Page 8 of The Missing Page
Leo quickly shook his head. “It was fine.” A gust of wind blew across the drive, making them both draw their coats across their chests and carrying with it a faint hint of salt, the only reminder of how close they were to the sea.
“I’m glad you’re back,” James said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Well, that was probably just because he hadn’t yet realized how abnormally Leo was behaving. Leo felt that he ought to point that out, but instead flicked the brim of his hat and winked. “See you in a couple of minutes.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Over half an hour passed, and still Leo hadn’t returned. James’s first thought, naturally, was that the car had exploded. He had no idea what carburetor caps did and doubted that their sole function was to prevent explosions, but that did little to put his mind at ease. Historically, his mind was not much inclined toward anything resembling ease in the first place, and during the past two months he had learned to live with a constant thrum of worry where Leo was concerned.
Earlier, he had watched Leo move, looking for signs of injury, and thought he saw some stiffness on the man’s left side. There were certainly faint circles under Leo’s eyes and a palpable weariness about him. He looked like he needed a couple of aspirins and some comfortable pajamas, and then to be tucked in to bed and left there for a long while.
The last time Leo returned from a mission, James had been at his kitchen table, about to have a solitary dinner of tinned soup and toast. When he answered the door and saw Leo, he had abandoned the soup and taken Leo straight to bed. He was extremely annoyed that he couldn’t do that now. He ought to have taken Leo up on the offer to leave Blackthorn. They would be home by midnight, and Leo could sleep as late as he pleased in James’s bed.
Another quarter of an hour passed, during which time a bottle of whiskey materialized courtesy of Sir Anthony. If nothing else, the man at least had the good sense to produce hard drink when the occasion called for it. James concluded that if there had been an explosion, he probably would have heard it, which offered some comfort.
A knock sounded at the door, but it was only Mr. Trevelyan’s driver arriving to take him home. James couldn’t sit still, so he paced the room, smoked a cigarette, pretended to look out the window, and then had another cigarette.
In any other circumstance, James’s edgy mood might be glaringly obvious, but nearly everyone else in the drawing room seemed either preoccupied or as nervous as James was. Lilah and Cousin Martha sat together on the sofa, discussing Lilah’s upcoming film. In a wingback chair, Sir Anthony leafed through a newspaper, turning the pages almost violently. Camilla lounged on an old-fashioned settee with her eyes half shut.
Madame Fournier approached James at the window. “When the night is so dark,” she said, her accent generically Continental and impossible to pin down, “a window is nothing more than a mirror. You do not strike me as a vain man, Dr. Sommers. Perhaps there is something else you regard in the window?”
Good Lord. What was a man meant to say to something like that? “Just debating whether it’ll be too cold to walk to the sea in the morning,” he said, aiming for bluff good cheer.
“It seems to me,” she answered, “that you and I are the only ones who find these goings on—how does one say—amiss? The little fair-haired one, she thinks it is droll. The rich ones, they think it is an annoyance. But you and I, we know it is wrong.”
This seemed quite impertinent, and even more so for being accurate. For twenty years, James had believed that Rose died in a swimming accident, and for almost as long he had understood this swimming accident to be a polite fiction disguising a suicide. He tried to remember why he was so certain of this, and had to wonder if it was simply because her death was hushed up in the same way his father’s had been, and took place only a few months later.
But if Uncle Rupert believed that something else had happened to Rose, James was entirely at sea.
“Who would have wanted to do away with Miss Bellamy?” asked Madame Fournier, giving voice to the suspicion that James hadn’t wanted to think about.
He dug his fingernails into the meat of his palm and drained the rest of his whiskey. “I beg your pardon,” he said, aware that he was resorting to stuffiness because he had no other sane manner of reacting.
Instead of looking at the strange woman beside him, he fixed his gaze on a vase of dried chrysanthemums that sat on the chimneypiece. The mums looked dusty and might have been picked any autumn in the past twenty years. The vase—a dark green art nouveau number with painted lilies—James remembered distinctly, as it had always been in precisely that place.
And then he realized why all these remembered details had unsettled him: under ordinary circumstances, houses didn’t remain unchanged for twenty years. Paintings were moved around. Carpets became too worn to be serviceable and were replaced or removed. Walls were repapered. Vases were shifted from the mantle to the sideboard.
Blackthorn hadn’t been preserved; it had been left to molder.
He had always assumed that life at Blackthorn carried on much as usual even after he was sent away, even after Rose was gone. He had supposed that the whirl of picnics and tennis and parties and dancing continued. But it seemed that Blackthorn had stopped living in 1927.
“It is what everyone is thinking,” said Madame, dragging James back to 1948. She was either unaware of or unbothered by James’s rebuff. “Or, it ought to be. It is certainly what I am thinking.”
James’s gaze traveled to Martha, who sat on the couch, pulling at a loose loop of yarn in her cardigan as Lilah gesticulated animatedly. “You’re wrong,” he said abruptly. “I mean, you and I aren’t the only ones worried. Martha—Miss Dauntsey—is worried too.”
“Worried?” Madame eyed him curiously. “That is not what I said. But yes, you are worried, I see that. Miss Dauntsey, she is not worried. She is distressed, and it is not new. It has nothing to do with the will or this gathering.”
James raised his eyebrows. “I was under the impression that you hadn’t met one another before today.”
“One can see that she wears her worry like an old coat.”
“Do I wear my worry like an old coat?” James asked, mostly to himself. He desperately wished that Leo would hurry up, because he had a most alarming suspicion that this conversation was about to take a turn toward the spirits of the vasty deep and he was too tipsy to keep a straight face. “How did you say you knew my uncle?” he asked. The more this woman talked, the less he could imagine her having anything to do with any Bellamy, alive or dead. She had to be one of the former Blackthorn servants mentioned in Uncle Rupert’s will, but James didn’t see how that could be possible without Camilla or Martha recognizing her.
“I didn’t,” she said, and before he could press her, James heard the front door open and shut, followed by the sounds of conversation drifting in from the hall.
James could recognize Leo’s voice—a trifle louder and heartier than usual, decidedly alive and not the victim of an explosion—but also that of another man.
Carrow appeared in the drawing room door looking apologetic and still wearing his heavy coat and flat cap. “Mr. Page’s car broke down,” he said to Martha. With that, he made a perfunctory gesture toward the brim of his cap, clapped Leo on the shoulder, and took his leave. Well, that was Leo. James supposed Leo had been given a hot supper and also the Carrows’ life story in the past hour or so.
