A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Friends, then,” I said, to Watson’s evident surprise. I rather liked the Joey character. “I think there’s ice cream in the freezer.”

  ORIENTATION WAS A BIT MORE FORMAL THAN I’D ANTICIPATED, this being a precollege program. We were ushered into the sort of long, paneled, beautiful room that one would expect from a cocktail party in the eighteenth century, or as the setting of a trial.

  Spaces like this reminded me of home. That wasn’t a good thing. I paused at the door.

  “God, this is gorgeous.” Watson unwound his scarf from around his neck. “Like Hogwarts,” he said, and pulled me inside.

  We’d moved him into his rooms that morning, just the two of us. He’d only had the two suitcases. He was sharing a stairwell with some other precollege students, but the only one there when we arrived was a cheerful brunet boy in a cardigan who shook both of our hands and asked straight off what we were studying and if we wanted to get a pint later, there was a pub nearby he loved, well, not a pub, a bit swankier, but we should go, it would be wicked—

  Watson had cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” he said cautiously, as though the boy was about to whip off his mask, announce he was Tom Bradford’s twin brother, and then mug us for our wallets.

  “Rupert Davies,” the other boy had said, and then, apropos of nothing at all, said, “Excellent! We’ll all meet later, then!”

  Now, at orientation, Rupert was waving us over to a block of seats he’d reserved with an umbrella, a coat, and what appeared to be one of his shoes.

  “Dear God,” I said.

  “I know. I keep flashing back to Sherringford. I am having,” Watson said, “murderous déjà vu.”

  “We should go, or he might strip us for parts.” I eyed the shoe Rupert had left on the seat beside him. “Imagine how many seats he could reserve with your trousers.”

  “Mr. Watson!” Rupert cried as we approached. “And I didn’t catch your name—what was it?”

  “Charlotte.” I didn’t offer my surname. “Are you waiting for others to join you?” I badly hoped that he was, and that those others weren’t us. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Rupert—I didn’t know him at all; how could I form an opinion?—but that there were a few hundred people in this room, and I was getting bits of their stories by looking at them (wasn’t sleeping; came from California; would drop out in two to three days’ time), and I was processing so much data that I was having difficulty being polite.

  I wanted to improve on that—politeness—as I disliked being bad at things. So I stuck a smile on my face and hoped it would soften into a real one.

  Rupert, bless him, was still talking. “Yes, well, this is my second year here! And my first year I met this boy Theo on the train and he wound up in my stairwell. And Anwen—oh, you’ll love Anwen. Ended up with her by mistake. Someone thought she was a boy by her name, stuck her with us, but no matter. We stayed up all night talking about music and Wales—we were all thick as thieves, the three of us, before you could snap your fingers.” For effect, he snapped his.

  This was too much information. I had to stall while I sorted it out.

  “I love a fast friendship,” I said, pulling Rupert’s umbrella off the chair so I could sit. “Tell me more about Theo. Is he originally from Wales as well?”

  What are you doing? Watson mouthed to me. Stop what you’re doing.

  “America,” Rupert said happily. I imagined he would still be thrilled if Theo came straight from the bowels of hell. “Boston, maybe? Providence?”

  “I love Boston,” I said. “And Providence.”

  Watson eyed me, then the seat with the shoe on it. “Is it okay if—”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Rupert said, and set it on the floor beside his socked foot. “You know, Anwen and Theo—”

  And at that point, the program director mercifully took the stage.

  As for Anwen and Theo, they didn’t arrive until orientation was under way. In fact, quite a few people slipped in late, and from the confident way they found their seats, I decided they were largely returners. None of this information would be new to them; might as well linger outside.

  On our end, there was quite a bit to learn. Watson paged through his folder as the program director ran through the regulations. All meals off-campus or in one’s kitchen; a long, disturbingly specific list of things not allowed in the dorms or flats—fireworks, cigarettes, goats, houseplants. (“We had an incident with a Venus flytrap last year,” the director said darkly.) There was a brief session about the Oxford tutorial system, as well. In addition to twice-weekly lectures we’d attend as a class, we’d meet in small groups with our tutor to discuss the material in depth.

