by Annie Dalton
Perfect handwriting. Anna felt a shiver go through her as she realized who must have taught Sabina her flawless calligraphy.
‘Mum had to live there in that horrible place until she was sixteen. On her last morning, the Mother Superior called her into her office and gave her a package. Inside was a little baby’s nightdress Hetty had sewn and embroidered while she was waiting for Mum to be born. There was also a diary and a package of letters and money. A lot of money,’ Sabina emphasized. ‘Someone had been sending a cheque to the convent every month since my mum was a few months old.’
‘Was the money from the Valliers?’ Anna asked, interrupting.
Sabina’s eyes became cold and flinty. ‘No, Mum never had anything from them.’ She leaned forward, her silky hair briefly swinging across her face. ‘Anyway, that night Mum stayed in a hotel for the first time in her life. She was too scared to go down to the restaurant so she called room service. There were only two items on the menu that she recognized: wiener schnitzel and apple strudel, so she ordered those. The strudel was so wonderful that my mum rang down for a second helping. After she’d eaten she lay down on her bed and began to read the letters.’
Sabina swallowed. ‘Despite the terrible things the nuns had told her about her mother, my mum had always clung to a hope that one day she’d come for her. Up in that hotel room, her stomach full of good food, the package of letters waiting in her suitcase, my mum thought that all her secret prayers had been answered. She had no doubt that the letters and the money were from the mother that she had never known. But my mum says as soon as she read the first letter something died inside her. No one was going to come. Her mother was dead, murdered. She’d come to a bad end just like those vicious old women always said she would.’
‘Who were the letters from?’ Anna asked.
Sabina gave her an incredulous look. ‘Can’t you guess?’
When Anna didn’t answer Sabina went on with her story. ‘My mum took a train to the nearest town where she found herself a room and a job doing fine embroidery for a dressmaker. She did well. She made a life. On her first ever holiday, she went to London where she met my father. Not long afterwards they got married. My father said she was ecstatic when she knew she was expecting me. She was going to be part of a real family at last.’
Sabina broke off. She suddenly seemed to notice her espresso and took a couple of sips. ‘Unfortunately, the happy family thing never really …’ She took a shaky breath and began again. ‘After I was born my mum went into a severe post-partum psychosis. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions for most of my childhood. My dad couldn’t cope so he left her. He left us both. Mum tried really hard to keep it together. She was so brave. She decided we’d go back to Switzerland. She thought she had a chance of staying well there. But then when I was twelve my mum had a really bad psychotic episode and my dad took me back to London to live with him and his new family.’ Sabina was twisting her fingers together. ‘They’re OK, really. But it’s never felt …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘That’s why you wrote those letters?’ Anna said. ‘Because you blamed Hetty’s friends for what happened to your mum?’
‘They weren’t real friends!’ Sabina’s eyes blazed. ‘They could have helped her to keep her baby, then Mum wouldn’t have had to grow up in that terrible orphanage and she wouldn’t have got ill.’
It was the wrong moment to suggest that Hetty’s daughter might have succumbed to mental illness regardless of her upbringing, though being abandoned to the twisted sisters had surely added to her problems, Anna thought.
‘So … you planned this?’ Jake asked. ‘You came to Oxford, intending to seek out Isadora and the other Oxford Six members?’
Sabina gave a nervous smirk, unable to hide her pride at her own cleverness. ‘Thanks to my mum I had enough info to track them down. I lucked out with my lodgings though. I couldn’t believe it when I went to the lodgings office and found Isadora Salzman on the list of this year’s landladies!’
Jake set down his coffee cup. ‘So you insinuated yourself into her home,’ he said slowly, ‘and you set about secretly punishing this wonderful warm-hearted lady because, in your opinion, she’d failed to help your grandmother. You don’t think that’s a bit of an overreaction?’ Jake’s southern accent was becoming more pronounced.
‘She deserved it!’ Sabina flashed back. ‘They all deserved it! Anyway, I was only doing the same as them!’
‘How do you figure that?’ Jake said.
