“It’s all right, Lori,” Kit soothed. “Calm down, relax, breathe.…”
“What bee got up her bum?” Rory grumbled.
“Hush, Rory,” scolded a third voice. “Can’t you see that the poor girl’s upset? I’m so sorry, dear. I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s this ridiculous ointment. It’s enough to give anyone a fright.”
I was back in my chair and trembling like a leaf. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there, because I had no clear memory of what had happened after I’d screamed.
Kit was kneeling before me, holding my hand and peering up at me solicitously, but the corners of his mouth were twitching in an all-too-familiar way.
“What’s so funny?” I snapped, glaring at him.
“Nothing,” he said quickly. “You’ve been very stressed lately, with the twins going off to school for the first time, and you haven’t been getting much sleep since your husband’s been away, and you and I had been having a heated discussion, so no one blames you for reacting as you did when you saw Charlotte.”
“Charlotte?” I repeated as Kit’s cue sailed over my head. “But Charlotte can’t be Ren—”
“Can’t be angry with you for opening the door and screaming in her face,” Kit filled in hastily. “And she’s not. Are you, Charlotte?”
“Certainly not,” said someone standing behind me. “I’d be the last person to criticize anyone’s behavior, after the show I put on the last time we met.”
I turned slowly in my chair and saw the tall, slender figure of Charlotte DuCaral towering over me in a pair of pointy-toed black leather boots. She’d thrown open her voluminous black cloak to reveal a lining of crimson silk that had a small, neatly mended tear near the hem. She was wearing bloodred lipstick, and she’d covered her face with a gooey white substance that made her look deathly pale.
“Your face,” I said shakily. “What’s on your face?”
“Zinc oxide,” she replied. “Dreadful, I know, but quite necessary, I assure you. It’s difficult to tell now, but I was once a flaxen-haired blonde, and my skin still burns quite easily. On a sunny day like today, I won’t leave the house without my cloak and my zinc oxide, but since the ointment bothers you, I’ll wipe it off. I can always reapply it before I leave—which, by the way, won’t be for a while. I have a few things to say to you, Rory.”
As she turned to leave the parlor, the cloak billowed around her, and I saw superimposed upon it a vivid mental image of an afghan swirling around Rob as he twirled in a half circle in my living room.
“He swooped,” I said under my breath.
“What’s that?” said Kit, getting to his feet.
“Nothing.” I faced the bed again and rested my chin on my hand.
“You didn’t ought to scream like that,” said Rory. “You scared the birds.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, staring blankly into the middle distance. I had no idea why Charlotte had been standing beneath the apple tree on Emma’s Hill ten days ago, but I also had no doubt that Will and Rob had seen her there. Rendor wasn’t a creepy psycho pervert voyeur who was menacing my children. He was a middle-aged woman who sunburned easily and liked to wear red lipstick when she went out. My vampire hunt, which had begun with so much promise, had ended in farce, and Kit would never let me forget it. I felt ten times a fool.
“Charlotte seems quite chipper, don’t you think?” Kit said as he carried another chair over to Rory’s bedside.
“Does she?” I said. “I didn’t notice.”
“She’s a different woman from the one who played such mournful music in the music room,” said Kit. “She looks ten years younger.”
“Must be the zinc oxide,” I said indifferently.
“I think we could all do with some tea,” Kit said, rubbing his palms together vigorously. “I’ll be right back.”
Rory took up his binoculars and I continued to stare disconsolately at nothing until Kit shoved a cup of tea under my nose and pulled me out of my cheerless reverie. I looked around and noticed for the first time that Charlotte had returned, with a clean face but without her cloak. She was wearing a gray silk blouse with a blue tweed skirt and looked every inch the country matron.
While I’d been contemplating the mortifying depths to which my vivid imagination had dragged me, Kit had set up an informal tea party on the coffee table, using china from Rory’s kitchen and the food Henrietta had packed for us. One plate was filled with crustless sandwiches, one held eclairs, lemon tarts, and cream puffs, and still another was piled high with jammy biscuits.
Rory gummed a jammy biscuit happily, but the sight of the raspberry jam on his puckered lips was enough to put me off raspberries for the rest of my life. I helped myself to a watercress sandwich instead and left the repulsive biscuits for the others.
