A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  Dedication

  For Chase, my partner in crime

  Family Trees

  Epigraph

  Thus I must act as my own chronicler.

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “THE LION’S MANE”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Family Trees

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Brittany Cavallaro

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  THAT MAY, IN THE WEEKS BEFORE THE BUSINESS WITH DR. Larkin and the Dramatics Society, the messages in the floodlights and the stripped-down production of Hamlet and the orchids, the orchids everywhere—before Jamie Watson came to stay and my life, as it often did, grew infinitely stranger—my uncle Leander took to throwing parties again.

  At first I wasn’t sure of the reason for it. May in Oxford is a milky, diluted affair, with little natural cause for celebration. Not to mention that my uncle was serving in loco parentis to me, a girl who had long passed the age when parenting was necessary; I must have been a burden to him. I was seventeen, after all, and I had ruined several lives, not the least of which was mine, and I had had my own bank account for ages. Surely that disqualified me from needing a father.

  And still I found myself reveling in it: the hiss and splutter of the electric kettle first thing, and the double-knock on my bedroom door that meant eggs and turkey bacon on the stove; the issues of New Scientist in the post, a magazine my uncle didn’t read, but I did; how sometimes I’d return home from the library to find my shirts and socks spinning in the little washing machine in the kitchen when I hadn’t put them in myself.

  How we had a childhood friend of Leander’s to dinner, and he walked in with a bottle of white wine and a carrier over his shoulder, and inside, making a small ruckus, was my cat Mouse. At my uncle’s request, she had been liberated from my father’s “care.” I was excused from dinner to take my cat to my room for immediate cuddling, and there, on the blue-and-white rug I had chosen because its pattern looked like fractals, as I buried my nose in Mouse’s soft white belly and she batted my face with her paws, I realized that I had been dismissed from the adults’ party like a child, and that, surprisingly, I didn’t mind in the least.

  These were not weighty things, taken separately, but together they covered me like a blanket, and just as I began to grow used to my mail sorted out on the counter and Leander, on the sofa in suit and American collar, watching Murder, She Wrote while eating handfuls of caramel corn, our days shifted once again.

  I was due to begin my summer courses in a few days’ time at the precollege program in St. Genesius College in Oxford University before enrolling there in the fall, and I suppose the first party that Leander threw was intended to prepare me. That is to say, he thought that inviting over a number of Oxford tutors to drink cocktails and eat miniature puff pastry in our kitchen would be comforting, and productive, and that I wouldn’t immediately blurt out that one of them was having an affair with their dog groomer or blow something up on the stove—that I would, in short, have some civilized fun.

  When I wrote to tell Watson of my uncle’s plan, he responded What on earth is he thinking? You hate parties. Has Leander gone entirely off his tit and, if so, do you have an escape plan? Maybe through the sewers?

  It was reassuring, remembering I wasn’t broken for not wanting to eat fun-sized sausages with strangers. I can tell him I’m just ducking out for the night, I decided, and that thought took me as far as the kitchen, where people had already gathered. I hadn’t even heard the front door opening and closing.

  I was that far away from my former self, the girl who noticed everything.

  And there, in the thick of all those tweedy people, was my uncle Leander, half-illuminated by the track lights, telling some improbable story about his time at the Sorbonne to two men in blazers and penny loafers. Standing in the doorway, I realized it’d been some time since I’d seen him with that look. That performing look, that is, something of a raised eyebrow and a half smile, something of an off-balance lean that meant my uncle had an adoring audience. I sighed, put a pile of sausages on a plate, and went to introduce myself to a woman—drama lecturer, divorced, two dogs—who was staring forlornly at the empty gin bottles on the counter. It seemed as though we might have something in common, though it had been some time since I’d indulged in my old vices.

  The night passed slowly. I was quite happy to go to bed.

