CHAPTER 16
THE FIRST NIGHT back on Janus, the wind howled around the lantern room, pushing at the thick panes of glass in the tower, testing for some weak spot. As Tom lit up, his mind went over and over the argument he had had with Isabel as soon as the store boat had left.
She had been unmovable: ‘We can’t undo what’s happened, Tom. Don’t you think I’ve been trying to find an answer?’ She was clasping the doll she had just picked up from the floor, hugging it to her chest. ‘Lucy’s a happy, healthy little girl. Ripping her away now would be – oh Tom, it’d be horrible!’ She had been folding sheets into the linen press, pacing to and fro between the basket and the cupboard. ‘For better or worse, Tom, we did what we did. Lucy adores you and you adore her and you don’t have the right to deprive her of a loving father.’
‘What about her loving mother? Her living bloody mother! How can this be fair, Izz?’
Her face flushed. ‘Do you think it’s fair that we lost three babies? Do you think it’s fair that Alfie and Hugh are buried thousands of miles away and you’re walking around without a scratch? Of course it’s not fair, Tom, not fair at all! We just have to take what life dishes up!’
She had landed a shot where Tom was most vulnerable. All these years later, he could not shed that sickening sensation of having cheated – not cheated death, but cheated his comrades, having come through unscathed at their expense, even though logic told him it was nothing but luck one way or another. Isabel could see that she had winded him, and softened. ‘Tom, we have to do what’s right – for Lucy.’
‘Izzy, please.’
She cut across him. ‘Not another word, Tom! The only thing we can do is love that little girl as much as she deserves. And never, never hurt her!’ Clutching the doll, she hurried from the room.
Now, as he looked out over the ocean, blustery and whipped white with foam, the darkness was closing in on all sides. The line between the ocean and the sky became harder to judge, as the light faltered second by second. The barometer was falling. There would be a storm before morning. Tom checked the brass handle on the door to the gallery, and watched the light turn, steady, impervious.
As Tom attended to the light that evening, Isabel sat beside Lucy’s cot, watching her drift into sleep. It had taken all her strength to get through the day, and her thoughts still swirled like the gathering storm outside. Now, she sang, almost in a whisper, the lullaby Lucy always insisted on. ‘Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly …’ Her voice struggled to keep the tune. ‘I stood by the lighthouse the last time we parted, Till darkness came down o’er the deep rolling sea, And no longer I saw the bright bark of my lover
When Lucy finally nodded off, Isabel opened her little fingers to remove the pink shell the child had been clasping. The nausea that had been with her since the moment by the memorial stone intensified, and she fought it by tracing the spiral of the shell with her finger, seeking comfort in its perfect smoothness, its exact proportions. The creature that had made it was long dead, and had left only this sculpture. Then the thought taunted her that Hannah Potts’s husband, too, had left his living sculpture, this little girl.
Lucy flung an arm above her head and a frown crossed her features for a moment, as her fingers closed tight around the missing shell.
‘I won’t let anyone hurt you, darling. I promise to keep you safe, always,’ Isabel murmured. Then she did a thing she had not done for some years. She got down on her knees, and bowed her head. ‘God, I can never hope to understand your mystery. I can only try to be worthy of what you’ve called me to do. Give me the strength I need to carry on.’ For a moment, doubt came roaring in, shaking her frame, until she managed to anchor again the rhythm of her breath. ‘Hannah Potts – Hannah Roennfeldt – ’ she said, adjusting to the idea, ‘is safely in your hands too, I know. Grant us peace. All of us.’ She listened to the wind outside, and to the ocean, and felt the distance restoring the sense of safety that the past two days had stripped away. She put the shell beside Lucy’s bed, where she could find it easily when she woke, and left the room quietly, newly resolved.
For Hannah Roennfeldt, the January Monday that followed the christening had been a momentous one.
When she went to the letterbox, she expected to find it empty: she had checked it the previous day as part of the ritual she had crafted to pass the hours since that terrible Anzac Day evening nearly two years earlier. First, she would call at the police station, sometimes giving no more than a questioning look, to which the constable, Harry Garstone, would reply with a silent shake of the head. As she walked out, his colleague Constable Lynch might comment, ‘Poor woman. Fancy ending up like that …’ and he too would shake his head, and carry on with his paperwork. Each day she would walk to a different part of the beach in search of a sign, a clue – bits of driftwood, a fragment of metal from a rowlock.
She would draw from her pocket a letter to her husband and child. Occasionally she enclosed things – a cutting from a newspaper about a circus coming to town; a nursery rhyme she had written by hand and decorated with colours. She would cast the letter into the waves in the hope that, as the ink seeped from the envelope, somewhere, in one or another of the oceans, it would be absorbed by her loved ones.
