A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(53)

Eighteen


I SENT WATSON TEN QUID FOR A CAB, AND THE VIDEO I’D taken in the theater. Watch on your way over, I said. I want your opinion.

I live to do your bidding, he responded.

Thanks, I said. Pumpkin.

It was a twenty-minute walk from the station to my door, and my aunt had always believed in a “constitutional” after train travel of any length, which meant that she would arrive, with military precision, at two minutes past seven.

And she did. When she let herself up into the building, I was waiting at the door to our flat to take her jacket.

In appearance, the Holmeses fell into one of two camps: those with a severe, clean-lined beauty, and those who looked like badly boiled eggs. In her youth, Araminta had been the former. I had seen pictures of her when she’d worked as a codebreaker for the Home Office: a tumble of black curls, her eyes glittering like jeweled knives. But in recent years, her face had begun to give way to gravity (we all do, in the end), and now the long bags underneath her eyes made her look startlingly like my great-aunt Mildred. She was slim, in sensible shoes with a sensible suitcase, but despite her neatness, she looked years older than the last time I’d seen her.

Though, when I thought about it, it had in fact been . . . years.

“Lottie,” she said, wheeling her suitcase smartly against the wall. “Let me have a look at you.”

I stepped forward to present myself. (A small, horrified part of me wondered if this had been what I’d done this morning to Watson—presented myself for inspection, as I’d learned growing up.) For a long moment, she studied me with those cut-glass eyes she’d had as a girl.

“You had a party last night,” she said.

“Of sorts.” I’d known there was no point in cleaning up. “You’re not going to make me work out how you knew, are you?”

Araminta snorted. “I’m not your father.”

“Thank God for small mercies.”

“And this—” She swept past me into the flat, and I could hear her judgment as she looked it over. Its overstuffed chairs and bookshelves, its bright throw blankets, its television. “This is quite nice, actually.”

I blinked. “I think so,” I said cautiously.

“You seem happy,” she said over her shoulder, as she floated into the kitchen like the indefatigable ship she was. “Your boyfriend—James—he stays over most nights?”

I followed behind her, trying not to stomp my feet. “Jamie. Watson, rather. And only since Leander’s been out of town.”

Watson, in his previous accounts of our “adventures,” has spoken of the frustration inherent in holding a conversation with someone (ostensibly me) who knows all your secrets at a glance (I don’t—well, not always). He’d said once it was like playing chess one-handed. I disagree. I can play chess perfectly well one-handed. Conversing with my aunt Araminta was, at times, like playing speed chess with both hands tied behind your back while someone screamed obscenities into your ear.

“Uncle Leander,” Araminta said, sitting down at the counter. She eyed the spread I’d laid out, then picked up a cheese knife. “Honorifics, Lottie, are never wasted words.”

“Yes, Aunt.”

She arranged herself a plate of Brie and grapes and water crackers, then, to my surprise, passed it to me. “Eat,” she said. “You’re still underfed for your frame. Though, thank God, nothing like the last time I saw you.”

I took the plate.

“Eat,” she said again, and, obligingly, I put a thumb’s worth of Brie in my mouth and chewed.

“Good girl,” she said, then watched my throat until I swallowed. “I could murder your father.”

Before I could say anything to that—could I, in fact, say anything to that?—she had moved on. “Did you learn to do this from films?”

“Lay out a spread?” I asked. “I—”

“Films,” she said, “or your housekeeper, or Leander. Uncle Leander. It’s one of the three. Most likely Leander. Though I shouldn’t count out your Jamie.”

“Jamie doesn’t know how to make a stir-fry,” I told her, and then reeled at having sold him out so easily.

“He doesn’t,” she said, with delighted interest. I watched her file that away. “Fascinating. We should teach him. Eat, Charlotte.”

I put a grape in my mouth. She squinted at me. I put in two more. “Also,” I said, mouth full, “I don’t know how to make a stir-fry.”

“Of course you don’t,” she said. “You know how to slit a man’s throat and how to get Lucien Moriarty extradited back to Britain, but you don’t know how to make a stir-fry.”

I nodded.

“I could kill your father,” she said, “kill him,” and at that, Watson rapped on the door.

In short order she had the three of us on the sofa, though Watson tucked himself behind me in case Araminta should want to bite him. I didn’t blame him—I had a number of family members who were, in point of fact, vipers—but he shouldn’t have worried. The two of them got on famously.

There aren’t very many stories about my aunt. The one that’s told over and over in my family is perhaps the most dramatic—her uncovering Walter Moriarty’s dastardly plot; his killing her cats in revenge—and it is also, perhaps, the only story about her they know. When Araminta quit her job at the Home Office to keep bees in Sherlock Holmes’s little cottage, my family had assumed that she had quit them as well.