She knew that Maggie had escaped—that much was clear from the diary, and from Maud’s letters. Maud had helped her get away sometime in January or February, and the two of them had come to Brighton to make a life together. There, in the peace and quiet of the little flat, Maggie had given birth to her baby daughter, and Maud . . . Maud could not have gone home. Lizzie had made that clear. She had never seen her family again, from the moment she walked out. So she must have stayed with her cousin, taking care of her, biding her time, hugging her acceptance letter from Oxford and waiting for autumn when she would take up her place at last.
But then, for whatever reason, Maggie had gone back to Trepassen. Something had drawn her back—and whatever it was, it must have been a good reason, for her to return to the place she had tried so hard to escape from. She had packed her bags, left her baby with her cousin, and taken the train down to Trepassen alone, with a “Joan of Arc look” upon her face, “like a maid going into battle,” as Lizzie had said.
Was it money that had driven her back? The realization that, try as they might, two young women not yet out of school could barely afford to feed and clothe themselves, let alone a baby? I have a little money left from my parents, she had told Maud in her letter. But that little money would not have lasted long, even supplemented with earnings from the pier, not with Maud soon off to university, and no childcare for Hal. Perhaps she had gone to fight for support for her child.
Whatever it was, it had gone terribly wrong. Maggie—not Maud—had disappeared. She had left Hal motherless, and left Maud to pick up the pieces of her life—her flat, her little booth on the pier . . . and her child.
In one respect, it must have been easy, with Margarida Westaway on the birth certificate and on the flat lease, and on the sign above the door at the pier. Her mother was Margarida Westaway—she had the passport and birth certificate to prove it. There was no dispute there. Maud had simply slipped into her cousin’s life.
But Hal’s heart ached at the thought of how hard it must have been too. Maud had given up everything—that freedom she had fought so hard for, her university place, her hard-won future—she had given it all up, for Hal. She had picked up her cousin’s child, and she had taken over the booth on the pier for one reason and one reason only—to put food on the table, because she had no other option.
No wonder the open, questing girl in the diary had read like a different person from the cynical, skeptical woman who had raised Hal. They were different women. It was not that Maggie had changed her mind; it was that Maud had never done so.
What was it Maggie had said, quoting Maud? Load of wafty BS, that was it. It had struck a chord with Hal, and she had laughed and connected with the remark in a way that she had not quite understood. But now she did.
Now she understood why Maud had shone so clearly out of the pages, that connection she had felt, reaching back through the years.
It was because they were connected. Maud was not just her aunt—she was the only mother Hal had ever known. The person she had loved beyond her own life, beyond reason, beyond bearing, when she had lost her.
Urgent questions beat inside Hal’s heart. How. Why.
But she had to take this step by step . . . with the slow, measured pace of a reading. She had to turn each card as it came, consider it, find its place in the story.
And the next card . . . the next card was one that made Hal feel terribly uneasy in a way that she couldn’t completely pin down.
For the next card was not a card at all: it was a photograph. The photograph. The one that Abel had given her that first day at Trepassen.
Hal pulled the Golden Virginia tin out of her pocket and prized it open. The photograph was there on top, folded in half, and she unfolded it, staring at the picture with fresh eyes.
There was Maud—staring out at the camera, with that defiant gaze. But there, too, was Maggie. Maggie who had written the diary. And she wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking at Ezra, with her blue, blue eyes.
Blue eyes met dark . . .
She had had it the wrong way round, all this time.
Hal had not inherited her dark eyes from her mother, for her mother was blond.
She had inherited them from her father. The man who had set up the camera on its tripod, started the timer, and returned to take his place in the photo.
Ezra. Daniel.
Ed.
Ezra was her father.
CHAPTER 46
* * *
Hal’s phone was upstairs in the attic, and she wore no watch, but she was sure from the stillness of the house that it must be gone midnight, probably long gone.
But there was no way she could go back to bed with this weight of truth heavy inside her, and the questions churning and churning.
There was only one person she could go to—one person who might tell her the truth.
Mrs. Warren.
And she had to go now, before Ezra woke up. If she left it until dawn . . .
Hal picked up the album, pushed back the chair, and stood, trying to summon her courage, remembering the thread across the stairs, the hissed invective in Mrs. Warren’s voice—Get out—if you know what’s good for you . . .
Like Joan of Arc, her mother had been. Like a maid going into battle.
Well, she had not inherited much from Maggie. Not her features, not her eyes or her hair, not even her sense of humor and skepticism. But perhaps she had inherited her mother’s courage.
Hal took a deep breath, steadying herself, trying to quiet the questions clamoring inside her—and then she opened the study door and stepped softly through the orangery to knock at the door of Mrs. Warren’s sitting room.
There was no answer at first, and Hal knocked a little harder, and as she did the door swung inwards, unlatched, and she saw that the gas fire in the little sitting room was on, and that the lamp on the table was burning.
Had Mrs. Warren fallen asleep in her chair?
It was pushed in front of the fire, close up, a blanket slung over the back of it making a dark shape that could have been a hunched old lady—but when Hal went cautiously forwards, her free hand outstretched in the flickering darkness, it only rocked away and then back, unmoored, and she saw that it was empty except for a couple of cushions.
“Mrs. Warren?” Hal called quietly. She tried not to let her voice shake, but there was something very eerie about the silence, broken only by the low rise and fall of a radio, and the creak, creak of the rocking chair upon the boards.
After the study, the sitting room was stiflingly overheated, and Hal wiped her brow, feeling sweat prickle across the back of her neck.
The sound of the radio was coming from behind a door at the back of the sitting room, and Hal took a cautious step towards it, but as she did so she nudged a little side table covered with pictures, and they fell, half a dozen of them.
“Shit!”
She grabbed for it, steadying the table before it could topple, but the pictures were like dominoes, clattering down in sequence, and Hal stood, frozen for a moment, her heart in her mouth, feeling its panicked thumping.
“Mrs. Warren?” she managed, her voice shaking. “I’m sorry, it’s only me, Hal.”
But no one came, and with trembling hands she began to right the pictures, one after the other.
As she did, she saw, with a growing sense of disquiet, what they were.
Ezra. All of them.
Ezra as a baby, in Mrs. Warren’s arms, his soft hand reaching out for her cheek.
Ezra as a toddler, running across the lawn.
Ezra as a young man, almost unbearably handsome, his smile flashing out, unguarded and full of wry mischief.
Ezra, Ezra, Ezra—a shrine, almost, to a lost little boy.
There was one of the three brothers together on the mantelpiece. None of Maggie, though that, perhaps, was not surprising. Not a single one of Maud. And none, save for that one picture with Ezra in her arms, of Mrs. Warren herself.
It was as if all the love in that twisted old heart, all the caring and gentleness, had settled on a single person, concentrated into a beam of adoration so ferocious that Hal felt that it could have burned the skin.
“Mrs. Warren,” she said again, a lump in her throat now, though whether it was pity or fear, she could not have said. “Mrs. Warren, wake up, please, I need to speak to you.”