The Lake House (31 page)

“That's right.”

“What did she do with the baby?” Sadie waited for the answer she knew was coming.

Margot Sinclair removed her glasses, holding them in one hand as she looked down her nose at Sadie. “DC Sparrow, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that times were different then. Young women who fell pregnant outside marriage did not have an easy time of it. Besides which, my grandmother had no means to look after a baby, not then.”

“She gave the baby up?”

“She had to.”

Sadie could barely contain her thrill. She was on the cusp of finding Theo Edevane after all this time. “Do you know who she gave him to?”

“Of course I do. She had a sister up north who was willing to take the baby and raise it as her own. And it wasn't a boy, it was a girl. My mother, as it happens.”

“She—? What?”

Margot continued, “That's why Rose was so upset when she was fired by the Edevane family. She felt she'd given up her own child, she'd poured all her love into their baby instead, only to be fired for something trivial.”

“But—” Sadie cleared her throat, still trying to catch up with her thoughts. “But if Rose's baby went to live up north, who was Theo Edevane's mother?”

“Well, you're the detective, DC Sparrow, but I'd have rather thought his mother was Mrs Edevane?”

Sadie frowned. It made no sense. She'd been so certain. Eleanor's inability to conceive another child—a son—for so long, followed by a stillborn baby; Rose's secret pregnancy, the timing of which fitted so perfectly; Eleanor firing Rose; Rose taking back her son. Only she hadn't had a son, she'd had a daughter. Margot Sinclair's mother, raised from birth in the Lake District by Rose Waters's sister. And there was no proof anyway that Eleanor had lost the baby she was pregnant with, only the rambling testimony of Constance deShiel. The whole theory collapsed like a house of cards.

“Are you all right, DC Sparrow? You're very pale.” Margot pressed a button on her desktop intercom. “Jenny? Some water, please.”

The secretary brought in a round tray with a carafe and two glasses. Sadie sipped at hers, grateful for something to do while she collected her wits. Gradually, she felt her mojo returning and a host of new questions floated to the surface. Rose might not have been Theo's mother, but she was still fired suddenly and unexpectedly, suspiciously close to his abduction. Why? If it wasn't because Eleanor Edevane felt threatened by her maternal presence, what had Rose done to put her employer offside? There must have been a reason. People who were proficient at their jobs and well-loved by those they worked for were not usually let go. She asked Margot.

“I don't think she ever understood that. I know it hurt her a great deal. She told me she loved working at Loeanneth. When I was a child and she came to visit she used to tell me stories about that house on the lake, and I always felt a kinship, an envy, too, for the little girls who grew up there. The way Rose told it, I half believed there were fairies in that garden. She was fond of her employers, too; she spoke well of them, particularly Anthony Edevane.”

“Oh?” That was interesting. Sadie thought back to her meeting with Clive, his account of the interview with Constance deShiel in which she intimated there'd been some sort of infidelity going on that might be relevant to the child's disappearance. “Do you think it's possible she became
too
close to her employer? To Anthony Edevane?”

“An affair, you mean?”

Margot Sinclair's frankness made Sadie wince at her own coy euphemism. She nodded.

“He's mentioned in her letters, I know she admired him. He was a very clever man, and she had sympathy for him, of course, but I never had the impression there was more to it than that. She does credit him at one point with having made the suggestion that she'd be an excellent teacher, encouraging her to pursue study in the future.”

“But no romance? Not even a hint?”

“Nothing of the sort. In fact, I think that after her pregnancy Rose was very cautious about getting involved romantically. She didn't marry until she was almost forty and there was no indication she was courted before then.”

Another dead end. Sadie sighed. She had lost the battle to keep desperation out of her voice. “Is there anything else you can think of? Anything that might be relevant to Rose leaving the Edevanes' employment?”

“There is something. I don't know that it's relevant, exactly, but it is a bit odd.”

Sadie nodded encouragement.

“Rose never understood why she was fired, which made it all the more perplexing that the Edevanes gave her an excellent reference and a very generous parting gift.”

“What sort of gift?

“Money. Enough to fund the travel and study that set her up for the rest of her career.”

Sadie took this in. Why fire someone and then reward them handsomely? All she could think of was that the money was a bribe, but there didn't seem to be a lot of point in bribing someone who had no idea what it was they weren't supposed to tell.

There was a knock and the receptionist poked her head around the door to remind Margot Sinclair she was due at her meeting with the board of governors in five minutes.

“Well then,” the headmistress said, with an apologetic smile, “I'm afraid I'm going to have to say goodbye. I don't know how much help I've been.”

Sadie wasn't entirely sure either, but she shook Margot Sinclair's hand and thanked her for her time. She was at the door when something occurred to her. She turned and said, “One more thing, Dr Sinclair, if you don't mind?”

“Not at all.”

