A leafy communal garden filled the middle of the square, its black iron gate locked against outsiders, and Alice hesitated beneath a thick sweep of ivy. It was quieter here, the bustle of the main road softened by the tall Victorian buildings that stood on all four sides of the square. Swallows twittered to one another in the branches above, the sound more enchanting and otherworldly for its contrast with the general urban hum. Through the dimpled glass of Deborah’s morning-room window Alice could just make out the shape of a tall, lean figure. Alice Edevane was not a person who made a habit of breaking engagements, certainly not when the other party was there waiting for her, but oh, how a part of her longed to keep on walking. Her heart gave a flutter at this glimpse of escape. She could simply pretend that she’d forgotten, laugh when Deborah rang to check on her, blame it on old age. She was old, after all. Not older or ageing or any of those other words people used because they thought they were softer and more palatable. Alice was old and old people were accorded certain privileges. But, no, she knew it was a fancy. The reprieve would only be brief. It was time.
She knocked on the door and was caught off guard when it opened almost immediately. More surprising was the fact that it was Deborah herself who opened it. She was beautifully dressed as always, in a draping silk dress that tied about her narrow waist. Her hair was scooped into an elegant silver chignon.
The sisters nodded at one another but neither said a word. With a slight smile, Deborah stood aside, indicating with her hand that Alice should come in.
The house was spotless and gleaming, bountiful floral arrangements exquisite on every surface. Alice remembered now. Fresh flower deliveries arrived every third day from that place in Chelsea, the order was longstanding. She looked at the bunch of roses in her hands. They seemed paltry suddenly, a folly. She held them out nevertheless. “Here. For you.”
“Oh, Alice, thank you, they’re lovely.”
“It’s nothing. Silly. They reminded me of Mother, that’s all, Nijinsky—”
“The Bakst costume.” Deborah smiled, lifting the flowers to her nose, as much, it seemed to Alice, to steal a moment as to sample their fragrance. Of course, she was dreading the meeting as much as Alice was. Kind-hearted Deborah would take no joy from the conversation to come.
Alice followed her sister into the morning room where Maria, more personal assistant than housekeeper, was unloading tea things onto the coffee table. She straightened, empty tray under her arm, and asked whether there was anything else they needed.
“A vase, if you wouldn’t mind, Maria. Alice brought these. Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Lovely colours,” Maria agreed. “Would you like them here, in the morning room?”
“My bedroom, I think.”
Maria swept the flowers from Deborah’s hand and left in a streak of brisk efficiency. Alice fought the urge to call her back, to ask after her mother or her many siblings, to keep the housekeeper there just a little longer. But she didn’t, and the room’s air particles settled to fill the space Maria had left behind.
The sisters met each other’s gaze and without a word sat down opposite one another on the linen settees. Alice noticed then a book on the table between them, a leather bookmark holding a place near the end. Recognition was instant and visceral. Their father had carried the edition of Keats’s poems with him always, a favourite from which he drew comfort over the years, clasping it to him even on his deathbed. The sight of it now made her cheeks warm, as if her parents were with them in the room, waiting to hear what she had done.
“Tea?”
“Please.”
The clean, crisp gurgle of tea being poured from the pot was excruciating. Alice felt that all her senses were sharpened. She was aware of a fly teetering on the side of the tray, of Maria moving about upstairs, of the faint lingering scent of lemon furniture polish. The room was very warm and she slipped a fingertip beneath her collar to lift it from her neck. The weight of her impending confession pressed. “Deborah, I need to—”
“No.”
“Pardon?”
“Please.” Deborah set down the teapot and pressed her fingertips together firmly. She clasped her hands and pushed them into her lap. The gesture was one of anguish. Her face was pale and drawn, and suddenly Alice realised she’d got it all wrong. That she wasn’t here to talk about Ben; that her sister was ill, dying even, and she, Alice, had been too self-absorbed to notice.
“Deborah?”
Her sister’s mouth tightened. Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Oh, Alice, it’s such a burden.”
