Mary had not expected a cordial reception to her engagement from her relations. Her mother surprised and delighted her by smiling beatifically upon being told of her daughter's intention, as they sat the next evening by the roaring fire in the drawing room of the Dower house.
"Certainly nobody could accuse dear Mr Parker of rushing things, dear, but better late than never. Such an eminently sensible young man, and such a kind, firm manner in the face of all sorts of extraordinary things. I suppose it partly comes from having to deal with so many odd and villainous people but it's awfully comforting to know that no matter what one says or does it can't possibly the most horrid thing he will have dealt with this week, poor man. But he has the disposition and constitution to withstand it, of course, unlike poor, dear Peter."
Mary was generally very keen to dwell on the subject of Charles's excellent constitution, leading as it so easily could to a period of happy contemplation of his commanding physique. Having seen him shirtless the previous day her contemplation could be more thorough and accurate than before so this topic was even more than usually interesting to her, but with an effort she dragged her thoughts away and said:
"Don't you really mind, Mother? You must realise he's poor. By our standards, I mean, though he told me once that his chief inspector's salary is more than anyone he knew when he was a boy could have earned. There's simply no family money at all. And he's - well, by all the measures we'd normally use, he's not anyone. I feel sure that Father must be turning in his grave."
Perhaps it was the mention of her long departed and not much mourned husband which made the Dowager Duchess suddenly more candid, although no more direct, than was her wont.
"He can turn away to himself if it gives him pleasure, though one can't imagine how it would be amusing to anyone, dead or alive," she replied cheerfully. "Charles Parker has loved you for years as anyone could see. I believe he's been faithful to you without any hope for all that time, which I find remarkable in view of how many men appear to find it impossible to be faithful to the perfectly good wives that they actually have. If you've the sense to see the value of that and to throw money and title to the wind, then I'm not going to be the one to talk you out of it. I've always liked him and I wish you'd tell me what his favourite colours are. I've taken up rug making and I shall make you a very jolly rug in them, if I can prevent Ahaseursus from destroying it half way through as he done so many others, the wicked cat. One assumes he does it for attention, which makes it doubly aggravating in view of all the attention he receives, though perhaps the mistake is in trying to ascribe human emotions to a cat when their lives must after all be so very different, particularly being able to sense so much through their whiskers, dear things, which must be such a very particular experience."
Mary rose and kissed her mother, and then sat down again, settling down to work her mother's conversation away from the follies of anthropomorphising cats and back to a long and hearty discussion of Charles' many excellent virtues.
The reaction of her oldest brother and sister-in-law was, predictably, quite different. Charles had suggested that he be the one to first approach the Duke of Denver and ask for Mary's hand in a traditional manner. Mary had refused to contemplate this, for the very sensible reason that her brother would be sure to say no, and Charles would then be in the awkward position of having asked for something that he clearly intended to have regardless of the outcome of the asking.
"Besides", she had said, "I'm not a chattel to be conveyed from one man to another."
"Certainly not," Charles had agreed fervently, and there had been no more discussion on that topic, or indeed any other, for many minutes. So Mary announced the news as a fait accompli over lunch at Duke's Denver itself. The response was at first anti-climatic. It was not so much that Gerald thought that she was joking; rather that his brain just couldn't take in information so outlandish and unwelcome. He remained simply baffled for some time, whilst Helen, herself all too capable of grasping what she was being told, seethed in a speechless fury. Mary had to repeat herself into a stunned silence. "I'm going to marry Charles Parker. Chief Inspector Parker. The policeman. As soon as it can be sensibly arranged. I think I'd prefer to be married from here, but we can be married from the church Charles attends in London if you'd rather."
There was another silence. Mary composedly ate her veal and potatoes whilst Gerald and Helen stared at each other. She had finished before anyone else spoke.
"I absolutely forbid it", Gerald said at last. "I'm sorry, Mary, but it can't be done."
"I'm afraid your forbidding it is what can't be done, Gerald," his sister replied calmly. She was beginning to enjoy herself. "You can decline to allow me my inheritance under Father's will, of course. But that's not the same as forbidding the marriage. Quite the opposite, in fact, as Charles doesn't want the money."
