The Light Between Oceans

by M. L. Stedman

  in her surroundings. There are soldier ants, which she knows to avoid, and she makes sure she’s a good distance from the trail they’re making. She’s not concerned. Mamma and Dadda will find her.

  As she sits there, drawing patterns in the sandy soil with a twig, she notices a strange creature, longer than her finger, approach from under the log. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen before: a long body, and legs like an insect or a spider, but two fat arms like one of the crabs Dadda catches sometimes on Janus. Fascinated, she touches it with the twig, and its tail rapidly curls up in a beautiful arch, pointing to its head. In that moment, a second creature appears, a few inches away.

  She is mesmerized by the way the insects follow her twig, trying to grab it with their crab claws. A third one emerges from under the log. The seconds pass slowly.

  As they reach the clearing, Tom gives a start. He sees a small, shod foot protruding from behind a log.

  “Lucy!” He races to the log, where the little girl sits playing with a stick. He freezes as he recognizes the shape clinging to the end of the twig as a scorpion. “Jesus, Lucy!” He grabs the little girl under her arms and lifts her high in the air as he dashes the scorpion to the ground and crushes it under his foot. “Lucy, what the hell are you doing?” he cries.

  “Dadda! But you killed it!”

  “Lucy, that’s dangerous! Did it bite you?”

  “No. It likes me. And look,” she says, opening the wide pocket at the front of her smock, proudly displaying another scorpion. “I got one for you.”

  “Don’t move!” he says, feigning calm and returning her to the ground. He lowers the twig into the pocket until the scorpion locks onto it, then slowly raises it and flings it onto the dirt, stamping on it.

  He inspected her arms and legs for signs of bites or stings. “Are you sure it didn’t sting you? Does it hurt anywhere?”

  She shook her head. “I did an aventure!”

  “You certainly did an adventure all right.”

  “Have a close look,” said Bluey. “You can’t always see the puncture marks. But she doesn’t look drowsy. That’s a good sign. Tell you the truth, I was more worried she was at the bottom of one of those soaks.”

  “Ever the optimist,” muttered Tom. “Lucy, darl, we don’t have scorpions on Janus. They’re dangerous. You mustn’t ever touch them.” He hugged her. “Where on earth have you been?”

  “I did play with Tabatha. You said to.” Tom felt a stab as he recalled his instruction earlier that morning to go outside with the cat. “Come on, sweetie. We’ve got to get you back to Mamma.” His mouth seemed newly aware of the significance of the word, as the previous night’s events came back to him.

  Isabel rushed from the veranda to meet them at the edge of the garden. She grabbed Lucy and sobbed with relief.

  “Thank God,” said Bill, standing beside Violet. Her put his arms around her. “Thank the blessed Lord. And thanks to you too, Bluey,” he said. “You’ve saved our lives.”

  All thoughts of Hannah Roennfeldt were swept from Isabel’s mind that afternoon, and Tom knew he couldn’t raise the subject again. But he was haunted by her face. The figure who had existed in the abstract was now a living woman, suffering every minute because of what he had done. Every aspect of her—the gaunt cheeks, the harrowed eyes, the chewed fingernails—were vivid in his conscience. Hardest to bear was the respect she had shown him, the trust.

  Time and again, Tom wondered at the hidden recesses of Isabel’s mind—the spaces where she managed to bury the turmoil his own mind couldn’t escape.

  When Ralph and Bluey cast off from Janus the following day, having delivered the family back to the light, the younger man said, “Cripes, things seemed a bit frosty between them, don’t you reckon?”

  “Piece of free advice, Blue—never try and work out what’s going on in someone else’s marriage.”

  “Yeah, I know, but, well, you’d think they’d be relieved that nothing happened to Lucy yesterday. Isabel was acting like it was Tom’s fault she’d wandered off.”

  “Keep out of it, boy. Time you brewed us up some tea.”

  CHAPTER 23

  It was one of the mysteries of the Great Southern District, the riddle of what happened to baby Grace Roennfeldt and her father. Some people said it just proved you still couldn’t trust a Hun: he was a spy and had finally been called back to Germany after the war. Made no difference that he was Austrian. Others, familiar with the oceans, didn’t bat an eyelid at his disappearance: “Well, what was he thinking, setting off into these waters? Must have had kangaroos in his top paddock. Wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.” There was a general sense that somehow it was God expressing disapproval for Hannah’s choice of spouse. Forgiveness is all very well, but look at the sorts of things his lot had done…

  Old Man Potts’s reward took on mythic status. Over the years, it lured people from the Goldfields, from up north, from Adelaide even, who saw a chance to make their fortune by coming up with a piece of splintered driftwood and a theory. In the early months, Hannah listened keenly to every tale that was spun of a sighting, every memory of a baby’s cry heard from the shore on the fateful night.

