Page 48 of A Ruse of Shadows
“We are alone in a dark house, and we are not doing anything scandalous,” she murmured. “I am consternated.”
Her lover glanced at her, set down his pocket lantern, pulled her to him, and kissed her—but only a skimming of the tip of his tongue against hers. Then he pulled back and said, “Why consign scandalous acts to the dark? They can and should be committed in good light.”
Charlotte batted her eyelashes. “Is that a promise, Ash?”
He smiled, his teeth a flash of excellent enamel. “That, Holmes, is practically a threat.”
Charlotte smiled, then shook her head. She wouldn’t call it an empty threat, but given how infrequently they had been in the sameplace at the same time of late, and how much of that precious little time had been consumed by non-amatory concerns…
“And you are right,” said he, bent over the typewriter again. “This is the device that produced the notes Bancroft sent you.”
It made sense that Mrs. Claiborne had been the one to type up Lord Bancroft’s letters, as she had been the one to visit him at Ravensmere, and prisoners there were typically not allowed to communicate with the outside world.
Like Mrs. Watson, Charlotte did not trust Mrs. Claiborne entirely—or much at all. But if Mrs. Claiborne had lied about her flight, at least she hadn’t made the elementary mistake of still lurking about in the same house.
They had found an unmade bed in her boudoir, a half-finished glass of water on the nightstand, and half a bag of provisions in the kitchen—all consistent with a hasty, unplanned departure. And other than the attic and the coal cellar, all the other interior doors had been unlocked, which had made the search relatively straightforward—and Lord Ingram had made short work of the few padlocks.
Mrs. Claiborne was not here. And neither was Mr. Underwood, dead or alive.
“Shall we go then?” asked her lover.
They still had other places they needed to be.
On their way out, the final lines of his prewritten letter came to mind. Or maybe they’d never decamped but remained like a trio of country cousins in the recesses of a ballroom, awkwardly yet patiently waiting for the more prominent guests to leave so that they might have a chance to at last pay their respects to the host.
The man stared at the closing door.
The painting was finished some time ago, and he suspected that she knew it.
Where did that leave him then?
She had felt his astonishment and hers as a single reverberation. His, because he realized what it could be read as; hers, that it had come so early in a reunion.
Their circumstances dictated that they spent far more time apart than together. Upon partings that preceded long separations, they had made various confessions and pledges. But by tacit agreement, their subsequent letters never referred to those words of commitment. Then, after weeks or months apart, when they met again in person, that tacit agreement somehow held, a garment for their sentiments, so that they did not need to bare too often the naked heart.
But this had been an instance of exposed emotions on his part, when hers still had on not only corset and combination but a full promenade gown and a pair of gloves besides.
Perhaps he had felt mortified to be unshielded. She could not quite explain it, but she had been almost as self-conscious about her state of emotional overdress, her desire to shed a few layers running smack into her inexperience at this kind of disrobing.
She did not do that here either but asked a lesser question. “You haven’t said much about your Society summer.”
As little as a year ago, he had been dead set on maintaining the outward appearance of a man who had achieved all the mandated markers of manhood—marriage, children, property, and the respect of his peers. Now, even if his personal popularity had not diminished, he was in the curious and uncomfortable position of being a divorced man, one who had no intention to marry again.
He set his hand on the small of her back to steer her away from the sharp corners of a console table. “It’s odd, I will not deny that. But…in a way it’s not as discomfiting as I thought it would be. You know what I’m sometimes reminded of?”
“What?” She was genuinely curious.
“You. Or perhaps I should say, your life after you were expelled from Society. At the time, when you ran away, it seemed to me that your life had ended. That nothing could possibly go right for you ever again. But I was proved remarkably wrong. Being outside the confines of the Upper Ten Thousand had a salutary effect on you; you became happier and more fulfilled than you could have been otherwise.”
He stopped; they’d reached the back door. “I wasn’t ostracized by my peers to anywhere near the same extent. But still, because of your example, I wasn’t as bewildered as I would have been. I have something to look forward to: Perhaps I will thrive as a divorced man, as you have as a no-longer-eligible woman.”
She gazed up at this man she knew so well yet still found so engaging. Before he could open the door to peek outside, she pulled him close for another kiss, this one long and passionate—because it was easier to kiss than to find words for things she could not yet define. “To cement our lamentable new tradition of not doing anything scandalous in the dark.”
?Mrs. Watson buttered her breakfast roll mechanically. She hadn’t slept too badly, but doubts and concerns about Mrs. Claiborne had returned the moment she’d opened her eyes. The one she worried about the most, of course, was Miss Charlotte, working for an enemy who didn’t mean her well.
The private entrance’s doorbell rang.
Mrs. Watson shot to her feet. Could it be Mrs. Claiborne?
