When James gave up on his breakfast, leaving half a bowl of soggy cereal and an intractably tight-lipped Camilla at the table, he went upstairs, thinking to grab a jumper before collecting Leo and walking to the village in search of something edible.
At the top of the stairs, he found Martha, standing before a cupboard and attempting to carry a stack of folded bath towels with one arm and a basket with the other.
“Let me take that,” James said, reaching for the towels. “No, I insist.”
“Thank you, dear. One forgets how much work it is to have a houseful of guests.”
“There used to be a veritable army of servants, didn’t there? There must have been a dozen.”
“More than that, when I first came here. But by the time you started visiting, I think we were down to half a dozen. Three maids, the cook, a gardener, and the chauffeur. That was enough to keep everyone in food and clean bedclothes. We’d bring in more help from the village for large parties. And then there were whatever servants the guests would bring with them, of course.”
Martha opened the door to a bathroom and put the used towels into the basket, replacing them from the stack of freshly folded towels James carried.
“Are any of the old servants still in the neighborhood?” James asked. “Perhaps they might remember something.” He felt wrong-footed, as gauche as Madame had been last night, but he pushed past the discomfort, remembering that this unpleasant conversation was why they were gathered at Blackthorn in the first place.
But Martha didn’t seem bothered. “One of our old cooks married the grocer,” she said. “Bridget Halloran, now Mrs. Mudge. None of the rest stayed nearby, as far as I know.” They proceeded down the hall into a bedroom that looked like it had been tossed by burglars. Clothing was draped over chairs, cosmetics and mysterious jars littered every flat surface, and damp towels were piled on the floor.
“Lilah’s room,” Martha explained. “It’s like this whenever she visits. I don’t know how she achieves this degree of chaos after less than twenty-four hours. If ever a woman required a lady’s maid, it’s Lilah.”
“I can’t remember the last time I encountered one of those,” James said, straightening one side of the bed covers while Martha took care of the other.
“Nor do I. A pity. Even Camilla fends for herself these days.”
That made something occur to James. “She must have had a lady’s maid back then, right?”
“There was Greta—no, it was Gladys, Camilla’s maid. But I never really knew her. She wasn’t a Blackthorn servant. She lived with Camilla and Anthony in London and traveled here with them. She was one of Anthony’s girls.”
“One of Anthony’s girls?” James repeated, trying his best to come up with a non-scandalous interpretation of those words.
“She was from the Society for the Reformation of Young Delinquents. Part of their reformation was apparently training them to go into service.”
“This is the charity that Uncle Rupert mentioned in his will, isn’t it? I didn’t realize that the, er, delinquents were meant to become domestic servants. That seems…” He let his voice trail off, unsure how to delicately phrase his point, but Martha saved him.
“It seems unwise to put pickpockets and shoplifters in among the silver teaspoons and strands of pearls? I was of the same mind. But when Camilla and Anthony first married, they were as poor as church mice. Camilla hadn’t turned twenty-one and come into her mother’s inheritance, and Rupert wouldn’t—well, Rupert was a stubborn man.”
“Did he not approve of Sir Anthony?” James asked before he could think too much about whether this question was in poor taste. “I thought Sir Anthony was a sort of family friend even before he married Camilla.”
“Rupert had high hopes for Camilla, and as much as he respected Anthony as a professional, it was a bit of a letdown.”
In the adjoining washroom, they performed the same switching of the towels.
“And what about Rose?” James asked, his thoughts reverting to their earlier conversation about lady’s maids and thinking that a lady’s maid might know all sorts of secrets.
Martha stilled in the middle of straightening a towel on the bar. “What about Rose?”
“Did she have a lady’s maid?”
Martha actually laughed, her face transforming and reminding James that she couldn’t yet be fifty. “Rose wouldn’t hear of it. On the rare occasions she’d allow me to persuade her to put on a proper gown, she still wouldn’t let anything be done to her hair. A lady’s maid would have needed danger money.” She sighed. “When I think of the way we used to go at it hammer and tongs, I’m ashamed of myself. That was years lost to the stupidest of quarrels.”
They proceeded into a surprisingly tidy bedroom with a matched set of pale green luggage stacked in the corner and the gown Camilla had worn the previous evening draped across the back of a chair. The bed was already made. “I remember some of that,” James admitted, thinking of what he had recollected in the dining room. “But it can’t have always been like that between you two.”
“Goodness no.” Martha briskly exchanged towels in the adjacent washroom. “But some kinds of strife bleed over into everything else.” She sighed. “Or maybe that’s only in my mind. After twenty years, it’s hard to tell memory from regret.”
“I think that when someone isn’t around anymore, it’s hard to stop regret from creeping into memory. At least it is for me. There’s always the feeling that I could have done better.”
Martha was looking at him oddly and James flushed, realizing he had put some of his neuroses on display for someone who was little more than a stranger. But then he saw that Martha’s eyes were a bit watery.
