Mary had intended to coincide with her niece at Duke's Denver during Winifred's half term holiday and to sort out the question of a bridesmaid dress then. But the half term holiday had fallen soon after Charles's return to London and, perhaps coincidentally, Mary suddenly found that she had too much to do to possibly leave for the country just then. The time before the wedding, which had seemed so endless, was suddenly countable in weeks rather than months, and Mary arranged instead to go down to Brighton to see her niece during the school term.
Tentative sunshine sparkled on the sea which lay below Roedean, and Mary, waiting in the headmistress's sitting room reserved for girls on the rare occasions they received family visits, gazed out of the window and thought of her own days at the same school over a decade earlier. She had not enjoyed school particularly, nor been a good student. Had the headmistress not placed an exceptionally high value on the Wimsey family name, she would hardly have allowed this unexemplary alumna to interrupt the school day of one of her current pupils. Mary knew this, and didn't care. At the same time that the headmistress was greeting her cordially and offering congratulations on Lady Mary's forthcoming marriage (of which of course the staff had read and made the chief source of scandalised discussion as they took tea for several weeks and which they all considered an insult to the reputation of the school), Lady Mary been smiling graciously and deciding with great determination that no daughter of hers would attend a boarding school.
She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she started when Winifred, called away from a music lesson, entered the room and dutifully came over to kiss her aunt. Mary looked dispassionately at the thin, pale twelve year old with the equally thin, pale hair, and she felt a rush of sympathy. Winifred had reached the age where childish things had either lost their appeal or the world so clearly expected them to have done so that they became guilty secrets, but the world had nothing yet to offer her in their place except a vague apprehension of what was expected of women and the many ways in which they could be found wanting.
"Time is such a strange thing," Mary said. "It's in precisely this spot that I stood years ago when my mother came to see me. I wish I could talk to that small Mary now, and tell her that all will be wonderfully well with her, if only she waits long enough and trusts to her instinct. But time being what it is, I can't. So I shall say it to young Winifred instead," Mary finished, laughing.
Winifred was in some ways her mother's daughter and she didn't approve of beginning a conversation in this fashion. "Thank you, Aunt Mary, but I'm quite happy", she replied with dull politeness, interpreting this eccentric speech as something in the line of an uncalled-for pep-talk.
Mary smothered a sigh. "I'm glad to hear it," she said. "What beastly lesson am I causing you to miss? I hope it isn't one of the jollier ones."
There followed conversation about school and about Winifred's favourite lessons and least favourite teachers, and it moved from stilted to comfortable relatively quickly. Being so much younger than Winifred's parents Mary had always got on rather well with her nephew and niece, though in recent years she'd spent less and less time at Duke's Denver and seen them much less often. But some half-buried memory of the hours reading Beatrix Potter or playing chalked out hopscotch on the flagstones of the grand terrace at Duke's Denver with her pretty young aunt flickered in Winifred, and by degrees she lowered her defences of good mannered implacability and became a normal girl again.
Mary reached into the case she had with her. "Let's sort out this dress question", she said cheerfully, drawing the curtains. "I wasn't sure what you'd think about the question of sleeves, so that's the bit that's left to do. Here are a few options. The dressmaker thinks the cap sleeves but I think the elbow-length." She pulled out the half made dress, of heavily lined sky blue silk, and three sketches showing the same dress completed with different types of sleeves. "Slither into this whilst you decide, and I can pin it up to the right size," Mary said practically, opening her pin case. Winifred took off her uniform and stepped obligingly into the dress, and Mary knelt and pinned it in at the back. The measurements Helen had grudgingly sent Mary had been good and it was nearly a perfect fit.
"Shall I ring for one of the servants to come and do this, Aunt Mary?" Winifred asked, blushing scarlet at having moved slightly and trodden on the hem of Mary's skirt.
Mary looked up at her and grinned, showing a mouthful of pins held securely between her teeth. Once the pins were safely in the dress at the appropriate places, Mary stood up and smoothed down her skirt. "Some things are really more satisfactory to do oneself." She saw Winifred looking at her awkwardly, and added, laughing, "This at least isn't a recent eccentricity, Winifred! I've been messing about with clothes for ages."
"Oh, yes, I know." Winifred was entering the years of adolescent embarrassment and was now caught between wanting to explain that she hadn't meant to criticise, and fearing that the explanation would be itself more offensive than implied criticism. Instead she said "I love the pyjamas you sent me. All the girls think they're simply marvellous. And one's legs are so much warmer, I can't imagine why anyone still wears nightgowns."
