“It’s quite an old program, and a popular one, and really, I think people are just indescribably stupid sometimes about their own safety.” I retrieved the cigarette from my pocket and lit it. Watson winced, but said nothing. It was my last remaining vice, and not one I intended to keep for much longer, and still his disapproval stung a bit.
“Was she sent an orchid, too? Matilda?” Watson asked, his eyes on the thing between my lips. I frowned, then stubbed it out on my armchair, and Watson winced at that too.
Mouse emerged from under the bed and wound her way over to me, and with a sigh, I gathered her up in my arms. “She was. Not that she was there to collect it. It didn’t go to the theater—at this point, the culprit must’ve known they would be closely watched—but to her rooms. The suite she shared with Theo and Rupert.”
“And?”
“Not to be melodramatic,” I said, “and do know that I’m just quoting Dr. Larkin here—”
“Oh, come on, just tell me—”
I cleared my throat. “The orchid was a bright, bloody red.”
Six
“RED? LIKE, THEY DYED IT?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t see it. And unfortunately, orchids don’t fall into my areas of expertise. Though from what I can tell, it is a fascinatingly complex field—”
With that, Watson flopped backward onto the bed as though he’d been shot.
“I refuse to apologize for having an interest in botany,” I said, trying not to laugh. I was always trying very hard not to laugh.
It’s possible he could tell. I never knew with him. Either way, he sat up on his elbows, smiling at me a bit lopsidedly. “Red orchids, white orchids—I’m sure you’ll dig in soon enough. Either way, they’re creepy. We’re headed back into creepy territory, here. And this is a cold case, a year old. Matilda could be anywhere.”
“The last case we had was hot enough for a lifetime,” I said. “And I don’t think we’re looking for Matilda. Not exactly. What Larkin wants is preventative work. Protecting the students who come this year. I’d prefer to do that than to clean up a Moriarty’s mess.”
He grew serious at that. “Do you have a plan?”
“I do,” I allowed. “But it’s getting quite late. Unless—unless you wanted to stay. It would be fine. With me, I mean, if you stayed.”
Caution was my watchword. Watson and I were rebuilding something, and I wasn’t quite sure what it would end up being, and in the meantime I didn’t want to push things unnecessarily, and also he still made me incredibly nervous.
Watson was watching me. “I want to know what you’ve deduced that made you take this insane leap,” he said finally. “But—won’t it foil whatever dastardly plan you have, if I’m not in the room with Rupert tonight to hear his reaction?”
“A bit,” I said.
Watson shrugged. “Then I’ll see what I can do.”
“Tell me what he says in the morning. And I’ll tell you what I’ve surmised.”
“An intelligence swap, Detective?”
I felt my lips twitch. “Indeed, Doctor.”
“Tomorrow, then,” he said. “Breakfast before your first lecture?”
“Come by at eight. We’ll have scones. I’ll walk you to class.”
He smiled to himself, his eyes gone soft. Off somewhere in a memory, or another life. Back at Sherringford, perhaps. “’Night,” he said, and before he left he pulled me in and kissed me on the forehead, and this once, my body let me accept it without flinching away.
It was becoming abundantly clear that, contrary to appearances and negotiated terms, I had no idea at all what I was doing.
I WAS AWAKE AT SIX THIRTY, AS I HAD BEEN SINCE I’D BEEN back on a proper sleep schedule. (It had been some time since I’d been up smoking til dawn in a nest of my own research.) Leander was still in bed when I got up—he’d come in quite late the night before, past midnight—and so I made myself a quiet cup of tea, poured it into a takeaway mug, and set out for a wander so that my footsteps wouldn’t wake him. It was a pacing sort of morning.
There had been some truth to what I’d said last night at dinner, that I was anxious at the thought of entering a new social sphere with Watson at my side. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him there. I wanted him there desperately. But I was worried about the weight of expectation—well. I was worried about my expectations for myself. I had been presented with a pretty little puzzle box of a mystery, here, and already I was showboating for his benefit rather than considering the case.
