“Harriet?” Abel said at last. “Are you okay? I’m sorry—it must still be very raw for you.”
“Y-yes,” Hal managed, though her voice was a whisper of its usual self. She swallowed, and forced herself to hold the photograph out towards Abel. “Abel—there’s you, Ezra, and m-my mother, but—” She swallowed again, trying hard to work out how to phrase this, how to ask the question she needed to know, without giving everything away. “Who’s the other girl?”
“Maggie?” Abel took the photograph from her fingers, and smiled fondly at the little group, forever seated in the sunshine, frozen in their teens and twenties, forever young. “Goodness. Little Maggie Westaway. I’d almost forgotten about her. She was . . . well, I suppose a sort of distant cousin. Her real name was Margarida too, I believe, like Maud, though we never called either of them that—too much of a mouthful. She used to call Mother her aunt, but I think in fact her father was my father’s . . . nephew, or cousin? Something of that kind. Her parents died when she was in her teens, a lot like you, Hal, and she came here to finish her final year at school. Poor thing. I don’t think it was a very happy time for her.”
Hal looked at the girl sitting on the grass, at her unflinching dark eyes, and she saw what Abel meant. There was something wary and equivocal in the girl’s gaze. She was the only member of the little group who was not smiling.
“I see,” Hal managed. She tried to steady the trembling in her legs and keep her muscles from betraying her. “Thank—thank you for sharing this with me. It means a lot.”
“It’s for you,” Abel said. He held out the picture, and Hal took it, wonderingly. She let her finger trace over her mother’s face.
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course. I don’t need it—I have enough memories of that time, and they’re not all of them very good ones. But this was a lovely day, I remember we all went swimming in the lake. It was before—well, never mind. But I’d like you to have it.”
“Thank you,” Hal said. She folded the photograph carefully along the existing line and pushed it gently into her pocket, and then she remembered her manners, and made herself smile. “Thank you, Abel, I’ll treasure it.”
And then she turned and walked away up the frozen slope towards the house, unable to keep up the pretense any longer.
? ? ?
AS HAL HURRIED UP THE stairs towards the attic, she could feel the shape of the photograph in her jeans pocket, and she had to stop herself from putting her hand over it, as if to hide it from sight.
Her mother. Dear God, her mother.
Hal was panting as she climbed the last set of steps to the attic bedroom, and inside she shut the door, pulled the photograph out of her pocket, and sank to the floor with her back against the door, staring at the little image.
It all made sense—the coincidence over the names, Mr. Treswick’s mistake—the only strange thing was that Abel himself hadn’t guessed the truth on seeing the photo. For it was so painfully clear now that Hal had the evidence in front of her own eyes.
Maggie, Abel had called her mother. Hal herself had never heard her mother use the nickname—but it made sense. It was an obvious shortening for Margarida. A family name, her mother had said once, when she’d asked why her grandparents had chosen such an odd, hard-to-spell name. And then she had shut down the conversation, as she often did when Hal wanted her to talk about her childhood and her long-dead parents.
Her real name was Margarida too, like Maud.
Two cousins—both called Margarida Westaway. And in looking for one, Mr. Treswick had stumbled upon the other, without realizing. Had he even known of the other Margarida’s existence? Presumably not, or he would have made sure to find the right person when he searched. But if all he had was a name, and an unusual name at that . . . If you found Joan Smith, you would make damn sure you’d found the right one. But Margarida Westaway—he could be forgiven for assuming he had found the right woman.
But now that she was over the first shock of seeing her mother—young, fearless, here—the disquiet began to sink in.
The question that had beat in her head as she hurried up the stairs was how Abel could possibly have seen that photograph and not joined the dots—and now, as Hal stared down at the faded, yellowed picture, the thought recurred, more unsettlingly. For the other Margarida, the real Margarida, the one sitting on the lawn next to Ezra, was fair, like Harding and Abel. Hal’s mother was dark, like Hal herself.
All her life, Hal had heard people remark on her likeness to her mother, and she had never really been able to see what they were talking about, beyond their obviously similar coloring. But now . . . looking at the photographic evidence in front of her, her mother at an age so close to her own . . . now Hal could see it only too clearly. From the suspicious dark eyes, the color of espresso coffee, to the straight black hair, the hawkish nose, even the defiant tilt of her mother’s chin—Hal saw herself.
Here, right in front of her, was concrete evidence of the truth—and of the mistake that had been made. How long would it be before Abel—or someone else—realized that?
Restlessly, Hal stood and walked to the window, looking out. The day had grown overcast, and far away in the distance she could see a gray mass, flecked with white, rising to meet the sky. It might have been a cloud, but Hal thought—though she could not be sure—that it was probably the sea.
All of a sudden she felt a powerful urge to get out, get away—and she found herself gripping the bars as if she could prize them apart and escape the confines of the little room and the prison she had created for herself with this situation.
Because, as she shoved the photograph away in her pocket for the second time, Hal realized that the evidence in the picture was only half the issue. The real problem was something far worse.
In taking that photo, in asking the questions she had in the way that she had, Hal had crossed a line. She was no longer simply the passive recipient of Mr. Treswick’s error, swept up in a mistaken assumption, with no provable wrongdoing on her part.
No. In that moment of accepting the photograph, she had begun to actively deceive the Westaways, in a way that could be tracked back to her and proven. And the potential result of her deception was no longer a few thousand pounds, but a whole estate—stolen from under the noses of Hester Westaway’s rightful heirs.
Up to this point, Hal thought, she might at a stretch have claimed ignorance or confusion. She could have cited Mr. Treswick’s letter coming out of the blue, the fact that she had never met her grandparents—she could have painted herself as an innocent bystander caught in a mix-up, a trusting young woman, too shy to question the discrepancies in what she had been told.
But now, by taking this photograph and failing to mention that the other woman in the picture was her real mother, she had begun something very different.
She had begun to commit an active, traceable fraud.
6th December, 1994
I couldn’t sleep last night. I lay awake, my hands over my stomach, trying to press it back to flatness, and I thought about the night it happened. It was late in August, when the days were longer and hotter than I could ever have imagined, and the sky was that fierce Cornish blue.
The boys were back from school and university, filling the house with an unaccustomed noise and energy that felt strange after the stifled silence I had grown used to these last few months. My aunt had gone up to London for some reason, and Mrs Warren had gone into Penzance to see her sister, and without their dark, crow-like presence the atmosphere felt light and full of happiness.