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“But Peter,” said Harriet, sitting up out of his arms. “What did you do with the dog collar?”
Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey, very recently engaged to be married, were caught in an embrace in a meadow. They had gone for a drive, and Peter stopped them in just the same place where the need for the dog collar had presented itself on that long ago occasion: last week, and a lifetime ago. As solemnly as he had then requested leave to attempt to strangle Harriet, he parked the car, solicitously opened her door, and asked for the opportunity to make love to her there, to beat out his previous attempts at violence.
Harriet ought properly have laughed him off, but it was a beautiful day in Oxford, and she was giddy with a love finally allowed to bloom, powerful and torrential enough to convince a woman of thirty two to behave as an undergraduate of nineteen would.
And so Peter had drawn her through the gate and into the grass, onto the ground on which he had thrown her half a dozen times in that previous life, and she lay by his side, half upon his breast. They talked and dozed and passed the time while the sun moved above them, a careful observer and a poor chaperone.
But eventually the memory had come to her, and startled her away from Peter’s wide warm hand at her back.
“I’ll give you another,” Peter said. “Much smaller this time, to my disgrace, but gold. I hope you’ll forgive the difference.” He grasped her palm, twining their fingers together. “Of course I should have to take the measure of you for that purpose as well.” He squeezed her hand.
“Oh, don’t say that.”
“No?”
“If it’s just another collar—”
He cupped her cheek. “No, dear heart, it’s another gift you’ll let me give you, much less liable to be smashed to bits.” He drew her down with his hand at the back of her neck. His other remained where it was, holding onto her tightly. “And you shall give me an equal one in turn.”
After an interval, Harriet returned to the original subject of her inquiry. “Of course you’re welcome to borrow it, as in the matter of the gowns.”
“Quite kind of you!” He tugged briefly at his shirt-collar, affecting a quizzical look. “But I don’t think the fit would be precisely the same.”
“No?” Harriet touched him under the chin, in a playful mood, but it drained out of her all at once when he took her by the wrist, keeping her hand in place. She became conscious of his heartbeat at her fingertips, steady as the sea.
She looked into his eyes then, caught in the false memory Miss Hillyard had given her of Peter at her bedside, the dog collar twisted in his grip. “I didn’t take very good care of that gift, either, did I,” she said gravely.
“It did its duty, as all good soldiers must.”
“And perished nobly for the sake of it?”
“That old lie! No, I’m afraid I unfairly took my anger out on it, but the patient shall pull through. It’s at the Mitre, safe among my things. It can be returned at your pleasure, with or without my name—it will be your name soon, in any case, won’t it?” He said this with pleasure, as if reminding himself of the fact.
Suddenly and without warning, Harriet burst out laughing. It bubbled up in her like a spring. She bent her head over Peter and began to shake with it.
“I see,” he said philosophically, petting at her hair and accepting his fate, “all my efforts at romance have come at last to their final resting place, buried under hilarity. I am grateful, my dear, that you showed restraint never treating my scheduled impositions this way.”
“Oh, be quiet,” she said affectionately, “it isn’t funny at all, I shouldn’t laugh—but what did poor Annie think of it, when she went for me and found that collar in the way? How terribly depraved, and she already loathed me.”
Peter reached up and cradled her jaw, so that they were nearly mirrors of one another. “Annie Wilson couldn’t see you as anything but a murderous harpy. I’m sure I don’t care a damn about what she thought.”
Harriet regretted bringing it up. “Don’t worry about it anymore, Peter.”
“Impossible,” he said fiercely. “Am I not to worry for the safety of my wife?”
He calmed in time, as Harriet pressed her forehead to his and murmured sweet assurances: “I’m alright, dear, I’m quite alright. Your ridiculous dog collar was of help after all. Couldn’t you be happy and say I told you so?”
“I’d have liked to be wrong.”
“I know.” At length, she continued: “Perhaps you ought to have one as well. Now that this business of the Poison-Pen is over, you’re more liable than me to be attacked in the night.”
“It won’t protect my ribs, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“We’ve established that the neck’s rather more vital.”
She had not taken her hand from his throat. Harriet, as an author of detective fiction, had given no small amount of thought in her life to the properties of the human jugular. Even before her wretched time in Wilvercombe, she could have explained exactly where to cut to deprive a man of his life’s blood. She traced that path now with the edge of one fingernail. Peter’s eyes did not leave hers, and he did not move an inch, holding himself utterly defenseless. Harriet was the one who swallowed.
