Night Train to Lisbon (19 page)

“What old thing?” asked Carson.

“His journal,” said Jane.

“What?” said Carson. “We can't read his journal.”

“Oh, come on, you're going to get cold feet on me now?” said Jane. “You give me this whole sob story about how you know Alec is innocent, and then you want to back out?”

“I didn't say that,” said Carson.

“Besides,” she said, “
you're
the spy.” Suddenly she stopped. “Hullo,” Jane said to herself. She'd uprooted a slender black leather-bound book out of the bottom drawer. “Of course,” she said, “I can't be certain he's even written about Alec, but if he has, it will be the truth. Lawrence is a great believer in journals. He's been keeping them since he was a boy at Eton.” She flipped through the pages quickly until she found an entry that gave her pause.

“Ah, here we are,” she said quietly, and she glanced quickly down the page. Carson had come around behind the desk, but Jane now raised the journal so that all her niece could see was its outside covers. “I think I should read what Lawrie has to say first,” Jane said. “If it doesn't involve
Alec, there's no need for you to be invading my husband's privacy, too.”

“Of course,” Carson said, but as she stood back and let Jane read the page, she couldn't help studying her aunt's face, scouring it for some tell-tale response.

And she got it. When Jane had finished reading and looked up from the book, her eyes were wide and watery. Apologetic, even. “I'm sorry,” she said as she turned the journal around and handed it to Carson. “I'm so sorry.”

Her hands shaking, Carson took the journal, smoothed an already smooth page with one hand, and then, halfway down, found the relevant entry. The blood was pounding so hard behind her eyes that at first she could barely focus. But she forced herself to continue. It was the truth she wanted, and it was the truth she would get.

“Monday
P.M
.,” Lawrence had written in his formal handwriting.

Carson had reached the end of the page, but as she turned to the next page Jane took the journal back out of her hands.

“Really, I should look first,” Jane said. She glanced down, turned the page. This time, Carson wasn't trying to read the response in her aunt's face. Still, she thought she noticed something flicker there.

“What is it?” Carson said. “There's more? I don't know if I can take it.”

“No,” Jane said, blinking, looking up. “Nothing involving you, anyway.” And she snapped the journal shut and dropped it back into the bottom drawer. Then she turned to Carson, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and said, “You look like you could use some tea.”

She helped Carson back to the drawing room, escorted her onto the couch next to Philippa, and poured her a cup of tea. Then she poured a cup of tea for herself. Jane stood sipping it, putting the cup back on the saucer in her other hand, then sipping some more. As she did so, she regarded Carson, as if to assess her reaction to what had just happened.

“What is it?” Philippa said. “What's wrong? Carson? Jane? Won't someone tell me?”

Carson, however, turned her face up so as to address her aunt directly. “I still believe him,” she said.

“Oh, Carson—” her aunt began.

“There's been a horrible mistake. That's all. A cock-up. Isn't that what you call it over here?”

“Carson, please,” Jane said. She placed the cup and saucer on the table and crouched before Carson. “You must listen to reason. There's evidence. There's that book, and that awful
ring
—”

“It's only inscribed to ‘Alec.' Surely there are other Alecs in Great Britain,” Carson said, but even as she was saying this, she heard how hollow it sounded. “I don't know. I don't
know.
I don't know
anything.
Maybe you're right. Maybe you're all right, you and Lawrence and you,” she said, turning to her mother. Then she covered her face with both hands; and then she removed them. She shook them in front of herself, as if trying to get a grip on something enormous. “But what else can I do? I've got to believe Alec. If I don't, who will?”

“Now, Carson,” Jane said, taking Carson's shaking hands in her own and then giving them a good squeeze, just as Carson had done for her earlier, “I want you to listen to me. I'm as great an advocate as you'll ever find when it comes to following one's heart. It's what I did in 1917 when I met Lawrie. There I was, hopelessly besotted with this rather peculiar and shy British officer I'd met in the lobby of a movie theater in London who was over there on some secret diplomatic mission. I wanted nothing more than to stay in England with him. Yes, he'd soon be going off to the front, and of course he could never support me in the style to which I was accustomed. But the most important thing, and I know that it will be difficult for you to believe this today, that it will sound rather quaint and old-fashioned, but the most compelling argument against my running off with him was that it
just wasn't done.
Everyone said so. My mother and father. My friends. My own sister,” and she reached out and grasped Philippa's hand now in addition to Carson's. For the first time all morning, Carson saw Jane grant her sister a smile, however bittersweet. “And I daresay ten out of ten people I might have stopped on the street would have said so, too,” Jane went on. “And do you know what? I didn't listen to any of them. I did what no young woman, no mere girl, did in those days. I did what I wanted. I stayed in England and waited for Lawrie. I followed my
heart.
Because I
knew
him,” and she gave Carson's hand a significant
squeeze, to let Carson know that the nature of her relationship with Lawrence had been on the same level of intimacy as Carson's with Alec: that they had been lovers. “But
you,
darling girl, darling, darling Carson,” Jane went on, letting go of Carson's hand to reach up and brush the hair off her niece's forehead, to tuck it behind her ear, to stroke the side of her face, “you must understand that sometimes you have to listen to your head, too.”

Carson looked into her aunt's tender, loving face, and she felt for a moment as if she might cry. So she looked at her own hands, folded in her lap.

