The Last of August

  Leander Holmes would turn up the next day. Three days later, he would disappear. And for weeks and weeks after, I’d wonder if, by wishing, we’d brought everything that happened after that onto ourselves.

  three

  I WOKE TO CHARLOTTE BESIDE ME AND SOMEONE ELSE flinging back the curtains.

  Even with the sudden brightness, even knowing there was a stranger in my room, I couldn’t make myself look. It felt like I’d gotten less than five minutes of sleep—maybe five minutes in the last five months—and my body was finally drawing the line.

  “Go away,” I mumbled, and rolled over.

  The lamp flicked on. “Charlotte,” a low, lazy voice said, “when I gave you that T-shirt, I didn’t intend for you to interpret it literally.”

  At that, I cracked an eye open, but the man speaking was too backlit to see.

  “I don’t think you intended for me to ever wear it, either,” Holmes was saying beside me, but she sounded pleased. Somehow, she didn’t look tired at all; on the contrary, she was sitting up, her knees tucked under her shirt, stretching out the words CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS. “It really is the worst Christmas present I’ve ever gotten, and that’s saying something.”

  “Worse than the time that Milo bought you a Barbie?” the figure tutted. “I really must be a monster. Come on, goose. Introduce me to your boyfriend, unless you want to continue pretending he’s invisible, in which case I’ll play along.”

  Holmes paused. “No lecture?”

  Leander—because it had to be Leander—laughed. “You’ve done worse things, and anyway, it’s fairly clear you aren’t actually having sex. This may be indelicate, but those sheets aren’t hardly wrinkled enough. So I’m not quite sure what I should be lecturing you on.”

  That was it. I was going to pass a law against people making deductions before lunch.

  As I sat up, rubbing at my eyes, Leander crossed to the other side of the bed. I finally got a good look at him. We’d met once before, at my seventh birthday party. He’d brought me a pet rabbit. All I remembered was a tall man with broad shoulders who’d spent most of the party laughing with my father in a corner.

  That impression held true, though the man standing in front of me was impeccably well dressed, given the hour. (The clock beside me read 7:15, because the world was trying to kill me.) He was wearing a blazer, and his shoes were shined up like mirrors. Below his slicked-back hair, his eyes were wrinkled with smile lines. He held out a hand to shake.

  “Jamie Watson,” he said. “Do you know, you look just like your father did when I met him. Which is making all of this quite a bit stranger for me, so could you please get out of the bed you’re sharing with my niece?”

  I scrambled to my feet. “We’re not—I’m not—it’s very nice to meet you.” Behind me, Holmes was snickering, and I rounded on her. “Come on, really? Some backup would be nice.”

  “Do you want me to give him the details, then?”

  “Do you want me to give you a shovel so you can keep on digging me this hole?”

  “Please,” she shot back. “I’d rather watch. You’re doing such a nice job of it, after all.”

  Something was wrong. Our usual banter sounded meaner, pettier than usual. I stopped, not sure what to say.

  Leander saved me. “Children,” he said, pulling the door open. “Stop bickering, or I won’t make you breakfast.”

  The kitchen was cavernous, all metal and marble and glass. The housekeeper was already hard at work, rolling out a blanket of dough on the counter. I don’t know why it surprised me. Clearly Holmes’s parents weren’t making their own meals, if last night’s formal dinner was any indication.

  “Hello, Sarah,” Leander said, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “How late were you up last night, cleaning up after that soiree? I’ll take over. We’ll send breakfast to your room.” He gave her a look I recognized too well, a criminally charming smile straight out of the Charlotte Holmes Is Conning You playbook.

  The housekeeper laughed, and blushed, and finally gave up her apron to his waiting hands before she left.

  At the counter, Holmes propped her head on her fists. “You’re much more efficient at that than I am.”

  Leander didn’t answer for a moment, selecting a saucepan from the hanging copper rack. Holmes’s eyes followed his hands. “You do know that it works best if you mean what you’re saying,” he said. “Fried eggs?”

  “I’m not hungry.” She leaned forward. “You have some fascinating bruises on your wrists.”

  “I do,” he said, as if she’d commented on the weather. “Jamie? Bacon? Biscuits?”

