Chapter 18
Departing Oxfordshire. A. Greville sends his regards. Holmes.
There were hundreds of things Lord Ingram needed to keep in mind and dozens of tasks to finish, but he stood in place and read the cable again and again, thoughts of Holmes overriding everything else.
They had not spent a great deal of time together, not in years.
Even when they had been much younger, passing long stretches of silence in each other’s company, he occupied with some minor excavation, she burrowing through two brick-like books in a single afternoon—those had not been regular occurrences, but had come only when they both happened to be at his uncle’s or Mrs. Newell’s estate at the same time.
He had a very clear memory of the day she told him to write her.
It was the summer of the Roman villa ruins.
She had blackmailed him into kissing her—and afterward had visited the ruins as she pleased, with him by and large ignoring her.
Or, rather, he had not spoken to her, but had furtively observed the utterly incomprehensible girl.
And had remembered the kiss more often than he wanted to, when he lay in bed alone at night.
I’m leaving in the morning, she’d said one afternoon, with no preamble. Here’s my address.
Out of politeness, he’d taken the slip of paper, while thinking ferociously, I won’t.
But two months later he had, from his room at school, with cricket practice canceled and a thunderstorm raging outside.
And it had been a far longer letter than he’d intended.
Nothing personal, a rather dry encapsulation of the lessons he’d learned from working on the ruins of the Roman villa, and the improvements to both record-keeping and excavation methods that he intended to make.
Her reply came sixteen days later—yes, he’d counted—and was almost identical to his in tone, a summary of books she had read in recent months on pedagogical theories and practices, and then the casual conclusion that she believed she would make a fine headmistress at a girls’ school.
He wrote back and told her that he’d never met any girl who made him think less of a headmistress, followed by his observations, only partially related to the subject, on how boys in a resident house organized into factions and cliques.
She admitted in her next letter that she wanted to be a headmistress less out of a desire to influence young minds than because a headmistress could command up to five hundred pounds a year.
And by the way, she did not understand people as well as she ought to and found his anthropological account of the behavior of boys very helpful.
After that they wrote weekly. It had come as a minor shock, when he’d met her in person again, to realize that their regular and sometimes voluminous correspondence would not translate into conversation, that silence would still be the order of the day.
But sliding back into silence had not been difficult or uncomfortable.
That correspondence continued without interruption—even when they were together, they would hand each other letters—until their quarrel over the future Lady Ingram, with Holmes warning darkly against believing in the illusion of the perfect woman.
He’d stopped writing until he’d returned from his honeymoon, euphoric in the knowledge that he was about to be a father.
In subsequent years, their epistolary exchange remained regular as clockwork, but without a single reference to his inner turmoil, not through the disintegration of his marriage, and certainly not with the suddenly piercing understanding of what he felt for Holmes—what he had always felt for her.
The correspondence faltered again when she ran away from home. And after Lady Ingram’s departure. He had stared at a blank page many times, with no idea what to write, now that his hesitation was the only thing that held them back from becoming more than friends.
Now they were more than friends.
Now every hour without her was an eternity.
Wait, he told himself, staring into the night. Patience.
But he had already exhausted a lifetime’s supply of patience. Had already held himself back for ages beyond count. And he had no more restraint left, no more willpower.
Only need.
It was past midnight, when Inspector Treadles arrived in London. The house he walked into was dark, silent. Lately it had not seemed quite his own, as if it no longer belonged to him, or he it. But tonight—tonight he felt as if he’d come home.
Alice was already in bed, asleep. He laid down beside her and stared up, Charlotte Holmes’s words echoing in his ears.
You have an open, amiable mien, which might lead those speaking with you to expect understanding.
And yet your judgment is such a pointed, implacable thing, as if you are the personification of the larger world they have known, the one that has thwarted them at every turn.
Did this also happen to his own wife? Frustrated with her father, who, though a good man, an excellent man, had refused to ever entertain the idea of giving her the reins to Cousins Manufacturing, she had fallen in love with a man she believed to be different, only to realize that of the two, her father had, in fact, been far more broad-minded.
