The Light Between Oceans (46 page)

‘I bet they’re lovely secrets.’

Again, the little chin moved up and down, while the eyes tried to work out what rules to follow.

‘Shall we play a game?’

The child slid her toe back and forth in an arc on the floor.

‘Let’s play a game where I guess your secret. That way it’s still a secret, because you haven’t told me. And if I guess it, you can have a lolly as a prize.’ The child’s face tensed as Hannah smiled awkwardly. ‘I guess … that you went to visit the lady from Janus. Is that right?’

The child began to nod, and then stopped. ‘We saw the man in the big house. His face was pink.’

‘I won’t be cross with you, darling. It’s nice to visit sometimes, isn’t it? Did the lady give you a nice big hug?’

‘Yes,’ she said slowly, trying to work out as the word came out whether this was part of the secret or not.

As Hannah took the washing off the line half an hour later, her stomach was still churning. How could her own sister have done such a thing? The expression on the faces of the customers at Mouchemore’s came back to her, and she had a sense that they could see something she couldn’t – everyone, Gwen included, was laughing behind her back. She left a petticoat dangling by one peg as she headed back into the house and stormed into Gwen’s room.

‘How could you?’

‘What on earth’s wrong?’ asked Gwen.

‘As if you don’t know!’

‘What, Hannah?’

‘I know what you did. I know where you took Grace.’

It was Hannah’s turn to be taken aback as tears sprang to her sister’s eyes and she said, ‘That poor little girl, Hannah.’

‘
What?
’

‘The poor thing! Yes, I took her to see Isabel Sherbourne. In the park. And I let them speak to each other. But I did it for
her
. The child doesn’t know whether she’s Arthur or Martha. I did it for
her
, Hanny – for Lucy.’

‘Her name’s Grace! Her name’s Grace and she’s my daughter and I just want her to be happy and—’ Her voice lost its force as she sobbed, ‘I miss Frank. Oh God, I miss you, Frank.’ She looked at her sister. ‘And you take her to the wife of the man who buried him in a ditch! How could you even think of it? Grace has to forget about them. Both of them.
I’m
her mother!’

Gwen hesitated, then approached her sister, and hugged her gently. ‘Hannah, you know how dear you are to me. I’ve tried to do everything I possibly can to help you – since that day. And I’ve tried so hard since she came home. But that’s the trouble. It’s not
her
home, is it? I can’t bear to watch her suffer. And I can’t bear how much it hurts you.’

Hannah took a breath between a gulp and a gasp.

Gwen straightened her shoulders. ‘I think you should give her back. To Isabel Sherbourne. I just don’t think there’s any other way. For the child’s sake. And for yours, Hanny dear. For yours.’

Hannah drew back, her voice steely. ‘She will never see that woman again, as long as I live. Never!’

Neither sister saw the small face peeping through the crack in the door; the little ears that heard everything in that strange, strange house.

Vernon Knuckey sat across the table from Tom. ‘I thought I’d seen every sort there was, until you turned up.’ He looked at the page in
front
of him again. ‘A boat washes up and you say to yourself, “That looks like a fine baby. I can keep it, and no one will ever know.”’

‘Is that a question?’

‘Are you trying to be difficult?’

‘No.’

‘How many children had Isabel lost?’

‘Three. You know that.’

‘But
you
were the one who decided to keep the baby. Not the woman who had lost three? All
your
idea, because you thought people wouldn’t think you were a real man without fathering kids. How bloody wet do you think I am?’

Tom said nothing, and Knuckey leaned in towards him, his voice softening. ‘I know what it’s like, to lose a little one. And I know what it did to my wife. Fair went mad with it for a bit.’ He waited, but got no reply. ‘They’ll go easy on her, you know.’

‘They won’t bloody touch her,’ said Tom.

Knuckey shook his head. ‘Committal hearing’ll be next week, when the Beak comes to town. From then on, you’re Albany’s problem, and Spragg’ll welcome you with open arms and Christ knows what else. He’s taken against you, and down there, there’ll be nothing I can do to stop him.’

Tom made no response.

‘Anyone you want me to tell about the hearing?’

‘No. Thanks.’

Knuckey gave him a look. He was about to leave, when Tom said, ‘Can I write to my wife?’

‘Of course you can’t bloody write to your wife. You can’t interfere with potential witnesses. If this is the way you’re going to play it, you play it by the rules, mate.’

