The first rays of sunlight were streaming through the window when Leo woke. That meant it was probably around seven o’clock, and since they hadn’t managed to get to sleep until past two, Leo could have done with quite a bit more sleep. But there were things to do—he didn’t care how many murders took place at Blackthorn, he still wanted to get James back to Wychcomb St. Mary that night, which meant he needed to get to work as soon as possible. Gingerly, so as not to disturb James, he tried to slide out from under James’s arm. But he must not have moved carefully enough, because James opened the eye that wasn’t pressed into his pillow.
“Too early,” James mumbled. “Back to bed.”
“Sleep. I’ll be back in an hour with tea.”
“I’ll come with you,” James said, sitting up.
“No, no. You can sleep for another hour, so you might as well.”
It spoke to how tired James must have been that he lay back down without a protest and was fast asleep by the time Leo was dressed.
When Leo reached the stairs, instead of going down, he continued straight, toward a group of rooms that were on the opposite side of the house from the guest rooms. Here, he hoped to find Martha Dauntsey’s bedroom and maybe the late Mr. Bellamy’s.
He passed what had to be Martha Dauntsey’s room, door ajar and bed hastily made. In the corner was a bookshelf jammed full of volumes, the accumulated reading of a lifetime, if Leo judged correctly. By the window stood a writing desk, and next to it an armchair with threadbare upholstery. Everything in the room was worn and tired-looking, shabby in the way that well-loved homes often were.
Across the hall was another room that might once have been a family bedroom but was now a box room. The walls were papered with a floral pattern that might once have been red, but which had long since faded to a tepid blush. Leo wondered if this might have been Rose’s room. On a whim, he stepped to the window and threw it open. When he stuck his head out, he could see a sliver of gray winter sea. It was his first glimpse of the sea since he had arrived here. He could also plainly see the door of the lodge. Carrow was already awake, smoking a cigarette.
Further down the corridor was a room that could only be Rupert Bellamy’s. It had the same well-worn comfort of Miss Dauntsey’s bedroom, only more opulent. He turned in place, taking in the photographs on the wall. They were much like any other collection of family photographs, except that the people in these were richer than most. Especially in the older pictures, the women were all but draped in pearls and jewels. He caught sight of an honest-to-god tiara in one photograph.
There was Lady Marchand at about twelve years old, looking like she was on her way to church—white gloves, clean pinafore, neatly curled hair—and beside her was a girl who looked like she had been dragged head-first out of a tree and shoved into a frock against her will.
Another photograph showed a man and a girl with dark hair and similar profiles, about fifty and twenty respectively. They wore riding clothes and stood beside an enormous black horse they both seemed inordinately proud of. Leo didn’t give a fig about that horse, or any horse for that matter. Instead, he looked at the woman who had disappeared and caused all this trouble. He looked at her face, as if something there might tell him her secrets.
There wasn’t anything, of course. She was just an ordinary rich girl.
A few frames over was a picture of what appeared to be Lady Marchand’s wedding day. So, this was the party that had taken James away from his cricket match. Camilla wore a gown that Leo could tell, even at a remove of twenty years, must have cost a small fortune and weighed at least a stone. Sir Anthony, Leo was irked to admit, was almost devastatingly handsome in the usual cutaway and tails.
Rose was in the picture as well, looking vaguely uncomfortable in a way that Leo couldn’t pinpoint. She had been much happier in the picture with the horse. So had her father, come to that. Well, it stood to reason—other than the newlyweds, people rarely looked happy in wedding photographs.
Off to the side in the wedding photograph stood a grim-faced boy in cutaways. Leo almost laughed, because he had seen that same expression on James’s face too many times. It was one of his favorite expressions, though he’d never tell James—that look of dutiful resignation with which he answered calls from patients at horrible hours, or when he did some other unpleasant task that he was too honorable to even dream of shirking. That’s what James was, an honorable man; Leo had always scoffed at honor as a means for men to let themselves become emotionally overwrought over trifles, but in James it was something else. It was something solid and reliable and good.
Leo scanned the photos and sighed. They did nothing but illustrate the parts of a story that he already understood. There was another, apparently separate story that was hidden from these photographs, but which Leo could see just as clearly: a pickpocket-turned-maid who ran away, a man who married an heiress but had no money, and a woman who disappeared.
Satisfied that he had seen all he needed to see, Leo moved quietly down the stairs, more from instinct than from any real fear of being discovered.
The police had locked the dining room and the door was still shut. He debated picking the lock and seeing for himself whether there were any traces of powder in the wine glasses, but doubted that the police would have left that kind of evidence sitting around.
Leo really ought to have checked the wine glasses himself last night, between the time Marchand died and the arrival of the police. But at the time he had been more concerned with James. The police, after all, could be relied on to put liquids in little vials and test for common substances. There was nothing to be lost by letting them do their job—no national secrets would be compromised and James wouldn’t be put in danger.
The realization that his list of priorities began and ended with national secrets and James Sommers, and probably not even in that order, didn’t come as a surprise.
The kitchen was empty but the kettle was warm. Martha, he supposed, must have made herself some tea already. He put the kettle back on the hob and set about making himself a cup; he’d wait to make James’s until a bit later so it didn’t get cold. He didn’t bother scrounging for sugar or milk and instead took his cup of black tea outside.
It was cold but not frigid as he made his way along the perimeter of the house. The sun was now high enough in the sky for him to get a good look at Blackthorn. It was, he supposed, not actively hideous, if one went in for twee faux-gothic nooks and crannies and pretty little embellishments.
Leo did not go in for any of those things. If pressed to choose a style of architecture he did go in for, he’d choose something spare and modern without any of these embarrassing excesses.