When had she realized that?
It struck him that she had known it for a while, for a long time, possibly since before she married him—and that was the reason she had never mentioned her erstwhile ambitions.
Then why had she married him?
She loved you, you idiot, said a voice inside him.
Perhaps she’d convinced herself that they could still be happy together.
Perhaps she’d believed that since she would never helm Cousins Manufacturing, he would never see—or disapprove of—that side of her.
Or perhaps she’d thought that if they dealt well for some time, he would come to trust her enough to see that ambitions or not, she was still the same woman he loved.
But she had been mistaken.
And how had she lived with his judgment, which he’d thought he’d kept to himself, but which, as Charlotte Holmes had pointed out, was anything but discreet or subtle?
His misery was like shards, cutting through every organ and nerve. He felt as if he didn’t know anything anymore—as if he’d never known anything at all.
In despair he turned to Alice and placed an arm around her.
She had her back to him. They used to sleep all entangled in each other, but as distances had grown elsewhere, the same had happened in bed, until they each slept facing a wall, a trench of empty space between their backs.
He laid his forehead against her shoulder and breathed in the scent of her skin. Alice, who had realized he was not the man she had hoped he would be, and loved him anyway.
She sighed and turned toward him.
The next moment they were kissing, as wildly as if this had been their wedding night.
And everything that followed was just as untrammeled.
Livia was an early riser. Though it was still dark outside, she’d already been at her desk for hours, wrestling with the second part of her Sherlock Holmes story.
The nameless young man’s eagerness to read her work didn’t make the work any easier. But it did make her more willing to bash her head on that particular wall a few more times.
She’d just finished a new précis of the plot when a commotion erupted on the floor below. Mrs. Newell herself came knocking on her door.
“Oh, my dear, I’m afraid that I’m once again the bearer of ill news.”
Livia’s ears rang. Lord Ingram. No! “What—what’s going on?”
“You will not believe this, but they discovered a bomb in the coal cellar.”
“A what?”
“Not to worry, we aren’t in any immediate danger. The bomb is in the kitchen’s coal cellar and that’s a fair distance from the house.”
“Oh,” said Livia, but her hands still shook.
In the past few years, Irish republicans had placed dozens of time bombs all over Britain, especially in London—explosions as a form of political expression seemed a permanent fixture of modern life.
But all the ones Livia had heard of, whether they’d gone off or been defused, had targeted places of strategic importance.
Military barracks, railway stations, newspaper offices, and such.
In the only instance she could recall of a private home as a target, the home had belonged to a member of parliament who strenuously opposed Irish Home Rule.
“But why? Why would anyone put a bomb here?”
“I know!” cried Mrs. Newell. “If I could vote I’d have cast my ballot for Mr. Gladstone, to give the Irish their Home Rule.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry this happened, Mrs. Newell!”
Mrs. Newell patted her on the arm. “I’ve sent someone to fetch the police. They’ll probably need to cable the Special Irish Branch to come, for all I know. But I’m afraid in the meanwhile we must decamp again.”
And not to Stern Hollow.
An idea came to Livia fully formed—and requiring immediate implementation. “I—I really mustn’t impose anymore. I’ve been enough trouble to you and should have gone home directly from Stern Hollow. I believe I’ll do that now.”
“Nonsense. Come with me to the inn, my dear. I know you don’t wish to go home.”
Livia didn’t, but sometimes one did what one must. “I’ll stay an extra week next year, if you’ll have me. You know I love it here, Mrs. Newell. But now I really must go.”
Treadles almost couldn’t face his wife across the breakfast table. His cheeks kept flaming as he ate his toast and fried eggs. They had made love three times during the night and done things to and with each other that he hadn’t even known were within the realm of possibility.
But they had not spoken, not a single word.
She, after sorting through the early post, broke the silence first. “I didn’t expect you home so soon, Inspector. Has the case already been solved?”
That she sounded tentative gave him some much needed courage. “No, not yet. We are in London to speak to Miss Charlotte Holmes.”