The Light Between Oceans

by M. L. Stedman

  though he was standing so close that strands of her hair blew into his face. “I trusted you, Tom.” She bunched her hair in her fists as she stared at him, openmouthed as she struggled for words. “What in God’s name have you done to us? What have you done to Lucy?”

  She saw resignation in his shoulders, relief in his eyes. As she dropped her hands, her hair swept across her face again like a mourning veil and she began to sob. “Two years! Has everything been a lie for two years?”

  “You saw the poor bloody woman! You saw what we’d done.”

  “And she means more to you than our family?”

  “It’s not our family, Izz.”

  “It’s the only family we’ll ever have! What on earth’s going to happen to Lucy?”

  He clasped her arms. “Look, just do what I say and you’ll be all right. I’ve told them it was me, all right? I’ve told them keeping Lucy was all my idea—said you didn’t want to, but I forced you. As long as you go along with that no one will touch you… They’re taking us back to Partageuse. Izzy, I promise I’ll protect you.” He pulled her close to him again and touched his lips to the top of her head. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me. I know they’ll send me to jail, but when I get out, we’ll still—”

  Suddenly she launched at him, her fists pounding at his chest. “Don’t talk about ‘we,’ Tom! Not after what you’ve done!” He made no effort to stop her. “You made your choice! You don’t give a tinker’s damn about Lucy, or me. So don’t”—she searched for words—“don’t expect me to care what the bloody hell happens to you from now on.”

  “Izz—come on now, you don’t know what you’re saying!”

  “Don’t I?” Her voice was shrill. “I know they’ll take our daughter away. You can’t begin to understand, can you? What you’ve done—it’s unforgivable!”

  “Christ, Izz—”

  “You might as well have killed me, Tom! Killing me is better than killing our child. You’re a monster! A cold, selfish monster!”

  Tom stood, absorbing the words that hurt more than the blows. He searched her face for some hint of the love she had sworn for him over and over, but she was full of icy fury, like the ocean all around.

  The petrel plummeted again, arising triumphant with a fish it had imprisoned in its beak so that only the mouth, feebly opening and closing, showed that it ever existed.

  “It’s too rough to start back now,” Ralph told Sergeant Knuckey. Sergeant Spragg, the senior policeman from Albany, had been making a great to-do about the need to set out at once. “He can bloody swim if he’s that keen to get back,” was all the skipper said.

  “Well Sherbourne can stay on the boat, under guard. I’m not having him cooking up stories with his wife, thank you very much,” Spragg had insisted.

  Sergeant Knuckey looked at Ralph and raised his eyebrows, the angle of his mouth betraying his opinion of his colleague.

  As sunset approached, Neville Whittnish strode briskly down to the boat. “What do you want?” asked Constable Strugnell, who was taking his guard duty seriously.

  “I’ll need Sherbourne to do a handover. Has to come with me to light up.” Although Whittnish spoke rarely and briefly, his tone never countenanced contradiction.

  Strugnell was wrong-footed, but regained sufficient composure to say, “Right, well I’ll have to accompany him.”

  “No unauthorized personnel in the light. Commonwealth rules. I’ll bring him back when I’ve finished with him.”

  Tom and the keeper walked in silence to the tower. When they reached the door, Tom said quietly, “What was all that about? You don’t need me to light up.”

  The old man said simply, “Never seen a light as well kept. None of my business what else you’ve done. But you’ll want to say goodbye to her. I’ll wait down here,” and he turned his back, looking out through the rounded window to size up the storm.

  So, one last time, Tom climbed the hundreds of stairs. One last time, he performed the alchemy of brilliance from sulphur and oil. One last time, he sent his signal to mariners for miles about: beware.

  By the next morning, the storm has abated, and the sky is once again serene blue. The beaches are decked with banks of yellow foam and seaweed thrown up by the waves. As the boat pulls away from Janus Rock, a school of dolphins plays about the bow for a time, their slithering gray forms rising and subsiding like water spouts, now closer, now further away. Isabel, eyes swollen and red, sits on one side of the cabin, Tom on the other. The policemen talk among themselves of rosters and the best way to get a shine on their boots. At the stern, the rotting tarpaulin exhales the odor of its dreadful contents.

  On Isabel’s lap, Lucy asks again, “Where are we going, Mamma?”

  “Back to Partageuse, sweetheart.”

  “Why?”

  Isabel throws Tom a look. “I really don’t know why, Luce, my darling. But we have to go.” She hugs her tight.

  Later, the child climbs down from her mother’s knee and clambers up onto Tom. He holds her wordlessly, trying to imprint everything about her: the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, the shape of her tiny fingers, the sound of her breath as she puts her face so close to his.

