Page 4 of The Affairs of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #2)

At the end of the most embarrassing hour of his life, Joseph Cowling seated himself, fully dressed again, in the chair across the desk from the doctor.

The chair was antique, Sheraton or one of those – Cowling was no expert, but he had visited enough rich men in their houses to know one when he saw it – and the desk was large and handsome; the carpet underfoot was Persian and must have cost a few bob.

Most telling of all, the doctor chap – specialists, they called themselves these days, when they were expert in some particular field – was wearing a very fine pair of hand-made shoes: William Lobb, if he was any judge, ten guineas if they were a penny, not new but lovingly polished.

Cowling could see them down there, below the desk, and they reassured him.

A doctor who could not afford the best would not be one Joseph Cowling cared to consult; and a man who did not take care of his boots was not someone Cowling wanted to know.

He had been in the shoe trade all his life, started off as a ’prentice cobbler in a village in Leicestershire, and now owned three factories and was rich enough to lend money to the King.

He tended to judge men by their footwear – and it wasn’t such a bad benchmark, either.

‘Well, then, Sir Grenville,’ Cowling said, because he’d sooner get down to business than wait about feeling nervous, which was not a natural state for him, ‘what have you got to tell me?’

Sir Grenville Kennet folded his hands on the desk in front of him. ‘I have no definitive answer for you,’ he said. ‘From my examination I cannot find anything functionally amiss. You seem, indeed, to be both in the prime of life and at the peak of health.’

Cowling was taken aback. ‘What’s going on, then?’ Kennet had been recommended as the best. Was this all he was going to get?

Kennet did not exactly smile – that would not have been appropriate – but his handsomely-carved features softened just a fraction.

‘Yours is not an uncommon problem,’ he said.

‘In fact, I should say that most men suffer from it at some point in their lives. To one extent or another. Sometimes it is a fleeting thing, at others, as in your case, it can persist for a while. It is something about which I am often consulted.’

He said it as though Cowling should take some comfort from the knowledge. Safety in numbers, was that it? But he was not paying top brass to a top man to be told he was just like everyone else. ‘Aye, well, you should have an answer, then, shouldn’t you, after all that practice?’ he said roughly.

Kennet resumed, unflurried. ‘You say that you had no difficulties with your first wife? Quite so. Well, where there is no illness or physical abnormality, one can only surmise that the problem lies in the mind.’

Cowling bristled. ‘What are you saying now? That I’m touched? That I’m milky in the filbert?’

‘The human mind is a complex and mysterious organ, Mr Cowling, about which we know almost nothing. But ultimately it controls everything we do. I take it that your present wife is, shall we say, receptive?’

‘She’s a jewel,’ Cowling said shortly. ‘She’s everything a man could want.’

‘Just so. Indeed. And a good deal younger than you?’

‘She’s eighteen.’

‘Hm.’ He steepled his fingers and stared judicially off into the distance.

‘It is possible, you know, for the mind to interfere with what should be a perfectly natural function. Imagine, if you will, a schoolboy called out to recite before the class. He knows his piece off by heart, but with all eyes upon him, he is struck dumb, he cannot bring forth a single word.’

‘And gets a thrashing for it, like as not!’

‘Indeed. But, my dear sir, he will grow out of his shyness. He knows his stuff all right; and in time his confidence will grow, his mind will allow his body to relax, and he will . . . rise to the occasion.’

If Kennet had smiled at that point, Cowling might have forgotten himself. But he remained perfectly grave. Cowling breathed out hard, considered, and said, ‘What am I to do, then?’ He hated to hear his own voice come out so pleading. He hated not to be in charge.

‘Be patient. You are a perfectly well man, Mr Cowling. In time everything will come about. Nature will take over. Nature is a powerful force, you know, and will not be denied. Carry on with your life, approach your wife as usual and try not to fret. The less you think about it, the more likely it is that you will succeed. It will happen in its own good time.’

‘Aye, well, I’d sooner it happened in my good time.’

Sir Grenville stood and offered his hand across the desk to indicate the séance was at an end.

Cowling stood too, but eyed the hand with disfavour. He didn’t feel he’d got value for his money. ‘I thought you’d give me something – some jallop or other.’

