by Anna Romer
Taking the steps two at a time, I ran up along the passage towards the open doorway. As I reached it, part of the roof collapsed behind me and a beam swung down, striking my arm, knocking the torch from my hand. I staggered through the doorway, bursting out into the garden, only stopping when I got to the edge of the orchard.
Soaked to the skin with rain and whipped by the wind, I hugged my arms around my body and looked back. As I did, lightning lit the sky. The scene burned into my eyes. The verdant green hillock. The churning clouds behind. The rain lashing sideways, driven by the wind. At the centre was the dead oak, its silvery trunk leaning on an angle, its bare branches quivering. As the world went dark again, the great trunk groaned, listing further over. Roots split and tore from the ground, spraying soil and stone. The tree gave a shudder, and finally fell. With a violent crash that seemed to shake the world, it collapsed onto the hillock.
The rain began to lash harder. The wind hurled a cloud of leafy grit into my face, but I held my ground, transfixed as another lightning flash illuminated the wreckage.
Beneath the oak’s heavy trunk, the knoll had collapsed. Where there had once been a mound, was now only a bank of rubble and shattered branches. The icehouse door lay on the path, its sturdy timber frame skewed around it. The icehouse was gone. The passageways under the hillock that had once led underground, the thick walls insulated with sawdust and stone, the rock ceiling upheld by support beams, and the silent chamber at its heart – all now buried beneath a heavy load of stone and debris.
Where the bones of a lost girl were finally at rest.
While the storm raged outside, I sat in Edwin’s office by candlelight, staring at the strongbox set into the wall. The power was out, the telephone had gone dead. I had navigated my way through the dark kitchen by the glow of embers in the Warmray, found a stash of candles in the pantry, and then gone upstairs to change my sodden clothes for dry ones. I found a first aid box, using what was inside to disinfect and then bandage my arm. Nothing felt broken, but bruises were already blooming and the skin along my forearm was grazed where the beam had struck it.
All the while, Basil had trailed behind me, meowing fretfully. He now sat on the desk enjoying a wash, apparently unbothered by the rumbling thunder outside.
The icehouse keys were still in my pocket. I took them out. Crumbs of soil still clung to the large brass key where I had used it to dig the bracelet from the icehouse floor. I set that one aside – I wouldn’t need it anymore. I had assumed that both keys belonged to the icehouse, but as I examined the smaller one, I couldn’t help wondering.
It fitted perfectly.
I turned the strongbox handle, and with a whisper of metal on wood, the door opened. The emptiness inside was a shock. I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d been expecting. Jewellery. Bundles of cash. Silver candelabras.
A box of secrets.
Anything but emptiness. I shone the candle into the cavity, just to confirm what I was seeing. Then the soft light caught the edge of what at first I thought was a book. On closer inspection, I found it was a slim bundle of papers tied with black ribbon.
A shiver of anticipation flew across my skin.
They were letters.
37
Bitterwood, May 1993
Some days his memories of Clarice were so bright and clear that he truly believed he was once again a young man. He could hear her laughter, see the glint of sun in her reddy gold hair, feel his body stir to her beauty; and always, when he blinked her away and startled back to reality with a wrenching shock, the ache of her loss was unbearable.
Edwin crossed his bedroom and went to the window, peered through the patina of grime at the sky beyond. The sun had set, leaving behind a trail of purple clouds. Soon, the day would lose its colour. How he resented that grey time before nightfall. Of all the lonely hours in his day, twilight was the loneliest.
He was an old man, while the woman he loved – still loved, despite the eternity that now lay between them – would remain forever as he had last seen her. Achingly beautiful, her skin smooth and free of lines, her sweet lips the colour of cherries.
He shook his head. He was privy to the terrible secret of those who grow old: that inside, he was still young. But the shell that concealed his youth was frail, a wrinkled carapace that shuffled hither and thither. Preserved, it sometimes seemed to him, only by the vinegar of his regret.
Taking the album from his bedside table, he flipped through the images until he found his favourite. Clarice, with her copper locks, and little Orah with her long golden waves. Sitting together on the garden bench, their smiles alight, the mulberry trees around them dotted with blossom. Happy times.
