The Light Between Oceans: A Novel

by M. L. Stedman

  The town was full of talk. It was a dummy had been found. No, a teething ring. It was something that proved the baby was dead; it was something that proved she was alive. The father had killed her; the father had been murdered. From the butcher’s to the greengrocer’s, from the farrier’s to the church hall, the story acquired and shed facts and frills as it passed from mouth to ear, always with a “tut” or a pursing of lips to disguise the thrill of each teller.

  “Mr. Potts, we’re not for a minute doubting you can recognize your own purchases. But I’m sure you’ll appreciate that it doesn’t prove the child’s alive.” Sergeant Knuckey was trying to calm the now ruddy-faced Septimus, who stood before him, chin up, chest out, like a prizefighter.

  “You’ve got to investigate it! Why would someone have waited until now to hand it in? In the middle of the night? Not tried to claim the reward?” His whiskers seemed even whiter as his face grew more puce.

  “All due respect, but how the bloody hell would I know?”

  “That’s enough of that language, thank you very much! There are ladies present!”

  “I apologize.” Knuckey pursed his lips. “We will be investigating, I can assure you.”

  “How, exactly?” demanded Septimus.

  “We… I… You have my word that I will.”

  Hannah’s heart sank. It would be the same as before. Still, she took to staying up late into the night, watching the letterbox, waiting for a sign.

  “Right, I’ll need a picture of this, Bernie,” announced Constable Lynch. Standing at the counter of Gutcher’s studio, he produced the silver rattle from a felt bag.

  Bernie Gutcher looked askance. “Since when have you been interested in babies?”

  “Since it was about evidence!” the policeman replied.

  It took time for the photographer to set up his equipment, and as he did, Lynch looked around the walls at the portraits illustrating choices of style and frame. His gaze passed evenly over an array of examples that included the local football team, Harry Garstone and his mother, and Bill and Violet Graysmark with their daughter and granddaughter.

  A few days later, a photograph was duly pinned to the noticeboard outside the police station, showing the rattle next to a ruler for scale, and asking for anyone who recognized it to come forward. Beside it was a notice from Septimus Potts, Esquire, announcing that the reward for information leading to the safe return of his granddaughter Grace Ellen Roennfeldt now stood at three thousand guineas, and that all approaches would be treated in the strictest confidence.

  Down Partageuse way, a thousand guineas could buy you a farm. Three thousand—well, with three thousand guineas there was no telling what you could do.

  “Are you sure?” Bluey’s mother asked again as she paced the kitchen, her hair still in the rag curlers in which she had slept. “Think, boy, for God’s sake!”

  “No. I can’t be sure—not completely sure—it was so long ago. But I’d never seen anything that flash before, and in a baby’s cot!” His hands shook as he rolled a cigarette, and he fumbled the match as he lit it. “Ma, what am I going to do?” Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead beneath his red curls. “I mean, maybe there’s some reason for it. Or maybe I was just dreaming.” He drew fiercely on his cigarette, and exhaled a thought. “P’raps I should wait until the next trip out to Janus and ask him then, man to man.”

  “Man to monkey, more like! You’re more lame-brained than I thought if that’s your idea of what to do. Three thousand guineas!” She waved three fingers in his face. “Three thousand guineas is more than you’d make on that godforsaken boat in a hundred years!”

  “But it’s Tom we’re talking about. And Isabel. As if they’d do anything wrong. And even if it is the same rattle—it could have just washed up and they found it. You should see some of the stuff that ends up on Janus. He found a musket once! And a rocking horse.”

  “No wonder Kitty Kelly sent you packing. Not an ounce of ambition. Not an ounce of common sense.”

  “Ma!” Bluey was stung by his mother’s jibe.

  “Put a fresh shirt on. We’re going to the station.”

  “But it’s Tom! It’s a mate, Mum!”

  “It’s three blessed thousand guineas! And if you don’t get in first, old Ralph Addicott might be down there spinning them the same story.” She added, “Kitty Kelly’s not going to look down her nose at a man with that much money, is she? Now brush your hair. And put that wretched cigarette out.”

  CHAPTER 24

  At first Tom thought he was imagining the shape of the Windward Spirit as it approached, lashed by the tail end of the cyclone which had been whirling down the West Australian coast. He called to Isabel, to check if she saw it too. They had been back on Janus only a week. No boat was due again until the middle of March, when it was scheduled to take them to the mainland before their transfer to Point Moore. Perhaps it had engine trouble on the way from another job? Perhaps Ralph or Bluey had been injured in all the wild weather?

  The swell was treacherous, and it had taken all the skill of the crew to dock the vessel without smashing it into the jetty. “Any port in a storm, eh, Ralph?” Tom shouted above the wind as the boat came alongside, but the old man did not respond.

  When, instead of Bluey emerging from the back of the boat, Tom recognized the craggy, timeless features of Neville Whittnish, his confusion deepened. Four policemen followed.

