fic for graycardinal: Insoluble Puzzles
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holmesticeTitle: Insoluble Puzzles
Recipient:graycardinal
Author:amindamazed
Verse: Charlotte Holmes, Mary Russell
Characters/Pairings: Charlotte Holmes, Araminta Holmes, Mary Russell, Leander Holmes, Jamie Watson
Rating: Teen
Warnings: mention of past (canon) traumatic events, including harm to animals. Not graphic.
Summary:
"Who would we be, we Holmeses, if not for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? Mere curiosities buried in old newspapers, forgotten mentions in mouldering secret government archives and unsealed police records? Or would we be something else we never thought — were explicitly trained not — to imagine?"
Happy Holmestice, Gray Cardinal! I can't place all the blame for this fusion on your "Charlotte Holmes in the 22nd Century" but it was certainly an inspiration to look backward in a similar fashion. I also took the opportunity to take a closer look at "nice enough" Aunt Araminta, who is mentioned just a few times in the series. No doubt all of this will be jossed by The Case for Jamie although I hope we might at least meet Araminta there at last. I couldn't resist bringing her forward a bit as a conduit between Mary and Charlotte.
And in case no one else noticed Araminta Holmes the way I did, chapter 2 on AO3 is an appendix of her mentions in books 1 & 2.
Many thanks to [REDACTED] for beta and to the Holmestice Mods for their flexibility and patience.
Also on AO3: Insoluble Puzzles
Charlotte
Aunt Araminta had started inviting Charlotte to her cottage for tea once a month, the summer after she graduated from Sherringford. It was as good a distraction as any when Charlotte could not bear to stay in her rooms any more. They discussed chemistry and bees, mostly, in the context of pesticides and colony collapse and climate change. It was surprisingly engaging, and Charlotte realized with chagrin that she’d let family lore replace actual observation when it came to her aunt. Sometimes Charlotte brought her violin, and they played together, Araminta on the cello, the music sending her two cats running out into the garden. She hadn’t known that Araminta had only recently had cats again after her first three died, and then only because a couple of feral kittens took shelter under her porch. It made her wonder what else she didn’t know about her aunt. And what assumptions others were making about her.
The first time Charlotte came to tea, prickly and exhausted, she had vented at length about Jamie’s attempts to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, distorting their experiences into stories. “Facts are also stories, Lottie.” Aunt Araminta paused a moment, reading Charlotte's impassive face. “Oh, pardon me, but you see my point there: Lottie, Charlotte, Holmes. Investigator, victim, murderer, survivor. Child, daughter; great-great-great-grandfather. Niece. Such a simple fact, a name: an identifier, a label, a means to classify and categorize, and already we can see the slippage from the specific to the aggregate, and from the discrete to a continuous flow. One might say facts are the building blocks, and you've been taught this, I know. I know.” She briefly touched two cool fingers to the back of Charlotte's hand. “But any given detail can be spun in myriad directions. You know this, too, of course you do. Obvious.” Her tea cup clinked against its saucer when she placed it down.
“Your young Mister Watson, there,” and Charlotte grimaced first and then coughed to cover a snort as she imagined his reaction to that moniker. “He’s grappling with this now, trying to make sense of it. Our very existence, Charlotte, his and and yours and mine: it's all a story spun out of the selected details left to us by Dr. Watson; in Sherlock’s journals and Mycroft’s memoranda; by the public record that their facts — the ones they shared and the ones they withheld — shaped and directed. Who would we be, we Holmeses, if not for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? Mere curiosities buried in old newspapers, forgotten mentions in mouldering secret government archives and unsealed police records? Or would we be something else we never thought — were explicitly trained not — to imagine?”
Charlotte couldn’t imagine that her family would have done anything other than what they did do this last century and more. Meddling and fixing and power-mongering, the lot of them. But would Jamie and she have ever met, if Dr. Watson hadn’t publicized and popularized his partner’s exploits? Would future generations of Watsons have cared at all about the reclusive, pompous Holmes clan? She remembered the thick block of a book that Jamie had given her, a recent annotated edition of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories to replace the set destroyed with her lab in 442 (along with a red pen, “so you can correct everything that’s wrong in the annotations,” he said with a smirk). Stories about stories about stories. She suddenly thought to glance over at the the wall of shelves behind her aunt’s (once her great-great-great-grandfather’s) work desk. None of the texts by either of the original Holmes or Watson remained on display.
Mary’s Journals
Once exorcised, the recurring dreams of my youth — the accident, the earthquake, the missing years — never returned. This one, however, has resisted all efforts to appease: Talking with Holmes; writing it down, again and again and again; one stilted conversation during an otherwise delightful (and profitable) visit to Monte Carlo. I’ve even resuscitated the mental exercises Dr. Ginsburg taught me, to no avail. And now that tonight’s offering has left me sleepless, I’m reduced to writing about writing about them.
It’s the aural memory that’s sunk deep into my psyche. His gasping and cursing, the scrape of his shoes against the worn-smooth floor Mrs Hudson had scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, so many stains removed, so many household sins absolved. This one is never going away; he might as well have carved it into my flesh along side my other scars. “You did this,” he says at first. “She stayed for you, she worked for you, she hid for you and performed for you. Did you notice? Did you care? Did you treat her like she was your own? Did you disregard her, take her for granted? Was she the mother to you that I never had?” His voice shifts from whisper to wheeze, and I strain to catch it all even as I’m desperate for him to stop.
I can’t help but remember my own mother’s son, whose dying breaths I likely witnessed but could not hear.
Araminta
Araminta had been young when her involvement in the family business resulted in murder (well, young by casual adult standards. Merely average by Holmesian expectations). She hadn't given the jurors cancer or kidnapped the judge’s wife, but everyone she knew believed it was a direct repercussion for her "success”; it was only logical therefore that she take responsibility for everything her work produced. She'd been the one to discover the cats, the blood and fur and the one still crying— it had been the small sound that drew her around the corner, although in retrospect there were many obvious signs she'd missed that a stranger had been there, that the cats had reacted to greet the newcomer, expecting their friendly reception to be returned… The look in his eyes when she broke through her horrified frozen stance to reach him, so much fear. Of her! She had been 15 when she learned she was not to be trusted with others. She waited until her brother's children had mastered the rudiments of self-defense before she started taking them out on excursions away from Sussex.