  “You can’t fake your way through a tutorial,” the director said. “Don’t even try.”

  So much for the two of us lying around, watching television. Watson looked a bit pale. He was here to study fiction writing, but I think he had imagined this would be the same sort of classroom-workshop setting as at Sherringford. It was something altogether different to sit in a small room while a decorated writer paged through your story mere inches from your face.

  Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t be anything like that. Perhaps, after everything, we’d finally found ourselves in a healthy learning environment.

  “They’re going to eat us all alive,” Theo said, flinging himself down next to me. At least I assumed this blond, broad-shouldered boy was Theo. The flap of his messenger bag was open—three brand-new Pilot V4 Very Fine pens, a dog-eared copy of Hamlet, an apple in a plastic bag.

  “Oh. Sure. Well, that’s fine.” Watson went pale. “Totally fine.”

  At that, Theo smiled. “I’m making it sound pretty bad, aren’t I? Sorry. We like to bait the new blood.”

  They appeared to want to continue talking, so I kicked Watson in the shins. Just in time—the director had turned a gimlet eye on us. After a moment, he continued monologuing (proper comportment amongst older students, program reputation, etc.), and Theo relaxed his shoulders, and a redheaded girl slipped into the seat between him and Rupert. She didn’t have an orientation folder, or even a bag. She had, in fact, nothing with her, and she sat there in her dark dress and boots as though that was all she needed to bring to the first meeting of a prestigious credit-bearing university program.

  I had always admired that sort of insouciance in a girl, as I am nothing if not prepared. If I don’t have my orientation folder (or similar) it is because I have a primary goal (sleuthing) that negates my secondary one (everything else).

  For a slightly delusional half second, I checked Anwen over for any signs that she was a detective. Nothing from her fingers, smoothing her dress; nothing from her unfocused eyes, her relaxed mouth—

  Watson poked me. “Stop staring,” he whispered.

  “I’m not staring.”

  “You’re staring at her like you’re carving her up.”

  Really, he was so unbearably dramatic. “I have no plans to quarter her.”

  “Like you’re thinking about making pork chops, or something—”

  The director clapped his hands twice. “All that said, welcome to the Oxford Precollege Program! We’ll see you all at the welcome dinner tonight.”

  “I hardly ever eat pork chops,” I told him, putting my folder into my rucksack. “I don’t eat human pork chops at all.”

  Next to me, Theo laughed, a sound that tunneled into a snort, and Anwen shook her head, and Rupert said, “You two are bizarre. Where should we go to eat?”

  Watson looked down at his schedule. “The JCR, it says? The Junior Common Room, in an hour?”

  “That’s where they’re eating,” Anwen said. “We’ll go for a pint later, but for dinner, we can do better. Where are we going, Rup? D’you want to book us in at that Italian place over by Trinity College? Next to the used bookshop, the good one. The food was terrific last year.”

  “I’ll ring over,” Rupert said, digging out his phone, and Theo stuck out a hand and sa
id, “You must be the two that Rupert was telling us about,” and as the two of them shook, I watched Watson’s shoulders drop down from where they’d been, somewhere around his ears.

  “New friends, then,” I said to him, as we were hustled out the door.

  “I’m going to end up making friends with them,” he said. “You, on the other hand, are going to pump them for information about William bloody Shakespeare and then leave them for dead on the side of the road.”

  I hooked my hand through his arm. “I think you have some strange ideas about my bloodthirstiness,” I said, and he shrugged, trying not to smile, and we wandered along that way, our shoulders bumping along together into the night.

  “You have a plan.”

  “I do not.”

  “You lucked out into meeting three of the actors straightaway,” he said. “Or . . . one actor and two hangers-on. I’m not sure yet.”

  “The Dramatics Soc is the most popular summer club,” I reminded him. “It’s hardly luck.”

  He looked down at me. “Still, you see an opportunity. To learn more about last year. Which you still haven’t told me about.”