He had known they couldn’t last.
Not known exactly, but rather sensed the approach of something large and overwhelmingly dark. He’d sensed it the way a dog detects the drop in barometric pressure before a storm. There was no logic to the feeling. He simply knew in his bones that the sky was too perfectly blue, and that any moment a cloud might drift across to obscure it. A cloud.
Or a shadow in the shape of a man.
He sighed and turned the page, gazed sadly at another snap taken in the orchard. Clarice and Orah seated under the blossoming cherry tree, tired after a long day, but still their faces glowed. He had pictures of Dulcie, and of Ron as a boy, but he always found himself returning to his favourites, the ones of Orah and Clarice. They were the ones he spent his nights bowed over, the ones whose pages he stained with his tears.
Today, it was finally time to let them go.
To erase them from the memory of the world.
From his memory.
He closed the album. Downstairs in the kitchen, he opened the Warmray. The fire had burned away, but the embers were still fierce. Without pausing, without giving himself the opportunity to waver, he thrust the album facedown into the fire and shut the hatch. Then he hastened through the kitchen door and locked it firmly behind him, determined not to weaken and retrieve his precious photos from the fire.
He passed the rearing house without a glance, following the path down through the orchard and around into the green hollow beneath the dead oak.
For a while, he stood at the icehouse door, unable to remember why he was there. Digging in his pocket, he took out a matchbox. Struck a match, and let the wind blow it out. A voice whispered to him from the past, a fragile murmur that might have been the rustle of leaves, or the rub of scarlet silk on soap-scented skin. He found himself tumbling back through time, to that dreadful night in 1931.
He could still see her huddled there, on the icehouse floor. Her head resting on the pillow he had fashioned from his cardigan, her hands tucked neatly at her face. She might have been sleeping. He had lingered, but only for a moment. A muffled voice had interrupted his farewell and called him back to the surface; it could only have been Clarice.
He had emerged from the icehouse, still trembling. He’d been right. Clarice’s voice, muffled by the heavy walls of the icehouse, now seemed alarmingly loud in the cold air. Edwin hesitated on the edge of the orchard, trying to gather enough calm to face her. His earlier cries for help must have woken her, and now she wanted to know where he was.
He shuddered.
Clarice was so frail. So afraid of losing the baby she carried. So desperate for a little one to love that her old fears were creeping back, her old nightmares. Edwin glared up at the sky, cursing God, cursing Hanley Dane, cursing fate and the twisted string of events that had brought Orah into their lives and then snatched her away again. Most of all, he cursed himself. He had believed he was doing the right thing, keeping Orah from the wreck of a man who had once been her father; had believed he was saving her from a life of destitution. Now he saw that he had not saved her at all, but condemned her.
‘Edwin?’
Clarice’s cry trembled in the cold night air. It sounded to Edwin as though a window was open somewhere, and he imagined Clarice in her nightgown, shivering as the wind blew up from the
sea.
He began to run. She was not at the window, but sitting on the edge of the bed. Edwin switched on the light. When he saw the blood, his knees buckled, but he forced himself to go to her. Crashing to the floor in front of her, he gripped her arms and searched her face. How pale she was, how gaunt. Her skin was slick with clammy sweat, her body trembling violently. Had she been that way earlier that night when he’d given her the draught of medicine? He couldn’t remember.
‘Dr Vetch,’ she whispered, and grimaced in pain. Circling her thin arms around her enormous belly, she hugged herself, rocking forward and back, shivering. ‘Hurry, Edwin. The baby’s coming.’
Thirty minutes later the doctor arrived, and delivered Clarice of a healthy baby boy. Dr Vetch must have assumed the blood on Edwin’s shirt was Clarice’s blood; he barely glanced at it. Such a lot of blood. Edwin stripped off his shirt and threw it on the pile of soiled bedclothes with Clarice’s blood-soaked nightdress. He dragged on his dressing gown and stood idly, watching as Vetch attended to the child, checking lungs and heart with his stethoscope.
Later, after Vetch had gone, Edwin washed the little boy and wrapped him in a soft blanket, then settled him into Clarice’s arms. Edwin sat at the bedside. When Clarice’s thin fingers sought his hand, he clutched them gratefully.