She hadn't recognized the tall, fashionably dressed, elderly woman at her threshold. She’d lived in the cottage over a decade by then, her blessed solitude rarely broken by visitors and never before by a stranger. The harsh skid of tires on the gravel and the slam of a door brought her to the window, where she saw some sort of bright red sports car jutting at an angle across the driveway and partway onto the grass, steam rising from the mud-splattered hood. She knew the driver would be tall, based on the position of the mirror, but this person was utterly unexpected. In multiple ways, as it happened. Mary Russell introduced herself as such and paused to wait for acknowledgment or recognition with complete assurance that it was forthcoming. As far as Araminta knew, none of the family members of her generation had crossed paths with the woman, despite her living just a few kilometres away all these years. "I don't have time for the rest of them," she said with a disdainful shake of her bright white bob. "You're the one I wanted to meet."
For a long time the Holmes lawyers blocked publication of all stories using Sherlock Holmes as a character as a matter of course, and almost all the writers intent on making up their own Holmes and Watson tales moved on to original characters with varying degrees of “inspired by” elements. There were guidelines and thresholds set by Henry and then Crispin for when to intercede, but as time went on, there was only so far copyright could extend. Film and television rights had always been too lucrative to ignore, of course, and besides, Sherlock Holmes himself had permitted the first (Holmes family lore blamed Watson, nonetheless). The family had tried, but they couldn’t stop Watson’s grandson from selling the story rights. They did prevent “that Russell woman” from publishing her memoirs and later, again, when she tried fictionalizing them as novels. Although it would seem that hadn’t stopped her from continuing to write.
The family lawyers disclaimed any relationship between Holmes and Russell, and there had been a fire in the building where the marriage registry had been kept. “Of course there was,” Miss Russell had been quoted in the local paper. But the woman who called herself Mary Russell knew the cottage too well. The bullet hole in the wall upstairs, the hidden compartments in the kitchen (including one Araminta had missed), the way you could watch the Pleiades rise from the bedroom window on clear winter nights. When Araminta had removed herself to the cottage in 1975, wandering from room to room in a kind of shell-shock after the debacle, she’d wondered about the bullet hole, and wondered too why her ancestor had chosen a windowless, ventless space for his chemistry lab. Miss Russell had rolled her eyes at that query, decades of vexation compressed into the reflex. “Men are not known for their common sense, and Holmes men barely at all.”
Araminta discovered that she believed her.
At the end of the visit, cold tea in the pot and two delicate glasses of honey mead finished on the tray, Miss Russell observed that the world they lived in was one Mycroft Holmes set in motion, that the current Holmes family business had its roots (or are they shackles, she murmured to herself) in his vision and machinations, not her husband's. “There's barely a bohemian bone in the lot of you, and none at all in the fortress your brother keeps over there. Agatha had that independence of spirit, I believe, but who followed in her footsteps? Where is her influence found now?” She quirked an eyebrow. “I’ve wondered more than once if we really know who Henry's father was. More to the point, do we know who raised him, and to what end?”
Araminta almost dropped her cup at the insinuation, and then immediately second-guessed what she’d heard, brow furrowed. Was Miss Russell serious? She tried to school her expression before looking up. Miss Russell shook her head ruefully. “I simply enjoy a bit of speculation now and then. I shouldn’t tease, but I’m 90 years old! There’s only so much more fun to be had.”
She got up and stepped to the fireplace, letting her hand brush lightly over the deep scratches and marks left in the wooden mantel piece above it, reportedly left by Sherlock Holmes’s knife. By Miss Russell’s husband’s hand, Araminta suddenly recalled. She left her hand there and turned back to Araminta. “We're always so certain our own deductions are sound. Until we're not, and we're forced to dig ourselves out of the rubble and start again. Truth is a slippery creature, Miss Holmes. A chameleon. It'll save you some grief, perhaps, to remember that.”
Charlotte
Charlotte had overheard Jamie and his father mocking the Russell papers once, Jamie explaining to his father what a Mary-Sue was, which made James laugh to gasping, beyond amused at the absurdity of it all. The public details about Mary Russell were merely rumors on a Holmesian fan site, although it seemed that once in a while King would leak some chapters out under the guise of an anonymous source in defiance of one cease-and-desist order or another. Someday she’d like to know if Russell was behind all of that, creating King as her sock-puppet, or if she really had wanted to publish novels and contracted King to make it happen. And who was keeping it going now? Surely the woman wasn’t still alive. The official Holmes position was utter indifference, but Milo must have assigned one of his lackeys to ferret out the truth.
This particular pair of Watsons seemed to think it was all fake, and Charlotte was more than inclined to let them believe it given their mutual disdain. Jamie had admitted his dislike of her parents, worse the longer he knew them. She wasn’t going to complicate things by letting him know she felt the same, at least about his father. “That guy’s a piece of work,” she kept hearing in the voice of one of Sherringford’s groundskeepers, the one who’d nod to her when she made her way back to 442 at dawn as her night’s work ended and his had just started. Besides being somewhat unreliable as a paternal role model, Watson the elder had treated Leander rather shabbily it seemed, for all that her uncle still held on to the relationship. Perhaps an ocean was buffer enough, for him.
She wasn’t sure what buffer would be enough for her.
It took forever (and so many consultations with Lena whose phlegmatic patience wore thin more than once. “Jesus, Charlotte, just cut him loose and come with me to Barcelona for the summer.”) but she finally maneuvered Jamie around to making the case that they really truly needed time apart if they were to have the eventual future they both wanted, like it was his idea. “How many adult couples do you know who’ve been together since high school?” he pleaded, keeping his palms flat on the table in her new lab and speaking with his soft, “I’m not a threat” voice, the one that alternately soothed her to sleep like a lullaby or drove her to want to pelt him with tacks.
