“You don’t seem surprised.”
She sets down the cup and takes my hand. “Virginia. There’s so much I haven’t told you. I didn’t want to burden you, you know, with everything you’ve been through.”
“I’m not a child.”
“No, you’re not. But you’ve endured so much. That was why I took you to Maitland, you see. I thought you’d be safe there, away from everything, and look at you!” She brushes my cheek with her thumb. “Where’s Samuel?”
“He went to look for you. To Miami Beach.”
“The Flamingo?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We’ll ring them and leave a message and stay right here, safe and sound, until he gets back. And we’ll plot, you and I, what’s next to be done. What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? My God! Look at us! You act as if nothing’s happened! And he’s trying to hurt us. He wants control of my money. Of my daughter, don’t you see? And you were in the way, you were protecting me, so he tried to get rid of you. And it’s my fault. I should have known better. I shouldn’t have softened like that. I shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t have brought Evelyn into this, and now we’re trapped. He won’t let us go until I give him what he wants. What he’s always wanted from me.”
Clara glances at Evelyn, who’s taken over the book. The subject is horses, I think. Evelyn’s studying each plate carefully with her grave hazel eyes.
“Who won’t let you go?” Clara asks quietly.
I lean forward and whisper: Simon.
Of course, she thinks I’m crazy. I don’t blame her. In the first place, the idea’s absurd. What kind of man goes to such lengths as to burn down his beautiful villa by the sea, in order to enact the fiction of his own death? For what possible purpose? Simon’s own brother identified his body. Agent Marshall of the Bureau of Internal Revenue confirmed it personally, summoning a great deal of sympathy as he did so. Not one person has disputed the fact of Simon’s demise, not even those who cared if he was alive.
And where is my proof? A postmark on an envelope. A letter from a bank. A distrust of revenue men. A pair of hazel eyes, staring at me in fury in the instant before I was struck down on a criminal beach at midnight.
“You must have imagined that,” Clara says. “It’s simply not possible. You said yourself, you didn’t remember a thing from that night.”
“Nothing except that.”
“Well, isn’t that suspect in itself? That you don’t remember anything else. You only think you remember it. You’ve seen Simon’s eyes a thousand times. It’s just a memory of him, shoved awkwardly into the wrong spot. Round peg, square hole. Because you want it to be true.”
“Want Simon to be alive?”
She takes my hand. “Darling, don’t think for an instant I don’t know. The human heart is such an unreasonable little organ. You loved him so. You still love him, even though you know how thoroughly bad he is.”
“I don’t love him anymore.”
“Yes, you do. You’re absolutely obsessed by him. Why else would you come all the way down to Florida in search of him? It’s the truth, dearest, and I don’t blame you for it. But you’ve got to be sensible. I know who kidnapped me. I saw his face, and it wasn’t my brother Simon, I can tell you.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. He might have been acting on Simon’s orders.”
She waves her hand. “Surely you know what kind of trouble Simon was in, before he died. How he got on the wrong side of some rather unpleasant chaps—”
“Yes, I know.”
“Well. There you are. However cold and calculating my dear brother was, he wasn’t going to get the better of the Ashley gang.”
“The Ashley gang. That’s their name?”
Her tea is cold. She leans forward and takes the pot delicately by the handle, and as she performs this little ritual, milk and sugar and tea leaves and water, I’m struck again by the ease of her manner. Why, she’s just escaped from a terrible ordeal! And she’s beaten up, she’s pale and bruised, but she’s thoroughly, terrifyingly intact. Drinking tea on a sofa. As if she’s got some kind of unending reservoir of British glue inside that small, playful body, holding all her parts together. How did she come by it? What awful things has Clara endured, over the course of the past few years? Her entire life, when you think about it. Hadn’t Simon said that she was a terrible inconvenience to her parents? Like Eve—or like the apple, really—she had caused the love-drunk Fitzwilliams to be exiled from their Eden in Borneo. Pearl fishing with their old friend Mr. Gibbons. This tiny little outcast, nothing like her brothers.
I think how inadequate I am. How weak, how easily overturned by the slightest obstacle.
“Samuel told me all about them,” she says. “They’re a primitive sort of family from the swamps. They don’t follow any laws, just one another. I suppose when you grow up in the wild like that, you don’t care much for the lives of outsiders. Anyway, they saw what Samuel had done—you do know about that, don’t you? You’re too clever not to have noticed.”
“Bringing in liquor.”
“Nothing very big, you understand. Just a bit of honest smuggling. It’s in our blood, you know. Cornwall. My great-grandfather made a bloody fortune shipping in brandy when the French were cutting up, did you know? Then that beast Wellington spoiled all our fun!” She makes a soft little laugh and sits back with her tea. “Maybe it was bad of Samuel—you Americans are so terribly strict about your little laws—but they needed the money, and he wasn’t hurting anybody. Until the Ashley chaps decided they wanted a share of the business. So do you know what they did? It’s rather fiendishly clever, actually. They would wait until the ships came onto shore, all filled with rum and whisky and that sort of thing, on those dark nights without any moon, and they’d intercept them! Take all the cargo for themselves!”
“My God!”
“Isn’t it frightful? And naturally Simon was furious. He never did like to share what he considered rightfully his, even if it was illegal to begin with.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Anyway, they had a great big row, Samuel and Simon. Samuel wanted to pay the buggers off—that was what they really wanted, after all—but Simon’s not the accommodating type. He thought he could do better. Take them on and take them over. He had some sort of scheme, Samuel said, but they were too clever for him. That gang, I mean. And that’s when they got him.” She lifts her hand and makes a slicing movement along her neck.
“Got who?” asks Evelyn. She looks up benignly from the floor, where she’s moved with her horse book, sitting small and cross-legged, the pages open on her lap. A thin layer of dried milk crusts the skin above her upper lip, and her sandy hair floats about her shoulders. Her father’s eyes are so wide and innocent on her face, I want to rage. I want to swoop her up and cradle her against my ribs, but my arms are so weak.