‘Playing games,’ Sabina said contemptuously. ‘Playing a part. Spying on people, dropping off secret messages. I was just doing it back to them.’
Anna wanted to say that this wasn’t quite how it was; that, in the beginning at least, Isadora and her friends had genuinely believed they were helping to save the world from another devastating war. She was surprised to feel a sneaking sympathy for this angry girl. Sabina had chosen such an elaborate revenge against people she had never met, people she had only glimpsed in the pages of her grandmother’s diary. What could have driven her to such extremes?
‘You never thought of playing things differently?’ she said tentatively. ‘Hetty came from an enormous extended family. You could have got in touch with them. I’d have thought they’d have welcomed Hetty’s granddaughter with open arms.’
To Anna’s dismay, fresh tears welled up in Sabina’s eyes. ‘That’s what I thought!’ Her voice was raw with hurt. ‘After I came to live with Dad, I kept reading about the Valliers in the papers and society magazines. I got a bit embarrassingly fan-girlish at the thought of being one of them. I felt like they were my real family. I’d literally dream about them.’ Her tears spilled over. ‘I should have left it as a dream,’ she said bitterly.
Anna felt her heart contract. ‘You contacted them?’
Sabina gave a tight nod. ‘And got accused of being an opportunist and a liar.’ She angrily brushed away her tears. ‘They said Hetty had never had a baby. Maeve, her stepmother, was the only member of the family who could have backed me up, and she’d died just a couple of years after Hetty. I was accused of trying to capitalize or whatever out of their family tragedy. Because obviously I don’t know anything about tragedy! I’m not a real person, apparently. I’m just a mistake, a nobody, like my mum.’
Here was the part of Sabina’s story that had been missing, Anna thought. If the Valliers had welcomed Sabina into their family, Anna doubted they’d all be sitting in Isadora’s kitchen on Christmas Day, having this painful conversation. It had been one rejection too many for Sabina to absorb. She wasn’t just angry with Hetty’s friends, she was angry with the whole world, a world that refused to see her.
I never saw her either, she thought, Sabina had been the toast-eating Swiss girl, a minor character eclipsed by the larger drama of Isadora and her friends. It hadn’t occurred to Anna that Sabina also had a story, that Sabina was how Hetty’s story had ended, the end of a long line of hurt and damage.
Sabina suddenly let out a scared whimper. ‘Was it my fault that Robert Keane killed himself?’ She couldn’t meet their eyes.
Jake and Anna exchanged glances.
Anna took a breath. ‘The truth is we don’t know why he killed himself. His life was basically a train wreck, Sabina. His wife had left him. He had no relationship with his children. He was going to have to declare himself bankrupt. He’d been severely depressed for a long, long time.’
Sabina shot her a frightened look. ‘But my letter could have pushed him over the edge?’
‘We can’t know that,’ Jake said. ‘Besides, that’s all in the past. Right now, we need to think about what to do about you.’
The colour drained from Sabina’s face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘First off, we’ve got to tell the police that you wrote those letters.’
Sabina tried to plead with him but Jake shook his head. ‘If only to eliminate you from their inquiries,’ he said soberly. ‘So they know your letters aren’t connected with all these attacks.’
‘What are you talking about? Why did he deserve it more than the others?’ Anna could feel herself starting to lose her temper.
Sabina sat back in her chair. ‘Because James Lowell murdered Hetty.’
SIXTEEN
It was Boxing Day, a few minutes after noon. Jake had just taken both the dogs for an overdue walk. The previous night, Anna had made a quick dash over to Park Town to pick up a very relieved Bonnie and pack an overnight bag. There had been no sign of Tansy.
As Jake ushered Bonnie and Hero out through the back door, Anna had begun transferring her centre of operations into the smaller of Isadora’s two sitting rooms where she’d also passed the night.
