“Yes, Aunt.”
She arranged herself a plate of Brie and grapes and water crackers, then, to my surprise, passed it to me. “Eat,” she said. “You’re still underfed for your frame. Though, thank God, nothing like the last time I saw you.”
I took the plate.
“Eat,” she said again, and, obligingly, I put a thumb’s worth of Brie in my mouth and chewed.
“Good girl,” she said, then watched my throat until I swallowed. “I could murder your father.”
Before I could say anything to that—could I, in fact, say anything to that?—she had moved on. “Did you learn to do this from films?”
“Lay out a spread?” I asked. “I—”
“Films,” she said, “or your housekeeper, or Leander. Uncle Leander. It’s one of the three. Most likely Leander. Though I shouldn’t count out your Jamie.”
“Jamie doesn’t know how to make a stir-fry,” I told her, and then reeled at having sold him out so easily.
“He doesn’t,” she said, with delighted interest. I watched her file that away. “Fascinating. We should teach him. Eat, Charlotte.”
I put a grape in my mouth. She squinted at me. I put in two more. “Also,” I said, mouth full, “I don’t know how to make a stir-fry.”
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “You know how to slit a man’s throat and how to get Lucien Moriarty extradited back to Britain, but you don’t know how to make a stir-fry.”
I nodded.
“I could kill your father,” she said, “kill him,” and at that, Watson rapped on the door.
In short order she had the three of us on the sofa, though Watson tucked himself behind me in case Araminta should want to bite him. I didn’t blame him—I had a number of family members who were, in point of fact, vipers—but he shouldn’t have worried. The two of them got on famously.
There aren’t very many stories about my aunt. The one that’s told over and over in my family is perhaps the most dramatic—her uncovering Walter Moriarty’s dastardly plot; his killing her cats in revenge—and it is also, perhaps, the only story about her they know. When Araminta quit her job at the Home Office to keep bees in Sherlock Holmes’s little cottage, my family had assumed that she had quit them as well.
That she had quit the world entirely. Shriveled up like some old crone.
That night, I remembered that other people can’t tell your story for you. And also that my aunt had a book club.
“I think you met my mother at a charity auction,” Watson was saying, “a long time ago?”
“Oh, yes,” Araminta said. “Grace is lovely. Very strong, very intelligent. I know you’re worried about her after that Lucien business—”
Watson winced. It was a rather euphemistic way to say “a Moriarty married your mother.”
“—but give her time, and she’ll come out of it unscarred. I know you’re worried that she blames you for it. She did warn you to never get involved with our family, didn’t she?” Her eyes flitted between us. “It wasn’t bad advice. But really, she doesn’t blame you.”
“I’m glad to hear that, but how—”
“She blames your father,” Araminta said succinctly, and ate another grape.
Behind me, Watson coughed. “How exactly do you know that?” he asked, a bit strangled. “Did I say—or do—could you tell from my shoes, or—”
Her mouth twitched, and then she burst into a hearty laugh. “Oh, you poor boy. You’ve been running around with Lottie for far too long. I talk to your mother maybe once a month.”
“Oh,” Watson said, and I leaned back and squeezed his knee.
“Don’t be disappointed. You don’t actually want someone to read your whole history from your body. Can you imagine what I’d be able to tell about what you’ve done the past few days?”
Watson’s eyes flickered to my bedroom door and back again.
“Dear God,” she said, “now I know. An idiot would know. Never mind that. Have some more cheese.” She pushed the cutting board toward him. “The Mimolette is very good. Lottie, did you get it at a cheesemonger?”
“Sainsbury’s,” I said, as behind me, Watson did his level best to disappear into the ground.
She huffed. “Well. It’s very good Mimolette. Jamie. Eat.”
“Has Charlotte told you about our case?” Watson asked, in an admirable attempt to change the subject. He was piling up a plate. “It’s Hamlet. Hamlet-adjacent, I guess I should say. It looks like there won’t be a production after all.”
“No,” she said. “she hasn’t. Though it’s getting rather late, don’t you think?”
“Late?” Watson paused. “It’s half past seven—”
“But you haven’t eaten,” she said, heaving herself off the couch.
He and I glanced down at our heaping plates. “No,” Watson ventured. “I suppose we haven’t.”
“You can tell me in the car,” she said, gesturing us toward the door. “Your uncle does have a car, doesn’t he, Lottie?”
He did, a little brown Fiat with a backseat sized for toddlers or mice, and it was there that I found myself squished in as we drove. We could have walked quite easily to most of Oxford, or taken a bus, and so in a way I wasn’t surprised as she drove us out of the city and west, into the gathering night.
In the front, my aunt kept up a lively conversation with Watson, though perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an interrogation. I hoped he didn’t take it personally. She took pleasure, it seemed, in asking you a question, then answering it herself. Did Watson have any siblings (oh, you do, how could I have forgotten) and how was Shelby doing this summer, would she come visit, did she keep in touch with Leander after he helped to free her from that horrible American school?
Watson began to respond, but Araminta shook her head, nimbly passing a Peugeot on the right. “Someone should have stepped in sooner.”
“It was a mess of my own making,” I reminded her quietly. “I had to sort it out.”
Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “You,” she said, “were a child, and ‘sorting it out’ nearly killed you both.”
“Shelby’s doing fine,” Watson said after a moment. “Do you know the story? How Leander and my dad broke her out of that ‘school’ in Maine?”
He told it well. My Watson, the consummate storyteller. We had been on the run from both Lucien Moriarty and the police, and the two of us had holed up in a safehouse in New York City. We could do nothing for Shelby. Shelby, Jamie’s little sister, who had always loved horses, who had a vivacious smile, who talked a mile a minute about her friends and her paintings and about L.A.D., her favorite boy band. She wanted nothing to do with Lucien Moriarty, in his guise as her mother’s boyfriend, and Moriarty had used Shelby’s resulting rebellion as a means to persuade Grace Watson to shuttle her to this “school” in Connecticut that was, of course, no such thing. What it was was the sort of wilderness rehabilitation/punishment facility with which I was intimately familiar. I had been threatened with many of them over the years. The difference?