Page 67 of The Hollow of Fear
She took a strand of his hair and rubbed it between her fingers, a gesture the intimacy of which rather took his breath away—and made him forget, for a moment, what he was about to say. “Please, please make me very happy by informing me that your experience with impotence happened with Roger Shrewsbury.”
“He managed to overcome it in the end,” she said in her matter-of-fact way.
“I know that—no need to for reminders. I just want to hear that he couldn’t get it up for some time.”
“Well... he told me that I intimidated him,” said the most intimidating individual he had ever met.
“Ha!”
She placed a hand on the pillow, under her cheek, her expression genuinely curious. “Why are you so happy about that?”
“I don’t know.” He grinned. “Obviously, despite my starchiness, I am not a very good man. I’ve wanted to punch him ever since that day last summer—every time we came across each other.”
“Why? You could have slept with me at any time since I was seventeen.”
And therein lay the rub, didn’t it? He’d been massively wrong about what he wanted—and needed.
“Maybe the one I really wanted to punch was myself,” he said.
She gazed at him, a pensive look on her face. Silence enveloped them, not tense or heavy, but a shade melancholy.
He sat up and checked his watch again. “We must dress now. This moment.”
She took his hand as he was about to leave the bed. “See, we’re still friends. Nothing has changed.”
He looked back at her, at the fulcrum of his life. She was not wrong. Nothing had changed.
Except him.
Mrs. Newelland her guests had left in the afternoon. The senior police officers had retired to their rooms in the village, leaving only a young constable in the entrance hall. The corridors echoed as Charlotte and Lord Ingram made their way to the drawing room.
Lord Bancroft was already there, studying a map of Stern Hollow. He rose. “You are late.”
They were, by ninety seconds.
“My apologies,” said Lord Ingram. “We must leave soon to fetch the policemen. Shall we dine?”
Lord Bancroft inclined his head. “I have requested service à la française. We won’t have need of servants.”
Dinner was normally service à la russe, with courses brought out sequentially, the reason Charlotte had sat through more than one three-hour dinner. Service à la française placed all the food on the table at once and the diners helped themselves.
They proceeded to the dining room, with its twenty-five-foot ceiling and a table capable of seating sixty guests. They occupied the merest corner of this table. The food took up more space: Lord Bancroft was not the sort of diner to accept anything but the finest efforts from the kitchen—and a variety of those, no less.
After soup was ladled, Lord Ingram dismissed the staff. Almost immediately Lord Bancroft asked, “Ash, what is this I hear about a page of your handwriting that might implicate Miss Holmes?”
“I think Lady Ingram had cut out some pages from my practice notebooks and sent them to Moriarty,” answered his brother, “so that he and his underlings would recognize letters from me, should they intercept any, even if I’d written in a different hand.”
Lord Bancroft loaded his plate with roast sirloin, lobster ragout, and oyster patties. “What woman would wander about with such a thing in her stocking? Can the police not fathom that it’s a transparent attempt to point the finger at her husband?”
“It’s obvious tous,” said Lord Ingram. “But Scotland Yard sees only what it wants to see.”
“Passel of idiots. Very well, what have you found out?”
The question was directed at Charlotte, so she told him about the extra crate that was put into the lavender house, and which later disappeared.
“So that’s how her body arrived at Stern Hollow, I see,” said Lord Bancroft, frowning. “When I was here last, I tried to ascertain whether other agents of Moriarty, besides Lady Ingram, had successfully infiltrated this household. I’d thought myself fairly satisfied on that account, but perhaps I was wrong.”
“You are not the only one who has taken a hard look at the servants,” said Lord Ingram. “I spent weeks at that same task. They are not working for Moriarty.”
