فصل 45

CHAPTER 45

If Hal had not already been sitting down, she would have had to grope for a chair.

Her mother was Maud. Maud. There was no other explanation. The girl in those photographs, Ezra’s twin, growing up alongside him at Trepassen, was Hal’s mother. It was unmistakable.

And yet—it made no sense.

It had to be true. The pictures in the book did not lie. There was her mother’s face, shimmering into focus in front of her very eyes, page after page, from babyhood through to first school days, into her almost-teenage self, all the time growing towards the woman Hal knew painfully well. Her mother was not Maggie.

Which meant . . . It meant that Hester Westaway was her grandmother.

It meant that the will was valid.

But what about the birth certificate? What about the diary? What about— And then Hal realized, and it was like the moon coming out from behind a cloud. All those shapes that had been formless black confusion in the clouded darkness were illuminated, falling into their rightful places in a landscape that suddenly made sense. She could not be sure. But if she was right . . . if she was right, she had been looking at this upside down the whole time.

If she was right, nothing was as she had thought it was.

If she was right, she had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

The snow outside was still falling, and Hal pulled her coat closer around her as she turned the pages. But it was not only the cold that made her shiver this time. It was a sense of foreboding suddenly gathering around her—of the weight of the secrets of the past, and the dam that she was about to break. The deluge.

This time, as she leafed through the fading pictures with their yellowed coverings, this time there was no sense of wonder or nostalgia. This time, she felt as if she were plunging down a rabbit hole into the past.

Because the child in the photographs, laughing and playing with her twin brother in the grounds of Trepassen, was not Hal’s aunt. It was her mother—her dark eyes unmistakably like Hal’s own—but not Hal’s own.

Which meant that Maggie, the girl who had come to Trepassen, who had written that diary, who had got pregnant, who had run away and disappeared—was a stranger. Yet Hal was Maggie’s daughter. There was no other explanation. However Hal worked the maths in her head, the result was the same—Maud could not have been pregnant at the time of Hal’s birth. And Maggie was.

There was only one possibility, and it had been staring her in the face ever since she opened Mr. Treswick’s letter, but she had been too blind to see it.

Hal’s mother—the woman who had loved her, and brought her up, and cared for her—was not the woman who had given birth to her.

But what had happened? How had it happened?

Hal put her hands to her head. She felt as if she were carrying a load, immensely heavy, and immensely fragile and dangerous. She had the sense of herself tiptoeing along a narrow tightrope, and in her arms a bomb, ticking gently, and about to go off at any moment.

Because if this meant what she thought it did . . .

But she was getting ahead of herself.

Don’t rush—her mother’s voice in her head. Build your story. Lay it out—card by card.

Card by card, then.

So. What did Hal know for sure?

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.