  The island swims away from them, fading into an ever more miniature version of itself, until it is just a flash of memory, held differently, imperfectly by each passenger. Tom watches Isabel, waits for her to return his glance, longs for her to give him one of the old smiles that used to remind him of Janus Light—a fixed, reliable point in the world, which meant he was never lost. But the flame has gone out—her face seems uninhabited now.

  He measures the journey to shore in turns of the light.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 25

  As soon as they disembarked, Sergeant Spragg drew a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and strode toward Tom. Vernon Knuckey stopped him with just a shake of the head.

  “It’s correct procedure,” said the Albany sergeant, who outranked Vernon in importance of station.

  “Never mind that. There’s a little girl here,” Knuckey said, nodding toward Lucy, who ran to Tom, grabbing his leg.

  “Dadda! Dadda, pick me up!”

  Naked distress flashed across his face as the girl’s eyes met his, with this most routine of requests. At the top of a peppermint tree, a pair of willy wagtails chittered away. Tom swallowed hard, digging his nails into his palms. “Look, Lulu! Look at the funny birds up there. You don’t see those at home, do you?” Keeping his eyes on the birds, he urged, “Go and have a proper look.”

  Two motorcars were parked near the jetty, and Sergeant Spragg addressed Tom. “This way. Into the first one.”

  Tom turned back toward Lucy, now distracted by the play of the birds wiggling their long black tails. He was about to reach out a hand to her, but imagined her anguish: best if he slipped away.

  She caught sight of his movement and stretched out her arms. “Dadda, wait! Pick me up!” she urged again, her tone betraying her sense that something was wrong.

  “Now, if you please,” urged Spragg, taking Tom’s elbow.

  As Tom walked away, every step more awful, Lucy pursued him, arms still outstretched. “Dadda, wait for Lulu,” she begged, wounded and confused. When she tripped and fell face down on the gravel, letting out a scream, Tom could not go on, and spun around, breaking free of the policeman’s grip.

  “Lulu!” He scooped her up and kissed her scratched chin. “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy,” he murmured, his lips brushing her cheek. “You’re all right, little one. You’ll be all right.”

  Vernon Knuckey looked at the ground and cleared his throat.

  Tom said, “Sweetheart, I have to go away now. I hope—” He stopped. He looked into her eyes and he stroked her hair, finally kissing her. “Goodbye, littlie.”

  The child showed no sign of letting go, so Knuckey turned to Isabel. “Mrs. Sherbourne?”

  Isabel prised her from Tom. “Come on now, sweet thing. You’re all right. Mamma’s got you,” sh
e said, though the girl continued to call, “Dadda, I want to go with you, Dadda!”

  “Happy now, Tom? This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Tears ran down Isabel’s face and on to Lucy’s cheek.

  For a moment, Tom stood paralyzed by the sight of the two of them—the pain etched on their faces—the two he had promised Bill Graysmark he would protect and care for. Eventually, he managed to say, “Christ, Izz—I’m sorry.”

  Kenneth Spragg had lost patience, and grabbed him by the arm again, shoving him along to the car. As Tom ducked into the back of the vehicle, Lucy began to howl. “Dadda, don’t go! Please, Dadda! Please!” Her face was crumpled and red and tears ran into her open mouth, as Isabel tried in vain to console her. “Mamma, stop the men! They naughty, Mamma! They being nasty to Dadda!”

  “I know, darling, I know.” She put her lips to Lucy’s hair and murmured, “Sometimes men do very bad things, sweetie. Very bad things.” As she said the words, she knew there was worse to come.

  Ralph watched the scene from the deck of the boat. When he got home to Hilda, he looked at her: really looked at her for perhaps the first time in twenty years.

  “What’s that for?” asked his wife, disconcerted by the attention.

  “Just—oh, just for nothing,” he said, and drew her into a long hug.

  In his office, Vernon Knuckey addressed Kenneth Spragg. “I’m telling you again, Sergeant. You’re not taking him to Albany this afternoon. He’ll be transferred in good time, when I’ve had a chance to ask a few more questions.”

  “He’ll end up as our prisoner. Lighthouses are Commonwealth, remember, so we do this the right way.”

  “I know the rules as well as you.” Every policeman this side of Perth knew how Kenneth Spragg loved to throw his weight around. Still had a chip on his shoulder about not enlisting, and tried to make up for it by carrying on like a sergeant bloody major. “He’ll be sent to Albany in due course.”

  “I want a crack at Sherbourne—I’ll soon get to the bottom of things. I’m here now. I’ll take him with me.”

  “If you want him that badly you can bloody well come back. I run this station.”

  “Telephone Perth.”

  “What?”