  “God, yes. Is there a kettle here somewhere? I need tea.”

  He pointed with his spatula, and the two of us got down to making a breakfast fit for an army. The whole time, Holmes sat with narrowed eyes, taking him apart.

  “Go on then,” Leander said finally. “Let’s hear if the deductions you’re making are correct.”

  Holmes didn’t waste any time. “Your shoes are hastily laced—the right’s done up in a different pattern than the left—and your blazer wrinkled at the elbows. And I know you’re aware of that; you’re as aware as I am of these things, which means that either you’re trying to send a message to someone or you are actually too worn out and tired to care that you’re pressed to something less than perfection, which means that things have been very hard for you lately. Your hair was just cut by someone in Germany. Don’t give me that look, it’s far more avant-garde than your usual, and Milo mentioned seeing you recently. Berlin, then. If you were to take the pomade out, it’d fall just like one of Jamie’s emo singers. Oh, stop glaring, both of you. I happen to know that Uncle Leander has been going to the same barber in Eastbourne since his teens.” Impatiently, she pulled at her own hair. “You’re hiding a limp, you’ve developed some terrific neck-beard, and—have you been kissing someone?”

  The kettle began to whistle loudly enough that neither of them heard me laugh.

  Leander made a tsking motion with his spatula. “Charlotte.” He was the only one in her family, I noticed, not to call her by her nickname. “Darling girl, I won’t tell you a single thing unless you agree to eat.”

  “Fine.” A smile crept across her face. “Hateful man.”

  After Leander brought a tray up to the housekeeper’s room, we settled in around the counter, and I snuck another look at Holmes’s uncle. She was right; he did look tired, the kind of tired I remembered from late last fall, where I felt like I wasn’t allowed the vulnerability of sleep. That, coupled with the trace of worry behind his showman’s smile, and I wondered just where he’d been before Sussex.

  “Germany,” he said, picking the thought out of my head. “Charlotte was right on that count. Their government asked me to uncover a forgery ring that may or may not be churning out work by a German painter from the thirties. I’ve been in rather deep cover, and for a long time. It’s a delicate business. You’re winning the trust of some dangerous people, and you need to know how to talk to skittish art students ripping off Rembrandts to make a living.” Unexpectedly, he grinned. “It’s quite fun, honestly. Like playing Whac-a-Mole, only with guns and a wig.”

  Holmes tugged at the cuff of his shirt, exposing the bruise beneath. “Yes. Fun.”

  “Eat your bacon, or I won’t explain.” He pushed her plate toward her. “Like I said, I’ve not been involved with the most genteel crowd these past few months. And honestly I didn’t really want to take this case to begin with. As interesting as it is, it involves so much legwork, and my legs are happiest on my ottoman. I like a pretty little puzzle as much as the next man, but this . . . well, and then I had lunch with your father, Jamie, and he persuaded me to take it. Like old times, he said, when we were sleuthing together in Edinburgh. He has a family now, so he’s less mobile than I am, but I’ve been sending him daily emails, and he’s helping me put it together from afar.”

  “Really?” I asked, bemused. “He’s helpful?” My father was excitable, irre
sponsible, a little touched in the head. I had some trouble imagining him as an analytical genius.

  Leander raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think I would involve him if he wasn’t?”

  I raised my eyebrow right back. My father might be helpful, sure, or he might just be the audience for Leander’s magic show. With Holmeses, you never really knew where you stood.

  Next to me, mine was ripping up her biscuit. “Yes, but the bruises. And the kissing.”

  “Deep cover,” her uncle said in a dramatic voice. “Deep, deep cover.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Then why are you here, in England? Not that I’m not happy to see you.”

  Leander stood and gathered our plates. “Because your father has contacts I can’t gain access to through my illegitimate means. And because I wanted to get a good look at Jamie, here, since the two of you are now attached at the hip. Morning and night, apparently.”

  Holmes shrugged, her shoulders thin under her shirt, and she brought a sliver of biscuit to her mouth. I watched her, the line of her arm, how her lips still looked bee-stung from the night before. Or was I imagining that detail, coloring it in because I needed to make it a story, to see cause and effect where there wasn’t any?