“Look at our parents, and my dad and Leander. Even Holmes and Watson the first met each other in their twenties.” His hands spasmed into soft fists, and she regulated her heartbeat, schooling her face into a thoughtful, pensive scowl. “I was thinking, take it a year at a time?” Her brows raised, and he swiftly continued to correct what he thought she was objecting to. “Not a whole year apart, of course not. But start out when you— when I go to university: we’ll see each other over the summer, of course. But once the term starts, we each follow our own path until next summer. And then…meet up to compare notes and reevaluate?”
Finally. She shrugged. “All right.”
“What—All right? That’s it?” What was he getting agitated about now?
“All right, yes, we remain apart while you’re in school and I continue my independent research. That timeline is both feasible and reasonable. You’ll have new distractions, as will I. And we’ll know from the start when we’ll assess the results.”
“It’s not an experiment, Holmes.”
“Of course it is.”
“Of course it is,” he echoed, with that Watsonian tone of exasperation that was so rarely justified. But given that this was, in fact, her desired outcome, perhaps a bit more was required to keep him on track.
“And what sort of communication do you propose during this year? Text and email as per usual, or total abstinence?”
She watched the reality of what they were discussing pull his face into textbook “sad clown.” He really needed to work on his tells. “What about something in between? Weekly texts of a pass code that confirms we haven’t been abducted and then maybe a mid-term report by email?”
She nodded. “That’s reasonable.” He watched her, expectant and then dejected when she didn’t say more. Did he want her to refuse? To argue for something? She just wanted it to be done. As she waited for him to work his way around to the actual topic he was obsessing over, she stretched her back and then got up to pace a little. His eyes tracked her movement exactly, but he didn’t tense up until she reached for her violin.
“Um,” he started, and bit his lip. She plucked the strings quietly, and he settled, understanding that she wasn’t cutting off discussion. “So,” he tried again, and cleared his throat. She thought about the empty compartment in the heel of her boot. Thought about having it not be empty. Enough.
“Yes, I understand that you may choose to date people in London.”
His face flushed bright red. “Uh—”
“You’ll let me know if and only if you find yourself wanting to renegotiate our annual arrangement.” She picked up the bow and let loose a cacophonous screech, a little louder than she had intended. “I don’t want extraneous details, Watson. I’ll have my own details to manage.”
His eyes narrowed, and holy fuck if she was going to take any of that double-standard jealousy bullshit. Two more loud screeches, and he winced and blinked and subsided, looking down as he forced his fists to unclench. “Yes, all right, you’re right.” He looked up with a wry grimace and spoke in unison with her retort. “Of course you’re right.”
Mary’s Journals
I never wanted children, and yet I find myself on occasion wishing I had someone younger to whom I might impart my cautionary tales cum wisdom. None of the few companions at my disposal are quite right for what I have in mind; my ultimate peer of course has life experiences at such divergence from my own as to be out of the question. I share some things with Ronnie; as my sole steady contact of my own age, there are topics best suited to address with her. All my other acquaintance of any duration are half a generation or more my elders, and my observations are irrelevant now and in most cases always.
I wonder at times how different I might be if I’d had the companionship of my brother through adolescence and adulthood. I look at Holmes and his brother, and how their intimacy, for lack of a better word, has waxed and waned. I can only speculate what Levi’s influence on me might have been, and how I would have changed to influence him. Ah, and I see I myself have been influenced by Mycroft’s influence to consider this in such terms. Levi and I would have been something other than Sherlock and Mycroft, to be sure. And I will never know what that would have been. Nothing to be done with that now except clear my mind of this clattering nagging need to express myself on topics no one could possibly care to follow by dumping these thoughts, and I use the term loosely, on to the page and then at last to be forgotten.
Araminta
She worried uselessly for Charlotte. So much was expected of her (of all of them, certainly, but the pressure seemed to mount with each new generation), and Charlotte seemed to have been born expecting even more from herself. No mistakes and no weakness. Araminta knew all too well the price of failure. The Hebrides had beckoned, once; as had the Antipodes (how far was far enough?). Araminta had always preferred the cold. But then she watched her brother with his daughter and knew she had to stay, futile and frustrating though it may be to remain so close to that bitter chill. People described bee stings in terms of heat, but she’d always felt the sensation as the burn of unbearable frost. When she was able, she tried to find ways to show Charlotte and Milo other ways to be in the world. She wanted them to feel they had room to grow into who they wanted to be.
She was ashamed to admit she wanted to believe Mary Russell had maintained a similar quiet held-back persistent background presence for her.
Her own brothers each engaged with the Holmes legacy in different ways. One wouldn’t say Alistair embraced his role because he would never do something so emotional, but he did treat it like a mantle, and Emma along side him. Leander wanted to be the Sherlock to Alistair’s Mycroft, and for a while she envied his enjoyment of the “adventures” he pursued with James Watson. At some point, however, he seemed to have slid too quickly from hedonism to nihilism, presumably around the time James withdrew to start first one family and then another. That had been unexpected, she thought. Leander shouldn’t have been so trusting. Perhaps he hadn’t had a choice. For a time she assumed she’d at least be able to commiserate with Julian, but he cocooned himself far more effectively than she ever had.
At the end of that visit decades ago, Mary Russell asked Araminta to remove a file box from the minuscule back seat of that absurd red car. Araminta expected Miss Russell to open it and extract some irrefutable proof of her Holmes status, but instead simply told Araminta to set it down on the large study desk, said, “Some light reading for you, my dear; make of it what you will. That’s all we can do when arguing with old manuscripts,” she said, and left. She never came by again. The Russell house was closed up when Araminta attempted to return the visit a few weeks later, and that fall word in the village was either certainty that old Miss Russell had surely died years before or that she’d suddenly retired abroad. Somewhere warm. California? The Levant? Monte Carlo? Araminta knew she should be relieved. Eventually she found a sort of bittersweet companionship in Russell’s papers, a confounding and curious mix of truth and fiction.