“You said before that Rose was sympathetic towards Anthony Edevane. Why sympathetic? What did you mean by that?”

“Only that her own father had been similarly afflicted, so she understood what he was suffering.”

“Afflicted?”

“My great-grandfather had a dreadful war. Well, I don't suppose there was any other sort. Gassed at Ypres, and then sent back into the trenches. He was never the same, Granny said. He suffered nightmares and dreadful dark patches; he used to keep them all awake with his ranting. Post-traumatic stress disorder we'd call it now, back then it was just shell shock, wasn't it?”

“Shell shock,” Sadie repeated. “Anthony Edevane?”

“That's right. Rose mentions it many times in her journal. She tried to help him, and in fact it was their interactions that inspired her later theories about the teaching of poetics, particularly the Romantics, to refugee adolescents.”

Shell shock. It was a surprise. Sadie replayed the conversation in her mind as she walked back to her car. Not a surprise that he'd suffered with the condition; after all, he'd fought in France for years. Rather, the fact she hadn't come across any other mention to date. Was it a secret? If so, why was Rose Waters privy to the truth? Perhaps, as Margot had said, it was as simple as the young nanny having been familiar with the signs, recognising symptoms that others overlooked. Sadie wondered whether it mattered or whether she was simply clutching at straws. She thought about ringing someone—Clive, Alastair, Bertie—to run it by them, to see whether they could shed light on the condition, but her phone when she pulled it out was flat. With the signal as bad as it had been at Bertie's, she'd fallen out of the habit of charging it.

A bell had rung and the students were filing back into class now. Sadie watched them through the car window. Charlotte Sutherland went to a school like this one. In the photograph she'd sent with her letter, she'd been wearing a fancy uniform with a crest on the blazer and a list of accomplishments embroidered beneath it. That list had been long. No doubt there was a tweed coat and a jaunty little beret for use in the colder months. Sadie remonstrated with herself for being churlish. She was glad to think of Charlotte in a place like this. What had it all been for if not to afford her daughter the sort of opportunity she could never have provided herself?

Sadie sweet-talked the car into starting and gave herself a stern injunction to forget about Charlotte, once and for all. The letter was gone, returned to sender, no one at this address. She was supposed to be feeling, and acting, as if it had never arrived. She turned her thoughts instead to finding her way out of Oxford, and once she was on the M40, heading east towards London, she replayed her meeting with Margot Sinclair, extracting all the new information—the excellent reference given to Rose Waters, the large cash payment—twisting it this way and that, and wondering vaguely whether Anthony Edevane's shell shock changed things, and how.

T
wenty

London, 1931

Afterwards, Eleanor treated herself to tea at Liberty. The appointment had ended sooner than she'd expected, leaving her with two hours to fill before the train was due to leave Paddington. She'd stood on the corner where Harley Street met Marylebone Road, grey clouds disintegrating into grey buildings, before deciding her spirits could do with cheering and waving down a taxi. And so here she was. She turned the dainty spoon in circles, stirring in her milk, and then tapped it against the cup's fine porcelain lip. She caught the eye of a well-dressed man at a nearby table but didn't return his polite, enquiring smile.

Stupid of her to have held out so much hope, but there you had it. There was no fool like an old fool. Anthony had been right: the doctor had nothing new to offer, just more of the same talk. Eleanor wondered sometimes whether hope, that awesome, awful habit, ever died; better still, whether it could be killed. Things would be so much easier if it could, if it were as simple as flicking a switch. But alas, it seemed hope's glimmer always hovered in the distance, no matter how long one journeyed towards it without success.

Eleanor set down her spoon. Even as she thought it, she knew that she was wrong. Anthony had lost his hope. Not on the fields of France, perhaps, but at some point in the decade that followed. And that was the rub, that was why she must keep trying. It had happened on her watch. She hadn't been paying close enough attention, for if she had she would surely have noticed and done whatever was needed to arrest it. She'd made a promise to him and to herself.

It was raining outside now and London was slate-coloured and smeary. The streets glistened with dark puddles and a tide of black umbrellas flowed above the human traffic beneath. People moved faster in the rain, their expressions set, their eyes focused, each intent on his or her goal. There was so much scurrying purpose out there that Eleanor was overcome with weariness. Here, in the warmth of the tearoom, she sat inert like a single piece of flotsam in a sea of determination that threatened to sink her. She had never been good at filling time. She ought to have brought a book with her from Cornwall. She ought to have brought her husband.

Anthony's refusal to accompany her had been predictable; it was his vehemence that caught her by surprise. “Stop,” he'd said when she first broached the subject. “Please. Just stop.”

But Eleanor hadn't. Ever since she'd read the article in
The Lancet
she'd been determined that she and Anthony must meet Dr Heimer. Apparently she hadn't been the only one. The appointment had taken weeks to make and she'd had to contain her excitement, her hope, as she waited for time to pass, knowing it was best not to burden Anthony too soon.

