“Sometimes I think you don’t give me enough credit,” she said instead.
“What?” I sat up. “I just . . . look, okay, maybe I’m feeling a little punchy. It’s late. But I don’t want you to feel like you have to act a certain way, or impress anyone. We’re impressed already. You don’t have to act like you like my mum, or my sister, or where I live—”
“I like your flat.”
“It’s the size of your lab at school—”
“I like your flat because you grew up here,” she said, looking at me steadily, “and I like eating your dinner because it’s yours, which makes it better than mine. And I like your sister because she’s smart, and she worships you, which means she is very smart. You talk about her like she’s a child, I’ve noticed, but the fact that she’s attempting to explore her nascent sexuality by listening to a lot of droopy-voiced boy sopranos isn’t something you should tease her for. It’s certainly safer than the alternative.”
The conversation had taken a turn I hadn’t expected. Though maybe I should have seen it coming from the moment the words “you’re pretty” slipped out of my mouth.
She’d pushed herself up to face me. Her sheets were twisted around her legs, her hair rumpled, and she looked like she was in some French film about illicit sex. Which was not something I should be thinking. I ran through a familiar list in my head, the least erotic things I could think of: Grandma, my seventh birthday party, The Lion King. . . .
“The alternative?” I repeated.
“It’s rather better to dip in a toe before you get dragged underwater.”
“We don’t need to talk about this—”
“I’m so sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable.”
“I was going to say if you don’t want to. How did we even get here?”
“You were trashing your upbringing. I was defending it. I like it here, Jamie. We’re going to my parents’ house next, and it won’t be like this. I won’t be like this.”
“Like what, exactly?”
“Stop being dense,” she snapped. “It doesn’t suit you at all.”
For the record, I wasn’t being dense. I was trying, repeatedly, to give her an out. I knew she was skirting right around the edges of something we didn’t ever talk about. She was raped. We were framed for that rapist’s murder. Whatever feelings she had for me were caught up in that trauma, and so whatever feelings I had for her were on ice for the time being. While I might, on occasion, spiral into some stupid reverie about how beautiful she was, I’d never voiced those thoughts. While I’d given her openings to talk to me about the two of us, I’d never pushed her. The closest we’d come were these elliptical conversations at dawn, where we circled around the subject until I said something wrong and she shut down completely. For hours after, she wouldn’t even look at me.
“I was just trying to say that I won’t go there if you don’t want me to,” I said, and by there, I meant Sussex, and Lee Dobson, who I routinely fantasize about digging up and killing again, and talking about the two of us, which frankly, I am not equipped to do, and even though your hair keeps brushing your collarbone and you lick your lips when you’re nervous, I’m not thinking about you like that, I’m not, I swear to God I’m not.
The best and worst thing about Holmes was that she heard everything I didn’t say along with everything I did.
“Jamie.” It was a sad whisper, or maybe it was too quiet for me to tell. To my complete shock, she reached out and took my hand, bringing my palm up to her lips.
This? This had never happened before.
I could feel her hot breath, the brush of her mouth. I bit back a sound at the back of my throat and kept myself still, terrified I might scare her away or worse, that this might break apart the both of us.
She ran a finger down my chest. “Is this what you want?” she asked me, and with that, my willpower broke completely.
I couldn’t answer, not with words. Instead, I dropped my hands down to her waist, intending to kiss her the way I’d wanted for months—a deep, searching kiss, one hand tangled in her hair, her pressed up against me like I was the only other person in the world.
But when I touched her, she recoiled. A rush of fear went across her face. I watched as that fear turn to rage, and then to something like despair.
We stared at each other for an impossible moment. Without a word, she pulled away and lay down on her mattress, her back to me. Beyond her, the bruised colors of dawn spread out across the window.
“Charlotte,” I said quietly, reaching out to touch her shoulder. She shook off my hand. I couldn’t blame her for that. But it twisted something in my chest.
For the first time, I realized that maybe my presence was more of a curse than a comfort.
two
THIS WASN’T THE FIRST TIME SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED between us.
