The Light Between Oceans

by M. L. Stedman

  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 toward 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 defense 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 offense. 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 jail. 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

  What the devil’s the matter?” demanded Vernon Knuckey, as Harry Gars
tone closed the door behind him and stood dumbly in the sergeant’s office.

  Garstone shuffled his feet and cleared his throat, jerking his head back toward the front of the police station.

  “Get to the point, Constable.”

  “There’s a visitor.”

  “For me?”

  “Not for you, sir.”

  Knuckey shot him a warning look.

  “It’s for Sherbourne, sir.”

  “Well? You know what to do, for Pete’s sake. Write ’em down and send ’em in.”

  “It’s—Hannah Roennfeldt, sir.”

  The sergeant sat up. “Oh.” He closed a file on his desk and rubbed his chin. “I suppose I’d better have a word.”

  Knuckey stood near the counter in the front of the station. “It’s not usual procedure to let the victim’s family members see the accused, Mrs. Roennfeldt.”

  Hannah held the sergeant with a silent, steady gaze, forcing him into speech again.

  “It really would be out of the ordinary, I’m afraid. All due respect…”

  “But not against the rules? Against the law?”

  “Look, ma’am. It’s going to be hard enough for you when it all comes to Court. Take it from me: it’s a distressing thing, a trial like this. You really don’t want to be stirring things up for yourself before it even starts.”

  “I want to see him. I want to look him in the eye, the man who killed my child.”

  “Killed your child? Steady on now.”

  “The baby I lost is never coming back, Sergeant, never. Grace will never be the same.”

  “Look, I’m not sure what you mean, Mrs. Roennfeldt, but in any case I—”

  “I’m entitled to that much, don’t you think?”

  Knuckey sighed. The woman was a pitiful sight. She’d been haunting the town for years now. Maybe this would let her lay her ghosts to rest. “If you wait here…”

  Tom had risen to his feet, still puzzled by the news. “Hannah Roennfeldt wants to talk to me? What for?”

  “You’re not obliged, of course. I can send her away.”

  “No… ,” Tom said. “I’ll see her. Thank you.”

  “Up to you.”

  A few moments later, Hannah entered, followed by Constable Garstone bearing a small wooden chair. He placed it a few feet from the bars.

  “I’ll leave the door open, Mrs. Roennfeldt, and wait outside. Or I can stay here if you’d prefer?”

  “There’s no need. I won’t be long.”

  Garstone gave one of his pouts and jangled his keys. “Right. I’ll leave you to it, ma’am,” he said, and marched back down the corridor.

  Hannah stared in silence, taking in every inch of Tom: the small hook-shaped shrapnel scar just below his left ear; the unattached earlobes, the fingers that were long and fine despite their calluses.

  He submitted to her inspection without flinching, like quarry offering itself up to a hunter at close range. All the while, scenes flashed through his mind—the boat, the body, the rattle, each fresh and vivid. Then other memories—writing the first letter late at night in the Graysmarks’ kitchen, the churning in his gut as he chose the words; the smoothness of Lucy’s skin, her giggle, the way her hair floated like seaweed as he held her in the water at Shipwreck Beach. The moment he discovered he had known the mother of the child all along. He could feel the sweat on his back.

  “Thank you for letting me see you, Mr. Sherbourne…”

  If Hannah had sworn at him or hurled her chair at the bars, Tom would have been less shocked than at this civility.

  “I realize you didn’t have to.”

  He gave just a slight nod.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” she went on. “Until a few weeks ago, if I’d thought of you at all, it would have been with gratitude. But it turns out you were the one I should have been afraid of that night, not the drunk. ‘Being over there changes a man,’ you said. ‘Can’t tell the difference between right and wrong.’ I finally understand what you meant.”

  In a steady voice she asked, “I need to know: was this really all your doing?”

  Tom nodded, slowly and gravely.

  Pain flitted across Hannah’s face, as if she had been slapped. “Are you sorry for what you did?”

  The question stabbed him, and he focused on a knot in the floorboard. “I’m sorrier than I can say.”

  “Didn’t you even think for a moment that the child might have had a mother? Didn’t it occur to you that she might be loved and missed?” She looked about the cell, then back to Tom. “Why? If I could understand why you did it…”

  His jaw was rigid. “I really can’t say why I did what I did.”

  “Try. Please?”

  She deserved the truth. But there was nothing he could say to her without betraying Isabel. He had done what mattered—Lucy had been returned, and he was taking the consequences. The rest was just words. “Really. I can’t tell you.”

  “That policeman from Albany thinks you killed my husband. Did you?”

  He looked her straight in the eye. “I swear to you, he was already dead when I found him… I know I should have done things differently. I’m truly sorry how much harm the decisions I’ve made since that day have done. But your husband was already dead.”

  She took a deep breath, about to leave.

  “Do what you like to me. I’m not asking for forgiveness,” Tom said, “… but my wife—had no choice. She loves that little girl. She cared for her like she was the only thing in the world. Show her some mercy.”

