The duration of Miss Livia Holmes’s stay at Mrs. Newell’s.
Lord Ingram glanced again at Miss Holmes—a quick turn of his head. Then he looked to where they were going: his house, which a moment ago Mrs. Watson had yearned to admire up close and in person.
But now she saw it as he must, a wilderness of solitude. Miles of echoing corridors, acres of empty rooms, long, hushed days, and longer, even more hushed nights.
“You should spend more time in the country,” he said quietly. “Nothing in London this time of the year but rain, fog, and the odors of industry.”
“And Sherlock Holmes’s livelihood,” Miss Holmes pointed out, her logic cutting through his sentiments with the sharpness of surgical implements.
“My oversight,” he acknowledged after a moment, clasping his hands behind his back. “That is, of course,an overriding consideration.”
The silence that followed made Mrs. Watson squirm. She endured it for no more than a minute before blurting out a question about the condition of his trout stream.
Conversation resumed.
Mrs. Watson askedto be introduced to the head gardener so that she might compliment him and in turn receive advice about her own future horticultural endeavors.
Lord Ingram had known her since he was a child. In all those years, she had never evinced the slightest interest in the cultivation of anything with roots. As far as he could tell, her entire interest in botany began and ended with the arrangement of bouquets.
He managed not to raise a brow at her sudden fascination with the composition of soil and the best way to divide bulbs. If Mrs. Watson was so naked in her desire to leave the young people alone, then they must not let her effort go to waste.
“You were behind the house when I first saw you,” he said to Holmes. “I assume you were looking for the kitchen garden?”
“I was indeed. May I have a tour?”
He gestured. “This way.”
Her abiding interest in what would end up on a dining table, hers or anyone else’s, for that matter, used to strike him as completely at odds with the cool ferocity of her mind. To his younger self it seemed that a person ought to be one or the other, a thinker or a gourmand, but not both.
He had pointed that out to her once, as he removed encrusted dirt from the handles of an amphoriskos he had dug up. She, sitting a few paces away, had listened attentively, a book in one hand and a jam tart in the other—the fourth consecutive one she’d eaten from the small picnic basket she’d brought. When he’d finished speaking she’d looked at him for some time, then gone back to reading and eating, as if he’d never taken the trouble to voice his opinion aloud.
It was the first time he’d told anyone how they ought tobe. It also happened to be the last time: He had been beyond mortified that she’d treated his considered commentary as if it were an ant that had crawled onto her jam tart.
Years later, in the early days of his marital courtship, when the future Lady Ingram had seemed sincerely interested in and impressed by his every last utterance, he had experienced what he’d believed to be a profound gratitude. But it had been less gratitude than smugness: At last he’d met a woman who knew how to be a woman; the hell with Charlotte Holmes and her insufferable self-sufficiency.
He’d known nothing then.
Alas, he knew nothing now—but at least now he was aware of it.
The walled kitchen garden occupied a sizable lot and supplied all the fruits and vegetables the estate consumed, either fresh or preserved in jars, during an entire year. Her gaze immediately went to the fruit trees that had been espaliered against the inside of the stone walls: apples, pears, plums, peaches, and cherries, each a different variety.
“Your kitchen must produce legendary quantities of jams and puddings,” she said, her voice wistful. “And there are fig trees, too. Does anyone here know how to make a fig tart? Did you ever replace the pastry chef Lord Bancroft poached from you?”
Speaking of Bancroft… “What happened between you and my brother?”
That courtship had been excruciating for Lord Ingram. Given her situation, he couldn’t possibly advise that she reject Bancroft’s offer. Had she accepted, however, it would have been a phantasmagoric horror.
When she’d related that Bancroft had withdrawn the suit, it had been all he’d needed to hear. The train had stopped at the edge of the precipice, no further details necessary.
Now he was no longer so sure.
“Nothing,” she said with perfect equanimity. “A grand total of nil.”
“He hasn’t been the same since you declined his second proposal.”
They were walking down the central path of the garden, lined with ornamental flowers grown for the house’s many vases. She caressed a crimson chrysanthemum the size of a large pom-pom. “I didn’t decline—he rescinded his offer.”
“Semantics.”