We’d kissed. Once. It had been brief, a brush of a thing. I’d been sort of dying at the time, so the kiss might’ve come from pity; we were at the end of our murder investigation, so it might have come from a misplaced sense of relief. Either way, I hadn’t really seen it as a promise of things to come. She’d said as much. Even if she did want something romantic with me, it wasn’t hard to see she was working through a metric ton of psychic damage. Like I said, I had no intentions of pushing her. I didn’t know if I wanted to push past this, if I’d shatter the strange, fragile thing that we’d spun between us, if we’d be worse off. After last night, it seemed like we would be.
We didn’t go to the Tate that next morning. We didn’t sneak out for breakfast on a couple hours’ sleep, as we’d done in the days before. We packed in silence, Holmes pale in her dressing gown and socks, and after we said good-bye to my mother and my teary little sister, we walked to the station in silence. We rode to Sussex in a private compartment, her face turned resolutely to the window. I pretended to read my novel, and then stopped pretending. I wasn’t fooling her, or anyone.
When we finally got off the train at Eastbourne, a black car was waiting for us at the curb.
Holmes turned to me, hands stuffed in her pockets. “This will be fine,” she murmured. “You’ll be there, so it’ll be fine.”
“It would probably help the whole ‘fine’ thing if we were, you know, talking to each other.” I tried not to sound as hurt as I felt.
She looked surprised. “I always want to talk to you,” she said. “But I know you. You always want to make things better, and I don’t know how us talking to each other right now will do anything but make it worse.”
As the driver came around to take our luggage, she patted my shoulder in her absent way and stepped down to say hello. I stood there holding my suitcase, furious at her for deciding on silence as a way to handle this. For making every decision. She treated me like I was her pet, I thought, and it came over me in waves, the kind of world-splitting lostness I hadn’t felt in months.
It was that same feeling that had gotten me into the whole mess that was Charlotte-Holmes-and-Jamie-Watson to begin with, and I wasn’t so far gone as to not appreciate the irony.
HER PARENTS WEREN’T WAITING FOR US WHEN WE GOT TO the house, which was fine by me. I didn’t think I could manage to be friendly to them, or anyone. A housekeeper met us instead, a neat, quiet woman my mother’s age. She took our coats and showed us down to Holmes’s rooms, and it was dark by the time we finished the lunch she brought down to us on a tray.
That night, after my impromptu lesson on European history, that same housekeeper produced a wooden box for me to stand on while she hemmed Milo’s too-long pants, a length of measuring tape draped over her shoulders. She’d been the only person in Holmes’s room when I returned with my suit. As I stood awkwardly, trying not to fidget, I tried to imagine where Holmes was hiding. Maybe shooting pool in a billiards room, or feeling her way blindfolded through some family obstacle course, the way Holmeses were rumored to train their kids. Maybe she was eating chocolate biscuits in the closet.
“Finished,” the housek
eeper said finally. She stood up to survey her work with some satisfaction. “You look very handsome, Master Jamie. The open collar suits you.”
“Oh God,” I said, tugging on my cuffs. “Please don’t call me that. Do you know where H— where Charlotte is?”
“Upstairs, I imagine.”
“There’s a lot of upstairs here.” I had a vision of myself wandering aimlessly through their house in a borrowed suit. Speaking of obstacle courses. “Second floor? Third? Fourth? Uh . . . is there a fourth?”
“Try her father’s study,” she said, holding the door open. “Third floor, east wing.”
I think it might have taken less time for me to get from London to Sussex, but I found his study at last, at the end of a mullioned hall hung with portraits. This wing felt older, darker than the rest of the house. The paintings glowered down at me. In one, Holmes’s father and his siblings were clustered around a table piled high with books. Alistair Holmes looked just like his daughter, serious and withdrawn, hands folded before him. The one with the rakish smile was clearly Leander, I thought. I wondered if he’d arrived yet, and hoped he had.
