“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 housekeeper 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.”