The House at Mermaid's Cove(51)

Curiosity got the better of me when I spotted the name on the envelope. It was addressed to J. Trewella, 14 Cadogan Square, Belgravia, London. The stamp bore a Guernsey postmark, dated April 14, 1940. I shouldn’t have taken it out of the drawer. And I certainly shouldn’t have opened it. But I felt an inexplicable compulsion to see what the envelope contained.

What my fingers found was not a letter but a photograph. It was a black-and-white snapshot of a sad-eyed girl holding a baby wrapped in a fringed shawl. I turned it over. On the back was written “Edward John” and the date January 15, 1939.

I flipped it over again and stared at the girl’s face. I couldn’t help but see the likeness. The elfin face, the sprinkling of freckles on the cheekbones. It could have been a picture of me from when I lived in Dublin.

You know, you remind me of someone. A girl ’Is Lordship used to knock about with. The words of the old fisherman Leo Badger came back to me as I gazed into the wistful eyes. I pried open the envelope, searching for any clue to the identity of the person in the photograph. But it was empty. Then I spotted something, written very small, on the flap. It was the return address. I angled it to the light, struggling to decipher the tiny writing. It said: “M. Martin, 18 St. Julian’s Avenue, St. Peter Port.” My heart shifted in my chest. Morwenna Martin was the name Leo had revealed. But if this girl was Morwenna, why had she sent Jack a photograph of a baby? Was he the father?

I felt a sick surge in my stomach as I turned the photo over again. “Edward John.” If the date written under the name was the baby’s date of birth, he would be nearly four and a half years old by now. About the same age as Ned. And Ned was short for Edward.

I snatched up the envelope, staring at the postmark, then the address written on the flap. Why would Morwenna have been living on Guernsey just months before the Nazi invasion? And if Ned was the baby in the photograph—their baby—why had Jack taken him off the island without her?

My hands were shaking as I stuffed the image back inside the envelope. I dropped it back into the drawer as if it were on fire. I hurried out of the room, back to Merle, telling myself that it couldn’t be true, that I was putting two and two together and making five. But I couldn’t quell the storm of emotion inside me.



It took every ounce of my nun’s training to conceal my feelings from Merle. I told her I’d been unable to find the stamps, and she said it didn’t matter—someone else had probably needed them, and she could buy more in Falmouth.

We sat on the top deck of the bus. From up there I could see the landscape stretching out beyond leafy hedges sprinkled white with cow parsley and hawthorn blossom. Fields of ripening crops were interspersed with meadows where cattle and sheep grazed. The only clue that a war was going on was an airfield where a trio of Spitfires came in to land as the bus trundled past.

We drove through the village of Constantine, where the Land Girls lived, picking up more passengers outside the post office. The bus wound past rows of cottages, then plunged into a green tunnel formed by the branches of oaks and sycamores on either side of the narrow lane.

More villages followed, with quaint Cornish names: Treverva, Mabe Burnthouse, Budock Water. Merle chatted about the children during the journey. She told me that they needed costumes for a performance the village school was putting on. She was making dresses for the girls from an old tablecloth, but she wanted to look for some lace to trim them with. I was listening to what she was saying and taking in the changing landscape—but another part of my brain was miles away, playing a movie reel of the story of Jack and Morwenna, trying to make sense of what I’d uncovered.

The more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed that Morwenna was the girl in the photograph. According to Leo Badger, she had left Cornwall, but no one knew where she’d gone. If she was pregnant and Jack wouldn’t marry her, that sudden disappearance made perfect sense. He’d had a boat. Taking her to Guernsey would have been easy—and far enough from Cornwall to avoid a scandal. But if Ned was their child, why had Jack taken him from his mother? Could the story he’d told Merle have been half-true? Had Morwenna been in the hospital when the Germans invaded the island? And if so, what had happened to her?

“You can see the docks from here.” The subtle change in the volume of Merle’s voice brought me back to the here and now. She was looking away from me, across the bus, out of the window on the other side. Following her gaze, I saw a wide sweep of bay and a forest of masts. A huge ship, painted gray, was making its way toward the docks up a wide channel of water. Houses covered the hill that rose up from the waterfront. Falmouth was bigger than I’d imagined.

“Can you see that gap in the houses—over there?” Merle pointed to a place where there were no roofs, just the jagged remains of walls. “That used to be Lister Street. Thirty people died when it was bombed.”

The bus wound its way through narrow streets with shops and houses painted in pastel colors. A man in a Royal Navy uniform with a pint glass in his hand glanced up at us from the doorway of the Star and Garter pub. More men, in uniforms I didn’t recognize, were gathered outside the Dolphin.

“Americans,” Merle whispered. “They’ve only just arrived in Cornwall.”

I nodded. “The Land Girls told me.”

We passed a building with sandbags piled around the walls. “What’s that place?” I asked.