Chapter 14 #3
She had heard herself described as difficult to read. Lord Bancroft’s face must be on a par with hers in its opacity. She could decipher little in his features beyond a concentration on his food.
He looked up. “I do. And before I left to present myself at Eastleigh Park, he made me a most excellent citron tart.”
Charlotte turned to Lord Ingram. “I like citron tarts.”
“Then you shall have them.” His gaze again lingered over her. “Now if you are done, Holmes, we must be going. Enjoy your dinner, Bancroft.”
“Now why do you suppose Lord Bancroft didn’t believe that I would invest some time and energy to gain the ability to pass myself off as a man?” asked Holmes, when she and Lord Ingram were alone in the coach. “It’s a valuable professional skill.”
“Because, for all that your mind is a thing of wonder—and terror—you are not particularly industrious. When need be, yes. Otherwise you could easily pass for a Punch caricature of a lady of leisure, eating bonbons and reading novels on the chaise, except you’d be reading The Lancet or a Patent Office catalogue.
“For you to set aside that book, get up from the chaise, put on the padding, the clothes, the wig, the orthodontia, the beard and mustache, and practice passing for a man—why should Bancroft believe this would have happened under normal circumstances?”
“Do you think he believed I would do it to travel abroad with you?”
He shrugged.
It was, as ever, difficult to guess what Bancroft might be thinking.
But he would have liked to believe that.
He could so easily see them standing shoulder to shoulder at the bow of a ship.
It didn’t matter what kind of seas they sailed, warm, cold, smooth, or choppy.
It didn’t matter where they were headed, empty wilderness or teeming metropolises.
It mattered only that they were together at last.
She was right. He was still the same romantic he had always been.
A bittersweet thought, more bitter than sweet.
He wanted to ask whether such a voyage might be possible, one of these days. But she was a woman who made no promises of the future. And he . . . deep down he still wanted all the promises.
Or at least clarity and certainty.
He glanced out of the window, at the murky night and the rain that seemed determined to drag on for the remainder of the year. After a while she placed her gloved hand on top of his.
Her words echoed in his ears. Why can’t things become simpler?
No, no complicated relationship ever became simpler by the addition of physical intimacy. But at least now, when they ran out of words, he could turn to her—and kiss her.
So he did.
Treadles had not expected to see “Sherrinford” Holmes in the coach—he thought she would have already gone to their destination to prepare for her role as Sherlock Holmes’s sister—or God forbid, Sherlock Holmes himself. But she—and Lord Ingram—greeted the policemen cordially.
Chief Inspector Fowler led the way with small talk.
Treadles waited for him to steer the conversation to the bodies in which “Sherrinford” Holmes had expressed an interest. But whether he was genuinely uninterested or merely wished others to think so, he instead concentrated his questions on the running of a large estate.
Treadles had attended Lord Ingram’s archaeological lectures. The man had no trouble keeping an audience spellbound. Here, although the topic was much more mundane, Treadles found himself fascinated by what he had to say about the myriad responsibilities that fell upon his shoulders.
“Do you enjoy it, your estate?” asked Fowler.
The question met with almost half a minute of silence, before Lord Ingram said, “My godfather, while he yet lived, had strongly hinted that Stern Hollow would be mine upon his passing.
I liked the idea exceedingly well—the wholesome, peaceful life of a country squire seemed everything I could possibly hope for.
“But in truth, this life is taken up with more mundane decisions than I could have imagined.
Stern Hollow has an excellent staff. Still, the staff deal with routine matters.
Anything out of the ordinary gets passed up.
And since Lady Ingram had very little interest in the running of the estate, everything eventually came to me.
“In the beginning I welcomed all the decision making. But after a while . . .”
The carriage turned. The lanterns at the front swayed. Light spilled across Lord Ingram’s features, then he was sitting in darkness again.
“About eighteen months ago, I was informed that one of the estate’s gates was in bad shape and should be replaced.
I could barely recall such a gate—I had to be shown its location on a detailed map.
It was in a remote corner, where the land was a great deal rougher, and inaccessible except by foot or on horseback.
“I said to go ahead and replace the gate. But my estate manager told me that it was the second time the gate had to be replaced in a decade.
“If we replaced one indifferent gate with another, warned my estate manager, we would need to replace it yet again in a few years.
We rode out and looked at the thing. He was right; everything was falling apart, not just the gate.
So we decided to improve the entire boundary, fences, gate posts, gate.
And because wooden gates had proved useless, we agreed that a wrought iron gate would be a much more satisfactory option.
“But how should this wrought iron gate look? I fancied myself a proficient draftsman, so I set about creating designs, only to then learn that some were too fanciful to execute and others too easy to climb over. And while he had my attention on the matter, my estate manager brought up a whole slew of other deficiencies near the gate, everything from a derelict woodsman’s cottage to footbridges that were too rotted for safe crossing.
“Before I knew it, I’d spent three weeks perfecting a part of the estate I would never visit again—not to mention creating and discarding dozens of sketches to finally arrive at an acceptable design for the new gate.
“When it was all done, I felt little gratification. Not even relief. By and large I was stunned that I’d spent so much time on absolute minutiae.
On things that I didn’t care about and which made no difference to anyone, except my estate manager, who derived a Calvinist satisfaction from scratching off every last item on his to-do list.”
“Ah, I see,” said Fowler, after a minute. “Undiluted joys are difficult to come by in life.”
Lord Ingram inclined his head, as if in gratitude at being understood.
“The chief draw of life in the country—or so my younger self had thought—was family and friends, away from the noise and distractions of the city.
But at Stern Hollow, what family life there existed had been a divided one.
And what functions we held never without an undercurrent of strain.
“As beautiful as my estate is, and as much as I take pride in looking after it, in and of itself it has given me very little joy and certainly none of the undiluted variety.”
No one else spoke. Treadles squirmed on the inside. What could anyone say when a man laid bare the truth of his life?
Of course Lord Ingram needed, absolutely needed, to strike Chief Inspector Fowler as candid, with nothing to hide. But surely, this was going a little too far.
And then Treadles remembered the person sitting beside Lord Ingram. He hadn’t been addressing the policemen, he’d been speaking to her, specifically and entirely.
She had listened with the quietness of good soil soaking up the first drops of rain. And even now, when he had stopped speaking, she was still listening.
To the sound of his breaths?
All at once Treadles felt a pang of longing for Alice, for her slightly honking laughter, her sweet-smelling hair, and the wink she always gave him when she brought him a sip of whisky, because she would have brought herself a larger one at the same time.
He missed her. He missed her so much. He missed—
It occurred to him, with a reverberation of shock, that she hadn’t gone anywhere. That she hadn’t turned out like Lady Ingram, to have married him for any kind of gain. That she hadn’t even been cold or distant—all the formality and aloofness had been on his part alone.
They were near their destination when Fowler spoke again. “When we questioned ladies Avery and Somersby earlier today, they said something rather interesting. They said, in so many words, that you are in love with Miss Charlotte Holmes. Are you, my lord?”
Treadles sucked in a breath, the sound mortifyingly loud in the otherwise impenetrable silence.
Did Lord Ingram tense? Did he brace himself for what he was about to say? “I have not thought in that direction.”
“That is hardly something that requires thinking, is it? Either one is in love or one isn’t. Are you, my lord?”
With no excitement or unease that Treadles could sense, Charlotte Holmes turned toward her friend, a man being forced to expose the deepest secrets of his heart.
He glanced out of the carriage, at the cottage they were rapidly approaching, golden light spilling from every window. “Yes, I am. I am in love with her.”