Tom sized him up. ‘Just a bit of paper and a pencil. You can read it if you want … She’s my wife.’

‘And I’m the police, for God’s sake.’

‘Don’t tell me you never bent a rule – never turned a blind eye for some poor bastard … A piece of paper and a pencil.’

Ralph delivered the letter to Isabel that afternoon. She took it from him reluctantly, hand trembling.

‘I’ll leave you to get on with reading, then.’ He reached out to touch her forearm. ‘That man needs your help, Isabel,’ he said gravely.

‘And so does my little girl,’ she said, with tears in her eyes.

When he left, she took the letter to her bedroom and stared at it. She raised it to her face to smell it, to find a trace of her husband, but there was nothing distinctive about it – no trace of the man. She picked up some nail scissors from the dressing table and began to slit the corner, but something froze her fingers. Lucy’s face swam before her, screaming, and she shuddered at the knowledge that it was Tom who had caused that. She put the scissors down, and slipped the letter into a drawer, closing it slowly and without a sound.

The pillowcase is wet with tears. A scythe of moon hangs in the window, too feeble to light even its own path through the sky. Hannah watches it. There is so much of the world she wishes she could share with her daughter, but the child and the world have somehow been snatched away.

Sunburn. At first, she is puzzled at the memory that has presented itself, unbidden, irrelevant. An English governess, unfamiliar with the very concept of sunburn, let alone its treatment, had put her in a bath of hot water ‘to take the heat out’ of the burn she had got from bathing too long in the bay when her father was away. ‘There’s no use complaining,’ the woman had told the ten-year-old
Hannah.
‘It’s doing you good, the pain.’ Hannah had continued to scream until finally the cook had come to see who was being murdered, and hauled her out of the steaming water.

‘Have you ever heard such nonsense in all your life!’ the cook had declared. ‘The last thing you do to a burn is
burn
it. You don’t need to be Florence flipping Nightingale to know that much!’

But Hannah had not been angry, she remembers. The governess had truly believed she was doing the right thing. She only wanted what was best for her. She was inflicting pain only to help her.

Suddenly furious at the weakling moon, she hurls the pillow across the room and slams her fist into the mattress, over and over. ‘I want my
Grace
back,’ she mouths silently, through her tears. ‘This isn’t
my
Grace!’ Her baby had died, after all.

Tom heard the rattle of the keys.

‘Afternoon,’ said Gerald Fitzgerald, guided in by Harry Garstone. ‘Sorry I’m late. Train hit a herd of sheep just outside Bunbury. Slowed us up a bit.’

‘I wasn’t going anywhere.’ Tom shrugged.

The lawyer arranged his papers on the table. ‘Committal hearing’s in four days.’

Tom nodded.

‘Changed your mind yet?’

‘No.’

Fitzgerald sighed. ‘What are you waiting for?’

Tom looked at him, and the man repeated. ‘What are you damn well waiting for? The bloody cavalry’s not coming over the hill, mate. No one’s coming to save you, except me. And I’m only here because Captain Addicott’s paid my fee.’

‘I asked him not to waste his money.’

‘It doesn’t have to be a waste of money! You could let me earn it, you know.’

‘How?’

‘Let me tell the truth – give you the chance to walk away a free man.’

‘You think destroying my wife could make me a free man?’

‘All I’m saying is – half of these charges we can put up a decent defence to, whatever you’ve done: at least put them to proof. If you plead not guilty, the Crown’s got to prove every element of every offence. That bloody Spragg and his kitchen-sink charges: let me have a go at him, if only for the sake of my professional pride!’

‘If I plead guilty to everything, they’ll leave my wife alone, you’ve said. You know the law. And I know what I want to do.’

‘Thinking about it and doing it are two different things, you’ll find. Hell of a place, Fremantle gaol. Bastard of a way to spend twenty years.’

Tom looked him in the eye. ‘You want to know a bastard of a place to spend time? You go to Pozieres, Bullecourt, Passchendaele. You go there, then tell me how awful a place is where they give you a bed and food and a roof over your head.’

Fitzgerald looked down at his papers and made a note. ‘If you tell me to enter a guilty plea, that’s what I’ll do. And you’ll go down for the whole kit and caboodle. But you need your bloody head read, as far as I’m concerned … And you’d better pray to the Good Lord bloody Jesus that Spragg doesn’t up the charges once you get to Albany.’

CHAPTER 32