A Study in Charlotte (27 page)

I didn't trust anything that was happening to me—Where was Holmes? For that matter, where was I?—but I was so overwhelmed by a wave of exhaustion that I let myself be carried away by it, all the way to sea.

When I woke—when I fully woke—night had fallen. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed things I hadn't before. There was a dim lamp by my bed, its mouth turned away to throw a white circle on the wall. Beside me, a machine counted out my pulse, reading it from a plastic clip attached to my index finger. My hands had been re-bandaged, expertly this time. I felt present in my body, in a way I hadn't since I opened that closet door.

There was a bright blanket at the end of my bed, a door across from me. In the shadowed corner was a chair. Empty, I thought, and as I squinted to make sure, I saw the velvet fabric, the tufted buttons.

I was in Bryony Downs's flat.

Frantically, I pulled myself up in bed, yanking the heart monitor off my finger and going to work on the medical tape over the needles on my arm. She'd taken me—she'd taken me
somewhere. Had Holmes and her brother been hallucinations, too? The heart monitor screamed a warning, and the door across from me flew open.

By the time she came in, I was on my feet, panting, the desk lamp ripped out of the wall and brandished like a weapon before me.

“Watson,” Holmes cried from the doorway. “
Watson
. God, I thought you were dead.”

It took some doing, but I let her coax me back into bed. She called a name I didn't recognize, and a man in scrubs came in and put my IV back in. He took my vitals while Holmes hovered behind him, biting her lip. She'd pulled her hair back roughly from her face; her nose was red, her face white. She looked ascetic and harsh. She looked, in fact, like she'd been crying. I started to reach out to touch her but then drew back my hand.

“Right now, we're managing your symptoms,” the doctor murmured. “We've given you medication to control the pain, and to bring your fever down. Don't try to get up. If you need to use the bathroom, let us know.”

I nodded. Now that the adrenaline rush was over, my legs were trembling from my attempt at self-defense.

“You shouldn't be here, Charlotte,” the doctor said. “He could be contagious, and I don't want you touching him—”

Stepping forward, she took my hand in hers.

“So be it,” the doctor said, and left.

“Holmes,” I asked her, “what did she give me? How did you know?”

She hoisted herself up on my bedside. I remembered the night I'd woken her this way, when she'd fallen asleep as Hailey and woken up, again, as my best friend. We'd had pancakes. She'd asked me to trust her.

“It's a created virus,” she said hoarsely. “Brewed in a lab. That doctor—Dr. Warner—is a specialist on this particular strain.” She rattled off a series of Latin words I didn't know. “That's what it's called.”

“Can you give me something easier to call it?” I asked, half-joking. “The Watson flu?”

She shrugged. “As you'd like. It was created, originally, as a bioweapon, for the rapidity with which it kills its victims. Dr. Warner works for the German government. Luckily for us, he was presenting at a conference in Washington. Milo more or less had him clubbed over the head and brought up here.”

“Oh,” I said. “So it can be cured?”

Holmes bit her lip again. I'd never seen her so ragged. “We think so,” she said carefully. “He has some theories. Right now, he's in the other room, researching.”

“The other room. Here, in Bryony's flat.”

“It was my idea,” she admitted. “God knows she won't be returning here after pulling a stunt like this. And I didn't want to bring you to your house, not contagious like this. So we took this place over, changed the locks; Milo called in some favors, as you can see. We'll bring in a professional cleaning crew, of course, after this is all over. The next tenant doesn't deserve to get the Watson flu in the bargain.”

After this is all over.
One way or another, it would be over
soon. She caught my gaze, and with that magician's trick of hers, I watched her read my mind.

She shook her head quickly, hugging her arms around herself.

“You can't do that,” I said quietly. “You can't fall apart yet.”

She nodded, her face turned from me.

“Come here,” I said, moving over in the bed. “If you really don't mind my being patient zero.”

She swallowed her tears. I pulled back the sheet, and she crawled in beside me, putting her head on my chest. I pressed my lips against the dark crown of her hair. It was like those hours under the porch, the stillness, the waiting; and it was nothing like it at all. My muscles ached. My limbs were heavy. My lungs were raw in my chest. I had to brace myself against the bed as another round of shivers ground their way through me.

“How did you know?” I asked, gritting my teeth. “About the virus? About what happened to me?”

“Bryony sent me a list of her demands,” she said, her voice muffled in my shirt. “Via text, of course. She had it timed to your appointment at Michener Hall. Must've gotten the schedule from the all-campus email.”

“Via text? Holmes, that can be used as evidence against her.”

