He waved a hand. “Of course. You’ve made my daughter very happy.”
“Thanks,” I said, though it wasn’t entirely true. I’d made her happy, or I thought I had. I’d also made her miserable. I’d held her while our hideout burned. I’d collapsed at her feet, too weak to stand, while Lucien Moriarty taunted her through Bryony Downs’s pink sparkly phone. This was a practice round. I wanted to see what was important to you. I wanted to see how much this foolish boy trusted you. I threaten him, and you kiss him. Cue strings. Cue the applause. And now I’d driven her to hide somewhere in her massive house by the sea, while her father made the kind of small talk with me that she’d always found abhorrent.
“Did you like that last painting in the hall, of our shared ancestors? I heard you stop to look at it.”
“You look a lot like Sherlock Holmes. Like the pictures I’ve seen of him, anyway,” I said. He nodded, and I found myself wanting to push past all the pleasantries and get to something real. “It made me think about how things have ended up. I mean, Charlotte and I are running around together. We’ve solved a murder case and found a Moriarty on the other end of it. It’s almost like history is repeating itself.”
“There are plenty of family businesses in the world,” he said, steepling his long fingers under his chin. “Men pass on their cobbler shops to their sons. Lawyers send their daughters away to school and then give them a place at the firm. We may have certain affinities that we pass down to our children, through genetic inheritance or through the way we teach them to think, but I don’t think it’s entirely out of our control. It’s not like we’re Sisyphus’s scions, forever pushing his boulder up the hill. Look at your father.”
“He’s in sales,” I said, trying to keep up with his train of thought.
Holmes’s father lifted an eyebrow. “And the woman who painted that portrait you were admiring in the hall was Professor Moriarty’s daughter, and she presented it to our family as an apology for her father’s actions. The past’s actions may echo, but you shouldn’t take it to mean that we’re predestined. Your father may like solving mysteries, but ever since he moved to the States, he’s seemed to be happier as a spectator. I imagined it helped him to be away from Leander’s influence. My brother is an actual agent of chaos.”
“Do you know when he’s getting in? Leander?”
“Tonight or tomorrow,” he said, checking his watch. “One can never really be exact, with him. The world must reshape itself around his desires. He’s much like Charlotte in that way. Not content to observe, not even content to mete out justice. Working for the benefit of others has never been their primary goal.”
I leaned forward, despite myself. Alistair Holmes was like a relic from a long-ago time—his formal language and determined stare. It was hypnotic, almost, and I didn’t resist the spell he cast. “Then what do you think Charlotte and Leander’s goals are?”
“To assert themselves on the world, or so I’ve always thought.” He shrugged. “They aren’t content to act behind the scenes. They always manage to be caught up in the play itself. In that way, I suppose they’re both more like Sherlock than any of the rest of us. He was always the would-be magician of the family. Do you know, I toiled away at the Ministry of Defense for years—I was the architect of some small international conflicts—and yet I rarely stepped out from behind my desk. I was content to move theoretical armies in a theoretical battleground, and let others make those ideas real. My son Milo does similar work. In many ways, for good or ill, he’s made himself from that mold.”
“But is that the best way?” I heard myself ask. I hadn’t meant to challenge him; it’d just slipped out. “Don’t you think it’s better to see the consequences of your actions firsthand, so that you can learn from them and make smarter decisions in the future?”
“You’re a thoughtful boy,” he said, though I wasn’t sure if he meant it. “Do you think I should have insisted that Charlotte stay and watch the fallout from her actions, after that debacle with August Moriarty, instead of sending her away for a fresh start?”
“I—”
“There are many ways of taking responsibility. We don’t always have to pay for our sins with our blood, or by sacrificing our futures. But I hear Charlotte down the hall, so we should change the subject.” He squinted at me. “You know, you aren’t what I imagined.”
“What did you expect?” I asked, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden. I wasn’t built for these sorts of deep-sea conversations, all murky ocean floor.
“Something rather less than you are.” He stood and walked to the window, looking over the dark hills that rolled down to the water. “It’s a shame.”
“What is?” I asked, but Holmes was rapping sharply on the study door.
“Mother is going to kill me,” she said when I opened it. “We should all be downstairs five minutes ago. Hello, Dad.”
“Lottie,” he said, without turning around. “I’ll be there soon. Why don’t you show Jamie down to the dining room?”
“Of course.” She tucked her hand into my arm in a matter-of-fact way. Were we still fighting? Had we been fighting in the first place? I was exhausted by this train of thought, and anyway, it didn’t matter, not in her family’s sprawling house in the dead of winter. I was getting the sense that, without Holmes as my translator, I wasn’t going to make it through this week alive.