Charlotte
When the time came, Jamie chased his writerly dreams (and unruly libido) to university in London — he wrote all the time, why was that not enough? Why must he find clay idols to worship in creative writing programs instead of studying practical subjects like necropsy or Mandarin or cryptology? For all the upheaval and unexpected outcomes during the two years they’d known each other, he’d never seriously considered doing anything else but go to university and study writing. She, on the other hand was certain only that she would not go to university to study writing. The reprieve came from an unexpected quarter: Aunt Araminta’s surprising announcement that she was off to spend six months studying the bees of Iceland and New Zealand, and would Charlotte please hive and cat (and cottage) sit for her during this time. All at once she couldn’t bear the thought of staying at home or with Milo or anywhere else but by herself in a cottage on the Sussex Downs, where generations of Holmeses had historically turned when they needed to withdraw for a while.
Milo squawked for no reason given that his security net extended throughout the property and well into the surrounding areas, but she agreed to have one of his multipurpose goons play housekeeper and cook for the duration. (He’d provided three dossiers for her to choose from, all women, and she thanked him in her head where she was fairly certain he couldn’t yet eavesdrop.) She wasn’t entirely certain who had played whom in that altercation. It wasn’t like she would be safer anywhere else, should the latest Moriarty detente crack again.
The day before Araminta’s departure, she asked Charlotte to come by to go over the final details. About winterizing the hives, Charlotte assumed, and more notes on which windows stuck and where the fuse box was. The last thing she expected was learning that the person who claimed to be Sherlock’s secret wife had visited the cottage once, and Araminta not only had a box of her loony manuscripts there but wanted Charlotte to read them.
“Whether or not you accept her as a Holmes, we have some things in common with her.” Araminta, who often avoided eye-contact, had emphasized that “we” with a brief earnest look that made Charlotte press her lips in a thin line. No secrets among Holmeses, indeed. “This is what she showed me, Charlotte, and what I believe you might find...fruitful to contemplate. Terrible things happen, and if we survive, they leave scars that can limit and bind us. The past doesn't have to be forgotten or excised to heal, however. It is possible to find some measure of reconciliation with those difficult...emotions.”
They both shifted uncomfortably. “You're skeptical, of course. As was I. As you should be: it's who you are. Not just because it's what we were taught to be, but who you would have been in any case. If you'd been raised by Julian or Grace Watson or Mrs Hudson. I'm just— Don't discount Miss Russell's words simply because that's what a Holmes would do, Charlotte. Don't accept others' judgment. Not even mine. I may be wrong. It's just— Hers is a voice we don't often hear, you and I. A woman and a Holmes, of sorts, and still herself, through it all."
Charlotte let the box be buried under the pile of things she moved from her rooms in the main house. She’d get around to unpacking eventually. Yes, in both the literal and metaphorical terms, she muttered to herself. That was the point of this retreat, was it not?
* * *
She had dinner with Leander in Eastbourne in early October, recognizing the visit for the remote sensing mission that it was.
“You can tell them I’m fine,” she said, after the waiter had brought them their meal. “Whichever ‘them’ it is you’re reporting to. Covered in cat hair and honey.”
“Is that the cozy version of tar and feathered?” he asked, twirling capellini onto his fork.
“The self-inflicted version. Cat hair is an excellent insulator, you know, and honey can be used to treat burns.” She nudged the baked potato out of the way. “Mostly I’ve been reading. The cottage library is as old as the building but also as modernized. Quite the eclectic mix. There are a couple of Sherlock’s notebooks I hadn’t read before.”
Leander hummed inquisitively through his mouthful.
“About beekeeping.”
“Ah,” he said, and left it at that, picking up the conversation with a ridiculous story of forged wine labels and hot air balloon chases outside Lisbon. She asked questions in Portuguese, and he tsked at her accent before admitting he didn’t speak it, got by on his Spanish. Later she wondered if he’d practiced the tale by emailing it all to James first.
Leander, and specifically Leander and James, had become role models for the partnership she specifically did not want. The desperate need to recall the fun they’d had in order to bury the dysfunction that kept them apart now. The part of herself she most despised writhed in fear that Jamie would decide he wanted the security and normalcy of wife and children, as James had chosen (despite the all too obvious lingering misgivings) instead of Leander. It was pathetic and illogical and infuriating. Wanting. Thankfully she could ignore it most of the time. It was harder to suppress the equally frightened part of her that wanted that outcome more than anything.
When she got home that night, she cleared a path for Miss Russell’s box and shoved it over to the settee where she’d built a nest of shawls and mismatched woolen throws, close enough to the fireplace to be able to poke the embers without getting up, and began to read.
Recipient:
graycardinalAuthor:
amindamazedVerse: Charlotte Holmes, Mary Russell
Characters/Pairings: Charlotte Holmes, Araminta Holmes, Mary Russell, Leander Holmes, Jamie Watson
Rating: Teen
Warnings: mention of past (canon) traumatic events, including harm to animals. Not graphic.
Summary:
"Who would we be, we Holmeses, if not for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? Mere curiosities buried in old newspapers, forgotten mentions in mouldering secret government archives and unsealed police records? Or would we be something else we never thought — were explicitly trained not — to imagine?"
Happy Holmestice, Gray Cardinal! I can't place all the blame for this fusion on your "Charlotte Holmes in the 22nd Century" but it was certainly an inspiration to look backward in a similar fashion. I also took the opportunity to take a closer look at "nice enough" Aunt Araminta, who is mentioned just a few times in the series. No doubt all of this will be jossed by The Case for Jamie although I hope we might at least meet Araminta there at last. I couldn't resist bringing her forward a bit as a conduit between Mary and Charlotte.
And in case no one else noticed Araminta Holmes the way I did, chapter 2 on AO3 is an appendix of her mentions in books 1 & 2.
Many thanks to [REDACTED] for beta and to the Holmestice Mods for their flexibility and patience.