“That's not what we're going to do.”

“But—”

“Don't, Watson.”

I didn't have the strength to argue with her. “What were her demands? What does she want?”

“A pony,” she said.

I smiled against the pain. “The very prettiest pony in the land, on a golden lead. Only then will the favorite sidekick be cured.”

“You're not my sidekick,” Holmes said softly. “That's her first mistake.”

“What am I, then?”

But I didn't know if I wanted to hear the answer. Not now.

She must have heard the reticence in my voice. “A pony,” she said, “and three million dollars, and safe passage to Russia, a country which, given my father's history as well as the current state of US-Russo relations, won't extradite her to either Britain or America to stand trial for what she's done. Which would be moot, anyway, because she wants me to claim full responsibility for Dobson's murder and Elizabeth's attack.”

“Jesus Christ.” I struggled against the idea.

“She's done the thing very completely,” Holmes said. There was a touch of admiration in her voice. “I should have known.”

“This is not your fault,” I told her, before she could go on. “You claiming it's your fault makes it sound like I'm just a piece of cargo getting hauled next to you. No will of my own. So stop
it.”

“But—”

“I'm dying,” I told her, with a grim sort of glee. “You have to listen to me.”

She laughed hollowly. “Milo has the money, and he's arranging the airfare as we speak. I've written out my confession. It's done. The exchange will be made at nine o'clock in the
morning. She has the antidote. I don't know how—Dr. Warner doesn't know how it's possible—but she does, and even if she's lying, it's still a chance we have to take. We're meeting her twenty-two hours after your infection, so you should still be—ah. It should be fine.”

“Where?”

“She'll text us the location when it's time.”

“You're not going to jail for this,” I said. “Detective Shepard won't let you. Wait, isn't she in his custody? What the hell happened there?”

“Remember when we thought she stopped for gas? She switched cars at the police station. Left her Toyota in the lot and picked up another car that she'd left there.” Again, that note of admiration. “We saw her as a stupid sorority girl, and she ran circles around us.”

“And where is he now? Detective Shepard?”

“Her terms were no police involvement, no sending you to the hospital. So I don't know. I've been focused on you.” I felt her shrug. “That's the other part. You'll die. One way or another, you'll die if I don't take this fall. I think it's a good idea to listen to her, as she's proven herself handy with a suitcase bomb.”

The door cracked open, and Milo stuck his glossy head in. If he was surprised to see his sister tucked in my arms, he didn't show it.

“You're awake. How are you feeling?” he asked.

Like I'd been run down by a truck. “Fine,” I said.

“Do you want us to contact your parents?”

“Oh God. My father thought—”

“—thinks you are discussing strategy with myself and Lottie until late tonight. This afternoon, Peterson and Michaels returned his car and gave him my reassurances. As we've decided to broker with Nurse Bryony for your cure, you don't have a real reason to worry him. Though I understand how one's parents could be a comfort, in a time like this.” He said the last part academically, like it was a theory he'd never personally tested.

“Right,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “No, that's fine, don't contact them.”

“Get some sleep,” he advised. “We'll handle this.”

If I wasn't included in that
we
—and how could I be; I couldn't handle even standing up—at least his sister was. I nodded at him, and he nodded back, and shut the door.

“You're not going to jail,” I said again. My mouth felt dry. “There has to be another way.”

“I need to be arrested, and convicted. Or she'll find another way to end you. She was very specific on those terms.”

“Holmes.”

“Watson,” she said roughly, “I remember a very recent conversation where you detailed all the horrible possibilities of my death. Do you remember that? Would you like to, for just a moment, imagine what it would be like to watch one come true? Think about what this is like
for me.”

“The trade-off shouldn't be spending the rest of your life in a cell for a crime you didn't commit!”

“No.” She curled my shirt into her fist. “No, but perhaps I
should serve time for the crime I did.”

“I can't talk about your martyr complex right now,” I said, swallowing against the sand in my throat. “I can't.” I reached blindly for the glass of water by the bed and drank it down.

She drew back to look at me. “You're flushed,” she said, scrambling to her feet, “I think your fever's returning—I'll fetch Dr. Warner—”

“Wait,” I said.

She was rumpled, undone, her hair coming out of its elastic to curl in tendrils around her face. There was something I had to say to her, I thought, something necessary, something right at the tip of my tongue.

I guess she knew it before I did.

Leaning over, she smoothed my hair back from my forehead. I closed my eyes at her touch. And so it was a surprise when she kissed me on the lips.

She smelled, unexpectedly, like roses.

