The Light Between Oceans(43)

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.