No, they arrested Alfred de Marigny, the son-in-law of Sir Harry Oakes. After all, the two of them were known to be on the outs, and de Marigny was a scoundrel of a man, a fortune hunter, a mountebank.

Lulu

December 1943

(Scotland)

“I don’t understand,” Margaret says to Annie. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why, you were too young, Miss Margaret. And then I was too old and forgot.”

“How could you forget a thing like this?” She sinks into the straw and lifts her hand to touch this thing, this brown canvas bag, the leather straps, one by one, the way you might touch a holy relic.

We’re speaking inside the hayloft of the carriage house. They hay is largely gone, as you might expect, and the bag’s sitting snug underneath the eaves. When she first deposited it here, Annie covered it with a striped horse blanket, which she now holds in her hands, folding and unfolding and folding again. The rain drums softly against the roof and drips in places to the floor.

I kneel next to her on the old wooden floor, the bits of hay and dust. The air is musty, but if you taste it carefully inside the chambers of your nose, there’s a horse there somewhere, long absent from the stalls below. There’s also the smell of gasoline, because the Morris occupies the center hall, next to a stately old brougham, coated in dust. Margaret’s in some kind of trance, just staring and staring at something nobody else can see, some memory. I say gently, “Should I open it? Or do you want to do it?”

“No, you do it.”

I unbuckle the straps, which is no easy chore, believe me. The leather’s stiff, the metal rusted. At last they pull apart, and I lift the flap at the top and reach inside. One by one, I pull out the objects, the socks, the field dressings, the gun oil, the gas mask, the shirts, the soap, the mess kit, the shaving kit—

Margaret snatches up the shaving kit and unties the knot with her fingernails, pick pick pick, until at last it comes loose and the belt unrolls, the scissors and razor and brush all stuck in their little slots, gleaming as if they were new. She pulls out the scissors and touches the tip with her fingers, and I think of my bathroom on Cable Beach, and how I kept shaving soap and razor and toothbrush in the cabinet, and how I liked to lean against the windowsill and watch my lover shave, fascinated at his concentration, the series of contortions, the new pink skin revealed in the stroke of the razor, the smell of the soap, his naked shoulders. How, when he was gone, I would sometimes rise in the middle of the night and take the razor from its jar and inspect the blade to see if some tiny hair still clung to the edge, some relic of Thorpe.