Also on AO3: Insoluble Puzzles
Charlotte
Aunt Araminta had started inviting Charlotte to her cottage for tea once a month, the summer after she graduated from Sherringford. It was as good a distraction as any when Charlotte could not bear to stay in her rooms any more. They discussed chemistry and bees, mostly, in the context of pesticides and colony collapse and climate change. It was surprisingly engaging, and Charlotte realized with chagrin that she’d let family lore replace actual observation when it came to her aunt. Sometimes Charlotte brought her violin, and they played together, Araminta on the cello, the music sending her two cats running out into the garden. She hadn’t known that Araminta had only recently had cats again after her first three died, and then only because a couple of feral kittens took shelter under her porch. It made her wonder what else she didn’t know about her aunt. And what assumptions others were making about her.
The first time Charlotte came to tea, prickly and exhausted, she had vented at length about Jamie’s attempts to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, distorting their experiences into stories. “Facts are also stories, Lottie.” Aunt Araminta paused a moment, reading Charlotte's impassive face. “Oh, pardon me, but you see my point there: Lottie, Charlotte, Holmes. Investigator, victim, murderer, survivor. Child, daughter; great-great-great-grandfather. Niece. Such a simple fact, a name: an identifier, a label, a means to classify and categorize, and already we can see the slippage from the specific to the aggregate, and from the discrete to a continuous flow. One might say facts are the building blocks, and you've been taught this, I know. I know.” She briefly touched two cool fingers to the back of Charlotte's hand. “But any given detail can be spun in myriad directions. You know this, too, of course you do. Obvious.” Her tea cup clinked against its saucer when she placed it down.
“Your young Mister Watson, there,” and Charlotte grimaced first and then coughed to cover a snort as she imagined his reaction to that moniker. “He’s grappling with this now, trying to make sense of it. Our very existence, Charlotte, his and and yours and mine: it's all a story spun out of the selected details left to us by Dr. Watson; in Sherlock’s journals and Mycroft’s memoranda; by the public record that their facts — the ones they shared and the ones they withheld — shaped and directed. Who would we be, we Holmeses, if not for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? Mere curiosities buried in old newspapers, forgotten mentions in mouldering secret government archives and unsealed police records? Or would we be something else we never thought — were explicitly trained not — to imagine?”
Charlotte couldn’t imagine that her family would have done anything other than what they did do this last century and more. Meddling and fixing and power-mongering, the lot of them. But would Jamie and she have ever met, if Dr. Watson hadn’t publicized and popularized his partner’s exploits? Would future generations of Watsons have cared at all about the reclusive, pompous Holmes clan? She remembered the thick block of a book that Jamie had given her, a recent annotated edition of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories to replace the set destroyed with her lab in 442 (along with a red pen, “so you can correct everything that’s wrong in the annotations,” he said with a smirk). Stories about stories about stories. She suddenly thought to glance over at the the wall of shelves behind her aunt’s (once her great-great-great-grandfather’s) work desk. None of the texts by either of the original Holmes or Watson remained on display.
Mary’s Journals
Once exorcised, the recurring dreams of my youth — the accident, the earthquake, the missing years — never returned. This one, however, has resisted all efforts to appease: Talking with Holmes; writing it down, again and again and again; one stilted conversation during an otherwise delightful (and profitable) visit to Monte Carlo. I’ve even resuscitated the mental exercises Dr. Ginsburg taught me, to no avail. And now that tonight’s offering has left me sleepless, I’m reduced to writing about writing about them.
It’s the aural memory that’s sunk deep into my psyche. His gasping and cursing, the scrape of his shoes against the worn-smooth floor Mrs Hudson had scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, so many stains removed, so many household sins absolved. This one is never going away; he might as well have carved it into my flesh along side my other scars. “You did this,” he says at first. “She stayed for you, she worked for you, she hid for you and performed for you. Did you notice? Did you care? Did you treat her like she was your own? Did you disregard her, take her for granted? Was she the mother to you that I never had?” His voice shifts from whisper to wheeze, and I strain to catch it all even as I’m desperate for him to stop.
I can’t help but remember my own mother’s son, whose dying breaths I likely witnessed but could not hear.
Araminta
Araminta had been young when her involvement in the family business resulted in murder (well, young by casual adult standards. Merely average by Holmesian expectations). She hadn't given the jurors cancer or kidnapped the judge’s wife, but everyone she knew believed it was a direct repercussion for her "success”; it was only logical therefore that she take responsibility for everything her work produced. She'd been the one to discover the cats, the blood and fur and the one still crying— it had been the small sound that drew her around the corner, although in retrospect there were many obvious signs she'd missed that a stranger had been there, that the cats had reacted to greet the newcomer, expecting their friendly reception to be returned… The look in his eyes when she broke through her horrified frozen stance to reach him, so much fear. Of her! She had been 15 when she learned she was not to be trusted with others. She waited until her brother's children had mastered the rudiments of self-defense before she started taking them out on excursions away from Sussex.
She hadn't recognized the tall, fashionably dressed, elderly woman at her threshold. She’d lived in the cottage over a decade by then, her blessed solitude rarely broken by visitors and never before by a stranger. The harsh skid of tires on the gravel and the slam of a door brought her to the window, where she saw some sort of bright red sports car jutting at an angle across the driveway and partway onto the grass, steam rising from the mud-splattered hood. She knew the driver would be tall, based on the position of the mirror, but this person was utterly unexpected. In multiple ways, as it happened. Mary Russell introduced herself as such and paused to wait for acknowledgment or recognition with complete assurance that it was forthcoming. As far as Araminta knew, none of the family members of her generation had crossed paths with the woman, despite her living just a few kilometres away all these years. "I don't have time for the rest of them," she said with a disdainful shake of her bright white bob. "You're the one I wanted to meet."
