“Shall we head upstairs as well?” James asked, coming to sit beside Leo on the sofa—not so close that they’d need to spring apart if anyone walked in, but close enough that they hardly needed to speak above a whisper to hear one another. Close enough, too, that he could give Leo’s arm a quick squeeze, which is exactly what he did. “You look knackered.”
“I am, and then some.” Leo stretched an arm along the back of the sofa, his fingers briefly resting on the nape of James’s neck. “But no, I don’t want to go to bed yet. The lawyer left his papers on the writing desk and I mean to read them as soon as I can be sure nobody will interrupt me.”
“Fine by me,” James said, refilling both their glasses and letting his fingers brush along Leo’s wrist as he did so.
Leo closed his eyes and tipped his head against the back of the sofa.
“When was the last time you slept?” James asked.
“I might have dozed on the airplane,” Leo said.
“In a bed, Leo.”
“Wednesday, I think.” Leo didn’t open his eyes.
That actually wasn’t as bad as James had feared. “It’s rather lovely to have you here,” James said, conscious that this was a drastic understatement. It was shocking enough that he got to have Leo at home; the idea that Leo might turn up elsewhere seemed almost too good to be true. In December they had—stumblingly, mortifyingly—agreed that they enjoyed being together in and out of bed and agreed to keep doing that. But surely it couldn’t be that simple. Surely James didn’t get to have someone like Leo in his life and keep him there just because he wanted it. “I was dreading this weekend.”
One of the corners of Leo’s mouth ticked up in a tired smile. “A reading of the will. For God’s sake, James. I half expected to find you all shooting one another. Cabinets of exotic poisons left unlocked. Sharpened daggers mounted above the chimneypiece.”
“Ah. I see. You came for the entertainment potential.”
Leo breathed out a laugh and rolled his head to face James. His tired eyes were still mostly closed and he regarded James through dark eyelashes. “You know why I came.”
James felt his cheeks heat and wondered if he’d ever get used to Leo saying these things. It happened so rarely and never with any warning. A man simply couldn’t build up any kind of natural immunity.
“Do you want to get to the bottom of whatever nonsense your uncle was up to,” Leo asked, “or do you want to let it go?”
James raised his eyebrows. “It’s a funny business,” he said tentatively. He didn’t know whether he wanted to get to the bottom of it, as Leo put it. His instinct was to insist that his uncle must have been mistaken, and that Rose had died exactly the way everyone assumed she did.
He thought that he would have told Leo precisely that if not for how this was Sir Anthony’s stance, and James didn’t care to agree with that man.
And so, driven mostly by a rare and uncharacteristic bout of contrariness, James examined his preconceptions. He wondered how much of his certainty about Rose’s fate was due to his reluctance to talk about things that he thought were better left alone. Sometimes it was a kindness to let unpleasant things rest, but sometimes silence transformed an ordinary event into something darker, something taboo.
He thought of his father, and how even now, so many years later, people hesitated to so much as mention his name. People even hesitated to mention suicide around James, as if he might have otherwise forgot how he lost his father. And that only made the loss into something shameful and confusing and which he still struggled now to understand.
Leo’s eyes were open now and he was regarding James with a steady intensity that made James want to look away. “What do you think?” James asked. “You’re the expert in secrets.”
“I don’t like it one bit.” Leo ran a hand over the stubble on his jaw. “But you were there, weren’t you,” he said in a non sequitur that James didn’t understand.
“The day Rose disappeared. Yes, but I don’t remember much of anything,” James said.
Leo raised an eyebrow and took a long drink from his glass. “Have you really not seen any of them in twenty years?” he asked after a moment.
“I ran into Camilla a few times and Sir Anthony once,” James said. “I never saw Martha or Uncle Rupert because nobody ever asked me back here, and from what I gather they seldom left the place. As for Lilah, I never met her until today.”
“Speaking of Miss Marchand, how on earth did you not think to mention that she was your cousin when we saw her in Twelfth Night?”
“Because I didn’t know,” James protested. “As I said, I never met her, so I never made any connection between Lilian Marchand and Lilah Fairchild. Besides, one hardly expects Bellamys to go on stage.”