  With time, even her eager heart could not fail to see the holes in the stories. When she would suggest that a baby’s dress which had been “discovered” on the shore did not match the one Grace had been wearing, the reward prospector would urge her, “Think! You’re overcome with grief. How could you be expected to remember what the poor child was dressed in?” Or, “You know you’d sleep more easily if you just accepted the evidence, Mrs. Roennfeldt.” Then they would make some sour remark as they were ushered from the parlor by Gwen, who thanked them for their trouble and gave them a few shillings for the journey home.

  That January, the stephanotis was in bloom again, the same voluptuous scent heavy in the air, but it was an ever more gaunt Hannah Roennfeldt who continued her ritual journey—though less often now—to the police station, the beach, the church. “Completely off her rocker,” Constable Garstone muttered as she wandered out. Even Reverend Norkells urged her to spend less time in the stony darkness of the church and to “look for Christ in the life around her.”

  Two nights after the lighthouse celebrations, as Hannah lay awake, she heard the groan of the hinges on the letterbox. She looked at the clock, whose eerie numerals signaled three a.m. A possum, perhaps? She crept out of bed and peered from the corner of the curtain, but saw nothing. The moon had hardly risen: no light anywhere save for the faint glow of the stars which dusted the sky. Again, she heard the iron clang of the box, this time caught by the breeze.

  She lit a storm-lantern and ventured through the front door, careful not to wake her sister, only vaguely wary of disturbing any snakes which might be taking advantage of the inky blackness to hunt for mice or frogs. Her pale feet made no sound on the path.

  The door to the letterbox swung gently back and forward, giving glimpses of a shape inside. As she held the lantern closer, the outline of a small oblong emerged—a parcel. She pulled it out. Not much bigger than her hand, it was wrapped in brown paper. She looked about for any hint of how it had got there, but the darkness curled around her lamp like a closing fist. She hurried back to her bedroom, fetching her sewing scissors to cut the string. The package was addressed to her, in the same neat hand as before. She opened it.

  As she pulled out layer upon layer of newspaper, something made a noise with each movement. As the last of the packing was removed, there, returning the soft glimmer of the lantern, was the silver rattle her father had commissioned in Perth for his granddaughter. There was no mistaking the embossed cherubs on the handle. Beneath the rattle was a note.

  She is safe. She is loved and cared for. Please pray for me.

  Nothing more. No date, no initial, no sign.

  “Gwen! Gwen, quick!” She hammered on her sister’s door. “Look at this! She’s alive! Grace is alive. I knew it!”

  Gwen stumbled from her bed, ready to
hear yet another outlandish idea. But confronted by the rattle, she became instantly alert, for she had sat with her father at the counter in Caris Brothers up in Perth as he discussed the design with the silversmith. She touched it warily, as though it were an egg that might hatch a monster.

  Hannah was weeping and smiling, laughing at the ceiling, at the floor. “I told you, didn’t I? Oh, my darling Grace! She’s alive!”

  Gwen laid a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s not get carried away, Hannah. We’ll go and see Dad in the morning and get him to come with us to the police. They’ll know what to do. Now, go back to sleep. You’ll need a clear head tomorrow.”

  Sleep was out of the question. Hannah was terrified that if she closed her eyes she might wake up. She went out to the backyard and sat in the swinging seat where once she had sat with Frank and Grace, and looked at the thousands of stars that dotted the hemisphere; they soothed her with their steadiness, like pinpricks of hope in the night. Little lives could barely be heard or felt on a canvas this vast. Yet she had the rattle, and the rattle brought her hope. This was no hoax. This was a talisman of love—a symbol of her father’s forgiveness; a thing touched by her child and those who treasured her. She thought back to her Classics studies, and the tale of Demeter and Persephone. Suddenly this ancient story was alive for her, as she contemplated her daughter’s return from wherever she had been held captive.

  She felt—no, she knew—she was coming to the end of a dreadful journey. Once Grace was back with her, life would begin again—together they would harvest the happiness so long denied them both. She found herself laughing at funny memories: Frank struggling to change a nappy; her father’s attempt at composure when his granddaughter brought up her recent feed onto the shoulder of his best suit. For the first time in years, her belly was tight with excitement. If she could just make it to the morning.

  When a glimmer of doubt crept into her thoughts, she turned her mind to the specific: the way Grace’s hair was slightly thinner at the back from rubbing against her sheet; the way her fingernails had little half-moons at their base. She would anchor her child in memory and draw her home by sheer will—by ensuring that in one place on this earth there was the knowing of every aspect of her. She would love her home to safety.

  The town was full of talk. It was a dummy had been found. No, a teething ring. It was something that proved the baby was dead; it was something that proved she was alive. The father had killed her; the father had been murdered. From the butcher’s to the greengrocer’s, from the farrier’s to the church hall, the story acquired and shed facts and frills as it passed from mouth to ear, always with a “tut” or a pursing of lips to disguise the thrill of each teller.