For a long time the Holmes lawyers blocked publication of all stories using Sherlock Holmes as a character as a matter of course, and almost all the writers intent on making up their own Holmes and Watson tales moved on to original characters with varying degrees of “inspired by” elements. There were guidelines and thresholds set by Henry and then Crispin for when to intercede, but as time went on, there was only so far copyright could extend. Film and television rights had always been too lucrative to ignore, of course, and besides, Sherlock Holmes himself had permitted the first (Holmes family lore blamed Watson, nonetheless). The family had tried, but they couldn’t stop Watson’s grandson from selling the story rights. They did prevent “that Russell woman” from publishing her memoirs and later, again, when she tried fictionalizing them as novels. Although it would seem that hadn’t stopped her from continuing to write.
The family lawyers disclaimed any relationship between Holmes and Russell, and there had been a fire in the building where the marriage registry had been kept. “Of course there was,” Miss Russell had been quoted in the local paper. But the woman who called herself Mary Russell knew the cottage too well. The bullet hole in the wall upstairs, the hidden compartments in the kitchen (including one Araminta had missed), the way you could watch the Pleiades rise from the bedroom window on clear winter nights. When Araminta had removed herself to the cottage in 1975, wandering from room to room in a kind of shell-shock after the debacle, she’d wondered about the bullet hole, and wondered too why her ancestor had chosen a windowless, ventless space for his chemistry lab. Miss Russell had rolled her eyes at that query, decades of vexation compressed into the reflex. “Men are not known for their common sense, and Holmes men barely at all.”
Araminta discovered that she believed her.
At the end of the visit, cold tea in the pot and two delicate glasses of honey mead finished on the tray, Miss Russell observed that the world they lived in was one Mycroft Holmes set in motion, that the current Holmes family business had its roots (or are they shackles, she murmured to herself) in his vision and machinations, not her husband's. “There's barely a bohemian bone in the lot of you, and none at all in the fortress your brother keeps over there. Agatha had that independence of spirit, I believe, but who followed in her footsteps? Where is her influence found now?” She quirked an eyebrow. “I’ve wondered more than once if we really know who Henry's father was. More to the point, do we know who raised him, and to what end?”
Araminta almost dropped her cup at the insinuation, and then immediately second-guessed what she’d heard, brow furrowed. Was Miss Russell serious? She tried to school her expression before looking up. Miss Russell shook her head ruefully. “I simply enjoy a bit of speculation now and then. I shouldn’t tease, but I’m 90 years old! There’s only so much more fun to be had.”
She got up and stepped to the fireplace, letting her hand brush lightly over the deep scratches and marks left in the wooden mantel piece above it, reportedly left by Sherlock Holmes’s knife. By Miss Russell’s husband’s hand, Araminta suddenly recalled. She left her hand there and turned back to Araminta. “We're always so certain our own deductions are sound. Until we're not, and we're forced to dig ourselves out of the rubble and start again. Truth is a slippery creature, Miss Holmes. A chameleon. It'll save you some grief, perhaps, to remember that.”
Charlotte
Charlotte had overheard Jamie and his father mocking the Russell papers once, Jamie explaining to his father what a Mary-Sue was, which made James laugh to gasping, beyond amused at the absurdity of it all. The public details about Mary Russell were merely rumors on a Holmesian fan site, although it seemed that once in a while King would leak some chapters out under the guise of an anonymous source in defiance of one cease-and-desist order or another. Someday she’d like to know if Russell was behind all of that, creating King as her sock-puppet, or if she really had wanted to publish novels and contracted King to make it happen. And who was keeping it going now? Surely the woman wasn’t still alive. The official Holmes position was utter indifference, but Milo must have assigned one of his lackeys to ferret out the truth.
This particular pair of Watsons seemed to think it was all fake, and Charlotte was more than inclined to let them believe it given their mutual disdain. Jamie had admitted his dislike of her parents, worse the longer he knew them. She wasn’t going to complicate things by letting him know she felt the same, at least about his father. “That guy’s a piece of work,” she kept hearing in the voice of one of Sherringford’s groundskeepers, the one who’d nod to her when she made her way back to 442 at dawn as her night’s work ended and his had just started. Besides being somewhat unreliable as a paternal role model, Watson the elder had treated Leander rather shabbily it seemed, for all that her uncle still held on to the relationship. Perhaps an ocean was buffer enough, for him.
She wasn’t sure what buffer would be enough for her.
It took forever (and so many consultations with Lena whose phlegmatic patience wore thin more than once. “Jesus, Charlotte, just cut him loose and come with me to Barcelona for the summer.”) but she finally maneuvered Jamie around to making the case that they really truly needed time apart if they were to have the eventual future they both wanted, like it was his idea. “How many adult couples do you know who’ve been together since high school?” he pleaded, keeping his palms flat on the table in her new lab and speaking with his soft, “I’m not a threat” voice, the one that alternately soothed her to sleep like a lullaby or drove her to want to pelt him with tacks.
“Look at our parents, and my dad and Leander. Even Holmes and Watson the first met each other in their twenties.” His hands spasmed into soft fists, and she regulated her heartbeat, schooling her face into a thoughtful, pensive scowl. “I was thinking, take it a year at a time?” Her brows raised, and he swiftly continued to correct what he thought she was objecting to. “Not a whole year apart, of course not. But start out when you— when I go to university: we’ll see each other over the summer, of course. But once the term starts, we each follow our own path until next summer. And then…meet up to compare notes and reevaluate?”
Finally. She shrugged. “All right.”
“What—All right? That’s it?” What was he getting agitated about now?
“All right, yes, we remain apart while you’re in school and I continue my independent research. That timeline is both feasible and reasonable. You’ll have new distractions, as will I. And we’ll know from the start when we’ll assess the results.”
“It’s not an experiment, Holmes.”
“Of course it is.”
“Of course it is,” he echoed, with that Watsonian tone of exasperation that was so rarely justified. But given that this was, in fact, her desired outcome, perhaps a bit more was required to keep him on track.
“And what sort of communication do you propose during this year? Text and email as per usual, or total abstinence?”
She watched the reality of what they were discussing pull his face into textbook “sad clown.” He really needed to work on his tells. “What about something in between? Weekly texts of a pass code that confirms we haven’t been abducted and then maybe a mid-term report by email?”
