Ember Island (39 page)

His lips left mine and wandered to my throat. “I knew when I first saw you,” he said. “You would be important to me. You can’t imagine how important you are to me.”

Niggling guilt.

“I love you, Nina,” he said, almost casually. Naturally.

Then he was kissing me again, deeply and passionately, and I knew I loved him too but I couldn’t say it out loud.

“Wait, wait,” I said, pulling away. “This is . . .” I had been
about to say “wrong,” but looking at him in the half-light, as the rain hammered down outside, I knew there was nothing wrong about my feelings for him.

Joe smiled. Such a wicked smile, making me melt like toffee in the sun.

I caught my breath. “Never mind,” I said. “Never mind.”

•

The storm rattled over and passed, we ate in bed, then slept wound around each other. Tomorrow and all my other tomorrows receded away from me. No deadline, no facing up to my sins and secrets. Just Joe and me, skin against skin, in the soft morning dark.

•

Joe was up at first light, pulling his jeans on while I blinked away sleep.

“Where are you going?”

“I feel terrible. Julian’s first night out of hospital and I wasn’t there to put him to bed.”

“It was a wild storm. You couldn’t have walked home,” I said, sitting up. “And your parents were there for him.”

He sat down, shirtless, reached across to stroke my hair off my face. “I should still go.”

I smiled at him, feeling something bright and hot swelling in my heart. I said, “Wait,” before I knew I was going to say it.

He looked at me curiously.

“I can’t have children. I mean, I can’t get pregnant.”

“So?”

So
.

“It’s why Cameron and I split up. And I know you want more kids one day . . .” I trailed off, feeling foolish.

“I did. But not anymore. Julian’s eight. I don’t want to go back to baby days. It’s too hard.” He leaned down and kissed me. “How long has that been on your mind?”

I laughed. “Since day one.”

“Well, I’m glad you got it out. Anything else you need to tell me? Skeletons in the closet?” He made a spooky gesture with his fingers.

I kissed him back, hard.

“I have to go,” he said.

After he left, I lay there a long time. Smiling and smiling. When my phone rang, I picked it up, still smiling.

“Nina, it’s Marla.”

“Hi, Marla. I was about to start writing. Things are really starting to move along now, so—”

“I spoke to Elizabeth Parrish.”

My skin prickled. Her tone was curt, almost angry. “The journalist?”

“Yes, the journalist. When I refused her request to speak to you, she told me why she’s writing about you.” A moment of silence as the phone signal dropped out and then bloomed back into life. “Do you want to know?”

Heat in my heart. Something bad was about to happen. I managed to keep my voice even. “I guess . . .”

“She says she’s been through the archives of Stanley and Walsh Publishers, 1926 through to 1929. She’s found letters . . .”

“No,” I said aloud. Or maybe I said it in my head.

“Letters between the publishers and a woman named Eleanor Holt, rejecting a series of manuscripts about a character called the Widow Wayland.”

My mouth opened and closed, unable to form words.

“Please, Nina, please tell me these were just your inspiration. Please tell me you didn’t plagiarize those books.”

I hung up, switched the phone off, and threw it in the corner.

It had all fallen apart.

T
illy felt guilty and fearful breaking Sterling’s rule about being in the garden. Not that he was ever around to enforce it, but Nell was a little harder to get away from. One week to the day after Tilly had first made her proposal to Hettie, she found herself locking her bedroom door carefully, then climbing out her window onto the verandah. If she went the long way around, to the back of the house, she passed neither Nell’s window nor Sterling’s office. She took the back stairs down, behind the kitchen, then rounded the house on the north and from there plunged into the garden.

Hettie had said she needed a week to think about it. At first, Tilly had found this astonishing. Was she not aching to get out of prison? To flee from the island and into her children’s arms? But Tilly told her to take her time, and then worried for the whole week that Hettie would report Tilly. Every footstep on the verandah had made her heart start: was it a warder coming to tell Sterling what she had done?