  She’d almost kissed me. I’d wanted her to. Everything was fine.

  “If it matters at all,” Leander said from the sink, rolling up his sleeves, “I approve.”

  Holmes smiled at him, and I smiled at him, because neither of us knew what to say.

  It was like the night before existed in some other universe. A lone hour in a sea of awkwardness where we could talk to each other the way we used to, and now that it was over, we were adrift again.

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED SLOWLY, AS MOST PUNISHMENTS do. During the day, I read the Faulkner novel I’d brought in a sunny alcove off the servants’ quarters. Those rooms stood mostly empty now, so I didn’t have to worry about being found. Which was a relief. I’d run out of things to say to Holmes’s parents fairly quickly. Even if I found her mother terrifying, I didn’t hate her. She was ill and worried about her daughter.

  Then Alistair told us that Emma’s condition had begun to deteriorate. She stopped eating meals with us. One night before dinner, I found Leander giving directions to nursing staff as they hauled a hospital bed in through the front door.

  “I thought she had fibromyalgia,” Holmes murmured over my shoulder. “Fibromyalgia doesn’t require a live-in team. I thought—I thought she was getting better.”

  I managed not to jump. She’d taken to doing that, to ghosting at the edges of whatever room I was in, and then, as soon as I noticed her, giving an excuse and running away. So I didn’t say anything, didn’t try to comfort her, just watched Leander grimace as the orderly crashed the bed into the doorframe.

  Upstairs, a man’s raised voice said, But the offshore accounts—no, I refuse. Was it Alistair’s? A door slammed.

  It didn’t matter. By the time I turned to her, Holmes was already gone.

  I found Leander later in the living room. “Living room” might have been too friendly a name for what it was—a black sofa; a low, expensive-looking table; a cowhide rug beneath them. I’d been prowling the halls, looking for my absent best friend, and found her uncle and mother instead.

  I was surprised. A hospital bed had just come through the front door, and I’d expected that she’d be in it. But no—she was on her back on the sofa, the heels of her hands pressed against her forehead, while Leander loomed over her.

  “This is the last favor I’ll do for you,” he was saying, in a low, furious voice. “For the rest of our lives. This is the last one. I want you to understand that. No school tuition. No bailouts. You could have asked me for anything, but this—”

  She dragged her hands down her face. “I know what the word ‘last’ means, Leander,” she said, and in that moment, she sounded exactly like her daughter.

  “So when?” he asked. “When will you need me?”

  “You’ll know,” Emma said. “We’re almost there.” At that, she stood, swaying on her feet. Like all the soft parts of her had shriveled away, leaving a dusty, exhausted shell.

  Leander noticed it, too, reaching out a hand to steady her, but she held up a hand in warning. With slow, labored steps, she left the room.

  “Hello, Jamie,” Leander said, his back still to me.

  “How did you know it was me?” I said lightly. “You all need a different party trick. I almost expect that one now.”

  “Sit,” he said, and motioned me over to the sofa. “Where’s Charlotte?”

  I shrugged.

  “I thought it might be like that,” he said.

  “Is everything okay with Mrs. Holmes?” I asked, in an attempt to change the subject.

  “No,” he said. “That’s obvious, though. Tell me—I’ve been in touch with your father, of course, but I’d like to hear it from you—how’s your family doing? How is your darling little sister? Is she still into Your Little Sparkle Ponies, or whatever they’re called? James misses her something awful.”

  “Shelby’s good,” I said. “She’s past the sparkle ponies and on to painting portraits of dogs. Starting to look at secondary schools near our flat.”

  Leander smiled at me. “James was making noises about having her sent to Sherringford. It might be nice to have you both in the same place. Do Sunday dinners. Go mini-golfing on the weekend. Or to the roller rink. Roller rinking is a family activity, right?”

  “Uh, right.” Though I was pretty sure it was called roller-skating, and that I’d rather die before doing it. “I heard you say ‘no school tuition,’ though. We can’t afford to send Shelby to Sherringford. Not on our own. And it’s no secret anymore that you’re footing my bill.”

