A Dangerous Collaboration (Veronica Speedwell #4)(66)

“A little more?”

“Angry. Nothing so obvious that you could put your finger on it, but it was there. A sort of edge to her. She was careful never to make any remarks in front of others, only me. But she would sit here on this bench and look around and I knew she was plotting something.”

“What sort of something?”

“To marry my brother and make herself queen of the castle,” she told me flatly. “I ought to have realized it sooner. We had talked about the castle when I was at school with her. Our dormitories were arranged with the girls two to a bed, and Rosamund was my bedmate. We would lie awake, long after the others had fallen asleep. I was too homesick to go to sleep. So I talked about the castle and she encouraged it. I told her all the legends, the giant, the Three Sisters, the mermaids and Spanish sailors. And I told her about Malcolm, how he was the loveliest brother imaginable. I think I made him out to be a bit of King Arthur and Siegfried and Theseus all in one. I quite adored him,” she said with an apologetic little smile. “Younger sisters often do. And I didn’t realize what it must have sounded like to a girl with Rosamund’s meager prospects. I was lonely for a castle and a wonderful big brother, and all she had was that bare room at school and the extra chores she had to do as a scholarship pupil. I never realized it was cruel.”

“You were a child,” I reminded her.

“A fanciful one. I spun her stories and she believed them as much as I did. In the end, she helped me run away. She gave me the little bit of pocket money she had and she lied for a whole day, telling the headmistress that I was abed with a stomachache. She got into terrible trouble. She was lucky not to be expelled. Malcolm helped with that,” she said with a vague smile. “He was so horrified that I had run away from school and so relieved I had made it home unscathed. Poor darling! He was so terribly young for such responsibility and not very good at being a guardian. Lucian was running mad at his school and there I was, halfway to getting my best friend expelled. He did the only thing he knew how—he threw money at the headmistress until she agreed to keep Rosamund on. Rosamund had only a glimpse of him that day when he went to settle things, but it was enough. She made up her mind then and there to live in our castle one day and to marry the prince who had appeared as if out of nowhere to save her.”

“He must have made quite an impression upon her,” I said.

“He did indeed. I am not surprised. To someone like Rosamund, who had known only the stings of privation and no real ease in her life, Malcolm must have seemed like a revelation. He was courteous and wealthy. He represented security, and when he stepped in like a figure out of myth to arrange her future at the school, she idolized him just a bit.” She broke off with a small smile. “I know it seems ludicrous that Malcolm could form the focus of a young girl’s fantasies. To me, he is so very ordinary. But he is not a bad-looking fellow, and Rosamund was so determined to see him as a hero. I think she was quite surprised to finally come to the island and find him a very regular sort of person.”

“Was it a long time between your leaving school and her visit here?”

“Oh, years,” she told me. “We kept in touch, after a fashion. I am a haphazard correspondent, but Rosamund wrote the first of each month, without fail. When she finished school, she had to take employment. There was never any question but that she would have to support herself. She wrote of her employers, her duties, her circumstances. At first, she was wildly entertaining about it all. She wrote with a sort of archness and made it seem like a lark. But as she changed posts and never quite found a place that suited her, she had to take smaller wages, less congenial employers. The tone of her letters changed. Finally, she decided to go out to India, but she was not due to take up her post for some time. It seemed the perfect opportunity to let her come to the island for a little rest.”

“Let her come?” I seized upon the curious phrasing. “Did she invite herself?”

“Very nearly,” she told me. “She sent a rather desperate letter, reminding me a little too pointedly about my promise to have her to stay. It rubbed me up the wrong way, but I realized I was being churlish. I had promised her, after all. And I decided it might be pleasant to have her. I thought it would be a few months only, a summer of working in the garden and sailing around the island, teaching her our ways and giving her a bit of respite before she had to charge into the fray again. But I saw it almost immediately, the way she looked at Malcolm, at the castle, at everything. There was such naked longing on her face.”

“Like a child at a sweetshop window?” I guessed.

“Not quite. This was something altogether darker, more determined. It was as if she meant to have it all or die in the attempt—”

She broke off, covering her mouth with her hand as she realized what she had said.

“Mertensia, what do you think became of her?” I asked gently.

She dropped her hand and rose abruptly from the bench, taking up her secateurs once more. “I don’t know. And I wish people would stop trying to find out.”

“You don’t want to discover what happened that day?”

“No. What purpose can it serve?” she demanded. “If she ran away—and even with the evidence of the bag, it is just possible—it will only make Malcolm miserable. If she died accidentally, it will make him miserable. If someone—”