Page 88 of The Hollow of Fear
And had remembered the kiss more often than he wanted to, when he lay in bed alone at night.
I’m leaving in the morning, she’d said one afternoon, with no preamble.Here’s my address.
Out of politeness, he’d taken the slip of paper, while thinking ferociously,I won’t.
But two months later he had, from his room at school, with cricket practice canceled and a thunderstorm raging outside. And it had been a far longer letter than he’d intended. Nothing personal, a rather dry encapsulation of the lessons he’d learned from working on the ruins of the Roman villa, and the improvements to both record-keeping and excavation methods that he intended to make.
Her reply came sixteen days later—yes, he’d counted—and was almost identical to his in tone, a summary of books she had read in recent months on pedagogical theories and practices, and then the casual conclusion that she believed she would make a fine headmistress at a girls’ school.
He wrote back and told her that he’d never met any girl who made him think less of a headmistress, followed by his observations, only partially related to the subject, on how boys in a resident house organized into factions and cliques.
She admitted in her next letter that she wanted to be a headmistress less out of a desire to influence young minds than because a headmistress could command up to five hundred pounds a year. And by the way, she did not understand people as well as she ought to and found his anthropological account of the behavior of boys very helpful.
After that they wrote weekly. It had come as a minor shock, when he’d met her in person again, to realize that their regular and sometimes voluminous correspondence would not translate into conversation, that silence would still be the order of the day. But sliding back into silence had not been difficult or uncomfortable.
That correspondence continued without interruption—even when they were together, they would hand each other letters—until their quarrel over the future Lady Ingram, with Holmes warning darkly against believing in the illusion of the perfect woman. He’d stopped writing until he’d returned from his honeymoon, euphoric in the knowledge that he was about to be a father.
In subsequent years, their epistolary exchange remained regular as clockwork, but without a single reference to his inner turmoil, not through the disintegration of his marriage, and certainly not with the suddenly piercing understanding of what he felt for Holmes—what he had always felt for her.
The correspondence faltered again when she ran away from home. And after Lady Ingram’s departure. He had stared at a blank page many times, with no idea what to write, now that his hesitation was the only thing that held them back from becoming more than friends.
Now they were more than friends.
Now every hour without her was an eternity.
Wait, he told himself, staring into the night.Patience.
But he had already exhausted a lifetime’s supply of patience. Had already held himself back for ages beyond count. And he had no more restraint left, no more willpower.
Only need.
It was past midnight,when Inspector Treadles arrived in London. The house he walked into was dark, silent. Lately it had not seemed quite his own, as if it no longer belonged to him, or he it. But tonight—tonight he felt as if he’d come home.
Alice was already in bed, asleep. He laid down beside her and stared up, Charlotte Holmes’s words echoing in his ears.You have an open, amiable mien, which might lead those speaking with you to expect understanding. And yet your judgment is such a pointed, implacable thing, as if you are the personification of the larger world they have known, the one that has thwarted them at every turn.
Did this also happen to his own wife? Frustrated with her father, who, though a good man, an excellent man, had refused to ever entertain the idea of giving her the reins to Cousins Manufacturing, she had fallen in love with a man she believed to be different, only to realize that of the two, her father had, in fact, been far more broad-minded.
When had she realized that?
It struck him that she had known it for a while, for a long time, possibly since before she married him—andthatwas the reason she had never mentioned her erstwhile ambitions.
Then why had she married him?
She loved you, you idiot, said a voice inside him.
Perhaps she’d convinced herself that they could still be happy together. Perhaps she’d believed that since she would never helm Cousins Manufacturing, he would never see—or disapprove of—that side of her. Or perhaps she’d thought that if they dealt well for some time, he would come to trust her enough to see that ambitions or not, she was still the same woman he loved.
But she had been mistaken.
And how had she lived with his judgment, which he’d thought he’d kept to himself, but which, as Charlotte Holmes had pointed out, was anything but discreet or subtle?
His misery was like shards, cutting through every organ and nerve. He felt as if he didn’t know anything anymore—as if he’d never known anything at all.
In despair he turned to Alice and placed an arm around her.
She had her back to him. They used to sleep all entangled in each other, but as distances had grown elsewhere, the same had happened in bed, until they each slept facing a wall, a trench of empty space between their backs.
He laid his forehead against her shoulder and breathed in the scent of her skin. Alice, who had realized he was not the man she had hoped he would be, and loved him anyway.
