They drove for three hours down sun-dappled lanes that snaked through the country like a river, up and across towards the north west. Mary did what navigating was necessary with quiet competence, and in between she watched Charles's hands on the wheel and the gear stick, or looked up to the trees and hedgerows that lined the road, with flutters of nesting birds darting about them. They had very little conversation, their sense of communion seeming too deep for any words of man's devising. They did not touch, but were acutely aware of each other's every breath and smallest movement. At length they reached the hotel at which they had arranged an overnight stay, a rambling limestone building set back from the road and flanked by ancient oak trees. Charles handed the car with some relief over to the hotel boy to park in the garages and they walked through the late afternoon sun, not yet overpowered by the incipient chill of an early spring evening, and up the front steps.
The hotelier showed them to their room, which was large and airy with cheerfully flowered curtains and bedspread and whitewashed walls, and left them. There was a silence of a very different sort than the peaceful and companionable one which had reigned in the car.
Mary exclaimed suddenly. "Oh! What a nuisance. I've left my handbag in the car." Charles smiled patiently. "I'll fetch it," he said, and set off down the stairs. Mary stood at the window and watched him crossing the drive of the hotel towards the garages before she turned and went quickly to the bathroom next door, then was struck by a sudden thought and rushed down to exchange a quick word with the hotelier.
The hotel boy was tinkering with some old cart wheels in the garage when Charles appeared. "Hullo there," Charles called to attract his attention. "My wife left a bag in the car - I'll just retrieve it." The hotel boy nodded, not particularly interested, but Charles's pride at this first causal reference to Mary as his wife was unbounded. He thought with delight of the countless such references he would make over the weeks, months and years to come, and felt that it was inconceivable the this pride should ever diminish. In this he was quite right, for although the novelty wore off, as all novelty must if it is given the time, he never introduced Mary as his wife without an unconscious stiffening of the shoulders and a secret triumphant smile. His step was very light for so solid a man as he half-jogged back to the hotel and up the stairs to their room.
There he found Mary standing by the window, looking pale and lovely as a lily in the afternoon light. He placed the bag carefully on a the writing table by the window, and then drew the curtains with slow deliberation.
"Come to bed with me, Mary."
There was no question mark in Charles's voice as he spoke and Mary thrilled to it. It seemed to her that she could feel the pull of her body, down to every cell insisting that she be his, every drop of blood rushing and pulsing, clamouring for her to be overpowered and completed by him. As if in a daze, she followed Charles to the large bed in the middle of the room. Charles began to undress her, slowly, reverently, kissing each new part of her body as he revealed it. He lingered long and lovingly on her breasts, the small of her back, her hipbones, and her senses reeled under his touch. The world seemed to have contracted until it consisted solely of Charles's mouth upon her, the soft, exploratory tracings of his large, rough fingers across her body and her own tentative responding caresses.
Through the vortex of sensations that this produced in Mary, she was increasingly conscious of a pounding pulse between her legs, an insistent drum beat of desire. Charles's eyes looked unfocused, as though he were drunk, as he clumsily unhooked her pale pink petticoat and she stepped out of her knickers. Standing naked in front of him at last, Mary was surprised to feel no awkwardness or hesitation. It was partly of course that he was so clearly staggeringly impressed - the look of awe on his face at one point made her wonder briefly whether he might be about to cry - but it was also because it felt so right and proper that they at last be simply male and female before each other, with everything else stripped away. Charles knelt before her and kissed her hand. "Mary, my love, my darling, my wife." His voice cracked with love and with desire. Still kneeling, he ran a trembling hand slowly up the inside of her thigh, along the delicate opening between her legs and then suddenly two of his fingers were inside her. She gasped in surprise, not so much at what had happened, for which her body was more than prepared, but at how much she responded to it. Charles's hands were very large and the sensation was intense, but her body urged her on to feel more. She had to fight down an impulse to press herself frantically against and into his hand.
