By every account—and by that, honestly, I meant my mother’s—Charlotte was the epitome of a Holmes. Coming from my mother, that wasn’t a compliment. You’d think that after all this time, our families would have drifted apart, and in most ways I suppose we had. But my mother would run into the odd Holmes at Scotland Yard fund-raisers or the Edgar Awards dinners or, as in the case of Holmes’s aunt Araminta, an auction of my great-great-great-grandfather’s literary agent’s—Arthur Conan Doyle’s—things. I had always been enthralled with the idea of this girl, the only Holmes who was my age (as a kid, I thought we’d meet and the two of us would go on wild adventures), but my mother always discouraged me without saying why.
I knew nothing about her but that the police had let her assist on her first case when she was ten years old. The diamonds she helped recover were worth three million pounds. My father had told me about it during our weekly phone call, in an attempt to get me to open up to him. It hadn’t worked. At least, not in the way that he’d planned.
I dreamed about that diamond theft for months. How I could’ve been there by her side, her trusted companion. One night, I lowered her down into the Swiss bank from a skylight, my rope the only thing holding her above the booby-trapped floor. The next, we raced through the cars of a runaway train, chased by black-masked bandits shouting in Russian. When I saw a story about a stolen painting on the front page of the newspaper, I told my mother that Charlotte Holmes and I were going to solve the case. My mother cut me off, saying, “Jamie, if you try to do anything like that before you turn eighteen, I will sell every last one of your books in the night, starting with your autographed Neil Gaiman.”
(Before they’d divorced, my father was prone to saying, “You know, your mother’s only a Watson by marriage,” with a pointedly lofted eyebrow.)
The only real conversation my mother and I’d had about the Holmeses happened right before I left. We’d been discussing Sherringford— Well. She had been monologuing about how much I’d like it there while I packed up my closet in silence, wondering if I flung myself out the window, would it properly kill me or just break both my legs. Finally, she made me tell her something I was looking forward to, and to spite her (and because it was true), I told her I was excited, and nervous, to finally meet my counterpart in the Holmes family.
Which didn’t go over well.
“Lord knows how your great-great-great-grandfather put up with that man,” she said with a roll of her eyes.
“Sherlock?” I asked. At least now we weren’t talking about Sherringford.
My mother harrumphed. “I always imagined he’d just been bored. Victorian gentlemen, you know. Didn’t have too much going on. But it never seemed to me that their friendship ran both ways. Those Holmeses, they’re strange. They still drill their children from birth in deductive skills. Discourage them making friends, or so I’ve heard. I can’t say it’s healthy to keep a child away like that. Araminta is nice enough, I suppose, but then again I don’t live with her. I can’t imagine what it was like for the good Dr. Watson. The last thing you need is to take up with someone like her.”
“It’s not like I’m going to marry this girl,” I said, digging in the back of my closet for my rugby kit. “I was just interested to meet her, that’s all.”
“I’ve heard that she’s one of the stranger ones,” she insisted. “It’s not as if they’ve sent her away to America on a lark.”
I looked pointedly down at my suitcase. “No, that’s usually not a reward.”
“Well, I hope for your sake she’s lovely,” my mum said quickly. “Just do be careful there, love.”
It’s stupid to admit to it, but my mother isn’t usually wrong. I mean, the whole sending me to Sherringford thing was a terrible idea, but I understood it at its core. She had been paying quite a bit—money we didn’t really have—for me to attend Highcombe School, and all because I’d insisted that I wanted to be a writer. There were a few famous novelists who taught there . . . not that any of them had really taken to me. Sherringford, despite its obvious drawbacks (Connecticut, my father) had as strong an English program, or better. And they offered to take me for free, as long as I did my best impression of an excited rugger for them now and again.
But at Sherringford, I kept the writer thing to myself. A constant, low-level drone of fear kept me from showing my work to anyone; with someone like Dr. Watson in your family, you didn’t want to invite any comparison. I did my best to hide my work away, so I was surprised when it almost came up that day over lunch.
Tom and I had grabbed sandwiches and sat down under an ash tree off the quad with some other guys from Michener Hall. Tom was digging around in my bag for some paper to spit his gum into. Normally it would’ve annoyed me, having someone shuffle carelessly through my things, but he was acting like any of my old Highcombe friends would, and so I let him.
“Can I tear a sheet out of this?” he asked, holding up my notebook.
It was only through sheer force of will that I kept from grabbing it out of his hands. “Yeah,” I said indifferently, fishing chips out of a bag.
He flipped through it, quickly at first but slowing as he went. “Huh,” he said, and I shot him a warning look that he didn’t see.
“What is it?” someone asked. “Love poems? Erotic stories?”
“Dirty limericks,” Dobson, my hallmate, said.