"Doesn't want the money?" This new angle seemed to make the matter even more incomprehensible to her brother than before.
"No. What would he do with it? So much money would make it seem silly for him to carry on working, and he'd simply hate to be a society person or spend his time on a country estate he wasn't born to. And it wouldn't be at all suitable for a man to live on his wife's money, to Charles's way of thinking. Besides, I like his work. It's interesting."
Gerald looked at his wife in despair, and the Duchess, of course, rose magnificently to the occasion.
"Mary," she began, her voice high and acidic. "You cannot be unaware of what a spectacle you make of yourself - of all of us - merely by entertaining such a notion. I can only assume that you are making this ridiculous proposal purposefully in order to cause pain to your family, and I must say I think it's particularly unbecoming when one no longer has the excuse of extreme youth, nor can I think what we or your mother have done to deserve such ill-treatment."
"Have you considered, Helen, that this might have absolutely nothing to do with any of you? I'm sorry if you don't like it, though I think it's jolly ungrateful considering what a good friend Charles has been to all the members of our family in various ways." Even such opaque references as this to the Riddlesdale affair were not generally permitted at Duke's Denver, and Gerald started guiltily as Helen's eyebrows shot still further up into her rigid face.
"I had thought better of the man. I thought at the very least he was the type who knows his place" Helen retorted, contemptuously.
Dangerously close to losing her cool, Mary replied "He knows his place perfectly well and he has no desire to change it other than as he has so far - through his own cleverness and hard work. And I know mine, and it's with him."
"You might spare us the romantic melodrama, Mary," Helen said cuttingly, as the servants cleared her untouched plate. "All this might make for a convincing plot of a cheap romance novel, but it will also make for a sorry, sordid life. You're mad if you think that anyone will invite you to dine or to their parties with a policeman on your arm."
"I'm not so sure about that," Mary said, reflecting on the reactions she had had from Sybil and Rachel Arbuthnot, the two friends she had already told. "The world has changed a bit, you know, and it's not going to stop. Most people don't feel quite the same about these things anymore. But honestly, if I were never invited to another party in my life I shouldn't care as long as I had Charles."
"You think that now, perhaps," Helen said ominously, "but -"
"I do think it, and I shall go on thinking it. As you point out, I'm not so young as to rush headlong into things without knowing very thoroughly all the possible consequences. Insofar as your objections are about the reputation of the family, I can see that from your perspective this isn't an advantageous match, and I'm sorry to disappoint you. Insofar as they're about my happiness" and Mary's expression more than her words conveyed how little she supposed this to be the case "I'm touched by your concerns and I don't know how to allay them other than by explaining that all of these things feel quite different when you marry for love."
There followed a silence so deep that the servants bringing in the pudding froze mid-motion.
Mary stood up. "I hope you'll soon get used to it. I've suggested that Charles come up for the weekend to talk to you, Gerald, so do let me know if you don't like that idea and what you'd propose instead. It seems to have stopped raining so I think I'll go for a walk. No, no pudding, thank you. I've hardly stopped eating for two weeks - nobody ever told me how hungry it makes you being so happy - and I want to look my best for the wedding."
With that, Mary sailed out of the room with her well-bred graceful stride.
Things had deteriorated dramatically by the time Peter appeared at Denver the next evening. Mary was of course unwavering in her resolve, which aggravated the Duke and Duchess beyond all endurance. Gerald had recovered his senses enough to bluster and threaten- at one point, his threats included that he would summon the police unless Mary changed her mind, at which Mary couldn't refrain from bursting out laughing. Helen wavered between an attitude of martyred sorrow and one of searing contempt, and Mary wasn't sure which she liked the least.
Peter's announcement that he intended to marry the recently exonerated alleged poisoned Harriet Vane landed in this atmosphere like a bomb in a warehouse already drenched in petrol. More than once Mary was glad that the Duke's children were out of the way at school. There were shouts and representations and admonitions and threats (equally toothless, as Peter had been the master of his own money since his majority, but no less furious) for many hours. Even Peter's legendary sang froid began to show cracks when Helen screamed shrilly "A policeman on one side and a poisoner on the other. I shall go mad! I shall go quite, quite mad!".