  His smile faded. “That doesn’t apply to your family. It never would. I’d stand by your father through anything, Jamie, because I know he’d never ask me to . . . It doesn’t matter. Listen, don’t ever think you’ll be a casualty in this war. You won’t be. I’ll make sure of it.”

  An invisible war with invisible blood. Or not invisible—just not our own, not yet. Lee Dobson had been a casualty already, and I’d come knife’s-edge close to becoming one myself. “How did this even start?” I asked him. It was a question that had been nagging me for weeks. “Like, why did the Holmeses hire August Moriarty anyway? I know it was a publicity stunt or whatever, but if you all hated each other so much, why would Holmes’s parents take that risk?”

  “It’s not a short story, you know.”

  I laughed. “I mean, I don’t know how I’ll fit it into my busy schedule of being avoided.” And it was true. What else was I going to do this afternoon? I might as well fill in some of the blanks that Holmes wouldn’t help me with.

  “Fine,” he said, “but if you’re going to make me tell it, we’re going to need some tea.”

  Ten minutes and one pot of Earl Grey later, we were settled back onto the sofa.

  Somewhere in the distance, I heard the rush of the sea. “You’re familiar with Sherlock Holmes’s run-ins with Professor Moriarty, aren’t you? Sherlock took down a number of ‘notorious’ men, but Moriarty was the one at the top. A right bastard. Every other criminal in England paid him protection money. He orchestrated their actions, knit them together into a web. And Holmes was able to deduce the spider from that web.” Absently, he rubbed at his temple. “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

  “I’ve heard it before,” I said, blowing on my tea. Half the world had heard it before. Sherlock Holmes squaring off against the professor; Holmes and Dr. Watson’s flight to Switzerland to escape him; my great-great-great-grandfather on a hill overlooking a waterfall, wondering if his best friend and partner had died in its depths. Both Holmes and Moriarty had disappeared that day, Moriarty for good, and the man who’d come back to Baker Street had done so only years later, after eradicating the last of the crime lord’s agents.

  Or so the story went.

  “When I was a child, I never und
erstood the fixation on Moriarty,” Leander was saying. “He’s never mentioned in the good doctor’s stories, not until ‘The Final Problem,’ where it’s like he was invented to explain all these fabulously strange crimes that Sherlock had investigated. Then he’s gone again. And you know, growing up, our relationship with that family was fairly civil. A bit apologetic, really. They didn’t have the best reputation—being cursed with an infamous last name will do that to you—but sins of the father, and so on. They weren’t the Napoleons of crime. I said as much to my father.”

  “How did that go?”

  Leander ran a hand over his slicked-back hair. “Poorly,” he admitted. “He told me that there’s a criminal strain in their blood. We might have been at peace when this August business started, but we’d spent the majority of the twentieth century tangling with them, one way or another.”

  “We did?” I said, then corrected myself. “You did?” From what I understood, the Watsons mostly spent the twentieth century losing their spectacular fortune at cards.

  “Forgive me if I get the dates wrong,” Leander said, sipping his tea, “but. 1918. Fiona Moriarty, dressed as a man, secures a position as a guard at Sing Sing. The costume, as I understand it, involved flour bags tied around her waist for bulk. Apparently it was splendid. After spending two months beating up the most hardened criminals in the world and, one assumes, gathering data, she quits her job. Two weeks later, she gets herself arrested for robbing a bank in broad daylight, disguised as a different man, and is thrown behind bars. Within the night, she has escorted twenty prisoners out of Sing Sing through a tunnel she’d spent the last ten days digging. A tunnel that went under the Hudson River.”

  I let out a low whistle. “Did she get away with it?”

  He grinned. “Tunnels have two openings, don’t they? My great-grandfather had built a bonfire at the exit. Those poor prisoners all ran yelling back to their cells. Thought they’d found their freedom . . . found lots of smoke, instead. And she was put behind bars herself. Her scheme had been clever, you know. A good five of those prisoners were her father’s lieutenants. Men who had helped raise her. Who, after her father’s death, escaped to America looking to avoid the long arm of Sherlock Holmes.” Leander raised an eyebrow. “Sentiment. It always gets you in the end.”