The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(13)

“So when?” he asked. “When will you need me?”

“You’ll know,” Emma said. “We’re almost there.” At that, she stood, swaying on her feet. Like all the soft parts of her had shriveled away, leaving a dusty, exhausted shell.

Leander noticed it, too, reaching out a hand to steady her, but she held up a hand in warning. With slow, labored steps, she left the room.

“Hello, Jamie,” Leander said, his back still to me.

“How did you know it was me?” I said lightly. “You all need a different party trick. I almost expect that one now.”

“Sit,” he said, and motioned me over to the sofa. “Where’s Charlotte?”

I shrugged.

“I thought it might be like that,” he said.

“Is everything okay with Mrs. Holmes?” I asked, in an attempt to change the subject.

“No,” he said. “That’s obvious, though. Tell me—I’ve been in touch with your father, of course, but I’d like to hear it from you—how’s your family doing? How is your darling little sister? Is she still into Your Little Sparkle Ponies, or whatever they’re called? James misses her something awful.”

“Shelby’s good,” I said. “She’s past the sparkle ponies and on to painting portraits of dogs. Starting to look at secondary schools near our flat.”

Leander smiled at me. “James was making noises about having her sent to Sherringford. It might be nice to have you both in the same place. Do Sunday dinners. Go mini-golfing on the weekend. Or to the roller rink. Roller rinking is a family activity, right?”

“Uh, right.” Though I was pretty sure it was called roller-skating, and that I’d rather die before doing it. “I heard you say ‘no school tuition,’ though. We can’t afford to send Shelby to Sherringford. Not on our own. And it’s no secret anymore that you’re footing my bill.”

His smile faded. “That doesn’t apply to your family. It never would. I’d stand by your father through anything, Jamie, because I know he’d never ask me to . . . It doesn’t matter. Listen, don’t ever think you’ll be a casualty in this war. You won’t be. I’ll make sure of it.”

An invisible war with invisible blood. Or not invisible—just not our own, not yet. Lee Dobson had been a casualty already, and I’d come knife’s-edge close to becoming one myself. “How did this even start?” I asked him. It was a question that had been nagging me for weeks. “Like, why did the Holmeses hire August Moriarty anyway? I know it was a publicity stunt or whatever, but if you all hated each other so much, why would Holmes’s parents take that risk?”

“It’s not a short story, you know.”

I laughed. “I mean, I don’t know how I’ll fit it into my busy schedule of being avoided.” And it was true. What else was I going to do this afternoon? I might as well fill in some of the blanks that Holmes wouldn’t help me with.

“Fine,” he said, “but if you’re going to make me tell it, we’re going to need some tea.”

Ten minutes and one pot of Earl Grey later, we were settled back onto the sofa.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard the rush of the sea. “You’re familiar with Sherlock Holmes’s run-ins with Professor Moriarty, aren’t you? Sherlock took down a number of ‘notorious’ men, but Moriarty was the one at the top. A right bastard. Every other criminal in England paid him protection money. He orchestrated their actions, knit them together into a web. And Holmes was able to deduce the spider from that web.” Absently, he rubbed at his temple. “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

“I’ve heard it before,” I said, blowing on my tea. Half the world had heard it before. Sherlock Holmes squaring off against the professor; Holmes and Dr. Watson’s flight to Switzerland to escape him; my great-great-great-grandfather on a hill overlooking a waterfall, wondering if his best friend and partner had died in its depths. Both Holmes and Moriarty had disappeared that day, Moriarty for good, and the man who’d come back to Baker Street had done so only years later, after eradicating the last of the crime lord’s agents.

Or so the story went.

“When I was a child, I never understood the fixation on Moriarty,” Leander was saying. “He’s never mentioned in the good doctor’s stories, not until ‘The Final Problem,’ where it’s like he was invented to explain all these fabulously strange crimes that Sherlock had investigated. Then he’s gone again. And you know, growing up, our relationship with that family was fairly civil. A bit apologetic, really. They didn’t have the best reputation—being cursed with an infamous last name will do that to you—but sins of the father, and so on. They weren’t the Napoleons of crime. I said as much to my father.”

“How did that go?”

Leander ran a hand over his slicked-back hair. “Poorly,” he admitted. “He told me that there’s a criminal strain in their blood. We might have been at peace when this August business started, but we’d spent the majority of the twentieth century tangling with them, one way or another.”

“We did?” I said, then corrected myself. “You did?” From what I understood, the Watsons mostly spent the twentieth century losing their spectacular fortune at cards.