Page 49 of The Missing Page
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” Leo said as she ushered them in. “Is Carrow here?”
“Been wondering when you’d show up,” Carrow said from the kitchen. He stood before a tray of cooling biscuits that bore a conspicuously empty spot. He had a crumb at the corner of his mouth. Leo fervently hoped he wasn’t going to disturb the peace of this couple.
“I’ll be quick,” Leo said. “But before I start, I want you to know that I can keep secrets, and so can James.” As he watched, Carrow swallowed and looked at something over Leo’s shoulder—his wife, Leo guessed. “How much was in that box? Was it the full twenty thousand?”
Something that was almost a smile crossed Carrow’s face. “God, no. Ten. I took five with me and paid the other five to John Davis—the chauffeur—for helping me.”
Miriam Carrowtsked. “Daft thing to do, burying money like that, I always said.”
“And you were right, love. In my defense, I was twenty-one. It seemed a grand idea at the time. I wanted to know that I could come back to it, if I ever got desperate.”
Leo supposed that it counted for something that he hadn’t been desperate, that for twenty years he hadn’t seen the need to try to dig up his inheritance. “Is that why you insisted the tree be planted? You knew you were going to run away, and you wanted a convenient hiding place for the money and a way to mark it?”
Carrow nodded. “I suppose Gladys saw me and couldn’t resist. Can’t blame her.”
Leo and James exchanged a glance. “We don’t think it was Gladys.”
“Who, then? Oh, bugger me. Marchand? He always was a shifty bastard. How did you know?” Carrow asked. “About me, I mean.”
“It’s just that you look remarkably like your father,” Leo said carefully, “once one knows what to look for. There was a photograph of you both standing next to a horse, both wearing almost identical riding kit. Can Martha and Camilla really not know?”
Carrow sank into a chair and gestured for Leo and James to join him. “People don’t see what they don’t want to see. Or what they aren’t expecting to see, I suppose. There were times I thought my father knew. How did you really guess? It can’t just have been the resemblance.”
“No, it wasn’t, and it took me until this morning, I’m ashamed to admit. The people who knew you best were quite certain you’d never take up with a man, but at the same time there were rumors flying about the village about you coming and going from the chauffeur’s quarters.” The chauffeur’s quarters, which were, Leo remembered, this very building. “There was gossip about you leaving your clothes behind. And your family talked about how you preferred to go about in trousers and crop your hair short. That all might add up to nothing, but it could also mean that the chauffeur was your ally, that he set you up with clothes and a place to get changed and then drove you off to wherever you lived the way you wanted to live.”
“Mostly I just sat around here,” Carrow said. Mrs. Carrow had come to stand beside him, a hand clamped over his shoulder. Carrow rested his own hand over hers.
“But Anthony Marchand found out.”
“He wanted to have me sent to an institution. For my own good, of course, and to spare Camilla the shame of having a deviant sister.”
“And so, instead of risking losing your freedom, you left,” Leo said.
“Yes, but also I had to get out if I wanted to be free. I couldn’t be Rose Bellamy. I couldn’t be the person they thought I was, and I couldn’t explain to them what it was I needed. I wanted to start fresh, and so I did.” He said these last words simply but not, Leo thought, without pride.
“I suppose that all I need to know is whether you want James and me to keep our mouths shut or whether you plan to come forward to inherit the estate.”
Carrow and Mrs. Carrow exchanged a look. “We’ve already talked about this,” said Carrow. “I don’t want the Bellamy estate. When I left, I made the choice to leave all that behind, and I meant it. I still mean it. What I have now, I earned. My life, my living, and my name are mine, and I don’t want to undo that.” He turned his attention to James. “You’ve turned out every bit as well as I knew you would, Jamie.”
There was nothing to risk, not in this company, so Leo reached out and squeezed James’s thigh under the table, and then didn’t let go. “Do you mean to tell Martha and Camilla?”
“No,” said Carrow. “I prefer my life the way it is. I have friends and I have Miriam. I don’t want to expose myself to hatred and rejection. I don’t owe that to any of them. Martha’s quite fond of me, as she’s come to know me. And so was my father. As for Camilla…” His cheeks flushed. “I send her a Christmas letter every year.”
“Camilla knew all this time that you were alive and didn’t say anything? I wouldn’t have thought she had it in her.”
“I don’t think she recognized me. She really needs spectacles but is too vain to wear them. But even if she had been able to see me properly, I don’t think she would have recognized me—not like this, and not after twenty years. All I told her in the letters was that I was alive and well, and that I wished her the best.”
“She’s said several times that your reasons for leaving were none of our business and that we ought to leave well enough alone,” James said.
“One could always rely on Camilla not to think too terribly hard about anything,” he said, smiling faintly. “But, my God, she’s loyal, never to breathe a word of it.”
“Madame—I mean Gladys Button. She recognized you, didn’t she. I saw her speaking with you,” James said.
“Yes,” said Carrow.
“She didn’t make trouble for you, did she?”
“No, she had spent twenty years thinking I was dead and that my brother-in-law had killed me. She only wanted to know whether he was dangerous.”