  “Let me telephone Perth. If I hear it from District Command, I’ll leave him here. Otherwise he’s in the motorcar and off to Albany.”

  It had taken Isabel so long to persuade the distraught child to get into the second motorcar that Tom was already in a cell by the time they arrived at the police station.

  In the waiting area, Lucy sat on Isabel’s knee, fractious and exhausted by the long journey and the strange goings-on. She kept touching Isabel’s face—patting and prodding it to get a response. “Where’s Dadda? I want to see him.” Isabel was pale, her forehead set in an absent frown. Time and again, her thoughts would drift off, her attention focused on a notch in the wood of the counter, or the call of a distant magpie. Then, Lucy’s fingers, prodding with another question, would bring her back to the sickening knowledge of where she was.

  An old man who had come to pay a fine for letting his cattle stray onto the highway stood at the counter, waiting for his receipt. He whiled away the time by trying to tempt Lucy into a game of peek-a-boo.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Lucy,” she said shyly.

  “That’s what you think,” muttered Harry Garstone with a sardonic smile, as his pen scratched across the receipt form.

  At that moment, Dr. Sumpton arrived from his surgery, puffing, bag in hand. He nodded perfunctorily at Isabel, but avoided eye contact. She blushed scarlet, recalling his last examination of her, and its devastating conclusion.

  “Through here, sir,” said Garstone, ushering him into a room at the back. The constable returned to Isabel. “The child has to be examined by the medico. If you’d just give her to me.”

  “Examined? What for? There’s nothing wrong with her!”

  “You don’t get a say in this, Mrs. Sherbourne.”

  “I’m her—” Isabel stopped herself before the word came out. “She doesn’t need a doctor. Please. Show some common decency!”

  The policeman grabbed the child and took her away, screaming and struggling. The shrill cries rang throughout the station, reaching as far as Tom’s cell, where they seemed even louder as he imagined what might be happening to her.

  In Knuckey’s office, Spragg replaced the receiver and scowled at his Partageuse counterpart. “All right. You’ve got your way for now…” Hoisting up his belt, he changed tactics. “The woman should be in the cells too, as far as I’m concerned. She’s probably in it up to her neck.”

  “I’ve known that girl all her life, Sergeant,” said Knuckey. “She never so much as missed church. You heard Tom Sherbourne’s story: sounds like she’s his victim too.”

  “His story! I’m telling you, she’s not all butter wouldn’t melt. Let me at him on my own and we’ll soon find out how that Roennfeldt chap really died…”

  Knuckey was well aware of Spragg’s reputation in that department too, but overlooked the comment. “Look. I don’t know Sherbourne from a bar of soap. Could be Jack the Ripper, for all I can tell. If he’s guilty, he’s for the high jump. But locking up his wife for the hell of it’s not going to help anyone, so just hold your horses. You know as well as I do that a married woman isn’t criminally responsible for anything her husband makes her do.” He lined up a stack of papers with the corner of his blotter. “This is a small town. Mud sticks. You don’t throw a girl in the cells unless you’re pretty bloody sure of your facts. So we’ll take it a step at a time.”

  Once the thin-lipped Sergeant Spragg had stalked out of the station, Knuckey entered the examination room and re-emerged with Lucy.

  “The doctor’s given her the all-clear,” he said, then he lowered his voice. “We’re going to take the child to her mother now, Isabel. I’d be grateful if you didn’t make it any harder on anyone than it has to be. So if you—if you’d like to say goodbye to her?”

  “Please! Don’t do this!”

  “Don’t make things worse.” Vernon Knuckey, who for years had observed the plight of Hannah Roennfeldt, sure she was basking in a sad delusion, now looked at this woman and wondered the same thing.

  Believing she was back safe in her mother’s arms, the child gripped her tight as Isabel kissed her cheek, unable to take her lips away from the soft skin. Harry Garstone put his hands around the girl’s waist and yanked at her.

  Even though everything in the past twenty-four hours had been leading to this, even though it was a fear Isabel had harbored from the day she had first laid eyes on Lucy as a baby, still, the moment ripped through her.

  “Please!” she pleaded through tears. “Have some pity!” Her voice reverberated around the bare walls. “Don’t take my baby away!”

  As the girl was wrenched from her screaming, Isabel fainted onto the stone floor with a resounding crack.

  Hannah Roennfeldt could not sit still. She consulted her watch, the mantel clock, her sister—anyone who could tell her how much time had passed. The boat had set out for Janus yesterday morning, and each minute since then had inched uphill like Sisyphus.