  “Crikey, Ralph! What’s all this?”

  Again Ralph failed to reply. A chill crept through Tom. He looked up the slope and saw Isabel edging back, out of sight of the jetty. One of the policemen staggered down the gangway like a drunk, and took a moment to adjust to the stationary dock. The others followed.

  “Thomas Edward Sherbourne?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sergeant Spragg, Albany police. This is my assistant, Constable Strugnell. Sergeant Knuckey and Constable Garstone you may recognize from Point Partageuse station.”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Mr. Sherbourne, we’re here about Frank Roennfeldt and his daughter, Grace.”

  It was a king-hit, knocking the breath out of him for a moment. His neck was stiff, his face suddenly waxy-pale. The waiting was over. It was like finally getting the signal for a hop-over after days of waiting in the trenches.

  The sergeant fished something from his pocket—a piece of cardboard that flipped about in the blustery wind. He held it steady between both hands.

  “Do you recognize this, sir?”

  Tom took in the photograph of the rattle. He glanced up at the cliff as he considered his reply: Isabel was gone. Time balanced on a fulcrum—there would be no going back after this.

  He gave a great sigh, as though relieved of a physical weight, and hung his head, eyes closed. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Ralph’s: “Tom. Tom, son… What the bloody hell’s been going on out here?”

  While the police question Tom alone, Isabel retreats to the little crosses near the cliff. The rosemary bushes move in and out of focus, like her thoughts. She is shaking as she goes over the scene: the shortest of the policemen, the youngest, had been very solemn as he showed her the photograph, and could not have failed to see her eyes widen and her breath stop at the sight.

  “Someone sent the rattle to Mrs. Roennfeldt, last week.”

  “Last week?”

  “Looks like the same person as sent her a letter getting on for two years ago.”

  This last news was too much to make sense of.

  “We’ll want to ask you some questions once we’ve spoken to your husband, but in the meantime, perhaps you should—” He shrugged awkwardly. “Don’t go too far.”

  Isabel looks out over the cliff: there is so much air, yet she struggles for breath as she pictures Lucy, having an afternoon sleep while in the room next door, police question her father. They will take her away. Her mind races: she can hide her somewhere on the island. She can—she can set off in the boat with her. She calculates qu
ickly—the rescue boat is always ready to launch at an instant. If she can pretend she’s taking Lucy… where? Anywhere, it doesn’t matter. She can get the girl to the boat and they can be off the island before anyone realizes they’ve gone. And if they get into the right current, they’ll head north… She pictures the two of them, making land far up toward Perth, together, safe. Logic intervenes to remind her of the risks of the southerly current and the certain death of the Southern Ocean. Urgently she explores another route. She can swear that the child is her own, that the dinghy washed up with two dead bodies, and they kept only the rattle. She clutches at any possibility, no matter how absurd.

  The same impulse keeps returning: “I must ask Tom what to do.” Then she feels sick, as she remembers this is all Tom’s doing. It hits her just as when she woke in the night after learning of her brother Hugh’s death and thought, “I must tell Hugh the awful news.”

  Gradually, some part of her concedes there is no escape, and fear gives way to anger. Why? Why could he not just leave things be? Tom is supposed to protect his family, not rip it apart. Deep beneath awareness, a tar-thick feeling has been disturbed, and now looks for a safe harbor. Her thoughts spiral into darkness—he has been planning this for two years. Who is this man who could lie to her, tear her baby away? She remembers the sight of Hannah Roennfeldt touching his arm, and wonders what really happened between them. She retches violently onto the grass.

  The ocean thundered against the cliff, showering spittle right up to where Isabel stood, hundreds of feet above the water, on the edge. The spray had soaked into the crosses and her dress was damp with it.

  “Izzy! Isabel!” Tom’s voice was all but blown off the island by the gale.

  A petrel was wheeling in the air, circling, circling, before plummeting hard as lightning into the jagged swell to retrieve a herring. But luck and the storm were on the side of the fish, and it wriggled from the bird’s beak, falling back to the waves.

  Tom covered the few hundred yards to his wife. The petrel continued to hover on the storm currents, knowing that the tumult of the water would make easy pickings of any fish not sheltered in the deepest reefs.

  “We haven’t got much time,” Tom said, pulling Isabel close. “Lucy’ll be awake any minute.” The police had been questioning him for the past hour, and two of them were now heading down toward the old graves on the other side of the island, armed with shovels.

  Isabel searched his face as though he were a stranger. “The policeman said someone sent Hannah Roennfeldt a rattle…”

  He held her gaze, but said nothing.

  “… that someone wrote to her two years ago, to say her baby was alive.” She wrestled with the implications a little longer. “Tom!” was all she could say, her eyes wide with terror. “Oh, Tom!” she said again, stepping backward.

  “I had to do something, Izzy. God knows I’ve tried to explain. I just wanted her to know her child was safe.”

  She looked at him, as if trying to make sense of words shouted from far away, 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 cl
ambers 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.