  “Mr. Potts, we’re not for a minute doubting you can recognize your own purchases. But I’m sure you’ll appreciate that it doesn’t prove the child’s alive.” Sergeant Knuckey was trying to calm the now ruddy-faced Septimus, who stood before him, chin up, chest out, like a prizefighter.

  “You’ve got to investigate it! Why would someone have waited until now to hand it in? In the middle of the night? Not tried to claim the reward?” His whiskers seemed even whiter as his face grew more puce.

  “All due respect, but how the bloody hell would I know?”

  “That’s enough of that language, thank you very much! There are ladies present!”

  “I apologize.” Knuckey pursed his lips. “We will be investigating, I can assure you.”

  “How, exactly?” demanded Septimus.

  “We… I… You have my word that I will.”

  Hannah’s heart sank. It would be the same as before. Still, she took to staying up late into the night, watching the letterbox, waiting for a sign.

  “Right, I’ll need a picture of this, Bernie,” announced Constable Lynch. Standing at the counter of Gutcher’s studio, he produced the silver rattle from a felt bag.

  Bernie Gutcher looked askance. “Since when have you been interested in babies?”

  “Since it was about evidence!” the policeman replied.

  It took time for the photographer to set up his equipment, and as he did, Lynch looked around the walls at the portraits illustrating choices of style and frame. His gaze passed evenly over an array of examples that included the local football team, Harry Garstone and his mother, and Bill and Violet Graysmark with their daughter and granddaughter.

  A few days later, a photograph was duly pinned to the noticeboard outside the police station, showing the rattle next to a ruler for scale, and asking for anyone who recognized it to come forward. Beside it was a notice from Septimus Potts, Esquire, announcing that the reward for information leading to the safe return of his granddaughter Grace Ellen Roennfeldt now stood at three thousand guineas, and that all approaches would be treated in the strictest confidence.

  Down Partageuse way, a thousand guineas could buy you a farm. Three thousand—well, with three thousand guineas there was no telling what you could do.

  “Are you sure?” Bluey’s mother asked again as she paced the kitchen, her hair still in the rag curlers in which she had slept. “Think, boy, for God’s sake!”

  “No. I can’t be sure—not completely sure—it was so long ago. But I’d never seen anything that flash before, and in a baby’s cot!” His hands shook as he rolled a cigarette, and he fumbled the match as he lit it. “Ma, what am I going to do?” Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead beneath his red curls. “I mean, maybe there’s some reason for it. Or maybe I was just dreaming.” He drew fiercely on his cigarette, and exhaled a thought. “P’raps I should wait until the next trip out to Janus and ask him then, man to man.”

  “Man to monkey, more like! You’re more lame-brained than I thought if that’s your idea of what to do. Three thousand guineas!” She waved three fingers in his face. “Three thousand guineas is more than you’d make on that godforsaken boat in a hundred years!”

  “But it’s Tom we’re talking about. And Isabel. As if they’d do anything wrong. And even if it is the same rattle—it could have just washed up and they found it. You should see some of the stuff that ends up on Janus. He found a musket once! And a rocking horse.”

  “No wonder Kitty Kelly sent you packing. Not an ounce of ambition. Not an ounce of common sense.”

  “Ma!” Bluey was stung by his mother’s jibe.

  “Put a fresh shirt on. We’re going to the station.”

  “But it’s Tom! It’s a mate, Mum!”

  “It’s three blessed thousand guineas! And if you don’t get in first, old Ralph Addicott might be down there spinning them the same story.” She added, “Kitty Kelly’s not going to look down her nose at a man with that much money, is she? Now brush your hair. And put that wretched cigarette out.”

  CHAPTER 24

  At first Tom thought he was imagining the shape of the Windward Spirit as it approached, lashed by the tail end of the cyclone which had been whirling down the West Australian coast. He called to Isabel, to check if she saw it too. They had been back on Janus only a week. No boat was due again until the middle of March, when it was scheduled to take them to the mainland before their transfer to Point Moore. Perhaps it had engine trouble on the way from another job? Perhaps Ralph or Bluey had been injured in all the wild weather?

  The swell was treacherous, and it had taken all the skill of the crew to dock the vessel without smashing it into the jetty. “Any port in a storm, eh, Ralph?” Tom shouted above the wind as the boat came alongside, but the old man did not respond.

  When, instead of Bluey emerging from the back of the boat, Tom recognized the craggy, timeless features of Neville Whittnish, his confusion deepened. Four policemen followed.

  “Crikey, Ralph! What’s all this?”