  I willed myself to believe that that was the last of the parties, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. (Obvious evidence. As in, a carrier bag full of cheeses on the counter, and my uncle, the Bach aficionado, humming a Justin Bieber song. Still, a girl could dream, etc.) Should I have been surprised when, that Friday evening, Leander interrupted my violin practice and asked if I perhaps wanted to do something with my hair, as we had company on the way?

  I did nothing with my hair. I put away my sheet music (the Hoffman barcarolle, exquisite) and skulked out to the living room in leggings and my slippers.

  “Charlotte,” Leander said, laughing, as he positioned a pair of speakers on the mantelpiece. “Really. You know, it’s good to be acquainted with one’s professors. Think of it as an opportunity to gather material, if you have to.”

  “Blackmail?” I thought briefly of Mr. Wheatley, Watson’s high school writing teacher, who had bugged his dorm room to “gather material.” “Noted.”

  “Chin up. That Dr. Whatsit woman you were speaking to the other night will be back. She was quite taken with you.”

  A small part of my brain was always at war: Of course she adores me, I thought, simultaneously thinking, that poor dumb woman. My therapist had been working with me on this duality with limited success.

  I truly hated parties.

  Still, I helped Leander light the clusters of candles in the windows, breathed in their scent when he asked me to, said, Yes, that amber one is lovely (not because it was, but because I loved my uncle); I arranged the miniature cheeses on a platter (Everything in miniature at parties, I thought, people should make themselves bigger); I changed into my boots but kept the leggings, and then took up a position in the armchair by the door.

  The same people again. Some dons in shirtsleeves, a pair of philosophy graduate students studying the bookshelves. My uncle listening intently to—yes, there it was, to an ebulliently handsome man in the kitchen, one who had been here the time before. Now he was touching Leander’s shoulder with a slim hand, as though for emphasis. It wasn’t for emphasis. Well done, Leander, I thought, and closed the case, as it were, on the mystery of the many parties.

  Pity, though. To my surprise, I found that I had been hoping for something a bit more sinister.

  I was studying my uncle’s suitor from a distance (blue-eyed, single, last boyfriend had given him terrible feedback on his hair) when the drama lecturer plopped down on the ottoman beside me.

  “Charlotte,” she said. Her name was Dr. Larkin. “Your uncle was just telling me about your
interest in Shakespeare.”

  “My interest in Shakespeare.” I wasn’t uninterested in Shakespeare, I supposed. I liked the language. I liked the pageantry. I liked above all the disobedient girls that populated his plays, and I told Dr. Larkin that.

  She tucked her hair behind her ears. “We’re doing Hamlet, you know, at the precollege Dramatics Society this summer. We do quite a bit of Shakespeare. It goes off just fine, usually, though the precollege program is always under-enrolled and in turmoil and, well, a bit on fire—”

  “You’re not selling it all that well,” I said, not unkindly.

  Dr. Larkin laughed. “I’m not actually asking you to audition,” she said. “Though I suppose, in a way, I am. We had a series of . . . incidents last summer, and so much of the program is returning—faculty and students and crew—and, in the end, we never quite figured it out.”

  “What, exactly?”

  But she was looking just past me, her eyes gone suddenly hard. “I’m invested in it not happening again,” she was saying in a hollow voice. “The business with the orchids, that is.”

  The party had grown louder; someone had put on the Rolling Stones, and a few people were dancing. A girl in the corner was reading my uncle’s copy of Middlemarch. Across the room, Leander and his suitor were peering out the windows at the night, their shoulders barely touching.

  None of it mattered. Something was stirring in my blood. “Begin at the beginning,” I told Dr. Larkin. “And tell me, please, that you don’t want me to play Ophelia.”

  Two

  “THEY WANT YOU TO PLAY OPHELIA?” WATSON ASKED, hoisting his duffel bag over his shoulder. His suitcase was already on the curb. “Isn’t that a little, like, on the nose?”