As in: Did I really need to run my foot up Rupert’s pant leg? There were many paths up the mountain, after all. And yet here we were.
Here, right now, was the little café down the street from our flat. It was called Blackmarket, though there was no whiff of any illegal activity on the premises. They sold coffee, and muffins, and a “cheeky snowman” latte that I only ordered when alone, so that as few people as possible would hear me say the words.
It was what I was doing just then, placing my order (and asking them to skip the snowman face they drew with strawberry syrup onto the whipped cream, I did have some last reserves of dignity) when Anwen walked up beside me. It wasn’t yet seven o’clock, but the café table behind her was heaped with books. I could just see the title of the one on top: Speech and Motivation in Shakespeare’s Tragedies.
“I’d thought you looked familiar last night,” she said, by way of greeting. “I must have seen you here before. I’m here most mornings in the summer.”
“Oh,” I said, because I hadn’t had my latte yet, and that was about all I could muster.
She’d been up for some time, clearly: her hair in a fishtail braid, her nails freshly painted. I could still smell the polish.
She seemed to want me to continue, so I said, “So you come here often?”
“I mean, yeah?” she said, as though I was daft. “Uh, yeah, this is one of our regular spots. Convenient to St. Genesius—the theater’s right over there, do you see it? Through the window. Which doesn’t matter much to Rup, he’ll follow me and Theo pretty much anywhere.”
I nodded. The barista handed me my drink.
Anwen looked at me again, as though she was waiting for me to give her something in return. Talkative people didn’t often do this, pause for the other person to speak; usually, when presented with a willing listener, they’d prattle on until stopped. But Anwen seemed to want something specific from me.
“I live down the street,” I offered.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s quite a nice address, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, and waited.
“Jamie’s very nice.”
“I’ve often thought so.” Despite my request, the barista had gone and drawn the snowman face onto my drink anyway. When I took a drink, I made its eyes bleed across the whipped cream. Anwen watched, fascinated. Her eyes flickered back up to meet mine.
I don’t often feel the need to apologize for myself or my actions in a social setting (really, I’ve come to like myself quite well in the day-to-day) but there was something about this girl that made me feel deeply ridiculous. My snowman wasn’t helping.
I thought for a moment. “I don’t have a lot to say before my coffee.” It was the sort of thing, after all, that people said.
“Rupert suggested that I ask you to run lines with me,” she said. It was a particularly ham-fisted sort of insult. Framed this way, Anwen herself would never want to run lines with me; she was only suggesting it out of obligation. “I’m doing costumes, but I’m auditioning for Ophelia, too. Rupert says I play her a bit unusually. It would be interesting to have your take.”
I had told her the night before I was auditioning for the part. This was either a bald-faced power play, or she was so assured in her own talent that she thought I ought to bask in it as well.
Or she wanted to be my friend. That was, perhaps, the scariest of all.
She didn’t know I’d already been called in to understudy the role, so the pressure was entirely off. An
d the possibilities ripe. “Do you want to meet at the theater?” I asked, putting just the tiniest bit of quaver in my voice. There it was, the whir of my brain; the coffee must have kicked in.
“Perfect,” she said, reaching out to lightly touch my arm. “I’ll meet you at the doors at noon.”
After an encounter like that, I wasn’t going to stick around.
Instead I had my usual constitutional. I chose a building on the St. Genesius grounds I hadn’t yet explored (the boathouse) and mapped it top to bottom. I loitered by the door, looking intently at my phone, until the clerk at the desk disappeared into the back, and then made a quick inventory. The number of punts; the number of poles, aluminum and wooden; the entrances and exits, the photographs on the walls.
I charted it all down in my head. The next day, I’d explore the meadow across the river. It would be good to know how long it would take to cross it if one were running flat out (being pursued by wild dogs or similar). I was still setting up a hypothesis in my head when I rounded the corner to my flat and found Watson at my front door, a paper bag in hand.