“Sometimes I forget how very Victorian you are,” Leo murmured, but he sounded fond.
“I’m practically bohemian, downright anarchic, compared to this stodgy lot. Can’t really imagine any of them allowing a teenaged girl to tread the boards.”
“Father did go into conniptions at first,” said a voice from the doorway, heavy with amusement. “He can almost stand it when I do Shakespeare, but he was not at all pleased with the cinema. Very common, you see.”
James turned to see Lilah. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” she said, holding up a hand to forestall James’s apology. “But I can’t possibly go to bed before midnight. It’s one of the perils of theater. One gets used to late hours. With film, it’s the reverse, of course, and one has to endure catastrophically early calls. But my next film isn’t until next month, and it’ll be in California, so there’s no point in trying to observe what my father calls decent hours.”
James performed the calculation that had been bothering him all day. He felt certain that he’d have remembered an infant in residence at Blackthorn, which meant that Lilah had not yet been born the last summer he spent here. Therefore, she couldn’t now be over twenty. And yet he felt certain that he had first seen her on screen in the middle of the war.
“You must have been fourteen when you were in your first picture,” he said.
“Fifteen. I ran away from school.” She cracked out a laugh. “I waited until I had got my hands on my birthday money and then I hit the road. There was quite a scene. Father wanted to ship me off to some ghastly school where they lock you in at night.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t.”
“Mother persuaded him that if we forbade me from acting, I’d run off and marry the producer or something equally dreadful.”
“Goodness.”
“I must say, this has been more diverting than my usual stays at Blackthorn.” Still leaning in the doorway, Lilah lit a cigarette and then offered the case to both men, who declined. “I thought father would have an embolism when that sweet old man read the will.”
With that, she went directly to the writing desk where Mr. Trevelyan had left the copy of the will and began to page through it. “It’s precisely as he said. How disappointing. I was hoping for secret codicils or some indication of what on earth Granddad can have meant by leaving Cousin Martha such a pittance, or any clue as to who Madame Fournier is.” She looked up from the papers and wrinkled her nose. “Those clothes. She might as well be wearing a false mustache.”
James was faintly shocked by this frankness, but Leo started laughing and Lilah began playing to her audience. “I’ve spent the evening trying to figure it out,” she went on. She’s of an age where she could either be Granddad’s natural child or a former mistress. But I do know a costume when I see one. Oh, look at this,” she said, one fingertip pressed to the paper. “The beneficiary who didn’t arrive is a vicar.”
Leo hauled himself to his feet and made his way over to the desk. “Reverend George Foster, vicar of St. Peter’s church, King’s Lynn,” he read from over Lilah’s shoulder. “And he was bequeathed the sum of a hundred pounds for the poor box.”
“Mr. Trevelyan did mention that there was a missing guest,” James said.
“Here’s an envelope with your name on it, James,” Leo said, tapping the pile of documents on the desk.
Somehow in the confusion following Mr. Trevelyan reading the will, James had neglected to retrieve his own bequest. Now he took the envelope from Leo and slid it into his breast pocket, where he could feel its presence as if it were a weight. He would need privacy in order to look at its contents.
“Was there really an inquest?” Lilah asked. “My father said something about that this evening. I had always been under the impression that Aunt Rose simply disappeared. But tonight everyone was speaking as if she had definitely died. One can’t have inquests without a body, can one?”
James glanced at Leo, thinking that if anyone in the room knew the workings of the coroner’s court, it should be Leo. But Leo had an abstracted expression on his face as he looked between Lilah and James. “Your father mentioned the police being involved,” James said, “but I don’t know anything about an inquest.”
Everything James knew was secondhand, learned after he had been taken away from Blackthorn and brought unceremoniously to the home of yet another uncle. “I was told that she went for a swim but got caught in a rip tide. She had been in the habit of taking early morning swims that summer.” That much was true: he remembered sitting on the rocks, watching her swim out much farther than he was ever allowed. “But I don’t think that was anything more than a polite fiction.” He was intensely aware of Leo looking at him, something careful and warm in his gaze, and he wished that he wasn’t the kind of person who needed to be looked at quite so carefully.
“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.