“You really ought to,” she said. Her voice had dipped. She spread her fingers out across his throat, her thumb tucked against the soft skin beneath his jaw. The blood was hot there, though she was too hot herself to feel it. She remembered how it had felt to have Peter behind her, taking her life between his hands. Taking rather more than that.
“Well, jeweler, what ring size, then?”
“Peter,” she said, helpless, and he calmly took her other hand and brought it down to meet its twin. Harriet wrapped both hands around his neck, thumbs pressed together, middle fingers just meeting at his nape. They lay suspended like that for a time. She thought of herself in the mirror with the collar heavy against her neck. Her own fingers didn’t create such a gruesome look, and of course Peter wasn’t alone in the night and terrified. He was serene, all of him filled with light. Nothing like a lily. She couldn’t think what his throat was like beneath her hands—she couldn’t think of anything at all.
Harriet released him, breathing like a bellows. “You’re unfair,” she said somewhat senselessly.
“I’m exactly fair,” he argued, a lazy quality to the words. “Come back here. Give me a lesson, magistra! If we’re to begin again on the basis of equality, that’s only right.”
Flustered, Harriet found she could not deny him anything. She allowed Peter to pull her close again—she knelt above him, and strangely the indecency of it wiped away all her fears. Oh, the Proctor would have a fit; poor Miss Hillyard an apoplexy; the Dean would laugh herself sick to know Harriet Vane was behaving so inappropriately with her fiance under the open sky, and not even doing so correctly. She laughed again, and then abruptly stopped, her gaze finding Peter Wimsey’s tipped back throat. Her knee lost purchase for a moment; she would have indiscreet grass stains on her stockings.
Harriet pressed her thumb just at his Adam’s apple, frighteningly aware of all that lay beneath his skin. He had shown her, after all, exactly where he was delicate. She was unbearably conscious of more than his bones, more than his breath coming softly—she could think only of his heart, always worn so casually at his cuffs and then snatched away when she was near, now beating somewhere to the left of her right knee.
Peter looked up at her with the widest smile she had ever seen on his perennially cheerful face. It shredded Harriet to the marrow. What a fool I’ve been, she thought savagely at herself, how stupidly I’ve deprived myself, and him—but she could not hold onto her anger in the face of Peter here now, beneath her and languid, as glad as he had ever been.
She curled both palms around his throat and squeezed, and watched the color come to his cheeks, felt him try to breathe and find it beyond him. It unsettled her terribly, tightened her stomach like a knot, like another heartbeat. Peter swallowed and she felt it, a wave beneath her fingers. She pressed harder. He didn’t jerk beneath her. He hardly seemed conscious of the pressure at all, except for how his eyes fluttered closed, and he brought a hand up against her back, steadying her where she was shaking. Harriet could hear how he would reassure her if he had possession of his voice. He spoke it just as easily with his fingers.
Harriet let him go, and sat back onto her heels, still atop his chest. She was breathing as hard as he was, maybe harder. Beneath her skin she felt like a kettle set on a flame but then abandoned in a hurry at some emergency—brought nearly to a boil and then left to cool without relief.
“Peter,” she said again. Words failed her as they so rarely did. But what good had words ever done her with him—except at the last, except when it really mattered. What were either of them without a library full of words carted behind them?
His breath was very loud. She felt frazzled and silly, and made to clamber off him. Peter sat up and caught her about the waist, and he looked her in the eyes again. It was as though they’d fallen off a punt together, tossed into the murky water, shocked into an absence of thought by the change. He held her fast with one arm, and with the other touched his own throat.
“A lesson I shall not soon forget,” he said, in a voice she had roughened herself. The flame caught again, and Harriet flushed everywhere. She lay a palm flat against his chest, and felt him struggle to regain composure.
His hand came up and pressed the place under her jaw that he had shown her, dangerous—and hadn’t he always been dangerous? Was he any less so now? He could snap her neck—he could have always done so without touching her. And rather than let the noose take her, he had wound one around his own neck, and smiled through it.
Dizzily—why was she dizzy—oh, but she was—she thought, we’re to be married. We’re to be married, and I have the measure of him. She had got that awful rope away from around his neck, and the both of them were free of it now.
Gently, he lay back down, taking her with him. There in the grass, with Peter Wimsey’s hand clasped loosely about her throat, Harriet found that all her worries had fled her like a flock of birds startled from a tree. Perhaps a few would come back and find their perches, but for the moment she felt loose and clear and easy as she had not been since her youth; and she would have the grass stains to prove it, and perhaps later the gift of a new pair of stockings, offered without regret.