“He thinks it was Anwen’s foot,” he said.
I snorted. “Good morning to you too.”
Yawning, he held out the bag between us. Inside was an untouched blueberry scone and the crumbs of a second. “Rupert kept me up until dawn. ‘What was Anwen thinking,’ and ‘Anwen said this last year to me in the pub but maybe I misheard her what do you think did she really say “I want to kiss your neck” or maybe my neck had mist on it?’ and ‘God, Jamie, Anwen’s foot felt just like heaven—’”
“He did not,” I said, laughing, and he took my arm as we set off back toward school.
“He came pretty close. Is that what you wanted? For him to need to spill, and for me to be there?”
I nodded. “He couldn’t tell Theo. You’re new, so you have no alliances, and you have a girlfriend, so there’s less chance you want Anwen for yourself. You’re perfect.”
We passed the St. Genesius library, its weathered brick (excellent for climbing) and high stained-glass windows (somewhat less ideal). “Theo made it sound like we’re going to live in there, with all the work we’ll be doing,” Watson said, craning his neck.
“You’re only taking the one course,” I told him. “I’m taking four.”
“Four? I thought you were taking seven.”
“I took on a case,” I said. “That’s three courses in itself. And also the administrators were a bit concerned about when I would sleep. I told them it wouldn’t be an issue, that I had my methods, and then Leander gave me that look as though he was going to send me back to rehab without even tossing my room first, and it seemed far simpler to just keep the chemistry courses, and my poetry tutorial, and be rid of all the rest.”
“Poetry,” Watson said, casting a look at me. “Poetry.”
“There is something wrong with you, if that’s the most concerning part of what I said.”
“You’re not using again,” he said, a statement.
“I’m not.”
We were passing the theater then. Cream brick, several stories, built in the fifteenth century. Watson could tell you more about its eaves and towers, I’m sure. I was counting its windows and wondering how much trouble I’d be in if I had to break one.
“Then my biggest concern,” he was saying, “are the nightmares I’m going to have about all the morgue poems you’re going to write. The murder poems. The I made this poison for you, poor swain poems—”
“I have layers,” I reminded him. “What if all my poems were about my grandmother?”
“You have a grandmother?”
“I didn’t spring whole from the head of Zeus.”
“Scary. Pass.”
“Kittens, then,” I said. We had made it to the steps of my lecture hall. “I could write about kittens. Tulips. My future wedding—”
“Completely terrifying.”
I squeezed his elbow. I adored him. “My lecture is about to start. Can you please sum up, without rhetorical or dramatic flourishes, what you learned from Rupert?”
Out of respect for my methods, he laid it out in a numbered list.
Rupert was attracted to Anwen and had been since he’d taken her suitcases up three stories to her room early last summer.
He had believed, based on fairly conclusive evidence, that she might feel the same way. (Staying up all night talking about television they’d loved as a child; her repeatedly touching his shoulder, his hair, etc.)
Rupert had then introduced Anwen to Theo, and immediately her attentions, and perhaps her affection, shifted targets. Theo did not reciprocate: he was interested in Matilda Wilkes. This didn’t seem to matter to Anwen.
Rupert did not resent Anwen or Theo for this turn of events. Instead, he made himself indispensable to them.
“It doesn’t feel like he’s just been creepily hanging out, waiting for Anwen to love him,” Watson said, “or, like, waiting to push Theo off a cliff, but it also doesn’t not feel like he’s doing those things?” He glanced down at his shoes.
“For the record, I’ve never thought you were creepily hanging out, waiting for me to love you,” I said, as it felt necessary.
Watson did not look back up at me. “Well, I think Rupert’s sort of sad,” he said, “as in pathetic-sad.”
“I have two minutes,” I said, as I literally did not have time for Watson’s unfounded bit of self-flagellation.
He ran a hand through his hair, shifted his bag, glanced up at me.
