Leo’s pulse thrummed with the familiar thrill of getting close to the truth.
“I’ve had two glasses of wine and I’m a bit muzzy around the edges, but we all agree my cousin was a lesbian, yes?” James murmured in Leo’s ear when they found themselves alone in the hall after everyone left the dining room in favor of the drawing room.
“At least Camilla thought so, and evidently Marchand as well,” Leo agreed. What Leo thought more intriguing was that apparently the entire village believed Rose was carrying on a flagrant affair with the chauffeur, but her family was convinced she had a different secret entirely. He wondered if she had attempted to tell them the truth. It hardly bore thinking of. “Christ, but did you see his face? If Camilla had said Rose was a cannibal he couldn’t have been more outraged.”
James shot him a confused look. “He’s hardly the only one to hold that opinion.”
“Yes, yes. But your cousin is long dead.” Leo entered the cloakroom, found his coat, and put it on. “The scandals of her personal life ought to have long since mellowed into something that can be alluded to at the dinner table. There weren’t even any impressionable youngsters at the table who might have been led down the garden path. Lilah’s an actress, for heaven’s sake. And for the past twenty years everyone has believed that Rose killed herself, something that Marchand himself has alluded to and which surely is even less respectable than lesbianism.”
“It all makes me feel a bit sick.”
“Hmm?” Leo paused in buttoning his coat and looked at James, concerned.
“The Marchands of the world will always think I’m unfit to be mentioned at the dinner table. Bent. Not quite right in the head. There’s hardly any circumstance of my life that can be discussed in polite company.”
This wasn’t true and they both knew it—James was a perfectly respectable doctor, well-loved by his patients and a fixture in the village. But Leo understood what he meant—these weren’t the only things that mattered. Sometimes what mattered were the things you couldn’t speak out loud, the things you didn’t dare be honest about. “Let me take you home,” Leo said. In Wychcomb St. Mary, there were at least a few dinner tables where they were welcome, secrets and all.
“Leo, I—” James started, and it had to be professional instinct that made Leo stop him.
“Don’t.”
James had been about to say something he couldn’t take back—something sentimental, something dangerous. And he shouldn’t go around saying that sort of thing, especially not to people like Leo.
Leo squeezed his eyes shut like a complete amateur, and when he opened them, James was looking at him with an expression that wasn’t hurt, thank God, but was somehow worse: it was fond. “Shut up about it and don’t quarrel with me,” Leo said. “We’re in the cloakroom.”
“I’ll tell you again later, then.”
Please don’t, Leo wanted to say. Instead he unbuttoned his coat and hung it back up. “I’m not leaving. Not yet.” Not with you in this state, he didn’t say. “Let’s go into the drawing room and say that you’ve convinced me to stay for a drink.”
“I thought you wanted to talk to the Carrows about Madame while I speak to Camilla. She’s rather above par at the moment, so perhaps it’s an opportune time to talk about indelicate topics.”
Leo wanted to say that the Carrows could wait, that this whole bloody affair could wait if it came to that. But James had a stubbornness about his jaw and a flintiness about his eyes and Leo knew he wasn’t going to be deterred. “All right,” Leo said, once again putting his coat on. “If you need me, I have a room at the Three Bells in the village. I’ll ring you in the morning.”
Leo made himself turn and walk out the door and head down the path to the lodge.
Now that Leo wasn’t in as much of a hurry as he had been the previous night, he could take a good look at the lodge. It occupied half of what must have been a stable block before it had been turned into a garage. Ivy covered the walls and a garden bed was tucked into what was probably a sunny corner in the summer. Discreetly out of view of the main house hung a clothesline. The lodge had a worn-in comfort that Blackthorn proper lacked.
When he knocked, Carrow himself answered the door.
“Car still giving you grief?” Carrow asked by way of greeting.
“No, not exactly,” Leo said. “May I come in and ask you a bit about that lot?” He gestured to the house.
“Can’t do that,” Carrow said, even as he ushered Leo inside. “Wouldn’t want to give you inside information that might let you win the treasure hunt, would I? Fancy a drink? Beer all right?”
Leo said that he’d love a drink and sat where Carrow pointed him, a wooden chair at the kitchen table. “Happily, I’m not in the running. James—Dr. Sommers—is, though, and he’s an old friend of mine. I can promise you he doesn’t want to win the treasure hunt, as you put it, so much as to find out what happened to his cousin. He was here when she disappeared.”
