The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  Rose had already started up the lawn. She was one of the few people who knew about Anthony; Eleanor hadn’t told her, she’d figured it out herself. Her father had suffered similarly, she’d said, on the night she came to tell Eleanor she’d be there to help if needed.

  “Daffyd,” Eleanor said, “take the girls to the boat.”

  He must have heard the panic in her voice because it took only a split second for him to understand, and then, with his jolliest storyteller voice, gather Deborah and Clemmie to him and start for where the boat was moored in the stream.

  Eleanor ran; she almost ran straight into Alice, who was hurrying to follow her sisters. Her heart was pounding and she could think only that she had to get to Anthony in time.

  One look at his eyes when she reached him and she could see he wasn’t there. He’d gone to wherever it was he went when the darkness came upon him. “The baby,” he was saying, his voice frantic, “make him stop, make him quiet.”

  Eleanor held her husband tightly, steering him back towards the house, whispering to him that everything was all right. When she had the chance, she looked back at Nanny Rose and saw that she was settling Theo. Rose caught her eye and Eleanor knew that she would keep the little one safe.

  * * *

  That night, when Anthony had fallen into a heavy, drug-induced sleep, Eleanor slipped out of the bedroom and walked, barefoot, along the hall. She went carefully down the stairs, avoiding the pull in Grandfather Horace’s Baluch carpet, her shadow skulking along the floor behind her.

  The flag-stones of the garden path still held the day’s heat at their core and Eleanor relished their solidity beneath the soft soles of her feet. Those soles had been tough once upon a time.

  When she reached the edge of the lake, Eleanor stopped and lit one of the cigarettes that no one knew she smoked. She drew deeply on it.

  She’d missed the garden. Friend of her childhood.

  The lake lapped in the darkness, the night-birds rearranged their wings, a small creature—a fox, perhaps—darted away from her in sudden alarm.

  Eleanor finished her cigarette and went quickly to the stream. She unbuttoned her dress and slipped it over her head so she was wearing only her slip.

  It wasn’t a cold night, though it was too cool really to swim. But Eleanor had a burning in her chest. She wanted to feel reborn. She wanted to feel alive and free and untethered. She wanted to lose herself, to forget everything and everyone she knew. Haven’t you ever wanted to drop out of the world? Ben has asked her in the caravan. Yes, she had, she did, tonight more than ever.

  She submerged herself and sank to the bottom, the reeds cool and slippery against her feet, the water thick with sediment on her hands. She imagined she was a piece of driftwood being buffeted back and forth by the current, no responsibilities, no worries.

  She broke the moonlit surface and floated on her back, listening to the night sounds: a horse in a nearby paddock, the birds in the woods, the gurgling of the stream.

  At some point she realised she was no longer alone, and somehow she knew that it was Ben. She swam to the bank and walked out of the water, then went to sit beside him on the fallen log. He took off his coat and wrapped it around her and without having to be told exactly what was wrong, he held her and stroked her hair and told her not to worry, that everything was going to be all right. And Eleanor let him say it, because she’d missed him, and the relief at being in his arms right here, right now, made her throat constrict.

  But Eleanor knew the truth. She was just like the Queen in Eleanor’s Magic Doorway, who so desired a child she’d been willing to make a deal with the devil to get him. She’d opened the door and walked through it and loved where she should not, and now she must suffer the consequences. The world was a place of balance and natural justice; there was always an equal price to pay, and it was too late now to shut the door.

  Thirty

  Cornwall, 2003

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” Clive was staring at Sadie, his blue eyes wide behind his glasses as the implications of what they’d just discovered fell into place.

  “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before,” she said.

  “No reason it should. I was here in 1933 and met the entire family. No one even hinted at such a thing.”

  “Do you think Anthony knew?”

  Clive whistled softly through his teeth as he considered the possibility. “It certainly lends a darker tinge to events if he did.”

  Sadie had to agree. “Was there anything in the journals?” she asked. “Around the time Deborah paid her visit to his study?”

