A Study in Scarlet Women (Lady Sherlock #1)(58)

She could have done without those feelings. She would have happily gone her entire life never experiencing the pangs of longing and the futility of regret. He made her human—or as human as she was capable of being. And being human was possibly her least favorite aspect of life.

“More tea, sir?” she asked, remembering that they weren’t truly alone. Mrs. Watson was in the next room, the door to which was open a crack.

“No, thank you,” he said quietly.

“Nibbles?” He hadn’t touched the madeleines.

“Most kind of you, but no.”

She returned to her seat and took a madeleine herself—she didn’t understand how anyone had the willpower to say no to madeleines. Then again, the man before her said no to the vast majority of her suggestions, whether they concerned tea cakes or life-altering courses of action.

Other young ladies she knew enjoyed the construction of an ideal man for themselves. Charlotte never understood the point of such an exercise: She’d yet to meet a woman who thought her house perfect, and unlike men, houses could be planned, expanded, and redecorated from top to bottom. But had she indulged in intellectually devising her own perfect match, she would have come up with someone substantially similar to herself, an aloof observer, a creature of silence, a man happy to live life entirely inside his own head.

Whereas with Lord Ingram, she was always first struck by his physicality. She was aware of the space he occupied, his motion, his weight, the cut and drape of his coat, the length and texture of his hair—even though she had never touched his hair. She found herself observing, intensely, the direction of his gaze, the placement of his hands, the rise and fall of his chest with every breath.

He was not the only fine male specimen of her acquaintance. Roger Shrewsbury, for one, was considered handsomer and more stylish. But Lord Ingram possessed something else, a vitality with a jolt of sensuality and an undercurrent of hostility to the world at large, which made for a masculinity magnetic to both men and women.

When he was younger, that hostility had been more evident. But at some point, the troublemaker reformed and became thoroughly integrated with the rest of the Upper Ten Thousand. He was a member at all the expected clubs, friends with all the right people, and of course his polo matches featured as some of the more notable highlights of any given Season.

Another ten years and he’d be called a pillar of Society.

But . . .

Somewhere beneath all the respectability and sociability still lurked the boy who preferred long, solitary hours among relics to almost anything else. And he remained the only person she had ever met who did not mind her tendency toward silence. Sometimes she even thought he was at ease with it, though it was possible he was simply relieved that when she didn’t speak, she couldn’t make discomfiting observations about his private life.

She remembered Mrs. Watson again. For her sake, the silence ought not to stretch much longer. “I didn’t explain to Inspector Treadles what I thought to be the significance of the discrepancy concerning the curtains.”

“I noticed.”

“But you understood?”

He hesitated briefly, then nodded.

It was Charlotte’s estimation that when Inspector Treadles married a woman from a family far wealthier than his own, he consented to have his clothes made at one of the best tailors’ in London to honor and respect his in-laws, so as to not appear as if he didn’t belong. It was also her estimation that Mrs. Treadles, who married down, would have opted to run a simple household, leaving behind the more luxurious style she’d known, to honor and respect the man to whom she had made the commitment of a lifetime.

Charlotte didn’t believe Inspector Treadles’s maid came into his bedchamber in the morning on a regular basis and his inexperience in the matter caused him to miss the clue in Mrs. Meek’s description of the events.

“I called on your sister this afternoon, by the way,” said Lord Ingram.

Her fingers tightened around the half-eaten madeleine in her hand. “How is she?”

“Doing her best to hold herself together.”

Oh, Livia. “She knows about our father’s quarrel with Lady Amelia?”

“Everybody knows.”

Was there a more terrifying phrase in the English language than “unintended consequences”?

“Did you see him?”

“He wasn’t at home. And your mother was not receiving visitors.”

Meaning she had taken to her bed—after another hefty dose of laudanum, no doubt.

“But Miss Livia did ask me to tell you, should I run into you, that she is grateful for what you have done. She emphasized that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen that—”

“That by connecting the deaths of Lady Amelia, Lady Shrewsbury, and Mr. Sackville, I would double the number of Holmeses suspected of homicide?”

“Inspector Treadles will find something tomorrow.”

She almost dropped the madeleine in her surprise. He was consoling her—and he’d never consoled her in all the years they’d known each other. “You don’t believe it.”

“I often question your actions, but rarely your reasoning. And this isn’t one of those rare instances.”

She took a deep breath: She had fallen so far that he of all people felt the need to comfort her. “Thank you. Very kind of you.”