The Death of Mrs. Westaway(47)

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.

It was Maud who came up to find me in my room, where I was reading—she burst in, holding a towel and her bright red swimming costume in one hand, and her sunglasses in the other.

“Get a move on, Maggie!” she said, plucking the book out of my hand and tossing it onto the bed, losing my place, I noticed with a flash of irritation. “We’re going swimming in the lake!”

I didn’t want to—that’s the strange thing to remember. I don’t mind pools or the sea, but I’ve never liked lake swimming—the slimy reeds, and the mush at the bottom, and the mouldering branches that catch at your feet. But Maud is a hard person to say no to, and at last I let her pull me downstairs to where the boys were waiting, Ezra holding a set of oars.

In the crumbling boathouse Maud untied the rickety flat-bottomed skiff, and we rowed out to the island, the lake water dappled and brown beneath the hull of the boat. Maud tied the boat to a makeshift jetty and we climbed out. It was Maud who went in first—a flash of scarlet against the gold-brown waters as she dived, long and shallow, from the end of the rotting wooden platform.

“Come on, Ed,” she shouted, and he stood up, grinned at me, and then followed her to the water’s edge, and took a running jump.

I wasn’t sure if I would go in—I was content to watch the others, laughing and playing in the water, splashing each other and shrieking. But the sun grew hotter and hotter, and at last I stood, shading my eyes, considering.

“Come in!” Abel yelled. “It’s glorious.”

I walked to the end of the jetty, feeling the damp wood fraying against my bare toes, and I dipped—just dipped—the tips of my toes in the water, watching with pleasure the scarlet polish I had borrowed from Maud glowing bright beneath the water.

And then—almost before I knew what had happened—a hand seized my ankle, and I felt a tug, and I stumbled forwards to prevent myself from going over backwards—and I was in, the golden waters closing over my head, the mud swirling up around me—and it was more beautiful and terrifying than I could ever have imagined.