Umbrage
Umbrage Hudson Holmes-Watson is taller than Vexation by a quarter of an inch and is pretty sure that she may grow as long as daddy, which would be very cool but isn't strictly necessary.
Um's dark, wavy hair usually hangs loose between her shoulder blades and is often snarled, but when daddy tells her to brush it—which she avoids at all costs if possible—she just looks at him with pretty grey eyes, and even though those eyes are like his, and her crooked, cupid's bow smile is his, and even though she speaks to him with the same measured tones he's employed since he could talk, well, despite all that, somehow this child of all three of their little girls is the most, the very most like John.
Not to say Um isn't every inch her own person because John will tell you right now that he never not one time ever spent an entire day teaching himself how to spit as far as possible, and he'll also tell you that he can't recall one instance where he drank three colas one right after the other just to see how long he could burp. And if he ever used the word bogey in every sentence for one whole day because he liked to see how many times his daddy would roll his eyes and growl, "I despair," then John has blocked this.
So, yes, aside from an unseemly fascination (which developed just this last summer) with bodily processes, Umbrage is, indeed, quite a chip off the old upright block.
For example, if someone is going to mediate a fight in their raucous house—including between papa and daddy, even if they very much tell her it's none of her sweet business—it's going to be Umbrage. If someone's going to bring home a hurt bird or a homeless pup it'll be Umbrage. And if someone is going to stub her toe against the kitchen table for the third time this week ("Pick your feet up darling.") and then break out a string of swear words shockingly inappropriate for an eight year old, it is going to be Umbrage.
Except, sometimes, lots of times, Um is nothing like her papa.
She recites poetry in the bath, for one thing. Why an eight year old is fascinated with poetry—and she is—when no one since Byron was a child has been so interested so young in this esoteric art neither John nor Sherlock can comprehend.
Um is partial to religious iconography as well, another mystifying trait neither papa or daddy can explain. Her interest manifests mostly in small pieces of jewelry, chiefly rings. At first Sherlock actually objected to her wearing of a crucifix, a pentacle, a fat, happy Buddha, a silly little rhinestone-bedecked angel. But once she explained the significance of each—in extensive, exhaustive detail—he withdrew his objections, which had been based only on the assumption she did not understand the meanings behind what she wore.
Of all the children she's the one who remembers. Birthdays, anniversaries, when library books are due. But it's more than that. Um remembers the last time you cried. She remembers the last time—it was two years ago—that you told her she's 'stupid' (Vex had not meant it). She remembers believing in heaven and then losing her kitten—it was her kitten, daddy had got it just for her—to cancer of all things and then not believing in much of anything any more.
Um smiles as much as any child, is as happy as any child, but she's also the only child of the three inclined to fits of melancholy, inclined toward melodramatic over-reactions to small stimuli, and the only one in the family to wake up so grumpy some days she just about qualifies as a biohazard.
Fortunately Um's blues are still somewhat rare, though her parents are careful to pay close attention, trying to be sure those fits of despair are getting no more frequent. And fortunately her moods can be lifted quite easily with the judicious application of toffee pudding, Maltesers, or humbugs. Sometimes all three. Plus coffee ice cream.
Coffee. Don't get her parents started on the whole coffee thing, okay? Because no eight year old should drink coffee, much less that much coffee with that much sugar in it. Dear god no.