"Not a poisoner, Helen," Peter had replied, testily. "That's very much the point."
"It's not so much for myself that I mind," Helen continued as though he hadn't spoken. "How can we ever made a decent match for St George or poor Winifred with the family name so degraded? What decent person will marry either of them now!"
"Nobody, I should hope," retorted Peter, "considering that they're children."
"Don't be so facetious, Peter" Helen said, and turning to Mary, "Now do you see what you have started?"
Mary was tired and her attempt to explain the lack of contingency between the two engagements fell anyway upon deaf ears. No understanding was reached and the family went to bed in a state of simmering resentment, on the unspoken understanding that hostilities would resume in the morning.
In the morning Peter proposed to leave for London. "My work here is done, Polly," he told Mary when she protested. "Nothing takes the edge off high-ranking police officer like a novelist with a sideline in being tried for murder, what?"
"Can't you wait until after the weekend? I'm sure Charles would be so much happier if you were here, and you might be able to help him and Gerald to come to some agreement."
Peter looked at her consideringly. Mary followed up her advantage. "Besides, you said that you haven't yet any fixed arrangement to meet Miss Vane, and from what you said last night I feel sure she'd like some time to gather her thoughts. Perhaps if you let a few days pass then she'll find that she misses you, and you'll start to seem like her own idea."
Peter raised an eyebrow. "I'm hardly going to take advice on these matters from a woman who took five years and a nudge from an interfering brother to extract a proposal from a man who publicly worshipped the ground she walks on," he said drily. "But I don't mind weathering this maelstrom for a few more days if you think it would help old Charles. Look here, what sort of arrangement do you want them to make? Do you want Gerald to make over your whole fortune?"
"Not at all. I shouldn't mind it myself but Charles would hate it. You know he would. But I should like to go on receiving my dress allowance."
Peter smiled affectionately at his sister. "Charles's salary is pretty decent, you know. You're hardly going to go hatless."
"Of course not. But I like expensive clothes, Peter. And lots of them. Charles doesn't realise how expensive my clothes are, I think. I know he'd never begrudge me spending every penny he earned on them if he did, but of course I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't spend a month of his salary on a coat." She met his gaze. "I don't mind about any of the other things - horses and servants and things, and I don't mind much about this. If Gerald says no, then that's that. I can always make my own clothes if it comes to it - that's one thing I'm really good at, anyway - but I should like it."
Peter, himself not indifferent to the pleasures of being well-dressed, smiled. "I think those are very modest demands, old girl" he said. "I'm beginning to have an idea about all this. Very well. I shall stay, and do what I can to broker some peace, if only through the device of being the persona even more non grata."
The next few days were happy ones for Mary. She and Peter spent many hours on cold winter walks, Mary listening, fascinated, to Peter's rather brief and reserved account of Miss Vane and his hopes in respect of her, or else Peter listening, affectionately resigned, to his sister's much lengthier discourse on the subject of Charles.
After two days he'd heard so much that he couldn't stick it any more. "It's as well that I already hold old Charles in such high regard," he told Mary. "If all I knew of him was from these endless panegyrics then I should be beginning to positively loathe the man."
The next morning Peter went hunting with Gerald instead. Not a word passed between them on the subject of either of the younger Wimsey siblings' romantic ventures, but somehow the brothers returned with a better understanding and Peter at least felt relatively sanguine about the meeting to take place the next day.
