The Light Between Oceans

by M. L. Stedman

  “No chance of that. Besides the fact that it’s not allowed, I get the impression she wouldn’t talk to you if you were the last person on earth.”

  Quicksilver. Fascinating, but impossible to predict. It could bear the ton of glass in the light, but try to put your finger on a drop of it, and it would race away in any direction. The image kept coming into Tom’s mind as he sat thinking about Isabel after Knuckey’s questioning. He thought back to the days after the last stillbirth, when he had tried to comfort her.

  “We’ll be all right. If it’s just you and me for the rest of our lives, that’s enough for me.”

  Her eyes had slid up to meet his and her expression chilled him. It was despairing. Defeated.

  He moved to touch her, but she drew away. “You’ll get better. Things’ll get better. Just give it time.”

  Without warning, she stood up and rushed to the door, doubling up for a moment from pain, before limping into the night.

  “Izzy! For God’s sake, stop. You’ll hurt yourself!”

  “I’ll do more than that!”

  The moon balanced in the warm, windless sky. The long, white nightgown Isabel had worn on their wedding night four years before glowed like a paper lantern as she stood, a tiny white dot, in an ocean of darkness. “I can’t bear it!” she screamed in a voice so loud and shrill that the goats started from their sleep and began to move with a jangle of bells in their paddock. “I can’t bear it any more! God, why do you make me live when my children die? I’d be better off dead!” She stumbled toward the cliff.

  He rushed to gather her into his arms. “Calm down, Izz.” But she broke free and ran again, half hobbling when the pain got too bad.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down, you stupid, stupid man! It’s your fault. I hate this place! I hate you! I want my baby!” The light scythed a path far above, leaving her untouched by its beam.

  “You didn’t want him! That’s why he died. He could tell you didn’t care!”

  “Come on, Izz. Come back inside.”

  “You don’t feel anything, Tom Sherbourne! I don’t know what you did with your heart but it’s not inside you, that’s for sure!”

  A person could only take so much. He’d seen it often enough. Lads who’d turned up full of ginger and ready to give Fritz hell, who’d survived the shelling and the snow and the lice and the mud, for years sometimes. Then something in them just packed up and went home—went somewhere deep inside where they couldn’t be touched. Or sometimes they turned on you, came at you with a bayonet, laughing like a maniac and crying at the same time. Christ, when he thought back to his own state by the time it was all over…

  Who was he to judge Isabel? She’d reached her edge, that was all. Everyone had one. Everyone. And in taking Lucy away, he had driven her to it.

  Late that night, Septimus Potts pulled off his boots and wiggled his toes in his fine woolen socks. He groaned at the familiar creaking of his back. He was sitting on the side of the solid jarrah bed carved out of a tree from his own forest. The only sound in the enormous room was the ticking of the carriage clock on the nightstand. He gave a sigh as he took in the finery—the starched linen, the gleaming furniture, the portrait of his late wife, Ellen—by the light of the electric lamps, shaded by frosted rose glass. The image of his granddaughter, distraught and cowering that afternoon, was still vivid: Baby Grace, given up for dead by everyone but Hannah. Life. Who the bloody hell could tell how it was going to turn out?

  That distress, that despair at the loss of a mother—he never imagined he would see it again after Ellen’s death, until confronted by his granddaughter in the garden. Just when he thought he’d seen all the tricks life could play, out it came with a new one, like an evil card sharp. He knew what the little girl was going through. A doubt seeped into a corner of his mind. Perhaps—perhaps it was cruel to keep her from the Sherbourne girl…

  He looked again at the portrait of Ellen. Grace had the same jawline. Maybe she would grow up to be as beautiful as her grandmother. He wandered off into imaginings of Christmases and birthdays along the way. A happy family, that’s all he wanted. He thought of Hannah’s tortured face; remembered with guilt that same look when he’d tried to stop her marrying Frank.

  No. This was the place for the child, with her true family. She’d have the top brick off the chimney. Eventually she’d get used to her real home and her real mother. If Hannah could just bear up that long.

  He felt tears in his eyes, and anger fought its way to the surface. Someone should pay. Someone should be made to suffer the way his daughter had been made to suffer. Who could possibly come across a tiny baby and keep her, like a driftwood souvenir?

  He drove out the intrusive doubt. He couldn’t change the past, and the years he had refused to acknowledge Frank’s existence, but he could make it up to Hannah now. Sherbourne would be punished. He would see to it.

  He switched off the lamp, watching the moonlight glimmer on the silver framing Ellen’s photograph. And he pushed away thoughts of what the Graysmarks must be feeling that night.

  CHAPTER 27

  Since her return, Isabel found herself constantly on the lookout for Lucy—where had she got to? Was it time for bed? What would she give her for lunch? Then her brain would correct her, remind her how things were now, and she would go through the agony of loss all over again. What was happening to her daughter? Who was feeding her? Undressing her? Lucy would be beside herself.

