A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(12)
“I was drinking a decaf cappuccino while my girlfriend had her foot up a gentleman sheep farmer’s pant leg—”
“Yes,” I said, and really, I was moments from laughing in his face, “you are a cliché, I’ve made you some kind of awful cliché. I apologize. I grovel. I throw myself upon your mercy.”
Watson rolled his eyes up to the ceiling and finally, after a long moment, he sat down on the bed. “You’re lucky I adore you,” he said. At last he was smiling, and I resisted the urge to go to him, to put my hands in his hair.
I considered him, then, sitting comfortably on the white cloud of my bed. I’d decorated this room sparely, the better to fill in details when I knew them. I had a rail for my clothes, a desk in the window, a table for my experiments that right now stood bare. At Sherringford, back in my supply closet, Watson had fit in amongst the teeth and the vultures and the marked-up books like he, too, had been something I’d collected. The thought had given me pleasure. I remembered studying him through the bow of my violin, thinking, Why are you here, why are you here—why do you sit so still like that, watching me?
But he didn’t look like a curio to me anymore, not in this bedroom that I’d left quiet and open. He looked like a boy. One who, by his presence, was beginning to fill in the blank space around him.
I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that either, and I snatched up the dressing gown off the back of my door and put it on like a suit of armor.
“I also ran my foot up Rupert’s leg in a way that made him think it was Anwen’s,” I told him, belting my robe. “Unless my aim is incredibly poor.”
“Jesus, Holmes. You could have led with that, you know—”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“But you didn’t. Okay. At what point do you fill me in on what’s happening here, exactly?” He twisted his hands. “If this isn’t anything more than a puzzle, why have you kept me in the dark?”
“Because I needed your interest tonight to be genuine,” I said. He was on my bed. Why was he still on my bed?
Frowning, I pulled a cigarette from the packet in my robe and began casting around for a match.
“Will you please just tell me?” he asked, and it was either I did so, or I sat on his lap and put his arms around my waist, and I wasn’t ready for that, not yet. Terms or no terms, I wasn’t particularly good with romance unless one or the other of us was about to die.
Fortunately (unfortunately?), that wasn’t on the table. I briefly considered poisoning us both so I could take him to bed, then discarded the idea.
I needed a distraction.
“Fine,” I said, and stuffed the unlit cigarette back into my pocket. “It began last summer.”
“Not just the facts, Holmes. Tell it like a story.”
“Like a story,” I said. “Fine. Fine.” After all, Dr. Larkin had provided me with a number of dramatic flourishes when she had told it to me.
It had been a hot June, a damp one. The air had lain thicker than usual over the dreaming spires of Oxford, and underneath that suffocating blanket, as the Dramatics Society painted their sets and learned their lines for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the company had fallen, too, under a spell from which they couldn’t easily wake.
The Dramatics Soc hadn’t always done Shakespeare, but they’d gotten into a pattern: comedy and tragedy in alternate summers. Midsummer had been Larkin’s idea, a way to showcase their finest actress, the reason they’d been doing all the Bard’s plays in the first place. Matilda Wilkes—tall, with burning eyes and with an understanding of the language that far outstripped her years—had come from London the previous year and laid everyone flat with her talent. She was only a rising junior when Dr. Larkin decided on Midsummer: Matilda, with her air of natural authority, would play the fairy queen, Titania, and the roles of the four lovers—the ostensible leads—could go to seniors, who hopefully wouldn’t realize they were being upstaged.
After the auditions, Dr. Larkin had posted the casting list and taken her customary place in her office across the hall, in hopes that she’d catch any malcontents early to comfort them. This was, after all, a precollege program; the goal was education more so than performance. Still, the posting of the cast list still brought students to tears.
(“It’s an extracurricular,” Watson interjected. “We all have to take other classes. It’s just acting.”
“You’d feel differently if someone yanked you from your fiction workshop because ‘it’s just stories, he can take something else.’”
“Yes, okay, point.”)
The students came and went, in their clogs and ripped jeans and crop tops, with their neon-colored hair; there had been good-natured ribbing (“Of course you’re playing Bottom”) and some dickering over details (“Uh, I don’t think I’m ‘delicate’ enough to be Hermia, but whatever?”) but largely they all had been pleased. The only surprise had been Matilda Wilkes, lingering near the back of the crowd, her face dark and drawn. She’d fled as soon as Dr. Larkin caught her eyes.
Why? The reason soon became clear. Matilda Wilkes had stage parents. More accurately, stage parent—her father had called Dr. Larkin not ten minutes later, upset that his daughter had passed over acting programs at Royal Scottish and Juilliard to be cast in such a humiliatingly small role.