“Who owned the house in ’41?” Peter asked.
“A cement firm,” Margaux said, “which took possession in the early thirties and destroyed the surrounding landscape with their quarries. The value of the property declined as a result and Asheham was eventually abandoned, though I’m not sure exactly when. And of course during the war, so many country places were requisitioned — for troop billets, and training, and so on.”
“Men in black cars,” Peter said distinctly.
The back of Jo’s neck prickled. “And now?”
“Oh, the house is gone. Demolished a good ten years ago. But if we could move on from the bloody house — ”
“What you’re saying is that Virginia left Sissinghurst sometime between the second of April and the seventh, when Vita went to see Leonard,” Peter said.
“Exactly. Five days.”
He lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Harold Nicolson’s vaguely menacing letter to Maynard Keynes was dated April fourth. That would be — ”
“The Friday before Vita’s Rodmell visit,” Jo supplied. “Harold would have been at Sissinghurst for the weekend, again.”
“He tells Maynard that Virginia’s his guest, and that he has her notebook,” Peter recited. “So she must still have been with the Nicolsons on Friday the fourth.”
“ — But gone by Monday, when Vita saw Leonard Woolf.”
“Which means Virginia left… when? Saturday? Sunday?”
“Saturday,” Margaux said decisively. “Once she knew Harold wrote to Keynes and tipped her hand, she had to get out immediately. She understood how vicious these people were. Harold wouldn’t believe it, of course, and Vita was always so vague — so lost in her own world… but Virginia knew she had reason to fear them. Burgess and his lot. So she ran. The Nicolsons might have hoped for news of her, Saturday and Sunday — but by Monday, Vita’s off to meet with Leonard.”
Jo considered all this. It fit as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle; but there was something wrong. “Why did they assume she was dead?”
“Sorry?” Margaux said, as though Jo were a half-wit who must be humored.
“Why did Vita condole with Leonard, as you put it? Why drag the river? Virginia had run away before. Why not assume she’d gone to London or Timbuktu? Why act as though she was never coming back?”
“Because they knew it was true,” Peter said quietly. “Think about it, Jo: how would Virginia manage to escape from Vita and Harold Nicolson, who were determined to save her? She must have had an accomplice. Someone who drove her to the train. Or all the way back to Sussex, for that matter. A person who would tell the Nicolsons exactly what happened, in the end — ”
“Jock,” Jo said.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“DID I DISTURB YOU, NANA?” JO ASKED.
It was barely six A.M. in the Delaware Valley, but Dottie was an early riser. She suffered from insomnia, a liability of old age, and often sat up in the middle of the night reading. Jo could imagine her: half-glasses poised on the bridge of her nose, faded pink nightgown beneath a sensible bathrobe, hair in pin curls. Her hands ropy with veins where they held her book.
“Sweetie!” Dottie cried. “Are you calling from England?”
“Yes, and I’m using a friend’s phone, so I’ll have to make it quick.”
“Are you having a good time?”
How to answer that question?
“It’s certainly been interesting,” she said faintly. “I have loads to tell you. But I called with a question, Nana. About Jock. Did you know he worked at Sissinghurst when he was young?”
“Sissinghurst? Where you’ve been working? I had no idea. What was he doing there?”
“Gardening. It must have been right before he joined up. Do you have any idea when that was — when he ran away to the army and lied about his age, I mean?”
“Well, it was 1941,” Dottie said doubtfully, “but I couldn’t give you the day and hour. Summer, I think. He used to say he decided to fight Hitler when the Russians did. If I’m remembering right, the Nazis invaded Russia in June. Did you learn anything about his letter? All that talk about the Lady?”
“I’m still working it out. Listen: Have you found anything else since I left home — anything of Grandpa’s, I mean? Something he wrote, maybe? Or… I don’t know. Anything that you can’t explain?”
There was a brief pause.
“No,” Dottie said, with that same doubtful tremor in her voice. “ — Not that any of his writing would be of help. He wasn’t in a mood to tell us much. I loved Jock dearly, Jo, but I wonder how well I actually knew him. He wasn’t himself in those last days. I mean, you wouldn’t have said he was religious, now, would you? Never went to church at all. And if he were getting that way — thinking of his Maker, and so on, and turning to the Lord — why take such an awful step as kill himself? Churchgoers call it a sin. It doesn’t make sense.”
“But Grandpa wasn’t religious — ”
“I know! But I found the oddest thing in his tool shed the other day. You said you wanted his old things, remember — and they have to be valued by an appraiser. It’s part of the settlement of the estate.”
Disgust, now, in Dottie’s voice; left to herself, Jo thought, she’d have thrown everything in black trash bags and left it all by the curb. Estate. An archaic word, better suited to the people who’d employed Jock Bellamy.
“What did you find, Nana?”
“A small statue,” she said. “Of the Blessed Virgin. And you know he wasn’t Catholic, Jo. It’s the oddest thing.”
THEY DROVE DOWN TO SISSINGHURST, ALL THREE OF THEM packed into the Triumph, on what Peter freely admitted was a hunch. “But if we’d waited for solid evidence,” he said, “we’d never have got this far.”
It was possible, Jo knew, that they’d reached the end of Virginia’s trail. It was more than likely they would never learn how or why she met her death. But they had so little left to lose.
“There’s everything to gain,” Margaux remarked sensibly. “Push on, and at least we may solve a mystery. Besides — why not spend the final hours of a swift November day in the most beautiful garden in Kent?”
They arrived just before closing time. It was curious, Jo thought, how strong a sense of homecoming she felt as the car approached Cranbrook, and the exterior of the George Hotel came into view. This corner of Vita’s world had come to mean too much to her: a link with her dead grandfather, a link to a barely glimpsed past. She would give anything to spend another week trolling with her laptop through the castle garden, absorbing the rich sights and scents as autumn came to a close. But this was Sissinghurst’s last open weekend of the year; as of Monday, it would go dark until March.
She directed Peter around to the greenhouses, and with no small feeling of trepidation, led him and Margaux toward the Head Gardener’s office.
“Is Imogen here?” she asked one of the staff gardeners who was busily watering some cuttings set out in trays.
“She’s over at the test border,” the young woman said. “Just behind the Powys Wall.”
The test border was a disciplined proving ground for new perennials. Imogen planted specimens that interested her there, and watched them for a few years before deciding whether they merited a spot in Sissinghurst’s beds. They found her deadheading a clump of pale green Echinacea — a type Jo recognized as Coconut Lime — with the withered stalks lying about her Wellies like sheaves of threshed wheat. She glanced up as the little cavalcade approached, and scowled.
“Not again!”
“Hello, Imogen,” Jo said. “I owe you an apology, and I’ve come to make it. I’m truly sorry for all the trouble and worry I’ve caused.”
Imogen studied her skeptically, then thrust her clippers in a pouch that dangled from her belt. “Yes, well, words are grand — but where’s the notebook, I’d like to know? In the hands of the bloody experts. I don’t know how I’m going to explain it all to the Trust — ”