It rained cold grey rain throughout February, and it was a miserable month across England, and for almost every member of the Wimsey family.
Pheasant shooting was over and the Duke of Denver had endless time to listen to his wife's bitter complaints about the degradations which his wayward siblings had contrived to heap upon them. Lord Peter was found that the obstacles in the path of true love were not as apt to melt away in the face of his personality as he had hoped, but that he could not bring himself to go far from Miss Vane's vicinity, just in case the moment should suddenly arise when she should solicit his company. He stayed in London, busying himself with antiquarian book purchases and the affairs of the Cattery, but lacking, as he himself admitted, his habitual joie de vivre.
"Any sign of Charles coming back, Polly?", he asked his sister languidly over a light supper one evening as the month drew to a damp and dreary close. They were dining together before they set off for a cocktail party at the Arbuthnots. "I want to be consulted on an interesting case. Anything so long as it doesn't involve poison."
"Well, I want to be complimented on my omelet-making," said Mary, gesturing to her brother's plate pointedly. "Apparently we can't all have what we want."
"Good Lord, I quite forgot that you'd made this! Sorry, old thing. It's as good as something Bunter would make, and I honestly have no higher praise than that."
Mary smiled with unabashed self-satisfaction. "Well, he did teach me," she said. "It's the sixth recipe I've truly mastered. He's been a saint."
Mary had decided on her return to London that she may as well learn housekeeping from the person who seemed able to perform any task, householder otherwise, for Peter without any apparent difficulty or exertion and she had commandeered Bunter's instructional services every morning since then. Peter had been surprised by her application to the task and her resistance to any attempts at distraction during the hours allocated to this education.
"All the same, Mary, you needn't go overboard," he said. "You'll have a woman who can cook meals, won't you, as Charles does now."
"Yes, but I refuse to have any servants who sleep in," Mary said, "and you know how he often has to work long into the night and I simply won't have him going without a suitable warm meal when he comes home."
"I can see it now!" Peter laughed. "You'll be itching to get up and prepare delicacies for his jaded pallet and he'll be tip-toeing around in the dark trying not to wake you up."
"I expect so," Mary agreed, happily, and gazed for awhile into the distance contemplating the delights of being woken up by Charles. After some time her brother coughed and repeated, "And so, any news on when he'll be back?"
Mary sighed. She had kept her spirits up better than any other Wimsey save for the unflappable Dowager Duchess over the weeks of iron-grey skies, but after three and a half weeks of Charles's absence, even she was flagging. Following their return from Denver Mary and Charles had enjoyed a glorious six day period in which they dined together almost every night, and Mary let herself delightedly in and out of the Great Ormond Street flat whilst he was at work to make plans for its renovation and leave him affectionate messages on the sideboard. One evening they had had dinner with one of Charles's colleagues and his wife, and Mary had astonished herself by feeling nervous, and fretted internally beforehand. But when they got there and Mrs Dorridge was so obviously many times more nervous, Mary found her own nerves dissipating. Had she but known it, her overpowering happiness perfectly tempered her unconsciously "society" air, and any suggestion of pride that her manner might otherwise have conveyed was negated by her eagerness for the recipe for the stew Mrs Dorridge so hesitantly served up and her candidness about the embryonic nature of her own cooking abilities. By the time the men retreated to the pub on the corner for a swift pint the two women were deep in conversation about the difficulties of obstructive sisters-in-law and the merits of different sleeve lengths for spring dresses. Mary had been genuinely surprised and not altogether pleased to see the men return so soon - she had been prevailed upon to give a potted history of Charles's courtship of her and was about to be told about the romance of the early days of the Dorridge ménage. She was fortunate to naturally feel interested in the detail of other women's lives, particularly if they were connected even remotely to Charles, and this willingness conquered even those of his acquaintance who were left unmoved or actively made suspicious by her beauty and her class.
Mary looked back on this six-day period now as if on Arcadia. On the seventh, a Sunday of all days, the police force in Bolton had called Scotland Yard and asked for assistance in the resolution of a missing persons case and Charles, who had successfully solved a similar case a year earlier, was unceremoniously dispatched up to Lancashire. He was resigned to having to leave his nicely progressing money laundering case in other hands, but dismayed at leaving London now that it had Mary in it. He assured her several times as she waited with him at Euston station, that this kind of thing happened very rarely and that normally no matter how demanding the case he was at least able to sleep at home, and that he would write as often as he could.
And he had. Every other day a letter came from Bolton, and Mary wrote back. Never having been really on intimate corresponding terms before, the letters were a novelty at first, and Mary re-read Charles's many times in the decades that followed, but after three and a half weeks the inadequacies of pen and paper as compared to being in Charles's arms were hard to ignore.
"He says it's getting on tolerably well. He's nearly certain who did it - and what they've done, which isn't straightforward in a missing persons case, he says - but doesn't have the evidence to charge. Sometimes there just isn't the evidence, he says, but he still hopes to get it in this case. He says it's a squalid case to begin with and he wishes he'd never heard of it. And to tell the truth, Peter, he's beginning to sound depressed."
