A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(67)

“That’s an understatement.”

I smiled. “I want to know how I can be of use.”

“What, then?”

“Is it okay if I don’t know?”

“Of course it is. You don’t need my permission.” He reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, and I leaned into the warmth of his hand. “Is there anything you can see, when you look into your future?”

Scotland, perhaps. The winding streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town; it was the only British city that hadn’t been bombed during the Second World War. I hadn’t seen them since I was a child, and the child in me wanted too to disappear into the highlands, see cows wander across a field, their faces like kindly, bearded old men. I wanted to go even farther, to Sweden and Iceland and to Norway. Up to Tromso to see the Arctic Cathedral, to Reykjavik to see the night stretch long into the day. I was as pale as the snow and as wicked-looking. I thought that was a landscape in which I’d fit.

“I pick up languages quickly,” I was saying, “and I notice things, and I can get into places no one else can. There are other girls out there who need help they don’t even think they can ask for. Girls like Matilda. I always felt so alone, you know, but now? I think I could be that person for them. Their . . . champion, I suppose. I want to find a way to put all that together.”

He took off his hat, held it loosely by his side, waiting. He could hear it, I think. What was coming.

I laughed hollowly. “These past few months have been the happiest I’ve ever been.”

I hadn’t known why my aunt had taken me to that little gilded restaurant where August had been tending bar. The towel tied in his apron strings. His hair longer, now, falling around his temples. His smile quicker than I’d ever seen. I’d never see it again.

I’d thought it was a punishment, of sorts. That had been so much of my past few years: people coming out of the woodwork to punish me for being who I was. A girl who’d been fashioned as a weapon, then left to rust out in the rain.

But it hadn’t been a punishment. She had offered me a kind of freedom.

And Watson was just looking at me.

“I love you,” I said. “But I don’t know if I can stay here, after all this is settled.”

He nodded once, twice. Took a step off to the side. Pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, and turned from me, walking out of the grove and into the darkening night.

It was selfish to follow, but I did.

“Jamie,” I said, crashing after him. “Jamie!” He sped up, but I lunged forward, close enough now to catch him by the elbow.

He stopped there, his back to me still. “You say the two things like they go together. That you love me, and that you have to go. Do you understand how—I have no idea what to say to that, Holmes.”

“Come with me,” I said. “I never said I didn’t want you to come.”

At that, he spun, so close to me that I could feel the heat of him through his shirt. “I don’t have the money,” he said. “I don’t have the time. I need to go to college. That’s what I’m doing this fall, Holmes. College. Not—not Tromso. Despite everything, I got into a good school, and I need to get a degree. And then maybe I’ll make, like, a wild decision and go to grad school for fiction instead of immediately getting a job as . . . as a copywriter. Which I would be lucky to get! I can’t just hare off after you while you go extravagantly find yourself. I think, actually, that would kind of defeat the purpose, don’t you?”

He shut his eyes, hard, and I felt childish. I felt like a fool. I had rehearsed all this in my head so many times. What had I expected?

“I can’t stay here,” I said desperately. I had to make him understand. “I can’t. I’ve changed. For the better, I think, but there’s still this . . . shadow over me. No one trusts me. No one but you.”

“I trust you,” he said. “How long? How long before you go—fuck, before you go wherever you’re going to go, and—” He was crying now, and he wiped at his eyes with his knuckles. “God.”

I couldn’t help it. I reached out and pulled his arms apart and stepped between them. He stood still and resistant for a moment, and then he collapsed, his arms going around my waist, tucking me up close. I could hear the hard echo of his heart.

“I love you,” he said quietly. “I’ve never in my life loved anything more.”

And somehow, somehow, that had been the last thing I’d imagined him saying.

“I’ll be back,” I promised. “I won’t be long. A year. Maybe two. And even if it isn’t to stay—maybe you can take a long summer, and come away with me.”

“You’re asking me to wait for you,” he said, pulling away. There was something broken in his eyes. “And you know I will. But I can’t make you feel better about this. I can’t. Not right now.”

“Jamie—”

“Come on,” he said, walking back to the boat. “I’ll take us home.”





Epilogue





Two years later

THE TRAINS FROM LONDON PADDINGTON STATION TO Oxford ran more than 150 times a day; the journey itself took about an hour. It cost seventeen quid to go there and back, twenty if you factored in the sausage roll I liked to buy in the station. I usually didn’t have a seatmate, but if I did, more often than not they’d be someone who looked like me—a university student with a weekender bag and a textbook they weren’t reading, off to visit a friend in another town.