A Study in Charlotte

The world slowed to a standstill, as it does when things go so wrong, the bad news closing in like a lowering ceiling. I should have been thinking up a solution. A way out. Deciding if I should grovel for her forgiveness, or if I should tell Detective Shepard that she and I should be pulled from the case. But I didn’t. I curled up against her in the cold and listened for her breathing. What were you supposed to do when you were dealing with drugs like this? How long would the effects last? I wished, for the first time, that I’d done something with my years at Highcombe other than read novels and swoon over icy blond princesses who’d never touch anything harder than pot. I could have gained some practical knowledge. She might be dying, I thought, and I had no way to know; the responsible thing would be to call the police, or an ambulance, or at the very least tell my father and let him sort it out.

I didn’t. They’d write that on my tombstone, I thought: Jamie Watson. He didn’t. The snow sifted down through the porch slats, filling in the tracks her knees had made crawling through the mud. I wasn’t Catholic, but this had the distinct feel of purgatory: the bitter cold, the unending wait. No idea of what would come after.

After what felt like forever, the back door slid open. I listened to the heavy footfalls over our heads.

“Jamie?” my father called. “Charlotte? Detective Shepard and I are done talking. Jamie?” I held my breath. After a long minute, he swore and trudged back inside.

“Worried,” she observed, after we heard the door shut. I stared at the cloud her breath made in the cold. “Good that he worries. I don’t. You’re nothing to me.”

“Liar,” I echoed. I tried to put the force of my affection behind it.

“You did once,” said Holmes. “Mean something to me. You don’t now.”

She began to shiver. Was that a good sign? A bad one? Either way I couldn’t stand it. Carefully, I pulled her into my arms, and to my great surprise she let me, curling up against my chest as pliantly as if she were my girlfriend. As if I’d held her before. As if I held her every day.

Somehow that scared me far more than the rest of it. Lee Dobson had found her this way, I thought, and my arms tensed, instinctively. Dobson had—

“Stop thinking about him,” she said. “It’s not yours to think about.”

“What am I allowed to think about?” I asked wearily. If I had a rope, this was its end.

“Let’s talk about the things you think you know.” That horrible snicker. “Let’s disappoint Watson some more.”

“No,” I said, “you don’t—”

“August was my maths tutor. Did you know that? You did. Can tell by how your hands seized.”

I’d thought I wanted to hear this. But I didn’t. I really, really didn’t. “You don’t have to—”

“It was my parents’ idea. For publicity. Had some bad press, and they wanted to change the story in the media. Forgiving Holmeses. Fucking liars. I hated him at first. But after Milo moved to Germany, I got used to him. It was like having an older brother again. And then it wasn’t. It was something else.”

“What?” I asked, into the silence.

“I loved him. And he wouldn’t have me.” The words came sharp and hard, sudden in their ferocity. “He was too old, he said, and even if we waited, it would be a catastrophic mess. Our families, you know. He said that I’d grow out of it. My ‘crush.’ Him saying that was worse than him rejecting me.”

I couldn’t quite breathe, hearing her speak this way, as if reciting her sins. When she spoke again, she was horribly precise.

“I wanted to punish him. To make him feel what I was feeling. So I got him to use his family connections to buy me cocaine. I knew he’d do it. I’d been taking so much, and he was so scared that, without it, I’d go through withdrawal.” She drew a breath. “I wanted to make him hurt me, and then I wanted him to pay for it. The night his brother Lucien drove up with a boot full of coke, I called the police. Lucien ran, and August stayed to take the blame, as I suspected he would. After all, he felt responsible.

“My mother fired him. Then she phoned his don at Oxford to have him expelled. And after all of that was over, she sat me down in the drawing room. She’d drawn all the curtains. And she explained to me, very patiently, that this was a lesson. It wasn’t to happen again.”

“The drugs?” I asked quietly.

“The drugs.” She laughed. “No. I’d started with ‘the drugs’ at twelve. I was too soft on the inside, you see. No exoskeleton. I felt everything, and still everything bored me. I was like . . . like a radio playing five stations at once, all of them static. At first, the coke made me feel bigger. More together. Like I was one person, at last. And then it stopped working, and I began taking more, and more, and they sent me to rehab. When I came back, I spent a few months going the classical route—morphine, syringes. It made everything quiet and far away. I was wrong inside, you see. I’d always been wrong. But it was too messy, the morphine, and I was found out—more rehab. So I dropped the morphine for oxy. More rehab. Then more oxy. I’ve never quite managed to shake it, any of it, and my parents stopped expecting me to. It doesn’t scare them anymore.”

The whole time she spoke, she didn’t look up at me once. She was curled up in my arms like she was my girlfriend, but she was talking to me like I was an empty shell.