‘A son,’ she said, her voice gentle with disbelief. ‘Edwin, can you believe it? A dear little boy of our own.’ Then she looked at him and the brightness left her face. ‘Oh Edwin, where were you? I called and called, but you never came. I called until my throat was raw. Where were you? Didn’t you hear me? Orah must be fast asleep. I called her too, but—’
Edwin began to weep. He was teetering on a knife edge. I must not fall, he told himself. For her sake, I must not fall. With a gargantuan effort, he forced a smile, wiped his face and murmured something about tears of relief. Part of him still lingered in the cool sanctuary of the icehouse, perhaps it always would. He was a ghost, a creature of such frail substance that he could barely breathe. Yet in that heartbeat of silence, he knew what he must do. Clarice seemed so fragile, her face ragged and pale, her lips bitten and bloody, her eyes brightly deranged.
‘Look, Edwin, isn’t he perfection? His tiny fingers, his dear little face . . . such a perfect sweetheart. Oh darling, I want to call him Ronald.’
Of course she did, and surprisingly, Edwin was glad. Joy flowed into his shrivelled heart. Too many years had passed since Clarice had called him darling. Her endearment electrified him. In that moment, he would have given anything, even happily died for her, if only to hear her murmur his name that sweetly again. As he gazed at the tiny bundle in her arms, the bundle they both had dreamed of for so long, he let himself believe, for one instant, that all was well in their world.
Then reality crashed around him. He could not tell her, he realised. Not about Hanley and the knocking on the door. And not about Orah. Nor could he tell her where he had put the girl. She must never know. Even the merest whisper of shock would send Clarice over the edge. The prospect of spinning more lies, of weaving a web of deceit between them, made his stomach churn, but what other choice did he have? Lies, as much as he hated to tell them, were really all he had left to give Clarice.
He realised then that this birth was not a joy. Rather, it was a curse. Each time he looked into his son’s face, it would haunt him.
‘Edwin dear, fetch Orah, will you? It’s nearly dawn. I want her to meet her new brother.’
‘Let’s get you cleaned up first,’ he said kindly. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I was . . . You see, there was—’ He stopped, overcome by a helplessness he’d never known before. ‘I’m so very sorry, my dear. But I’m pleased as well. Look at him.’ He swallowed around the lump lodged painfully in his throat. ‘He certainly is a handsome little fellow.’
In the days that followed – dark days sweetened only by the pink-faced little boy Clarice could hardly bear to let out of her sight – Clarice badgered him endlessly about Orah. Where was she, why hadn’t she come to see the baby? Had she taken ill, as Edith had all those years ago? Was she all right? Then, on the fourth day, Clarice demanded that Edwin tell her the truth.
Edwin told her, as gently as he could, that Orah had gone to stay with her father for a while, a sort of holiday, really, and that she would return in a month or so. Clarice didn’t need to worry herself; Orah was coming back, she was coming back. He hoped the lie would buy him time, stall Clarice’s questions until she was strong enough to bear the truth, but he quickly saw that he was wrong.
Clarice asked repeatedly, Why did Orah not come to say goodbye? When Edwin could not answer, she withdrew deeper into herself. She refused to eat. She turned her face away when Edwin tried to make her drink. She could not sleep. Black shadows appeared around her eyes. When her milk stopped flowing, Edwin bought formula and heated it in a bottle, but Clarice waved it away. He needs his mother’s milk, she insisted, squeezing the baby tighter in her arms. Edwin wanted to bathe the child, to wash away the smell of Clarice’s sickness, but Clarice rejected his attempts to take the baby. For two days, the little boy cried from hunger or distress, perhaps both, until Edwin’s heart could stand it no longer.
Dr Vetch returned several times that week. Administering injections, monitoring her pulse, speaking with a cheery voice in the hope of rousing Clarice’s spirits. Edwin moved to the guest room along the hall, to give her space. Another day passed, then another. Still, Clarice rejected Edwin’s offerings of soup or tea, or dry toast and honey, even the warmed milk with brandy that Dr Vetch recommended. Still the baby cried.
And then, the letter.