But then he’d remember James’s house—their house? James thought so, but he was not a reliable source of information on this topic—and its quaint window seat and pointless little gable. And he’d have to concede that his definition of what a home ought to look like was out of alignment with all his aesthetic principles.
Blackthorn, in any event, could be dismissed as a failure both aesthetically and also according to whatever muddled feelings Leo was inclined to apply to James-related things.
“It’s not that bad,” said a voice.
Leo turned to see Camilla, a cup of tea cradled in her hands. She was standing in the middle of a patch of dead grass, looking at a tree that was just beginning to come into leaf. She wore a coat over what appeared to be a dressing gown, and her dark hair was loose around her shoulders. Without makeup or her hair dressed, she looked remarkably like the photograph he had seen of Rupert Bellamy. Something about the set of her jaw and the way her hands clasped her teacup made him decide not to offer condolences on the loss of her husband.
“It’s not my idea of a seaside home,” Leo said instead. “You wouldn’t even know you were near the ocean, let alone within a stone’s throw of the shore.” Leo’s knowledge of seaside holidays was entirely theoretical but conjured images of either Brighton or Monte Carlo and not many places in between.
“Nor is it mine. It is where I grew up, though. Where are you from, Mr. Page?”
Yesterday he would have assumed that this line of questioning was meant to determine his pedigree, but there was something almost candid in the way she asked now. “Bristol,” he said, which was at least the partial truth. “But it’s been years since I’ve been back.”
“Sometimes it’s better that way.” Camilla took a sip of her tea.
At some point in the past twenty-four hours, her accent had unraveled and so had her posture. What had been an almost mincing RP was now looser; the way she sat could almost be described as slouching. He’d have chalked these changes up to the loss of her husband, but he had noticed them yesterday at dinner as well. He saw in Camilla the signs of someone who had spent so long—years, maybe decades—checking her impulses, but something had happened yesterday to make her drain a bottle of wine and throw caution to the wind.
Leo knew what it was like to finally stop checking impulses, to finally acknowledge that there was someone inside who had impulses. He had let the contours of his world be shaped entirely by his work, and Camilla had perhaps done something similar—but instead of work, she served some other god. Her husband? Propriety? He didn’t know, and it probably didn’t matter. What mattered was that something had happened to make Camilla cast off the things she had once thought paramount.
Leo thought of that Gainsborough landscape that hung on the dining room wall, the one that had been left to Camilla in her father’s will. It was almost grotesque in its departure from reality, with its cheerful peasants and fat cows, its serene ocean and pillowy boulders. Maybe he was making too much of it, but this whole family was so dedicated to looking away from anything difficult that he wondered if they really saw the world through a gauzy screen. What must it be like for that screen to be whipped away? Is that what had happened to Camilla?
“I was beastly to James,” Camilla said.
“I doubt that very much.” As far as Leo could tell, she and James had hardly spoken.
“I didn’t keep in touch with him after Rose—after everything. Anthony said it would be kinder to let James forget about what happened here, to let him get on with things. But I shouldn’t have listened to him.”
Leo looked at Camilla, really looked at her, and listened to what she was saying. Her husband had died not twelve hours earlier and she was thinking of his past misdeed—and how she had been complicit.
“He’s too kind to hold a grudge about such a thing even if he ought to,” Camilla went on.
“Daresay you’re right.” Leo, on the other hand, would happily carry all James’s grudges for him.
“I know I am. People do change from who they are as children, but they don’t change fundamentally.”
When his offer to fetch another blanket was waved away, Leo left Lady Marchand in the garden. He returned to the kitchen, where he brewed another cup of tea—this time ransacking the cupboards until he found the sugar bowl—and brought it up to James.
When Leo opened the bedroom door, James rolled over to face him, his face lit up with a sleepy surprise. Leo sat on the edge of the bed and handed him the cup. “What do I need to do,” Leo asked, “for you to expect to see me walk through doors?”
“It’s not that I expect you to run off,” James said. He leaned against the pillows, his hair pushed around in all directions the way it always was in the morning, all cowlicks and disorder.
Leo could, and probably should, leave it there. The alternative was a conversation about—he didn’t quite know what it would be about. His feelings? His devotion? Both sounded terrible. But if the alternative was James not believing that Leo would stick around, then he’d muddle through it. “You just don’t expect me to come back.”
“Not that either.” James idly brushed his knuckles against Leo’s knee. “It seems so implausible that I get to have you around. Not because of who you are or what you do, but because it’s lovely and I suppose I’m not in the habit of expecting lovely things.”
“You should be,” Leo said, too fast and too urgent. This was all wrong. It ought to be Leo who felt like he didn’t deserve good things. James deserved everything good in the world, and how could he be so stupid as not to realize this?
“Sweetheart,” James said, and Leo felt his cheeks heat. “Perhaps I’m just not used to keeping lovely things.”
“Get used to it,” Leo grumbled, and then couldn’t take much more of that so he got to his feet and busied himself in packing their bags and in general tidying up. “Whose jacket is this?” he asked, holding up an unfamiliar garment. “Harris tweed, too large to be either of ours.” He knew the answer even as he asked the question.
“That was Marchand’s. I took his coat off in order to do chest compressions, and I took my own coat off at the same time. They must have got mixed up and Martha brought it here by mistake.”
Out of habit or professional instinct or just plain nosiness, Leo began turning out the pockets. A few shillings, a button, a length of string, a folded-up piece of paper—exactly what you’d find in anyone’s pocket. He unfolded the paper. But instead of a scrawled telephone number or shopping list, it was a note: “I saw what you did by the cherry tree. A thousand pounds by ten p.m.”