  “I might,” I allowed. “I might also just want pasta.”

  I liked this part of Oxford. I hadn’t spent all that much time around the university, considering. By now, I would usually have known my city down to the ground: the sewer systems, the bus lines, which alleys were shortcuts and which ended blind. That would be what I was looking for now. Thoroughfares. Quick exits.

  Instead I was studying the way that the road ahead of us curved up and slightly to the left, how the sun still hung high enough in the sky to be seen over the Georgian buildings at the top of the hill. We had another three hours of sunlight; we were approaching the longest day of the year, here at the top of the world. It was close enough to the end of term that undergraduates were still wandering the streets, dazed from the completion of their exams or the graduation of their girlfriends or, in one case, the grandeur of their plans for when the sun finally set. Punting, I thought, as we passed a pair of girls planning where on the river to meet up later. Didn’t James Watson used to go out punting with my uncle? Didn’t—

  Dear God. I found myself slowing until I came to a stop, as ahead of us, Theo and Anwen and Rupert walked on in close concert, whispering about something that I was sure was of some tangential importance to my case and which I had missed altogether. Even now, Theo’s mouth was pinched, Anwen was tossing her hair over her shoulder.

  I looked hopelessly up at Watson. “Well,” he said, scrolling through his phone, “at least we know now that your hunch was right. They’re talking about Hamlet; they’re some of the right people to follow. I wonder who they’ll end up playing. Theo’s sort of princely, right? Maybe him for the lead?”

  Pretending to scroll through his phone. Watson had been paying better attention than I had, and it wasn’t him helping that was such a surprise as much as my needing help at all.

  Dear God. Was I any good at what I did anymore? Did I even want to be?

  “Well done,” I said to Watson as serenely as I could, as Theo strolled up to the restaurant’s front door. “Do you think they do a good chicken picatta?”

  Four

  BY THE TIME WE HAD BEEN SAT AT A TABLE IN THE CORNER, I had managed to recalibrate. I would not be admiring the tablecloth, the minimalist décor, the waiters’ black bow ties. I would not be watching Watson’s eyes go dark and soft in the candlelight. I would instead do what I did best: empty myself of all wants except the one at hand.

  I would extract basic information about the Dramatics Society from these three sitting ducks, and then, and only then, would allow myself to return to my daydream about going punting with Watson tomorrow.

  “It’s been a whole year. Can you believe they still remember us?” Theo asked, as the waiter brought a round of cocktails that no one had ordered.

  “We certainly spent enough money here last summer,” Anwen said.

  Watson looked down at his drink. “For a minute there, I forgot I was back in England. I haven’t had a legal drink in ages.”

  “America sucks, mate,” Theo said, with a thick fake accent, and Rupert chucked a roll at him that Theo caught neat-handed. Anwen rolled her eyes.

  I sipped my water. “Did you all keep in touch between summers?”

  “Of course,” Rupert said, and Anwen looked down and said, “Not really,” and Theo leaned back to signal the waiter, and didn’t answer at all.

  Not a good question. I watched Watson clock it the same moment I did. “You’re from Wales, Anwen?” he asked, and you could almost hear the sound of things realigning.

  “I am,” she said, “from all over,” and the waiter brought another basket of rolls and a plate of beef carpaccio that made Rupert look ill and Theo ecstatic, and I watched her, Anwen, as she immediately changed the subject to the houseplants she’d brought with her, if they were getting enough sun in her summer digs.

  As the night went on, I realized I kept doing that: watching them, not individually, but as some kind of three-headed person, a benign hydra. Benign? Perhaps. There was some tension here, something I wanted to tease out.

  This was a problem, yes, but it had training wheels on. Precisely what I needed. We needed.

  Though Watson didn’t seem very sleuth-like at the moment, at least not from where I was sitting. He’d rolled up his sleeves and was relaxing back into his chair—his blood orange cocktail had smoothed out his edges. As for me, I drank my water and ate my chicken and felt myself return. I kept asking questions, flattering ones, ones they wanted to answer—the best nights most people seem to have are those where they’re allowed to shamelessly talk themselves up—and though I kept edging them back around to the theater, the theater and the accidents last year, I kept stumbling over a smaller, more intricate mystery in the way.

