Page 3 of The Missing Page
“She had twelve bridesmaids at her wedding. Quite a foolish woman,” said Edith. “Sickly, I believe. Died ages ago. As for Rupert, Cora’s quite right. A very boring man.”
“The only interesting thing that happened to him wasn’t even his doing,” Cora said. “What was his daughter’s name?” she asked, turning to Edith. “Not Lady Marchand, but the one who disappeared. Rosalind? Rosalie?”
“Rose. Must be twenty years now. 1927 or so. And she didn’t disappear, Cora. She had a swimming accident.”
“Is that right? I always hoped she ran off with the chauffeur,” Cora sighed.
“Yes, well the papers could hardly have run the story for two straight weeks without some romantic angle. But it turned out that the chauffeur—you know, Cora, I think he might have been a gardener or a groom, not a chauffeur.”
“It was always one of those three, when a girl ran away with a servant,” Cora observed. “I do wonder who girls run away with these days.”
The women paused, as if observing a moment of silence for modern girls who had to make do in unknown ways.
“In any event,” Edith said, “I believe they said the chauffeur or gardener or groom ran off because he got a girl in trouble and it had nothing at all to do with Rose. Sadly prosaic.”
“What a good memory you have, dear. All I can really recall is Reverend Sommers having to leave in the middle of the village fete in order to fetch James. The curate had to step in and man the coconut shy.”
“And what a sorry affairthatwas,” Edith agreed.
What had been a slight sense of unease now developed into alarm. “Fetch James from where?” Leo asked. “James was there when this girl died? And he’s been summoned back?” Now Leo was worried about something far more probable than poisoned tea. Sometimes even the thought of violent death stirred up memories of war that James couldn’t quite shake off. James was a grown man and could handle his own mind’s idiosyncrasies, but if Leo could do anything to help, then he’d make it his business to do so.
CHAPTER THREE
As he made his way toward the drawing room, James encountered detail after familiar detail. The carpet at the top of the stairs; the painting of a rather mangy-looking dog hanging opposite his bedroom door; the wallpaper with a pattern that looked peculiarly like faces. He hadn’t thought about any of these things for years, but evidently Blackthorn existed in a corner of his mind, intact and undisturbed, sealed tight with a layer of dust, even though he hadn’t thought about it in decades.
He supposed it could have felt like a homecoming of sorts, but instead, each remembered detail made James feel vaguely queasy—which, in turn, made him feel oddly guilty and ungrateful, as if he were still the orphaned child here on sufferance.
Even before pushing open the heavy door, James heard the crisp tones of a cut-glass accent emanating from inside the drawing room.
“Not a fire lit in the whole house,” the woman said, her voice a drawl that split the difference between amusement and irritation. “And I forgot, if you can credit it, Lilah darling, that your grandfather never put in central heating. We always come in summer, of course, and one doesn’t think to ask. Why on earth Martha didn’t put her foot down, I cannot imagine. We all know what Father was, but you’d think that with him gone she’d at the very least light a fire.”
James hesitated on the threshold, his hand poised to open the door, but not quite ready to enter. That voice. It was his cousin Camilla, of course: Lady Marchand, Uncle Rupert’s only surviving daughter. It could hardly be anybody else. They had run into one another in London a few times before the war—once at the theater, once when James was taking a girl out to dinner, back when he still was trying to convince himself that he wanted to do that sort of thing. What James remembered most from these meetings was Camilla’s rich attire and the general air of money that seemed to follow her around like a cloud. She always seemed vaguely surprised to discover that James still existed, despite having spent every summer with him until he was twelve and then sending him a handful of birthday cards when he was still at school, sometimes with a crisp five-pound note folded inside.
James opened the door in time to hear a much quieter female voice respond.
“I daresay Aunt Martha is used to being uncomfortable, Mother,” said a slim, platinum-haired woman who sat straight-backed on the sofa. “She’s spent thirty years at Blackthorn, which is long enough to accustom one to all manner of inconvenience.”
“You only say that because you don’t remember what Blackthorn used to be. Poor Martha,” sighed Camilla. James hadn’t remembered her as being particularly striking as a young woman—compared to Rose, everyone else seemed faded and unremarkable. But whatever had been the case twenty years ago, in her early forties, Camilla was very handsome. Her dark hair was fashionably dressed beneath a smart black hat. She wore a tailored gray dress and matching cardigan that suggested, rather than announced, mourning. The girl on the sofa must then be her daughter, Lilian. He had never met her, as she had not yet arrived on the scene that final summer he spent at Blackthorn. That meant she must now be at most twenty.
James deployed his warmest smile, the one he used for stubborn patients and ornery nurses. “Hullo,” he said, awkwardly hovering in the doorway and rather wishing Martha were there to smooth over the introductions. How was one meant to introduce oneself to one’s own relations? “I don’t suppose you remember me.” He regretted the words immediately—it was as if being at Blackthorn had transformed him back into into the shy and diffident child he had once been, a boy used to being shuffled among aunts and uncles during school holidays, forever on his best manners.
But Camilla turned to face James, turning on him a pair of bright blue eyes only slightly obscured by gold-rimmed spectacles. “Of course I remember you, James. Don’t be absurd. You’re the very image of your father.”
James sucked in a breath. He was used to people sidestepping the issue of his father.
“Camilla,” murmured a man in a tone of unmistakable reproach.
James turned to see Sir Anthony Marchand rise to his feet. He was at least ten years older than his wife, with thick gray hair and piercing blue eyes. Sir Anthony had risen to prominence as a Harley Street psychiatrist, although James still remembered when he had been referred to in hushed tones as a nerve specialist. Before marrying Camilla, he had attended James’s own father in the private asylum where Theodore Sommers had been sent after the war. As a child, James had never warmed to him, possibly because of associations with his father’s absence, or simply because Marchand had only rarely joined in sailing and swimming and playing tennis.
But as an adult, and as a physician himself, he knew that Sir Anthony Marchand was considered the best, and when James, in a fit of desperation after his own war, needed help, he had sought out Marchand.
James preferred not to think about that appointment.
“One can hardly escape noticing the likeness,” said Camilla, whose gaze hadn’t left James since he entered the room.
“No need to mention such things,” Sir Anthony said to his wife, his voice pitched low enough that James might almost believe he wasn’t meant to hear, but then the older man glanced apologetically at James.
Camilla removed her glasses and slid them into her handbag, and James repressed a sigh. Sir Anthony, like so many people, believed that it was better to pretend that James’s father had never existed. Perhaps he believed that suicide shouldn’t be alluded to in a civilized drawing room, or perhaps he believed that James would go to pieces at the slightest provocation. Or maybe he just didn’t like being reminded of a patient he had lost.