Charlotte refused the cup of tea Kit offered to her, and instead of sitting in the chair he’d drawn up for her, she stood at the foot of Rory’s bed. When Kit had resumed his seat and we’d all finished eating, she rested her hands on the foot railing and smiled down at Kit and me.
“I saw you leave Aldercot Hall this morning,” she informed us, “and after speaking with Mrs. Harcourt, I learned that you were coming here, to Rory’s cottage. I followed you, intending to apologize for my intemperate outburst the other day, but as I approached the front door, a few words drifted through the open window that stopped me in my tracks.”
She ducked her head, and a pink flush rose in her fair cheeks.
“I don’t eavesdrop, as a rule,” she said, “but I simply couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t keep myself from listening to the story drifting through the open window.” She raised her head and gazed incredulously at the gamekeeper. “Rory, you old fool. Why didn’t you tell me the truth long ago?”
“I didn’t see what good it’d do,” he said. “You’d only think worse of your parents if you knew how we tricked you, and Leo wasn’t ever coming back, so I figured, let sleeping dogs—” He broke off as someone knocked on the front door.
Kit and I exchanged perplexed looks.
“Henrietta,” I guessed. “With quail’s eggs and chilled duck in aspic.”
“I’ll get it this time,” he said, and went to the front door.
I heard only a murmur of muted voices coming from the corridor, but Charlotte must have heard something else, because her hands tightened on the footrail, her lips parted, and her entire face seemed to glow with an inner light as she stared expectantly at the parlor door. When it opened, she drew in a shuddering breath.
“Leo,” she said.
I turned my head and saw the expression on Leo’s face when he heard her speak his name. He looked like a man uncertain of his welcome.
“Oh, Leo,” Charlotte said, and crossed the room to rest her head upon his chest.
Leo put his arms around her, closed his eyes, and laid his weathered cheek against her white hair. He held her to his heart, breathing in her fragrance, and she released a tremulous sigh, as if she’d reached the end of a long journey. In one suspended moment, the past became the present, and the intervening years faded away, as if they’d never been. The decades Charlotte and Leo had lost meant nothing to them, because true love exists outside of time.
Kit stood behind them, beaming like a priest at a wedding.
“Kit,” I whispered loudly, waving to get his attention as I stood. “I think maybe you and I should leave.”
“I’m not leaving,” growled Rory. “It’s my house. If those two want to canoodle, they can go somewhere else.”
Charlotte and Leo broke apart, and Leo shook a fist at the old gamekeeper.
“You’re skating on thin ice, mate,” he said. “I wouldn’t push it if I were you.”
“No one’s leaving,” Charlotte added. “Leo, may I pour you a cup of tea?”
“That’d be lovely,” said Leo.
He didn’t have to tell her how he liked his tea. She remembered.
A short time later, we were seated in a semicircle at Rory’s bedside. Kit had already brought Leo up to speed in the corridor, so Leo was explaining to the rest of us why he’d come to the gamekeeper’s cottage.
“It was the way Kit looked at me last night, after I told him about the shooting,” he said. “He looked at me as if I couldn’t possibly have killed a man, not even when I was a young idiot, not even when I was whiskey-drunk. As if I didn’t have it in me”—he tapped his chest—“to do something as bad as that. It got me to thinking. And today I decided to look Rory up and talk over old times with him.”
“I’m sorry for what I did, Miss Charlotte,” Rory said, staring down at his fingerless gloves. “And I’m sorry for what I did to you, too, Leo.”
“Never mind,” said Charlotte, leaning forward to put a hand on the old man’s brow. “It all happened a very long time ago.”
“And you did keep Maurice from blowing my brains out,” Leo added. “So I guess I can forgive you for everything else.”
Charlotte sat back in her chair, laughing. “I’ve made a pilgrimage every year to look down on Anscombe Manor and curse your name,” she said to Leo. “I should have known this year’s would be the last.”
“Why’s that, love?” asked Leo.
“I tore my cloak on the way back,” she answered, twinkling up at him. “It was an omen.”
The two of them laughed as though she’d told the funniest joke in the world. I supposed they’d do a lot of laughing for a while, if only to release the joy that was bubbling up in them. I, on the other hand, felt like grinding my teeth, because I now knew why Charlotte had been standing beneath the apple tree ten days ago, when Will and Rob had seen her. Her pilgrimage had sent me on my wild-goose chase.
