Author's Note: this vignette is imagined as taking place just as Lord Peter leaves the Parkers in chapter seven of Murder Must Advertise. I've always thought it was inconceivable that Mary would be completely good-humoured about the attack on Charles (though clearly that works wonderfully for the tone and focus of the book), and have looked more closely at what she might have been feeling here. I also think she has an important role as being one of the few people who can and does challenge Peter on his behaviour (siblings' prerogative!).

Lady Mary showed her brother to the door, shutting the door to the bedroom with quiet decisiveness and not speaking until they were at the end of the hall. When she did so, her face was white with cold rage. The lightness of manner she'd shown in her husband's presence was gone, and a far less acute observer than Lord Peter could have told that he was in for a bad time.

"I've apologised to dear old Charles," he said, hastily, "and I really do mean it. I hadn't the faintest when I got into all this that the upshot would be bloodthirsty copy writers descending on your home and hearth."

"You should have thought of it, then. For a man who assumes so disgustingly superior an air of omniscience, you seem remarkably short-sighted when it comes to the consequences of your antics upon people who already have plenty of dangers of their own to contend with. I can't think when I've been more furious with you."

Lord Peter wisely refrained from suggesting the couple of examples which sprang immediately to his mind. "It must have been an awful shock to find the old boy in a crumpled heap in the hall," he said instead. I'm sorry about it, Polly, honestly. I'll take steps to deflect any more horseplay of this type in my own direction. Then at least only old Bunter will be left cradling my lifeless head by the front door."

Mary was indeed still reeling from the horror of the moments when she had thought that Charles was dead. Hearing him merrily rattling through lists of people who might like him out of the way in the course of the conversation they had just had had hardly helped settle her nerves.

"See that you do. You once told me that being loved was an awful responsibility, but loving someone very much is still worse. I'm never not worried about Charles. I can only hope, Peter, that one day you'll know the agony of loving someone more than your own life, and you'll see what you've done."

There was a pause during which her brother correctly judged that anything he could add would only make Mary angrier.

"It's as well that I didn't pursue the assailant," she added, savagely. "I'd have shot him in the face."

"He'd have deserved it," Peter agreed, appeasingly. "But honestly, I know it's bad, but Charles has taken harder blows than this. He's made of strong stuff."

"Not strong enough for my liking," Mary replied, her eyes still glinting with the cold blue fire of her wrath. "And not strong enough for you to treat him so cavalierly."

"Certainly not," Peter replied. He started to edge out of the door. "Truly, Polly, don't think I'd have merrily accepted risk to his life and limb if I'd foreseen it. Quite apart from the fact that he's my best friend, I don't forget that he's your husband and your children's father."

"Very well," said Mary, listening to distant but approaching sounds of small feet and voices and wondering whether the children's nanny was having difficulty in keeping them away from their father. "But if anything like this happens again, Peter, I shall shoot you in the face with absolutely no compunction and gladly swing for it."

"Duly noted, old girl," her brother murmured as he closed the door behind him. The look on her face did not suggest that she was joking.

Mary passed by the mirror in the hall as she went down the corridor and smoothed her fair hair. She had no time to reapply her make up, but she pinched her cheeks a little so that Charles shouldn't notice her pallor.

As she directed her steps to the bedroom again, she was greeted by the sight of her two children, aged three and two, standing mournfully outside the bedroom door with their nanny Emily holding firmly onto their hands.

"I'm ever so sorry, my lady," said Emily, whose kind but firm manner with her charges meant that it was rare for her to find herself in the position of having to explain herself to her employer. "They so wanted to see Mr Parker, and we heard him talking just now, so I said they could just listen at the door and hear if he's still awake and if he was we'd ask if they could come in."