“Stop.” He hadn't raised his voice; it had been almost a whisper.

“This could be it, Anthony,” she'd pressed. “This man, this Dr Heimer, has been working on the problem, studying other men with the same afflictions, and he's had success, it says here that he knows how to fix—”

“
Please
.” The word cut like a knife and the rest of her sentence fell away. He didn't look at her, his head remained bowed over the top of his microscope so that Eleanor didn't realise at first that his eyes were closed. “Just stop.”

She went closer. She could smell the faint hint of his perspiration, mingling with the strange laboratory odour of the room. Her voice was soft but firm. “I won't give up on you, Anthony, no matter how hard you try to push me away. Certainly not now when it seems as if we might have found someone who can help.”

He'd looked at her then with an expression she'd been unable to name. She had seen him aggrieved before, too many times to count, the nightmares that came even by day, the sweats that came at night, and the terrible shaking that couldn't be stilled, even by the full force of her own body wrapped around his; but this had been different. The stillness. The quiet. That expression on his face that made her flinch as if she'd been struck. “No more doctors,” he'd said in a low steady tone that was almost a hiss. “No more.”

She'd left him in his study, hurried downstairs, her face hot and her thoughts scattered. Later, when she was alone, she'd conjured his face. She hadn't been able to help herself; that expression of his had accompanied her all afternoon as she shadow-walked through the day's tasks. Only in the dead of night, as he slept fitfully beside her and she lay wide awake listening to the night-birds on the lake, remembering the long-ago evening when they'd cycled together over stones made white by moonlight, did the word come to her. Revulsion, that's what she'd seen in his face. Those features she'd loved so long and so well had been arranged in an attitude of disgust and loathing usually reserved for one's worst enemies. Eleanor could have borne revulsion directed at her; it was knowing that his loathing was reserved for himself that made her want to weep and wail and curse.

By morning, though, he was himself again. He'd even suggested a picnic down by the stream. Hope had been resurrected, and if he still refused to come with her to London, at least this time he did it with a smile on his face and a claim that there were things he should be getting on with in his study. So it was, she'd carried her hope with her. All the way from Looe station it had sat on the empty train seat beside her where her husband ought to have been.

Now, she tilted her teacup and watched the tepid dregs roll this way and that. She'd told the girls she was travelling to London to visit a dressmaker in Mayfair, and they'd believed her because that's the sort of person they thought she was. Mother. They didn't remember the early years of their lives, when Anthony was away at war and she'd been alone with them at Loeanneth. The time they'd spent combing the estate together, the stories she'd told them, the secret places she'd shown them. There were so many aspects of Eleanor her daughters didn't know. She took them out sometimes, those hidden traits, and turned them over, inspecting and admiring from all sides, as if they were precious seed pearls. And then she wrapped them up again safely and tucked them away. She would never reveal them again because then she'd have to explain why she'd changed.

Eleanor didn't discuss Anthony with others. To do so would have been to break faith with the young man she'd fallen in love with that summer in London, twenty years ago now, and, more devastating perhaps, with her tightly held belief that one day this too would pass. When it did, when she found the way to return to him his levity of spirit and everything he'd lost, when he was well again, he would be glad that no one knew how low he'd sunk, no one but Eleanor. His dignity deserved that.

She certainly never let the girls know. Anthony loved their daughters. In spite of it all he was a good father and the girls adored him. They'd never known the young man and his exceptional ambitions; he was simply “Daddy', and his eccentricities made him their own. The long walks through the woods, days at a time in which he disappeared, returning with his bag filled with samples of this fern leaf or that butterfly, treasures that the girls pored over and helped him to archive. They had not seen, as Eleanor had, the man with his old medical book on his lap, his eyes closed as he tried to remember the bones of the human hand, his own hand, once so elegant and capable and sure, shaking where it rested on the broad page. He'd sensed her presence and opened his eyes, a sad, tight smile appearing when he saw that it was her. “I've become one of those men,” he said, “one of those fellows who sit around trying to fill their empty hours with useless pursuits.”

“That's not true,” she'd said. “You're working on your natural history book. You're having some time away from medicine, but you'll go back to it. You'll complete your clinical training and be better than ever.”

“When will you see that it's too late? That I'm not that man anymore? That he died in France? The things that happened, Eleanor, the terrible choices, the monstrous decisions . . .”

“Tell me about them. Tell me, please, and then I'll understand.”

But he never did, only looked at her and shook his head and turned back to his books.

A woman at the entrance caught Eleanor's attention. A handsome woman holding the hand of a small boy—three years old, Eleanor guessed—dressed very smartly for the occasion in a white sailor suit. He had a cherub's face, big blue eyes, round flushed cheeks, and cupid-bow lips parted in wonder as he peered around his mother's hand at the busy, brightly lit room.

