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It’s well past midnight when the knock comes.
Harriet Vane knows this in her subconscious because she’s been staring at fictional clocks for over two hours now, the scattered papers of her novel over her desk, her pen forgotten under one of Paul Alexis’s Russian novels, the tick-tock of the clock in the room mocking her creative subconscious over not solving what seems to be a simple problem. Harriet drinks another gulp of whiskey. She knows she shouldn’t indulge in such things, especially when she has to look at the cipher codes in the morning. The words fluctuate on the edge of her vision: dermatoglyphics, complaints, nightmares, journal, destroying, binocular, shockingly…
The knock comes again, and she rises to her feet, still unsure that she’s hearing it right. A knock at this hour seems silly, a distraction her own brain is trying to create so she doesn’t have to fix the town clock problem for Robert Templeton.
Harriet gets to the door of the small room, and opens to find none other than Lord Peter Wimsey standing there.
“How did you get here?” she asks, the first thing that comes to her mind. He’s taller than she remembers, or maybe it’s the whiskey, making her head swim.
“I walked,” he answers nonchalantly. “First to the pub with that boy Jem, and then to the Inspector, but he wouldn’t hear what I had to say. I think that man thinks I’m rather silly.”
“Aren’t you, though?” Harriet asks, her tongue loose because of the alcohol.
“Dear Miss Vane, please, let me maintain the distant illusion that the work I do here is godly and unparalleled. Every small discovery unravels a new part of the mystery. It’s quite entertaining, even if it means running around chasing Russian mannequins, what?”
He doesn’t wait for an invitation to come in, and Harriet is glad, because she doesn’t know if she can consent to it. She smells it on him too, the alcohol, and the blurriness of his eyes, the smoothing over of his manners. She should kick him out, turn him around and send him back to Bellevue. He could find his way there on his own, before Mrs Lefranc comes knocking on her door hearing the voices.
Instead, she gets another glass. Pours one for him too.
“Drinking, are we?” Peter asks, good-humouredly. “Templeton giving you trouble, is he?”
“Yes,” Harriet replies. “He’s starting to talk like you. It’s become something of a nuisance.”
“Not like my own intruding presence here, I hope.”
Harriet smiles, hands him the glass. Peter drinks, his hat on his knee, his posture relaxed. She’s never seen him like this. There’s always an aura of undeterred energy around him, an unstoppable force in pursuit of justice and truth. Here, in the quietness of this room, there is just the two of them. She’d almost rather them be naked, it sounded more proper and fairer than whatever was happening now.
“If you want to help with the cipher, I’m all ears,” she says.
Peter sighs loudly, a funny noise coming from him, always so composed.
“Oh, forget the cipher,” he replies. “Forget this murder case which we can never be sure is a murder only because both of us want it to be. I’ve had enough of clues and riddles and lies for today. Promise we’ll speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the outright and unimpeded truth.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Promise me, Miss Vane, oh dearest and most cruel of ladies.”
“I promise, if only you are to leave me alone.”
Peter smiles, a triumphant shine to his gaze.
“We should be allowed a few moments when we are only meant to be ourselves and nothing else,” he says. “It’s rather boring to have to pretend and talk in airs most of the time.”
“You never pretend,” she accuses. “And I dare say you’re never bored.”
“Well, mostly,” he concedes. “There’s always new adventure to be claimed for oneself on the horizon, if we look hard enough for it. I look for it, or I wouldn’t have crossed half of England to stand in such a small village only to find myself in the midst of a possible Bolshevik plot.”
“Or getting yourself mixed up in a case of a lady poisoning her lover.”
“Or asking said lady to marry me on sight.”
The conversation takes a sudden turn, as it always meant to do. It was a subject that was always there between them, and Harriet didn’t always know how to deal with it. Sometimes she treated it as a joke, and sometimes, she knew entirely it wasn’t.
“I’ll always be indebted for it,” Harriet reminds him, and it’s like putting up another wall, a reminder more effective for her sake than his.
“Damn your gratitude,” Peter says. “What a terrible, miserable word. Tasting arsenic is sweeter than listening to it.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“It’s all my fault, really,” Peter continues. “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t been so damned gentlemanly about it, mind you. Swooping in for your rescue, and thus placing you in the burden of eternal obligation.”
“You haven’t placed me anywhere I didn’t want to be,” Harriet replies, her tone haughty. This sounds like a rematch to their one conversation in the hotel, his confession playing on the background.
He came so she wouldn’t have to send for him.
He was vain to assume she’d call for him. That she’d even want him there. Now that he was here, though, there wasn’t much she could do about it. And he had been right, too. It was a trick of fate. He’d saved her, and now they’d both stand under this shadow, under this premise, where he could be magnificent and gallant, and she would be the maiden in his debt.
“I suppose I could have let your case rest.”
“Yes, indeed, and I’d be condemned a murderess.”
“It would have been quite interesting for you, I dare say. You could play the part well, my dear.”
The word slips out between both of them, isolated in this tiny room. He’d already called her darling and dear, but out in the daylight, the words got carried by the wind. Out in the daylight, they could be ignored, and Harriet would sleep in peace.
