had handsome eyes, large and clear and grey, and his mouth was narrow but expressive.
"I have been insufficiently cautious, I find," he said, and offered her his arm. It was well-muscled, if lean. They walked away together towards the Rue de Richelieu.
"I hope you do not have much cause for concern," she said. "If your nemesis indeed ended at the bottom of the Falls?"
"Yes," he said. "After I shot him, of course."
They had dinner in another of the small anonymous cafés, sitting on the sidewalk with the noise of conversation and carriages around them. "Some of his lieutenants have escaped the net," he said, waving an impatient hand, long-fingered and pale, "but they are not of his caliber. They are all watching Watson, in any case."
"I suppose," she said thoughtfully, "that you will find that an excellent excuse to give him."
He looked at her sharply.
"It is not always easy to be adored," she said.
"No," he said. Then his mouth twisted a little, in wry amusement. "The only thing worse, of course—"
She nodded, and looked down into her coffee cup.
Her prince had taught her that lesson, with his jewels and his exclamations of surprise. He had never imagined she would take his engagement so badly. He had thought she was a woman of the world. He had thought she understood—and so indeed she had understood, after the fact: she had been loved only as a flower, set upon the mantel in a vase, inevitably to be discarded with the cloudy water.
Even in that first moment of harsh pain, she had not regretted him in his person, not even on the rawest level—his broad shoulders, his strong mouth. All her anger was to have been so cheaply held, so easily cast off. She might have dismissed it as his weakness, not hers; but she had chosen him, after all.
She had taught him to regret her, though, and then she had forgiven herself the mistake: she had been only a girl then, not yet twenty, and after all she had learned quickly. Only to be adored was, in the end, nothing; to be adored by someone worthy, everything.
And oh, Godfrey was worthy, and she loved him, even if something wild and errant in her still fought and struggled against the necessary sacrifice of liberty and always would; but she could not have him without it.
"How did you learn?" she asked, abruptly. "What taught you—?"
"He married," Holmes said.
No need to ask who he meant, of course. "I encouraged it," he added. "I wished that he were not necessary to me, and so I convinced myself he was not; that I would do better for solitude." He smiled, that wry look again. "I have had more than enough leisure since to contemplate the irony of having successfully deceived myself, who could scarcely be led astray by the most dedicated attempts of all the criminals in London."
She did not ask him, of course, but there was a weary regret in his face that made her quite certain the two of them had never been lovers. He had thought of it, and rejected it, likely in defense of that same independence. Watson would have crossed that Rubicon for him, but he would never have left, afterwards. A line from the story recalled itself to her: He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer—some bitterness there, in Watson's words; he knew he had been refused, whether consciously or not. The marriage, Irene thought, had been some part revenge, and one startlingly complete, to have driven the man across the table into flight.
Irene had never before had the least cause to be grateful to that injustice which had made the sacrifice of her own virtue her own easiest road to independence, but at least she had never been tempted, afterwards, to think herself above such needs. "Will you go back?" she asked.
"Not while she lives," he said.
His room would have been untidy, but for the lack of possessions; no letters, no photographs, only a scattering of sheets of music on the windowsill and the dresser, and pieces of rosin for his bow left on the writing desk.
He was inexpert enough to confirm her suspicions, and taken aback by his own responses: a strange wrenched look on his face afterwards. She laughed at him softly, a greater kindness than pity, because he shook off the expression and came back into her almost fiercely.
Reputation had given her a dozen lovers, but in truth he was