The Light Between Oceans: A Novel

by M. L. Stedman

  “Now you be a good girl, and we’ll go and visit Granddad.”

  The girl’s eyes flickered at the mention of the man with the big horses and big trees. She wandered along, sucking the toffee. She did not smile, but neither did she scream or howl, Gwen noted.

  Strictly speaking, there was no need to pass the park. They could have got to Septimus’s house more quickly by taking the route by the cemetery and the Methodist chapel.

  “Are you tired, Lucy? Why don’t we have a bit of a breather? It’s a long way to Granddad’s, and you’re only a little mite…” The girl merely continued to open and close her thumb and fingers like pincers, experimenting with the stickiness of the toffee residue. Out of the corner of her eye, Gwen saw Isabel on the bench. “You run ahead now, that’s a good girl. You run to the bench and I’ll follow.” The child did not run, but ambled, dragging her rag doll along the ground. Gwen kept her distance and watched.

  Isabel blinked. “Lucy? Sweetheart!” she exclaimed, and gathered her into her arms before it occurred to her to see how she’d got there.

  “Mamma!” cried the child, gripping her tightly.

  Isabel turned and at a distance saw Gwen, who gave a nod, as if to say “Go on.”

  Whatever the woman was doing or why, Isabel did not care. She wept as she hugged the girl and then held her at arm’s length to see her better. Somehow, despite everything, perhaps Lucy could still be hers. A warmth spread through her at the idea.

  “Oh, you’ve got thin, little one! You’re skin and bone. You must be a good girl and eat. For Mamma.” Gradually she took in the other changes to her daughter: hair parted on the other side; a dress made of fine muslin sprinkled with daisies; new shoes with butterflies on the buckles.

  Relief swept over Gwen to see her niece’s response. She was watching a completely different child, suddenly safe with the mother she loved. She left them together for as long as she dared, before approaching. “I’d better take her now. I wasn’t sure you’d be here.”

  “But—I don’t understand…”

  “It’s all so dreadful. So hard on everyone.” She shook her head and sighed. “My sister’s a good woman, really she is. She’s been through so much.” She nodded in the child’s direction. “I’ll try to bring her again. I can’t promise. Be patient. That’s all I’m saying. Be patient and perhaps…” She left the sentence hanging. “But please, don’t tell anyone. Hannah wouldn’t understand. She’d never forgive me… Come on now, Lucy,” she said, and held her arms out to the girl.

  The child clung to Isabel. “No, Mamma! Don’t go!”

  “Come on, sweet thing. Be good for Mamma, won’t you? You need to go with this lady now, but I’ll see you again soon, I promise.”

  Still the child clung. “If you’re good now, we can come again.” Gwen smiled, pulling her carefully away.

  Some remnant of the rational stopped Isabel from acting on the impulse to snatch the child away. No. If she could be patient, the woman had promised to bring her again. Who knew what else might change with time?

  It took Gwen a long while to calm her niece. She cuddled her, and carried her, taking every opportunity to distract her with riddles and snatches of nursery rhymes. She wasn’t sure yet how she would make her plan work, but she simply couldn’t bear to see the poor child kept from her mother any longer. Hannah had always had a stubborn streak, and Gwen feared it was blinding her now. She wondered how likely it was that she could keep the meeting from Hannah. Even if she couldn’t, it was worth trying. When Grace had finally quietened down, Gwen asked, “Do you know what a secret is, sweetheart?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled.

  “Good. So we’re going to play a game about secrets, OK?”

  The little girl looked up at her, waiting to understand.

  “You love Mamma Isabel, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I know you want to see her again. But Hannah might be a bit cross, because she’s very sad, so we mustn’t tell her, or Granddad, all right?”

  The child’s face tightened.

  “We have to keep this a special secret, and if anyone asks what we did today, you just say we went to Granddad’s. You mustn’t tell about seeing your mamma. Understand, love?”

  The girl kept her lips pursed as she nodded gravely, the confusion showing in her eyes.

  “She’s an intelligent child. She knows Isabel Sherbourne isn’t dead—we saw her at Mouchemore’s.” Hannah sat again in Dr. Sumpton’s consulting room, this time without her daughter.

  “I’m telling you, as a professional, that the only cure for your daughter is time, and keeping her away from Mrs. Sherbourne.”

  “I just wondered—well, I thought if I could get her to talk to me—about her other life. Out on the island. Would it help?”

  He took a puff of his pipe. “Think of it like this—if I’d just taken your appendix out, the last thing to be doing would be to open up the wound every five minutes and prod about again to see if it had healed. I know it’s hard, but it’s a case of least said, soonest mended. She’ll get over it.”

  But she showed no sign of getting over it, as far as Hannah could see. The child became obsessed with putting her toys in order and making her bed neat. She smacked the kitten for knocking over the dolls’ house, and kept her mouth snapped shut like a miser’s purse, not wanting to let slip any sign of affection to this imposter mother.

  Still, Hannah persevered. She told her stories: about forests and the men who worked in them; about school in Perth and the things she’d done there; about Frank, and his life in Kalgoorlie. She would sing her little songs in German, even though the child paid no particular attention. She made clothes for her dolls and puddings for her dinner. The little girl responded by drawing pictures. Always the same pictures. Mamma and Dadda and Lulu at the lighthouse, its beam shining right to the edge of the page, driving away the darkness all around.

  From the kitchen, Hannah could see Grace sitting on the lounge room floor, talking to her clothes pegs. These days she was more anxious than ever, except when she was around Septimus, so her mother was glad to see her playing quietly. She came a little closer to the door, to listen.

  “Lucy, eat a toffee,” said a peg.

  “Yum,” said another peg, as it gobbled the thin air the child delivered with her fingertips.

  “I’ve got a special secret,” said the first peg. “Come with Auntie Gwen. When Hannah is asleep.”

  Hannah watched intently, a cold sickness spreading through her.

  From the pocket of her pinafore, Grace took a lemon and covered it with a handkerchief. “Goodnight, Hannah,” said Auntie Gwen. “Now we visiting Mamma in the park.”

  “Pwoi, pwoi.” Two other pegs pressed against one another with kisses. “My darling Lucy. Come on, sweetheart. Off we go to Janus.” And the pegs trotted along the rug for a bit.

  The whistling of the kettle startled the child, and she turned and saw Hannah in the doorway. She threw the pegs down, saying, “Bad Lucy!” and smacked her own hand.

  Hannah’s horror at the charade turned to despair at this last admonishment: this was how her daughter saw her. Not as the mother who loved her, but as a tyrant. She tried to stay calm as she considered what to do.

  Her hands shook a little as she made some cocoa and brought it in. “That was a nice game you were playing, darling,” she said, battling the tremor in her voice.

  The child sat still, neither speaking nor drinking from the beaker in her hand.

  “Do you know any secrets, Grace?”

  The girl nodded slowly.

  “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 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 Garstone 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.”