The Last of August

“And that wasn’t the end of it, I guess.”

“No. It goes on like that. 1930. Bank vault heist. Glasgow. All the culprits caught, but the jewels missing. Guess who shows up in society wearing a million pounds’ worth of rubies?” He laughed at my expression. “Jamie, you’ve been in America too long. Pounds sterling. The currency. Apparently one of their hired cons had delivered the rubies to them through the sewer, using a pulley system. Quentin Moriarty claimed his wife’s jewels came from an inheritance, but Jonathan Holmes disproved that through a pair of rats, a scalpel, and a lady’s handkerchief. 1944, and the Moriartys are raiding the museums of Europe during the second World War; 1968, and they’re chairing the Nobel Prize Committee; 1972, and my older sister Araminta was asked to decode a series of messages that used Francis Bacon’s substitution cipher. They were being used to negotiate the sale of nuclear warheads. To Walter Moriarty. What on earth would a Moriarty do with a warhead? Sell it again, probably, and at a profit. He went to trial. Two jurors developed rare forms of cancer. The judge’s wife went missing. All quiet. All out of the news. And then someone killed all three of Araminta’s cats.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s awful.”

“Walter Moriarty was out of jail sixteen weeks later. A travesty. And still—you must remember this—the family wasn’t all bad.” He refilled his cup. “Really there was only one bad apple in a generation. The rest . . . well. I knew a Patrick Moriarty when I was younger. We ran into each other at a party at Oxford, got drunk enough to duck into a corner and compare notes. We got to talking about the bad blood between our families—though it was nothing like it is now—and he said that the fundamental difference between us was that Holmeses were heartless optimists, and they were hedonist pessimists.”

“Heartless optimists?” My Holmes didn’t seem particularly optimistic. “Meaning?”

“Do you know that old image of Lady Justice? All done up with the blindfold and the scales. Made of shiny copper, not to be touched. I’ve thought of us that way. In order to pass judgment on other men, you remove yourself from them. Not all Holmeses are detectives, you know. Far from it. Mostly we end up in government. Some scientists, some lawyers. One really dry stick of a cousin sells insurance. But when we do detective work, we tend to work outside the law. We have our own resources. And, at times, when the law won’t prosecute, we are our own jury. To wield that kind of power . . . it makes sense that you wouldn’t let yourself be blinded by your emotions. Would it really help you to put a man away to know he’d leave behind a starving child? And, to top it all off, it’s not in our natures to be effusive. We’re mostly brains, you know. The body’s just something to get us from place to place. But over time, we calcified. Went brittle, staring at ourselves for so long. Maybe it made us better at our jobs. Because you don’t do this kind of work unless you think it’ll really make a difference, really make the world better. And you don’t think you can make the world better unless you are a tremendous egomaniac.”

“And the Moriartys?”

Leander considered me over his teacup. “They have gobs of money, and a family name that made them pariahs, and quite a few of them grow up to be geniuses. So they feel entitled to the best parts of the world. Extrapolate from there, my dear Watson. But it wasn’t really until this current crop that there were so many marvelously depraved specimens all at once. I miss the ones like Patrick,” he said with a laugh. “He grew up to be a hedge fund manager. We’re talking minor evil. Ran a couple Ponzi schemes. This lot . . . well, August was a nice kid, much nicer than Patrick could ever be. August was patient with Charlotte. Smart as a whip. When Emma and Alistair hired him, it was because Alistair was about two seconds from being the eye of a media hurricane, and we needed to build up some public goodwill. We hadn’t had a run-in with the Moriartys in twenty years. Memories fade. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“That’ll be written on a few tombstones before this is over,” I said.

“You have quite the mordant sense of humor.” His eyes went faraway. “Still, I wonder if you’re right. The cycle’s beginning all over again.”

“And my family?” I asked him. “We didn’t play a role in any of this?” I sounded like a child, I knew I did, but I’d been raised on the Sherlock Holmes stories. My father styled himself an ex-detective. I’d imagined that we’d been in the thick of it all this time, right beside the Holmeses, fighting the good fight.

“Not in a long while,” Leander said. “Too many of us were automatons, maybe. Too distant. Our families were friendly, to be sure, but not friends. Not in pairs. Not until I met your father. Until you met Charlotte.”

I sighed. I couldn’t help it.

He leaned forward to clap me on the shoulder. “You’re a good influence on her. Just give her a bit of space. I don’t think she’s ever had a friend before you.”

SO I GAVE HER SOME SPACE.

My Faulkner novel in the mornings, and silence in the afternoons as I wandered through their library, pulling down the books I wanted to read and wouldn’t, because they were all first editions, gilt leaf and delicate pages, things meant to be looked at and never opened. I was afraid I’d ruin them. I was afraid for so many pathetic reasons, scared that, in a few weeks, I’d be back at school and without Holmes’s friendship, that the dread that prickled the back of my neck was the sensation of loss before it came. I was so messed up that I couldn’t shake the feeling even at our dinners, sitting next to Leander, who had taken Emma Holmes’s place beside me. In an attempt to cheer me up, he told me ribald, ridiculous stories about my father that always seemed to end with one of them bailing the other out of jail. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">