Three weeks, later, Robert Forsyth’s body washed up on an outcrop of rocks on the shore some seven miles from Wych Elm House. He was identified almost immediately, not only from the scraps of clothes the body was wearing that bore his monogram, but from the fact that his was the most high-profile disappearance in the area in thirty years. Everyone, from the police to the villagers, assumed that Robert Forsyth was dead, but no one knew what exactly had happened.
The body was not a surprise, but it did not solve the mystery. It was in such a degraded condition that the newspapers could not describe it outright, and no cause of death could be precisely determined. The corpse’s neck was broken, its limbs torn, though the coroner could not say whether these injuries had happened before or after death. At Dottie’s request, the postmortem was done quickly, and then the body was cremated and given to her for disposal. I never knew what she did with the ashes; she certainly did not bury them in the family plot in the Anningley graveyard. I sometimes suspected she dumped them in a trash can, or perhaps down a toilet, though of course she would never tell.
The newspapers reported the finding, of course. The public could not get enough of the tragic story of Wych Elm House’s mad patriarch, who had grown so debauched through his wayward ways that he had finally snapped and tried to kill his wife, his nephew, and his niece-in-law. There was no suspicion in the papers about Frances’s death; she remained a suicide. Only Dottie, Alex, David Wilde, and I knew the truth, and we did not care to share it with the police or the public. There was no point now that Robert was dead, and to claim he had killed his daughter would bring attention dangerously close to the matter of the sketches and the attempted treason. I assumed Colonel Mabry, wherever he was, approved of our silence.
As I’d thought, Dottie did not go back to Wych Elm House. When she was released from the hospital, a bare five days after the tragedy, she had servants bring her a packed bag, and she went directly to London. There, she installed herself in a hotel and helped Cora and her parents nurse Martin through the two surgeries that they all hoped would repair him and bring him back to life. The surgeries were a success, but Martin’s recovery was slow, and her weeks in London stretched to months. Eventually, through the offices of David Wilde, she dismissed the servants and closed the house.
Alex and I did not go back, either. I’d packed all of our belongings that day I visited and had them transported to a hotel room I took a few blocks from the hospital, where Alex was still under care. He was there for nearly three weeks, much longer than Dottie, and I made the trip several times a day between my room and the hospital. The nurses doted on him, of course—he was obviously a ward favorite—and through his own natural strength he recovered quickly, though the wound had been serious.
The day they discharged him, I walked him the few blocks to our hotel and finally had my husband to myself again. I fed him strong tea and roast beef ordered from the kitchen downstairs, then helped him bathe, wash his hair, and shave, both of us in the steamy bathroom for nearly an hour. When that was finished, we did other things. I was worried that it would aggravate his injury, but Alex assured me it was, in fact, the best possible medical therapy, and so I really had no choice at all but to comply.
When he was well enough to travel, we journeyed to London. Christmas had passed with the two of us lazy and cozy in our hotel room, and it was nearly New Year’s, the trees lined with frost and the wind icy and damp. Alex drove the motorcar and I sat in the passenger seat as usual, the map in my lap. We stopped frequently for hot tea to warm our blood. We felt rather bohemian, like gypsies living a traveling life, and we did not discuss the fact that we had no permanent home and no certain plans. We talked of politics, the situation on the Continent, and the plays we wanted to see in London. After three years apart, we had an inexhaustible stream of conversation.
Only once did Alex talk to me of what he’d seen that day as he lay on the floor of the morning room in Wych Elm House, looking past my shoulder as I crawled toward him. It was near dawn one morning just before we left for London, and I rolled over in bed to find him propped up on his pillows, wide-awake and thinking.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“I can almost remember it,” Alex said. His arm was angled behind his head, the angry scar of the bullet wound visible on his left shoulder above his heart. He had lost weight in the hospital, and in the dawn light his cheeks were slightly hollowed. “It comes to the edges of my memory, and then it goes away again.”
I pushed myself up on one elbow; I knew immediately what he was talking about. “What did you see?”
He thought about it, and then he shook his head. “It’s so unclear, like I saw it from the corner of my eye. And for some reason it gets mixed up with the war.”
“The war?”