Sabina had been furious when they’d insisted that she called her father but after she’d spoken to him she’d seemed almost relieved to have everything finally taken out of her hands. Her father hadn’t seemed surprised to hear that his daughter was in trouble. ‘We invited Sabina to spend Christmas with us,’ he’d told Anna, in the huffy tone that she thought might be habitual. ‘But she said she had too much work. My wife and I have tried to do our best by her but she doesn’t make it easy.’ His best didn’t include being able to come up until after Boxing Day, thought Anna wryly. He had made it quite clear that they couldn’t expect him to cut his family Christmas short simply because his daughter was in a spot of trouble. Anna and Jake had felt they had no choice but to promise to stay with Sabina until he arrived.
Anna had insisted that she could manage on her own. Hetty’s granddaughter was hardly Jake’s problem and he had enough to do with sorting out Mimi’s house. But he’d just said, half joking, ‘I think of it as karma. I wasn’t exactly an angel either in my teens.’ Something else she and Jake shared.
Even so, Anna felt the responsibility for this troubled girl weighing on her. She’d chosen the sitting room because it was directly opposite the stairs. If Sabina tried to creep out of the house, Anna would hear. Though Sabina had apparently accepted her and Jake as her temporary minders, Anna wouldn’t put it past her to try something stupid.
Setting her coffee down on a small carved table, she dumped her little pile of photocopies next to the armchair nearest the door. Someone, Anna thought it was Jake, had pulled back the curtains and opened the old sash window a crack to let in the cold fresh air.
Anna had visited Isadora countless times but she had never been in this room until last night. At the time, her mind had been too full of the day’s events, and Isadora’s lighting too dim, to properly take in her surroundings. The room had just been somewhere more relaxing, though no less cluttered, for the three of them to sit after a day that already seemed to have lasted several weeks too long. Now, for the first time, Anna noticed the photographs propped haphazardly on Isadora’s already overflowing bookshelves. The majority were old black-and-white photos featuring people unknown to her, their solemn or laughing faces looking back at her from a world that no longer existed. Curious, she picked up an old studio portrait of a formally dressed man and woman she assumed to be Isadora’s parents. Their wedding portrait, she decided, though their stiff expressions showed no obvious signs of joy. Beside the wedding picture was a framed photo of a dark-haired little girl furiously plying her bow across the strings of her miniature violin. The little miracle girl, Anna thought with a pang, who had first dedicated herself to saving her parents from their grief and after that the world.
There were several photos of an endearing small boy with sticking-out ears and two or three of a rather less endearing teenager just recognizable as Gabriel, the future accountant. There was also an intriguing photograph of a handsome fortyish man. Anna studied his face for a moment, wondering if this was the mysterious Valentin, who Isadora had once declared to be the love of her life.
Anna returned to her armchair, alert for any sounds coming from upstairs. Earlier this morning she’d had to wake Sabina from a dead sleep so that she could talk to the police officer who’d arrived to take a statement. After the policewoman had left, taking Hetty’s diary and the originals of James’s letters, Sabina had pleaded exhaustion and gone back to bed. It had been an emotionally draining evening for everyone and no one had had much sleep.
Anna picked up James’s first letter. She and Jake had skim-read them all last night, but she felt she needed to read them through again while there were fewer distractions. Though he had sent money for Hetty’s daughter every month for sixteen years, James had written to her only a dozen or so times in all. At no time, even in the very first letters, did he seem to picture himself addressing a small child. It was more as if he was unburdening himself to the adult he imagined that Iona would one day become. Maybe he had never seriously believed the letters would ever reach her? Perhaps he’d sent them off the same way a desperate castaway entrusts a message to a bottle, throwing it into the sea to sink or float? Anna suspected the letters had been written at low moments when James’s guilt, and the crippling silence Tallis had imposed upon the Six, had become too much to bear.
With the help of the letters she and Jake had been able to piece together more of Hetty’s story. In fact, Hetty had confided in James almost as soon as she knew she was expecting a baby, which sounded to be surprisingly far along in the pregnancy. At first, he assumed she’d told him because he was the father of her child and immediately declared that he would give up everything, his place at Oxford, his dreams of being a historian and a writer, to look after them both.
