A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(25)

“It’s true. It doesn’t need to be nice.” My voice came out stiff.

He tipped his head to the side, considering. It was more than I deserved. “You don’t want me to meet her.”

We sat together in a silence that wasn’t particularly companionable. Inside, I could hear my uncle beginning to stir—he was pulling pots and pans from the cupboard. The deep, hollow bell of the Dutch oven on the countertop. The drawn-in breath of the kettle as it settled on the stove.

My upbringing had taught me to listen and to assign meaning to what I heard. Both the formal training, and the informal—those moments when I woke in the morning, determining how safe it was for me to go downstairs.

It was the only way I knew how to be in the world.

“She’s a version of myself,” I said. “She hides in plain sight. She might be interesting to you, for that reason.”

“Every version of you is interesting to me,” he said.

“I know,” I said. I had been someone else, I remembered her saying, and now I’m not.

He, who more than anyone saw every part of me, could feel the shift and stutter of my mood. It had turned, as it always did; I was like the water that way.

“Do you want to go in now?” he asked.

I listened. There was another voice in with my uncle—the handsome man from the party. I remembered his clear tenor. She wants me to step in, the voice was saying, and in the background, the water in the kettle began to turn over. A hiss, a splutter.

You shouldn’t do anything you’re not prepared for, my uncle’s boyfriend told him, and I could hear the shuffle of his feet in slippers, the sharp sound of the spoon against the pan.

“I can leave,” Watson was saying. “We can pick this up tomorrow. I know we haven’t talked at all about the case.”

“The case.” I’d forgotten. The sheet monster with Matilda’s face pinned to it, the gang of feuding friends around the supper table, Anwen in her floral dress. It’s all her fault.

I reached for his hands and settled them on my hips. “Come in with me,” I said. “Stay over.”

Inside the flat, a pot clattered loudly against the stove, and for once, neither of us startled.

“What are you thinking?” he asked. “I can see those gears moving. What do you want?”

I wanted to know who I was, now, in what felt like the aftermath of my life. I had survived my childhood. I was an adult, standing with the boy I loved, doing meaningful work that I had trained for.

I reached up to smooth Watson’s brow. The neatness of my life now was shocking to me, a girl with such ragged edges. I wasn’t sure if I could fit inside its borders.

But I wanted him. I always did. “I want to tell you more stories about my aging aunt,” I told him, instead, and when he realized I was teasing, he wound his fingers into my hair and kissed me, a promise in a language I couldn’t yet speak.





Ten


I WOKE IN THE MORNING TO THE SOFT, RHYTHMIC KNEADING of my cat’s paws on my stomach. When I opened my eyes, Mouse peered at me, shook herself all over, and then leapt from the bed.

Watson didn’t stir at such slight movement. It took more than that to wake him—I knew that from lingering in doorways, seeing him passed out on his back on his father’s couch, his eyes bruised underneath the arm flung over them. I often felt like some kind of wretched war bride, watching him recover from whatever trouble we’d gotten ourselves into. Moments like that, brief and far between, before I pulled him off to the next adventure.

But we had nowhere to go this morning, not yet, and still I couldn’t keep myself from stirring. I slid out from under the coverlet and picked up my dressing gown from the floor. My black mood had evaporated, as it often did, with the dawn. I had at least a few hours until it returned.

I had a cigarette by the window, a cup of tea in the kitchen. On the counter was a note from my uncle, written in his leisurely cursive: In London with Stephen through the weekend; he has tickets for Hamilton! You and your young man have fun. Call if you need anything xxxx.

I read the note over again. The flat was ours, then. I’d always been allowed a measure of freedom (see: boarding school, Berlin, the boy asleep in my bedroom), but Leander had been so present these past months—making meals, arranging doctors’ appointments—that I found myself reflexively looking over my shoulder, expecting to see him in the sitting room with a book braced against one knee, calling out, Charlotte, do you want toast soldiers with your eggs?

My stomach rumbled. I did, in fact, want toast soldiers with my eggs.

After spending some time with Anwen’s text messages, I stubbed out my cigarette in a coffee mug and began pulling things from the cupboards. There was a loaf of good sourdough bread on the counter, a pot of Araminta’s honey, a pair of avocados, some jam. There was a carton of brown eggs in the fridge, vegetables in the crisper. Onions in a wire basket, and potatoes. Butter and margarine.

Oil was for cooking. I knew that abstractly. I opened up the cupboard above the stove and pulled down bottles one by one. Olive oil, sunflower, sesame, coconut. I lined them all up on the counter, then redid my alignment alphabetically, then from largest bottle to smallest. I picked up the avocado and poked at it, the way I’d seen people do in markets. I lifted each egg to the light, then shook them, then placed them delicately back in the carton.