Page 66 of The Vanished Sister

“But it did not end up being a wise choice, did it?”

“I’m hardly qualified to comment on other people’s choices in matrimony, when I displayed neither sense nor acumen in my own selection.” She glanced at Lord Ingram. “At least I’m not alone here.”

Lord Ingram was taken aback. Usually people did not comment to his face on his erstwhile marital failures, but there was no malice in Mrs. Wellesley’s remark, only the curiosity of a fellow traveler. “No, indeed. Many look to marriage for refuge, only to find it either a prison or a battlefield.”

Or in his case, a desert in which he’d struggled daily for his own survival.

“Mine was both a prison and a battlefield, and I barely escaped with my sanity intact,” she murmured. “You’ve met Emaline, my lord. Do you think she and Reggie would have been happy together had I remained abroad?”

“I’m afraid I barely exchanged two words with the younger Mrs. Carstairs,” replied Lord Ingram. “But you have lived under the same roof since your return. Do you think they would have managed a tolerable life together?”

Rebecca Wellesley turned her face up to the fox hunt scene above the mantel. There was no fox in sight. A foreigner unfamiliar with the tradition might suppose it merely a spirited race in the countryside, with red-jacketed men, horses, and eager hounds all flying in the same general direction.

Such was anything in life—even the truest depiction might give the wrong idea to those who didn’t know what they were looking at.

Yesterday he’d undertaken a visit to a firm of solicitors in Birmingham, a firm that did not number among its clients any Carstairs or anyone related to Mrs. Whitehill. He’d learned nothing earth-shaking, or even table-shaking, merely one more truth in a situation where everyone seemed to be sincerely telling a lot of truths.

And yet…

“It’s dangerous to indulge in what-ifs,” said Mrs. Wellesley softly. “What I will say is this. Emaline is a sensible woman who doesn’t ask for too much. She has been placed in a difficult situation. In her shoes, I don’t know what I would have done.”

“You do not indulge in what-ifs?”

“I would rather I didn’t. It’s tiring, always curtailing my own thoughts, stopping myself from imagining this happy idyll.”

“You speak of the possibility of marrying Mr. Reginald Carstairs?”

Marriages between stepsiblings was a murky subject. It wasn’t exactly forbidden by civil law, but it was frowned upon and considered, if not analogous to incest, then at least carrying with it a whiff of something unwholesome. But loud, insistent moral concerns were usually aimed at the unwashed masses, whose potential lack of boundaries and restraints fueled the ever-active imagination of their betters. Reginald Carstairs and the former Rebecca Robinson, coming from a family that exemplified respectability, might have caused tongues to wag, but would not have faced any real obstacles.

Even if clergymen along the way raised objections based on canon law, the Carstairses’ support would have been enough to make the church look the other way.

If, that is, the young people could have obtained Everett and Justina Carstairs’s support.

“Could I have married Reggie back then? I rather doubt it—I very much thought of him as a brother. And I wanted to see the outside world, to live a different life than the one I knew in Noble House.

“But the world outside is cruel. So much crueler than I’d ever believed possible. In retrospect, Reggie…” She sighed. “In any case, he never brought up the subject of marriage between us. Even in my what-ifs, I’d always imagined myself not as his wife but as his spinster sister who lived comfortably thanks to his generosity, a spinster sister with a fearsome reputation in a twenty-mile radius.”

She was addressing her words not to Inspector Treadles but only to Lord Ingram, two refugees from what everyone else considered hearth and home, the bedrock institution of society. He then must do the probing for Inspector Treadles, who, after his initial questions, had refrained from interrupting the flow of the conversation.

“Why didn’t he? Forgive me this rather forward observation, but it seems to me that your place in your stepbrother’s affection remains unshakable. Why do you suppose he never proposed, or even brought up the subject?”

Mrs. Wellesley looked genuinely perplexed. “I’ve never asked him. When I was a girl it didn’t occur to me that he might wish to marry me. After I became a widow, well, he’d married himself so what was the point in dwelling on useless thoughts? But if Emaline is already considering the impossible—and after the chocolate incident I do not blame her—then perhaps I ought to at least ask him.”

A quavering ding came from Sherlock Holmes’s bedroom. Lord Ingram excused himself and went inside. When he returned to the parlor, he said to Rebecca Wellesley, “Mr. Holmes wishes to know your views on your mother’s disappearance.”

Mrs. Wellesley winced. “I thought it the most unprecedented thing. But Papa said not so. He asked me if I remembered the time long ago when Mamma had gone to visit my Aunt Watson. I was fourteen or fifteen so I did remember, mostly because I was told not to say anything about it to her when she came back. Apparently she hadn’t gone to visit Aunt Watson, but had disappeared much as she had this time until Papa found her at a remote property that was almost never used.”

“Did you ask him why she disappeared that time?”

“I did, but he said that the reasons were private to the two of them, and I could scarcely press beyond that.”

Indeed, Everett Carstairs had no reason to reveal as much of the inner workings of his marriage to his stepdaughter as he judged he must to the police.

“How do you think your stepfather and your mother get along?”

“Enviably. Although these days my standard for what passes as enviable in a marriage is probably not difficult to surpass. But still, to see all that he had lavished upon her, the pride in his eyes when he beheld her…” She sighed. “Truly, there are far, far worse ways to be married.”

“Do you have an opinion on them as parents?” Holmes also wanted answers to this question.