  The image of the little girl’s face as she was forced to swallow the bitter sleeping draft made Isabel’s throat tighten. She tried to blot it out with other memories: Lucy playing in the sand; Lucy holding her nose as she jumped into the water; her face as she slept at night—at ease, safe, perfect. There was no more wonderful sight in the world than your child sleeping. Isabel’s whole body bore the imprint of the little girl: her fingers knew the smoothness of her hair as she brushed it; her hips remembered the weight of her, and the tight locking of her legs around her waist; the warm softness of her cheek.

  While she wandered through these scenes, sucking comfort from them like nectar from a dying flower, she was aware of something dark behind her, something she could not bear to look at. It would come to her in dreams, blurred and dreadful. It would call to her, “Izzy! Izzy, love…” but she could not turn around, and her shoulders would shoot up to her ears as if to escape a grasp. She would awaken, breathless and sick to the stomach.

  All the while, Isabel’s parents took her silence for misplaced loyalty. “There’s nothing I can say,” were her only words that day she first came home, and she repeated them whenever Bill and Violet tried to broach the subject of Tom and what had happened.

  The cells at the back of the police station usually had to do no more than keep a drunk long enough to sleep it off, or give an angry husband time to see sense and promise not to take his temper out with his fists. Half the time, whoever was on duty didn’t bother to lock the cell door, and if it was someone they knew, on a shift that was dragging, more often than not they’d have them out in the office playing cards, on the strict understanding that they wouldn’t try to shoot through.

  Today Harry Garstone was particularly excited, at last in charge of a serious criminal. He was still spitting chips that he’d been off duty the night a year ago when they brought in Bob Hitching from Karridale. The fellow had never been right in the head since Gallipoli. Got carried away with a meat cleaver and did in his brother from the next-door farm because they didn’t see eye-to-eye over their mother’s will. Ended up swinging for it. So now, Garstone was delighting in the niceties of procedure. He got the rule book out to check that he was following it to the letter.

  When Ralph had asked to see Tom, the constable had made a great show of consulting the book, sucking his teeth, and sliding a pout from one side of his letterbox mouth to the other. “Sorry, Captain Addicott. I wish I could let you, but it says here—”

  “Don’t give me any of your nonsense, Harry Garstone, or I’ll be on t
o your mother.”

  “It’s quite specific, and—”

  The walls in the station were thin, and the constable was interrupted by the voice of Vernon Knuckey, who rarely bothered to rise from his seat for such communications. “Don’t be so bloody wet, Garstone. It’s the lighthouse keeper in the cell, not Ned bloody Kelly. Let the man through.”

  The deflated constable gave the keys a vigorous jangle in protest as he led Ralph through a locked door, down some stairs and along a dark corridor until he arrived at a few cells with bars.

  In one of them, Tom sat on a canvas bunk that folded out from the wall. He took in Ralph’s face—drawn and gray.

  “Tom,” said the skipper.

  “Ralph.” Tom gave a nod.

  “Came as soon as I could. Hilda says hello,” he said, “and Blue,” emptying his pockets of greetings like small change.

  Tom nodded again.

  The two sat in silence. After a while, Ralph said, “If you’d rather I left you…”

  “No, it’s good to see you. Just not much to say, sorry. All right if we don’t talk for a bit?”

  Ralph was full of questions, both his own and his wife’s, but he sat out the silence on a rickety chair. The day was warming up and the wooden walls creaked, like a creature stretching as it awoke. Honey-eaters and willy-wagtails chirruped outside. Once or twice a vehicle sputtered down the road, drowning out the clicking of the crickets and cicadas.

  Thoughts clamored in Ralph’s mind and made it to his tongue, but he managed to stop them just in time. He put his hands under his thighs, to overcome his urge to shake Tom by the shoulders. Unable to resist any longer, he finally barked out, “In God’s name, Tom, what’s going on? What’s all this about Lucy being the Roennfeldt baby?”

  “It’s true.”

  “But—How… What in hell… ?”

  “I’ve explained it to the police, Ralph. I’m not proud of what I’ve done.”

  “Is this—is this what you were talking about putting right, that time on Janus?”

  “It’s not as simple as that.” There was a long pause.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Not much point, Ralph. I made a bad decision, back then, and it’s time for me to pay for it.”

  “For God’s sake, boy, at least let me help you!”

  “There’s nothing you can do. I’m in this one alone.”

  “Whatever you’ve done, you’re a good man and I won’t see you go down like this.” He stood up. “Let me get you a decent lawyer—see what he makes of it all.”

  “Not much a lawyer can do now either, Ralph. A priest might be more use.”

  “But it’s all tommy rot, what’s being said about you!”

