The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “No,” she’d told him. “You’re coming with.”

  She’d refused to answer further questions. I was done trying to ask them.

  The Moriartys were brought in, and then brought to the back. The plane took off. We looked at each other.

  “So what now, for you?” I asked August.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think—I think maybe I’ve been lying to myself, a little bit.”

  “Really, now,” Holmes said.

  “No sarcasm from you.” He said it with a half smile. “I disappeared because my parents wanted me to. Really, I took that job working in your house in the first place because they wanted me to—and I took that job from your brother at Greystone because I was so determined to try to bring an end to this war. A lot of good that did. But tonight’s shown that I don’t have to do it anymore.”

  “Greystone?” I asked.

  “Any of it,” he said. “Make peace. Offer up my life. Now, I might . . . go back to my academic work, in maths. Take on a persona. A new one, you know, build it up from the ground. I could forge some records, or maybe I could even do my DPhil again—it might be nice to take my time, this time—and get a teaching job somewhere. I hear Hong Kong has a nice expat scene. Maybe I’ll go there.”

  I snorted. “It’s not a big deal to do your doctorate again?”

  “What would you rather do, Jamie? Data entry for the rest of your natural life?” He grinned. “Even if that’s your calling, you’ll be safe. My brother Lucien won’t touch you. Not if he knows he’d be ending my life, too.”

  “I don’t know if we can count on that.”

  August shrugged. “Forgive me if I don’t feel the need to reassure you of your safety. It’s not like you think it’s important. I kidnapped you and told you to go home, warned you about the dangers of your situation, and all you did was double down.”

  I stared at him. Even after hearing him tell Hadrian, after hearing him say it now, I still couldn’t quite believe him. “That, instead of telling me, Hey, maybe you’re in danger, Jamie. Which would’ve been too easy. Or un-psychopathic.”

  To my surprise, August looked over at Holmes. “I was raised to solve problems in a particular way.” His voice was clipped and rough, a simulation of hers. “Generally, I ignore my education. There, it seemed apt. I keep my promises, Charlotte.”

  Holmes scoffed. “You were serious. You were serious about killing yourself to save us.”

  “I was serious about that.”

  “Hong Kong,” I echoed. I tried to imagine it. The August from the photos, from the research I’d done. With a professorial beard and a briefcase and a whole bunch of papers to grade. Somewhere out of reach, somewhere far away from all of this.

  I couldn’t hold on to the image. It didn’t seem possible, that you could walk away from this burning wreck with a brand-new name and no scars but the scratch on your neck.

  “Well, good luck with that,” Holmes said, leaning back into my coat.

  “Stop being a child, Charlotte,” he said.

  “I’m not being a child. I’m being realistic. How can you believe that your brother isn’t a complete monomaniac? That he has compunctions? You think he won’t hunt you down for sport?” She barked a laugh. “You’d use the name Felix. You’d teach at an English-speaking university. I could find you within ten minutes. Lucien? Within seconds.”

  “This isn’t about me,” he said formally. “It’s about you. You’re hurt that I said those things. I understand, you know. It can be difficult.”

  “Difficult?”

  “Actions have consequences—”

  “Don’t you trot out that patronizing bullshit with me, August, I can’t stand it—”

  He threw up his hands.

  “—I thought of you as the last good one. Of all of us. I thought you’d forgiven me.”

  “How could I? How could I possibly, when—” August cleared his throat. “You know where Leander is.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Why do you think we’re going back to Sussex?”

  “How? How long have you known?”

  “No.” She peered at him over my arm. “First show your work.”

  That expression crept across August’s face again, the one I’d seen him smother so many times before. This time, he didn’t try to mask it. Bit by bit, it played out, the look of a man who’s torched his own house only to fall in love with the flames. He hated himself, anyone could tell that—the bandage around his neck was still stained red—but I don’t think he hated Charlotte Holmes as much as he claimed. I think it was something else completely.

