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Similarities. “I had to solve a Vigenère cipher recently. It nearly broke my will to live.”
Miss Holmes, however, displayed no sign that she was feeling remotely similar to Miss Elizabeth Bennet at Pemberley: superbly impressed and duly regretful that she had let go of this man instead of fighting for him tooth and nail when she’d had the chance.
Mrs. Watson was giddy merely from being in the vicinity of the desire that smoldered beneath Lord Ingram’s tweed-clad decorum. Miss Holmes ought to feel a maelstrom of butterflies in her stomach, at the crosscurrent of so much physical attraction.
Her abiding interest in what would end up on a dining table, hers or anyone else’s, for that matter, used to strike him as completely at odds with the cool ferocity of her mind. To his younger self it seemed that a person ought to be one or the other, a thinker or a gourmand, but not both.
It was the first time he’d told anyone how they ought to be. It also happened to be the last time: He had been beyond mortified that she’d treated his considered commentary as if it were an ant that had crawled onto her jam tart.
“Well,” said Fowler, “I always enjoy a case more once witnesses start quoting Shakespeare, don’t you?”
“Lady Avery and Lady Somersby characterize her as odd, grandly odd. What do you think?” Lord Ingram picked up a paperweight from his desk and turned it around in his hand. “If I were to think of it at all, I would be struck by how grandly and inhospitably strange the world must appear to Charlotte Holmes.”
“I was rather hoping, given how starchy you are in public, that in private you might be a man of varied and somewhat depraved tastes. I must say I’m not disappointed.”
“Obviously, despite my starchiness, I am not a very good man. I’ve wanted to punch him ever since that day last summer—every time we came across each other.” “Why? You could have slept with me at any time since I was seventeen.” And therein lay the rub, didn’t it? He’d been massively wrong about what he wanted—and needed. “Maybe the one I really wanted to punch was myself,” he said.
In the morning, Treadles almost couldn’t face his wife across the breakfast table. His cheeks kept flaming as he ate his toast and fried eggs. They had made love three times during the night and done things to and with each other that he hadn’t even known were within the realm of possibility.
You go, Alice!
One side of Lady Ingram’s mouth curved down, the side where her beauty mark had been. A woman on the run couldn’t afford such a distinguishing characteristic; now there was only a slight dent. The dent on Constantina Greville, at the same spot, must have been to disguise the fact that she had never had a beauty mark.
Thank goodness. I was afraid they thought twins would have the same birthmark. Yay for gene expression differences during development!