  It was almost unbelievable that she might soon hold her daughter again. Since the news of the rattle, she had daydreamed about her return. The hugs. The tears. The smiles. She had picked frangipani blossoms from the garden and put them in the nursery, so that the scent filled the little cottage. Smiling and humming, she dusted and cleaned, and sat the dolls up on the chest of drawers. Then doubts would dart in: what would she eat? This had prompted her to send Gwen shopping for apples and milk and sweets. Before her sister returned, Hannah suddenly wondered whether she should be giving the child something else. She, who hardly ate, went next door to Mrs. Darnley, who had five little ones, to check what she should feed a child Grace’s age. Fanny Darnley, always keen to have a tale to tell, immediately let slip to Mr. Kelly at the grocer’s that Hannah had gone completely mad
and was catering for ghosts, for word had not yet got around. “You don’t like to speak ill of your neighbors, but—well, there’s a reason why we have lunatic asylums, isn’t there? I’m not keen on someone who’s a shingle short living so close to my kids. You’d feel the same in my place.”

  The telephone call had been perfunctory. “You’d best come down in person, Mr. Graysmark. We’ve got your daughter here.”

  Bill Graysmark arrived at the police station that afternoon in a state of confusion. With the phone call, his mind had jumped straight to a vision of Isabel’s body lying on a slab, awaiting collection. He had hardly heard the rest of the words that came through the newly connected telephone: death was the most obvious conclusion to jump to. Not a third child. He could not have lost all his children—surely God would not allow that? His mind could make no sense of words about the Roennfeldt baby, and something scrambled about Tom and a body.

  At the station he was ushered into a back room, where his daughter sat on a wooden chair, her hands on her lap. He had been so convinced of her death that at the sight of her, tears came to his eyes.

  “Isabel. Isabubba!” he whispered, pulling her up with a hug. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  It took him a few seconds to notice her peculiar state: she did not hug him back; she did not look at him. She slumped down again in the chair, lifeless and pale.

  “Where’s Lucy?” he asked, first of his daughter, then of Constable Garstone. “Where’s little Lucy? And Tom?” His mind was fast at work again: they must have drowned. They must have—

  “Mr. Sherbourne’s in the cells, sir.” The policeman stamped a piece of paper on the desk. “He’ll be transferred to Albany after a committal hearing.”

  “Committal hearing? What the devil? Where’s Lucy?”

  “The child’s with her mother, sir.”

  “The child is demonstrably not with her mother! What have you done with her? What’s this all about?”

  “Looks like the child’s real mother is Mrs. Roennfeldt.”

  Bill assumed he must have misheard whatever it was Garstone had said, and blundered on, “I demand you release my son-in-law right this minute.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. Mr. Sherbourne is under arrest.”

  “Arrest? What the hell for?”

  “So far, falsification of Commonwealth records. Breach of duty as a public servant. That’s just for starters. Then there’s child stealing. And the fact that we dug up Frank Roennfeldt’s remains out on Janus Rock.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” He turned to his daughter, suddenly understanding her pallor and dreamy state. “Don’t you worry about this, dear. I’ll sort it out. Whatever it’s about, it’s obviously all a terrible mistake. I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “I don’t think you understand, Mr. Graysmark,” began the policeman.

  “You’re damn right I don’t understand. There’ll be the devil to pay over this! Dragging my daughter into a police station because of some ridiculous story. Slandering my son-in-law.” He turned to his daughter. “Isabel—tell him it’s all nonsense!”

  She sat, still and expressionless. The policeman cleared his throat. “Mrs. Sherbourne refuses to say anything, sir.”

  Tom feels the stillness of the cell weigh upon him, as dense and as liquid as mercury. For so long, his life has been shaped by the sound of the waves and the wind, the rhythm of the light. Suddenly, everything has stopped. He listens to the whipbird declaring its territory with song from high in the karri trees, oblivious.

  The solitude is familiar, carrying him back to his time alone on Janus, and he wonders if the years with Isabel and with Lucy were just imagined. Then he puts his hand in his pocket and retrieves the child’s lilac satin ribbon, recalling her smile as she handed it to him when it slipped off. “Hold this please, Dadda.” When Harry Garstone had tried to confiscate it at the station, Knuckey had snapped, “Oh, for God’s sake, boy. He’s hardly going to choke us with that bloody thing, is he!” and Tom had folded it safely away.

  He cannot reconcile the grief he feels at what he has done and the profound relief that runs through him. Two opposing physical forces, they create an inexplicable reaction overpowered by a third, stronger force—the knowledge of having deprived his wife of a child. As fresh and raw as being spiked on a meat hook, he feels loss: what Hannah Roennfeldt must have felt; what Isabel has felt so many times, and grips her again now. He begins to wonder how he could have inflicted such suffering. He begins to wonder what the bloody hell he’s done.