The Death of Mrs. Westaway(101)

Maud.

Hal let her gaze rest on the tranquil little face, cherubic in repose.

Where are you, Maud? she wanted to ask. Dead? Running? Hiding? But how could she do that—how could she leave her brothers, her twin in pain for so many years?

She turned the page, to see Maud as a fat-legged toddler pushing a battered wooden dog across a hearthrug, and beside her Ezra, playing with a huge bear, almost larger than himself. The next few pages were just of Ezra—age four, on a brand-new bicycle, shining in the sun. Age five, grinning a gap-toothed smile. Hal shook her head, remembering Abel’s bitter remark about Ezra being his mother’s favorite.

She was about to turn the page, in search of another picture of Maud—but suddenly it was too painful to carry on, watching this little girl growing towards whatever oblivion had snatched her up, and Hal sighed and closed the album, pressing her fingers into her eyes, pushing back the ache in her head, and her heart.

Whatever answers she was looking for, she had been foolish to think they would be here. She should put it back where it came from, go to bed, to sleep, and follow Ezra’s advice to forget the past—give up this stupid obsession with finding out what had happened, so many years ago.

But who had got the album down, that first morning? One of the brothers? Edward? He had barely arrived, but he might have just had time. The only other option was Mrs. Warren, and that was stranger still.

One thing was for sure—the truth about her mother did not lie within these pages. Unless—

She stopped, the thought snagging at her, and then opened her eyes, her blurred vision refocusing painfully on the buttercup-yellow cover in front of her. Once again, she picked it up and leafed slowly forwards through the pages, her stomach clenched with uncertainty, unsure of what she was about to see.

The confirmation came slowly—not from a single picture, but shimmering into focus, like a Polaroid photo developing in the light, features appearing from an unformed blur.

First there was a round, childish face sharpening into features that were painfully familiar, baby-blue eyes deepening and darkening into black ones. Limbs lengthening, skin tanning, an expression that changed slowly from openhearted trust to wariness.

And then at last, the final photograph in the book—The Twins’ 11th birthday—there she was. Staring out of the page through a dark, tangled fringe, her dark eyes alight with the bright reflection of the candles, so like her brother that Hal wondered how she had ever managed to miss it.

Margarida. Maud. Hal’s mother.

CHAPTER 45


* * *

If Hal had not already been sitting down, she would have had to grope for a chair.

Her mother was Maud. Maud. There was no other explanation. The girl in those photographs, Ezra’s twin, growing up alongside him at Trepassen, was Hal’s mother. It was unmistakable.

And yet—it made no sense.

It had to be true. The pictures in the book did not lie. There was her mother’s face, shimmering into focus in front of her very eyes, page after page, from babyhood through to first school days, into her almost-teenage self, all the time growing towards the woman Hal knew painfully well. Her mother was not Maggie.

Which meant . . . It meant that Hester Westaway was her grandmother.

It meant that the will was valid.

But what about the birth certificate? What about the diary? What about—

And then Hal realized, and it was like the moon coming out from behind a cloud. All those shapes that had been formless black confusion in the clouded darkness were illuminated, falling into their rightful places in a landscape that suddenly made sense. She could not be sure. But if she was right . . . if she was right, she had been looking at this upside down the whole time.

If she was right, nothing was as she had thought it was.

If she was right, she had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

The snow outside was still falling, and Hal pulled her coat closer around her as she turned the pages. But it was not only the cold that made her shiver this time. It was a sense of foreboding suddenly gathering around her—of the weight of the secrets of the past, and the dam that she was about to break. The deluge.

This time, as she leafed through the fading pictures with their yellowed coverings, this time there was no sense of wonder or nostalgia. This time, she felt as if she were plunging down a rabbit hole into the past.

Because the child in the photographs, laughing and playing with her twin brother in the grounds of Trepassen, was not Hal’s aunt. It was her mother—her dark eyes unmistakably like Hal’s own—but not Hal’s own.

Which meant that Maggie, the girl who had come to Trepassen, who had written that diary, who had got pregnant, who had run away and disappeared—was a stranger. Yet Hal was Maggie’s daughter. There was no other explanation. However Hal worked the maths in her head, the result was the same—Maud could not have been pregnant at the time of Hal’s birth. And Maggie was.

There was only one possibility, and it had been staring her in the face ever since she opened Mr. Treswick’s letter, but she had been too blind to see it.

Hal’s mother—the woman who had loved her, and brought her up, and cared for her—was not the woman who had given birth to her.

But what had happened? How had it happened?

Hal put her hands to her head. She felt as if she were carrying a load, immensely heavy, and immensely fragile and dangerous. She had the sense of herself tiptoeing along a narrow tightrope, and in her arms a bomb, ticking gently, and about to go off at any moment.