A Study in Charlotte

“And after that he kept coming back. It was clear he was infatuated with me. You can see why, of course.” A smile crept over her face like a poisonous fog. “I can see you are, too, Jamie, from the way you look at me. I knew it the day that you got into that tussle with my Lee, the starry-eyed look on your face. Don’t be ashamed. I did pageants, you know. Won quite a few prizes. But no. No, I was talking about Lee Dobson and that protein powder.

“Because the two of you had more or less marked him for dead. Charlotte had made her disgust for that poor boy so loudly clear, and, you, Jamie, had made an attempt to kill him. No, don’t look at me like that—you would’ve beaten him stupid, and all for him saying things about your Charlotte that were true. I got all of it from Dobson in the infirmary. How he’d tried to warn you about what a slut she was. He was doing you a favor! And look at how he repaid it. Poor thing marked himself for death at that point. From my own experience”—here she huffed, like a disappointed grandmother—“I know that Charlotte is utterly ruthless. She would’ve taken him out eventually, especially with such a besotted baby mastiff like you by her side. I was doing him a favor, really. At least I got rid of him in a humane way.

“It wasn’t hard to start dosing him with arsenic in his protein powder. A little bit at a time, building the dosage each day—I made him come to me to take it, of course. And then I had a blank page to write my story on, once he was dead. You know, I loved Dr. Watson’s tales when I was young. It was so much fun to get to do a reenactment. I nicked a brand-new copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes out of the library and made a dorm visit that night—came up through the back stairs. I’d asked Lee to prop them open for me. Had a surprise for him, I said. He probably thought he was going to get laid. I knew his roommate was on that rugby tour; he’d told me, so eager to get his hands on me. Well. By the time I arrived, he was dead. They called me to help comfort the students, after.”

She studied a nail. In a flash, I remembered seeing her there outside Dobson’s door, patting my sobbing hallmate on the shoulder. I swallowed the bile that had risen in my throat.

“Of course, I had help with the snake.”

Holmes started. “What help?”

Bryony clucked her tongue. “Speaking out of turn,” she said, and for the first time, I heard a trace of anger in her voice. “But I’ll play along. Still haven’t thought through the consequences of your actions, have you? Well, birds can’t change their feathers. Here’s a quick education: when you orchestrated my fiancé’s downfall—all for the crime of loving me—you ruined my life. You ruined. My life.” She took a step closer to the two of them, almost inadvertently. When she moved, I saw the gun she’d holstered underneath her puffer coat.

“You whore. I’d been with Augie since we were kids. He’d gone to Eton, and then early to Oxford, while I went to the village school, but all the while he’d always loved me. Me, do you understand? I went over to the Moriartys’ for every Sunday dinner. They came to my flute recitals, when my own mother was too drunk to scrape herself off the sofa. And when I was seventeen and my mother died, and my father couldn’t be fucked to take me in, do you know who did? Oh, that’s right. Professor Moriarty and his wife. I don’t care what they did on the side—they were saints, do you understand? If they asked me to slit my own throat, I would have, for them.”

“I thought you came to the States when you were sixteen,” Holmes whispered.

Bryony smiled. “Do you think my name was the only part of my employment records I had falsified? No, I was never sent away across an ocean. No one wanted to be rid of me that badly. You see, I was to marry Augie as soon as I finished at uni. His parents paid for me to attend the University of London, and his family had already bought a flat for us to live in as husband and wife. I was to be a doctor. I’m very smart, you know. Though you Holmeses all think that there’s no one as bloody brilliant as you, Augie could run circles around you with his eyes shut, and I was going to be a doctor.

“And then Augie took that horrible job.” She ground her teeth so hard that I could hear it, the enamel and bone. “At your house.

“His parents warned him against it. His brother Lucien did too. They thought he was mad, going into a den of vipers like that. Your bitch of a mother and your homicidal brother and you, the enfant terrible, as his student? God, the games the Moriartys play are small compared to yours. But Augie believed the best of people. He believed the best from you, baby Charlotte. That was his downfall.”

That was when I realized that she was talking about him as if he were dead. Holmes noticed, too—her eyes finally drifted up from Bryony’s boots to her cruelly smiling face. But Holmes kept her immaculate poker face. Either this wasn’t a surprise, or her composure was even better than I’d thought.

“The last time I saw Augie alive,” Bryony said, “was the day before the drugs bust. He’d come up to London for a few days, to visit me. It was beautiful. He took me to this gorgeous restaurant. White tablecloths. We talked about our wedding. It was going to be small, intimate. In his family’s backyard, wildflowers, his mother’s wedding dress. We were so happy. We didn’t need anything but each other.” She lost her dreamy look, then. “He went back to your house the next day. I reckon you could smell me all over him. Made you crazy with jealousy. Just a little girl, but with such big-girl appetites. He told me all about your crush, you know. He thought it was adorable.”