Page 79 of The Vanished Sister

It’s probably much too forward of me to write to you, given that we’re minimally acquainted. But I’m in a state of bewilderment and you’re family, for better or for worse. (We’re all most grateful for the search you conducted for my mother when the rest of us either couldn’t venture abroad or were too stunned to know what to do.)

By the time you receive this, you may already know that I called on Sherlock Holmes at 18 Upper Baker Street. There I was asked whether I knew why Reggie had never propounded the possibility of a union between us.

I didn’t. When I returned to the carriage, where Reggie was waiting for me, I asked him. (He’d sent the coachman to the newsagent’s around the corner, we anyway had to sit at the curb until the man returned, and there seemed no point in any further delays.)

Reggie, after a long moment of pained silence, said, “I didn’t because I couldn’t. Mamma told me that you’re Papa’s daughter, Rebecca. You’re as closely related to me as you are to Charlie.”

I can’t recall what I did or said in the immediate aftermath of his answer. We were on the train, halfway to the Devon coast, before I realized that I was repeating incessantly, “But I’m Reverend Robinson’s daughter.”

My governess had always stressed that I must not let my upbringing at Noble House go to my head, because I was not a daughter of the house but the descendant of a different lineage. My mother rarely spoke of my father, but when she did, usually because of my questions, she did not shy away from glowing terms. He had been a true Christian, Reverend Robinson, a generous soul beloved by his friends and his congregation.

I’d always taken pride in being the child of such an exemplar, only to have that belief yanked away. And my mother—surely you must be no less shocked than I was. I may have complained from time to time that she was too narrowly confined to Noble House—why did she not travel more or at least write a pseudonymous book on marvelous housekeeping and picture-perfect party-giving?—but I’d never doubted her unassailable virtue.

But for me to be my stepfather’s child, she had to have conducted an affair with him while they were both married to other people. Of course he was at least as much at fault as she, but I truly struggled to reconcile my mother with the magnitude of wrongdoing all this implied.

You can well imagine my half-deranged distress as Reggie and I arrived at High Burrow. My stepfather, after my rather incoherent account, said, “I have no idea why your mother said what she did to Reggie. I can tell you this—and I swear it on my life—that I was never unfaithful in my first marriage. You, my dear Rebecca, are the product of a sanctified union between your parents and not the result of a tawdry affair. And the two of you, Reggie and Rebecca, are not in the very least related by blood.”

I sat there dumbfounded, unsure what to think or whom to believe. Reggie, always so subdued, leaped up from his chair. “I don’t understand. Why would Mamma lie to me?”

His father regarded him sadly. “I don’t know, Reggie. These days I don’t know what is on Mamma’s mind—maybe I never did.”

I write to you from the railway station at Ilfracombe, where Reggie and I await the next outbound train. We’ve slept on the news and Reggie is no less devastated. “Why?” he murmurs repeatedly. “Why did she do this?”

I’m relieved that I am still who I’ve always believed myself to be. But Reggie—he’d loved my mother as his own, loved and admired her in equal measure. I cannot begin to grasp how betrayed he must feel. Not only had she taken away the chance he’d sought, but with that one falsehood his love had been turned into something impure and beneath contempt—and he’d had to live with that all these years.

Unless my mother returns—or we accidentally run into her—our questions will go unanswered. Do you have a wiser interpretation of all this, Aunt Watson? Other than my stepfather, you must be the one who knows my mother best out of everyone living and breathing on this green earth.

Yours respectfully,

Rebecca Robinson Wellesley

P.S. I don’t know your address, so I’ll post this letter to Sans Souci. Someone there ought to be able to forward it to you.

The letter had been written on the day Mrs. Watson and Miss Charlotte had attended Mrs. Whitehill’s funeral and met Mr. Arbuthnot, before Mrs. Watson had had her heart broken by Mrs. Osmond’s confession. Penelope, decamping from Sans Souci at last, had brought it to London. And last night Mrs. Watson, breaking her journey in London, had read the letter and groaned.

She had no wise interpretation to offer. All she knew was that for some reason, she believed Everett Carstairs on this one. Murders could be executed cleanly and adroitly—such as the one Justina had committed herself; adultery, on the other hand, felt too seamy for a woman who liked everything beautiful and immaculate.

In the morning Inspector MacDonald had met Miss Charlotte and Mrs. Watson at the railway station in Barnstaple. Their vehicle sped along on a path that veered several miles inland to avoid narrow, deep coastal combes. Rain came down sporadically, pounding on the roof of the carriage in sudden staccato bursts. A thin mist drifted between undulating hills and valleys. An occasional farm peeked out from behind a dense copse of trees, its vegetable garden brimming with courgettes and late tomatoes.

Inspector MacDonald had finished reading the reports of their investigation in Shropshire. He and Miss Charlotte discussed the case, sotto voce. But still their conversation was inescapable.

“I shouldn’t have allowed Everett Carstairs to leave.”

Mrs. Watson had her face turned to the window, but she knew the young policeman must have grimaced. She could almost hear his teeth gnashing together in frustration.

“You could scarcely have held him here,” said Miss Charlotte. “His wife was apparently still alive and Mr. Broadfield had what appeared to be an overwhelming motive for doing away with Mrs. Whitehill.”

And how quickly things changed.

“In any case, it may not be the worst thing that he has departed the coast,” continued Mrs. Watson’s partner.

Did she expect him to lead them to Justina? Mrs. Watson wrapped her hand around a leather strap, an antiquated safety measure from a time when badly sprung coaches traveled long distances between towns, for something to hold on to.

Mrs. Albright’s hired house, half a mile west of Lynton proper, sat on the shoulder of a cliff. The small wrought iron gate was just wide enough to allow their carriage to pass through. On the top of the gate, in gilded letters, was the name Villa Inglese, and beneath that, 1870, the year of its construction.

Past a dense growth of oak and ash, the landscape to either side of the ribbon-slender drive changed into terraced gardens held up by much-engineered retaining walls. The terraces, four levels deep, dropped eight to ten feet and sometimes nearly fifteen feet from one level to the next. And they were so narrow that some levels looked like squiggly, made-to-order planter boxes for equally squiggly rows of needle-like cypresses.

“My goodness,” exclaimed Inspector MacDonald. “I didn’t know one gardened like this. The gardeners here must be mountaineers.”