly gagged upon his drink, barely managing to hold it down this time.

“Galahad,” I hazarded, passing the pretzels to Bradstreet.

“I wish,” Lestrade chuckled. “Sorry.”

I drank down the shot holding my breath, wondering whose idea this had been and hoping it hadn’t been mine.

“Ganymede,” Gregson tried.

Lestrade fluttered his eyelashes gamely. “You wish,” he laughed. He turned to Holmes. “Your turn,” he said, and I was not sure if I saw a flutter of fear in the professional’s eyes.

Not that I was very sure of anything; we had gathered for the occasion of Lestrade’s birthday, and due to the excellent cask of wine Mycroft had sent along as a present, all those present had grown increasingly merry over the passing hours. How congratulating our friend upon the anniversary of his birth had turned to mild speculation upon his forename was easy to understand; what no-one seemed to remember is how we had allowed ourselves to take this particularly dangerous path to divine it.

Even Holmes, whom I had never known to be affected by alcohol before, looked somewhat unsteady as he took the bottle of whiskey that stood at the centre of the table and poured himself a shot.

“Pass,” he said, downing the liquor in one gulp.

“All right,” Athelney Jones sighed, “I’m going to have to ask a question.”

“Half-pint for the Inspector!” Lestrade called.

Jones knocked down the small glass of stout with no problem, wiping his mouth somewhat indecorously with his sleeve. “All right: was your mother Spanish, by any chance?”

“My mother was born Mary Elizabeth Cottingham,” Lestrade said somewhat reproachfully.

“Well, that lets off Galeno and Gaspar,” Jones muttered.

“Hey, that’s two guesses,” Hopkins protested. “Here, he can’t guess twice in a row, can he?”

“Ease it, laddie. Those weren’t guesses. Here’s my guess: Grant.”

“Watson guessed that two rounds ago,” Lestrade declared. “That’s a two-shot penalty. And Hopkins, you’ve earned yourself a shot for your insolence to your elders.”

“But I –”

“Drink, lad,” Holmes ordered, and Hopkins speedily complied.

“I believe it’s back to you, Bradstreet,” Lestrade said, grinning widely.

Bradstreet tugged at his moustache. “I’m going to ask for a reading of the list,” he said finally, flushing a bit with pride at our murmurs of awe.

Lestrade nodded, visibly impressed. “On your aching head be it, old friend,” said he with a low whistle. “Barkeep! another jigger of rum for Inspector Bradstreet. Wiggins, kindly read the list, will you?”

The Captain of the Irregulars rattled off an impressive list of names, starting with the predictable, such as George and Gregory, wandering through the literary, with Gulliver and Gawain, and even descending into the absurdities of Gardenia, Gelato, and Gertrude. We had between the six of us pretty much exhausted the possibilities, along with any remaining brain cells we might have had left.

Bradstreet blinked several times, swaying only a little as he mulled things over. “All right, how about Grace?”

“Another penalty; we have already ascertained that I do not have a traditionally female name. Two shots.”

Bradstreet heaved a weary sigh. “We’ll need another bottle, then.”

“Another bottle here! Well, Mr. Stanley Hopkins?”

“Guada-guadala-guadalajara,” Hopkins stammered.

“What in the devil made you guess that, lad?”

“Am I right?”

“No.”

“Damn. I just thought that geographical locations might –”

It happened abruptly; one moment, the young inspector was vertical, the next, he was unconscious and snoring loudly on my shoulder.

I gently manoeuvred him to a more comfortable position, leaning back in his own chair. “And then there were five,” I muttered. “All right, then. Perhaps the lad’s onto something. What about Gloucester?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Glasgow,” Gregson tried hopefully.

“Not even close. And I’m going to take mercy on you all, lads; it’s not a geographical location. An interesting idea, though. Holmes, another pass?”

“Actually, no. I believe I have deduced the truth.”

We all turned to look at Holmes in surprise; he had not made a single guess, yet opted to keep drinking with us.

Lestrade licked his lips. “You know what my Christian name is, then?”

“No.”

“Well, then –”

“You do not have a forename, Christian or otherwise. You were baptised simply G. Lestrade, just the first initial. That is my deduction. Am I correct?”

Lestrade bowed his head. “Yes,” he confessed. “When I was born, not even the midwife thought I’d live to morning, so they just gave me my father’s first initial – G – and left it at that. May I ask how you deduced the truth?”

“Elementary. While the rest of our companions have been racking their over-stuffed brains for every literary, mythological, and Biblical reference they could remember, I was watching you. You listened to the obvious and the obtuse guesses with equal detachment, showing that you did not expect anyone to guess the right answer. The only time you betrayed any sign of nervousness whatsoever was during my turn; you visibly relaxed each time I passed. Obviously, you felt that I alone was intelligent enough to penetrate your secret. Thus, it was logical –”

“Oh, sod it, Sherlock,” I grumbled, as the true import of Lestrade’s confession began to sink into my alcohol-soaked brain. “You knew,” I snarled. “You knew there was no way in Hell –”

Holmes blinked. “I assure you, my dear fellow, I wasn’t entirely sure until Lestrade said that it wasn’t a geographical location. Then I became –”

“I wasn’t talking to you, well, I was, but I moved on. I was – where was I?”

“You were about to yell at me, I think,” Lestrade said, a little sheepishly.

“Hey, he pulled one over on us,” Hopkins mumbled indistinctly.

“Go back to sleep,” Gregson sighed. “Really, Lestrade, this is beneath even you. You knew we wouldn’t be able to guess it, and so you amused yourself by sousing the finest legal minds in London. And medical,” he added, nodding at me.

