Page 51 of The Missing Page
Camilla stood in front of Blackthorn, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She looked ten years older than she had two days earlier. Her hair was still down and her dark clothes were silhouetted against the gray stone of the house. She looked like nothing so much as a woman on the cover of a penny dreadful.
And she was apparently waiting for them, or at least for James.
“Lilah said that you wanted to know whether Anthony needed money in the summer of 1927,” she said bluntly. “He needed capital to buy a colleague’s practice, and I wasn’t due to get my inheritance until the following year.”
“And did he get the money?”
She smiled tightly. “He said he was able to arrange something. I never asked questions about money.”
James remembered the look Camilla and Lilah had shared the previous afternoon in the library when James had revealed that Rose’s bank account was empty. Camilla had known then, James was sure of it. She probably didn’t know how her husband had got his hands on her sister’s money—onCarrow’smoney—but she knew he had something to do with it.
“He didn’t want her to come back,” Camilla said. “If she came back, she might discover that the money was missing. All those things he told the police, all of it was intended to make it look like she was dead. How was she meant to come back after that?”
James knew that the truth was more complicated: Carrow had other reasons not to come back, but the knowledge that his brother-in-law might institutionalize him had to be at the top of the list. So while Camilla might have the details wrong, she was right in the sense that her husband had been complicit in her sibling’s disappearance.
“Anthony killed her, in a way,” Camilla said. “It was a kind of killing.”
Before James could wonder why she had phrased it this way, Mr. Trevelyan’s car rolled into the drive and it was time to go inside.
As the guests gathered in the library to meet one last time, the mood in the room was even more fraught with anticipation than it had been two days earlier.
Lilah sat at one end of the sofa, one leg crossed over the other while she read a fashion magazine. Camilla sat beside her, gazing off into the distance fretfully. Martha perched on the edge of the armchair by the fire, her fists clenched on the arms of the chair. James sat in the chair opposite her, Leo at his side, his back to the fire.
Once again, the Carrows stood in the doorway.
Mr. Trevelyan cleared his throat. At that moment, the casement clock in the hall struck twelve. While it chimed out the hour, everyone shifted uncomfortably, the way one always does when an overly loud clock makes its presence known.
“I suppose the estate will pass to the home for wayward girls or whatever charity struck Father’s fancy,” Camilla said, for all the world as if she was supremely uninterested in the fate of Blackthorn or her father’s money.
“Not exactly,” said Mr. Trevelyan. “I did receive a solution.”
Everyone sat up a little straighter, suddenly alert. James did his best not to look at Carrow, knowing the cost an accurate solution would mean to the man.
“I will read to you the relevant portion of the solution: ‘The person once known as Rose Bellamy is alive and well, happily married, gainfully employed, and beloved by many.’”
For a long moment, nobody spoke.
“Is that it?” Martha finally asked.
“No,” said Mr. Trevelyan. “But the letter writer goes on to say that there is nothing in Rupert Bellamy’s will that requires me to share the solution. In fact, she makes an argument for secrecy, beginning with an account of what she believes her grandfather would have wished, and ending with some statements that might be considered to skate rather perilously close to extortion by less charitably inclined minds.”
Her grandfather—that meant the solution had come from Lilah. As he turned to her, she glanced up from her magazine.
“What manner of extortion did you use to make Mr. Trevelyan keep quiet?” Leo asked her, sounding amused, of all things.
“That’s for me to know and you never to find out.”
“I don’t understand,” Martha said.
“You don’t need to, Aunt Martha,” said Lilah. “Your cousin is well.”
“But where is she? Camilla, surely you must want to know,” Martha said.
“I’ve always said that Rose must have had her reasons and that it was none of my business,” Camilla said, but James didn’t think it was his imagination that the way she said this was much more brittle than it had been that first day.
“James?” Martha asked.
“I’m inclined to respect Mr. Trevelyan’s point of view,” James said.