She nodded. “That’s reasonable.” He watched her, expectant and then dejected when she didn’t say more. Did he want her to refuse? To argue for something? She just wanted it to be done. As she waited for him to work his way around to the actual topic he was obsessing over, she stretched her back and then got up to pace a little. His eyes tracked her movement exactly, but he didn’t tense up until she reached for her violin.
“Um,” he started, and bit his lip. She plucked the strings quietly, and he settled, understanding that she wasn’t cutting off discussion. “So,” he tried again, and cleared his throat. She thought about the empty compartment in the heel of her boot. Thought about having it not be empty. Enough.
“Yes, I understand that you may choose to date people in London.”
His face flushed bright red. “Uh—”
“You’ll let me know if and only if you find yourself wanting to renegotiate our annual arrangement.” She picked up the bow and let loose a cacophonous screech, a little louder than she had intended. “I don’t want extraneous details, Watson. I’ll have my own details to manage.”
His eyes narrowed, and holy fuck if she was going to take any of that double-standard jealousy bullshit. Two more loud screeches, and he winced and blinked and subsided, looking down as he forced his fists to unclench. “Yes, all right, you’re right.” He looked up with a wry grimace and spoke in unison with her retort. “Of course you’re right.”
Mary’s Journals
I never wanted children, and yet I find myself on occasion wishing I had someone younger to whom I might impart my cautionary tales cum wisdom. None of the few companions at my disposal are quite right for what I have in mind; my ultimate peer of course has life experiences at such divergence from my own as to be out of the question. I share some things with Ronnie; as my sole steady contact of my own age, there are topics best suited to address with her. All my other acquaintance of any duration are half a generation or more my elders, and my observations are irrelevant now and in most cases always.
I wonder at times how different I might be if I’d had the companionship of my brother through adolescence and adulthood. I look at Holmes and his brother, and how their intimacy, for lack of a better word, has waxed and waned. I can only speculate what Levi’s influence on me might have been, and how I would have changed to influence him. Ah, and I see I myself have been influenced by Mycroft’s influence to consider this in such terms. Levi and I would have been something other than Sherlock and Mycroft, to be sure. And I will never know what that would have been. Nothing to be done with that now except clear my mind of this clattering nagging need to express myself on topics no one could possibly care to follow by dumping these thoughts, and I use the term loosely, on to the page and then at last to be forgotten.
Araminta
She worried uselessly for Charlotte. So much was expected of her (of all of them, certainly, but the pressure seemed to mount with each new generation), and Charlotte seemed to have been born expecting even more from herself. No mistakes and no weakness. Araminta knew all too well the price of failure. The Hebrides had beckoned, once; as had the Antipodes (how far was far enough?). Araminta had always preferred the cold. But then she watched her brother with his daughter and knew she had to stay, futile and frustrating though it may be to remain so close to that bitter chill. People described bee stings in terms of heat, but she’d always felt the sensation as the burn of unbearable frost. When she was able, she tried to find ways to show Charlotte and Milo other ways to be in the world. She wanted them to feel they had room to grow into who they wanted to be.
She was ashamed to admit she wanted to believe Mary Russell had maintained a similar quiet held-back persistent background presence for her.
Her own brothers each engaged with the Holmes legacy in different ways. One wouldn’t say Alistair embraced his role because he would never do something so emotional, but he did treat it like a mantle, and Emma along side him. Leander wanted to be the Sherlock to Alistair’s Mycroft, and for a while she envied his enjoyment of the “adventures” he pursued with James Watson. At some point, however, he seemed to have slid too quickly from hedonism to nihilism, presumably around the time James withdrew to start first one family and then another. That had been unexpected, she thought. Leander shouldn’t have been so trusting. Perhaps he hadn’t had a choice. For a time she assumed she’d at least be able to commiserate with Julian, but he cocooned himself far more effectively than she ever had.
At the end of that visit decades ago, Mary Russell asked Araminta to remove a file box from the minuscule back seat of that absurd red car. Araminta expected Miss Russell to open it and extract some irrefutable proof of her Holmes status, but instead simply told Araminta to set it down on the large study desk, said, “Some light reading for you, my dear; make of it what you will. That’s all we can do when arguing with old manuscripts,” she said, and left. She never came by again. The Russell house was closed up when Araminta attempted to return the visit a few weeks later, and that fall word in the village was either certainty that old Miss Russell had surely died years before or that she’d suddenly retired abroad. Somewhere warm. California? The Levant? Monte Carlo? Araminta knew she should be relieved. Eventually she found a sort of bittersweet companionship in Russell’s papers, a confounding and curious mix of truth and fiction.
Charlotte
When the time came, Jamie chased his writerly dreams (and unruly libido) to university in London — he wrote all the time, why was that not enough? Why must he find clay idols to worship in creative writing programs instead of studying practical subjects like necropsy or Mandarin or cryptology? For all the upheaval and unexpected outcomes during the two years they’d known each other, he’d never seriously considered doing anything else but go to university and study writing. She, on the other hand was certain only that she would not go to university to study writing. The reprieve came from an unexpected quarter: Aunt Araminta’s surprising announcement that she was off to spend six months studying the bees of Iceland and New Zealand, and would Charlotte please hive and cat (and cottage) sit for her during this time. All at once she couldn’t bear the thought of staying at home or with Milo or anywhere else but by herself in a cottage on the Sussex Downs, where generations of Holmeses had historically turned when they needed to withdraw for a while.
Milo squawked for no reason given that his security net extended throughout the property and well into the surrounding areas, but she agreed to have one of his multipurpose goons play housekeeper and cook for the duration. (He’d provided three dossiers for her to choose from, all women, and she thanked him in her head where she was fairly certain he couldn’t yet eavesdrop.) She wasn’t entirely certain who had played whom in that altercation. It wasn’t like she would be safer anywhere else, should the latest Moriarty detente crack again.