But here it was, a week later, and Hettie was waiting for her down near Tilly’s plot. She turned at Tilly’s footsteps on the leaves. Her face was florid and her eyes almost black.

“Hettie?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will . . . we will do this. I knew I would say yes a moment after you said it. But I had to think . . . I am sorry I killed him. I am so sorry. But my babies . . .”

Tilly realized she had been hoping, deep down, that Hettie might say no. It was no small thing to help a prisoner escape; and yet it was the only thing she could do to absolve herself of her own guilt. She grasped Hettie’s calloused hand. “I know you’re sorry. But he deserved it.” Not like Jasper. Not like Chantelle. “He might have killed you one day, or the children.”

“How is it to be done, then?” Hettie said. “We must . . . plan it. So many have tried before and not succeeded.”

“Because they have done it alone, with rough materials, with no resources. That’s what makes this different. I can help you.” Tilly lowered her voice, looked around. “I think I can get you a boat.”

Hettie’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“And together we will row our way across to the mainland and put this island behind us forever.”

“Together?”

Tilly nodded, firm in her intention. She risked too much by staying. She was not naïve: assisting a prisoner’s escape would be punishable by law. No, if she left the island, left Chantelle Lejeune’s name behind there, life could resume on the mainland. She would take a job, far away where nobody cared much who she was and where she came from. Perhaps it would be safe to reclaim her old name: Matilda Kirkland. A woman from another time.

Hettie squeezed her hand. “Then let us start to prepare ourselves. We must be careful and clever.”

“And we mustn’t rush.”

“If we wait for the cooler weather, when the sun goes down earlier . . .”

“A month from now, then?”

“A month.”

•

A boat. Tilly needed a boat. Not a raft made of sticks found around the island and lashed together with a pajama belt. These were the kind of vessels escaping prisoners usually made, building them over months and leaving them stored amongst the mangroves and mud. Sterling said they routinely searched the area and found many half-made boats; none were ever seaworthy. If the escapees did make it off the island, they would sink in the dark water and be prey to sharks.

But there were boats on the island, in the boat shed. Sterling had mentioned it when Nell had gone missing, had said she knew which drawer the key to the boat shed was in. Tilly would be mad to ask Nell for help. The girl’s curiosity would unbind all Tilly’s plans. So she resolved instead to find the key herself.

Tilly lay in bed, awake, very late that night. She had no trouble fighting sleep. Her mind whirled. Sometimes she remembered what she had done, or what she intended to do, with a terrible jolt. She had not been bred for such things; for burning houses and helping prisoners escape. She had been bred for tea and meek conversation. And yet, these things had happened; and she needed to make peace with the fact that she was not meek. She had never been meek.

Long after midnight, when the house was quiet, and the sigh of the wind outside and the ticking clock in the parlor were the only
sounds, Tilly rose and lit a candle. Her feet creaked lightly on the floor, so she moved slowly. Past Nell’s room safely, through to the dining room, then to the door of Sterling’s office.

The doorknob was cool in her hand. She turned it and the door opened. She slipped in, closed the door behind her. She was overwhelmed by the smell of the place. His smell. Tilly placed her candle on the desk. Shadows flickered across spines of record books, papers laid out in neat piles, inkwells and pens, across the framed map of Moreton Bay hung on the wall. On Sterling’s blotting pads were doodles of seabirds: some with spread wings, others standing on rocks or in water. They were beautiful, rendered in soft pen strokes, with finesse and fine form. She was fascinated by the idea of Sterling as an artist: he always seemed such a practical man. A lover of art but not a man with time to make it. Indeed, he hadn’t time to make it. These were blotting-paper doodles.

Tilly shook herself. It wasn’t time for reflection, nor was it time to fall deeper in love with Sterling. This process she had set in motion would take her away from him forever; the double duty of freeing Hettie and denying herself Sterling’s love would surely absolve her sins. Instead of mooning over Sterling, she should be searching drawers.

