Read The Ambitious Orphan for Free Online

behind it was a stack of very
important documents like birth certificates, death certificates and
passports.
    At the top sat
Sebastian's passport, and it was still in date so she flipped it
over and placed it on the floor. Underneath was a birth certificate
for Sebastian stating his date of birth to be June 1983. Under
that, a marriage certificate for an Edward Holmes to a Heidi
Fitzwilliam.
    As she went
through the box she noticed the few certificates that were older
seemed to have smudged ink, were horribly faded or just didn't seem
right, until she got to the birth certificate for Sherlock Holmes,
born in June 1854.
    Once she'd fetched
her notebook, Amelia went back through the pile from oldest to
newest jotting down all the dates.
    With that done she
noticed that there was a pattern. The man before had died almost
exactly twenty-seven years after the birth of the next man in the
box in every case but the most recent one of Edward. There was also
only Edward's marriage certificate, but no death certificate. It
was incredibly odd.
    Just in case
Sebastian returned early, she decided to put everything back the
way it was, using her camera once more to get the placement of
everything just right, and then she returned with her notebook to
the sofa.
    Over the next half
an hour she added the few details she knew for Myron and Mycroft,
leaving blanks for the other possible family members not accounted
for. Sebastian had once mentioned that Myron was seven years his
elder so that birth date was nice and easy to pin down. Neither
looked quite as old as they were, however.
    There were two
birth certificates for people no longer alive, although they
appeared to sit neatly as the two people between Sherlock and
Edward. There was a Quentin who apparently was born in 1886 and
died in 1944, twenty-seven years after Livingston was born. And he
died twenty-seven years after Edward was born. She noticed that all
five men in the tree were born in the same thirty-day window. One
was born in early July but still only twelve days after Sherlock
was born.
    It also came to
her attention that all of them, with the exception of Sebastian,
were fathered by a man whose name began with M. Mycroft fathered
Quentin, A Milton Holmes fathered Livingston, and Edward was
fathered by someone called Morton. It was strange to have so many
birth certificates for men who weren't directly related to each
other.
    Amelia had a
feeling that if she looked up the elder Holmes and went back
through the family tree she'd find every Holmes she already had on
her list, and that all these fathers were seven years older than
their generational counterpart. Deciding she had to know one way or
another, she grabbed her coat and packed her notebook into her
handbag.
    After writing a
note to explain she'd stepped out to do research, she hurried over
to the British Library. In there would be archives for all the
relevant births and deaths she needed to look up.
    Within the hour,
she was talking to a librarian about the Holmes family, and less
than five minutes later she was heading to the section she
needed.
    It didn't take her
long to find the right place and begin flicking through birth
records for the area. An hour later she had a complete family tree,
and it was exactly as she'd expected. Each generation of Holmes
siblings, one of them had two sons, always roughly seven years
apart. The only logical explanation was that they were faking lives
to try and go unnoticed.
    Given that no one
else lived long enough, and they both stayed out of the public eye,
it didn't even surprise her that no one had really noticed the
pattern. As she found herself somewhere quiet to sit and think,
something Sebastian had once told her came to mind. 'When you
eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how
improbable, must be the truth.'
    She knew it wasn't
impossible to live a long time. Science knew how it could be done;
it just hadn't worked out a good way to do it yet. The