“My poor parents,” said Charlotte, her smile fading. “My father’s foot never healed properly, and neither he nor my mother ever got over my brother’s death. They were so proud of him, you see. They thought he’d have a Nobel Prize before he was thirty. But his clinic was far out in the bush, and the airstrip was quite primitive. The medical-supply plane crashed one day, and my brother was killed. After that my parents withdrew from the world completely. If I hadn’t been there to take care of them, they would have forgotten to eat.”
I sank lower in my chair. I’d concocted so many lurid stories about Charlotte and her family over the past ten days that I couldn’t bear to look her in the eye. She hadn’t been a slave to her dastardly parents. She’d been a good daughter, taking care of a heartbroken mother and father who’d lost their only son. And her brother hadn’t been a psychopathic pervert. He’d been the kind of man who risked his life to help the poorest of the poor. I was so ashamed of myself that I wanted to crawl under Rory’s bed and never come out.
“My dowry isn’t what it used to be,” Charlotte said, looking up at Leo. “When my brother died, my father stopped keeping track of his investments. I tried to manage them wisely, but the income slowed to a trickle about ten years ago. I had to let most of the staff go and sell the furniture to make ends meet. Luckily, it was worth quite a lot of money. It was fortunate that my mother insisted on hanging blackout drapes throughout the house. Sun-damaged furniture wouldn’t have fetched half as much.”
“Is that when you boarded up the attic?” Kit asked.
Charlotte turned to him and nodded. “I shut off the central heating and turned off all but the most essential lights as well, to conserve energy and keep the bills low.”
“And you sold the fallow deer for the same reason,” said Kit.
“She kept the herd as long as she could, because her mother liked them,” Rory piped up.
“The deer were among the few things that made my mother smile,” Charlotte said. “But after she died, it was a luxury I couldn’t afford.”
“Could’ve sold Aldercot,” Rory mumbled.
“Yes,” Charlotte agreed, “I could have sold the hall. I’ve been on the verge of doing so many, many times. But my parents and my brother are buried in the cemetery. Who would look after their graves if I left Aldercot?”
“You’ll never have to leave Aldercot,” said Leo, putting his arm around her, “and you’ll never want for luxuries again. We’ll buy a herd of elephants, if you like, and we’ll fill the place with the finest furnishings to be had. We’ll light it up like a Christmas tree and turn the central heating up to sizzle, and we’ll hire enough staff so that you’ll never have to lift a finger. Whatever you want, you’ll have.”
Kit’s eyebrows rose at the exact same moment as mine. Leo caught our skeptical expressions and chuckled.
“I made a few bob Down Under,” he said. “A few million bob, in fact. Your old uncle’s filthy, stinking rich, Kit.”
“But you live in a…a tin can,” I managed.
“I like living rough every once in a while,” said Leo. “It reminds me of where I started, keeps me from getting too full of myself. But you can have too much of a good thing. When that ruddy storm hit, I hightailed it to Oxford and spent the weekend at the Randolph, being wined and dined by one of my bankers. It made a nice change.”
I picked my jaw up from my lap and tried to revise my image of Leo, but it would take more than a few minutes to move him from St. Benedict’s Hostel for Transient Men to one of the poshest hotels in all of England. In the meantime Kit carried on tying up loose ends I was too embarrassed to even think about.
“When Lori and I were at Aldercot the other day,” Kit said, “we thought we heard someone moving around upstairs. It seemed a bit odd, because Mr. Bellamy and Mrs. Harcourt were downstairs, in the kitchen.”
“It must have been Jacqueline,” Charlotte said readily. “She’s a photographer, you know. She uses the attic as a darkroom, and she locks the door so Bellamy won’t walk in on her and ruin whatever she’s developing. We leave the lights on in the stairwell so she can find her way there. One must make some accommodations to the staff, and she really is quite talented.”
I sank even lower in my chair.
Charlotte smoothed her skirt. “I didn’t come here today to talk about myself, though I suppose, under the circumstances, it couldn’t be helped—Leo and I have a lot of catching up to do. But I came here to speak of something else. There’s something I must tell you, Kit.” She took Leo’s hand in hers. “Something we both must tell you.”
“Are you sure?” asked Leo.
“Yes.” Charlotte stroked his hand. “I know that Amy swore us to secrecy, but I can’t live with secrets anymore. You and I have paid too high a price for them. We must tell Kit the truth.”