Hetty had told James that she didn’t need him or anyone to take care of her. He wasn’t the father and she wasn’t going to keep this baby. Her ex-stepmother, Maeve, was arranging for her to have the baby in Switzerland. Hetty and Maeve had agreed that Hetty’s father must never find out; which seemed strange, Anna thought, given that he seemed to go around impregnating females like some randy old stallion.
James said Hetty had expressed relief that her child wasn’t due to be born till the long summer holidays. She could give birth then go back to start her final year at Oxford as if nothing had happened.
‘I told her this was wrong,’ James wrote to the young Iona.
I told her, ‘You can’t have a baby, a small living, breathing person with a soul, and carry on as if nothing’s happened!’ I said I didn’t care whose damn baby you were. I’d stand by her and marry her and we could bring you up together. Hetty said that was insane. She said I would only end up resenting and hating her. Besides, she wasn’t ready to settle down with a husband and a child. She didn’t feel like enough of a grown-up. ‘How can I raise a child, when I don’t even know who I am?’ I begged and pleaded with her to change her mind. I said I could be grown up enough for the two of us.
If I could go back in time to that day, Iona, I swear I would beg and plead harder, because I would know that I wasn’t just begging for your life but for Hetty’s.
After she came back nobody seemed to see the change in her but me.
That wasn’t entirely true, Anna thought. Isadora had half sensed a difference in Hetty, but since Hetty hadn’t directly confided in her, she had no way of understanding the trauma her friend had been through. She returned to James’s letter.
Your mother was still beautiful, possibly even more beautiful, but there was something slightly frenetic about her now. She was like a light that shone too brightly and it scared me. I didn’t know how to reach her. I kept remembering that night when we lay together in her bed and my fear that I’d lost her forever seemed like the cruellest thing anyone had ever had to bear. I was young and selfish and I related everything back to my own happiness. I didn’t know what I know now, that the cruellest thing was seeing your mother cold and white on that hotel floor, knowing that I’d ended the life of the person I loved most in the world.
Anna took a gulp of her cooling coffee. Love, she thought, and had an involuntary flashback to her surprise awa
kening at six that morning: when she opened her eyes to find herself lying on Isadora’s sofa, with her head resting on Jake’s chest. Despite their cramped conditions he’d appeared to be sound asleep.
She had felt such a bewildering mix of pleasure and fear that for a few moments she couldn’t seem to move, just stayed where she was in Jake’s arms, feeling his strong heartbeat, listening to his slow, even breathing, as she mentally paged through the events of the previous evening.
She’d gone back to Isadora’s with Bonnie. They had all eaten crackers and cheese. Somewhere around two a.m., Sabina had gone up to bed. Mindful of their promise to her father, Jake and Anna had sat up playing Scrabble from a battered set Anna had found on a dusty bottom shelf. Sitting side by side on the sofa with the Oxford dictionary between them, in between some gentle wrangling about proper and improper words, they had talked in that spacey unfocused way of people who have had far too little sleep.
Jake had told Anna he’d started reading the book she’d brought him for Christmas. ‘I knew dogs were amazing,’ he’d told her. ‘But this book gives you the science behind canine amazingness. I’ve always been nuts about dogs. When I was a little kid I used to fantasize about finding my own version of Lassie and just setting off with her on adventures!’
‘You did find her. Eventually,’ Anna had reminded him. ‘You found Bonnie. She definitely has her Lassie moments! She found Naomi’s body if you remember.’
Jake had nodded. ‘I’d never thought of it like that. She had more than a few Lassie moments in Afghanistan now I think about it.’ And he’d told her of the time Bonnie had led him and his men to where an injured comrade was lying half buried under rubble. Somehow this had led on to Jake’s memory of another dog-related adventure story he had loved as a boy. ‘One time after I met Mimi, she took me to a yard sale and she bought me an ancient hard-backed copy of The Call of the Wild, by Jack London. Ever read it?’ Anna had shaken her head. ‘It’s about sled dogs in Alaska,’ he’d explained. ‘Man, I literally loved that book to death! I read it so many times, it fell apart.’