"Well, I suppose some people must prefer them" Mary replied vaguely, remembering suddenly that despite the countless hours they had spent in conversation she had not in fact ascertained Charles's preference as to women's night attire, and that she should certainly do so before they found themselves married. Winifred wriggled back into her uniform blouse and tunic.
"I'm sorry if the fuss about all this -" Mary's gesture took in herself and the bridesmaid dress "made for a rather stormy half-term holiday."
"It wasn't bad. I don't think Daddy minds so awfully anymore," said Winifred, candidly. "By the end of the hols he said that it would look even worse if the business were called off now, and that at least the fellow doesn't the seem to type to run up large gambling debts."
Mary's eyes sparkled with laughter. "Talk about damning with faint praise! But it's certainly true."
Winifred considered her aunt, so suddenly imbued with this unquenchable supply of merriment and good humour. Wonderingly she asked, "Aunt Mary, don't you really care what anyone thinks?"
Her aunt reflected for a moment. "Well, I care most awfully what Charles thinks, and not at all about anyone else. It saves an awful lot of time. And as he finds everything I do utterly charming, it all works out quite well. Now. Miss Marchbanks asked if I wanted them to bring us tea but I said I'd take you out. Have you time? There's a place whose eclairs I remember very fondly."
Aunt and niece set off and by the time they returned, having decided the question of sleeves and eaten a tea which would have been disastrous had their metabolisms been less fierce, there was a greater warmth between them than there had been for many years. Mary had not talked very much about Charles, or even of the wedding; and yet somehow the afternoon was the awakening for Winifred of the sense that men and marriage could represent something other than the distasteful duty which she had always supposed them to be.
When Mary got back to London, she was greeted in the drawing room at Grosvenor Square by her oldest brother.
"Gerald! What on earth are you doing here?" Mary exclaimed with more surprise than pleasure. It was to that gentleman's credit that he did not point out in response that it was his house.
"Felt that it was time to come up to town for a bit, what? Some business to see to. And tail end of winter is a dismal time in the country. It drags on so."
The weather over the past few days had in fact been positively spring-like, and in Mary's experience a sudden flight like this on the part of the Duke usually had more to do with a desire on his part for less exacting female company than that his wife provided than the need to conduct any business relating to the affairs of his estate. But she was feeling well-disposed towards everyone and always found Gerald easier to contend with without Helen, so she smiled and repressed the urge to ask him when he thought he'd be leaving.
"Ive just seen Winifred," Mary told him. "She seems in fine form."
"Oh, good. Awfully glad to hear it. Good, good."
Gerald seemed alarmed by the very thought of his daughter, though he'd always been an affectionate if inconsistent father. Mary remembered that he hardly seemed to have known what to do with her when she had been that age and Gerald a young man, so it was perhaps unsurprising that he should stumble again now.
"They get to a certain age and begin to look and sound so grown up, that one forgets that they really are just slightly larger children, wanting to be loved and listened to," Mary said, carefully, and left it at that. There was a pause, during which Garvey, the butler at the Denver London residence, came noiselessly into the room and murmured to Mary, "Mr Parker telephoned an hour ago and asked if you would be so good as to telephone to him when you have a moment."
"Oh!" Mary's eyes lit up. "I thought he'd be busy with his tiresome money-launderers this evening. Excuse me, Gerald." She skipped off to the telephone in the library. As the butler turned to follow her out of the door, the Duke cleared his throat. "Have you seen much of him around here - of Mr Parker, I mean - since Lady Mary turned up, Garvey? Just out of interest and all that?"
"Not much, your grace," came the reply. "I understand that he was away from town on business for several weeks." There was a pause during which Garvey wondered whether "business" was quite the right word for the sorts of things policemen went away to do. He decided it would serve and continued. "Over the last fortnight he has very often seen Lady Mary home in the evening, but we have rarely had the opportunity of seeing him in the house. He has called in at breakfast on two occasions, but never in the evening."
"Thank you, Garvey," the Duke said, reassured although shame-faced at having committed the solecism of having asked a servant about a person who was soon to be one of the family. The Duke was a person whose own morals regarding sex and women were questionable, and had he but known it were held in deep but unspoken contempt by his brother-in-law elect. But he had a code and he stuck to it. He would have been as shocked by a man having his way with a woman - a woman of quality, at least - whom he intended to marry before the event as he was comfortable with any amount of infidelity to the same woman after the event.
