It started with the usual sorts of things. Sherlockian societies and book clubs. Fan sites for my great-great-great-grandfather’s stories, but far more for the film and television adaptations. Flipping through the pages, I found printouts from some of the fan sites that tracked the movements of the Holmes clan. They were intensely secretive, Holmes’s family, and so gathering kernels of information had become something of a sport for the greater world.
I folded out a taped-together family tree, one in my father’s own handwriting. Watsons, always the record-keepers. At the top, he’d placed Sherlock. Then came Henry, the son he’d had so late in life, categorically refusing to name the mother. I traced through Henry’s sons down to Holmes’s father, Alistair, and his siblings: Leander, Araminta, and Julian. A small line connected Alistair to Emma, Holmes’s mother; below that was a fork each for Milo and Charlotte Holmes.
I browsed through the articles about Holmes’s first case, when she tracked down the Jameson diamonds. In a photograph with her parents at the Met’s press conference, she stood pale and solemn-faced between her parents. On one side stood her father, looking at the camera with hooded eyes. Her mother had blond hair and a dark-red smile, one possessive hand on her daughter’s shoulder.
Enough of what I already knew. I flipped through to the last page and worked backward. Information on Leander Holmes’s charity. The page before it was a clipping from a Yard fund-raiser. And the one before that, like a lump of pyrite nestled into all that gold, was from the Daily Mail.
It was a single paragraph, down at the very end of a long stream of gossip, squeezed between a bit on the Royal Family and another about Shelby’s favorite band:
Remember how the oh-so-secretive Holmeses made a big splash last year inviting boy-genius heartthrob (and DPhil student) August Moriarty, 20, to be a live-in tutor for their daughter Charlotte, 14? The two families have had bad blood between them for more than a hundred years now, and daddy Alistair wanted to make a very public peace offering. Well, it looks like things at Casa Holmes took a turn this past week. August was escorted out by the police, and not for diddling with the children! Our source tells us that he got caught feeding Charlotte’s dirty little drugs habit. Oxford’s already expelled him, the Moriarty family’s disowned him: what’s next for the former future professor? As for Miss Charlotte Honoria Holmes, we hear it’s boarding school or bust.
So her middle name was Honoria.
I had to read it again. A third time. A fourth. And then I made myself read between the lines. Was I feeling bad for August Moriarty? Was that what this was? Anyone else would look at the age disparity there and think, Oh, that asshole took advantage of an innocent young girl, but Charlotte Holmes wasn’t innocent. She was imperious, and demanding, with a self-destructive streak that ran as wide as the Atlantic. I thought about the way she’d run roughshod over Detective Shepard when she’d wanted in on this case. About how she’d convinced me of my own worthlessness when she’d wanted to be alone with her homemade bomb. Her blackmailing a math tutor into buying her drugs was only a hop, skip, and a jump away.
The worst part? I’d almost known. I’d made an educated guess, that night in the diner, and she’d let me believe it was the whole story—that she was sent to America because of her drug problem. Never mind the Moriarty at the center of it all.
If any of this was true, August would have a million reasons to want to bring Holmes down. I racked my brain to remember what Lena had said that night at poker. If she was right that Holmes was upset about August her freshman year, it was further proof that she did actually have a heart, and a conscience, despite her protests. (Honestly, if I were Holmes, I’d be worried he was living on a street corner somewhere.) Milo had come to visit and said . . . what? That he’d take care of things. But Lena hadn’t known how, only that Holmes had been happier after Milo left. At the time, I’d thought, oh, drone hit. And now I just wanted to know how much it had set Milo back to pay August off. I hoped August had been given a sizable check, maybe a little house by the sea. A book-lined study where the poor bastard could continue doing his math on his own terms.
It would’ve been one thing for a Holmes to fall in love with a Moriarty, I thought bitterly. In fact, it’d be sweepingly, crushingly romantic—and on cue, my imagination began to color it in. Charlotte and August, our star-crossed lovers, locked in a constant battle of deductive wills. Missile codes swapped via elaborate games of footsie. Having veal cutlets in the garden while debating whether to annex France. Et cetera, ad nauseam.
The thing was, Charlotte Holmes didn’t fall in love.