“I’m not sorry,” Kit said softly.
“You will be,” Leo said with a bitter smile. “I wasn’t a very nice young man, you see. I fell in with a bad crowd when I was about sixteen. By seventeen I was a swaggering punk, the sort that breaks windows and drinks too much and slags off coppers just for the fun of it. Mum and Dad had washed their hands of me by the time I was eighteen, but Amy didn’t believe I was beyond redemption.
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She thought a change of scene would straighten me out.” Leo gave a grunt of mirthless laughter.
“Is that when she invited you to Anscombe Manor?” Kit asked.
“Amy and I were like night and day,” Leo went on, ignoring Kit’s question. “She was a good-hearted, hopeful sort of girl. She truly believed that she could help me turn my life around. She had me move into the manor three months after she married Sir Miles.
I kept my nose clean for a few weeks, stayed away from the boozer and minded my manners, but I’d learned too many bad habits to shake them all at once. One night I got into a scrap with a local yobbo, and it found its way into the dear old Upper Deeping Despatch.
Sir Miles was ready to throw me out on my ear, but Amy talked him into giving me another chance, and another, and another. . . .”
Leo took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And then I met Charlotte.”
“Charlotte DuCaral?” I said.
“Amy’s best mate,” said Leo in a nostalgic, faraway voice. “She was only seventeen when I met her, two years younger than me.
She had white-blond hair and soft gray eyes and the sweetest way about her. She was the kind of girl you don’t want to disappoint, you know?”
“I know,” said Kit.
Leo gave Kit a searching glance, then turned his gaze to the fire again. “She’d led such a sheltered life, and mine had been so wild, that no one could believe it when we fell head over heels for each other.
Charlotte woke something up in me.” He shrugged. “I can’t explain it, but it made me want to be a better man. I stayed away from the boozer for a whole year. I started thinking with my brain instead of my fists. I turned over a new leaf, just to make her proud of me.”
“You were transformed by love,” I said softly.
“I was,” Leo agreed, “but Charlotte’s parents didn’t buy it.
Looking back, I can’t really blame them. I’d made a name for myself, and it wasn’t a good one. In their eyes I was a snot-nosed
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young hooligan who was bound to go from bad to worse. They didn’t like it one bit when they found out that their precious daughter was in love with the likes of me.”
“They might not have liked it,” I said, “but what could they do about it?”
“What do you think they did?” Leo stabbed the stick into the flames. “They told us we couldn’t see each other anymore. They banned me from the grounds. They told Sir Miles that if I set a toe on their property, they’d have me arrested, and they’d see to it that the story wasn’t hushed up this time.”
“Did my mother know that you’d fallen in love with Charlotte?”
Kit asked.
“Of course she did,” said Leo. “She was Charlotte’s best mate, wasn’t she? And she was on our side. She acted as our go-between when Charlotte and I came up with a plan to run away together.
We’d elope at midnight and be married before her parents knew she was gone. Only marriage would do, for a girl like Charlotte.”
I gazed into the darkness beyond the fire and imagined the young Charlotte DuCaral making her escape. I saw her packing a small bag, letting herself out the kitchen door, making her way through the shrubbery and into the woods to the appointed meeting place, where she waited until dawn, when her heart told her that Leo had failed her.
“When the big night came, I lost my nerve,” said Leo. “I tried to get it back with a few shots of whiskey, then a few more. It was past midnight by the time I staggered out of Anscombe Manor, nearly dawn when I stumbled down the hill, sucking on a flask to keep my courage up. And who should I run into at the bottom of the hill?
Charlotte’s father. He had a shotgun, and he waved it in my face.
Called me all sorts of names. I lost my temper, grabbed the gun, and I . . . I killed him.”
“No!” I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright. “It wasn’t you. Charlotte’s brother attacked Maurice.”
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Leo looked as confused as I felt. “Charlotte’s brother was setting up a children’s clinic in Africa on the night I shot Maurice. He wasn’t even on the same continent.”
“Does Charlotte have another brother?” I asked.
“No, just the one, and he died in a plane crash two years later,”
said Leo, glancing at Kit.
“What about sisters?” I inquired hopefully.