  “Not all of it, Ralph.”

  “You tell me straight to my face that this was all your doing! That you threatened Isabel! You look me in the eye and tell me, and I’ll leave you in peace, boy.”

  Tom inspected the grain of the timber in the wall.

  “You see?” exclaimed Ralph in triumph. “You can do no such thing!”

  “I was the one with the duty, not her.” Tom looked at Ralph, and considered if there was anything at all he could tell him, explain to him, without jeopardizing Isabel. Finally, he said, “Izzy’s suffered enough. She can’t take any more.”

  “Putting yourself in the firing line’s no way of dealing with it. This has all got to be sorted out properly.”

  “There’s no sorting out, Ralph, and there’s no going back. I owe her this.”

  Miracles were possible: it was official. In the days following Grace’s return, Reverend Norkells experienced a decided increase in his congregation, particularly among the womenfolk. Many a mother who had given up hope of seeing her darling son again, and many a war widow, took to prayer with renewed vigor, no longer feeling foolish about praying for the hopeless. St. Jude had never received so much attention. Dull aches of loss reawakened, as raw longing was soothed by that balm so long exhausted—hope.

  Gerald Fitzgerald was sitting opposite Tom, the table between them strewn with papers and pink legal tape from the brief. Tom’s lawyer was short and balding, like a jockey in a three-piece suit, wiry but nimble. He had come down on the train from Perth the night before, and had read the brief over dinner at The Empress.

  “You’ve been formally charged. Partageuse gets a circuit magistrate every two months, and he’s just been, so you’ll be held in custody here until he’s back. You’re a damn sight better off on remand here than Albany jail, that’s for sure. We’ll use the time to prepare for the committal hearing.”

  Tom looked at him with a question.

  “That’s the preliminary hearing to decide whether you’ve got a case to answer. If you have, you’ll get committed for trial in Albany, or Perth. Depends.”

  “On what?” asked Tom.

  “Let’s go through the charges,” said Fitzgerald, “and you’ll find out.” Once again he cast his eye over the list before him. “Well, they’ve certainly spread the net wide enough. WA Criminal Code, Commonwealth Public Service Act, WA Coroners Act, Commonwealth Crimes Act. A real dog’s breakfast of State and Commonwealth charges.” He smiled and rubbed his hands together. “That’s what I like to see.”

  Tom raised an eyebrow.

  “Means they’re scraping around, not sure what they can get you on,” the lawyer went on. “Neglect of Statutory Duty—that’s two years and a fine. Improperly dealing with a body—two years hard labor. Failing to report a dead body—well,” he scoffed, “that’s just a ten-pound fine. Making a false statement to register a birth—two years hard labor and a two-hundred-pound fine.” He scratched his chin.

  Tom ventured, “What about the—the child-stealing charge?” It was the first time he had used the phrase, and he flinched at the sound of the words.

  “Section 343 of the Criminal Code. Seven years hard labor.” The lawyer screwed up his mouth and nodded to himself. “Your advantage, Mr. Sherbourne, is that the law covers the usual. Statutes are drafted to catch what happens most of the time. So section 343 applies to…” he picked up the dog-eared statute and read from it, “‘any person who, with intent to deprive any parent of the possession of a child… forcibly or fraudulently takes or entices away, or detains the child…’”

  “Well?” Tom asked.

  “Well they’ll never get up on that. Luckily for you, most of the time, babies don’t leave their mothers unless someone takes them away. And they don’t usually find their way to barely inhabited islands. You see? They can’t make out the necessary elements of the offense. You didn’t ‘detain’ the baby: legally speaking, she could have left any time she wanted. You certainly didn’t ‘entice her away.’ And they can never prove ‘intention to deprive’ because we’ll say you honestly believed the parents were dead. So I reckon I can get you off that one. And you’re a war hero, a Military Cross and Bar. Most courts will still go easy on a bloke who risked his life for his country and never had a whiff of trouble.”

  Tom’s face relaxed, but the lawyer’s expression changed, as he continued, “But what they don’t like, Mr. Sherbourne, is a liar. In fact, they dislike it so much that the penalty for perjury is seven years hard labor. And if that liar stops the real culprit getting what’s coming to them, then that’s perverting the course of justice, and that’s another seven years. Do you get my drift?”

  Tom gave him a look.

  “The law likes to make sure that the right people are getting punished. Judges are a bit particular about that sort of thing.” He stood up, and wandered to the window, gazing up through the bars into the trees beyond. “Now, if I walked into a court, and told a story of a poor woman, beside herself with grief over the loss of her stillborn baby—a woman who wasn’t right in the head for a bit, couldn’t tell right from wrong—and if I told the story of how her husband, who was a decent bloke, who’d always done his duty, but who, just this once, trying to make things better for his wife, let his heart get the better of hi
s common sense, and went along with her idea… Well, I could sell that to a judge. I could sell it to a jury. The Court’s got what we call ‘the prerogative of mercy’—the right to impose a lesser sentence, for the wife too.

