Cornwall, February 1948
When James descended from the platform of an unfamiliar train station and climbed into a waiting taxi, he was already in an unspeakable mood, raw and vulnerable as an undressed wound.
Perhaps he could blame the weather, which was as gray and damp as any February could hope to be. Perhaps it was because he had just spent four hours on a train with no amusement other than a book that revealed itself to be a sorry disappointment mere minutes into the trip. Perhaps it was because somebody had left a newspaper on an empty seat, and all it took was a single glance at the front page to confirm that it contained nothing but tales of danger and strife. Danger and strife, in addition to being generally unpleasant, now held the added complication of being all too likely to occur in places where Leo was sent.
Leo would be back in England by the beginning of March. James held that thought carefully, just out of view, as if it might dissolve under closer scrutiny, and therefore his mood remained as bleak as the relentless monochrome of the landscape.
When the taxi pulled up in front of Blackthorn, James was fully prepared to hate the sight of the place. It had survived in his memories as something of an enchanted castle, but childhood memories were notoriously unreliable, and James knew himself to be lamentably prone to bouts of gauzy nostalgia. Blackthorn was likely nothing more than a mid-Victorian monstrosity, crusted over with all manner of turrets and whatnot.
But the house that stood before him mapped surprisingly well onto the Blackthorn of his memories. Admittedly, there were turrets and crenellations and more towers than one would think a relatively modest country house could accommodate, but the more egregious excesses were softened by a good deal of ivy and something James didn’t think he could quantify. Charm, perhaps.
He frowned, vaguely irritated not to find the house tasteless. There really was no pleasing him today, was there? He paid the cabbie and wrapped his muffler a second time around his neck to ward off the cold wind that blew in from an unseen sea.
Suitcase in hand, he stood on the gravel drive, gritted his teeth, and turned in a circle. There was the apple tree Rose had taught him to climb; there, in the distance, were the stables where Rose had shown him a litter of kittens. And, of course, at the bottom of the garden was the path that led to the sea. As a child he hadn’t properly understood the gravity of the situation. But as an adult—indeed, as an adult some years older than Rose had been that final summer—he had the sense that he had stumbled across a hidden graveyard. It made him want to turn around and get the first train back to Wychcomb St. Mary.
But he had come for a reason. Well, that wasn’t quite true—he had come because there was no reason not to, and James, for good or for ill, wasn’t in the habit of denying requests. The old man had been good enough to remember James in his will, and if he had seen fit to require the presence of all his legatees at Blackthorn, then it would be churlish and ungrateful for James to decline. And if James privately thought it quite odd that Uncle Rupert—solemn, dour, rather a killjoy—would go in for such a set piece as gathering the family for a reading of the will, then he could keep that to himself for a day or two.
He knocked on the door.
At the back of his mind he had expected the door to be answered by the butler, or at the very least a housemaid. The Blackthorn of his memories existed in a time before butlers as a species had practically gone extinct.
Instead, the door was opened by a small woman closer to fifty than forty, with pale hair that was more gray than blond, a tea towel clutched in one hand, and a face James was startled to find familiar even after twenty years. “That can’t be Jamie,” she said. “Or, bless me, I suppose I ought to call you Dr. Sommers.”
“You ought to do no such thing,” James said warmly, putting down his suitcase and holding out his hand. “Cousin Martha, it must be.” It was funny, now that he thought about it, that Rose and Camilla had been plain Rose and Camilla, but Martha was always Cousin Martha. She was only a few years Rose and Camilla’s senior, but that had been enough to firmly establish her as a proper grown-up, even if her poverty hadn’t already set her apart from the daughters of the house. All that nuance had been lost on him as a child, but it was embarrassingly clear now, as he took in Martha’s worn tweed skirt and moth-eaten cardigan.
He realized that he hadn’t any idea whether Martha had ever left Blackthorn. Was she as much a guest as he was? Or had she stayed here for the past twenty years, still keeping house for Uncle Rupert?
“I’ll show you to your room and then you can make yourself at home,” Martha offered, reaching for his case.
“I have it,” he said easily, his hand closing around the handle.
“Of course you do,” she said, looking at him oddly. “You were always such a sweet child.” There was something almost wistful in her expression, something he might have classified as regret, if that made any sense at all.