  “If there was, it was too cryptic for me to grasp.”

  “What about during the interviews in 1933? I know you said there was no hint that Anthony wasn’t Theo’s biological father, but was there anything else, anything at all? Some small detail that didn’t seem important at the time but might matter now?”

  Clive considered. At length he spoke doubtfully. “There was something. I don’t know that it means much, I feel a bit silly even mentioning it, but back when we first carried out our interviews, my boss recommended that the Edevanes talk to the media. He was of the opinion that enlisting the public’s sympathy would mean a whole lot more eyes on the lookout for the missing lad. It was stifling that day, all of us in the library downstairs, a photographer, the journalist, Anthony and Eleanor Edevane sitting side by side on the sofa while outside police were searching the lake.” He shook his head. “Terrible, it was. Just terrible. In fact, Eleanor suffered a bit of a collapse, and that’s when Anthony called an abrupt end to the interview. I didn’t blame him at all, but what he said stuck in my mind. Have some pity, he said, my wife is in shock, her child is gone.” Clive looked at Sadie, a new determination in his gaze. “Not ‘our child’, but ‘her child’.”

  “It might just be that he was empathising with her, describing her reaction in particular?”

  Clive, with growing excitement, said, “No, I don’t think so. In fact, the more I think about it, the more suspicious it seems.”

  Sadie felt a pull of resistance. As Clive became increasingly certain that Anthony had known he wasn’t Theo’s father, her urge grew to prove that he hadn’t. There was no logic behind her obstinacy; she simply didn’t want to believe it. To this point, she and Alice had been acting under the assumption that Anthony killed Theo accidentally, a terrible consequence of a shell-shock-induced rage. But if Theo, the long-awaited, much-adored son, wasn’t his biological child, and if Anthony had somehow discovered the truth when he learned of his wife’s infidelity, then a much grislier possibility opened up.

  If Donald were here, Sadie knew, he’d accuse her of letting the family get under her skin, and so, as Clive continued to list the many small observations he’d made of Anthony in 1933, twisting them now to fit his developing theory, she tried to keep an open mind. She owed it to Alice not to let her personal feelings cloud her judgement. But it was an ugly picture Clive painted. The thought Anthony would have had to put into selecting the perfect night to commit his crime, an annual party during which he knew his wife would be run off her feet performing her duties as hostess, with their staff too busy to notice anything unusual. The convenient removal of Rose Waters, whose vigilance, Eleanor had lamented in her police interview, would never have allowed any harm to befall her charge. The young nanny’s replacement with old Hilda Bruen who could be counted on to furbish herself with a draught of whisky if party noise threatened her sleep. It was all so premeditated. And what about Eleanor, where did the theory leave her? “Do you still think she knew?” Sadie asked.

  “I think she must have. It’s the only thing that explains her resistance to offering a reward. She knew it was a pointless exercise, that her son wasn’t going to be found.”

  “But why would she have helped to cover up the crime? Why didn’t she say anything? She stayed married to Anthony Ede
vane, happily by all accounts!”

  “Domestic situations are complicated. Maybe he made other threats, maybe he threatened Benjamin. That would certainly explain why Munro disappeared so completely off the scene. Maybe Eleanor felt that she was in some way to blame, that her infidelity had driven him to it in the first place.”

  Sadie thought back to her conversation with Alice, the description of Eleanor as possessing a strong and specific set of moral values. Presumably a woman with an ethos like that would have felt tremendous guilt for having broken her marital vows. But could she possibly have accepted the death of her child as due punishment? No. It was one thing to forgive Anthony an accident—and even that was a stretch—but it was quite another to excuse the murder of her child. And no matter Sadie’s determination to keep an open mind, she just couldn’t marry the descriptions she’d read of Anthony Edevane, gentle father, beloved husband, brave ex-soldier, with this picture of a vengeful monster.

  “So,” said Clive, “what do you think?”