  I thumped the roof of the cab, and it trundled back out into the road. Six on a Sunday, and the city was quiet, the sun still not entirely up. Flights from America always came in with the dawn. For once, Watson didn’t look the worse for wear. He never fared well on planes across the Atlantic, sleeping fitfully or not at all, but this morning his hair was so extravagantly tousled, I knew he’d spent the whole flight unconscious. Though the red lines near his temples (striated; elastic?) flummoxed me until—

  “You had on a sleeping mask,” I said, delighted beyond all sense. “Tell me, was it one of those with the eyelashes printed on it? Was it silk? Was it your mother’s, or—”

  He pulled it from his pocket and tossed it to me; I caught it one-handed. Black silk, sans eyelashes. “You’re a jerk,” he said, laughing. “I bought it in the terminal.”

  “Why would I be a jerk? I’m only asking about your beauty sleep.”

  “Did it work? Am I more beautiful now?”

  His white shirt was rumpled—why on earth had he worn an oxford on an international flight?—and he still had his medicinal-blue flight pillow around his neck, and everything he was thinking, every last thing, played out on his face: anticipation, happiness, a little fear. Knowing what he did about the way I worked, what I observed, he still wore it there for me to see.

  Of course he was beautiful.

  “Of course you aren’t,” I told him, but I was smiling. “It’d take a longer nap than that, surely.”

  Upstairs, we settled in on the sofa, his feet propped up on his duffel. The soles of his trainers would leave a mark there, but at least they weren’t on the couch. Leander would have had kittens. “So. Ophelia,” Watson said. “Isn’t there another part for you to play?”

  “Not for my purposes.”

  “I guess it isn’t much of a stretch for you.” He knew he was annoying me, and he was enjoying it. I could tell from his left eyebrow.

  “I’m not sure if you’re aware of this,” I said, “but I have no plans to drown myself because of you. I don’t see how my playing Ophelia is ‘on the nose.’”

  He tipped his head against the cushion. “You are the smallest bit tortured, you know.”

  I grimaced. “Less so, now. Therapy. Lots of therapy. And I’m eating breakfast. I’m a healthy, sound person.”

  “I’m sure that Ophelia ate breakfast.”

  “Pedant,” I said, and pulled my legs up to my chest. “I’m just not particularly interested in playing a character whose most striking characteristic is her virginity.”

  Watson reddened, which was fascinating, and so I studied him until he began to squirm. Finally he said, “But you’d be doing it so you can solve a mystery, and also you’ve always wanted to be an actress. I mean, like, you are an actress. A good one. You have a literal wig box under your bed.”

  It was now in pride of place on my dresser, but that was beside the point. “It will be an interesting exercise,” I allowed. “And anyway, I’m not playing Ophelia straight out, I’m understudying. Less time onstage, more time backstage. I need that freedom of movement.”

  “At least it isn’t Macbeth,” Watson said, hugging a pillow to his chest.

  “I thought we did Macbeth last year, you and I.”

  “What, starring Lucien Moriarty? In the Scottish access tunnels? Sherringscotland? What does that make you . . . MacHolmes?”

  “And you Lady MacHolmes?” I snorted. “I think those are the technical terms, yes.”

  “So what about me?” Watson asked. He was struggling to stay awake; his eyes were half-closed. “How do I help with all of this?”

  “Well, I’ll be quite busy. I’ll need someone to do my poetry homework,” I said, and he roused himself enough to poke me with his shoe. “No, there are a few different options to get you in. You could assist with the production. Set painting, lighting, et cetera. You could write a piece on the precollege Dramatics Society. Make up some American college newspaper to do it for. Or you could audition, but I doubt you’d want to, or—”

  “I could be a good Hamlet,” Watson murmured, and with that he fell asleep altogether.

  I watched him for ten minutes or so before I went to go organize my lockpicks.

  Later, closer to noon, Leander knocked on my door. He went for a luxurious lie-in some weekend mornings, and today wasn’t an exception. “Breakfast?” he asked, popping his head in.