  Again Ralph failed to reply. A chill crept through Tom. He looked up the slope and saw Isabel edging back, out of sight of the jetty. One of the policemen staggered down the gangway like a drunk, and took a moment to adjust to the stationary dock. The others followed.

  “T
homas Edward Sherbourne?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sergeant Spragg, Albany police. This is my assistant, Constable Strugnell. Sergeant Knuckey and Constable Garstone you may recognize from Point Partageuse station.”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Mr. Sherbourne, we’re here about Frank Roennfeldt and his daughter, Grace.”

  It was a king-hit, knocking the breath out of him for a moment. His neck was stiff, his face suddenly waxy-pale. The waiting was over. It was like finally getting the signal for a hop-over after days of waiting in the trenches.

  The sergeant fished something from his pocket—a piece of cardboard that flipped about in the blustery wind. He held it steady between both hands.

  “Do you recognize this, sir?”

  Tom took in the photograph of the rattle. He glanced up at the cliff as he considered his reply: Isabel was gone. Time balanced on a fulcrum—there would be no going back after this.

  He gave a great sigh, as though relieved of a physical weight, and hung his head, eyes closed. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Ralph’s: “Tom. Tom, son… What the bloody hell’s been going on out here?”

  While the police question Tom alone, Isabel retreats to the little crosses near the cliff. The rosemary bushes move in and out of focus, like her thoughts. She is shaking as she goes over the scene: the shortest of the policemen, the youngest, had been very solemn as he showed her the photograph, and could not have failed to see her eyes widen and her breath stop at the sight.

  “Someone sent the rattle to Mrs. Roennfeldt, last week.”

  “Last week?”

  “Looks like the same person as sent her a letter getting on for two years ago.”

  This last news was too much to make sense of.

  “We’ll want to ask you some questions once we’ve spoken to your husband, but in the meantime, perhaps you should—” He shrugged awkwardly. “Don’t go too far.”

  Isabel looks out over the cliff: there is so much air, yet she struggles for breath as she pictures Lucy, having an afternoon sleep while in the room next door, police question her father. They will take her away. Her mind races: she can hide her somewhere on the island. She can—she can set off in the boat with her. She calculates quickly—the rescue boat is always ready to launch at an instant. If she can pretend she’s taking Lucy… where? Anywhere, it doesn’t matter. She can get the girl to the boat and they can be off the island before anyone realizes they’ve gone. And if they get into the right current, they’ll head north… She pictures the two of them, making land far up toward Perth, together, safe. Logic intervenes to remind her of the risks of the southerly current and the certain death of the Southern Ocean. Urgently she explores another route. She can swear that the child is her own, that the dinghy washed up with two dead bodies, and they kept only the rattle. She clutches at any possibility, no matter how absurd.

  The same impulse keeps returning: “I must ask Tom what to do.” Then she feels sick, as she remembers this is all Tom’s doing. It hits her just as when she woke in the night after learning of her brother Hugh’s death and thought, “I must tell Hugh the awful news.”

  Gradually, some part of her concedes there is no escape, and fear gives way to anger. Why? Why could he not just leave things be? Tom is supposed to protect his family, not rip it apart. Deep beneath awareness, a tar-thick feeling has been disturbed, and now looks for a safe harbor. Her thoughts spiral into darkness—he has been planning this for two years. Who is this man who could lie to her, tear her baby away? She remembers the sight of Hannah Roennfeldt touching his arm, and wonders what really happened between them. She retches violently onto the grass.

  The ocean thundered against the cliff, showering spittle right up to where Isabel stood, hundreds of feet above the water, on the edge. The spray had soaked into the crosses and her dress was damp with it.

  “Izzy! Isabel!” Tom’s voice was all but blown off the island by the gale.

  A petrel was wheeling in the air, circling, circling, before plummeting hard as lightning into the jagged swell to retrieve a herring. But luck and the storm were on the side of the fish, and it wriggled from the bird’s beak, falling back to the waves.

  Tom covered the few hundred yards to his wife. The petrel continued to hover on the storm currents, knowing that the tumult of the water would make easy pickings of any fish not sheltered in the deepest reefs.

  “We haven’t got much time,” Tom said, pulling Isabel close. “Lucy’ll be awake any minute.” The police had been questioning him for the past hour, and two of them were now heading down toward the old graves on the other side of the island, armed with shovels.

  Isabel searched his face as though he were a stranger. “The policeman said someone sent Hannah Roennfeldt a rattle…”

  He held her gaze, but said nothing.

  “… that someone wrote to her two years ago, to say her baby was alive.” She wrestled with the implications a little longer. “Tom!” was all she could say, her eyes wide with terror. “Oh, Tom!” she said again, stepping backward.

  “I had to do something, Izzy. God knows I’ve tried to explain. I just wanted her to know her child was safe.”

  She looked at him, as if trying to make sense of words shouted from far away,