Gerald went into the library, where he found his sister holding the telephone crossly to her ear. "I'm still waiting. The exchange is terribly slow this evening," she explained. "Do you need the telephone, Gerald?"
"No, no. Not at all. Rather not." Having said this, yet the Duke did not leave.
Mary looked at him expectantly.
"Look here, Mary, if you're arranging to meet Parker this evening- Mr Parker, I mean - why not ask him to pop in here and have a drink?"
"With you?" Mary's astonishment was so great that she didn't consider how rude it might appear.
"Well, dash it all, what?" As so often these days, Gerald was wrong-footed. It could not possibly be the case that a policeman could have any objection to coming to drink cognac at the house of a Duke, of course. Of course not. The fellow couldn't be insensible to the honour. Which made it more incomprehensible that Mary should imply that her policeman might prefer to do something else with his evening. Gerald spluttered slightly for a second. But he was beginning to feel that since the bally marriage was clearly going to go ahead, it would be less of a devilish nuisance if he had an easier relationship with his brother in law. He had also reflected over the past month or so that his own wife, though an excellent person in many ways and of course an eminently suitable person to have brought into the family, had perhaps not always been the easiest of relations and that in their different ways his siblings had done their best. He didn't of course articulate any of this any more clearly than by the elliptical assertion "Well, here we are, don't you know." Fortunately his sister seemed to understand something of his intention and she lightly pressed his hand, and nodded. A click emanated from the telephone and Mary's head whirled back to the apparatus to hear a bored voice announce "Chief Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard on the line. Hold the line please," followed by Charles's voice, deep and firm but excited like a school boy about to talk to one of his sporting heroes, saying "Hullo, Mary."
"Hullo, Charles," Mary replied. Her back was to her brother, but he could hear the smile in her slightly breathless voice. There was so clear and so joyful intimacy behind this uninspired dialogue that even Gerald could discern it and he felt suddenly rather cold and excluded as he left the room and shut the door quietly behind him.
When Charles was shown into the drawing room half an hour later, he looked tired but cheerful. The kiss he bestowed upon Mary when she ran lightly towards him was formal and brief, and yet somehow failed at conveying an impression of chasteness. He shook hands politely but warily with Gerald. "Good evening, your grace", he added, quelling his instinct to add "I've just come to ask you a few questions", so odd did it seem to be interacting with someone like the Duke of Denver on anything other than a professional basis. He had felt like this about Peter once, of course, he told himself briskly, as he gratefully accepted the cognac the Duke poured for him, but he couldn't delude himself into believing that a similar meeting of minds was likely to happen with the elder brother.
The Duke responded over-loudly to Charles's polite enquiries as to his mother's and wife's health, and then lapsed into silence. He racked his brain for something to talk to the damned fellow about, and came up against brick wall after brick wall. Peter had told him that Charles didn't hunt, shoot or play cards and that what free time he had was mostly spent reading New Testament commentaries. It was as though the man were going out of his way to be impossible to talk to, Gerald reflected desperately.
Mary, slightly dismayed for both of them but rather more amused, went over to the gramophone and began to sift through the records that stood next to it. Suddenly, as though being struck with a world-changing inspiration, Gerald shouted out "Money laundering! Mary says you're investigating some money launderers, what?"
Charles nodded. He trusted Mary, quite rightly, not to have said more to Gerald than was perfectly proper on any question relating to his work, and there was no harm in him knowing the type of activity which any given officer was investigating at any given time. All the same, Charles did not elaborate on the matter. "That's the main case I have on at the moment, though there are others," he said, vaguely. "It was in the course of making arrests in relation to a fraudulent investment scheme that I got this", and he gestured to the remnants of a very fine bruise on his right cheek bone. It was ten days old and nearly healed now, but Charles felt sure that the Duke would have noticed it, and didn't want it to go unexplained.
"Good God," said the unobservant Gerald, who had not done so. He peered at Charles and then said with something like wistfulness, "Good God, that takes me back! I haven't had a bruise like that since I was a boy."
"There are rules about the degree of force the police are allowed to use, or the blighter who did it would have got off far worse," Charles said, cheerfully. "As it was, he won't try it again, even if he's in a position to do so, and that's unlikely in view of the charges he's facing."
