A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(2)

I truly hated parties.

Still, I helped Leander light the clusters of candles in the windows, breathed in their scent when he asked me to, said, Yes, that amber one is lovely (not because it was, but because I loved my uncle); I arranged the miniature cheeses on a platter (Everything in miniature at parties, I thought, people should make themselves bigger); I changed into my boots but kept the leggings, and then took up a position in the armchair by the door.

The same people again. Some dons in shirtsleeves, a pair of philosophy graduate students studying the bookshelves. My uncle listening intently to—yes, there it was, to an ebulliently handsome man in the kitchen, one who had been here the time before. Now he was touching Leander’s shoulder with a slim hand, as though for emphasis. It wasn’t for emphasis. Well done, Leander, I thought, and closed the case, as it were, on the mystery of the many parties.

Pity, though. To my surprise, I found that I had been hoping for something a bit more sinister.

I was studying my uncle’s suitor from a distance (blue-eyed, single, last boyfriend had given him terrible feedback on his hair) when the drama lecturer plopped down on the ottoman beside me.

“Charlotte,” she said. Her name was Dr. Larkin. “Your uncle was just telling me about your interest in Shakespeare.”

“My interest in Shakespeare.” I wasn’t uninterested in Shakespeare, I supposed. I liked the language. I liked the pageantry. I liked above all the disobedient girls that populated his plays, and I told Dr. Larkin that.

She tucked her hair behind her ears. “We’re doing Hamlet, you know, at the precollege Dramatics Society this summer. We do quite a bit of Shakespeare. It goes off just fine, usually, though the precollege program is always under-enrolled and in turmoil and, well, a bit on fire—”

“You’re not selling it all that well,” I said, not unkindly.

Dr. Larkin laughed. “I’m not actually asking you to audition,” she said. “Though I suppose, in a way, I am. We had a series of . . . incidents last summer, and so much of the program is returning—faculty and students and crew—and, in the end, we never quite figured it out.”

“What, exactly?”

But she was looking just past me, her eyes gone suddenly hard. “I’m invested in it not happening again,” she was saying in a hollow voice. “The business with the orchids, that is.”

The party had grown louder; someone had put on the Rolling Stones, and a few people were dancing. A girl in the corner was reading my uncle’s copy of Middlemarch. Across the room, Leander and his suitor were peering out the windows at the night, their shoulders barely touching.

None of it mattered. Something was stirring in my blood. “Begin at the beginning,” I told Dr. Larkin. “And tell me, please, that you don’t want me to play Ophelia.”





Two

“THEY WANT YOU TO PLAY OPHELIA?” WATSON ASKED, hoisting his duffel bag over his shoulder. His suitcase was already on the curb. “Isn’t that a little, like, on the nose?”

I thumped the roof of the cab, and it trundled back out into the road. Six on a Sunday, and the city was quiet, the sun still not entirely up. Flights from America always came in with the dawn. For once, Watson didn’t look the worse for wear. He never fared well on planes across the Atlantic, sleeping fitfully or not at all, but this morning his hair was so extravagantly tousled, I knew he’d spent the whole flight unconscious. Though the red lines near his temples (striated; elastic?) flummoxed me until—

“You had on a sleeping mask,” I said, delighted beyond all sense. “Tell me, was it one of those with the eyelashes printed on it? Was it silk? Was it your mother’s, or—”

He pulled it from his pocket and tossed it to me; I caught it one-handed. Black silk, sans eyelashes. “You’re a jerk,” he said, laughing. “I bought it in the terminal.”

“Why would I be a jerk? I’m only asking about your beauty sleep.”

“Did it work? Am I more beautiful now?”

His white shirt was rumpled—why on earth had he worn an oxford on an international flight?—and he still had his medicinal-blue flight pillow around his neck, and everything he was thinking, every last thing, played out on his face: anticipation, happiness, a little fear. Knowing what he did about the way I worked, what I observed, he still wore it there for me to see.

Of course he was beautiful.

“Of course you aren’t,” I told him, but I was smiling. “It’d take a longer nap than that, surely.”

Upstairs, we settled in on the sofa, his feet propped up on his duffel. The soles of his trainers would leave a mark there, but at least they weren’t on the couch. Leander would have had kittens. “So. Ophelia,” Watson said. “Isn’t there another part for you to play?”

“Not for my purposes.”

“I guess it isn’t much of a stretch for you.” He knew he was annoying me, and he was enjoying it. I could tell from his left eyebrow.

“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this,” I said, “but I have no plans to drown myself because of you. I don’t see how my playing Ophelia is ‘on the nose.’”

He tipped his head against the cushion. “You are the smallest bit tortured, you know.”

I grimaced. “Less so, now. Therapy. Lots of therapy. And I’m eating breakfast. I’m a healthy, sound person.”