Page 70 of The Hollow of Fear
The carriage turned. The lanterns at the front swayed. Light spilled across Lord Ingram’s features, then he was sitting in darkness again.
“About eighteen months ago, I was informed that one of the estate’s gates was in bad shape and should be replaced. I could barely recall such a gate—I had to be shown its location on a detailed map. It was in a remote corner, where the land was a great deal rougher, and inaccessible except by foot or on horseback.
“I said to go ahead and replace the gate. But my estate manager told me that it was the second time the gate had to be replaced in a decade.
“If we replaced one indifferent gate with another, warned my estate manager, we would need to replace it yet again in a few years. We rode out and looked at the thing. He was right; everything was falling apart, not just the gate. So we decided to improve the entire boundary, fences, gate posts, gate. And because wooden gates had proved useless, we agreed that a wrought iron gate would be a much more satisfactory option.
“But how should this wrought iron gate look? I fancied myself a proficient draftsman, so I set about creating designs, only to then learn that some were too fanciful to execute and others too easy to climb over. And while he had my attention on the matter, my estate manager brought up a whole slew of other deficiencies near the gate, everything from a derelict woodsman’s cottage to footbridges that were too rotted for safe crossing.
“Before I knew it, I’d spent three weeks perfecting a part of the estate I would never visit again—not to mention creating and discarding dozens of sketches to finally arrive at an acceptable design for the new gate.
“When it was all done, I felt little gratification. Not even relief. By and large I was stunned that I’d spent so much time on absolute minutiae. On things that I didn’t care about and which made no difference to anyone, except my estate manager, who derived a Calvinist satisfaction from scratching off every last item on his to-do list.”
“Ah, I see,” said Fowler, after a minute. “Undiluted joys are difficult to come by in life.”
Lord Ingram inclined his head, as if in gratitude at being understood. “The chief draw of life in the country—or so my younger self had thought—was family and friends, away from the noise and distractions of the city. But at Stern Hollow, what family life there existed had been a divided one. And what functions we held never without an undercurrent of strain.
“As beautiful as my estate is, and as much as I take pride in looking after it, in and of itself it has given me very little joy and certainly none of the undiluted variety.”
No one else spoke. Treadles squirmed on the inside. What could anyone say when a man laid bare the truth of his life?
Of course Lord Ingram needed, absolutely needed, to strike Chief Inspector Fowler as candid, with nothing to hide. But surely, this was going a little too far.
And then Treadles remembered the person sitting beside Lord Ingram. He hadn’t been addressing the policemen, he’d been speaking toher, specifically and entirely.
She had listened with the quietness of good soil soaking up the first drops of rain. And even now, when he had stopped speaking, she was still listening.
To the sound of his breaths?
All at once Treadles felt a pang of longing for Alice, for her slightly honking laughter, her sweet-smelling hair, and the wink she always gave him when she brought him a sip of whisky, because she would have brought herself a larger one at the same time.
He missed her. He missed her so much. He missed—
It occurred to him, with a reverberation of shock, that she hadn’t gone anywhere. That she hadn’t turned out like Lady Ingram, to have married him for any kind of gain. That she hadn’t even been cold or distant—all the formality and aloofness had been on his part alone.
They were near their destination when Fowler spoke again. “When we questioned ladies Avery and Somersby earlier today, they said something rather interesting. They said, in so many words, that you are in love with Miss Charlotte Holmes. Are you, my lord?”
Treadles sucked in a breath, the sound mortifyingly loud in the otherwise impenetrable silence.
Did Lord Ingram tense? Did he brace himself for what he was about to say? “I have not thought in that direction.”
“That is hardly something that requires thinking, is it? Either one is in love or one isn’t. Are you, my lord?”
With no excitement or unease that Treadles could sense, Charlotte Holmes turned toward her friend, a man being forced to expose the deepest secrets of his heart.
He glanced out of the carriage, at the cottage they were rapidly approaching, golden light spilling from every window. “Yes, I am. I am in love with her.”
15
“Sherrinford Holmes”did not disappear into the bowels of the cottage, then to reemerge as her true self.
Instead, they met a gamine-looking young woman in the parlor. “A good friend of the family,” said Charlotte Holmes, “Miss Redmayne.”
Miss Redmayne cheerfully shook hands with all three men. “Good to meet you, Chief Inspector Fowler. I have heard of you from Sherlock, Inspector Treadles. And my lord, it is good to see you again.”
“Always a pleasure, Miss Redmayne,” said Lord Ingram, with a smile.
“How is the great savant?” asked Charlotte Holmes.
