Mrs. Watson placed her hand over her heart and sighed.
Miss Holmes, however, displayed no sign that she was feeling remotely similar to Miss Elizabeth Bennet at Pemberley: superbly impressed and duly regretful that she had let go of this man instead of fighting for him tooth and nail when she’d had the chance.
But Mrs. Watson did not fail to notice that Miss Holmes’s blue-and-heather-gray promenade dress sported an enormous and entirely superfluous bow in the back, a downright flirtatious feature, in Mrs. Watson’s judgment.
Presently Miss Holmes glanced at the map of the estate they had been given at the gatehouse. Mrs. Watson stopped talking and allowed her young friend to concentrate on driving. But as they came down into the valley and skirted the first herbaceous borders, she couldn’t help exclaim, “Are the gardens not marvelous?”
Any halfway decent gardener could make his plot flower riotously in spring—it was the nature of the season. But to present an autumnal tableau worthy of a sonnet, that took talent, planning, and meticulous execution. Here, Japanese maples formed a backdrop of rich golds and vibrant reds, against which a profusion of dahlias and chrysanthemums still bloomed.
“It is pleasing to view, but a marvel it isn’t. With the amount of money, expertise, and manpower that must have been expended, Lord Ingram ought to be dissatisfied with anything less.”
Trust Miss Holmes to strip the romance from any scenario and see only the brute, barebones facts underneath.
“Well, he can’t possibly be dissatisfied with this—with perfection.”
Miss Holmes glanced about. “Yes, I suppose this is perfection.”
The reluctant compliment gratified Mrs. Watson, until she realized that it was no compliment at all, but an indictment.
While Mrs. Watsonwandered in the gardens, Charlotte made her way to the back of the house.
A proper country house did not reign in isolation. Behind the formal grandeur of the manor existed a collection of lesser buildings: the kitchen, of course, a complex of its own; the stables, usually some distance away; miscellanies such as the dovecote, the hen house, and the kennel; not to mention a number of greenhouses, the precise number depending on whether the master of the house required his own supply of strawberries at Christmas and pineapples in January.
Lord Ingram’s godfather had been one of the wealthiest men in the realm. And one of the shrewdest: In correctly forecasting that the difficulty of keeping young people in service would only increase, he had chosen not to acquire for himself too extravagant a country property.
But that he had not bought the equivalent of a Blenheim Palace or a Chatsworth House didn’t mean his seat was modest. Mrs. Watson no doubt yearned to see the inside of the house. But Charlotte was far more interested in the ancillary structures, where the work of the estate went on.
“Charlotte Holmes—I thought I might see you here.”
The voice belonged to Lord Ingram, but slightly raspy, as if he were under the weather—or recovering from a night of hard drinking.
She turned around slowly. “Hullo, Ash.”
A complicated pleasure, this man. In fact, it was their sometimes fraught friendship that had taught her the meaning of complicated pleasure, a gladness pockmarked by not only irreversible choices but also staggering incompatibilities.
All the same, such a sharp, sharp, almost painful pleasure.
They shook hands. She couldn’t be sure whether he held her hand a fraction of a second too long, or she his. When they let go, abruptly and at the exact same moment, despite the glove she still wore, her fingertips tingled.
“You are well?” he asked, as they walked toward the gardens.
“Well enough.” Most of the time they were regular correspondents. But he had not written since they’d last met in person, months ago. And she, not sure whether he hadn’t wished to hear from her, or if he needed something that she didn’t know how to give, had also refrained. “You, on the other hand, look as if you haven’t slept properly for a few days.”
He was in tweeds, and boots that had seen plenty of service—the very image of the quintessential English country squire. If the latter had stayed up late then got up at the crack of dawn, that is.
“I met your sister at Mrs. Newell’s earlier today,” he said, making no comments on her observation.
“How is she?”
“Worried about you getting into trouble.”
“I prefer to think of them as adventures. The adventures of Charlotte Holmes, consulting detective.”
“What is this I hear about trouble and adventures?” said Mrs. Watson.
She and Lord Ingram greeted each other warmly. The last time the three of them had been together in the same place, Mrs. Watson had been in disguise as Mrs. Hudson, a member of Sherlock Holmes’s household, and Lord Ingram had been full of disapproval over Charlotte’s choice to take up with a former actress.
Today they were themselves, longtime friends and allies.