“No one knows anything about where Anwen’s from,” he said. “Her parents. Her family. Where exactly in Wales, and Rupert thinks that if she didn’t have the accent he wouldn’t even know that much. She avoids the subject totally. But—
“Even though Theo denies it, Rupert thinks he knows her whole story.”
The students were streaming around us now, up and down the long steps to the lecture hall.
“You have biochemistry,” Watson said. He could be quite obvious.
“Yes. And then I’m meeting Anwen at noon at the theater. To run lines.”
“I’ll catch up with you after?” He took a step toward me, then hesitated. “Do we—do I—”
“Oh,” I said, realizing, and threw my arms around his neck. My schoolbag thudded satisfyingly against his jacket; I had forgotten what it was like to touch someone like this—or had I? When had I done it last? “Good-bye, poor swain.”
“I hate you,” he said, his nose in my hair. “Have a good lecture.”
Seven
ONE FEATURE OF MY VERY PARTICULAR UPBRINGING IS that I am able to absorb large amounts of information while my brain loiters somewhere else altogether.
An illustration: my father, at the dinner table, liked to engage my mother in lengthy conversations about horse racing or sea anemones or a vaccine she was developing at her lab, and just as my eyes would unfocus (it didn’t concern me, after all), he would turn and have me recite their words back verbatim. By age seven I was able to do this easily; by age eight, I could do it while thinking about something else.
All of this is to say that I could recite the entirety of my first Oxford biochemistry lecture (thank God, as I had a tutor quizzing me on it the day after next), and still I hadn’t heard a word. I had spent the hour in the small mirrored room in my head, where I examined myself and my motives, as another feature of my upbringing was that, since I was not allowed to have feelings as a child, I continued to have difficulty having feelings as an eighteen-year-old girl.
For instance: Why on earth did Watson touching me make me feel so disordered? I had applied rules to our courtship. Rules were, by definition, orderly. And still I felt too hot, that my skin was too tight. In the past when I’d felt this way I’d played something feverish on my violin and exorcized it from my body.
I didn’t think that that would work now.
Part of me recoiled at feeling so out of control; another part examined closely the part that recoiled; another hugged
herself tightly and tried not to look at herself in the mirror.
As usual, the muddle of myself was too much to work out, and I arrived at the theater hoping for an easier mystery to solve. The place had a certain charm, I had to admit: like the other buildings on the St. Genesius campus, the white marble was scattered about with light. The front was rounded to incorporate the rows of seats inside, and when I tipped my head back to see the roof, I spied a small white tower that looked as though it had been hot-glued on. A crow’s nest, I thought. I wondered what its purpose was.
The doors were wooden, built into a larger wooden wall reinforced with crosshatched metal, and when I stepped into the vestibule, that small space was as hushed as a Catholic church I visited once in New York. (I’d needed to change my wig in the vestry.) It had a similar smell, too, like cloth and dust, though what I could see was spotless. There was a small ticket office to one side, built an obvious four centuries after the rest of the building, and a coatroom at the other, and when I walked through the second set of doors into the theater itself, I paused for a moment to get my bearings.
Rows of seats leading down to the stage, red velvet and gold leaf, everything oppressive with age and still, in its own way, beautiful. I was coming to notice this about Oxford, the heavy sense of history, how it made one feel important and insignificant in the same breath. I’d been around wealth before, or the appearance of it; my parents had done a very good job pretending they hadn’t lost their fortune. But our own claim to fame could only be traced back a hundred years and change. Before that, we were humble country squires, and before that, I didn’t know.
Subtract another five hundred years, and Oxford would still have been standing.
This was all rather abstract for me, this musing about atmosphere, but it wasn’t as though I had immediate matters to absorb me. Coming to a mystery a year after the original incidents meant that you did a bit of useless wandering before you struck on anything gold. Still, I had some time before I was scheduled to meet Anwen, so I decided to start looking around.
A Question of Holmes Page 5