Page 96 of The Vanished Sister

Mrs. Watson slowly rose out of her seat, feeling every bone in her body creak and protest. “I’ll see him in the morning parlor.”

The morning parlor was the formal reception area, a cooler, much more aloof space than anywhere else in her London house. An old man walked in. Every line on his face was deeply furrowed, his hair had turned largely white, and he stooped, as if carrying too heavy a weight on his shoulders—if he only shuffled a little, he could pass for the father of the Everett Carstairs who’d hosted the Newells in the first part of August.

They sat silently for a while, then he brought out an album of photographs. “I cannot be sure, Mrs. Watson, but I hope, at least, that you would like to have this.”

Mrs. Watson’s hands shook as she accepted the album. When she’d left home, the only mementos she’d taken had been her mother’s velvet choker and her grandfather’s watch. The watch she’d used as a bribe for a bit role that had gone nowhere and the choker was lost within a year after her arrival in London, as she ran from a pair of street thugs, returning home too late from a soirée that had also gone nowhere.

The first photograph of her life had been part of her parents’ death portrait. There they were, in matching open caskets, taken by pneumonia, with their daughters, garbed in black, standing to either side.

The next one was of a much happier occasion. She’d been fifteen, with a flower crown on her head, Justina likewise. They sat on a grassy knoll, a maypole in the distance.

Then there was a photograph of their grandfather, a frail old man with a twinkle in his eye. It must have been Easter, for he was in the beautiful cope Justina had embroidered. He looked proud.

The next leaf held not a photograph, but a small pencil sketch. Mrs. Watson thought for a moment that it was a self-portrait by Justina, until she realized that the subject was not Justina, but herself. She had been sixteen or so, prettier than she remembered, her smile at once pure and naughty.

“Look on the back,” said Everett Carstairs.

Dear Jo, I drew this for your birthday, but then I decided that I’d produce a portrait for you every five or ten years and give them all to you when we’re old women. A very grand idea, no? Wait for it.

Tears filled Mrs. Watson’s eyes. She turned to the next leaf. Her grandfather sat in the center of this image, Justina and herself standing behind him. This must be not too long before she left for London—she and Justina both looked full grown—but she couldn’t recall the occasion.

Then she saw that they were in the vicarage’s garden. The conversation the sisters had had about their separate futures, during which Justina had weeded assiduously while Joanna had sat around doing nothing—Justina had been making sure that the garden would look its best when the traveling photographer arrived.

It was the last photograph in the album.

She wiped at her eyes. “Did she ever mention plans for a lodging house for women?”

“Yes. We met not long before I departed for London to search for a wealthy wife to save Noble House. I called on my late mother’s old friend for advice and Justina happened to serve as her companion.”

Mrs. Watson had had no idea they’d met that early. The beginning of the end, she thought, staring at the window behind Everett Carstairs. Golden and saffron-colored leaves had already appeared on the trees beyond.

“I called five times that month,” continued the man who had both made and destroyed Justina. “A hundred years ago, when land was king, I could have married her outright. Instead we wished each other good luck and parted ways, not to meet again until my first wife invited an old family friend to Noble House and who should come with him but his young, beautiful new bride.”

What had Mrs. Osmond written in her letter? I remembered what my cousin had said in jest one time, that she’d married him, an old vicar, solely because he was a family friend to the first Mrs. Carstairs and a regular guest at Noble House.

Had that been true? Did it matter anymore?

“That, as it turned out, was the most fateful encounter of our lives. What happened to your dream, I asked her when we had a moment in private. She only shook her head and said even then she’d known it wouldn’t come true, that without a partner, she would not be able to sustain a lodging house all by herself.”

Everett Carstairs smiled slightly. “I will say no more as you’d probably consider all further reminiscence tainted.”

“I should have stayed in Lincolnshire to keep her on the straight and narrow,” mumbled Mrs. Watson, she who by anyone’s definition had fallen off the straight and narrow not long after she was born.

Silence.

Mr. Mears entered with a fresh pot of tea, glanced at her, and exited just as unobtrusively. Mrs. Watson did not bother to pour as both her teacup and Everett Carstairs’s remained full, untouched. She exhaled. Had this brother-in-law not called on her, she would have called on him within the month. So she might as well bring the subject into the open.

“Fairly early in the investigation, when I still thought Mrs. Whitehill’s death unrelated to High Burrow—or at least, when I was still unwilling to contemplate the idea—Sherlock Holmes sent someone to Mr. Nesbitt’s solicitors.”

Mr. Nesbitt, father of Everett Carstairs’s first wife, had died years before his daughter was old enough to marry.

“Mr. Nesbitt’s will stipulated that the fortune his only child inherited would only go on to male heirs of her body, otherwise it would revert back to the Nesbitts and be split among his two agnate cousins and their descendants—in other words, to his relatives in the patrilineal line. Only in the case of the cousins and their lines having extinguished would the money go to female descendants of the first Mrs. Carstairs.”

“Yes, there had been such a document,” Everett Carstairs admitted wearily. “But the two Nesbitt cousins have already since passed away, one died a bachelor, and the other died childless.”

Now the Nesbitt men were gone, but decades ago they’d been young and hale. Which had been a problem for a man who no longer wished to be married to Mr. Nesbitt’s daughter: Her fortune would not be truly his unless and until their union produced a son.

In a stroke of good fortune, Cordelia Carstairs and Justina were expecting at approximately the same time, which gave Everett Carstairs more room to maneuver.