The missing page, p.1
The Missing Page, page 1
Cat Sebastian
The Missing Page
Page and Sommers Book 2
Copyright © 2021 by Cat Sebastian
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
First edition
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Acknowledgement
This book wouldn’t exist without the enthusiasm of those readers who asked for another book in the Page & Sommers universe and then patiently waited for nearly three years while this project was repeatedly derailed by illness, pandemic, moving, misbehaving computers, sick pets, and a parade of inconveniences both large and small.
This book owes a tremendous debt to Rose Lerner’s book doctoring. After approximately seven billion revisions there was still something seriously amiss, and Rose was able to zero in on what wasn’t working. It was like sending a book to therapy.
In addition, I’m grateful for Kim Runciman’s copyediting and to Bran at Crowglass Designs for the beautiful cover.
Content Notes
This book contains references to period-typical queerphobia; queerphobic family members; discussion of suicide, including the suicide of a parent; and manipulative/undermining behavior by a psychiatrist.
CHAPTER ONE
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.
CHAPTER TWO
Leo dug his fingers into the coarse fabric of his seat and shut his eyes as the airplane flew through a pocket of rough air over the Channel. Less than an hour and he’d be on British soil. A few hours after that and he’d be in Wychcomb St. Mary.
That was what he needed to think about: a warm cup of tea and whatever tin of soup James decided to heat up. He needed to think about going to sleep with James by his side and knowing that when he woke up, James would still be there. He could spend all of tomorrow in the pair of James’s pajamas that Leo had claimed as his own, watching James grumble over the cryptic crossword as they drank milky tea. There would be nobody shooting anybody else and certainly no question of whether Leo thought they ought to be doing so.
And there his thoughts went, skittering away from Wychcomb St. Mary and into the usual swamp.
Leo was used to jobs going sideways. During the war, he had been reasonably pleased with himself if half his missions yielded anything close to success, and even those tended to end with somebody trying to shoot him.
By any standards Leo was familiar with, this job had been an unqualified success. He had done what he was sent to do and nobody had shot him, not even once. He had even managed to wrap things up days ahead of schedule. He ought to feel good about it, all things considered.
So what if there were two more dead bodies somewhere in Vienna. One had unquestionably been a Soviet spy, the other an American agent, and Leo hadn’t killed either of them. But the spy had been barely more than a kid, and Leo didn’t like it.
Kids got caught up in this business all the time. Nobody paid them much attention and they were good at lying and brilliant at holding their lives cheap: they made natural spies. That was how Leo had started out himself.
But during the war it had been easy to cultivate a flexible understanding of good and evil. And even when that flexibility was stretched to the utmost, Leo trusted his handler. That trust had turned out to be a bad idea, as trust usually was, but it had smoothed over a lot of things his sad excuse for a conscience might otherwise have got tripped up on.
Now Leo didn’t have his old handler and he didn’t have a war. And he didn’t have any good reason why that kid and that American weren’t breathing anymore. Was a strategically placed radio worth it? Leo didn’t know and he was vaguely embarrassed to even care. He ought to have got over this sort of silliness years ago.
For the hundredth time in the past couple of months, he decided that he needed to get out of this business. He was no good at being a peacetime spy; this entire line of thought was proof enough of that. But Vienna had been his third mission since Christmas, his third mission since his handler retired and Leo found himself absorbed into MI6. His third mission since James had given Leo the spare key to his house and space in his wardrobe. Every time he told himself it would be his last mission.
And he also told James it would be the last. He never meant for it to be a lie, but somehow even Leo’s attempts at honesty twisted their way into untruth. James deserved better. Christ, Leo was beginning to think that he deserved better too, and wasn’t that an alarming thought.
When the plane landed, Leo couldn’t scramble down the stairs fast enough. He ought to go in for a debriefing, but that could wait until Monday, protocol be damned. Instead, he hired a car to take him all the way to Wychcomb St. Mary. It was a frightful expense, but he thought that if he had to wait a single minute pacing the platform at Paddington, he would work himself into a frenzy.
When the car pulled up in front of James’s house, though, all the windows were dark and there were no signs of life inside, despite this being Friday, a day James ordinarily had clinic. He paid the driver and knocked on the door anyway, but nobody answered. Leo’s own key hung on a hook inside; he could hardly have taken it to Vienna. He considered picking the lock, but the odds of getting something good to eat were much higher at Little Gables than they were in James’s kitchen, so to Little Gables he went.
Edith Pickering answered the door and gave Leo a disapproving once-over that Leo was beginning to suspect signaled concern. “James isn’t here,” she said by way of greeting.
“I figured he was out seeing a patient,” Leo said, handing Edith his coat. It was the same coat he had put on early that morning in Vienna, with a spot of blood still on the cuff, and seeing it in Edith’s clean hands made him want to snatch it away.
“I wish he were doing anything so sensible,” Edith said briskly, leading the way into the sitting room. “James has gone to Cornwall.” She said this as if announcing that James had taken up a life of crime and perversion. “Some uncle of his died and he’s gone for the reading of the will.”
Leo bent to kiss Cora Delacourt on the cheek. She looked smaller and frailer every time he saw her, even though her mind was still sharp when she wanted it to be. “I didn’t know James had any relations,” Leo said, “let alone one who would leave him anything.”
“James was surprised as well,” Edith said. “The letter from the solicitor said the uncle’s will stipulated that all legatees attend the reading at the family home in Cornwall or forfeit their bequest.”
Leo’s eyebrows shot straight up. “Was it his uncle’s dying wish to reenact a radio drama?”
“That is precisely what I asked,” Edith said, handing Leo a cup of tea, “but James said his uncle had been entirely sane and not at all given to theatrics.”
“Quite right,” said Cora from the sofa. “James’s uncle was Rupert Bellamy. You remember him, Edith. He was a few years older than us. He could make no conversation unless it was about golf, tennis, or banking. I shouldn’t have said he had a fanciful bone in his body, but I haven’t seen him since 1910 and I daresay people change.” She spoke these last words with a heavy dose of skepticism that Leo wholeheartedly shared.
The more Leo thought about it, the less he liked it. Leo had read this detective story and he had seen the film and knew that when you made the heirs gather together, they immediately started putting exotic poisons into one another’s tea. They simply couldn’t help themselves.
Leo had been awake for over thirty hours and was aware that he had perhaps reached the point at which his thoughts became slightly less reliable than usual. He knew that he was inclined to be overly suspicious, but that inclination had kept him alive this long. And where James was concerned, he saw no reason not to let every spark of worry kindle itself into a full-blown conflagration.
