Charlotte said nothing.
She only stared in silence at the fragrant, steaming dish of baked pasta with cream and meat sauce, a look of open bewilderment crossing her grey-blue eyes.
"Why?" Charlotte couldn't help but ask, turning toward Mrs. Hudson, who was in the process of untying her apron. "Didn't I see you slicing ham at noon?"
"Oh, that." Mrs. Hudson set the bread on the table, entirely oblivious to the fact that she had just determined the outcome of a wager.
"I was going to make sandwiches, but just before you two headed out, young Russell came and told me he fancied baked pasta with cream and meat sauce."
She said it warmly, glancing over at Russell with a fond, indulgent smile.
"I thought, well, we've had sandwiches plenty enough this week — might as well have a change of pace."
The words had barely landed before Charlotte whipped her head around to stare at Russell.
Russell met her gaze and simply shrugged.
"You never said I couldn't do that, did you? Of course, if you'd rather call the whole thing void, I haven't any objection."
Charlotte was silent for a moment. In the end, she simply drew a long breath, pulled out her chair, and sat down.
"I never said I wasn't going to honour it."
She picked up her fork, twirled up a length of pasta thick with meat sauce and cream, and put it in her mouth, speaking around it in a muffled voice:
"It's only one day. It's hardly the end of the world."
Russell smiled faintly and pulled out his own chair.
Dinner concluded in an atmosphere of easy, unforced cheer.
After the meal, Charlotte rose and retreated to her room. Russell, for his part, helped Mrs. Hudson with the washing-up before returning to his own.
He still had to make a trip to Belgravia tonight — more good deeds to accumulate.
As the night deepened and the clock's hands crept toward the hour of rest, Russell changed his clothes, slipped out through the window, and disappeared into the darkness of Baker Street.
The following morning, Russell — who had been up half the night doing good works — dragged himself out of bed through sheer willpower, wrestled the alarm into silence, and shuffled downstairs in no particular hurry.
At the dining table sat a figure — familiar, yet somehow slightly out of place. She was holding a slice of buttered toast and eating at her own unhurried pace, a cup of coffee close at hand.
At the sound of his footsteps, Charlotte unhurriedly lifted her gaze.
"I'd decided," she said, "that if you hadn't appeared in another two minutes, I'd consider yesterday's wager null and void."
"Sounds like I've timed my entrance rather well, then." Russell smiled and pulled out his chair.
His gaze swept the table around her, then he asked:
"Where are your textbooks?"
"You actually thought I'd go to lectures?" Charlotte gave him a withering look. "If I can sit in a classroom for five whole minutes without leaving, that's already doing you an enormous favour."
"Fair enough, fair enough." Russell shrugged, not pressing the point.
"Finish my coffee, then we go."
"Mm." Charlotte gave a brief sound of assent, and turned her attention to the morning newspaper.
Today's front page was, once again, Moriarty's one-man show.
Beyond the conspicuous countdown figure, there was a scatter of inconsequential little stories. One reported that a certain aristocrat's daughter had put up a standing offer to purchase Moriarty's handwritten calling cards directly from his previous victims — purely, it seemed, for the sake of being a fan.
Russell cast a curious eye over the figures: a single card of his could fetch ten pounds or more, depending on whatever message he'd scrawled on it at the time.
Some people had even gone so far as to frame those offhand little notes as collector's items on display.
To be fair, that particular breed of enthusiast — the ones with the leisure for artistic curation — tended to be the ones Russell had only paid a light visit to: something taken, then quietly returned.
Cases like Ethan Roy's, where the man had been left utterly ruined, were a different matter entirely. Collectors or not, those lot were in no state for anything — buying back their own dignity would have been getting off lightly.
Breakfast finished, Russell led Charlotte away from Baker Street. They took the tram to Imperial College.
When Charlotte walked into the tiered lecture hall, the entire room fell into a dead silence.
Every pair of eyes turned toward the figure in the back row — someone who stood out from everyone around her with unmistakable, almost jarring distinctness.
If Mary's presence at Imperial College was a scenic feature of the landscape, then Charlotte's was a fault line running clean through it.
She paid the stares absolutely no mind. She walked directly to the seat at the very back, against the wall, and sat down.
Russell dropped into the seat beside her, yawned, and folded his arms on the desk.
"This is what you do every day at Imperial College?" Charlotte looked at him.
"You might as well apply for an exemption."
"I'd love to. My grades don't exactly qualify me for one." Russell said, voice muffled against his sleeve.
"What am I supposed to do, then?" Charlotte asked. "Slump over the desk like you?"
"Whatever you like. The wager only said you had to come for one day. All you need to do is wait — wait for the bell, wait for Godot."
Charlotte found herself at a rare loss for words.
She had a powerful urge to simply stand up and leave.
Just then, the sound of footsteps drifted from behind them — and with it, a faint, delicate trace of white tea.
Charlotte turned her head toward the sound, and found herself looking directly into a pair of cerulean eyes.
The girl's step faltered — barely perceptibly — and a flicker of surprise, brief and quickly mastered, crossed those eyes that almost always carried a gentle smile. It was suppressed as swiftly as it had appeared, replaced by a gaze that was more keenly appraising than before.
She continued forward, moving toward the spot that had already become the room's focal point. Under the eyes of everyone watching, she did exactly what she always did: she took the empty seat beside Russell.
"Good morning, Russell." She greeted him first, softly — as though the commanding presence seated on his other side simply didn't exist.
"Morning." Russell raised his head, bleary-eyed.
Only then did Mary shift her gaze to the other side, her face composing itself into the flawless, characteristic elegance of Miss Morstan.
"Good morning, Charlotte."
She paused, her tone carrying a perfectly calibrated note of surprise and curiosity.
"Morning." Charlotte replied — and Mary's arrival, she found, had shaved a little of the boredom off.
"Didn't Russell mention that you'd already been granted an exemption?" Mary asked with genuine curiosity.
"I was simply curious what this one gets up to at school every day, so I came along to see for myself." Charlotte said, her expression betraying nothing.
Mary raised an eyebrow. She sensed there was more to it than that — but she was tactful enough not to pursue the thread.
"Speaking of which —" the girl paused, then dropped her voice, "— I heard from Russell that there's more to the Lloyds Bank case than meets the eye?"
"The Professor of Crime," Charlotte said, without evasion. "A legend in London's criminal underworld. For now, though, there are no leads to follow."
"Is the suspect who was frightened out of his mind still showing no signs of recovery?"
"Regrettably, none." Charlotte shook her head. "To be honest, I've stopped expecting anything useful from that lunatic. Even if he did recover, I expect he'd still be drooling on himself."
Mary let out a small breath of relief, then — as though it had only just occurred to her — brought up another matter:
"By the way — what do you make of the announcement letter from Moriarty that's been printed in the papers?"
At those words, Russell — sandwiched between the two of them — shifted ever so slightly.
Oh? Talking about me, are we?
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