Mary felt relieved and exasperated as she watched her brother and her fiancé settle more happily into each other's company now that some curious bond of masculinity had been established. "Investment fraud, eh? Now, the thing that stumps me about all these criminal johnnies is this: the amount of bally effort they must put in to their crimes! One wonders why they don't just do honest work and put the same effort into that, what? And I'll tell you what I think..."
Charles relaxed further. Every policeman is used to dealing with those who have Opinions on matters relating to crime and policing, and who feel that Her Majesty's police force will be greatly advantaged by having heard them. He nodded intelligently, making objections and counter-arguments to Gerald's theories only when they were too obvious to be left unsaid, and so a happy quarter of an hour was spent. When Mary put on some dance music, chiefly to amuse herself whilst this exchange took place, Charles was quite pleased to hear from the Duke's expostulation that he was almost as horrified by the idea of dancing to the sort of thing that was popular these days as Charles was himself. "I'll waltz if I have to," Gerald said firmly, as though anybody had required him to dance in any fashion at all, "but this sort of jumping around as though your britches are on fire is out of the question."
Charles laughed his agreement. "The only dancing I ever learned is ceilidh dancing," he said. "There's lots of Scots in Barrow-on-Furness, mostly people who worked in the shipyard," he explained, noticing Mary's expression of surprise. "My friend Jack's parents used to clear their parlour - put the furniture in the street - and teach us all, and they had parties for Hogmanay. It's probably not as useful as waltzing," he reflected suddenly. "I'll happily learn if you'd like me to, Mary." He looked up at her from his armchair, and the sincerity in his voice and trepidation in his face were irresistible to Mary, who laughed and leaned down to kiss him lightly.
"No, no," said Gerald, moved to joviality by this exchange. "Don't do it, man, or you'll spend your life taking her to tea dances and other horrifying things."
Charles began to protest that he would be delighted to do so, if Mary wanted him to, when the very fine baroque clock on the mantelpiece struck the hour. "Good Lord," said the Duke, "I'd told Hanbury that I'd dine with him at my club. I must toddle off, what? No, no, old man," he added, as Charles rose to leave at the same time. "You stay here and entertain Mary. Just don't let her start teaching you to waltz, eh?" And the Duke of Denver bustled off in high good humour, and complacency at his own cleverness in having avoided saying "Mr Parker", which now felt too formal for a future brother in law, without having had to bite the bullet and commit to "Charles".
Charles rubbed his hand over his eyes and looked sideways at Mary. Then they both started to laugh. "That went a lot better than I expected," Charles began as Mary slotted herself into his arms and said "My poor Charles! All that nonsense about the criminal mind. You bore it so nobly."
"Oh well, I should sound pretty silly if I started talking about the good management of ducal estates," Charles said fair-mindedly. Neither of them needed to add that knowing this Charles would not do so, and that this was the key difference.
"Anyway, he's left you in his house with his sister, which I think he intends as a show of trust," Mary said, looking up at Charles, and adding demurely. "so how do you propose to entertain me, Mr Parker?"
Mary should hardly have asked this question with so mischievous a smile and from inside Charles's embrace if he she had expected a coherent answer.
They had in fact spent a good deal of time alone over the past week or so, mostly because Charles felt that it was hardly seemly for Mary to be seen in public with a man sporting so noticeable a bruise on his face. They had spent evenings at Great Ormond Street, once on the night after the Blackwoods had vacated the upstairs flat gleefully eating fish and chips out of the paper on the floor of the sitting room like children camping out, since the kitchen and dining room were both mid-modification and quite unusable, and running up and down the newly accessible staircase to the upstairs flat, telling each other what each room would be used for, and how it should be decorated - or rather, Mary breathlessly telling Charles how each room should be decorated and Charles agreeing adoringly. Charles's well-honed skills of self-control had reasserted themselves and he had had no cause to reproach himself for his behaviour, even as he had stood in the doorway of the room which was to be their bedroom with his arm around Mary, still half-wondering if he would at any moment be roused and find that this had all been a dream. His kisses had been frequent, but light and respectful, and it was not by any conscious intention that they increased Mary's longing for him no less than he would have done with a more unguarded intimacy.