On the way back she would call at the church and sit silently in the last pew, near the statue of St Jude. Sometimes she would stay until the marri trees laid their lanky shadows across the stained glass, and her votive candles were cold puddles of hard wax. Here, somehow Frank and Grace still existed, for as long as she sat in the shadows. When she could avoid it no longer, she would return home, opening the letterbox only once she felt strong enough to face the disappointment of its emptiness.
For two years, she had written to anyone she could think of – hospitals, port authorities, sea-faring missions: anyone who might have heard tell of a sighting – but had received only courteous assurances that they would let her know if any news of her missing husband and daughter came their way.
That January morning was hot, and magpies carolled their waterfall song – notes that fell in splashes over gum trees beneath the bleached azure sky. Hannah ambled the few yards from the front verandah down the flagstone path as though in a trance. She had long ceased to notice the gardenia and the stephanotis and the proffered consolation of their sweet, creamy scent. The rusty iron letterbox creaked as she coaxed it open – it was as weary and reluctant to move as she. Inside was a scrap of white. She blinked. A letter.
Already a snail had etched a filigree track across it, the paper glistening like a rainbow around the parts it had eaten: just one trail across the corner. There was no stamp, and the hand was measured and firm.
She brought it inside and placed it on the dining table, lining up its border with the wood’s gleaming edge. She sat in front of it a long while, before taking up the pearl-handled letter-opener to slit the envelope, careful not to tear whatever was inside.
She drew out the paper, a small, single sheet, which read:
Don’t fret for her. The baby is safe. Loved and well cared for, and always will be. Your husband is at peace in God’s hands. I hope this brings you comfort.
Pray for me.
The house was dark, the brocade curtains drawn as a shield against the fierce brightness. Cicadas rasped in the grapevine on the back verandah at such a ferocious pitch that Hannah’s ears buzzed.
She studied the handwriting. The words formed before her eyes, but she could not quite un-jumble them. Her heart hammered at her lungs and she struggled to breathe. She had half expected the letter to disappear when she opened it – that sort of thing had happened before: catching sight of Grace in the street, perhaps, the pink flash of one of her baby dresses, then finding it was merely a parcel of the same colour, or a woman’s skirt; glimpsing the silhouette of a man she would have sworn was her husband, tugging his sleeve even, to be met with the bewildered expression of someone who was no more similar to him than chalk to cheese.
‘Gwen?’ she called, when she could finally muster words. ‘Gwen, could you come in here a minute?’ She summoned her sister from her bedroom, afraid that if she moved a muscle the letter might evaporate – that it might all just be a trick of the gloom.
Gwen was still carrying her embroidery. ‘Were you calling me, Hanny?’
Hannah did not speak, just nodded warily towards the letter. Her sister picked it up. ‘At least,’ Hannah thought, ‘I’m not imagining it.’
Within an hour they had left the simple wooden cottage for Bermondsey, Septimus Potts’s stone mansion on the hill at the edge of the town.
‘And it was just there, in the letterbox, today?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Hannah, still bewildered.
‘Who’d do a thing like this, Dad?’ asked Gwen.
‘Someone who knew Grace was alive, of course!’ said Hannah. She did not see the look that flashed between her father and sister.
‘Hannah, dear, it’s been a very long time,’ said Septimus.
‘I know that!’
‘He’s just saying,’ Gwen said, ‘well, that it’s odd not to have heard something sooner, and then to get this out of the blue.’
‘But it’s something!’ said Hannah.
‘Oh, Hanny,’ said Gwen, shaking her head.
Later that day, Sergeant Knuckey, the senior policeman in Point Partageuse, sat awkwardly on a squat grandmother-chair, balancing a dainty teacup on his broad knee as he tried to take notes.
‘And you didn’t see anyone unusual around the house, Miss Potts?’ he asked Gwen.
‘No one.’ She put the milk jug back on the occasional table. ‘No one comes to call, usually,’ she said.
He jotted something down.
‘Well?’
Knuckey realised Septimus was addressing a question to him. He examined the letter again. Neat handwriting. Plain paper. Not posted. From a local? Lord knew there were still people about the place who’d take comfort in watching a Hun-lover suffer. ‘Not much to go on, I’m afraid.’ He listened patiently to Hannah’s protests that surely it must contain clues. He noticed that the father and sister looked a bit awkward, like when a mad aunt starts up about Jesus at the dinner table.
As Septimus showed him to the door, the sergeant replaced his hat and said quietly, ‘A cruel piece of mischief-making, looks like. I reckon it’s about time to bury the hatchet against Fritz. All a filthy business, but there’s no need for pranks like this. I’d keep it under your hat, the note. Don’t want to encourage copycats.’ He shook hands with Septimus and made his way up the long, gum-lined drive.
Back in his study, Septimus put a hand on Hannah’s shoulder. ‘Come on, girlie, chin up. Mustn’t let this get the better of you.’