She heard her mother say, “Thank you, Jane. That was very thoughtful of you.”

She heard the creak of Jane's knees as she raised herself from a crouching to a standing position.

She heard the sniffling of her aunt to one side of her and of her mother to the other.

And then she heard silence.

They were waiting for her.

Carson stood. She was nodding her head, composing her thoughts, as she crossed the room. When she reached the hallway of the suite, she turned back to her aunt and her mother, two sisters still fighting a battle from a time before she herself was born.

“Thank you,” she said in a voice that seemed too soft to have carried very far. So she cleared her throat and tried again. “Thank you. Both of you. I do hope you understand. But I have to do what I have to do.”

“And what is that?” Jane said.

Carson smiled, and she realized it was the same bittersweet smile her aunt had given her mother several minutes earlier.

“I'll think of something,” she said.

 

And why not?
Carson said to herself as she descended in the lift. The strategy of relying on her intuition—of trusting herself to think of something, of going with her gut, as they might have said back in the States—had worked so far. Not in the ways she'd thought it would; walking up to the door of Jane and Lawrence's suite, for instance, she couldn't possibly have known she was about to be reunited with her own mother. Still, it had worked: Carson was walking away from there now with precisely the information she'd come to get.

The problem, of course, was the information itself: the evidence against Alec. As she left the lobby of Claridge's and fully reentered a world of trilling whistles and argumentative automobile horns, Carson couldn't help reflecting on the contrast between her aunt's description of what she had wanted out of her courtship with Lawrence long ago and what Carson was hoping to accomplish now. Back then, Jane had been acting out of a personal conviction, taking the kind of social stand that might seem ahead of its time, even brave. You might resent her for it, as the members of her own family had; but you also had to respect her for it, even if you couldn't admit it to
yourself. Carson, by contrast, knew how her own actions must appear to her mother and her aunt—as stubbornness, a willful effort to ignore the evidence.

But just the opposite was true. Carson wasn't ignoring the evidence at all. Now that she knew what the evidence against Alec was, maybe she could do something about it. That had been her intention all along, even if she hadn't known exactly what it was she would be able to do with the information once she had it. But now she did.

She would go to Cambridge. The book and the ring were meaningless to her—and yes, she was willing to admit now that somehow they must have belonged to Alec—but maybe they wouldn't be meaningless to Alec's closest friends. Carson, after all, had known Alec for barely three months, and much of that time she'd spent ignoring him. Tom and Michael and Freddy, however, had known Alec for years. If anyone other than Alec himself could clear up the mystery of the book and the ring—and visiting the defendant in a case as sensitive as this one would be impossible, Simon Harkness had emphatically informed Carson—it would have to be his closest friends.

The train trip to Cambridge was picturesque, Carson supposed, though she barely noticed the sights. Still, when the train pulled into the station, she couldn't miss the majesty of the city, the power that seemed to reside in the spires and towers of these academic fortresses. She'd never been much of a student before, always preferring to chat with
her friends instead of truly learning with the kind of depth that real scholars did. But now, for a moment, she felt a pang of longing, wishing she could settle here and learn everything there was to learn—with Alec at her side, of course.

Walking up the winding streets of Cambridge, Carson consulted the street map she'd bought for ten pence at the train station and made her way to the row house where Alec and his colleagues shared a flat. The bell made a buzzing sound when she pressed it, and within a moment Michael Morling appeared in the doorway.

“Carson?” he said, seeming genuinely amazed that she was standing there. “I thought Alec went to the States to see
you.
What's going on?”

“Long story,” said Carson quietly. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” said Michael, and he stepped aside so that Carson could pass. She entered the narrow front hall, with its smells of cooked beef and tinned beans, and walked past a small sitting room with old brown furniture and dull ocher-colored walls. She was just about to wonder why in the world these men chose to live here when she entered the living room, an enormous, welcoming space filled with books and light. This was more like it. Here, she could imagine Alec making himself right at home. It was just as Alec had described it to her: the beautiful mess of an orderly mind.

Carson turned to Michael and pointed vaguely down another hall. “Which is Alec's?” she said.

“First door there,” he said. He pointed the way, but he didn't follow Carson. He let her do the exploring on her own.

Alec's bedroom was small and tidy and, again, exactly as he'd described it. Warm prints on the walls, desk cluttered with papers, bed unmade—she half expected Alec to be sleeping in it. Carson lightly touched his pillow, running her hand along its smooth surface as though it were Alec's face. She closed her eyes, remembering that moment in the pub with Alec the previous day, when she'd tried to commit the sensation of his hand on her cheek to memory. Then she turned and went back out into the living room, where Michael, Tom, and Freddy were now assembled.

“Hello, Carson,” Tom said. “What's wrong? You look worried.”

“Where's Alec?” said Freddy.

“I
am
worried,” said Carson. “About Alec. He's been arrested.”

“Arrested?” said Tom. “For what?”

“Treason,” Carson said simply.

The three men gaped at her. Michael emitted a little laugh. “You're putting us on,” he said.

But Carson's expression told them everything they needed to know.

“You're
not
putting us on,” Michael said, sinking into a chair.

“I don't
believe
it,” said Tom.

“Good
Lord,
” Freddy echoed.