Page 10 of The Hollow of Fear
The cottage Mrs. John Watson had hired for their country sojourn gave onto a lovely panorama of green hills and gentle valleys. But its interior was faded, with small and oddly placed windows. As a result, the parlor, even on a sunny day, was underlit, almost gloomy. And Miss Holmes, in her creamy dress the sleeves of which were abundantly embroidered with green vines and magenta flowers, was the brightest object in the room.
She hadn’t spoken since she sat down half an hour ago. Not speaking was her natural state and Mrs. Watson had learned to savor Miss Holmes’s silences. To think of them as something similar to the quietude of a slope covered in wildflowers, or the restfulness of rolling pastures dotted with new calves.
Since the night Miss Holmes helped her brother escape, however, the sense of tranquility had disappeared from her silences. Lately, sitting near her, Mrs. Watson thought of London fogs, thick and all-obscuring, of maritime brumes, the kind that made ships sail straight into rocky cliffs, and even, occasionally, of quagmire and quicksand, seemingly innocuous surfaces waiting to entrap hapless travelers.
Even her delight in the consumption of sweet, buttery goods felt...less joyful. She ate more—Mrs. Watson scarcely came upon her without seeing a biscuit or an entire Victoria sponge parked by her side. But the woman across from Mrs. Watson demolished her slice of Madeira cake with not so much pleasure as a mechanical neediness, the way a tense man would light one cigarette after another.
In the days and weeks immediately following Mr. Finch’s narrow escape, Mrs. Watson, too, had been frantic with worry. She and Miss Holmes had conferred frequently and at length concerning the various scenarios that could arise, and what their countermeasures must be in any given situation.
But months went by and nothing happened. Mrs. Watson, as fretful as she could be, began to relax. Sooner or later everyone made a mistake. Even the otherwise unflappable Miss Holmes must overreact from time to time.
“My dear,” she said, “we’ve been here three days and you’ve scarcely gone out. What say you we make a tour of Stern Hollow today?”
Stern Hollow was Lord Ingram’s estate. They hadn’t hired a house in the area for his sake. They’d come because Mrs. Newell, Miss Holmes’s first cousin, once removed, lived nearby—and Miss Holmes’s sister was expected at Mrs. Newell’s for the latter’s house party.
But Mrs. Watson was confident that Miss Holmes did not mind at all that Lord Ingram also happened to be close at hand.
“We needn’t call on the master of Stern Hollow. We could simply apply to see the house. And he could come upon us as a coincidence, à la Lizzy Bennet’s visit to Pemberley.”
Miss Holmes eyed a third slice of Madeira cake, but did not reach for it—possibly because she was approaching Maximum Tolerable Chins, the point at which she began regulating further helpings of cakes and puddings. “Is that a literary reference?”
“You haven’t readPride and Prejudice?” cried Mrs. Watson, scandalized. “How is that possible?”
“My sister is the great devourer of fiction in our household. As a girl, I found novels difficult to understand—I found people difficult to understand. From time to time I would read a story or two, if she absolutely insisted. She did not insist onPride and Prejudice.”
“Well, I might need to, in that case. The scene I mentioned, Miss Bennet and Mr. Darcy coming upon each other by accident, is so very—” Mrs. Watson barely managed to swallow her next word,romantic. “Well, it makes for riveting fiction.”
Though perhaps not the best analogy for the situation between Miss Holmes and Lord Ingram. Miss Austen wrote with humor and perspicacity, but she also wrote with tremendous decorum. What would she think of Miss Holmes’s current situation as a woman no longer received in any polite drawing rooms—or the fact that Lord Ingram was still a married man, absent wife or not?
“Anyway,” she hastened to add, “do let us make a point of touring the place. It is most attractive, from what I understand. And in any case, Lord Ingram might very well already be at Mrs. Newell’s for her party.”
“He wouldn’t leave his children to attend a house party, however nearby.”
“Oh, you don’t know? Well, of course you couldn’t have heard yet, since I only learned it myself this morning. His children left with Lord Remington weeks ago.”
Lord Remington was the third Ashburton brother, the youngest besides Lord Ingram. Even so, there was an eleven-year difference between the two.
Miss Holmes, who had been studying a plate of almond biscuits, looked up. “Lord Remington is in England? The family’s black sheep?”
Lord Remington had spent nearly the entirety of his adult life abroad. Mrs. Watson had a soft spot in her heart for him, but even she had to concur, somewhat at least, with Miss Holmes’s assessment. “I might call him the grayest of the flock. Currently, that is. When they were all young—and Lord Ingram barely out of the womb—Lord Bancroft was, in fact, considered the actual black sheep.”
“Really?” Miss Holmes’s question emerged slowly and seemed to linger in the air.
“You would have been an infant then. But he was notoriously spendthrift. The old duke broke canes beating him.”
“Hmm.”
“I know. How people change. One should never be judged on one’s adolescence. Now where was I? Oh, Lord Remington. From what I hear, the children were smitten with their uncle, and when he asked if they wanted to come with him to the seaside, they absolutely could not be held back.”
“I guess in that case, there is no reason for Lord Ingram not to be at Mrs. Newell’s,” said Miss Holmes.
She took hold of an almond biscuit, then, remembering herself, set it down and instead picked up the correspondence that had come for Sherlock Holmes.
The consulting detective had stated in adverts that he would be away from London for some time. As a result, the previous month, Mrs. Watson and Miss Holmes had run themselves into the ground seeing to a torrent of clients motivated by this upcoming scarcity to request a consultation in the here and now.
But of course, there were always those who didn’t read the adverts carefully. And Mr. Mears, Mrs. Watson’s faithful butler holding down the fort in London, had forwarded a batch of letters that had arrived in Sherlock Holmes’s private box at the General Post Office.
Miss Holmes quickly opened and scanned all the letters; then she read one letter again and handed it to Mrs. Watson.