Having found the response he had hoped for between her legs, and driven to a frenzy by this touch and by Mary's gasp of pleasure, Charles removed his hand, stood up and undressed very swiftly. Mary watched him fascinated, aching to touch him but hesitant suddenly, now that she was confronted by the force of his solid frame with no impediment between them. He stood wearing only his trousers and took her into his arms again. The touch of her naked chest against his firm solidity and the brush of the fine hairs of his chest and arms took her breath away. Suddenly he took her hand and pressed it to the part of his body she had not seen, at the same time slipping his fingers back inside her, and the drumbeat between her legs became almost deafening. She felt dizzy with longing. At the same time her heart lurched in trepidation, as the size and power of him impressed itself upon her in a new and alarming way. It seemed a matter of plain physics that he simply was not going to be able to fit inside her. Then with a cry unlike any she'd heard him make before, Charles pulled off his trousers, socks and underpants, and half lifted her onto the bed. She lay beneath him, her legs open, staring up into his eyes. There was no wildness or lack of focus in them now: he looked more like himself than she thought she had ever seen him, adoring, kind, and utterly masterful.
"Mary, may I?" He could hardly get the words out, and Mary could see what it cost him to ask and to wait for the answer. She nodded, and lifted her hips a little to help him find the angle. He entered her slowly and they both cried out. Charles's was a cry of euphoria; Mary's a cry of pain. Her body hadn't been prepared for the sheer size of him, apparently unending, and she briefly saw only blackness. She blinked and Charles's face swam back into focus - so familiar and so different at this new angle - wearing an expression of anguished concern.
"Mary, my darling, have I hurt you?"
"No," she lied, loving him with every atom she was made up of, "Charles, don't stop."
The relief on his face was almost comically pronounced. He kissed her deeply, and even through her pain Mary responded to the glory of having his tongue in her mouth at the same time that he was deep inside her. Then he thrust into her again and again - as gently as he could, though she didn't know it - and she wondered whether she could bear it. She closed her eyes and concentrated on his voice as he raggedly cried her name, and then after a short time she suddenly realised that the pain was gone. In its place was a physical sensation of absolute bliss. She was astonished. The feeling left her no capacity for coherent thought, and she reflected later that this must be the sort of oblivion for which all people yearn and seek in so many different ways. She opened her eyes wide and gripped on to Charles's strong arms, which were pressing into the bed near her shoulders and were taut from supporting his weight, and she braced herself to receive him as deep as she could. He kissed her briefly, transported with delight at her eagerness, and carried on, and each thrust now was harder than the last, until he suddenly let out a guttural cry and had his release.
Slowly he drew out of her, kissing her and caressing her with a shaking hand as he did so, and she was conscious of warm liquid spilling out of her at the same time. She was fascinated by her own feelings about everything - it should have been at the very least uncomfortable, surely, but she revelled in this physical remnant of Charles's passion inside her.
Charles lay back and pulled her gently into his arms. Her head rested on his chest and she lay half on top of him, her slight figure against his solid powerful one, encircled by his arms. She felt an overwhelming sense of peace, as if rather than just the absence of disturbance it were a positive presence in the room surrounding them. She didn't think of it in these terms, but it was the closest thing she had ever had to a religious experience.
For Charles the whole thing had been a religious experience, and as he held his wife and felt her breathing become gradually more regular against his chest, he quietly thanked God for the extraordinary fortune by which he should have existed on this strange spinning ball of dust in the vast expanse of space at a time when Mary existed too, and the still greater fortune that she should love him and willingly give herself to him. The design of so perfect a way for them to love each other, so impossibly wonderful a way for their bodies to merge and for a man to lovingly possess a woman, struck him as evidence of God's unfathomable benevolence. He lay still, in a suspended moment of perfect happiness.
The tides of lust temporarily receding, Mary's body became conscious of its surroundings again and she shivered suddenly. Charles was roused from his blissful revery, and gently disentangled his arms and legs from hers, in order to get up and pull the sheets and blanket over her. His eye fell on a small pool of pale blood, diluted with his semen, on the side of his own stomach across which Mary's leg had been draped.
