A Study in Charlotte

“I’m Holmes,” she said finally, in that marvelous, ragged voice. “But you knew that already, didn’t you.”

She wasn’t going to shake my hand, then. I slid both of them into my pockets.

“I did,” I admitted. “So you know who I am. Which is awkward, but I figured—”

“Who put you up to this?” There was a flat kind of acceptance in her face. “Was it Dobson?”

“Lee Dobson?” I shook my head, bewildered. “No. Put me up to what? I mean, I knew you’d be here. At Sherringford. My mum told me that the Holmeses had sent you; she keeps in touch with your aunt Araminta. They met at some charity thing. Right? They signed the His Last Bow manuscript? It went for leukemia patients or something, and now they write emails back and forth. Are you in my year? I was never clear on that. But you’ve got a biology textbook there, so you must be a sophomore. A deduction, ha. Maybe best avoid those.”

I was babbling like an idiot, I knew I was, but she had been holding herself so straight and still that she looked like a wax figurine. It was so at odds with the commanding, freewheeling girl I’d seen at the party that I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, what had happened to her since then. But my talking seemed to calm her down, and though it wasn’t funny, or morbid, or witty, I kept on going until her shoulders relaxed and her eyes finally lost some of their sharp sadness.

“I know who you are, of course,” she said when I finally stopped to draw breath. “My aunt Araminta did tell me about you, and Lena, though it would have been obvious anyway. Hello, Jamie.” She extended a small white hand, and we shook.

“I hate it when people call me Jamie, though,” I said, pained, “so you might as well call me Watson instead.”

Holmes smiled at me in a closed-mouth kind of way. “All right, then, Watson,” she said. “I have to go to lunch.”

It was a dismissal if I’d ever heard one.

“Right,” I said, tamping down my disappointment. “I was going to meet Tom anyway; I should go.”

“Right, see you.” She stepped neatly around me.

I couldn’t leave it at that, and so I called after her, “What did I do?”

Holmes flung me an unreadable look over her shoulder. “Homecoming’s next weekend,” she said drily, and went on her way.

By every account—and by that, honestly, I meant my mother’s—Charlotte was the epitome of a Holmes. Coming from my mother, that wasn’t a compliment. You’d think that after all this time, our families would have drifted apart, and in most ways I suppose we had. But my mother would run into the odd Holmes at Scotland Yard fund-raisers or the Edgar Awards dinners or, as in the case of Holmes’s aunt Araminta, an auction of my great-great-great-grandfather’s literary agent’s—Arthur Conan Doyle’s—things. I had always been enthralled with the idea of this girl, the only Holmes who was my age (as a kid, I thought we’d meet and the two of us would go on wild adventures), but my mother always discouraged me without saying why.

I knew nothing about her but that the police had let her assist on her first case when she was ten years old. The diamonds she helped recover were worth three million pounds. My father had told me about it during our weekly phone call, in an attempt to get me to open up to him. It hadn’t worked. At least, not in the way that he’d planned.

I dreamed about that diamond theft for months. How I could’ve been there by her side, her trusted companion. One night, I lowered her down into the Swiss bank from a skylight, my rope the only thing holding her above the booby-trapped floor. The next, we raced through the cars of a runaway train, chased by black-masked bandits shouting in Russian. When I saw a story about a stolen painting on the front page of the newspaper, I told my mother that Charlotte Holmes and I were going to solve the case. My mother cut me off, saying, “Jamie, if you try to do anything like that before you turn eighteen, I will sell every last one of your books in the night, starting with your autographed Neil Gaiman.”

(Before they’d divorced, my father was prone to saying, “You know, your mother’s only a Watson by marriage,” with a pointedly lofted eyebrow.)

The only real conversation my mother and I’d had about the Holmeses happened right before I left. We’d been discussing Sherringford— Well. She had been monologuing about how much I’d like it there while I packed up my closet in silence, wondering if I flung myself out the window, would it properly kill me or just break both my legs. Finally, she made me tell her something I was looking forward to, and to spite her (and because it was true), I told her I was excited, and nervous, to finally meet my counterpart in the Holmes family.

Which didn’t go over well.

“Lord knows how your great-great-great-grandfather put up with that man,” she said with a roll of her eyes.

“Sherlock?” I asked. At least now we weren’t talking about Sherringford.

My mother harrumphed. “I always imagined he’d just been bored. Victorian gentlemen, you know. Didn’t have too much going on. But it never seemed to me that their friendship ran both ways. Those Holmeses, they’re strange. They still drill their children from birth in deductive skills. Discourage them making friends, or so I’ve heard. I can’t say it’s healthy to keep a child away like that. Araminta is nice enough, I suppose, but then again I don’t live with her. I can’t imagine what it was like for the good Dr. Watson. The last thing you need is to take up with someone like her.”