"I know how he feels," Peter replied, somewhat unsympathetically. "Everything is beastly in February, let alone when you're contending with a troop of law-breaking northerners. You'll have to try to cheer him up with your merry tales and outpourings of adoration."
"Well, but that's it," Mary said, thoughtfully, ignoring the teasing tone of her brother's comment. "He says - well, he says that he forgets it all when he thinks of me and the world seems a hopeful place once more." Charles's letters said a lot more than that, but not much that Mary wanted to repeat to Peter.
"Well, there you are, then. Jolly good show, keeping the honest policeman's heart light and all that."
"I wish you'd be serious, Peter. I feel it's an awful responsibility, somehow. What if one day I disappoint him in some way, and it doesn't work anymore?"
Peter complied with Mary's request for seriousness, though it went against the grain. "My dear girl," he replied. "It is a terrible responsibility being loved by anyone. Why do you suppose I've avoided it so strenuously for so long? And apparently still contrive to avoid it now," he added, ruefully. "But Charles has been scrutinising the rottenest of all the bad eggs in this god forsaken country for many long years before he even set eyes upon you, and managed to keep his spirits up by virtue of own resilience and some frankly stupefyingly boring religious light reading. And there's one thing about Charles, you know, and that's that he takes people as he finds them. Doesn't try to take them over or mould them into something else, I mean. It's clear to anyone who happens to be within a mile of him that he adores you, doubtless for some mysterious reasons of his own, but I shouldn't think you'd be capable of disappointing him. Unless perhaps you came upon the scene of a crime and trampled over all of the evidence."
"I've never heard you speak so much sense at one sitting, old man," said Charles, grinning wearily, and coming into the room behind Bunter looking dishevelled, but decidedly not depressed. Mary ran into his arms with the alacrity of a sprinter off a starting block, and on tip-toe she kissed his mouth and the corners of his tired eyes. Lord Peter went over to the decanter on the sideboard, poured his friend a generous tumbler of french brandy and handed it to Charles.
"It strikes me that you might be in need of refreshment" he said, drily, "and the fact that you will have to remove at least one hand from Mary's waist to politely accept the drink is a happy by-product."
"Thanks awfully," Charles replied, doing so reluctantly. "I'm sorry to barge in. I went to the Mayfair house and Garvey told me Mary was here, and I..."
"Is everything all right, Charles? Why are you back so suddenly?" Mary asked.
"Sudden break-through. It was the husband, of course. We went up and down the same street for a fourth time and found an old lady whom nobody had bothered to ask before. Nobody had even mentioned to the police she was living there - we only found out this time because she had a fall whilst the officer was on the doorstep and he went up to help the daughter pick her up. She's frail but sharp as a tack, and she'd seen my man go down the street with his wife in his arms at just the right time - to go to the doctor, she'd assumed. She said the wife was completely immobile, as though she'd fainted. There's a street light just outside her house. She didn't mention it to her daughter because she says nobody listens to her, anyway. And she'd seen nothing about it in the papers because the daughter doesn't like her mother to read upsetting things and takes anything unpleasant out before she passes it to her."
"I shouldn't think that would leave an awful lot of news," Mary observed, seriously. "But will the statement of one old lady be strong enough evidence? At the very least I can imagine she might do rather badly under cross-examination, if it came to that."
Peter stared at his sister, who had expressed no interest at all in his own adventures with detection, even when she had been an active suspect in the case, and from whom these pertinent questions were unexpected. Apparently they were not unexpected to Charles, who smiled at Mary adoringly, but not with astonishment. He had sunk down into a chair whilst she spoke and Mary immediately draped herself elegantly over the arm.
"You're absolutely right, Mary," he said, lightly stroking her arm. "But it was the thread which, when pulled, started to unravel the whole show. The fellow panicked and contradicted his earlier story badly when took him in for questioning and told him we had a witness. It took four hours but in the end he confessed that he'd killed her and where he'd put the body. He's saying it was accidental of course, but the Lancashire police can disprove that. They've got a bunch of bright lads up there."
"Could it have been an accident, do you suppose?"
Charles looked at Mary, and struggled briefly with the temptation to agree that it could. It seemed hateful that a woman of such sweetness should have her world besmirched by the squalid realities of senseless male violence. Why shouldn't she believe the less cruel story? But he respected her as well as loved her, and he replied heavily,
"It's unthinkable that any accident should produce the kind of marks that we found on the body." He didn't add that the fellow was well known to the police because at least once a month they were called to his house by a neighbour to intervene in what was called a domestic dispute, even though in that case as with so many others, only one party was doing any disputing, and he was doing it with his fists. Charles had seen murdered women before whose peril had been ignored because of the police's refusal to consider wife-beating anything particularly untoward either in itself or as a sign of likely escalating violence, and lack of powers to do anything about it if they did, and he felt infinitely weary when he thought of it.
There was a silence.
"You look so tired, darling," Mary said. She had never called him that before, and hadn't really intended to at this point. The surprise of it recalled him to himself and he smiled up at her.
"I am. We did most of it last night and then this morning I tied things up enough to leave with the Lancashire lads, and came home."