“Come in, already,” said a muffled voice from behind the study door, though I hadn’t knocked. Of course they knew I was there. There were secrets in this house, it was clear, but I wasn’t going to be able to keep any of my own.
I reached for the handle, then stopped. I hadn’t noticed this final portrait. Beside me, Sherlock Holmes sat with pursed lips and a magnifying glass clutched in one hand, clearly annoyed by the whole enterprise of being painted, at having to do his best impression of himself for someone else’s benefit. Dr. Watson, my great-great-great-grandfather, stood behind him. He rested a reassuring hand on his friend’s shoulder.
I could’ve taken it as a sign that everything would be okay. But I looked at that hand for a long minute and wondered how many times Sherlock Holmes had tried to shake it off. Watsons, I thought, generations of masochists, and pushed open the door.
The room was dimly lit. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. A massive desk stood in its center, and behind it, bookshelves spread out like wings. Sitting in front of all that collected knowledge was Alistair Holmes, his canny eyes fixed on me.
I liked him immediately, though I knew I shouldn’t. By all accounts, he’d driven his daughter half to death with his training and expectations. But he knew me. I could tell by the cataloguing look on his face, one I’d seen on Charlotte Holmes time and time again. He saw me for what I was, a flustered middle-class boy in a borrowed suit, and yet he didn’t judge. Honestly, I didn’t think he cared about my social class one way or another. After the emotional turmoil of the last few days, it was nice to encounter a little impassivity.
“Jamie,” he said in a surprising tenor. “Please, sit. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
“You too.” I perched in the armchair across from him. “Thanks so much for letting me stay with you.”
He waved a hand. “Of course. You’ve made my daughter very happy.”
“Thanks,” I said, though it wasn’t entirely true. I’d made her happy, or I thought I had. I’d also made her miserable. I’d held her while our hideout burned. I’d collapsed at her feet, too weak to stand, while Lucien Moriarty taunted her through Bryony Downs’s pink sparkly phone. This was a practice round. I wanted to see what was important to you. I wanted to see how much this foolish boy trusted you. I threaten him, and you kiss him. Cue strings. Cue the applause. And now I’d driven her to hide somewhere in her massive house by the sea, while her father made the kind of small talk with me that she’d always found abhorrent.
“Did you like that last painting in the hall, of our shared ancestors? I heard you stop to look at it.”
“You look a lot like Sherlock Holmes. Like the pictures I’ve seen of him, anyway,” I said. He nodded, and I found myself wanting to push past all the pleasantries and get to something real. “It made me think about how things have ended up. I mean, Charlotte and I are running around together. We’ve solved a murder case and found a Moriarty on the other end of it. It’s almost like history is repeating itself.”
“There are plenty of family businesses in the world,” he said, steepling his long fingers under his chin. “Men pass on their cobbler shops to their sons. Lawyers send their daughters away to school and then give them a place at the firm. We may have certain affinities that we pass down to our children, through genetic inheritance or through the way we teach them to think, but I don’t think it’s entirely out of our control. It’s not like we’re Sisyphus’s scions, forever pushing his boulder up the hill. Look at your father.”
“He’s in sales,” I said, trying to keep up with his train of thought.
Holmes’s father lifted an eyebrow. “And the woman who painted that portrait you were admiring in the hall was Professor Moriarty’s daughter, and she presented it to our family as an apology for her father’s actions. The past’s actions may echo, but you shouldn’t take it to mean that we’re predestined. Your father may like solving mysteries, but ever since he moved to the States, he’s seemed to be happier as a spectator. I imagined it helped him to be away from Leander’s influence. My brother is an actual agent of chaos.”
“Do you know when he’s getting in? Leander?”
“Tonight or tomorrow,” he said, checking his watch. “One can never really be exact, with him. The world must reshape itself around his desires. He’s much like Charlotte in that way. Not content to observe, not even content to mete out justice. Working for the benefit of others has never been their primary goal.”
I leaned forward, despite myself. Alistair Holmes was like a relic from a long-ago time—his formal language and determined stare. It was hypnotic, almost, and I didn’t resist the spell he cast. “Then what do you think Charlotte and Leander’s goals are?”