“That’s precisely it,” she said, and they proceeded to tidy Sir Anthony’s austere bedchamber in silence.
Next, they entered James’s room, and James tried not to look as if he were paying too much attention to the sofa where Leo had purportedly slept. But Martha was in her own world of memories and fresh towels. “It’s odd that none of the Blackthorn servants responded to the legacy. I should have thought the amount would have been enough to tempt them.”
“Perhaps Mr. Trevelyan couldn’t find their current addresses.”
“That must be it. But Mrs. Mudge, the grocer’s wife, didn’t come, and surely Mr. Trevelyan knew where to find her. I daresay none of them want to be reminded of all that.”
They proceeded to the last room in the corridor, which had to be Madame Fournier’s. She appeared to have traveled light, as the room bore no sign of occupation other than a well-worn carpet bag sitting beside the bed and a shawl folded on top of the pillow.
“Madame Fournier must be one of the former servants,” James pointed out. “Otherwise, why would she be here?”
“I should have thought that I’d recognize any Blackthorn servant, even after all this time. They all answered to me.”
By now they had evidently finished their tidying and towel-changing mission, and Martha proceeded toward the back stairs. “At the time, the police questioned them all quite thoroughly. Rather too thoroughly, if you ask me. Two maids gave notice in a single week, one maid ran away, and the chauffeur eloped with a girl from the village.”
By now, they’d reached the bottom of the stairs and James followed Martha through a baize door. “I always prided myself on being a decent judge of character, but that chauffeur had me utterly bamboozled,” Martha said. “I thought he was a decent lad, if rather more handsome than one likes one’s chauffeur to be, but evidently he was stringing along a housemaid as well as two different girls in the village. At first the police got very excited, thinking he had perhaps eloped with Rose, but that entire affair was unrelated, it seems.”
There was something off about the way she recounted this, as if she had heard all this secondhand or thirdhand and was merely passing it on. Surely it wasn’t only the police who had been hopeful to find Rose with the chauffeur; surely Martha herself must have hoped that her cousin was alive and well and living in sin—unless, of course, she already knew what had become of Rose.
“Martha, what do you think happened to Rose?”
“I wish I knew. I really wish I did, James.” She looked silently at him for a moment. “When they told me, I was certain she had only run off, probably to buy a secondhand motorcycle or learn to fly airplanes or something equally trying on one’s nerves. But for twenty years to pass without a word from her, she can’t possibly still be alive.”
Martha had been the de facto housekeeper at Blackthorn, and if anybody had disappeared, she would have known right away. There would have been no question of her needing to be told. Again, James wondered what Martha wasn’t saying.
They had reached a small room off the kitchen, a sort of scullery that was now where dirty linens awaited the laundry van, so James placed the basket on the floor near the door. “Who else was here at the time?” James asked, recalling that he never got a straight answer from Camilla. “Did Rose disappear in the middle of a house party?”
Martha’s pale eyebrows shot up. “No, there wasn’t a house party. Nothing like that. There weren’t any guests, unless you consider Camilla and Anthony guests. And you, of course. Naturally, Rupert was there.”
James tried to remember whether that summer had been more subdued than the previous ones. If Martha was speaking the truth, then it must have been, without legions of guests, without enormous cars coming and going up the gravel drive, laden with luggage. But none of that had stuck in his mind.
He thanked Martha and watched her leave through the kitchen.
James shoved his hands in his pockets and looked out the window. Not that there was much of a view—there were the withered remnants of a garden and, beyond that, the lodge and the adjacent garage. He could see smoke coming out of the chimney, and suddenly felt chilly in the unheated, empty kitchen.
As he watched, someone emerged from the lodge, a thin figure in trousers, a battered-looking coat, and a flat cap. Carrow leaned against the wall of the lodge in a tense, furtive manner that made James think that either he was sneaking a cigarette or that he was waiting for someone.
Then another figure approached the lodge, coming down the path that led from the side of the house. James stepped closer to the window to get a better look, hoping that he remained unseen by either of the people outside. It was a woman in long skirts and a coat that somehow seemed too short, as if it belonged to somebody else. Beneath her hat, James could see hennaed hair.
At first, he thought that it had to be a coincidence—Madame Fournier surely was not walking to the lodge for the purpose of meeting Carrow. Maybe she was just out for a stroll. Or perhaps she wanted to talk to Mrs. Carrow. Hadn’t Leo mentioned that Mrs. Carrow was an artist? Madame Fournier might want to buy a watercolor.
But when Carrow caught sight of Madame Fournier, he moved to the side of the lodge, out of view of most of the house, but still visible from James’s window. Madame evidently saw this, and followed him there.
James could hardly believe his eyes, but there was no way to interpret what he saw as anything other than Madame Fournier and Carrow having a secret conversation.