  The bitterness in Hannah’s face faded to weary sadness. “Frank was a lovely man,” she said, and walked slowly back down the corridor.

  In the dim light, Tom listened to the cicadas that seemed to tick the seconds away, thousands at a time. He became aware of opening and closing his hands, as though they might take him somewhere his feet could not. He looked at them, and for a moment, considered all they had done. This collection of cells and muscles and thoughts was his life—and yet surely there was more to it. He came back to the present, to the hot walls and the thick air. The last rung of the ladder that might lead him out of hell had been taken away.

  For hours at a time, Isabel put Tom from her mind: as she helped her mother around the house; as she looked at the paintings Violet had kept, done by Lucy during her brief visits back; as she felt ever more deeply the grief of losing her child. Then thoughts of Tom would creep back and she pictured the letter Ralph had delivered, banished to the drawer.

  Gwen had promised to bring Lucy to see her again, but she hadn’t appeared at the park in the days afterward, even though Isabel had waited for hours. But she must stay firm, while there was the merest sliver of a hope of seeing her daughter again. She must hate Tom, for Lucy’s sake. And yet. She took the letter out, observed the tear in the corner where she had begun to open it. She put it back, and hurried out to the park, to wait, just in case.

  “Tell me what you want me to do, Tom. You know I want to help you. Please, just tell me what to do.” Bluey’s voice was tight and his eyes glistened.

  “Nothing more needs doing, Blue.” Tom’s cell was hot, and smelled of carbolic from the mopping an hour earlier.

  “I wish to Christ I’d never seen that bloody rattle. Should have kept me trap shut.” He gripped the bars. “That sergeant from Albany came to see me, asking all sorts of questions about you—whether you were handy with your fists, whether you were a drinker. He’s been to see Ralph, too. People are talking about—they’re talking about murder, for Pete’s sake, Tom. Down the pub they’re talking about hanging!”

  Tom looked him in the eye. “Do you believe them?”

  “Of course I don’t believe them. But I believe that sort of talk takes on a life of its own. And I believe that an innocent bloke can be accused of something he never did. It’s no use saying sorry when he’s dead.” Bluey’s expression continued to implore Tom silently.

  “There are things that are hard to explain,” Tom said. “There are reasons
why I did what I did.”

  “But what did you do?”

  “I did some things that have ruined people’s lives, and now it’s time to pay.”

  “They’re saying how Old Man Potts reckons that if a bloke’s wife won’t stick up for him, then he must have done something pretty crook.”

  “Thanks, mate. You’re a real comfort.”

  “Don’t go down without a fight, Tom. Promise me!”

  “I’ll be right, Blue.”

  But as Bluey’s footsteps echoed away, Tom wondered how true that was. Isabel had not responded to his letter, and he had to face the fact that it could be for the very worst of reasons. Still, he had to hold on to what he knew of her, of who he knew her to be.

  On the outskirts of the town are the old timber workers’ cottages, meager clapboard constructions ranging from the derelict to the respectable. They’re set on smaller blocks of land, near the pumping station that brings the town its water. One of them, Isabel knows, is where Hannah Roennfeldt lives, and where her treasured Lucy has been taken. Isabel has waited in vain for Gwen to appear. In desperation, she now seeks Lucy out. Just to see where she is. Just to know she is coping. It’s midday and there isn’t a soul in the broad street, braided with jacarandas.

  One of the houses is particularly well kept. Its wood is newly painted, its grass cut, and, unlike the others, it’s bounded by a tall hedge, more effective than a fence in keeping prying eyes away.

  Isabel goes to the laneway at the back of the houses, and from behind the hedge, hears the rhythmic squeak of iron. She peers through a tiny gap in the foliage, and her breath comes faster as she sees her little girl, riding a tricycle up and down the pathway. All alone, she has no expression of happiness or sadness, just fierce concentration as she pedals. She is so close: Isabel could almost touch her, hold her, comfort her. Suddenly, it’s absurd that she can’t be with the child—as if the whole town has gone mad, and she is the only sane one left.

  She considers things. The train comes once a day from Perth down to Albany, and once a day from Albany to Perth. If she waited until the last minute to get on, might there be a chance that no one would notice her? That the child’s absence mightn’t be discovered? In Perth, it would be easier to melt into anonymity. Then she could get to Sydney by the boat. England, even. A new life. The fact that she has not a shilling to her name—has never held a bank account—doesn’t seem to stop her. She watches her daughter, and weighs up her next action.

  Harry Garstone hammered on the Graysmarks’ door. Bill answered, after peering through the glass to see who it could be at this hour.

  “Mr. Graysmark,” the constable said, and gave a peremptory nod.

  “Evening, Harry. What brings you here?”

  “Official business.”

  “I see,” said Bill, braced for more grim news.

  “I’m looking for the Roennfeldt girl.”

  “Hannah?”