“If I were any kind of physician,” I groaned, “I would have us all committed for engaging in such dangerous sport.”

“I say we hang Lestrade up by his toes on the bar-sign,” Jones grumbled.

“I say we remember who put flour in my file-cabinet the day of Lord Sheridan’s visit,” Lestrade answered sharply.

“Oh, so it’s come to that, Mr. G. Lestrade? Well, I can tell you –”

“Easy, Jones,” Bradstreet soothed, pulling the irate inspector back down into his seat. “Look, I can take a joke as well as the next fellow, but you can’t get out of it as easily as all that, Lestrade. I can’t imagine that for the next decade of your life your family simply addressed you as the seventh letter of the alphabet.”

“And hence our friend’s reluctance to call to attention his lack of forename,” Holmes put in, smiling beatifically. “You see, once it became known that his family addressed him by some other sobriquet at home, the possibilities become much more interesting.”

“And much more varied,” Gregson protested. “The first initial –”

“Is still the letter G,” Holmes answered with an airy wave. “That fact may be ascertained from the good inspector’s nervousness that we might still guess his childhood nickname; it would be quite impossible otherwise. Friend Lestrade realizes even now that he made a fatal error when he mentioned his mother’s maiden name. Combined with the knowledge that he is originally from the East End –”

“Of course!” I ejaculated. “I thought the name sounded familiar. Cottingham, as in Cottingham and Sons, the poulterer. Those are the finest geese –”

Not a man of us could miss it; at the word “geese,” he visibly flinched. Even Hopkins noticed. The young inspector sat up, goggling at Lestrade, his big brown eyes as wide as saucers, every over-inflated capillary keenly visible.

Suddenly, Hopkins threw back his head and laughed. “Gosling!” he shrieked, his face alight with drunken merriment before he flopped back down in his seat once more, once again prisoner to Morpheus.

As one man, the rest of us turned to face Lestrade, who had discovered an extremely interesting speck of dirt upon the table.

“I am only going to tell this story once,” said he in a voice so quiet that we had to strain to hear him. “I am going to tell it, and then you are all going to forget all about it.”

“Are you paying for the drinks?” Bradstreet muttered.

“And for the pot of coffee we’ll need to recover,” Lestrade answered, his mouth flickering with the ghost of a sheepish smile.

“If you’re paying, then we’re forgetting,” Gregson said solemnly. “Now tell.”

Lestrade took a deep breath. “You see, Mr. Holmes was right,” he began mournfully. “I shouldn’t have put you to guessing the impossible if I didn’t think I could escape having to admit to my childhood name. Yes, when I visit Mum in Little Cheatham, she still calls me Gosling, and I shall ever answer to it for her sake.

“My great-grandfather was Roderick Cottingham, poulterer to kings. The family’s business is now in my Uncle Ned’s hands; he’s the only other person I let call me by that name. I grew up in the goose-pens, and I’m not ashamed to say I earned my first sixpence feeding the meanest old ganders that no one else could get near. I’m not a large man, but I’ve never been afraid of rousting a drunk or cuffing a thug, nor would you be, gentlemen, if you’d had to deal with some of the tough customers I met in Uncle Ned’s barn.

“I was born in the barn, in fact; Mum was helping out her parents for the Christmas rush when she went into labour. I wasn’t expected for another two weeks. Well, since it was so cold, and they figured they had nothing to lose –”

“Tell me they didn’t use the egg incubators,” I broke in.

Lestrade frowned at me. “Of course not,” he said. “That would have been cruel, being all alone like that. They put me in with the newly-hatched goslings.”

I opened my mouth, about to protest that a nest of birds could hardly be called a sanitary environment for a newborn, but Holmes touched my sleeve.

“No doubt the family’s long association with the birds has produced a beneficial effect upon their immune system,” said he. “So, you were dubbed Gosling in honour of your foster-brothers and sisters, who, no doubt found their way to some of the finest tables of London Society –”

“Please, Mr. Holmes!” Lestrade winced, but the tension had been broken; after all, one could not be angry with a man for having been saddled with such an embarrassing secret. Our talk soon drifted away into other topics before we started to make the accepted gestures that would permit our rapid departure.

“So what do we do with Sleeping Beauty?” Bradstreet asked, pointing a finger at the loudly snoring Hopkins.

“I’ll take him home,” Lestrade said. “I owe it to him to make sure he gets to bed safely.” As each of us bid the man good-night, it was clear that we had all resolved to leave this secret behind, never speaking of it again. What had happened in the back room of the Four Crowns would stay in the back room of the Four Crowns.

As for me and Holmes, of course, the silence lasted until we got home and were preparing for bed. I plumped my pillow, immediately all too conscious of the goose-down just underneath the cotton of the pillow-ticking. I punched the pillow playfully. “Gosling, indeed,” I chortled.

“Now, now, Doctor,” Holmes chuckled, sliding between the sheets, “I am equally to blame; I suspected something was amiss from the start, and yet allowed the drinking game to continue.”

“Then perhaps I should punish you,” I yawned, blowing out the lamp. “I shall think more about the possibilities when I awake. The size of my headache shall be the determining factor –”

“But shall you take into account,” Holmes interrupted, wrapping his arms around my waist, “that I know that your middle name is not, in fact ‘Hamish’?”

My heart leapt to my throat. “You wouldn’t –”

Sherlock Holmes kissed my cheek. “Good-night, John,” he said, rolling over.
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