Charles arrived very late that evening, having left detailed instructions at the Yard about contacting him in case of emergency. His friend and subordinate Dorridge, on being told that if needed he was to telephone for the Chief Inspector at Duke's Denver, had given him a piercing look which had caused even the stolid Charles to turn slightly red. He hadn't mentioned the engagement to his colleagues, partly because it still felt in some ways too wonderful - too sacred, even - to be spoken aloud in a casual way, but also because it simply hadn't come up. It was hard to see how it would come up, until he would casually say something along the lines of "I shall be away that week getting married", which would be time enough, in his view. But Dorridge was a good friend, and under his inquiring glare, Charles grinned sheepishly and made a self-deprecating shrugging gesture. Then of course there had to be a swift pint at the nearest pub to celebrate and to listen to Dorridge say many times "I knew it! I knew you'd get her in the end! Tell me all, you old goat" and to promise to come to supper with Dorridge later that week and tell Mrs Dorridge, who was romantically inclined, the whole story. All of this made Charles even later than he had intended, and only Peter and Mary were still up when he arrived at the Dower House. The Dower House was exceedingly grand, but the Dowager Duchess's personality had so infused it that it was somehow welcoming nonetheless, and the Dowager Duchess herself in the morning was so friendly to him, and so obviously genuinely pleased with the state of affairs, that its cavernous halls and lavish furniture soon ceased to be intimidating or even remarkable to Charles.
The Dowager Duchess's conversation over breakfast was as diffuse as ever, but as she gathered up her aggressive Persian cat - the one aspect of the Dower House which Charles found less than charming - to prevent him from following Charles, Mary and Peter down the drive in the direction of Duke's Denver which, as she observed, would hardly help anybody's frame of mind, she said to Charles, "You mustn't mind my son - the older one, I mean, you've been minding Peter far more than he's merited for many years and I'll always be grateful for it, because he does take such a great deal of minding in some ways- nor indeed my daughter-in-law. They've each invested so much in the idea that other things must be sacrificed for the sake of the family and its perpetual nobility that there's pain in admitting that there could be - could have been for them, perhaps - a different way."
Charles nodded. "Don't worry, Duchess. When you spend so much of your time making arrests, expecting an unenthusiastic reception becomes second nature. And, I say -" he faltered. Mary and Peter were waiting on the drive, seemingly arguing amiably about something, and it was the first time he'd been alone with his prospective mother-in-law since she learned of the engagement. She looked up at him. The vast height disparity made it difficult to maintain eye contact for long, but he held her gaze as he said awkwardly,
"Thank you. I know it can't be what you would have - I mean - but I promise you, Duchess, I'll make her so happy."
The Dowager Duchess smiled. "My dear Charles," she said, gently, gesturing to where Mary stood laughing exasperatedly at her brother in the pale winter sunshine, "I know it. But I think the present tense is more suitable than the future."
Charles pressed the old woman's hand, moved both at her words and at her addressing him by his Christian name, and stepped out into the sunshine.
It was probably largely due to Peter and his sensible proposals for dealing with the money question - that Mary receive an allowance each month equivalent to the earnings of her husband and the money be held otherwise in trust for any offspring - that the interview that morning went so smoothly, though Mary reflected later that there was probably something a bit more primal about it, too. As the party from the Dower House was admitted to - welcomed would have been too strong a word - Duke's Denver, she watched as Gerald and Charles shook hands stiffly. Gerald was a tallish man, and solid, but Charles was taller and broader, and his movements were those of a man whose occupation requires the use of physical force. They looked at each other for a time, and then Charles said, "Good morning, your grace." He said it pleasantly but extremely firmly, and without the air of deference he had used to address Gerald previously, when their dealings had involved Charles acting purely in a professional capacity.
There was a second during which Gerald appeared to struggle with himself and then he mumbled gruffly, "Mr Parker." The tension in the room seemed to dissipate a little, and Gerald bravely attempted some routine small talk about Parker's journey and the weather in London, all the while studiously avoiding his wife's steely eye.
When the three men retreated to Gerald's study to have the conversation, Mary was left alone with Helen. The Duchess's face was so strained that Mary felt stirrings of sympathy but no inspiration as to anything she could offer by way of an olive branch. Unable to breach the stony silence, Mary picked up a magazine. Every time she turned the page the rustle seemed to echo around the room, and out of the corner of her eye Mary could see Helen sitting stiffly, her face a death mask of disapproval. At length Mary said, tentatively, "Do you suppose Winifred would like to be a bridesmaid?"