The day before Araminta’s departure, she asked Charlotte to come by to go over the final details. About winterizing the hives, Charlotte assumed, and more notes on which windows stuck and where the fuse box was. The last thing she expected was learning that the person who claimed to be Sherlock’s secret wife had visited the cottage once, and Araminta not only had a box of her loony manuscripts there but wanted Charlotte to read them.
“Whether or not you accept her as a Holmes, we have some things in common with her.” Araminta, who often avoided eye-contact, had emphasized that “we” with a brief earnest look that made Charlotte press her lips in a thin line. No secrets among Holmeses, indeed. “This is what she showed me, Charlotte, and what I believe you might find...fruitful to contemplate. Terrible things happen, and if we survive, they leave scars that can limit and bind us. The past doesn't have to be forgotten or excised to heal, however. It is possible to find some measure of reconciliation with those difficult...emotions.”
They both shifted uncomfortably. “You're skeptical, of course. As was I. As you should be: it's who you are. Not just because it's what we were taught to be, but who you would have been in any case. If you'd been raised by Julian or Grace Watson or Mrs Hudson. I'm just— Don't discount Miss Russell's words simply because that's what a Holmes would do, Charlotte. Don't accept others' judgment. Not even mine. I may be wrong. It's just— Hers is a voice we don't often hear, you and I. A woman and a Holmes, of sorts, and still herself, through it all."
Charlotte let the box be buried under the pile of things she moved from her rooms in the main house. She’d get around to unpacking eventually. Yes, in both the literal and metaphorical terms, she muttered to herself. That was the point of this retreat, was it not?
* * *
She had dinner with Leander in Eastbourne in early October, recognizing the visit for the remote sensing mission that it was.
“You can tell them I’m fine,” she said, after the waiter had brought them their meal. “Whichever ‘them’ it is you’re reporting to. Covered in cat hair and honey.”
“Is that the cozy version of tar and feathered?” he asked, twirling capellini onto his fork.
“The self-inflicted version. Cat hair is an excellent insulator, you know, and honey can be used to treat burns.” She nudged the baked potato out of the way. “Mostly I’ve been reading. The cottage library is as old as the building but also as modernized. Quite the eclectic mix. There are a couple of Sherlock’s notebooks I hadn’t read before.”
Leander hummed inquisitively through his mouthful.
“About beekeeping.”
“Ah,” he said, and left it at that, picking up the conversation with a ridiculous story of forged wine labels and hot air balloon chases outside Lisbon. She asked questions in Portuguese, and he tsked at her accent before admitting he didn’t speak it, got by on his Spanish. Later she wondered if he’d practiced the tale by emailing it all to James first.
Leander, and specifically Leander and James, had become role models for the partnership she specifically did not want. The desperate need to recall the fun they’d had in order to bury the dysfunction that kept them apart now. The part of herself she most despised writhed in fear that Jamie would decide he wanted the security and normalcy of wife and children, as James had chosen (despite the all too obvious lingering misgivings) instead of Leander. It was pathetic and illogical and infuriating. Wanting. Thankfully she could ignore it most of the time. It was harder to suppress the equally frightened part of her that wanted that outcome more than anything.
When she got home that night, she cleared a path for Miss Russell’s box and shoved it over to the settee where she’d built a nest of shawls and mismatched woolen throws, close enough to the fireplace to be able to poke the embers without getting up, and began to read.
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Date: 2017-12-16 09:49 pm (UTC)However. This is just fascinating. I like this Araminta very, very much; this Mary, meanwhile, is very much a cipher (but then, that's what one would expect from a memoir coming from the Cavallaro-Holmes' camp). There is certainly room to wonder about the origins of the Holmes dynasty here; all we really have in the Cavallaro is Charlotte's assertion that Sherlock himself originally claimed Watson as the mother of his child...and depending on where Charlotte got that claim, and on the relative values of "Watson" in Sherlock-speak, that doesn't necessarily exclude Russell.
Meanwhile, though, there's also a lot of thoughtful poking here at Charlotte's and Jamie's relationship to one another, and at Charlotte's problematic relationship with her own family. Again, it's Araminta who connects things together; I do hope she gets to bond properly with the new cats, without undue meddling from the forces of evil (wherever they may be lurking).
And, as with my own piece last year, So Much Room for further exploring....
Very well done, very satisfying, and very much a worthy speculation on how these two canons might intersect. Bravo, and thank you!
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Date: 2017-12-23 04:13 pm (UTC)In the interest of finishing before the end of the posting schedule, I stopped myself from following the trail of what the "true" story might actually be, that Mary disguised as Damien Adler's existence in her fictionalized memoir, within the Cavallero universe. I hadn't actually considered the possibility of Mary being the mother of Holmes's child - my head canon is that both personal preference and the car crash would prevent that. But of course she could be! It would then require more backstory to explain why she remained an outsider despite Henry's recognized position in the lineage... I shall leave this speculation as an exercise for the reader. (Along with the AU in which Araminta and Grace are the well-matched Holmes and Watson of their generation.)
Oh, I so want to believe we'll get Araminta in Book 3 and simultaneously doubt very much that we will. Agatha also clearly needs a book (and some fic) of her own as well.
Thank you for the Holmestice request that got me thinking about all of this!
"a piece of work"
Date: 2017-12-17 07:27 pm (UTC)I only have a nodding acquaintance with the canons, so it took a while to put it all together, but it was very worth the time.
Given the short timeframe for exchange gifts, I'm especially impressed with the polish of the prose. I didn't know or care much about these characters when I started, yet as I was gently pulled along I discovered deftly-constructed paragraph after paragraph stuffed with allusions, observations and questions that I *had* to follow up on.
I especially liked the section where Charlotte convinced Jamie to go off somewhere else with his sack of wild oats, thank you very much. A great summary of the state of things at that point in their lives, and of the complications of the relationship in general.
Re: "a piece of work"
Date: 2017-12-23 04:21 pm (UTC)and a belated "thanks" for my treat! I realized I neglected to include the actual word in my comment on that post. they're really lovely.
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