“That's all I can do,” she whispered, resting her forehead to mine.

“That's a lot,” I said, and she laughed.

“No. I mean, that's all—it's nearly too much for me to touch anyone, after Dobson, and I—for you, I'm trying.”

I could feel her breath on my lips. “I don't know how long I'll be like this,” she said, slowly, “or if I've maybe been this way all along. I don't know if it'll ever be enough.”

It was confusing, what she said, but I thought I understood it.

“You don't have to try,” I said to her. “Whatever this is, already—it's already enough.”

“I know,” she said, straightening. “It has to be.”

We looked at each other for a minute.

“If you get yourself thrown in jail over this,” I told her, “I will never, never forgive you. You need to find another way, or I swear to God I will die on you just out of spite.”

Her flickering smile. “Okay.”

“Okay? It's that simple?”

“Okay,” she said again. I had no choice but to believe her. “Your pulse is racing, and you're far too warm. I'm going for Dr. Warner.” She smirked. “Don't want you to die before you can use it as a bargaining chip.”

“Thanks,” I said, pleased, at least, that she chalked my hammering heart up to my fever.

I
WAS MUCH
,
MUCH WORSE IN THE MORNING.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise. Logic dictates that a deteriorating illness deteriorates. But then, logic is hard to come by when you're dying.

Whatever brief reprieve Dr. Warner's drugs had granted me ended around midnight, when I maxed out on the highest morphine dosage he'd allow me. The hours after that were . . . well, I've been assured it's best that I can't remember them.

As morning broke, I moved in and out of fitful dreams, dark, sodden landscapes that were at once cruelly hot and cut through by the bitterest winds. At the same time, I was conscious of something happening in the room around me. A hand on my forehead. A pair of voices, shouting. It all added
to my unrest, since, for the life of me, I couldn't make myself understand what was happening. Burma, I thought, I was in Burma. I was in Afghanistan. No, my mother was baking cinnamon rolls in the kitchen, and if I was very good, if I made my bed and put all my toys away, she'd bring them in to me. Holmes was there too, dressed in all black. Someone had died. We were headed to the funeral.

I woke to the barest hint of sunlight through the curtains.

My room was silent. I could tell that much without opening my eyes. The effort I had to put into even that simple task left me dizzy and sweating. When I managed it, I realized that I was alone. Was this another hallucination? It didn't feel like one. There was the bedside table, there the tufted chair.

And I wasn't in any pain.

I turned my head to look at the morphine drip (that took another eternity), but I didn't understand how to read the dosage on the bag. Whatever I was being given, it was working. In place of the pain, there was a sort of bodily rebellion. I asked my legs to swing off the bed. They didn't. I asked my arm to reach out for my water glass. It wouldn't. I panted with the effort, and the panting took effort. I was about as weak as a newborn child.

“No,” a woman insisted in the other room. It was a voice I recognized, but from where?

“No,” she said again, angrier this time, and then fell silent.

It was Bryony Downs.

The meeting was taking place in the next room.

It was brazen of her to do it here, to walk into the enemy's
stronghold and cut a deal in the place where they had every advantage. She really did think herself invincible.

The antidote could be out there, nestled in her pocket.

No. She wouldn't have brought it with her, not where it could be taken from her by force. She'd have hidden it somewhere nearby, only giving its location over when she'd gotten what she wanted. If Holmes gave her what she wanted.

Which meant, of course, that I would die, and in the next two hours.

I struggled, again, to get my legs to obey me.
Move
,
I told them, as laughter pealed in the next room.
Move.
The shirt and soft pants I'd been dressed in were already drenched through with sweat. Sweat. Was that a good thing, sweating? Did that mean the nerves and veins inside me—I imagined them now, crackled black and breaking—were still healthy? Was I somehow beating this?

If I was beating this, I'd probably have working legs, I reminded myself. Grinding my teeth, I focused on my knees.
Move.

And I did. I rolled right off the bed and onto the carpeted floor, bringing the bedside table down with me.

The crash was tremendous, and I lay in the middle of it, in the spilled pills and scattered tissues and the shards of my drinking glass, helpless.

I'd been in denial until that point, I think. But that was when it really hit me. That I was going to die. That they were going to put me in the ground, not years from now, not surrounded by books I'd written in the little flat on the Rue du
Rivoli at age seventy-three, but today. In a matter of hours. I'd kissed Charlotte Holmes once, and I would die before I'd see a second time.

The door flung open with a bang.

“Watson,”
Holmes said, going down to her knees beside me.

“Bring the boy in here.” The voice rang out like a sweet bell. “I'd like to see him.”