“To assert themselves on the world, or so I’ve always thought.” He shrugged. “They aren’t content to act behind the scenes. They always manage to be caught up in the play itself. In that way, I suppose they’re both more like Sherlock than any of the rest of us. He was always the would-be magician of the family. Do you know, I toiled away at the Ministry of Defense for years—I was the architect of some small international conflicts—and yet I rarely stepped out from behind my desk. I was content to move theoretical armies in a theoretical battleground, and let others make those ideas real. My son Milo does similar work. In many ways, for good or ill, he’s made himself from that mold.”
“But is that the best way?” I heard myself ask. I hadn’t meant to challenge him; it’d just slipped out. “Don’t you think it’s better to see the consequences of your actions firsthand, so that you can learn from them and make smarter decisions in the future?”
“You’re a thoughtful boy,” he said, though I wasn’t sure if he meant it. “Do you think I should have insisted that Charlotte stay and watch the fallout from her actions, after that debacle with August Moriarty, instead of sending her away for a fresh start?”
“I—”
“There are many ways of taking responsibility. We don’t always have to pay for our sins with our blood, or by sacrificing our futures. But I hear Charlotte down the hall, so we should change the subject.” He squinted at me. “You know, you aren’t what I imagined.”
“What did you expect?” I asked, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden. I wasn’t built for these sorts of deep-sea conversations, all murky ocean floor.
“Something rather less than you are.” He stood and walked to the window, looking over the dark hills that rolled down to the water. “It’s a shame.”
“What is?” I asked, but Holmes was rapping sharply on the study door.
“Mother is going to kill me,” she said when I opened it. “We should all be downstairs five minutes ago. Hello, Dad.”
“Lottie,” he said, without turning around. “I’ll be there soon. Why don’t you show Jamie down to the dining room?”
“Of course.” She tucked her hand
into my arm in a matter-of-fact way. Were we still fighting? Had we been fighting in the first place? I was exhausted by this train of thought, and anyway, it didn’t matter, not in her family’s sprawling house in the dead of winter. I was getting the sense that, without Holmes as my translator, I wasn’t going to make it through this week alive.
“You look very nice,” I told her, because she did—floor-length dress, dark lips, her hair tied up in a knot.
“I know,” she sighed. “Isn’t it awful? Let’s get this over with.”
EMMA HOLMES WASN’T SPEAKING TO ME. SHE WASN’T really speaking to anyone. Her left hand glittered with rings, and she was using it to rub the back of her neck. The other was busy with her wineglass. This wouldn’t be a problem except that if their dining room was a continent (it was the size of one), I was sitting somewhere in Siberia.
I’d been placed between Holmes’s mother and the silent, sullen daughter of the Czech ambassador, a girl named Eliska who gave me a once-over and sent a pleading look up into the ceiling. Either she could sniff out my lack of a trust fund, or she’d been hoping for a taller, buffer Jamie Watson, one who looked a little more like a volunteer fireman and less like a volunteer librarian. Either way, I’d been left to make small talk with Holmes’s mother while Eliska sighed over her food.
Holmes—my Holmes, if she was that—wasn’t any help. She’d cut up all the food on her plate and was now busily rearranging it, but I could tell from the distant look in her eyes that she was preoccupied with the conversation at the other end of the table. The only conversation, actually, something about the going prices for Picasso sketches. Alistair Holmes was correcting the weaselly-looking museum curator. Of course he knew more about art than someone who worked at the Louvre. I couldn’t muster the energy to be surprised.
In fact, I couldn’t muster much energy at all. I kept waiting for the threat in this place to be made real, something I could see or hear, something I could counter. I’d expected a colder welcome. Holmeses falling over themselves to put me in my intellectual place. Maybe an actual flaming hoop. What I’d gotten instead was some very nice food and one cryptic conversation with Holmes’s father. I thought back to the warning she’d given me before we’d arrived, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
The Last of August Page 2