  Did he want to be her? Did he want to be with her? It didn’t matter now. This was the tail end, the epilogue. After what he’d said to us in Prague, I couldn’t imagine our paths would run together much longer.

  August leaned forward in his seat, his hands steepled before him. “You haven’t had any urgency on this matter since we’ve arrived. All the tools in the world to track down your uncle, and instead, you play back the same voicemail, again and again, not picking it apart for analysis but listening to it like you’re mourning for him? My brother and sister were at your disposal. At your mercy. You held them at gunpoint, and then at an auction that you demanded they hold, and instead of extracting information from them, by force, about your uncle’s whereabouts—don’t give me that look, I know precisely how bloodthirsty you are—you show a cute little surveillance video that implicates them in his disappearance and then you buy up all the Langenberg paintings, one two three? There’s no hard evidence there. It’s bad detective work, plain and simple. You’re solving this sloppily, Charlotte, with money and borrowed power, and you’re going to use Milo—who, unlike you, has a moral code underneath all that expediency—to put them in whatever black box you put Bryony in. It’s like you’re trying to race to some end before the howling wolves catch you, and that would make sense if you feared for Leander’s life, but you don’t. And now you’re saying he’s been in England the whole time? I don’t know what you’re doing, but why are you dragging me along?”

  I wasn’t holding her anymore. I was blank, in shock, trying quickly to catch up. No. That was a lie, and I knew it. But there had been something wrong with the way Holmes had gone about all of this from the moment we’d touched down in Berlin, and all my exhausted heart could do was hope that August had come to the wrong conclusions.

  “My brother is meeting us there,” Holmes said. “We need to speak to my father, and then we all need to go. Immediately. All three of us.”

  She turned from him, burying her face in the cloth of my coat. August pulled a notebook from his pocket; he turned it over in his hands. And me? I felt so thoroughly betrayed, so abandoned, that I hardly knew what to think. She was holding on to me like she thought it was the last time I’d let her.

  And if she’s kept all this from me, maybe it should be, I thought, and stared out the darkened window, waiting for the first lights of London to appear.

  WE TOOK A CAB TO THE TRAIN, AND THE TRAIN DOWN TO Eastbourne, and a black car from the station up to her family’s estate. There was snow on the ground, a dusting of it that turned and turned in the wind. We weren’t speaking to each other. None of us. I didn’t know what to say to August, especially now, and I didn’t try. As for Holmes, she’d disappeared into her magician’s trunk and swallowed the key. There wouldn’t be any prying her out, not until the big reveal.

  I thought I knew what it might be. I hoped I was wrong.

  The house came into view at the end of the drive, and beside me, I heard August draw a sharp breath. He hadn’t been back here since the night he had Lucien deliver his latest shipment of coke. This was the last place he’d been August Moriarty.

  It didn’t seem to register for Holmes. She sat between us, hands folded in her lap. Her jaw was set. “You need to decide what we do with Hadrian and Phillipa,” she said to August.

  “I thought you’d made that Milo’s call.”

 
“Greystone is keeping them subdued. I want you to decide what happens next.”

  “Can’t we ask Milo his opinion?”

  Without looking, Holmes pointed out the window. “He isn’t here,” she said. “Ours are the only tracks in the drive. Things are about to happen very quickly. Make a decision. Or else I will.”

  August sighed. “It’s difficult, Charlotte. That’s my brother. My sister. I don’t know.”

  “Dammit, August, Milo will have them killed. That’s what happened to Bryony. All right? What do you want? Make a decision!”

  The car began to turn down onto the long drive, but Holmes told the driver to stop. August sat stunned and unspeaking.

  Holmes took a breath. “Fine,” she said, measured again, and leaned over me to pull the door handle. “I’ll do it my way. The way I’ve wanted to all along. God help me—

  “Watson, get out.”

  “What are you—”

  She pushed me, and I stumbled out onto the gravel on my hands and knees. Holmes followed, and before she slammed the door on August’s face, I heard her say, “You always sit back and let someone else be the monster. Hadrian. Lucien. Me, as a matter of fact, but it stops now. Let’s go.”