Carrow opened the bottles of beer, his back to Leo. “He must have been a child.”
“Yes. And I gather he was fond of Miss Bellamy, and that she was kind to him at a time when he had precious little of that in his life.”
Carrow turned to the table and slid a beer across to Leo before taking a seat. This was the first time Leo had seen the man without a cap. The only light in the kitchen came from a lamp on the dresser, but Leo gauged that he was about forty or so, with a mop of dark hair that didn’t yet have much in the way of gray. He was old enough to have been an adult in 1927. He could have been the chauffeur, Leo supposed, although it was hard to discern the remnants of movie-star good looks in Carrow’s weather-beaten face. He might have been one of the other servants, though.
“And you want to help him out,” Carrow said.
Leo nearly delivered his line about James having stitched him up, but instead simply said “Yes.”
Carrow nodded, and Leo had the sense he was coming to a decision. Not wanting to put too much pressure on the other man, Leo looked around the lodge.
On the ground floor was a kitchen and sitting room. Off to the side was a door leading to what had to be Mrs. Carrow’s studio. Upstairs probably held at least one bedroom. It was a spacious home for a couple, filled with what Leo could only call nice things—vases of dried flowers, some good old furniture, a collection of dishes in a china cabinet. Between the electric fire and the warmth from whatever was baking in the oven, Leo felt warm enough to loosen his muffler.
Leo could see why the Carrows put up with being in the strange space between servant and tenant. “It’s a lovely home,” Leo said to Carrow.
“Ah, well. That’s all Miriam.”
“What’s that about me?” asked Mrs. Carrow, emerging from the back room in a paint-spattered smock.
“Only that you made the lodge livable.”
Leo stood and greeted Mrs. Carrow, who waved him back to his seat. “It was livable before we moved in,” she protested.
“Sure, for spiders, maybe.”
Leo had the sense that this was a well-worn conversation, and that Carrow often complimented his wife and she often deflected, and that they both did it with love. They looked directly at one another, as if they were alone in the room, alone in the world, with the only person who mattered.
It made something ache in Leo’s heart, made him long for something he preferred not to even think about. It made him wonder what it would be like to belong to a person, to belong to a place and a home the way these two belonged to one another, the way they so obviously belonged here.
And he knew that if he told any of this to James, he wouldn’t understand why it wasn’t possible. Hell, he’d probably think they were well on course to having it themselves. But Leo knew better. It was impossible, and not because they were both men. Well, partly because of that—if anyone caught them looking at one another the way the Carrows were looking at one another presently, they’d wind up publicly shamed at best. But the real reason Leo couldn’t ever have anything like this was that he was all wrong for it. Long ago, he’d cast his lot in with knives and shadows and other things that were sharp and dark and cold. In this warm little home, he was an intruder.
He thought of James’s house, which was warm and lovely in its own right, and cursed the entire Bellamy family, living and dead, for keeping James and him miles away from it. But even there, Leo was an intruder. Just because he had been invited in—welcomed, even—didn’t mean he belonged there. You could invite a snake into your home and that didn’t mean it was a good idea.
Not that Leo had any intention of leaving. He was too selfish for that. He wasn’t nearly noble enough to walk away.
“Mr. Page is here to talk about Rose Bellamy,” Carrow said.
The couple exchanged a look that Leo couldn’t decipher.
“I wouldn’t object to talking about Miss Bellamy,” Leo clarified, “if you have anything to say. But I’m really here to ask about Gladys Button.”
There was the tiniest hesitation before Carrow spoke. “Gladys Button?”
“A former maid at Blackthorn. Does the name ring any bells?”
“Can’t say that it does.”
“Ah, well. It was worth a try. Do you know anything about Madame Fournier? James saw you speaking to her this morning and I wondered if she said anything interesting to you.”
“I did speak with the Frenchwoman. And a lot of nonsense she had to say too, she did, all about how she knew me straight away and it wasn’t any use hiding from her.”
“What do you think she meant by that?”
“Maybe she did know me—I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t remember every girl I met in my life, begging your pardon, Miriam.”
“Who did she think you were?” Leo asked.
“Can’t say she was specific about that,” said Carrow.
Leo strongly doubted this. There would hardly have been any point in claiming to know Carrow’s true identity without saying what that identity was. Unless Madame—Gladys, whoever she was—was just taking potshots.
“Did she want anything from you?” Leo asked.
“No,” said Carrow without elaboration.
“Did she say who she was? I mean, did she introduce herself as anything other than Madame Fournier?”