But the evening's unexpected turn of events, and perhaps the unfamiliar surroundings, had knocked him off his guard, and he kissed her without first bracing himself to comply with his self-imposed limits. The effect was electric. Mary's arms snaked around his neck like delicate ivy around an oak tree, and she leaned back slightly in his arms in response to the force of his kiss. The furniture around her blurred in Charles's eyes, and Mary's features blazed into radiant clarity; it was as though only she really existed as he kissed her long slender neck, pressing his hand against her back to steady her.
"Charles," she murmured, leaning her head back further as he traced his forefinger along her down to the slight swell of her breasts, his other hand at her waist, and as ever the sound of his name in her mouth in tones of pleasure was like a shot of the most intoxicating drink imaginable. He groaned and kissed her again, and his kisses became deeper and more urgent. "Charles ... don't-" Mary murmured, and he sprang back as if he had been burned.
"Mary, my darling," he said - and thus the first time that he addressed her by an endearment passed them completely unnoticed - "I'm sorry - I didn't -"
He broke off, forlorn. Mary smiled at him, half-laughing. "I was going to say 'don't stop'", she told him softly, and she kissed him firmly before he could reply. He staggered back against the wall, light-headed with relief, and pulled Mary to him. The part of him which longed to possess her, which he had valiantly suppressed for so long, and to which Mary so instinctively responded, surged violently within him, casting out all scope for rational thought. He lifted her and turned around, so that she was against the wall and he supporting her there, half by holding her and half by the pressure of his body against hers. Her legs wrapped around him - indeed they could hardly go anywhere else - and they stared for a long moment into each other's eyes. It seemed to Mary that she could see deeper into his soul than she ever had before. The sensation of her body vibrating to the pulse of his need was so strong that she almost felt she could hear the hum of it in the thick air between them, and she shook slightly with the knowledge that she would do anything that he asked of her. The layers of clothing between them seemed flimsy and unsubstantial, and the veil which social convention placed over their interactions, too thin at the best of times despite Charles's best efforts to really cover the essential truth of Charles's fierce longing and Mary's breathless thirst to be consumed into it, seemed gone completely. Charles's eyes were slightly wild-looking and Mary thrilled at being so completely in his power. After a pause during which time would have seemed to stand still were it not for the heavy ticking of the clock in their ears, the familiar expression returned gradually to Charles's face. The muscles in his face seemed to stiffen as if with great effort and then he relaxed into his habitual expression of respectful good-humour. With great gentleness he lowered Mary to the floor, and kissed her forehead and then her hands.
"Where's Ahasuerus when I need him?" Charles's laugh was shaky as he struggled to regulate his breathing. "I'm sor-"
"Don't you dare apologise again," Mary admonished him, quite severely. "Honestly, Charles. I've never known a man so determined to believe that a woman is accepting his embraces purely from the kindness of her heart! And it's particularly silly because I don't believe a woman has ever wanted a man in the history of the world as badly as I want you."
He stared at her a long while and then smiled the smile she had come to recognise over the past months as one which was only for her, a beam of grateful delight which crinkled his eyes.
"22 days," he said, to himself as well as to her. "In 22 days you'll be my lawful wedded wife. In the meantime, perhaps you should teach me to waltz. I think I can safely promise that the experience will kill any remnants of desire you have for me."
Mary laughed, half disappointed and half relieved at the step that had just been averted. "I'll teach you to waltz if you teach me ceilidh dancing," she agreed. So it was that when the under housemaid came into the room to see to the fire twenty minutes later, they were to be found standing close together but very innocently in the middle of the room, Charles laughing sheepishly and Mary fondly, to the strains of the blue Danube on the gramophone player. Charles started when the maid entered, having completely forgotten that servants in houses like the Duke's would not be in the habit of knocking, and cursed himself for a fool for having so nearly lost control in the Duke's drawing room. By the time the Duke returned from a very good dinner followed by not a few drinks at his club, the dancing lessons had long since been abandoned. Fully master of himself again, Charles was reluctantly rising from where he had been sitting in an armchair with Mary curled up in his lap, as naturally as though she had done it a thousand times, talking softly into the night. The two men met in the front hall, and shook hands with genuine cordiality. The Duke carried on into the house whistling cheerfully and reflecting that after all Mary could have married many a sillier chap. "A decent fellow, that Parker of yours," he remarked to his sister when he joined her in the drawing room, and then looked around half-guiltily, thanking heaven that Helen wasn't there to hear him.