Without moving her head, Helen snapped, "She'll have to, if you really insist on going through with this ridiculous enterprise. It would look very pointed if she weren't, though it's hardly a thing she'll want to tell her friends about."
There was a lot of bait here but Mary resisted it. "I shall write to her at school this evening and ask her what she'd like by way of dress colours and flowers. I've always thought she looks nice in pale blue."
Helen didn't reply, but it seemed to Mary that her shoulders relaxed slightly. They continued in silence until the men returned from the study, each looking happier than he had when he went in. Mary rose and walked over to Charles, and he put his arm lightly around her, whilst Gerald bustled around, still avoiding his wife's eye, pouring brandy from a decanter. The Duke's nerve failed when the moment would have been propitious to propose a toast, so Peter stepped in. He raised his glass of Cointreau towards them. "To Mary and Charles", he said, with uncharacteristic simplicity. They all drank solemnly - except for the Duke, who drank somewhat sheepishly, and the Duchess, who did not drink at all, and then Mary took Charles for a tour of the estate.
"You'll get much further if you ride," Helen said, maliciously, as Charles and Mary set out of one of the many side-entrances. Charles was unperturbed.
"I can't ride a horse," he said, cheerfully. "Never been on one in my life." He presented it as a neutral piece of information, neither to be confessed nor boasted of, and Helen had nothing to say.
Outside, walking out from the sprawling shadow cast by the vast house and into the clear, cold January sunlight, Charles told Mary about the agreement proposed. "There would be a review, naturally, if I die or have to retire early for ill-health, for example, but otherwise, that's the set-up. What do you think?"
"I think it's a fine idea", Mary said, happily, thinking of the shops and designers she would be able to continue to frequent.
"My idea is that all the household expenses should come out of my money, of course, just as we planned. So your allowance would just be for clothes and, well, any other things you happened to want which we couldn't otherwise afford." Charles finished this sentence somewhat vaguely because his tastes were so simple and his vices so few that he couldn't possibly imagine how he could spend his month's salary if he weren't paying for rent and household expenses, even if he spent the whole month trying.
Mary beamed up at him, her fair hair like a halo in the sunshine, and he stopped grappling with the problem of what she would buy. Hoping that their route across the estate parkland would soon become less straight, so that he could kiss her out of sight of the house, he said,
"On the subject of household matters, I've had an idea. Mrs Munns redeemed herself quite considerably in my eyes yesterday by breaking off from giving me knowing glances to tell me that the Blackwoods - the people who live in the flat above mine -are moving away in March, so they're giving up their lease. I've been up in that flat a few times, to help Mr Blackwood move heavy furniture and things like that, and it's awfully nice. Much nicer than mine," he added, frankly.
"Well, but it hardly seems worth all the bother of moving just to go up one floor. Honestly Charles, I like your flat."
"Mary, the kitchen is also the bathroom! Like it or not, you can't live in it," he replied, firmly. "Not in only it, anyway. There's a back staircase between the two flats still - left over from when it was all one house, of course - to which the entrances are obviously filled in now, but you could easily knock through them again. We could comfortably afford to take both flats. The Blackwoods' would make a grand upstairs - it's got a really decent bathroom, I remember from fixing a leaking tap once. Then the kitchen in my flat can be re-done so as to be a proper kitchen for you to make me scones in" (his eyes twinkled teasingly), "and there'll be spare bedrooms for visitors and children and things like that. What do you think?"
Mary's mind had already started to race joyously over the interior decorating that this proposal would occasion, and she stopped walking and turned delightedly to face Charles. "I think you're quite the cleverest man I've ever met," she said. She was so pleased and so lovely against the stately beauty of the winter landscape that Charles forgot about the possibility of being overlooked, and lifted her into the air and spun her round. She laughed delightedly, and when he came to rest he kept her in the air, but drew her close to him. She put her arms around his neck and looked down into his eyes.
"Do you know, I don't think I've ever seen the top of your head before," she said, "I suppose it's because you're so polite and you always stand up if ever I do. I can see quite a few grey hairs from up here."
