The worst part of not knowing is how the imagination fills in the blanks, how it tries to ferret out an answer from all the possibilities and how, in doing so, it settles on the most terrifying. In that version, Lily is abducted. And sometimes she is murdered, and sometimes raped, and sometimes she is still alive and suffering.
Clive once told Jane that what she really had to live with was the not knowing. All kinds of accidents, Jane, are very real in a place like that. Sitting by the lake, the early morning light coming up over the stiff-necked trees, Jane thinks, Accident and she can see some version of it, the long muddy slope William had slid down when he was calling for Lily, the gap in the boulders around the shore side of the drainage grate, the relatively short distance from the trail to the water. This lake, her grandmother told her years later, was the first place they thoroughly searched. Within twenty-four hours they’d brought in divers and two days later they dredged it from one end to the other, but they found no trace of Lily.
Because William refused to see Jane or her grandparents, Jane came to believe that if, in the years that followed, someone found a shirt, a shoe or a body, they’d call William, but no one would think to contact her. The key to Jane’s grandparents’ house had been around Lily’s neck, which meant that for months Jane had nightmares about the person who might have taken Lily appearing in their house in South Kensington, waiting in Jane’s bedroom for her to come home from school or rehearsal. Clive had wanted to know what “he” looked like when Jane confessed this, because if any leads came out of Jane’s sessions it was agreed that he could pass on the particulars. But the intruder was never the same: sometimes he was a version of some movie actor, sometimes a stranger, and sometimes he looked like her father or like William.
What Jane wants now, sitting on the rock, the waves of the lake lapping in front of her, is a sign or a ritual. If she had something of Lily’s she would send it off on a leaf over the water or dig it down next to the roots of a plant. But she has nothing — just as she found nothing in William’s face when she walked up to him at the gala: a vacancy where she had hoped for more.
• • •
Turning away from the lake, Jane listens for Sam. The last time she saw him he was running between the trees along the shore, probably on the trail of a wood mouse or a squirrel. When she doesn’t hear him she whistles and starts back up toward the trail. She is thinking about the shooting party William described at the lecture, about how the Chesters had stopped on their way to Edmund’s prospective mill to tour the Farrington grounds and walk out to the caves. They’d probably inched down the very slope she was now climbing on their way out to the lake. The rock that she’d been sitting on still had an old mooring ring mortared into the stone, and it was flat enough to use as a jetty. William had mentioned how Prudence Farrington’s diary described in great detail the preparations at the house around the time of the Chester — Sutton visit but said little of the occasion itself. It seems to Jane that William’s lecture, too, was full of gaps — the fact of Norvill and Charlotte’s relationship chief amongst them. In the latter part of his talk he’d focused on the state of the gardens that summer, and on George’s autumn trip to Sikkim, for which he’d procured funding from the Suttons. William had been fixated on the story of the plants — the retrieval of seven megalantha specimens from Kangchenjunga; the discovery of Campanula grandiflora and rupestris.
This, Jane realizes now, is where his attention has always been: not on the people in the story but on the withering plants sealed in terraria and Wardian cases. The fact that Norvill had received a commission to survey fault lines along the east coast shortly after the shooting party, and then went away for the better part of a year, had been a quick footnote in William’s lecture. But it was something that Jane hadn’t known, something that surprised her. The Suttons, William had said in conclusion, returned to Helton Hall. Edmund eventually purchased the mill up north and the Chester family went back to their museum.
The pieces of the puzzle clicked into place, Jane thinks, and everyone was back where they had started — except Norvill.
By six a.m. the sky that zigzags above the trees has turned a cloudless blue. It is still too early for a B&B, but Jane supposes that by seven the local hotel staff might be up and making breakfast, which means that she can see if there’s a room available. She can picture it, a narrow single with awful floral paper and a costly in-room phone from which she can call Lewis to make sure it’s okay that she’s taken the car. But then she imagines Lewis saying, Gareth called, followed by an awful hanging silence.
At the gate Jane stops and whistles for Sam again. For the last twenty minutes he has been darting in and out of the treeline. She stands there listening, waiting for him to come barrelling toward her, but he doesn’t. Leaning against the wood slats in the cold, she whistles again, her fingers in her mouth this time, like Lewis taught her. She whistles this way twice and then puts her hands in her pockets thinking, Okay, it’s been a while since he’s been allowed off-leash, he’s nine years old, this is the last of his wild oats. And then it dawns on her: Maybe this is how it works: you do what’s expected of you all of your life and then one day this loses its lustre and you stop what you’re doing, take off into the woods and disappear.
We watch Jane whistle again, turn her ear toward the humming woods, scan the dawn-lit lip of pasture and the crumbling stone wall behind it. We know she is willing herself not to be scared but her heart is pounding. She can hear birds, the falls, a car engine turning over on the main road, even the distant shush of cars on the motorway. Time stalls, then hitches forward: Sam comes bounding through the alder. He skirts a post at the edge of the woods and runs straight for her, his wet and glistening body wrapped in night smells as he leans against her legs, the happiest she’s ever seen him.
12
The first time Jane met William Eliot he was standing in her grandmother’s overplanted South Kensington garden in a crisp white shirt with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His hands were caked in dirt and he was listening while Jane’s grandmother Meredith carried on about the crested irises. There were two freshly planted pots of lavender at his feet and a snake of ivy he’d cleared from the overgrown trellis. When Jane stepped out of the glass door of the conservatory to ask if she’d missed breakfast, Meredith ignored her at first, concentrating on what William was saying about the Botrytis. It was a Sunday and Jane had slept in; her bare feet warmed on the flagstone while she crossed her arms over her nightdress and waited for her grandmother’s attention, an eleven-year-old who was not yet self-conscious in front of strangers.
“Jane?”
When Jane looked up, both Meredith and William were staring at her, William with a bemused expression, Meredith tight-lipped. A bee had zigzagged up from the lavender and was hovering around Jane’s elbow, and she had been following it, the insect lightly touching her fingers before veering off toward the verbena.