“Let’s walk to the sea,” James said when they left the lodge. “We still have a little time before Mr. Trevelyan is due to arrive.” He glanced at Leo, whose hands were deep in his pockets and whose shoulders were hunched.
It was an ugly day, gray and damp and dreary. It was the sort of day best spent near a fire, and James couldn’t say what possessed him to want to see the ocean except that it felt like a waste to be a stone’s throw from the sea and not bother to take so much as a look at it.
They had walked for a few minutes when their silence began to strike James as strained. He nudged Leo with his elbow. “Out with it.”
Leo sighed, and it sounded like capitulation. “I keep expecting you to come to your senses.”
This wasn’t the first time Leo had said this sort of thing, and previously James had—well, not exactly dismissed it, but told Leo he had nothing to worry about. But now that seemed wrong. It seemed like something that the Bellamys would do: find something unpleasant or difficult and refuse to look at it.
So he swallowed hard. “I feel pretty much the same way, actually.”
“Really?”
“I suppose it’ll wear off after a while. And we have a while. We have all the time we want.”
They walked the rest of the short distance to the sea, and it was just as dark and unpleasant as James could have predicted, but he felt better seeing it anyway, and even better because Leo was at his side, plainly humoring him, valiantly attempting to light a cigarette in the wind.
“Yesterday you said something about how I had invited my worst nightmare into my life,” James said.
“I was being maudlin and all I did was embarrass myself,” Leo griped. “Don’t remind me.”
“No, listen. I’m not inviting you into my life,” James said. “I’m trying to live my life with you.” That wasn’t quite right either. “I want us to live our lives together. Or a life.”
“Still think you’re mad.”
“Could be. But if you were—if I were—Christ almighty, if it were possible, I’d have had you at the registrar’s office weeks ago.”
James could almost hear Leo’s blush. “Nobody would marry you in a registrar’s office,” Leo finally said, sounding strangled. “It’d be a church or nothing.”
And that—that was Leo not arguing with the premise. That was Leo accepting the premise. “You’re probably right,” James agreed.
“People would say we were being hasty,” Leo said.
“Pfft. Half the married couples I know got hitched within weeks of meeting. War, you know. We’d be boring.” James’s heart felt like it was in danger of beating out of his chest.
“That’s me, boring.”
They were alone on the beach, the tide halfway out, and the wind fiercer than it had been back at Blackthorn. Leo deliberately turned up James’s collar and adjusted his muffler.
They returned to the house in a silence that felt settled and satisfied, their shoulders bumping and the backs of their hands brushing together.
Camilla stood in front of Blackthorn, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She looked ten years older than she had two days earlier. Her hair was still down and her dark clothes were silhouetted against the gray stone of the house. She looked like nothing so much as a woman on the cover of a penny dreadful.
And she was apparently waiting for them, or at least for James.
“Lilah said that you wanted to know whether Anthony needed money in the summer of 1927,” she said bluntly. “He needed capital to buy a colleague’s practice, and I wasn’t due to get my inheritance until the following year.”
“And did he get the money?”
She smiled tightly. “He said he was able to arrange something. I never asked questions about money.”
James remembered the look Camilla and Lilah had shared the previous afternoon in the library when James had revealed that Rose’s bank account was empty. Camilla had known then, James was sure of it. She probably didn’t know how her husband had got his hands on her sister’s money—on Carrow’s money—but she knew he had something to do with it.
“He didn’t want her to come back,” Camilla said. “If she came back, she might discover that the money was missing. All those things he told the police, all of it was intended to make it look like she was dead. How was she meant to come back after that?”
James knew that the truth was more complicated: Carrow had other reasons not to come back, but the knowledge that his brother-in-law might institutionalize him had to be at the top of the list. So while Camilla might have the details wrong, she was right in the sense that her husband had been complicit in her sibling’s disappearance.
“Anthony killed her, in a way,” Camilla said. “It was a kind of killing.”
Before James could wonder why she had phrased it this way, Mr. Trevelyan’s car rolled into the drive and it was time to go inside.
As the guests gathered in the library to meet one last time, the mood in the room was even more fraught with anticipation than it had been two days earlier.
Lilah sat at one end of the sofa, one leg crossed over the other while she read a fashion magazine. Camilla sat beside her, gazing off into the distance fretfully. Martha perched on the edge of the armchair by the fire, her fists clenched on the arms of the chair. James sat in the chair opposite her, Leo at his side, his back to the fire.
Once again, the Carrows stood in the doorway.
Mr. Trevelyan cleared his throat. At that moment, the casement clock in the hall struck twelve. While it chimed out the hour, everyone shifted uncomfortably, the way one always does when an overly loud clock makes its presence known.
“I suppose the estate will pass to the home for wayward girls or whatever charity struck Father’s fancy,” Camilla said, for all the world as if she was supremely uninterested in the fate of Blackthorn or her father’s money.
“Not exactly,” said Mr. Trevelyan. “I did receive a solution.”