  “But at the moment, I’ve got a man who by his own admission is not only a liar, but a bully. A man who, presumably worried that people will think he’s got no lead in his pencil, decides to keep a tiny baby, and forces his wife to lie about it.”

  Tom straightened his back. “I’ve said what I’ve said.”

  Fitzgerald continued, “Now, if you’re the sort of man who really would do something like that, then, for all the police know, you’re the sort of person who might go even a step further to get what you want. If you’re the sort of man who takes what he wants because he can, and who’s prepared to make his wife act under duress, then perhaps you’re the sort of man who’s prepared to kill to get what he wants. We all know you did enough of that during the war.” He paused. “That’s what they might say.”

  “They haven’t charged me with that.”

  “So far. But from what I hear, that copper from Albany’s dying to get his hands on you. I’ve come across him before, and I can tell you, he’s a right bastard.”

  Tom took a deep breath, and shook his head.

  “And he’s very excited that your wife won’t corroborate your story about Roennfeldt being dead when you found him.” He twirled the crimson tape from the brief around his finger. “She must really hate your guts.” As he unwound it, he said slowly, “Now, she could hate your guts because you made her lie about keeping a baby. Or even because you killed a man. But I reckon it’s more likely she hates your guts because you gave the game away.”

  Tom made no response.

  “It’s up to the Crown to prove how he died. With a bloke who’s been underground for nearly four years, that’s no easy task. Not that much left of him. No broken bones. No fractures. Documented history of heart trouble. Normally, that would probably lead to an open verdict by the Coroner. If you came clean and told the whole truth.”

  “If I plead guilty to all the charges—say I made Isabel go along with me, and there’s no other evidence—no one can touch her: is that right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then I’ll take what’s coming to me.”

  “Trouble is, there might be a lot more coming to you than you’ve bargained for,” Fitzgerald said as he put the papers back in his briefcase. “We’ve got no idea what your wife’s going to say you did or didn’t do, if she ever decides to talk. If I were in your shoes, I’d be doing some damned hard thinking.”

  If people used to stare at Hannah before she got Grace back, they stared a lot harder afterward. They had expected some sort of miraculous transformation, like a chemical reaction, as mother and daughter met. But they were disappointed on that score: the child looked distressed and the mother distraught. Far from getting a bloom back in her cheeks, Hannah grew more gaunt, as every one of Grace’s screams made her wonder whether she had done the right thing in reclaiming her.

  Old logbooks from Janus had been requisitioned by the police as they examined the handwriting on the letters to Hannah: there was no mistaking the sure, steady penmanship in both. Nor was there any question as to the rattle Bluey had identified. It was the baby herself who had altered beyond recognition. Hannah had handed Frank a tiny, dark-haired infant weighing twelve pounds, and Fate had handed back to her a frightened, willful blonde changeling who could stand on her own two feet, walk, and scream until her face was scarlet and her chin wet with tears and dribble. The confidence Hannah had gained in handling her baby in the first weeks of her life was swiftly eroded. The rhythms of intimacy, the unspoken understandings, which she had assumed she could just pick up again, were lost to her: the child no longer responded in a way she could predict. They were like two dancers whose steps were foreign to one another.

  Hannah was terrified by the moments when she lost patience with her daughter, who at first would eat and sleep and be bathed only after pitched battles, and later simply withdrew into herself. In none of her years of daydreams, or even her nightmares, had her imagination managed anything as awful as this.

  In desperation, she took the child to Dr. Sumpton.

  “Well,” said the rotund doctor as he put his stethoscope back on his desk, “physically she’s perfectly healthy.” He pushed the jar of jelly beans in Grace’s direction. “Help yourself, young lady.”

  The girl, still terrified from her first encounter with him at the police station, stayed mute, and Hannah offered her the jar. “Go on. Any color you like, darling.” But her daughter turned her head away, and took up a strand of hair to curl around her finger.

  “And she’s been wetting the bed, you say?”

  “Often. At her age, surely you’d normally expect—”

  “You hardly need me to remind you that these aren’t normal circumstances.” He rang a bell on his desk and, after a discreet knock, a white-haired woman entered.

  “Mrs. Fripp, take little Grace out to sit with you while I have a word to her mother, would you?”

  The woman smiled. “Come on, dear, let’s see if we can find a biscuit for you somewhere,” she said, and led the listless child away.

  Hannah began. “I don’t know what to do, what to say. She still keeps asking for”—she stumbled—“for Isabel Sherbourne.”

  “What have you said about her?”

  “Nothing. I’ve told her that I’m her mother and I love her and—”