“No, we’d all be much better off if you’d stuffed your idea exactly where I told you to.”
“I can’t live the way you want me to, all bottled up and pretending that everything is all right.”
“It’s how the rest of us live. Why can’t you?”
This debate was inching dangerously close to the lines of their previous conversation, which had flared into a heated argument, and ended with her shouting that no, they really would have all been much better off if he’d taken her advice and never proposed to his wife, an I-told-you-so she had refrained from lobbing at him for six long years.
They had not parted on the best of terms.
She sighed. “Fine. Don’t take me as your mistress then, even though you want to.”
He set his hat on his head. “Good evening, Miss Holmes.”
She hated it when he called her Miss Holmes in a private conversation. Hated the distance it implied. The gulf that he would not cross.
“I apologize for being such a trial when you are only trying to help. I’m sorry.”
He was quiet for a long moment. “You don’t try me, Charlotte. You discomfit me. You make me question things that I would otherwise have happily accepted as given. But that is not your fault. Not the preponderance of it, anyway.”
He opened the door and left. By the time she reached the stair landing, he was already halfway down. “Now I’m safe with Mrs. Watson,” she called after him. “You don’t need to have me followed anymore.”
He stilled—and answered without turning around, “Miss Holmes, I have no idea of what you speak.”
Charlotte opened A Summer in Roman Ruins to her favorite page.
My aunt delighted in the entertainment of her progeny and not infrequently hosted children’s parties that were almost bacchanalian in their duration and intensity. The energy and volume of two dozen boys and girls did not bother me—I had been guilty of spurring them to ever greater levels of boisterousness. But that summer I slept fitfully, worried that one fine day a gaggle of youngsters with too much cake and orangeade in their bellies would break away from the vicinity of the house and stumble upon my wondrous and fragile site.
In fact, a reprobate thirteen-year-old preyed on my apprehension by threatening to do exactly that: drive a herd of wild children across the estate to descend upon my dig, wreaking as much havoc as Hannibal had done in Italy with troops and elephants brought across the Alps.
What I had to do to preserve the integrity of my site, I wish upon no one.
What memories. An excellent day’s work, blackmailing his fifteen-year-old self into kissing her.
I don’t want a genteel peck, she’d told him cheerfully. I want you to live up to your scabrous reputation.
He’d scowled. Do you even know what scabrous means?
Indecent and salacious.
That’s the kind of reputation I have?
He was usually spoken of as “that troublesome young Lord Ingram.” And the other children whispered about him as if he had horns and a forked tail: He had been smoking cigarettes since he was nine; he had caused a dozen governesses to be dismissed; he had got a serving maid into terrible trouble during his very first year at Eton.
Charlotte didn’t consider any of the rumors credible, except the smoking part—a hint of Turkish tobacco clung to him, not an unpleasant scent for a glowering boy.
Yes, that’s your reputation.
He looked at her askance. And you want an indecent and salacious sort of kiss?
Is there any point to any other kind?
This last she might or might not have said out loud: the kiss that followed caused a minor malfunction in her brain. She didn’t remember their exchanges afterward either, if anything at all.
Present-day Charlotte sighed softly. They’d contemplated each other with so little regard on the day they had first and last kissed, he as a target to exploit for her, and she as merely a very strange girl for him.
If only they could have seen the future.
“Miss Holmes, you mustn’t worry so much. Everything will be all right,” said Mrs. Watson.
They were at the tail end of a late supper and Charlotte was eating without her usual gusto.
She sometimes thought of her mind as bearing a certain resemblance to the post office, a complex system that sorted and conveyed packets of information with speed and efficiency. But at the moment her most prized asset was more comparable to an automobile, a machine liable to break down every few miles and strand the hapless motorist by the side of the road.