Edwin palmed his face as the ink-stained page drifted into his mind’s eye. He wished he had the power to block it from his memory, but it had seared itself there, indelible as a scar.
Bitterwood, 1931
Her fingers were numb; she could barely hold the pen. Ink splatters covered the paper. Dear, she managed to write, but then another wet splodge fell from the nib, and in her haste she dragged the side of her hand through the mess, making it worse.
Making everything worse.
Dear Edwin, she wrote. Then stalled. The words she had intended to say jumbled in her mind. She grabbed the tail end of a sentence and scratched it across the page, but the nib flicked up more ink spots. Screwing up that attempt, she took out a fresh leaf.
Dear Edwin, she began again. Her fingers trembled, her shoulders shook with concentration. Just as she was forming the words in her mind, the baby began to cry. She glanced over her shoulder to the cot. The child had a fragile tearful smell that made her think of the ocean. He had small gooey fingers like starfish tentacles, and his grip on her was surprisingly strong—
The room was suddenly hot. She couldn’t breathe. She ran to the window and flung it open, gulped in the cold air. Her head pounded. For a moment she couldn’t remember what she had been trying to do.
The wind blew hard and she gripped the sill, steadying herself. Letting her thoughts untangle. For a while, there was only the delicious cold air, damp with sea spray, and the fresh salt-seasoned darkness. She wished she could stay adrift in that moment forever.
Once, when she was a child, a relative had given her a tiny seahorse preserved in a specimen jar of alcohol. It fascinated her, but it had also instilled a trembly sort of terror. An animal so mysterious and rare did not belong in a bottle. She had lain awake at night, watching it on her bedside table. It was a question mark of a creature drifting in its glass bubble, its pale body catching the moonlight. After a week, she could stand it no more. She crept out of the house into the garden and smashed the specimen bottle with a brick. She scraped the seahorse into her mother’s roses with the toe of her boot, and then hurried back to bed.
Years later, when she was nineteen, she had received a letter from Ronald’s mother. She had known, of course, even before she opened it, what it would say. She knew Ronald was gone, knew by the emptiness, the ache in her chest.
Sitting very sti
ll in her mother’s parlour, she had torn open a corner of the envelope, but then stopped. The image of the seahorse flashed into her mind. With it came her old terror, her old fascination. She saw herself as though from a faraway place, a curious specimen poised in a single sorrowful moment that would, for the rest of her life, define her.
The memory passed.
Behind her in the room, the baby’s cries dwindled, ebbed away. The child made a hiccupping sound, and Clarice held her breath. Don’t look at him. Don’t go near. Instead, she fixed her gaze on the world outside. Searching, praying to glimpse a slight figure with a trail of fair hair slipping through the shadows of the garden, perhaps on her way to see Clarice, to visit the new baby—
The ache in her chest made her gasp.
It was cruel, to torture herself. Orah was not coming. Edwin had lied about the girl’s whereabouts, but Clarice did not have the heart to press him further. To endure what he might say.
She clung to the windowsill, forcing her gaze outwards. The headland was a grey blur. Waves crashed against the rocks at the base, and overhead a lone sea eagle wheeled in the predawn sky. Below her in the garden, the trees swayed in the wind. Somewhere, a branch cracked.
A cry answered from the cot, a gurgle. Then the baby filled his lungs and let out a bellow that rose in pitch until it became a shrill wail. Clarice ran back to the writing table, snatched up her pen, and dunked its nib in the ink.
Dear Edwin . . .
The words came then, gushing from her in a hectic flood. The nib sped across the page, splashing words and ink and dark regret in a jumbled mess that she prayed Edwin would somehow decipher.
She folded the note once, and then slid it beneath the inkbottle. Her heart began to buck against her ribs like a frightened horse, and she stood for a moment in the centre of the room, lost. Her only lifeline was the baby’s thin wail, lifting around her like a thread of hand-spun silk, and then unravelling into a cry so desolate that it stole away her breath. She wanted to snatch that cry from the air, pull herself along it and find, at the other end, the loving mother she had once been . . . but that was an illusion. There was nothing left of that person. There were no soft arms, no soothing voice, no enchanting stories; no part of her being that a small child might burrow into and call home.