  I knelt there, on the ground, in disbelief. I’d never seen her do anything that cruel. Never, at least, to me. Even now, she was stepping over me, wrapping her scarf more tightly around her throat, and instead of heading down the drive, she took off down the salted path that cut through her house’s backyard. Careful, even in her haste, to keep from leaving footsteps in the snow.

  Behind me, August clambered out of the car and offered me a hand up. “Do we follow her?” he asked.

  I was brushing the gravel off of my knees. “What do you think?”

  We weren’t as careful as she’d been not to leave footprints, though I tried. Even now the light was fading, at four o’clock in the afternoon, and behind us and down the cliffs to the sea, the water raged against the rocky shore. Holmes didn’t once glance back at us. She moved quickly through the grounds, head down, keeping to the stands of bare trees and bushes, until she reached the house. The woodpile was there, the one I’d worked with Leander, my ax still standing upright in its fallen log.

  It didn’t interest her, not in the slightest. The basement windows did, low to the ground, and Holmes was pulling a metal pick out from the inside pocket of her coat. She studied its sharpened edge for a moment before jamming it into the top of the window frame, pulling it free from its hinges. I was at her heels, then, and she handed it up to me.

  “You didn’t tell Milo about this access point?” August asked, behind me.

  “If he’s worth his salt, twelve alarms are going off at Greystone right now.” She dusted off her hands. “Come on.”

  Down into a storage room, all rakes and hoes and storage bins, and through the door into a room that looked like it’d been used as a training ring. For combat, maybe, or for something else, but there was a dirt ring in the middle of the floor lined with tape. On the walls were knives and wooden staffs, a set of fencing foils, a pistol with the orange plastic ring around its mouth that meant it was a toy. Did Alistair use it when training his daughter to disarm an enemy? Black ribbons hung from a pipe, thick enough to be blindfolds, and below that were coils of rope, a wooden chair with its seat cut out. I didn’t look too closely. After all my wild curiosity, the years I spent as a boy dreaming of the training I could get from the Holmes family in spying and deduction, how I could be transformed into a weapon at their hands, and here it was, the proof. When I’d asked him for training, my father had given me spy novels to read, but Alistair and Emma had put their children through their paces until they gleamed like blades.

  The basement smelled like cedar chips and mold. A set of stairs led up to the main level. Already Holmes was at the door at the far end of the room. She tried the knob once, twice, then pulled out her pick again and got to her knees.

  “This door isn’t ever locked,” she said to herself, as if in confirmation.

  The door was reinforced with steel bars. The lock was the old-fashioned kind, with a large keyhole you could peer through. I was reminded of the doors I’d liked so much in Prague. What had Holmes said were behind them? Tourist shops? I peered up at the doorframe.

  “It’s wired,” I told her, pointing up. “There must be a keypad on the other side, some kind of alarm system.”

  “On the far side?” August asked. “I know this house. The only entrance into that room is from this door.”

  “What’s inside?” I asked him, but he looked away.

  Holmes moved the pick to the left, then the right, and paused. “The silent alarm is about to sound. If we haven’t been detected already, we will be now. I don’t want commentary on what you see. I don’t want judgment. I want you to follow me in and then we move out.”

  She looked ill. Pale, drawn, her eyes flat as coins.

  And with that last confirmation, I let myself think it, make it into words, the thing I’d known since we boarded that flight back to England but hadn’t wanted to believe. Leander was being kept in this house. In this room. I didn’t know why (though I had my suspicions) or what the consequences were of springing him free, but as Holmes picked the lock, humming that strange, tuneless melody under her breath—even now, she was a creature of habit—I tried not to think about what would happen next. After.

  If he was still alive in there.

  A click. A creak. Holmes charged in before me on her long legs, August muscling past me to follow, and all I saw, at first, were their coats as I pushed in after them. There was a low buzz in the air, like the vibration of a phone going off in a pocket, but amplified, something hanging between these cinder-block walls. This lightless room.