Everyone sat up a little straighter, suddenly alert. James did his best not to look at Carrow, knowing the cost an accurate solution would mean to the man.
“I will read to you the relevant portion of the solution: ‘The person once known as Rose Bellamy is alive and well, happily married, gainfully employed, and beloved by many.’”
For a long moment, nobody spoke.
“Is that it?” Martha finally asked.
“No,” said Mr. Trevelyan. “But the letter writer goes on to say that there is nothing in Rupert Bellamy’s will that requires me to share the solution. In fact, she makes an argument for secrecy, beginning with an account of what she believes her grandfather would have wished, and ending with some statements that might be considered to skate rather perilously close to extortion by less charitably inclined minds.”
Her grandfather—that meant the solution had come from Lilah. As he turned to her, she glanced up from her magazine.
“What manner of extortion did you use to make Mr. Trevelyan keep quiet?” Leo asked her, sounding amused, of all things.
“That’s for me to know and you never to find out.”
“I don’t understand,” Martha said.
“You don’t need to, Aunt Martha,” said Lilah. “Your cousin is well.”
“But where is she? Camilla, surely you must want to know,” Martha said.
“I’ve always said that Rose must have had her reasons and that it was none of my business,” Camilla said, but James didn’t think it was his imagination that the way she said this was much more brittle than it had been that first day.
“James?” Martha asked.
“I’m inclined to respect Mr. Trevelyan’s point of view,” James said.
Martha looked—there was no other word for it—defeated. “That’s it, then, I suppose.” Turning to the Carrows, who still stood near the door, she said, “I beg your pardon. We’ve taken up so much of your time. Have a lovely afternoon, my dears.”
“I wonder how Trevelyan verified Lilah’s solution,” Leo murmured.
“Maybe he didn’t,” James said. “Maybe he just wanted Lilah to inherit the house.”
Leo’s eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t disagree.
“Can I speak to you for a moment?” asked Lilah after Martha, Camilla, and the solicitor had left the room.
“Of course,” said James.
“Privately.” She glanced at Leo.
“I’ll bring your luggage out to the car,” offered Leo, and shut the door as he left the drawing room.
Lilah seemed reluctant to speak, instead examining the room as if she had never seen it. Well, maybe it seemed different to her now that it was her own.
“What will you do with it?” James asked.
“If you mean the house, other than making sure that Martha is comfortable here, I don’t much care,” she said. “But if you’re talking about the money, it belongs to Will Carrow, doesn’t it? My father stole what was in that box. It seems only right to pay Carrow back.”
James wasn’t so sure that Carrow would take the money, but figured that was for Lilah to sort out. “How did you know?”
“About Carrow? Remember, I spent the winter shifting between Viola and Cesario. Maybe I’ve just got used to looking at a face without thinking much about the gender of who the face belongs to.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’ve spent years comparing my own reflection to the Bellamys and wondering at the difference. Or maybe I’ve always supposed that Rose Bellamy ran away and it wasn’t hard for me to figure out why.” She shrugged. “Or maybe it was a lucky guess.”
James nodded. “You really won’t tell your mother the truth about Carrow?”
“I’m good at keeping secrets from my mother.” She looked pointedly at James. “And she’s good at keeping secrets from me.”
“She cares about you,” James said, knowing how feeble this must sound. “You must know that the reason she let you take up acting was that she didn’t want you to run away. She had already lost someone who ran away when they didn’t get what they needed, and she wasn’t going to let that happen again. Now, what did you want to speak to me about?”
“Would my father have lived if he had got his digitalis sooner?”
“Doubtful,” James said. “In my experience, when a heart attack comes on that quickly, there’s nothing to be done.” This never stopped him, or most doctors, from trying everything in their repertoire.
Usually, families found this information comforting. When someone died suddenly, their families often wanted to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, wanted to identify that one moment when things could have gone differently. Hearing that there wasn’t such a moment often gave families some peace.
But what passed over Lilah’s face wasn’t peace. It wasn’t anything at all. She was schooling her expression into one of cool neutrality, he realized. There was no reason for that, though.
Unless. He remembered what Camilla had said not a quarter of an hour ago, about believing her husband to have as good as murdered her sister. “Did you and your mother ever find your father’s digitalis?” he asked gently.
She shook her head. “Of course not,” and left the room.
He was left alone in the drawing room, dumbfounded and unsure of whether Lilah had just confessed to attempted murder. But, no, it wouldn’t have been Lilah. He remembered Camilla insisting that she, not Lilah, would run upstairs to find the digitalis. She had been up there for what felt like ages. Had she simply decided that her husband wasn’t worth saving?
And all that while, James had been downstairs, trying to save the man. It wasn’t his place to decide who lived and who died. And in this instance, it certainly wasn’t his business to decide who was culpable. The man would have died one way or the other, and whether a person had done wrong by merely intending another person to die was a question he’d leave to philosophers.
As for James, he would go home.