Leo kissed her on the side of the head. “I’m with you all the way, love, but Kit”—he turned his bright blue eyes on his nephew—“had better buckle his seat belt, because he’s in for a few jolts.”
“I’m tougher than I look, Uncle Leo,” said Kit.
“You’d better be,” said Leo. “Because the truth of it is, your mother made a big mistake when she married Sir Miles. She knew it before they were back from the honeymoon.”
“He was quite a bit older than she was,” Kit acknowledged.
“Their problems had nothing to do with age,” Leo said firmly.
“Sir Miles was a difficult man,” Charlotte interjected. “He went into terrible rages, then sank into deep depressions.” She hesitated, then said carefully, “He struck your mother on several occasions.”
Kit stared at her, aghast.
“It’s true,” said Leo. “I had to pull him off her a couple of times.”
“W-why did she stay?” Kit stammered.
“Your father’s troubles weren’t his fault,” Charlotte explained. “He was ill. Amy hoped that she could help him.”
“But my father never raised a hand to me,” said Kit. “He showed me nothing but kindness.”
“Then remember him that way,” Charlotte urged. “But the truth of the matter is that his second wife was able to control him with new and more effective medications, most of the time. She kept you away from him during his bad spells.”
“Your mother wasn’t alone during the rough times she had with him, Kit,” said Leo. “I told you last night, Charlotte was Amy’s best mate. Aldercot Hall was a sanctuary for her. She could always find a bit of peace there.”
“And one day,” said Charlotte, “she found my brother. He was home for a few months from his travels, and he got to know Amy very well.”
“They were birds of a feather,” said Leo. “Good, kind, gentle souls, both of them. Always trying to help people.”
“They were very much alike,” Charlotte agreed. “And she was so miserable and he felt so sorry for her that I suppose it was inevitable that they should fall hopelessly in love.”
Leo leaned forward in his chair. “The thing is, Kit—”
“No,” Charlotte interrupted. “Let me tell him.”
“Tell me what?” Kit said tautly.
Charlotte focused her soft gray eyes directly on Kit’s face.
“My brother’s name was Christopher,” she said. “You’re his son.”
For a moment the only sound I could hear was the slow rasp of Rory’s breathing. No one moved. No one spoke. Even the creatures in the clearing had fallen silent. Then a bird chirped, and Kit shifted his gaze to the open window.
“I’m not Sir Miles Anscombe’s son?” he said slowly.
“No,” said Charlotte. “You are the son of Amy Sutherland and Christopher DuCaral.”
I put a hand to my head as I realized why Ruth and Louise Pym had refused to talk about Christopher’s shameful desires. He’d fathered a child by another man’s wife—a child, moreover, who’d grown into a man they both knew and loved. They’d thought it would hurt Kit to learn the truth about his parentage. They couldn’t have known that the truth would set him free.
Kit stood abruptly and said, “I have to leave.”
“Look here, mate,” Leo began.
“I have to leave,” Kit repeated, more urgently. He snatched his pack from the floor and strode out of the parlor.
“I knew it would be a shock for him,” Charlotte said anxiously.
“It just may be the best shock he’ll ever have,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “Thanks for your hospitality, Rory. I’ll visit you again real soon.”
“Who’s going to clean up this mess?” Rory demanded, waving a hand toward the coffee table.
“Not me,” I said, and, grabbing my day pack, I tore after Kit.
I pounded after him all the way to Anscombe Manor and got to the stable-yard wall just in time to see him drop his pack on the graveled drive, vault over the riding ring’s fence, and charge straight through a dressage class Nell was conducting.
He took the reins from her hands and passed them to a student, then lifted her from the saddle and set her lightly on the ground. He removed her helmet, tossed it over his shoulder, and smoothed her golden curls back from her forehead. He ran his fingers along her brow, her cheeks, her jawline, her neck, like a blind man reading a face, and then he drew her close, wrapped his arms around her, and bent his head until his lips met hers.
Fireworks exploded, the earth quaked, and fluttering rose petals filled the air. Crowds cheered, peasants danced, and cannons roared in the distance. Church bells rang, angels sang, and a heart-shaped flock of snow-white doves soared above a glimmering rainbow and into the clear blue sky. And he was still kissing her.
I knew I was the only one who could see, hear, and feel the world rejoicing, but I didn’t mind. Sometimes it’s a good thing to have a vivid imagination.