  He was eagerly awaiting Sadie’s agreement, but she couldn’t give it. They were missing something. It could almost be made to make sense, but the missing piece of puzzle was crucial. “I think we should go downstairs, crack open the Thermos, and have a cuppa. Let it all percolate for a while.”

  Clive was deflated but he nodded. Sun was streaming into the room now and as Sadie gathered up the scattered envelopes he went to the open window. “Well, I never,” he said. “Is that who I think it is?”

  Sadie joined him, scanning the familiar view, the tangled garden and the lake beyond. Two figures were making their slow way up the path. Sadie couldn’t have been more surprised had she seen baby Theo himself toddling towards the house. “It’s Alice,” she said. “Alice Edevane and her assistant, Peter.”

  “Alice Edevane,” Clive repeated, with a soft whistle of disbelief. “Come home at last.”

  * * *

  “I changed my mind,” was all Alice said by way of explanation when Sadie and Clive met her in the entrance hall and she and Clive had been reacquainted. Peter, having delivered his employer to the door, had been dispatched back to the car to fetch something she referred to rather mysteriously as “the supplies’, and Alice was standing on the dusty tiles with a vaguely indignant air, looking for all the world like a rakish country Châtelaine who’d just popped out for a morning stroll but was home now and none too pleased with the efforts of her bumbling staff. She continued briskly, “The old place could certainly do with a polish. Shall we sit in the library?”

  “Let’s,” Sadie agreed, offering Clive a slight, baffled shrug as they followed Alice through a door on the other side of the hall. It was the room Sadie had glimpsed through the window the first day she’d stumbled upon Loeanneth, the place where police had carried out their interviews in 1933, and where Clive said Anthony and Eleanor had met with the journalist and photographer the day after Theo was reported missing.

  Now Clive sat at one end of the sofa and Sadie the other. It was all very dusty, but short of performing an emergency spring-clean, there didn’t seem much to be done. Presumably Alice was here for an update on their investigations and she wasn’t the sort of person to brook opposition or let a little grime get in her way.

  Sadie waited for Alice to sit in the armchair and begin firing questions at them, but the old woman continued pacing instead, from the door to the fireplace to the desk beneath the window, pausing momentarily in each spot before moving again. Her chin was held high, but Sadie, with the detective’s trained eye, could see through this performance. Though she was trying desperately to mask the fact, Alice was nervy, unsettled. And little wonder. There could be few experiences stranger than arriving at one’s childhood home, seventy years after having left it, only to find it still furnished exactly as it had been. And that was before one took into consideration the traumatic event that had sent the Edevane family packing. Alice stopped near the desk and lifted the sketch of the child’s face.

  “Is it him?” Sadie asked gently, remembering the otherworldly beauty of the illustration she’d glimpsed through the window on the morning she discovered Loeanneth. “Theo?”

  Alice didn’t look up and for a second Sadie thought she hadn’t heard. She was about to repeat herself when Alice said, “It was drawn by a friend of the family, a man by the name of Daffyd Llewellyn. He sketched it the day Theo died.” She glanced up at the window, her jaw tightening. The encroaching brambles blocked most of the view but Alice didn’t seem to notice. “I saw him carrying it back from the stream. He used to stay with us over the summer, in the Mulberry Room upstairs. He’d head out early most mornings, an easel over his shoulder, a sketch block under his arm. I’d never known him to draw Theo until I saw this picture.”

  “An interesting coincidence,” Sadie probed carefully. “The first time he drew your brother was the day Theo disappeared.”

  Alice looked up sharply. “A coincidence, perhaps, but I wouldn’t call it interesting. Mr Llewellyn had no part in Theo’s fate. I’m glad he drew the portrait, though; it brought my mother great comfort over the weeks that followed.”

  “Daffyd Llewellyn died very soon after Theo, didn’t he?” Sadie remembered her interview with Clive, the suspicions she’d had about the timings of the two events.

  Clive nodded, as Alice said, “Police found his body during the search. It was a most unfortunate . . .”