Not knowing how to respond to that, as he could hardly accept a compliment bestowed on a version of himself that was twenty years out of date, he pasted on a smile. “Am I the first to arrive?” he asked, curious as to who else had been summoned to this gathering.
“Mr. Trevelyan is in the library,” Martha said as they climbed the stairs. “Did you ever meet him when you stayed here? Oh, well. I daresay young boys don’t take much notice of elderly solicitors. We’re still waiting for Camilla.”
“Is that all?” James had thought that if Uncle Rupert’s will included as distant a relation as James, it must also name a number of other beneficiaries.
“Mr. Trevelyan asked me to prepare five bedrooms. Those two at the end of the hall will be for Camilla and Anthony. They’ve always used that pair of rooms.” She paused in front of a closed door. “And this room is yours. I haven’t any idea who the other two rooms are for. Now,” she said, opening the door, “I think you’ll find everything you need. I’d tell you to ring if you want anything, but there isn’t anybody to ring for these days. You’ll have to try your best to track me down, I’m afraid.”
And that, James supposed, answered his question about whether Martha was not only living at Blackthorn, but still serving as an unofficial housekeeper. James assured her that he wouldn’t need anything and leaned against the closed bedroom door.
He hadn’t thought Sir Anthony Marchand would also be at Blackthorn. He had rather counted on the man not coming, in fact. Surely, Sir Anthony had patients in London and better things to do than attend the will reading of his late father-in-law. Surely, he had a full schedule of being smug and officious, and couldn’t possibly spare the time for a trip to the country. With any luck, the remaining empty bedrooms would be occupied by people with sufficient neuroses and obsessions to keep Sir Anthony busy and far away from James.
James told himself not to be unkind. Sir Anthony had done his best by James, all things considered. Hadn’t he?
He started unpacking his suitcase, then crossed to the window and peered out. The view wasn’t what he expected. In fact, he hadn’t been aware that he expected anything at all until he saw nothing but brown and gray.
What he had expected—what he remembered, in some part of his mind he hadn’t been aware even existed—was an expanse of green leading to tennis courts and then to the sea. The green of high summer was of course absent from this February landscape, and the tennis courts were overgrown and barely visible. And there Rose crept into his mind once again, the memory of her laughingly berating someone for a bad serve as James ran around the court, collecting stray balls.
As suddenly as the memory appeared, it drifted away. Still, he knew that if he opened the window and stuck his head out, he’d catch a glimpse of the sea. It was funny, the things one’s memory saw fit to throw at one out of nowhere. He hadn’t thought about the view from Blackthorn since he was a child, and now he could vividly remember throwing the window open to see the merest fragment of the ocean.
Not that he would do that now. It was cold and damp outside and only marginally less cold and damp inside. He cast a doleful eye on the empty grate. There was neither electric fire nor radiator anywhere in sight.
Well, at least he had brought plenty of warm clothes with him. He had grossly overpacked, not knowing whether this was to be the sort of weekend where one dressed for dinner. Was it to be a jumper and corduroy trousers sort of weekend or a tweed jacket and tie sort of weekend? As the only invitation he received had come not from a hostess but from a firm of solicitors, there hadn’t been anyone to ask. He already felt peculiar about returning to Blackthorn after so long and for some reason was loath to do so in the wrong clothes. As a result, James’s suitcase was close to bursting at the seams despite the fact that he planned only to stay a single night. The letter from the solicitor’s firm indicated that he was welcome to stay from today—Friday—through the entire weekend, but Leo might return any day now. And since Leo’s stays in England tended to be measured in days rather than weeks, James didn’t want to waste an hour of whatever time they had.
The thought was oddly jarring, thinking of Leo as he was standing in a house he had occupied as a boy. Maybe it was because the idea of Leo was so out of keeping with memories of carefree summers and endless sunshine. Or maybe it was because James was now living a life his twelve-year-old self couldn’t have imagined and didn’t even know how to hope for.
Or maybe it was just that he had never quite believed Leo would return, and being so far from home made it seem that much less likely that Leo would ever find his way back to him.
He groaned at his own capacity for hand-wringing. This was what came of time off work, he supposed. He abandoned his suitcase and went downstairs.