  It was coming from a generator, and the generator was powering a series of beeping machines, something that whirred and something that beeped and something else that had clear plastic tubes and wires that wound up from its base and over to the hospital bed where Leander was lying, in a blue cotton gown, his hair lank and greasy like it hadn’t been washed since we’d left. A tube taped to his mouth, as if to feed him. An IV tower next to him hung with bags that didn’t hold saline and blood. I knew what saline and blood looked like. I’d been in the hospital enough myself. The room was scattered with crutches, a wheelchair, what looked like a Persian rug. It was a makeshift hospital.

  This was enough to stop me dead, more so than if the room had been set up for torture or interrogation—though, now that I looked more closely, I thought I saw the metal hardware for hooks and chains still attached to the walls and the ceiling—the idea that Leander had been here, underneath everything, sedated to be kept out of the way of whatever plan was in play.

  Except that he wasn’t sedated. He was awake. And Emma Holmes hovered over him in a mask and a lab coat, a scalpel in one latex-gloved hand.

  Then she reached over and yanked the cord from the security camera in the corner.

  Instinctively, I searched my pockets for a weapon; next to me, August did the same, coming up with nothing but the stained knife he’d pulled out in the museum in Prague.

  Charlotte Holmes rushed over and flung herself into her mother’s arms.

  “Lottie,” she said, one arm around her daughter, the other pulling off her mask. “Excellent timing. He’s fine to travel. We have about four minutes. Move.”

  UNDER EMMA’S SWIFT DIRECTION, AUGUST HELPED HER remove the IVs. I took socks and a sweater from the suitcase in the corner—Leander’s—and helped him into them, taking care to lean in closely to his ear to whisper, “Is she hurting you?”

  “She isn’t,” he said, his voice strangely strong. “He is.”

  Alistair? August? The latter was putting an arm under his legs now to help turn him off the bed and put him into the wheelchair.

  “Get off me,” Leander said, and stood. “I’m fine.”

  “Where is Dr. Michaels?” Holmes was asking her mother. “Where is she being kept?”r />
  “In my room,” Emma said. “Your brother had a camera put there—is he secure? Leander, are you ready to go?” I was shocked to hear her speak to him with such gentleness.

  “Fastest way out,” I said. “The window we came in?”

  “Done.” Emma Holmes was pulling things from the suitcase—a pair of passports, an envelope, scarves and gloves and a hat—and stuffing them into the pockets of her lab coat. “Go,” she said. “I’ll follow.”

  We ran. Leander kept pace behind us, moving far too quickly for a man who looked as debilitatingly ill as he did. The window was just ahead, but there were footsteps, now, above our heads, the scuffle-run of someone moving too quickly for grace.

  August hoisted himself up out of the window. “Here,” he said to me, “help him up.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Leander said. “Come on, Charlotte. Move.”

  I grasped her waist and lifted her high enough that August could pull her out onto the snowy ground. Leander went next; I made a cradle with my hands and boosted him up and out.

  Footsteps on the stair, a different set of footsteps behind me. Emma had her arms full of files; wordlessly, she handed me half the stack, and we passed them up to Holmes until her mother’s arms were free, and then I lifted her up to the window and pushed her out, my arms aching, my bruises pulling painfully against my skin, and just as August reached down both hands to drag me out of the basement, a voice behind me said my name.

  I didn’t have to look to know it was Alistair Holmes. He said my name again, louder, a shout now, “James Watson,” like there wasn’t a difference between me or my father at all, like we were all interchangeable, these idiot Watson men who were beaten up and outsmarted by the enemy, kidnapped and shoved out of cars by their friends, men who left their own families behind to find themselves in the thick of a family feud that would leave a trail of bodies by the time this was all over.

  “Jamie,” Alistair said again, approaching me with his hands out, entreating. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Lucien’s made threats. He presented them through Hadrian. He’ll know. He needs to see Leander sick in that hospital bed. He needs to see my wife debilitated in her room, unable to work. He needs to see us at his mercy.”