"Ah, that's the result of so much pining over my hopeless love," said Charles, grinning. "I dare say it'll stop greying now. Your face is as lovely as ever seen from below, anyhow."
"I think it looks very distinguished," Mary hastened to explain, "I didn't mean tha-" here she stopped talking as Charles gently lowered her to the ground, and kissed her very firmly on the mouth.
Their exuberance from the morning's activities saw Charles and Mary through a lunch at Duke's Denver, which, although trying, would certainly have been worse had it not been for Peter's ability to keep up a steady stream of elegantly phrased piffle more or less unaided. The worst moment was when the foie gras starter was brought in and Helen deigned to speak to Charles for the first time that morning.
"I don't imagine you'll have eaten foie gras before, Mr Parker," she said in a voice suggesting both condescension and scorn. Mary itched to kick Helen viciously under the table, so it was perhaps fortunate that they were seated far apart at the vast polished table.
"I've had it a few times," Charles replied, good-humouredly. "All of them with Peter, though." He was surprised himself not to be nettled by any of Helen's jibes, and he diplomatically neglected to mention that he didn't much care for foie gras at the best of times and would have preferred a slice of honest cold beef. In truth he was simply too unassailably happy to be touched by her displeasure. Lunch endured, he shook hands again with Gerald, more warmly this time, and Mary and he left to spend the afternoon meeting with the rector and fixing upon the first Saturday after Easter for the wedding. Sitting contemplating Mary in the drawing room at the Dower House after dinner that night instead of concentrating on the game of chess he had rashly agreed to play with Peter, Charles mentally calculated the number of days and nights until then, and they still seemed damnably numerous, although hardly sufficient for the bewildering amount of matters which, as he listened to Mary and her mother talking, he realised needed to be organised for a wedding of this type.
The Dowager Duchess got up and smiled benevolently on them all. "All this excitement is too much for an old woman such as myself," she said, her eyes twinkling in a way which somewhat belied her words. "I shall retire to bed with my novel. Charles dear, you might write down your mother's address for me - there's paper and a pen in the davenport. I'd like to write to her and invite her and your sister to stay at the Dower House for the wedding."
Charles thought this was a lovely idea, and said so appreciatively, though he could already imagine the excitement and confusion into which the invitation would throw his relatives, and Mary embraced her mother. Silence reigned for a few minutes after the Dowager Duchess left.
"This victory would be more gratifying if I could flatter myself that I had had more than a tenth of your attention, old man," Peter said suddenly, neatly check-mating Charles. Charles had not even been looking at the chess board, and grinned as he packed the exquisite chessmen away.
"You shouldn't have so beautiful a sister if you expect a man to concentrate on playing chess with you," he replied.
"On that repellent note, I'll toddle off to bed, too," Peter announced genially, and he did so. Mary smiled after him fondly. Her brother did not ordinarily retire early.
Charles and Mary, by contrast, did not go to bed early: the mahogany grandfather clock had struck two in the morning before they parted. They had that night the sort of conversation that spans an infinity of topics both personal and general and can somehow only ever be had by firelight. Charles was not even troubled by any doubts as to his ability to control himself, because as soon as Peter left the room Ahasuerus appeared from underneath an armchair and settled himself possessively on Mary's lap. Every time Charles made a movement towards Mary, the cat sat up and hissed at him.
"Good Lord," Charles said, when he had tested this reaction out several times and found that he was only allowed to move from his position on the couch if it was to put more wood on the fire. "The animal's bewitched."
Mary scratched Ahasuerus softly between the ears and laughed. "Certainly not. He isn't the cat to be rendered by any means subordinate to anyone else's will. Perhaps he imagines he's protecting my virtue. Don't you like cats, Charles?"
"I don't like this one," Charles said, eyeing Ahasuerus warily. "I don't generally have strong feelings about them one way or another. But you shall fill our flat with cats, Mary, if it gives you pleasure." And there Ahasuerus remained unmovable, all the hours that, freed from the electricity of physical touch, they shyly bared their souls, until Charles had left the room and the cat at last suffered Mary to rise from the sofa.
