"Hm?" Russell looked up and met Charlotte's eyes, surprise and puzzlement on his face.
"Since when are you interested in that sort of thing?"
And why today, of all days?
"It was just... a passing question," Charlotte said.
Russell was quiet for a moment.
What was he supposed to say?
"Nothing worth mentioning," he said, his voice level.
"About what you'd imagine. Lessons, sleeping through them, the bell — what else is there?"
"That's all?" Charlotte lifted her head and glanced at him.
There was a flicker of suspicion in those grey-blue eyes, as though she were weighing whether he was lying.
"There was an interview as well," Russell said.
"An interview?"
"Mm. For The Phoenix."
"The Phoenix?" Charlotte blinked, her brow creasing. "What's that?"
"A student magazine," Russell explained.
"The sort that prints, well, poems written by students. Missing-person notices. Things like that."
"Missing-person notices?" Her frown deepened. "They came to you to find someone?"
"No." Russell gave a helpless little laugh. "They came to interview me."
"Interview you?"
Something odd crossed Charlotte's face.
"What is there about you worth interviewing?"
"They read The Times, and it made them curious about me."
Russell shrugged. "The only reason they left you alone is that you don't go to school. Otherwise they'd have been knocking on your door too."
Charlotte was silent for a few seconds.
"And what did you tell them?"
"That you stay up all night," he said honestly. "That you drink your coffee strong, that you never listen to reason, that you like playing the violin. And a whole pile of other things."
Russell relayed the substance of the interview to her, neatly leaving out the parts that were better left unsaid.
Charlotte rolled her eyes.
"So that's how you slander me the moment I'm not there?"
"How is telling the truth slander?" Russell shrugged.
"A truth told by halves is a lie," Charlotte said, mouth twisting.
"Oh — they also asked what I thought of you," Russell added, as if it had only just come back to him.
"And how did you answer?" Charlotte pressed, leaning forward before she noticed she was doing it.
"I said," Russell watched her, a teasing smile spreading across his face, "that you're trouble."
Charlotte went rigid.
"That's it?"
Why did that answer sound so familiar?
"That's right." Russell nodded.
"She says she doesn't need anything, and then remembers every last detail.
"She tells you to leave her be, and if you do, she'll sit up until sunrise." Russell shrugged.
"That's more or less the whole of it."
"Russell Watson!"
"I'm joking," Russell said, laughing.
Charlotte glared at him, then lowered her head and went back to prodding the mashed potatoes on her plate.
She jabbed harder than before. The fork sank into the soft mash with a faint squelch.
"...Nobody asked you to say any of that."
Her voice came out muffled, as if squeezed up from somewhere deep in her throat.
Russell raised an eyebrow. "You were the one who asked."
Charlotte didn't answer.
She only went on stabbing that poor heap of potato — once, twice, three times — as though venting some feeling she couldn't put a name to.
Russell watched her and smiled, resigned.
"Food is for eating, not for taking your temper out on."
"Mind your own business... In a minute I'm going to Buckingham Palace to report you."
Charlotte pursed her lips and set down her fork.
Then she looked away and bent over her soup again.
For some reason, she kept feeling that something was off.
Not the kind of wrongness she could reason her way toward — something subtler, a dissonance she couldn't articulate.
A woman's sixth sense, if you liked.
Charlotte didn't press him about it.
A thing like that had no factual basis whatsoever. She might well be chasing shadows.
"And you?" Russell said abruptly, cutting across her thoughts.
"Me?"
"Mm." Russell nodded. "You were shut up in the house all day? Never went out?"
"No."
"Then what did you do?"
Charlotte's hand paused around her soup spoon as her mind ran back over the day.
That morning, while he was out, she had crept into his room, gone through his trunk, looked at his clothes, and then lain down on his bed and fallen asleep.
And slept there, just like that, until he came home.
That was the entirety of what Charlotte had done today.
"...Slept," she said thickly.
"You slept all day?"
"Mm."
Russell raised his eyebrows, and a laugh escaped him.
"Impressive. That's excellent sleep quality."
Charlotte said nothing.
The odd tension that had been hanging over the table eased a good deal.
"Speaking of which," Russell said suddenly.
"Hm?"
"Madam Vanessa's end of things," Russell said. "Charles Brown. Has there been any news?"
Charlotte paused a beat.
"None," she said. "He's likely still not over it."
"Is that so..." Russell nodded. "Pilsen is dead. Charles Brown is the last thread we have left."
He sighed. "If he goes mad as well, we really will be out of options."
Charlotte listened to him grumble in silence, her mind on something else entirely.
Vanessa had said, earlier, that next time Charlotte should come alone.
To see how Charles was when Russell wasn't there.
At the time, that experiment had stirred a small, stubborn resistance in Charlotte, and a good deal of unease.
Not because she was afraid of the experiment itself, but because she was afraid of what it would show.
If Charles genuinely grew far steadier whenever Russell was absent — what would that mean?
Vanessa had floated other hypotheses, but everyone knew those hypotheses amounted to nothing more than pleasant self-deception.
Later, though, Charlotte had found a reason to set her mind at rest.
There was no evidence.
The chain of evidence was broken, and out of that break she had drawn a thin, frail sense of safety.
But now, with the matter of Charles still hanging over them, that safety was beginning to look distinctly precarious.
Vanessa's suggestion was like a splinter, lodged somewhere under Charlotte's skin and refusing to work its way out.
It didn't ache and it didn't itch. It was simply, undeniably there.
It reminded her at every moment that a possibility remained — unsettling, and neither proven nor disproven.
If the thing that sent Charles spiralling out of control really was Russell —
Then she would have her evidence.
Not direct evidence; nothing that would prove outright that Russell was Moriarty. But enough to prove that whatever ran between those two was nowhere near as simple as it appeared.
Enough, at the very least, to support building a chain of suspicion.
Charlotte set down her spoon.
She discovered that she didn't want that "at the very least."
She didn't want evidence.
She would rather there were never any evidence at all.
____
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