  “Breakfast,” I confirmed.

  There were hash browns and sausages on the stove, and I perched in my usual seat at the counter, twisting back and forth on my stool. It was childish to do it, but we had nothing this whimsical in my house growing up. A seat with a mechanism!

  In an attempt to stop “paying my whole bank balance to Starbucks,” as he put it, Leander had invested in an espresso maker, and this morning, he was making the two of us cappuccinos. Despite its racket and the smell of the fry-up on the stove, Watson stayed asleep on the sofa, his arms around one of the paisley cushions.

  “It’s going to be a bit different for you two,” Leander said, following my line of sight.

  “Different how, exactly?” I stopped turning about on my stool. I wasn’t willing to have a conversation about my love life with Watson sleeping five feet away.

  No matter how much breakfast I was bribed with.

  He tipped the tomato he’d sliced into the skillet. “Oh, come,” he said. “You’re both of age. You’re both finished with school. You’re free to run around setting things on fire as much as you’d like.”

  “We were more or less doing that before.” I padded over to pick up my cappuccino.

  “And now, my little arsonist, you have three months to figure out your next move,” Leander said, stirring the baked beans. With his other hand he peeled bacon out of the package. I made to help him, but he brandished his spoon.

  “I’m defending this little fiefdom,” he said. “Sit. Have your cappuccino.”

  “University,” I said, obediently taking a sip. “Oxford. That’s what’s next. That’s been settled. I sat A levels. I forged papers so I could sit A levels without having taken the classes. I did an interview with a tutor and solved maths problems on a whiteboard for an audience.”

  “I encouraged it,” he reminded me. “I still think it’s an e
xcellent plan. But I want you to understand the possibility here. Sometimes I worry that . . .”

  I waited for him to finish, but he was looking up into the hood above the stove as though the rest of his sentence was kept there.

  “This,” Leander said finally, “is where your map runs out, Charlotte. We’ve reached the edge of the page. Nothing about you has ever been traditional, and so a traditional education might be precisely what’s on order, starting with this summer program. But allow room for possibility. I know you don’t need me to tell you this, but Lucien—”

  My hateful, treacherous heart began to hammer just at the sound of his name.

  “—is locked away. You don’t need to make your decisions on the run. No one’s hunting you.”

  “He’s not the only Moriarty,” I reminded him. “Remember?”

  “Yes,” Leander said, “but Philippa’s hardly going to round up the producers of her antiquing show and set them on you with machetes.”

  “You never know,” I said darkly.

  He took down plates from the cupboard. “And Hadrian isn’t after you. He sent you a bloody graduation card, God knows why.”

  “He might be trying to get back in your good graces,” I said. “Didn’t you snog him in—”

  “Finish that sentence,” Leander said, “and I’m feeding your breakfast to Mouse.” He arranged a plate for me and pushed it across the island. “All I’m saying is that you’re on the other side now. It’s summer. Jamie’s here. Go have some fun. Do easy things, things that make you happy.”

  I looked at him over a forkful of hash browns. “I picked up a case,” I said.

  “Yes.” Leander braced his hands on the counter. “But is that what makes you happy? Do you know what does?”

  I CONSIDERED WHAT MY UNCLE HAD SAID AS I WASHED UP the breakfast dishes. I’d left Jamie’s on the coffee table, within wafting distance, and he was beginning to make grumbling sounds in his sleep. Leander had run out “on a work errand,” though I knew that, since January, he’d dropped absolutely everything to watch over me. His income from his rental properties had been buoying us along, though we were both aware it couldn’t forever. Leander was a world-renowned investigator, fast on his feet, charming, vaguely debonair. Last week, I’d overheard him turning down a case in New South Wales (something delicious-sounding—I’d heard “circus,” and “throwing knives”), and he’d gone out straight after to his club, a racquet clutched in his hand like a bludgeon.