“What is it?”
“I should have said something years ago. I meant to, I did. There have been so many occasions over the years when I almost—and then, the other day at the gallery, when you mentioned Loeanneth, the gardener. You surprised me, I wasn’t ready.”
Not an illness, then. Of course not. Alice almost laughed at her own boundless instinct for self-preservation. Here she was, sitting in the confessional, still looking for an escape hatch. Outside, a taxi trundled up the street. Alice saw the flash of black through the gauze curtains. She wanted to be inside that taxi, going away, away, to anywhere but here.
“Theo,” said Deborah, and Alice closed her eyes, waiting for what she knew was coming. “I know what happened to him.”
After all her agonising, after years of keeping the secret to herself, of living with the guilt, it was over. Alice felt surprisingly light. She hadn’t even needed to say it herself, Deborah already knew. “Deborah,” she started, “I—”
“I know everything, Alice. I know what happened to Theo, and the fact of it is driving me mad. It was my fault, you see. Everything that happened was my fault.”
Nineteen
Oxford, 2003
It turned out Rose Waters had a great-niece living in Oxford. Margot Sinclair was headmistress of a fancy public school and “a very busy person.” Her secretary had, however, managed to find Sadie a half-hour appointment at one o’clock sharp on Tuesday. She hadn’t actually said the word “sharp’, but it had been implied.
The interview was a long shot—most people didn’t maintain the closest of relationships with their great-aunt—but Sadie, eager as a hound and with not much else in the way of leads, was there by midday and focused on the questions she’d jotted down. Preparation was key. It was going to take a very delicate touch to draw out Margot Sinclair on the subject of her great-aunt’s possible involvement in the kidnapping of her own illegitimate child; a boy born secretly and passed off as the son of her employers.
“You sure you’re not turning out a novel?” Bertie had asked when she tried the theory out on him.
She rolled her eyes. It was breakfast time, the morning after they’d had their almost-argument, and both were trying extra hard to sound light and breezy.
“All right, all right. Remind me again why the Edevanes would have taken on the child?”
“Because they had trouble conceiving again after their third daughter and they wanted a son, desperately. A decade went by and although Eleanor finally fell pregnant in 1931, the baby was stillborn the following year—that’s what Constance was trying to tell people, but no one listened. You can only imagine how awful it must’ve been, how unfair they must have thought it, particularly knowing that Rose Waters, their unmarried nanny, was also secretly pregnant; surely with a child she couldn’t keep. It doesn’t take that much of a leap to see what happened next. They’d have been falling over themselves to take the baby off her hands, don’t you think?”
He scratched his whiskery chin, before conceding with a nod that it was possible. “The craving for a baby is certainly a powerful thing. My mother used to joke that if I hadn’t come along when I did she’d have started eyeing off babies in prams at the park.”
“Only Eleanor Edevane didn’t have to steal a baby from a pram. A little boy in need of a good home fell ri
ght into her lap, so to speak. And everything worked out perfectly until Eleanor fired Rose, and Rose decided she wanted her baby back.”
“Pretty risky move, firing the child’s natural mother.”
“Maybe it was becoming risky having her there. That’s what I intend to find out.”
He sighed thoughtfully. “I suppose it’s not the craziest theory you’ve ever come up with.”
“Thanks, Granddad.”
“Now you just need to run it past someone who knew Rose Waters.”
Alastair was the one who’d found Margot Sinclair. The morning after she came up with the theory, Sadie had gone straight down to the library and been pacing back and forth on the pavement out front when he arrived to open up. “Coffee?” she’d said, handing over a takeaway. He’d raised his snowy eyebrows but hadn’t said a word, ushering her inside as she explained in a halting fashion what she was thinking. Evidently he caught the gist, because when she finished and drew breath he said, “You need to find someone who knows what happened to Rose after she left Loeanneth.”
“Exactly.”