The next morning, as they smiled sleepily at each other over the breakfast table, though, Ahasuerus behaved to Charles with his usual lofty indifference, and the odd behaviour of the Dowager Duchess's Persian cat that night was a mystery that Chief Inspector Parker never solved.
After church, during which even through the shield of his happiness Charles had been made uncomfortable by the degree of staring and whispering of which he found himself the subject and Helen irritated Mary and indeed everybody else by her expression of wounded dignity, followed by an early luncheon at the Dower House, Charles went upstairs to pack his things. Entering his room, he realised that, of course, a servant had already done this for him. He sighed slightly, thinking how incongruous it must have felt for the impeccably dressed servant to be packing Charles's extremely ordinary clothes into the case that was, now he came to look at it, slightly shabby. He turned around to see Mary standing shyly in the doorway. She proffered towards him the shirt he had been wearing when they had last met at his flat in London, laundered and ironed and with all the buttons neatly sewed back on.
He grinned at her. "I promise not to make a habit of that sort of thing," he said, placing his finger gently on the top button. The idea of Mary sitting by the fire her golden head bowed as she sewed buttons onto his shirt filled him with a charge of happiness and gratitude at this sudden, seemingly endless beneficence of the universe. The shirt in question, which was far from his best, was ever after his favourite and he wore it until it fell quite apart.
"Thank you, Mary," he said, and he stroked her cheek with the back of his forefinger. He started a little at the sound of the polite cough of the servant now standing behind her, feeling that he would never get used to the ubiquity of servants, but nodded politely in response to the message that Lord Peter was ready with the car to take Mr Parker to the station.
"Send Alice to fetch my case, will you, Mason," said Mary, casually, as she descended the staircase with Charles.
"I'm going to London with Charles," she added, in response to her brother's enquiring glance when she reached the front door, whilst Charles busied himself taking an affectionate leave of the Dowager Duchess and a relieved one of Ahasuerus. "I think Gerald and Helen will come round to things more easily without being forced to contemplate my beam of imbecilic happiness, as you describe it, for a little while. And I want to talk to Mrs Schmidt about wedding clothes, and to start thinking about the changes we'll make to the Great Ormond Street flat. I'll stay in the Mayfair house of course", she explained hastily. She had asked Gerald this morning and he had seemed to think it was a small price to pay for getting his sister out of Helen's sight.
"Don't worry, Polly," her brother replied, "I've played the overbearing older brother once and once only with Charles and I don't propose to do so again. Besides, you don't need to tell me that he's a model of rectitude. You wouldn't believe the amount of perfectly respectable night spots he's refused to go to merely because some of the clientele or entertainment is a little on the risqué side. I believe", Peter continued affectionately as he watched Charles converse with the Dowager Duchess, "you could spend a week on a desert island with him and be safe from his advances until all is made right with the Lord and state."
Mary flushed and looked determinedly away from Peter's gaze. "Or perhaps not," Peter said, raising an elegant eyebrow. "Tell me no more. These things aren't fit for a nice-minded brother's ears."
"No indeed," agreed Mary, fervently. "Thanks awfully for being here this weekend, Peter. I wish there were something I could do to help you with your own affair."
Peter's smile faded. "I think we'll have to trust to time and to my own dubious charms there. Fear not, Mary", and he handed her into the car.
The lateness of the previous night began to tell on Mary as the train trundled through the sparse winter countryside and towards London. Charles and Mary were not alone in their carriage; an elderly gentleman sat in a corner unobtrusively reading his newspaper. If he felt any interest in the murmured conversation between the large, dark man whose vowels still revealed his northern upbringing from time to time and the fair young lady with the aristocratic drawl and the shining blue eyes, he didn't show it. He was a person who kept himself to himself and was not at all interested in the detailed aspects of police procedure about which the young lady was asking intelligent questions and the man providing surprised but detailed responses. But when the young lady at length had fallen asleep nestled into the man's chest, the elderly gentleman happened to look up from turning a page and found himself smiling, such was the expression of awe and tenderness on the man's face.