Page 11 of The Missing Page
“Evidently, Granddad didn’t put much stock in that explanation,” said Lilah, still paging through the will. “I suppose it might have been wishful thinking on his part.”
Leo frowned doubtfully. “Let’s say it’s not wishful thinking, though. If your grandfather had reason to believe that Rose’s death wasn’t what everyone had always assumed, then he must have believed that the truth was important enough to warrant discovery even though he wasn’t around to see it.”
“Which means,” Lilah said, perching on the edge of the desk, “that he probably suspected she was either killed or she ran away and was still alive.”
“I think I’m mostly disturbed by the idea that for all those years, your grandfather had doubts,” James said. “Do you think he kept it to himself? Has Martha or your mother ever said anything?”
Lilah gave James an odd look, and for a moment she looked much older and more jaded than she ought to. “They hardly ever mention Aunt Rose.”
Rose had such a larger-than-life presence in his childhood that James felt vaguely appalled at the idea that people might pretend she had never existed.
But evidently Rose’s existence had been swept under the rug as thoroughly as James’s father’s had been. It bothered James, the idea that the entirety of a person’s life could be wiped away by the manner in which they left it. He was over thirty years old and he knew almost nothing of his father. Aside from the photograph that his uncle had, after all these years, chosen to give him, James had nothing to remember his father by, not even anecdotes that had been passed on to him secondhand. He didn’t even know anyone who had known his father—except, he supposed, Martha, Camilla, and Sir Anthony, and they had all excised themselves from his life, or he from theirs.
Leo was looking at him now, not with concern, but with a sort of gentle carefulness that made James need to look away so he didn’t blush. “It was all so long ago,” James said. “I don’t know how we’re meant to get to the bottom of it.”
“Well, with a little bit of digging we ought to be able to uncover the bare bones of the situation,” Leo said, returning to the sofa. “There’s no mistaking someone running off with someone getting murdered, not unless somebody went to a great deal of effort. Or so I imagine,” he added, making James bite back a smile. “I mean, if a person goes for a swim and drowns, there will be evidence of the swim. There will be people who see her with a towel on the way to the beach, for example. There will be clothing or a towel left on the sand. If she runs away, there will be items missing from their belongings. Nobody runs off empty-handed.”
“And murder?” Lilah asked.
The words hung heavily in the air until everyone agreed that it was time to go to bed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“What’s this about?” Leo asked when they were upstairs in James’s room. He traced his thumb over the line that had appeared between James’s eyebrows. Not one bit did he like the haunted look that kept chasing across James’s features.
James settled his hands on Leo’s hips and leaned in with a sigh, resting his forehead against Leo’s. Some of the tension drained out of his body, as if he had been waiting for this. Leo couldn’t resist ducking his head and brushing his lips against James’s. It was barely a kiss—Leo knew that once he started kissing James, he wouldn’t want to stop, and first they needed to talk.
“Every time we turn a corner,” Leo said, his lips moving against the corner of James’s mouth, “you’re ready to jump out of your skin. Downstairs you looked like you had seen a ghost.”
James huffed out a humorless laugh and pulled away. “This place is filled with ghosts. I just didn’t expect my father to be one of them.” He reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a small envelope, then tossed it on the bed.
Leo paused in loosening his tie and sat on the bed, then picked up the envelope. He raised a questioning eyebrow at James, who only gestured for Leo to go ahead. The envelope itself was old and yellowed but crisp and smooth, as if it had sat in someone’s desk for decades before being taken out and used. Across the front, James’s first and last name were written in a wavering hand. Leo slid a finger under the flap and unsealed the envelope.
Inside was a single photograph. A young man posed with two women and two little girls. The man wore an old-fashioned morning coat, a top hat, and a rather impressive mustache. The ladies wore the sort of gowns from before the Great War that made women look like they were about to pitch forward. Both the children wore pinafores and a profusion of ribbons. But Leo only spared the ladies and children a cursory glance. His attention was riveted by the gentleman, who looked so much like James that there was no questioning the family connection.
The mattress dipped as James sat by Leo’s side, close enough that their thighs touched. Leo automatically put his arm around James’s waist, still inwardly thrilling that he was allowed to do that.
“My father,” James said unnecessarily.
All Leo knew about James’s father was that he had been badly shell shocked during the Great War, was sent to an institution, and took his own life sometime thereafter. He also knew that James’s mother had remarried and left the country. This sequence of events had been recounted to Leo in a vague enough way that he was fairly certain James’s mother had run off with a man while James’s father was still alive. James had subsequently spent his childhood either at school or in the homes of various relations. “He was awfully handsome. The woman on the left is your mother?”
“Yes. The other woman is my father’s sister, my aunt Charlotte. The girls are Rose and Camilla.”
That evening, Leo had tried to detect a family resemblance between James and Lady Marchand, but beyond dark hair and a general air of patrician well-being, he didn’t see any likeness. Between James and Martha there was even less, and between James and Lilah there was none at all.
But this picture of James’s parents was an unexpected glimpse at his antecedents. It was like seeing what James could have been in different circumstances. James always had a wary air, lines around his eyes that had been earned by work and worry. This man in the photograph had none of it—not yet, at least. He flipped the photograph over and saw the date: June 1911. The man would lose that carefree quality soon enough.
“After my father was sent to the nursing home,” James said, “everybody did their best to pretend he didn’t exist. There were never any photographs of him, and certainly nobody mentioned him in my hearing. At the time I thought he had done something terribly shameful. After all, my mother ran off and nobody mentioned her because shehaddone something scandalous. So it all added up—my parents weren’t mentioned because they were wicked, and nobody wanted to embarrass me by reminding me of their existence.”
As far as Leo cared, it was an unspeakable luxury to be born into a family that could feed and house a child, to parents who had probably loved and wanted a child. To have that memory whisked away by relatives—however well-meaning—seemed to Leo so shortsighted as to be very nearly depraved. When a good many people hadn’t any family at all, or who had families that were actively terrible, it seemed a shocking waste.
“How old were you when your father went away?” Leo asked, squeezing James’s thigh.
“I’m not certain. I was born during the war, so I suppose he was ill my whole life. I certainly never knew the man in this photograph. When we visited, he didn’t really talk.”
Without knowing more, Leo couldn’t say whether Rupert Bellamy had been motivated by spite or by something else. This photograph that James now regarded as if it were an undetonated grenade might have been meant for James to think of his father in his prime. Or it could be a cruel reminder that James came from what the deceased regarded as bad stock.
At best, it was thoughtless to force James’s hand in coming here, confront him with an uncomfortable bit of family history, and then make him think about his cousin’s untimely death. Leo did not think very highly of this Rupert Bellamy.