  Why had these three friends, despite their seeming closeness, despite this being their first night together in a year, chosen to invite out two strangers to their favorite restaurant to break bread with them? Had they wanted to avoid each other, they would. Had they wanted to be together, they wouldn’t have invited us.

  I cracked my knuckles, so to speak, and dug in.

  Rupert was a youngest child from Norfolk. “The youngest of six,” he said, and I looked at his ruddy cheeks and his hands, calloused not from holding a pen or playing an instrument but from lifting and carrying, and asked where his family farm was. He liked that, the “trick” I’d just done, deducing he was a farmer—it told me almost as much about someone if they found my read of them fascinating or invasive—and said yes, part of the reason his parents had had so many children was so they had help with their sheep and their cows. He didn’t appear bothered by that; he didn’t feel used. He loved the farm, he said, feeding the baby lambs with a bottle. But his accent was more city than country, and his boots were expensive—hand-tooled Italian leather—and he wasn’t planning on being an actor, he was here to study economics. “It’s my current project,” he said, “when I’m not farming.” The rich did this sometimes, I’d learned, chose words that were technically true but that obscured whole worlds of meaning. I asked if he spent all year on the farm, and he blushed—Rupert blushed quite a lot, it was charming and seemingly genuine—and he said no, in fact, he went to Eton during the school year, it was silly to attend a school so posh and expensive but his father had gone, his uncles too, and anyway his parents were away most of the year doing business in London, and that’s when Anwen leaned over and stage-whispered to me, “Rupert Davies. As in, Davies Fine Leathers. They do the saddles for the queen? His family has Rup and his brothers come home to work the barns in the summer, they think it keeps them from becoming spoiled tosspots.”

  Rupert did not, in fact, appear to be a tosspot, though I reserved the right to change my opinion given further evidence. At any rate, I didn’t resent him for coming from money, or for wanting to hide that fact. It was, in fact, such a logical decision on h
is part that I lost interest in Rupert temporarily. What I did find interesting: Anwen’s satisfied smile at outing Rupert, Theo rolling his eyes.

  Unlike Rupert, Anwen didn’t talk much. Only in asides, redirections, the odd sarcastic comment. When I asked her a question about herself, something as straightforward as how she found out about the Oxford program, she would say, “Well, Theo learned about it from his dad . . .” and he would smoothly pick up where she had trailed off. Everything an evasive maneuver. Still, there was no nervousness in her gestures, no tells that she was lying, no self-consciousness at all that I could see—and I almost always found self-consciousness, particularly in other teenagers. Her dark dress was simple but well cut. It had a high collar but fit close to her body. Her hair was a dramatic curly tumble down her back—she clearly hadn’t brushed it; the not-brushing was deliberate, and it gave her a wild, fairy-tale look. Her nails were filed and painted translucent, so they had a subtle gleam, and she wore no jewelry except a signet ring (bought new, made to look vintage) on her smallest finger. It was, as my mother would say, a look, a push-pull between shined-up and attractively undone.

  What I managed to glean about her was all in those details and in the things she let slip: she was here to study Russian history; she designed clothes and painted as a hobby and would be helping out with sets for Hamlet, even if she auditioned and won a part, “but only because Theo dragged me into it, naughty boy”; she had been accepted to Cambridge for the fall and professed to not care if her credits from this summer would transfer, which was the one moment I could tell she was lying, though I couldn’t tell if it was about Cambridge or about the not-caring. All I knew for certain was that she had both a polish and a bratty insouciance that drew her friends’ eyes to her over and over again.

  Soon enough, Watson was looking at her too. Looking to evaluate, I thought, not with any real interest; and still I wished I hadn’t noticed, because my fondness for him tripped me up. Made me invested. It kept me from running my game as I liked to.