“As Gladys Button, you mean?” Carrow shook his head. “Gladys Button,” he repeated, seemingly to himself. “No, she did not.”
“What kind of accent did she have?”
“Accent? Oh, I see what you mean. Inside, she came over all foreign. But no, she sounded normal when she talked to me.”
Gathering that he wasn’t going to get any more from this vein of questioning, Leo sat back in his seat and took a long pull from his beer. “How long have you and Mrs. Carrow lived here?”
“Two years this past October.”
“Why Cornwall?”
“It’s as good a place as any.”
“Better than most, I should think. My flat was bombed while I was overseas,” said Leo, lying through his teeth. Strictly speaking, he hadn’t kept a flat in London so much as he occasionally stored luggage at one of the vacant flats owned by the agency. That had, in fact, been bombed. “And it turns out that this country is filled with people who’ve been bombed out of their homes and I couldn’t find anywhere to stay, so now I live in James’s spare room.”
“He’s a doctor, isn’t he?”
“Yes, in a village at the edge of the Cotswolds in Worcestershire. Wychcomb St. Mary. Disgustingly quaint. I grew up in Bristol,” Leo said, again resorting to a half-truth. He had started out life in an orphanage on the border between France and Belgium, then been sent to live with his sister in Bristol, and then lived on the streets of that fair city after his sister died. Shortly thereafter, his old handler had found him and that was that. “So all that picture-postcard Beatrix Potter stuff is a shock to the system.”
This was where Carrow ought to volunteer where he grew up, but instead he opened his mouth, shut it, then collected their empty beer bottles and put them aside. Leo knew he was being dismissed.
“I’d like to buy one of your paintings,” Leo said to Mrs. Carrow, “if you’ll let me.”
Manifesting only a little surprise, Mrs. Carrow said that of course she would be glad to sell him a painting, and led him to the studio. Canvases leaned against two of the walls and an easel was set up in the middle of the room. In addition to the large windows on the north side, there was a skylight, dark now, but which in the daylight must make the room bright and almost cheerful.
“The watercolors go for a guinea apiece,” she said, gesturing at a row of pretty landscapes. They were neither so small as to seem insignificant nor too large to fit in a suitcase, and were painted in colors that wouldn’t look offensively out of place in most homes.
“And what about the oil paintings?” he asked, nodding at a different series of canvases.
“I don’t usually sell those.”
Leo could see why. These paintings weren’t pretty in the least. Some were beautiful—there was a painting of what looked like Dartmoor, and another of an empty airfield. But they weren’t the sort of thing you’d hang over the sofa in the front parlor.
There was also a painting of Blackthorn, its absurd Victorian dollhouse aesthetic twisted around so that it seemed to erupt from the ground like a mushroom. It was not a flattering view of the house, there was no question. But it was also somehow…friendly, perhaps? It was not painted by a person who hated the place.
It was painted by a person who saw Blackthorn for what it was—tacky and overwrought but on a domestic scale. It was a home. This was the first time Leo had really thought of the place in that way. People had lived and died there; children had grown up there. Cold and barren as it now was, it might once have been something else.
For a moment, he thought that maybe it was also painted by a person who knew Blackthorn’s secrets.
“That’s Miriam’s haunted house,” said Carrow.
Leo raised an eyebrow. “Does Blackthorn have a ghost?”
“No, it’s not nearly old enough for that. But Miriam made it look flat spooky.”
“You have an overactive imagination,” Mrs. Carrow said fondly.
Tacked up on the wall above the painting of Blackthorn was a charcoal sketch, the only portrait Leo had seen in the studio. It was of Carrow in three-quarters profile. Well, it was an attempt at Carrow in three-quarters profile—even in the sketch, it was obvious that the man wanted to turn to see his wife. His lips were slightly parted, as if he were just about to speak and had been hastily silenced by the artist just before he broke the pose. It was a portrait of a man who was dying to look at the woman he loved, and was only holding off out of fondness for her.
The portrait was one of love caught in the act. Love was there in every stroke of charcoal over paper, in the roughly drawn jaw and the slope of his nose.
Placed alongside the painting of Blackthorn, the two images looked like they somehow belonged. Carrow was not, objectively, a handsome man; Blackthorn was not an attractive house. But they had both been captured by a hand that knew them, and saw them for what they were, and didn’t seek to change them.
Maybe, also, the subjects of both paintings had secrets they didn’t want to give up.