Eleanor felt a familiar tug of longing. She still hoped for another baby. More than hoped, she yearned. Ached with her desire to hold a child in her arms again, to tickle and kiss and cuddle a small, plump body. She reminded herself, sometimes, of the queen in Mr Llewellyn's story, who'd lost her child and so craved another she was willing to deal with the devil to obtain one. Eleanor's wasn't an
entirely
selfish longing. There was a small part of her that wondered whether maybe another child, a little boy, was just what Anthony needed. He loved the girls, but didn't all men want a son who would grow in their own image? Her hand went absently to her flat, firm abdomen. There were still occasional tender moments between them, when he was able; it was possible she would fall pregnant again. But despite her willingness, her eagerness, it had not happened in ten years.

Wistfully, Eleanor forced herself to look away from the woman and child, sitting together now at a table, the little one careful to observe the manners he'd been taught, while his big round eyes gave him away, busily cataloguing the unfamiliar place. She turned back to the window, on the other side of which the world still glowered. The dark grey clouds had lowered further over London and the city was gloomy. The lights were on inside the tearoom and as Eleanor took in the warm interior mirrored in the dark window, ghosted commuters hurrying by beyond it, she met her own reflection by mistake.

It was always a shock to catch oneself unexpectedly in repose. The woman looking back at her was a model of discreet respectability. Her back was straight, her clothes were fashionable without being modish, her hair was neatly set beneath her hat. Her face was a pleasantly drawn mask that gave nothing away. The sort of face other people's gazes slid across. The woman in the glass was everything Eleanor had sworn she wouldn't become. Certainly not the sort of person Eleanor the Adventuress might have been expected to grow into. Eleanor thought of her sometimes, her childhood doppelgänger, that little girl with wild, wide eyes, hair that wouldn't be controlled and a fierce spirit of adventure. Eleanor liked to imagine she was still out there somewhere. That she hadn't been subsumed but, rather, had turned back into a pearl and rolled away. That she was waiting somewhere for the fairies to find her and the woods to bring her back to life.

The thought was upsetting and Eleanor did what she always did when dark thoughts threatened to undo her. She moved. A quick wave brought the waiter, she paid the account, gathered her handbag and the decoy dress she'd barely looked at before purchasing, and with a shake to open her umbrella, headed out into the rain.

* * *

The ticket office was teeming with people when she reached the station, the smell of wet clothing pervasive. Eleanor joined a queue of disgruntled travellers and made her way slowly to the front of the line. “I have a fare booked in the name of Edevane,” she told the booking clerk on the other side of the counter.

The man began searching through his file box and as he muttered the names he was passing over Eleanor glanced behind her at the jostling crowd. “I gather the train is full,” she said.

The man didn't look up. “Previous train broke down. Been overrun all afternoon with folk trying to get themselves shifted onto the next one. Edevane, you say?”

“Yes.”

“Here we are then.” The man in the booth slid two tickets beneath the grille. “Departing platform three.”

Eleanor turned to leave, looking as she did so at the pair of tickets in her gloved hand. She pushed back to the front of the counter. “My husband won't be travelling with me,” she said when she had the clerk's attention. “He was unexpectedly detained.” More excuses. She made them without thinking these days.

“No refunds,” the man said as he started serving the gentleman behind her.

“I don't want a refund, only to return this ticket.” Eleanor slid it back across the counter. “I don't need it. The ticket might as well be used by someone else.”

Eleanor sat in the carriage, waiting for the train to leave the station. On the platform, men in suits strode busily this way and that, while porters pushed leaning towers of suitcases through the crowds and small groups of people performed the intimate rituals of farewell. It seemed to Eleanor as she watched them that some of the most vivid moments of her life had been enacted in stations like these. There'd been the day she first met Anthony, the lemonade in Baker Street underground station, and then the morning in 1914 that she'd waved him off to war. He'd looked so dashing in his uniform, Howard there beside him, both men gleaming with youth.

When he told her that he planned to enlist, the two of them lying side by side on a blanket by the Loeanneth stream, a thousand reasons why he shouldn't had crossed her mind. “But we're so happy,” she'd blurted.

“We'll be happy again, when I come home.”

“
If
you come home.”

It was petulant, the first thing that came to mind and the worst thing she could have said. Selfish, childish and true. She kicked herself afterwards. The four years ahead would teach her temperance, but at the time, fear, panic and her powerlessness to stem their flow made her fierce. “It's a war, you know. It's not going to be a picnic.”

He reached to push aside a stubborn lock of hair that had fallen across her eyes. His fingertips on her temple made her shiver. “I have medical training, Eleanor. I can be useful. Those men, my friends, are going to need people like me.”