"Mary," he burst out, horrified. "I have hurt you. I was too rough, too forceful." His happiness collapsed around him and he could think of nothing but that he had been driven by his lust to commit the unpardonable offence of hurting his delicate, trusting wife. Mary looked down and her face flushed. She wriggled up and performed with astonishing grace a sort of shuffle over to the chair by the window where towels were folded, tidied herself and returned to the bed with a towel for Charles. He sat up and distractedly mopped at himself, and his face was such a picture of dejection that Mary found the courage to speak.
"Charles, it was painful, but only for a little while. And I think - that is, I've been given to understand that it always is, and that there usually is a little blood. But just the first time, I mean."
Charles stared at her, astonished. "But it wasn't - I mean, it was for me, of course, but I thought - surely you -?"
He stumbled over the question, which now seemed an extraordinarily uncivil one to put to one's wife. He had taken for granted that given Mary's very involved romantic past and the defiantly bohemian outlook of her earlier years she had slept with at least one of the men whose histories he had been required to contemplate at such length when investigating the death of Dennis Cathcart.
"I mean - I know yours was a different world in some ways," Charles continued awkwardly, worried lest she should infer censure from his words. "And from what I know of Peter's amorous adventures - and Gerald's, in point of fact - it seemed natural that you too would have..." he trailed off in confusion.
Mary flushed again, not unaware of the irony in finding it so much more difficult to talk about these things with Charles than to do them with him. She swallowed and said "I dare say I would have done so, if I'd run away with poor, silly George that night. But only because we planned to be married. Not for moral scruples, I'm afraid, but because - well, it's different for women. Being an aristocrat doesn't endow you with any secret mechanism to escape pregnancy, you know, and if there are any truly fail-safe measures then I don't know about them. A maid of my mother's died of a failed attempt to get rid of a pregnancy when I was thirteen: I've never forgotten it. The risk has never been worth it. And I've never wanted to enough to make it a real temptation - not until you first kissed me and this wild and clamouring part of me soared into existence."
Mary had not looked at Charles during this long speech. He stood up and embraced her with a worshipful tenderness. She looked up into his eyes and added "I thought you knew. I mean - you're so virtuous about these things - thinking that I had already - didn't you mind?"
He kissed her slowly, almost thoughtfully. Then he said "No, not at all. I didn't think about it because it made me long to go and find Goyles and smash his face in for him - but because he wasn't worthy of you, not because I thought he'd taken something I had a right to. I mean, I don't think of you like that, as if you're a thing to be taken ownership of and whose value could be diminished by it, or a land to be conquered by a man sticking a flagpole in it."
They both laughed suddenly at the awkward aptness of the simile. Then Charles added, smiling, "But to know that I'm the first - and the last - the only man to have you, that you are mine and mine alone in every possible way - oh God!" He kissed her with the light, quick kisses of a man whose smile is too broad to kiss in the normal way. Then he said "I'm glad I didn't know, Mary. I would have been too frightened to touch you and I don't think I could have done it differently - more gently, I mean. But I'm desperately sorry to have been the means of causing you pain. Does it hurt now?"
Mary shook her head and then, marvelling at her own daring, put her hand on that part of Charles which the tightness of their embrace had caused to stiffen again already. "Not at all. You ... I mean - it is colossally big, though, Charles. Isn't it an awful nuisance?"
Charles laughed heartily and lifted her into his arms. He carried her over to the writing table by the window, and set her gently on it. "Sometimes," he admitted. "Particularly when you visit me at my office. I keep a large pile of files on my desk at the perfect height so that I can stand up when you come in and still be respectable. People are always trying to tidy them away for me."
Now Mary was the one laughing. Her laughter subsided into sighs of pleasure as Charles ran his hands all over her body, despite his words for all the world like a man charting a land of which he claims possession, and this time when he entered her she wrapped her legs around him and leaned back on the desk in unbounded welcome, crying out his name and feeling waves of pleasure transport her as he made her his own again and again.