"Do you mean you haven't been to bed since the day before yesterday?" Mary demanded.
"I slept a little on the train," he replied. "Garvey told me you'd be going to an evening party so I thought I'd just have time to come and, well, say hullo, and then go home and sleep for 14 hours."
"But I don't want to go to a silly party now you're here! I mean, I would if you wanted to come, of course, Rachel would be simply delighted if you did, but otherwise I'd much sooner stay here and talk to you."
Charles was not particularly fond of parties of any sort, but he had discerned that behind Mary's declaration that she was quite capable of attending them in her own and never wanted him to feel that he should have to, she dearly wanted him to. He had internally committed himself to take Mary to as many parties as he could, though he was not sorry to reflect that he would often inevitably be prevented from attending by urgent work demands, but not after a 48 hour period during which he had slept only for two hours, uncomfortably on a busy jolting train. Besides, the dinner suit which he had realised he would need for these functions and resignedly ordered from a tailor recommended by Peter was not ready.
"Charles, you arrive just as we've finished our humble meal," Peter said. "Bunter shall rustle you up something to keep body and soul together whilst you consider your next move."
Before Peter could ring for Bunter, Mary had leapt up from Charles's chair. "Bunter shall do no such thing," she said, determinedly. "Are you hungry, Charles?" When Charles confessed he had eaten nothing since a hurried sandwich whilst changing trains at Stoke-on-Trent many hours ago, Mary positively danced out of the room, despite Charles's entreaties that she should stay.
He was almost asleep in his chair when Mary returned, slightly pink in the face, with an omelet and toast, followed by Bunter with a large pot of tea, and he gratified her by eating it with gusto in a minute and a half. Peter began to fill a pipe for him, but Charles rose to his feet. "No, honestly," he said. "I'm not fit for anything. My intention was really to go straight home from Euston and be in a decent condition to spend all day with you tomorrow, but I found when it came to it that I just couldn't go another day without seeing your face."
"It's frightfully kind of you to say so, old boy," Peter said, although of course Charles's words had been addressed to Mary. "Would that others found it so alluring. All right, let's dress, Mary, and we can send Charles off home in our taxi when we get to Freddy's."
Mary acquiesced, and sent Peter off to dress first, on the basis that it took much longer to put on a suit than a dress. When Peter had retreated from his own sitting room, Charles gently pulled Mary down onto the Chesterfield sofa by the book case, and kissed her very thoroughly.
"I was going to say that I would come back to Great Ormond Street and watch you sleep," she said, laughing shakily, "on the grounds that you were too tired to be put to temptation by my presence. But it seems not."
"Good God. It would take a lot more than 48 hours of wakefulness," Charles said, ardently.
"Come to late breakfast at Grosvenor Square tomorrow," she said by way of breathless reply, and if this conversation was neither witty nor entertaining the author can only note that neither party really had their minds on the exchange.
Peter sang one of his french ditties in a loud, strong tenor as he strode down the hall to re-enter the sitting room, and as a consequence he found his guests sitting beside each other conversing demurely when he opened the door. Mary went off to change, and Peter eyed his friend reflectively. "You know, Charles, there's not many men who'd resist the temptation to turn up at this party with Mary on their arm and show high society, as it considers itself, that he's got the girl and he's here to stay."
Charles hadn't considered it from this angle. "Well, I have got the girl," he said, "though I'll never understand exactly how. And I don't care a straw for the rest of it. It's very fine for those who -"
"Who like that kind of thing?" Peter interrupted, grinning. "Don't worry about offending me - I know what a rum show it all is, all right, though the Arbuthnots are very decent. All I mean to say is that you're a peculiar kind of creature. One of the best."
"Well, I'll be honoured to escort Mary wherever she wants to go, of course, when I can," Charles put in, slightly red in the face. "It gives me great pleasure to think that she wants me to. But hardly when I haven't had a bath in days and she already has so suitable an escort. Talking of escorts, will you be taking anyone else with you to the party?"
It was as close as Charles dared get to inquiring about the success of Peter's own courtship, and he was met with a polite rebuttal. There the matter rested and they talked of Charles's case - though its resolution had required perseverance rather than genius and was not much in Peter's line - until Mary re-entered. She too was singing, though not in her case for practical reasons. Charles of course stood up when she came into the room, as he would to his dying day, although the habit became démodé and positively eccentric over the decades that followed, and he swallowed hard as he contemplated her in an evening dress of which his mother's opinion would not have been favourable. He very briefly wondered whether perhaps he did not want to go to the party after all, and then checked himself. If he had needed any reminder of the peril and wrong-headedness of men's possessive jealousy then his work afforded them in generous plenty.
"Shan't you be cold?" he asked, instead, and Mary smiled.
Mary was not cold as she basked in Charles's decidedly warm gaze, and nor was she cold later at the party, even once she had divested herself of her furs. Her happiness burned inside her like a furnace.The Earl of Fridingham drew Peter aside as the evening drew to a close and spluttered good-humouredly "I say, Wimsey, you'll have to do something about that sister of yours. If she goes about looking as happy as that, all the women will be wanting to take up with policemen. Eh, what?"