“Can you move?” Holmes asked, unnaturally loud. She put her hands under my arms. “If I get you to your feet, can you lean on me?”

“Yes,” I managed to say, though I had no idea if it was true.

She heaved me up to my knees. “Listen to me,” she said in my ear. Her black hair brushed against my cheek. “When I blink twice, you play your last card.”

“Okay,” I said, because
I don't know what the hell you're talking about
was seven more words than I could force out.

“Milo,” she called, “I could use a hand.”

Together, the two of them manhandled me out of the bedroom and into the sitting room that, when I'd last seen it, had been empty. Under Holmes's direction, Milo's mercenaries had reassembled it into what it had been, which was something like a preppy brothel. A pink shag rug. Lucite chairs around a Lucite table. A sofa that looked like it'd been stuffed with marshmallows, and a pair of men's trousers hung over its arm. An iPod dock and speakers, a haphazard setup of slides and beakers and a microscope (those must've been Dr. Warner's).

A gilt mirror spanned the whole length of one wall, gathering the entire room in its reflection—Charlotte Holmes, in her
trim black clothes, sitting on a fuzzy ottoman that looked like it escaped from
Fraggle Rock
; Milo, so close to his sister that their knees were touching; and me, slumped like a beached whale on one of those clear plastic chairs. If the beached whale had lost fifteen pounds overnight, coated his face in Vaseline and blacked his eyes, and then crawled up onto a beach to end it all.

Looking at me, Bryony Downs curled her lip in disgust.

She'd come in no further than the front door. Her purple puffer coat was unzipped, but she still wore her pom-pomed hat and gloves. With her porcelain doll face, flushed from the cold, she could have been taking a breather from the slopes. Really, everything about her belonged in a catalog for Fair Isle sweaters, or an advertisement for a ski lodge in Aspen. Everything except the fanatical gleam in her eyes.

“Hi, Jamie,” she said brightly. “It's good to see you.”

If I hadn't been an hour from death, I would've walked right up to her and snapped her neck.

But I was. That was the point.

“Okay, where was I? Before this one's attempt to prematurely kick the bucket?” She rested against her doorframe, hands in her pockets.

“You were gloating,” Milo offered.

“Yes,” Holmes said, leaning forward. “Do go on, it's fascinating.” She had that cataloging look to her, with her fingertips pressed together and that line at the bridge of her nose. I noticed, then, that there was a briefcase at Holmes's feet, a pair of plane tickets resting on it. Bryony's terms, fulfilled.

Her eyes flicked to the two of them, and then back to me. “I don't want to bore you,” she said, clearly thinking about her getaway.

“Tell me,” I coughed, in an attempt to stall her. “Dobson. How?”

“Poor thing,” she said. “I'd come over to check your vitals, but I think little Charlotte here might react poorly to my hands on you. A shame. You know, this
orthomyxoviridae surrexit nigrum
virus doesn't have a precise countdown clock. It isn't a bomb. Really, you could croak at any time. So I'll honor your last wish.” She put a hand to her heart in apparent sincerity. “I'll do that. Isn't that how all those stories always end? The hero explaining everything to his hapless confidant? You are a Watson, after all, so let's stick with tradition.”

Holmes wasn't listening, it was clear. Her eyes were fixed on Bryony's boots. Slowly, her hand stole over to her brother's, and she took it. For comfort, or for another reason, I wasn't sure. So I clamped my eyes on Bryony, giving her the captivated audience she obviously wanted.

“Lee Dobson. Nasty thing, wasn't he? One of my first patients back in September, with a mean case of thrush. He had to come in for a follow-up, and I think he thought . . . well, you know. Attractive older woman, lusty young man. He was trying to impress me. Asking all these ‘oblique' questions about narcotics, opiates. For a friend. They always say it's for a friend. How does someone react to heroin? As opposed to morphine? To oxycodone? Did they go nonresponsive? At what dosage? How pliable were they? Were they still able to have sex?”

Holmes's shoulders went stiff, her jaw set. Part of her was listening, after all. Beside her, Milo's expression was set in a determined blank.

“Oh, I was happy to oblige him and answer his questions. I had no qualms about it. Because how many other students at this school could be depraved enough to do drugs of that caliber? I knew I wasn't pointing him toward the innocent. Why, yes, I told him, your friend will be euphoric. So happy, so lazy, so unwilling to move. They should be careful, I said. Terrible things can happen to girls when they're that high. He thanked me profusely. Nearly wrung my hand off. And I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was sending our little whore here exactly the man she'd been asking for.

“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.”