“It’s late, Peter.”
“So it is,” he agrees. He closes his eyes for a moment, and he looks peaceful. It’s a jarring sight, seeing him so devoid of armour, devoid of his usual chaotic energy. “I have asked many things of you of late, and I’m glad you keep saying no.”
Harriet blinks, surprised by this tone. Peter keeps his eyes closed, as if that gives him the courage to keep talking.
“I understand what we’re both to make of it,” Peter continues. “It’s nigh impossible to come to an agreement under those terms. It’s rather beastly of me to keep insisting, but I’m not a man to hide my feelings or obsessions. I’d rather make a show of them than have you bear it in silence. I grant you the only gift I can under these troubling circumstances, which is the right to mock me and answer me however you want. I’d rather always hear you speak your mind.”
Harriet, half stunned into silence, gulps another dose of her whiskey. It burns down her throat. Of all the things she’d thought about his idiotic proposals, she’d never considered them to be kind.
“So you’ll keep asking, then?”
“Alas, I’m not a ‘one word from you shall silence me forever’ type of man.”
“I believe you can’t be silenced in any matter at all.”
“Much to everyone’s grievance,” Peter adds. “And of course, if I keep talking, perhaps there will come a day where there will be a change of mind, or of heart, as that stands. You, Harriet, have rather vile control of both, which is one of your most admirable traits.”
“I think you do me great injustice,” she answers, more quietly this time. Her mind and heart have always been in disarray when it comes to Peter Wimsey. “But I’ll gladly reserve my right to say no. I’ve grown quite accustomed to it. I’m nothing if not a woman of habits.”
“A habit of getting herself caught up in other people’s murders.”
“I believe we’re more alike than we thought.”
Peter laughs, a good and hearty sound, and it breaks her walls. Harriet almost drops her glass, but holds it in the last second. All this talk is going nowhere. All this talk is making her lose the small remaining control she has over herself. All this talk seems inevitable, because they’ll be dancing with each other, if not literally, at least figuratively.
“I never doubted that,” he replies. “You have the same stubbornness and unwillingness to be corrected as I do. I suppose it’s why we end up in arguments. I suppose it’s why I refuse to take no for a final answer, and you never change your own. The wheels must keep on turning, or so the saying goes. I’m afraid I’ve lost some of my coherence at this point.”
“Were you ever very coherent to begin with?” She asks, not unkindly.
Peter only gazes at her, his gray eyes boring into her figure even in the dim light of the candles she’s lit for the room when she pretended she wanted to keep writing.
“I can’t ever promise you to be that,” he answers. “I can promise, however, that we might get somewhere, my dear undeterred Sherlock. Doesn’t this conversation sound somewhat new?”
“No, it sounds like a repetition,” she answered, trying to be cautious. That was the problem. She had to guard herself against his genuine question, against his unsmothered affections, and she often forgot. Harriet had guarded herself from the whole world, but around him, she was always forgetting. “I’m tired, Peter. Aren’t you? Don’t you get tired?”
He looks up at her, those sharp gray eyes like a storm brewing on the horizon.
“Of course I do,” he answers. “But what else can I do but carry on?”
He stands up, puts his glass on the table. There’s a slight imbalance to him, his feet a little wobbly. He opens up a genuine smile at her, takes her hand and plants a kiss on the back of it. It’s a gesture of companionship more than romance, and Harriet finds that she doesn’t have any objection to it.
Peter walks over to stand at the door, his eyes still sharp even after they’ve drunk so much, even when their breaths smell of alcohol and the whole room could light up on fire from a single match. That was how it was, Harriet realized. When she was with him, any room could end up in flames.
He holds his hat in his hand, his tie in disarray, and he asks her again, when the light outside is dark and not even ghosts can hear them.
“Harriet, will you marry me?”
And for a moment, Harriet almost says ‘yes’.
She’d wanted to say yes, maybe for a while, the desire buried deep inside of her. Her fear, unspoken, the way they both played around the words. The way Peter would keep asking as a form of joke between friends until their answers became natural, until they were both talking like there wasn’t any bigger feeling held there, until it became a part of who they were with each other.
Because she knows it’s the fear of losing the one thing she’s fought to have all her life, because yes, love is losing a part of yourself, because it’s breaking your walls and tearing down the part of you that’s wholly your own, because if she lets herself say yes she knows her life will change forever and Harriet Vane fought hard to have what she has now.
She could almost glimpse into the future. She’d say yes, he’d slide his signet ring to her finger, because he’d forgot to buy a ring—of course he would, and she’d laugh, and he’d make an outrageous remark, and they’d stay with their hands clutching each other tight, and they’d never let go. In a world where she could let herself be careless and free, those were going to be treasured moments.
She’d say yes to this ridiculous, almost preposterous man standing before her, imagine a life that could be unpredictable but never boring, because that’s what marrying Peter meant. She would never be bored.
Harriet didn’t know if she could live with that.
“Absolutely not,” she said instead. “Good night, Peter.”