‘But I don’t understand, Dad. She must be alive! Why would someone bother to write a note lying about something like that, completely out of the blue?’
‘I tell you what, sweetheart, what’s say I double the reward? I’ll make it two thousand guineas. If anyone really knows anything, we’ll soon find out.’ As Septimus poured his daughter another cup of tea, he was, for once, not pleased that he was unlikely to be parted from his money.
Although the figure of Septimus Potts loomed large in business round Partageuse way, there weren’t many who could say they knew him well. He was fiercely protective of his family, but his chief opponent was, and always had been, Fate. Septimus was five years old when, in 1869, he disembarked at Fremantle from the Queen of Cairo. Around his neck he wore the little wooden sign his mother had placed there as she kissed him a distraught farewell on the dock in London. It read: ‘I am a good Christian boy. Please take care of me.’
Septimus was the seventh and last child of a Bermondsey ironmonger who had waited only three days after the baby’s birth before departing this world under the hooves of a runaway carthorse. His mother had done her best to keep the family together, but after a few years, as consumption burrowed away at her, she knew she had to secure her children’s future. She dispatched as many of them as she could to relatives around and about London, where they could be free help to the people who took them in. But her lastborn was too young to be anything but a drain on scarce resources, and one of his mother’s last acts was to secure passage to Western Australia for him, alone.
As he put it decades later, that sort of experience either gives you a taste for death, or a thirst for life, and he reckoned death would come calling soon enough anyway. So when he was gathered up by a round, sunburnt woman from the Seafarer’s Mission, and sent to a ‘good home’ in the South West, he went without complaint or question: who would have listened to either? He started a new life in Kojonup, a town well east of Partageuse, with Walt and Sarah Flindell, a couple who eked out a living as sandalwood pullers. They were a good sort of people, but shrewd enough to know that being so light, sandalwood could be loaded and manoeuvred even by a child, so they agreed to take the little boy in. As for Septimus, after his time on the ship, having a floor that stayed still and people who didn’t begrudge you your daily bread was paradise.
So Septimus got to know this new country to which he had been shipped like a parcel without an address, and grew to love Walt and Sarah and their practical ways. The little hut on their patch of cleared land had neither glass in the windows nor running water, but, in the early days, somehow there always seemed to be enough of what was needed.
When eventually the precious sandalwood, sometimes worth more than gold, was virtually wiped out by over-harvesting, Walt and Septimus turned instead to work on the new timber mills that were opening up around Partageuse. The building of new lighthouses along the coast meant that shipping cargo along that route changed from a sheer gamble to an acceptable commercial risk, and new railways and jetties allowed the forests to be chopped up and shipped out to anywhere in the world, right from their doorstep.
Septimus worked like a devil and said his prayers, and cadged reading and writing lessons from the Pastor’s wife on Saturdays. He never spent a halfpenny he didn’t have to, and never missed an opportunity to make one. The thing about Septimus was, he seemed to see opportunities where other people couldn’t. Though he grew to no more than five foot seven in his boots, he carried himself like a much bigger man, and always dressed as respectably as funds allowed. At times this meant he looked almost dapper, and at the very least it meant clean clothes for church on Sunday, even if he’d had to wash them at midnight to get the sawdust out of them after an all-day shift.
All of this stood him in good stead when, in 1892, a newly made baronet from Birmingham was passing through the colony in search of somewhere exotic to invest a little capital. Septimus seized the chance to make a start in business, and convinced the baronet to put up the money for a small land deal. Septimus smartly trebled the investment, and by careful risk and shrewd re-investment of his cut, soon set himself up in business in his own right. By the time the colony joined the newly formed nation of Australia in 1901, he was one of the richest timber men for miles around.
Times had been prosperous. Septimus had married Ellen, a debutante from Perth. Hannah and Gwen were born, and their home, Bermondsey, became a watchword for style and success in the South West. Then, at one of her famous picnics in the bush, served on a dazzle of linen and silver, his cherished wife was bitten just above the ankle of her pale kid boot by a dugite, and died within the hour.
Life, thought Septimus, when his daughters had returned to the cottage the day the mysterious letter arrived: you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. Finally reconciled with Hannah when her baby was born, then the husband and child disa-bloody-ppear into nowhere, leaving his daughter a wreck. Now some troublemaker was stirring things up again. Well, you just had to count your blessings and be thankful things weren’t worse.
Sergeant Knuckey sat at his desk, tapping his pencil on his blotter, watching the tiny lead trails. Poor bloody woman. Who could blame her for wanting the baby to be alive? His Irene still cried sometimes about young Billy, and it had been twenty years since he’d drowned as a tot. They’d had five more kids since then, but it was never far away, the sadness.
Really, though, there wasn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell that the baby was still alive. All the same, he took a fresh sheet of paper and started on a report of the incident. The Roennfeldt woman deserved the formalities, at least.