They spent the following hours in bed, following the tides of desire flowing between frantic possession into languorous caresses and whispered endearments and back again. The sun set outside and they did not get up to switch on the gas lamps. They were both emboldened by the darkness, and the absence of vision enhanced the intensity of their remaining senses. They carried out solemn, curious, loving surveys by touch of every part of each other's bodies between kisses. Mary lay in Charles's arms at last, exhaustion and unquenchable excitement battling for dominance. She ran her hand gently up and down one of the arms which encircled her. "I've always loved your forearms, Charles, since the first moment I ever saw you with your sleeves rolled up."
"Good gracious. They're just arms," Charles replied, honestly baffled.
"Oh, no. They're solid and capable and strong, and I think the hair makes them feel sort of unknowably masculine to me. I suppose it's the sense of power, mixed with how good I know you to be - that you couldn't use your strength to hurt me but only ever to keep me safe."
"Oh God, yes, Mary" Charles exclaimed. "You must believe that. All I want - all I have wanted for so long - is to use all the strength and resources I have to serve you."
"I know," Mary replied, blissfully. "I feel utterly invulnerable when I'm in your arms. I never want you to let me go." These sorts of confessions were much easier to make when there is no light to show whether the speaker is blushing, but Charles replied seriously, disentangling himself,
"Well, I must let you go, but only extremely briefly." He got up and groped his way over to the gas lamp, and lit it. "I couldn't go another minute without seeing your beautiful face," he explained apologetically, taking her immediately into his arms again and stroking her cheek with the back of his forefinger. In fact being able to see all parts of his wife again had the effect of renewing the lusts which Charles had thought the last few hours must surely have sated, and in moments their movements were urgent and questing again. The clock from the church which stood just across the road from the hotel struck eight just as Mary was arching her back with pleasure in response to Charles's ministrations.
"Good Lord," said Charles, removing his mouth slowly from the space between her breasts and sitting up mournfully. "Eight o clock! I suppose we'll have to go down or the woman will run up and summon us for dinner."
"Are you hungry, Charles?"
"Not at all." He couldn't imagine ever experiencing so banal a feeling as hunger again.
Mary smiled, and pulled her husband back down to lie opposite her again. "I told the hotelier that my husband is a very important chief inspector from Scotland Yard who works terribly hard and is badly in need of a great deal of rest, and that they mustn't be surprised if we slept through both tea and dinner."
Charles's gaze was one of pure adoration as he laughed and immediately resumed his previous activities. Though his voice was muffled, it was clear enough for Mary to hear him pay her many compliments on her foresight and intelligence before his words trailed off and she surrendered blissfully to his love yet again.
Mary was inclined to think less well of her own foresight and intelligence at six o' clock in the morning when she woke and even through the ecstasy of waking to find herself in Charles's arms noticed that she was extremely hungry. The hearty breakfast which had occasioned her sister-in-law's raised eyebrow and her perfectly sensible luncheon at the wedding breakfast seemed a very long time ago and unlike Charles, who frequently had to delay or miss meals in the course of duty, her body strenuously objected to the absence of any tea or dinner since. After a time she crept out of bed - Charles stirred but did not wake - and over to the window, where she opened the curtains enough to let in a small amount of pale moonlight giving way to the first touches of dawn. The light was not enough for Mary to find her dressing gown by, and though she knew she had worn it to the bathroom at some point during the previous evening she couldn't remember where she had been standing - sitting? Kneeling? Lying? It could have been anyone of them - when Charles removed it. But she found his shirt across the back of the chair and enfolded herself in it. She curled up in the chair and opened the handbag into which she had tidied the little bundles of sweets which her nephew had strewn into the car yesterday, and she sat in the rapture of love triumphant watching the sunrise gradually creep across the room and illuminate the crumpled, stubble-prickled features of the man she loved and who, at long last, she need never leave again.