He’d spun into action (the man really was a magician) pulling dusty folders off shelves, typing things into search engines on the computer, flipping through file cards, and then finally, “Bingo!” Something about old employment records, the census, next of kin, and then he’d announced that Rose Waters’s sister Bess had lived in the Lake District, and Bess had a granddaughter who could now be found in Oxford. Sadie’s mate in Traffic had done the rest—she definitely owed him a bottle of something nice when she got back to London—leaving the school’s address in a message on her phone. “I hope this is all above board, Sparrow,” he’d said before signing off.
“Totally, Dave,” Sadie muttered, gathering her notes together and pushing them into her bag. “Totally.”
At ten to one she locked her car and crossed between the pair of griffin-topped pillars, following a wide entrance path towards a building that wouldn’t have looked out of place next to Buckingham Palace. It was lunch break and kids in boater hats and blazers were milling about in small groups on the vast stretch of manicured lawn. In this world, this sunlit circle quite outside the one Sadie usually moved in, she felt suddenly underdressed in jeans and a T-shirt. They gleamed, those kids, with their braces-clad teeth and thick, glossy ponytails, their fearless laughter and their shimmering futures.
She found the administration office and gave her name to a demure young woman behind a dark wooden desk. “Please take a seat,” the woman said in a polite half-whisper. “Dr Sinclair will be with you soon.”
The reception was quiet of voices but busy with the noise of industry. The furious thrum of the receptionist’s fingers on the keyboard, the canter of the clock, an air-conditioner humming importantly. Sadie realised she was biting her thumbnail again and stopped. She told herself to calm down.
In the outside world, the real world, Sadie wore her lack of formal education proudly. “You and me, Sparrow,” Donald had said on more than one occasion, flinging a look of withering disdain over his shoulder at the “expert’ they’d just got shot of interviewing, “we’re street wise. A hundred bits of paper telling the world how clever you are doesn’t equal that.” It was a very agreeable worldview, equating education with wealth and wealth with posh and posh with moral bankruptcy. It made Sadie better at her job. She’d seen the way people like Nancy Bailey flinched and withdrew when Inspector Parr-Hopkins started talking at them in his cut-glass accent. It was only when she came to places like this that Sadie felt the niggling of what might have been.
She straightened her collar as the clock’s minute hand leapt to vertical. One o’clock on the dot and the office door opened. A statuesque woman in a cream suit appeared, sleek brown hair grazing her shoulders as she tilted her head and widened her sea-blue eyes at Sadie. “Sadie Sparrow? I’m Margot Sinclair. Please, do come in.”
Sadie did as she was told, chiding herself for trotting. “Thanks for seeing me, Mrs Sinclair.”
“Dr Sinclair. I’m not married,” said the headmistress, smiling briskly as she sat behind her desk. She indicated with a sweep of the hand that Sadie should do likewise on the other side.
“Doctor Sinclair,” Sadie corrected herself. It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts. “I’m not sure how much your secretary told you?”
“Jenny told me you’re interested in my maternal great-aunt, Rose Martin—Rose Waters, before she was married.” She had a way of glancing over her glasses and down her nose that suggested interest without suspicion. “You’re a police officer. Are you working on a case?”
“Yes,” said Sadie, before deciding Margot Sinclair was one for crossing “t’s and dotting “i’s, and adding, “Though not officially. It’s a cold case.”
“Is it?” The other woman leaned back in her chair. “How intriguing.”
“A missing child, back in the 1930s. His disappearance was never solved.”
“I take it my great-aunt is not a suspect?” Margot Sinclair seemed amused by the prospect.
Sadie smiled in return, hoping the gesture implied agreement. “It was a long time ago, and I’m clutching at straws, really, but I was hoping to find out a little about her life before she married. I’m not sure whether you know, but she worked as a nanny when she was young.”
“On the contrary,” Margot Sinclair said, “I know a great deal about Rose’s professional life. She was one of the subjects of my postdoctoral dissertation on women’s education. She was a governess. She taught children of the aristocracy.”
“A governess? Not a nanny?”
