A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(22)

“You look a little like you’ve short-circuited,” he said, smiling, and took my hand gently as we followed her to the back corner of the restaurant.

Brick walls. A leather banquette. A votive candle on the table, and a sprig of lavender in a mason jar. The silverware was not silver but copper, polished to a shine. For a moment I was terrified that Watson might do something wretched like pull out my chair, but he gestured instead toward the booth side of the table. I slid in and immediately pulled up my feet. Sometimes it helped to make oneself more compact in combat situations.

Across from me, Watson fiddled with his watch, pulling it out from the cuff of his jacket and then sliding it back in. “How did it go?” he asked. “With Anwen?”

“Good,” I said brightly. “Fine.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“Not really.” That was untrue, but I didn’t want to be my clinical self just now. The rest of the world got that self. Tonight, I wanted for once to be the Charlotte beneath all the Holmes.

Whoever that was.

“Oh,” he said. His disappointed eyes met mine for a second before dropping again.

If our date were a test, I was failing. I had no idea how to do it right but still knew I was doing it wrong. I had no real examples for this sort of thing. Books? I didn’t read fiction. Television? The characters in Friends were hopelessly mean to the people they dated, and besides, I only watched that show to watch Joey, who was very attractive even while consuming entire pizzas. I thought back to the films that Leander and I had watched when I was convalescing these past months—screwball comedies from the 1940s, brightly lit mid-2000s films about “crashing” weddings to meet girls, the odd Transformers movie or two—and despaired. I should have curled my hair. I should be touching my face. I should be tastefully revealing bits of my past in anecdote form, until he found something with which he connected or which he found hopelessly charming.

Aha, I thought, and leaned forward. “Have I told you about the time that my aunt Araminta tried to teach me to handle the hives at her apiary?”

“No,” Watson said. “It’s a big one, right? Her apiary?”

“Hundreds of thousands of bees. She tends them herself. The honey, when she jars it, is a beautiful amber color. Some of it’s flavored—she has a tarragon one that’s quite sharp, and a lavender.” I touched the little bloom in the jar. “She does the infusions out in her workshop. It’s the original one, built about a century ago.”

“Sherlock’s, then.” He was watching me, now. Watson always had a fascination with my family history. Was it terrible to exploit that?

The villa, as my ancestor had called it, wasn’t far from the manor where I had grown up. His was a southern-facing set of buildings that overlooked the chalky cliffs that led down to the Channel. The cottage itself wasn’t particularly grand; it had a garret stuffed with books, many dating back to the turn of the last century, and the kitchen was one of those prodigious old caverns with an Aga stove and a tabletop for rolling out biscuits. Araminta made wonderful biscuits, made still better by the honey that dripped down into the little crevices of dough, and as a child I had gone down the lane—when issued an invitation; I had always been required an invitation—to eat those and look out over the sea.

“Yes,” I said, “though she’s expanded a bit. It isn’t a commercial production, her honey. She sells it in a few shops in town. A neighbor boy helps her in the summers, but I think she intended to have me come on as her partner. I hadn’t known that until my parents decided to send me to America for school. She was very resistant. Didn’t like the idea of my being so far away.”

“I didn’t know you were close.”

“Physically, she was right down the road, in that cottage on the hill. Emotionally . . . I don’t know how close she was to anyone, really. I certainly didn’t know how to speak to her. She was quite a bit older than my father. Had a job as a codebreaker in the 1970s, until something awful happened—”

“Walter Moriarty,” Watson said, surprising me. “Leander told me. She found out Moriarty was negotiating the illegal sale of a nuclear warhead. He cottoned on that she has turned him in, killed all three of her cats.”

I thought of Mouse, and shuddered. “I’d heard something like that. She acted . . . not as a grandmother, exactly, but something like it. She took us on errands to London and to short weekend trips to Prague and Munich and Rome. We’d be marched through a few museums, photographed against a river or two, taken to a nice restaurant. And then at night, Milo would inevitably end up watching me in the room while she went to the theater.”

Over his shoulder, I noticed the waiter hovering, but Watson was watching me again now, his eyes warming back up, and I realized that the look in them was a sort of tempered delight. “Araminta didn’t take you with her?” he was asking.

I took a steadying breath and addressed the waiter. “A beer for him—something floral, I imagine you have it—and a French 75 for me.” He jotted it down and said he’d return for our dinner orders, though we hadn’t yet looked at the menu.

Watson lifted an eyebrow. “Something floral,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Floral.”

“You don’t drink often,” I told him, “and you make a bit of a face whenever you have beer, but you insist on ordering it, now that we’re back in the UK—I think it pleases you to have it. The pint glass to cup your hands around. The color of it and how you look when you’re drinking it. You sip it slowly, so you can make it last the whole night, and that’s cheaper for you on the whole, which should be moot anyway because my uncle will be paying for this meal, and any meal, and anything you need, really, because he loves you like a son. But. The beer. I’m not going to presume to change your order entirely, but I may as well send for something a bit easier for you to drink.”