Mary sighed. "Don't worry, Emily." The day had been extremely chaotic compared to the normal smooth running of the children's regular routine. Although mercifully they had both slept serenely through the dramas of the previous evening, Mary had not had time to attend to them as she usually would when they awoke. They had still been unbreakfasted and in their night things when Emily arrived, and since then their mother, who normally spent a great deal of each day with them, had barely seen them. She had told them that their father had been knocked over by a bus, on the grounds that it would frighten them less than the truth and that it might encourage Peterkin to be more sensible about keeping carefully to the pavements when they went out and about.

"You're perfect darlings," she told them, picking up little Polly, all fair curls and large wistful blue eyes, and kissing her on her slightly runny nose. "Listen, why don't you run along with Emily now and once you've had your supper and your baths, you can come in and gently - gently - have a hug with Daddy in the bed whilst I read your bedtime story?"

The prospect of hearing "The House at Pooh Corner" in the novel situation of their parents' bed rather than their own cots was enough to compensate for the disappointment of not immediately being admitted to the sickroom. "You can give Daddy this sword I found at the park," Peterkin said magnanimously, handing his mother a long stick. Mary set Polly down and stopped to kiss her son. "That's just the sort of sword Daddy likes best of all," she said, accepting it solemnly, and the children set off again down the hall back to the nursery.

She went into the bedroom and shut the door behind her. Charles tried to turn towards her, then winced and settled back into the pillows with a wry expression. She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece as she walked around to his side of the bed and sat down gingerly next to him. "You can have some more pain relief medicine in half an hour," she said, she said and put her hand to his forehead.

"Have you been reading your luckless brother the riot act?" Charles asked her.

"Yes, I have. And when you're sufficiently recovered, you and I shall have a long chat about this apparently extensive list of criminals keen to finish you off who might reasonably be imagined to have followed you home to do it."

Charles removed Mary's hand from his forehead and kissed it gently.

"My dear, I've been a policeman for two decades and though I've taken some blows I've never once been followed home to be beaten up or murdered. There are plenty of people with a reason to cordially dislike me, but it's rare for a policeman to attract sufficient concerted personal resentment for this sort of thing. That's the beauty of discharging an office and being a cog in a machine. Peter was right, we should have realised from the start that this reeks of his sort of show."

"But -"

"Mary, my worst enemies couldn't accuse me of being a reckless man, least of all with respect to the safety of my wife and children. There is some risk, inevitably, and that's why we have the revolver and we both know how to use it. But I promise you there's no reason to panic and assume that there's a man with a cosh and an ugly expression behind every corner. Perhaps you'd like to come here and lighten your wounded husband's heart with a kiss instead of reprimands?"

He attempted an appealing glance through his pained expression, and Mary found herself smiling down at him.

"Certainly not. If I wouldn't let you speculate about Peter's silly business for fear of raising your temperature, I'm hardly going to risk kissing you. I'll read you an improving book after I've spoken to Mrs Gunner about dinner, if you like."

"Hmmmm. All my books are improving," replied Charles, accurately enough.

"Very well, then. I'll choose the one I think I can most easily stand," was the cheerful reply of his wife, whose own tastes ran rather to historical romances. And so she read him a little from a commentary on St Luke's Gospel until it was time to bring him a suitably soothing meal and to take over the children when Emily went home. She brought them in, shiny and sweet-smelling from their bath, and tried to stem the tide of Peterkin's excited questions about the fictitious incident with the bus while she arranged them on the matrimonial bed so as to minimise the possibility of Charles being jostled by their wriggling limbs.

Polly fell asleep first, burrowed into her father's side like a forest creature. Exhausted by pain, Charles was next, his large hand resting lightly in his tiny daughter's golden head. Mary and Peterkin stayed up reading three long chapters in the fading daylight until at last hand in hand and, Peterkin only mildly protesting, they went off to the nursery. Mary came back in at length to retrieve Polly, gently dislodging Charles's hand before she slid her arms under her daughter who was small and slight but the astonishing dead weight that sleeping infants always are. Charles stirred, and Mary leaned forward to kiss him softly on the forehead before she lifted Polly into her arms and stole quietly out of the room.