“She started that way, when she was very young, but she went on to become a governess and later a teacher of some note. Rose was incredibly clever and self-motivated. It was no easy thing back then to acquire the necessary training to lift one’s station in life.”
It wasn’t so easy now, thought Sadie.
“I’ve a copy of my dissertation here.” Margot went swiftly to a wall of bookshelves and took down a leather-bound book, pausing to wipe the dustless top. “It doesn’t get much of an airing these days, but I was passionate about the subject when I was studying. It sounds daft, perhaps, but Rose was, and continues to be, my inspiration. Throughout my career I’ve held her up as a shining example of what’s possible with a bit of application.”
Returning to her seat, Margot began an enthusiastic description of her thesis argument, while Sadie’s gaze lifted to take in the array of framed qualifications hung neatly on the wall behind the desk. A doctorate from Oxford in biology, a second degree in education, various other accomplishments and achievements. Sadie wondered what it would feel like to go through life with proof, gold-etched and ebony-framed, that you were worth something. Smart.
Sadie had been fifteen when at the urging of her headmaster she’d agreed to sit the scholarship exam for the fancy girls’ school in the neighbouring town. She still remembered the letter arriving to tell them she’d been awarded a place for the sixth form, but the memory had taken on the surreal air of a dream. The trip to purchase her uniform, however, was burned into her psyche. Sadie and her mother had gone together, her mother dressed carefully in what she imagined the polo-set wore, tight with nerves as she walked beside Sadie, determined, as always, to perform perfectly. Everything was going well until they became lost between quadrangles. The assigned appointment was strictly one hour; the faithless clock on the stone tower was slicing further into it; and her mother had had one of the anxiety attacks they all agreed to call “asthma.” Her mother was a perfectionist and a snob, and the grandeur of the place, the pent-up pressure to prove herself, the realisation that their tardiness was going to “ruin everything’, was too much. Sadie found a bench for them to sit on while her mother recovered, and then she flagged down a groundsman who gave her directions to the uniform shop. They arrived with twenty minutes left in the hour, which her mother spent in s
ilent reproach while a woman ran a tape measure up Sadie’s legs and spoke with reverent familiarity of “the tweed coat’ and “our little velvet beret’ and other things Sadie couldn’t imagine wearing.
In the end she hadn’t needed to. She met a boy over the summer, a good-looking boy with a car and a winning way, and by the time school started she was pregnant. She postponed her enrolment, planning to go back the following year, but by the time it was all over she was a different person.
Even if Sadie had been able to see herself right to start, when the new school year came round her parents wouldn’t have her back—they’d told their friends she was finishing high school on exchange in America; how would it look if she came back a year later, still at school?—and the scholarship didn’t include boarding fees. Ruth and Bertie had assured her they’d find some way to work things out, but Sadie knew they wouldn’t be able to meet the costs without going into serious debt. It was too much to ask; she’d thanked them but told them no. They weren’t pleased with her decision as they wanted the best for her, but Sadie promised herself, and them, that she was going to be a success on her own terms and she didn’t need a fancy school for that. She finished her A-levels at night and joined the police. A surprise to her grandparents, but not an unpleasant one. They were just relieved by then that she wasn’t going to wind up on the wrong side of the law. It had looked a little hairy for a while there, after the baby, when Sadie was in freefall.
“So there you have it,” said Margot Sinclair, passing her thesis across the desk to Sadie. “I’m not sure it will answer all your questions, but it will certainly give you a better idea of who Rose was. Now, shall we get down to it? I’m afraid I’ve another appointment scheduled in fifteen minutes.”
Margot’s manner was brisk but willing, which suited Sadie perfectly. She’d been wondering how the other woman would react to questions about Rose’s personal life, just how carefully she’d have to tiptoe around the subject, but with the clock ticking and Margot Sinclair nodding her no-nonsense encouragement, Sadie decided just to jump. “I believe your great-aunt had a baby when she was a young woman, Dr Sinclair. Before she was married. Back when she was working as a nanny for a family in Cornwall, the Edevanes.”