‘I’m afraid there’s nothing that would help.’

‘Mebbe I’d have been better consulting a veterinarian,’ Cowling said grumpily. ‘At least they always give you a ball, or a drench.’

‘There are quack remedies on the market, Mr Cowling, but I assure you they are worthless. I would not insult you by offering you some useless palliative. I respect you, and myself, too much for that. Please be assured, the problem will right itself in time. The essential thing is not to worry.’

A little later Joseph Cowling emerged onto Harley Street in the pallid March sunshine, a poorer man by the specialist’s reassuringly hefty fee, but not much the wiser.

But Sir Grenville had said there was nothing wrong with him.

He’d been definite about that. Don’t think about it, he’d said.

Cowling was not sure that was helpful advice.

As well tell a man to walk three times round a donkey and not think of its tail.

He stumped away to his business meetings, with humiliation like a lump of something unpleasant in his breast pocket.

Nina – Mrs Joseph Cowling – had jumped at the opportunity, when Mr Cowling suggested it, of accompanying him up to London.

‘I’ve business to do, so I shan’t be able to squire you about,’ he’d said apologetically.

‘But I thought you might visit your aunt and do some shopping and p’raps meet a friend. ’

‘I’d love that,’ Nina said, her face lighting in a way that Mr Cowling noticed with a small pang.

He’d been busy as a cat with ten kittens since Christmas, but he hadn’t been too busy to notice that his bride didn’t seem as happy as he’d hoped.

He’d promised her a honeymoon trip when things quieted down, but they never had.

She’d said she didn’t mind, bless her, and she never complained, but when a man of forty-six marries a girl of eighteen, he’d better not take her for granted.

‘Buy yourself some pretties,’ he urged. ‘You can have everything charged – everyone knows who I am. But just in case . . .’ And he had thrust a handful of banknotes into her hand, which she had later counted and been slightly shocked by.

Nina had been trying hard not to let it show that she was restless and bored.

But when she called on her Aunt Schofield in Draycott Place, and her aunt, who had brought her up since she was orphaned at the age of ten, asked with routine politeness how she was, she couldn’t help letting it spill out.

‘Northampton is so dull, Auntie! The married women I meet are much older than me, and all they talk about is their children and their servants and their ailments. The only time I have a proper conversation, it’s with Decius.

But he’s so busy, it’s hardly more than once a week that he has time to chat.

’ Decius Blake was Mr Cowling’s secretary and factotum.

Aunt Schofield seem to recoil slightly. ‘My dear Nina,’ she protested. She was watching Nina’s little dog Trump bustle round the room, sniffing all the new smells, and interrupted herself to say, ‘If that dog makes a mess—’

‘He won’t. He’s very good now. And I made sure he went outside before we came in.’

‘I’d have thought you’d have left it at home. London is no place for a dog.’

‘But Mrs Mitchell hates him so, I was afraid something might happen to him if I left him. That’s the other thing,’ Nina rushed on, suspecting she was about to be stopped.

‘I thought I could do things about the house, but Mrs Mitchell simply hates any interference. I moved a little table the other day because it was in my way when I went to the window, and she came and quizzed me about it and said everything in the house was the way Mr Cowling liked it, as she should know having been his housekeeper for twenty years. I don’t understand,’ she went on, forestalling her aunt’s indrawn breath, ‘how she even knew I’d moved it.

I think Nellie must have told her. I’m sure the servants spy on me.

The only thing I’ve managed to change is that we have Gayetty’s Medicated Squares instead of newspaper in the privy.

And Mrs Mitchell only agreed to that because it frees Nellie from having to cut up the newspapers and gives her more time for spying. ’

She paused for breath and Aunt Schofield seized the moment.

‘My dear Nina, listen to yourself!’ she said.

‘I didn’t expect this flood of complaint.

You were fully aware when you accepted Mr Cowling that your life would change.

You were not forced into the marriage. I took pains, indeed, to make you think hard about it.

And now, because married life is not perfect in every respect—’

Nina broke in. ‘I miss your parties, and your friends. We had such wonderful conversations. About everything in the world. But all Mr Cowling’s friends discuss at dinner is business, and their wives! Mrs Amberley, for instance, talks endlessly about the trouble she has with her teeth .’