"Give him a… chance?"
The confusion on Mary's face only deepened.
"Why…?"
"Have you read today's paper?" Arthur Morstan answered her question with one of his own.
"Not yet…" Mary shook her head.
"Then read it." The man pushed the newspaper across the table toward her.
"Once you've finished, you should understand."
Mary reached out and took the paper. Her eyes landed on the headline.
[Exclusive Interview: The Genius Detective of Baker Street and Her Assistant]
The girl's heart skipped half a beat, and her hands opened the paper before she had decided to.
The first thing she saw was a photograph.
Charlotte Holmes sat on a sofa, her expression detached, her gaze aimed at the camera and yet somehow passing straight through it, fixed on something much farther away.
Her hair was a little disordered, and one tuft at the crown stuck up at an angle, but she herself seemed entirely unbothered, sitting there as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
And beside her—
Mary's gaze stopped.
Russell.
He sat next to Charlotte, also looking into the lens, the faintest trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
Mary stared at the photograph for several seconds before she made herself look away, down to the body of the article.
The interview was long. It filled two full pages.
She turned them one by one, her eyes racing across the dense columns of print.
The content was richer than she had imagined.
It ran from the suspicious suicide of Nicholas Winter, the painter every drawing room in high society had gossiped about, all the way to the Holly Davey case that almost nobody had heard of — and even the shadow of Buckingham Palace appeared somewhere in its pages.
Those scattered fragments of cases she had once heard from Russell's own lips had been strung together by The Times reporter, in a style dense with narrative flourish, into one sweeping, magnificent tapestry.
And at the center of that tapestry sat the young man and young woman on the sofa.
The Russell of the article spoke freely and easily, recounting the adventures they had shared in a light, humorous voice.
Charlotte, by contrast, functioned as a silent backdrop, offering a sparing sentence or two only now and then — and every one of them cut straight to the heart of the matter and lit up the whole story.
The prose spared no effort in its embellishment. It cast Charlotte as an all-knowing genius detective, very nearly a god.
And at the same time it painted Russell as the perfect partner: modest, dependable, always there to support the genius at the critical moment.
They were like the knight of legend and his loyal squire — the finest double act on the stage, moving in flawless step.
Reading that, Mary found her fingers tightening on the paper, her brows drawing together.
The girl's eyes came to rest at last on the end of the interview.
It was a passage about the pair's everyday life, and the most human, most gossipy part of the whole piece.
[At the close of the interview, we put to Miss Holmes a question that was perhaps somewhat impertinent:]
[In her eyes, what sort of man was her assistant, Mr. Watson?]
["He is a nuisance."]
[Miss Holmes delivered this assessment with her usual composure.]
["A necessary nuisance."]
Mary stared at that line for a long, long time.
She had known this article was coming. She had even prepared herself for it in advance.
Yet for some reason, seeing the thing itself lying in front of her, the tangle of feelings rose up all the same, and there was no stopping it.
It was like a treasure she had kept and cherished in private, until one day someone else discovered what it was worth, laid claim to it in the loudest possible fashion, and put it on public display.
Now, the moment anyone in London so much as mentioned Russell Watson, they would inevitably connect him to Charlotte Holmes.
The two of them were bound together.
That feeling was…
very strange.
Very unpleasant.
She had been there first.
So why… why should the latecomer take the lead?
"Finished?"
Arthur Morstan's voice cut into her thoughts.
Mary raised her head, folded the paper gently, and set it at the edge of the table.
"Yes, Father."
"And what do you make of it?"
"I…" Mary was silent for a moment. "I never imagined he'd been through so much."
"Indeed," Arthur Morstan nodded, committing to nothing. "Neither did I."
He picked up the coffee at his elbow and took a small sip.
"A penniless boy out of an orphanage who worked his way into Imperial College, and then became Charlotte Holmes's assistant.
Not only that — he's an honored guest at Scotland Yard, and he's even caught the favor of Buckingham Palace."
His tone sounded flat enough, but the contempt of earlier was gone from it.
"This young man is worth rather more than I imagined."
"So…" Mary looked at her father. "You intend to—"
"I've already said it." Arthur Morstan set down his cup and turned his gaze on her.
"Since he's taken an interest in you, we may as well give him a chance."
"A… chance?"
"Do you know what a man fears most in the business of investment?"
Arthur Morstan lifted the cup again and sipped at it, unhurried.
Mary said nothing, only waited.
"What he fears most is making the wrong judgment at the wrong moment." Arthur put the cup down, his eyes settling on his daughter's face.
"You decide a certain stock belongs in the rubbish heap and nowhere else, so you dump the lot of it early.
And then, not long after, it shoots straight for the sky, and suddenly everyone is scrambling to buy."
He tapped the open newspaper on the table with his fingertip.
"At that point, what do you do?"
Mary thought for a moment, then ventured, "Buy back in?"
"Correct." The corner of Arthur's mouth lifted into a satisfied curve.
"Buy back in before the price runs away from you. Before everyone else has their eye on it."
He tapped the paper again, harder this time.
"Russell Watson is precisely that kind of stock right now," he said.
"I thought little of him before because there was genuinely nothing about him worth thinking much of."
Arthur explained it plainly.
"A penniless boy out of an orphanage. Even getting into Imperial College only proves he works harder than the rest and has a little more talent.
But so what? In London you could throw a brick and flatten a dozen of them — it's the cheapest commodity there is.
In fact, if he hadn't gotten himself tangled up with that Charlotte Holmes, I wouldn't have spared him a single glance."
He paused, and something appraising entered his voice.
"But now it's different."
Arthur Morstan tapped the newspaper once more.
"A front-page interview in The Times. Honored guest of Scotland Yard. Special consultant to Buckingham Palace.
No matter how much water there is in those titles, they're in print now.
From today onward, the whole of London's high society will know there is such a young man.
That at his age he already stands beside the Holmes family, beside Scotland Yard — beside the very threshold of the royal household."
Arthur lifted the coffee and drank again.
"Do you understand what that means?"
Mary raised her head and looked at him.
"It means," Arthur said slowly, "that he is no longer the stock lying in the rubbish heap.
He is now a founder's share, freshly discovered, with enormous potential.
Whoever buys in before the others catch on will, one day, collect a return several times over."
He set the cup back on its saucer with a small clink, and his eyes burned as they fixed on his daughter.
"And you, Mary — you are the one and only person who can buy him now."
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