She started with the desk. She found two keys tied on a piece of narrow rope. Was it to be that easy? She laid them on the desktop and went to the next drawer. In this one she found blank sheets of paper like the ones he gave Nell. In the next drawer there were boxes with ink bottles in them, and another key; this one on a loop of metal with a paper tag on it. Nothing was written on the tag. Tilly put it with the other keys. Now she turned to the bureau behind the desk. Four drawers. In amongst empty ledgers, pencils, candles, matches, snuffers, rulers, and balls of string, she
found two more sets of keys. All together, she had seven keys. She glanced around the room. No more drawers.

Tilly sat down at Sterling’s office chair, considering the keys. Which one was the one to the boat shed? The only way to know was to go down there now and try them all, one by one.

She gathered them up in her palm, and returned to her room. This time she dressed, pulled on stockings and shoes, lifted the sash and climbed out her window, just as she had done that afternoon. The night was cool and she shivered a little. But the sky was clear, a million stars, and the path down to the boat shed dry.

The island appeared deserted at night. With all the prisoners counted and locked in, the warders either went to their own beds or contracted in small crews around the hulking black shape of the stockade. Tilly wore a dark dress so she wouldn’t catch the eye of anyone, should they be out at this time of night; but she feared nothing from discovery while simply walking down the road. She was a free woman after all, and a late-night bout of insomnia could explain away her movements. No, it was when she was at the boat shed that she needed to be fearful, careful. So she took her time walking down there, being aware of sights and sounds. The movement of palm leaves, the white-bright sliver of moon, the shush and pull of the sea. Near the boat shed was the tall lookout tower they used when somebody had escaped. Now, it was empty, a spindly white ghost in the dark.

She had no light but the stars and the thin moon. She fumbled through the keys, telling them apart with her fingertips. The first key she came to was clearly too big for the lock. The second fit the lock but wouldn’t turn. Tilly pulled it out, but it was stuck. Hot fear engulfed her. She wriggled it, looking around wildly. With a sudden jerk it slipped out. She paused a moment, walked away from the shed. Surveyed the area all around. Nobody, nothing.
The third key, the single key with the paper tag, slid in easily. She took a deep breath and turned it.

Click
.

The lock gave. The handle turned. The door swung outwards.

Tilly opened it only as far as she needed to slip inside, then closed it behind her. Now she was in pitch black, cursing herself for not having brought a lamp. She stood very still, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark, but still could make out nothing more than a few shapes less dark than the black surrounds. So she put out her hands and gingerly felt her way forward. She bumped almost instantly into the prow of a rowboat. With her hands, she felt around its contours. It was upside down on the ground, next to another like it. She presumed there were a number of rowboats in here, but where were the oars? Shuffling on the dirt floor, careful not to kick anything and bruise her shins, she made her way further into the shed. Against the stone back wall she found oars, felt along them to see they were supported by hooks in the wall.

Satisfied that she understood where the important things were in the shed, Tilly quietly slipped out and locked the door. She knew she needed to return to the house and replace the keys, memorizing the drawer where the paper-tagged key rested, but her mind felt heavy. So she walked down to the jetty and along the wooden boards, then sat down with her legs over the side, her hands on the rough timber. Turning ideas over in her mind, plans coalescing, the future rushing up to meet her.

•

“We’ll go out through the mangroves,” Tilly told Hettie, after four days of wild winds that had kept her inside in the afternoons. “I will have the boat waiting for you.”

“How will you get it there?” They sat together on the grass, shielded from curious eyes by the hedges.

“I’m still working that out. Do you know how often they use the boats? Count them?”

“I have no idea.” Hettie crossed her knees and hunched over them. “You don’t understand. I spend most of my time inside that stone box. It boils in summer and freezes in winter. I come to the garden a few hours a day and that is my life, in its entirety. I don’t know what else happens on this island.”

“Well, I’ll find out. But it will mean you have to escape from the garden in the late afternoon, before the turnkey comes to take you back to your cell.”

Hettie took a deep shuddering breath.

“It will be all right,” Tilly said.

“What if somebody sees me? This prison uniform is so . . . white.”