A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(10)
This was a problem, yes, but it had training wheels on. Precisely what I needed. We needed.
Though Watson didn’t seem very sleuth-like at the moment, at least not from where I was sitting. He’d rolled up his sleeves and was relaxing back into his chair—his blood orange cocktail had smoothed out his edges. As for me, I drank my water and ate my chicken and felt myself return. I kept asking questions, flattering ones, ones they wanted to answer—the best nights most people seem to have are those where they’re allowed to shamelessly talk themselves up—and though I kept edging them back around to the theater, the theater and the accidents last year, I kept stumbling over a smaller, more intricate mystery in the way.
Why had these three friends, despite their seeming closeness, despite this being their first night together in a year, chosen to invite out two strangers to their favorite restaurant to break bread with them? Had they wanted to avoid each other, they would. Had they wanted to be together, they wouldn’t have invited us.
I cracked my knuckles, so to speak, and dug in.
Rupert was a youngest child from Norfolk. “The youngest of six,” he said, and I looked at his ruddy cheeks and his hands, calloused not from holding a pen or playing an instrument but from lifting and carrying, and asked where his family farm was. He liked that, the “trick” I’d just done, deducing he was a farmer—it told me almost as much about someone if they found my read of them fascinating or invasive—and said yes, part of the reason his parents had had so many children was so they had help with their sheep and their cows. He didn’t appear bothered by that; he didn’t feel used. He loved the farm, he said, feeding the baby lambs with a bottle. But his accent was more city than country, and his boots were expensive—hand-tooled Italian leather—and he wasn’t planning on being an actor, he was here to study economics. “It’s my current project,” he said, “when I’m not farming.” The rich did this sometimes, I’d learned, chose words that were technically true but that obscured whole worlds of meaning. I asked if he spent all year on the farm, and he blushed—Rupert blushed quite a lot, it was charming and seemingly genuine—and he said no, in fact, he went to Eton during the school year, it was silly to attend a school so posh and expensive but his father had gone, his uncles too, and anyway his parents were away most of the year doing business in London, and that’s when Anwen leaned over and stage-whispered to me, “Rupert Davies. As in, Davies Fine Leathers. They do the saddles for the queen? His family has Rup and his brothers come home to work the barns in the summer, they think it keeps them from becoming spoiled tosspots.”
Rupert did not, in fact, appear to be a tosspot, though I reserved the right to change my opinion given further evidence. At any rate, I didn’t resent him for coming from money, or for wanting to hide that fact. It was, in fact, such a logical decision on his part that I lost interest in Rupert temporarily. What I did find interesting: Anwen’s satisfied smile at outing Rupert, Theo rolling his eyes.
Unlike Rupert, Anwen didn’t talk much. Only in asides, redirections, the odd sarcastic comment. When I asked her a question about herself, something as straightforward as how she found out about the Oxford program, she would say, “Well, Theo learned about it from his dad . . .” and he would smoothly pick up where she had trailed off. Everything an evasive maneuver. Still, there was no nervousness in her gestures, no tells that she was lying, no self-consciousness at all that I could see—and I almost always found self-consciousness, particularly in other teenagers. Her dark dress was simple but well cut. It had a high collar but fit close to her body. Her hair was a dramatic curly tumble down her back—she clearly hadn’t brushed it; the not-brushing was deliberate, and it gave her a wild, fairy-tale look. Her nails were filed and painted translucent, so they had a subtle gleam, and she wore no jewelry except a signet ring (bought new, made to look vintage) on her smallest finger. It was, as my mother would say, a look, a push-pull between shined-up and attractively undone.
What I managed to glean about her was all in those details and in the things she let slip: she was here to study Russian history; she designed clothes and painted as a hobby and would be helping out with sets for Hamlet, even if she auditioned and won a part, “but only because Theo dragged me into it, naughty boy”; she had been accepted to Cambridge for the fall and professed to not care if her credits from this summer would transfer, which was the one moment I could tell she was lying, though I couldn’t tell if it was about Cambridge or about the not-caring. All I knew for certain was that she had both a polish and a bratty insouciance that drew her friends’ eyes to her over and over again.
Soon enough, Watson was looking at her too. Looking to evaluate, I thought, not with any real interest; and still I wished I hadn’t noticed, because my fondness for him tripped me up. Made me invested. It kept me from running my game as I liked to.
Still, it was a compromise I was willing to make.
Theo and Watson got on like a house on fire. They read the same books; they listened to the same grunge rock from the nineties; they both wanted the carbonara for dinner and the tiramisu for dessert. Theo had on a cheap military jacket cut to look stylish and shoes that he’d bought secondhand. He was attractively rumpled, a boy with strong shoulders and a slim waist, like a diver. Unlike Rupert, Theo didn’t have much to say about his life back home, only that he’d always wanted to do theater in Britain, ever since a Shakespeare troupe had come to do a workshop at his school in Boston and told him he was talented. It was true, he had a certain clarity of expression, a certain resonance to his speaking voice. He would do well playing a shipwrecked prince or a well-intentioned pirate; for now, he told us he’d set his sights on playing Hamlet. “The audition’s the day after tomorrow, and I shouldn’t be drinking at all—my voice, you know—but I’m a little nervous,” he said. He didn’t seem nervous. He had a boyfriend back home in Boston, and when Anwen poked him for texting under the table, she said to us, fondly, “Theo’s like this whenever he dates anyone. Smitten. You should have seen him with his girlfriend last year.” It was important to her for us, for whatever reason, to know about the girlfriend, to know he was bisexual, or pansexual, that he wasn’t only attracted to boys.