  “Coincidence?” Sadie offered.

  “Turn of events,” Alice said pointedly. She returned her attention to the sketch and her expression softened. “Such a tragedy, such a dreadful waste. One always wonders, of course . . .” But whatever it was she wondered, she didn’t say. “We all cared a great deal for Mr Llewellyn, but he and Mother were extremely close. He didn’t much enjoy the society of other adults and she was a notable exception. It was a double blow for her when he was found so soon after Theo disappeared. Ordinarily she’d have sought comfort in her friendship with him. He was like a father to her.”

  “The sort of person she’d have told her secrets to?”

  “I should imagine. She didn’t have many other friends, not the sort in whom she might have confided.”

  “Not her own mother?”

  Alice had been gazing still at the sketch but she looked up now, her expression wryly amused. “Constance?”

  “She lived with you didn’t she?”

  “Under sufferance.”

  “Might your mother have confided in her?”

  “Certainly not. My mother and grandmother never got on. I don’t know the cause of the animosity, but it was old and it ran deep. In fact, after Theo died and we left Loeanneth, the last tenuous ties between them were broken. Grandmother didn’t come with us to London. Her health wasn’t good; she’d been confused in the months leading up to Midsummer and afterwards went quickly downhill. She was sent to a home in Brighton where she lived out her days. It was one of the only times I saw Mother show any real affection for her: she was very particular that only the best nursing home would do for Grandmother, that everything had to be perfect. Families are complicated, aren’t they, Detective?”

  More than you know, thought Sadie, exchanging a glance with Clive. He nodded.

  “What is it?” Alice, as astute as ever, looked between them. “Have you found something?”

  Sadie still had the letter from Eleanor to Ben in her back pocket and she passed it now to Alice, who ran her gaze over its contents, a single brow lifting. “Yes, well, we’d established already that my mother and Benjamin Munro were engaged in a love affair.”

  Sadie explained then about the other page she’d found by the boathouse, in which Eleanor talked about her pregnancy. “I presumed she was writing to your father when he was away at war. She mentioned how much she missed him, how difficult it would be to have the baby without him, but when I found this page upstairs I realised she’d been writing to Ben.” Sadie
hesitated briefly. “About Theo.”

  Now, Alice sank slowly into the armchair and Sadie finally understood the expression about having the wind knocked out of one’s sails. “You think Theo was Ben’s son,” she said.

  “I do.” Short and sharp, but Sadie couldn’t see that there was much else to say on the matter.

  Realisation had drained Alice’s face of colour and she was staring into the middle distance, her lips moving slightly as if she were adding numbers in her head. In London she had seemed formidable, but now Sadie glimpsed vulnerability. It wasn’t that Alice appeared frail; rather, that having stepped out from behind her own legend, she’d revealed herself a human being with ordinary frailties. “Yes,” she said eventually, a hint of wonder in her voice. “Yes, it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense.”

  Clive cleared his throat. “It rather changes things, don’t you think?”

  Alice glanced at him. “It doesn’t change my brother’s fate.”

  “No, of course not, I meant—”

  “You meant my father’s motive. I know what you’re suggesting and I can tell you there’s no way my father would have harmed Theo on purpose.”

  Sadie had felt the same way when Clive first floated the theory upstairs; but now, seeing Alice’s vehement refusal even to consider the possibility, she wondered whether she, too, was letting a profound distaste for the idea cloud her judgement.

  There came the tread of footsteps in the room outside and Peter appeared at the door, back from his mysterious task. “Alice?” he said haltingly. “Are you all right?” He turned to Sadie, his eyes wide with concern. “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine,” said Alice. “Everything’s fine.”

  Peter was by her side now, asking whether she’d like a glass of water, some fresh air, some lunch, all of which she flapped away with her hand. “Really, Peter, I’m quite well. It’s just the surprise of being back here, the memories.” She handed the sketch to him. “Look,” she said, “my little brother. That’s Theo.”