Ember Island (38 page)

One of the warders found me, half an hour later. I was black with soot, sobbing on the ground.

“Miss Holt?” he said, scooping me up in meaty arms. “Are you hurt?”

I sobbed, barely able to make words come. “Miss Lejeune has been burned alive.”

“What?”

“I saw her go in the field, right before they lit it up.”

“Good God!” He began barking orders, noise and confusion gathered around us, men with lamps, commands to stop the burning immediately. But it was too late, it was already too late. Why didn’t they understand?

The warder—whose face I cannot bring to memory: I was so lost in the black moment of my grief and shock—carried me up the hill to Starwater. Papa, who had been alerted to some disaster, was on the verandah pulling on his coat.

“Nell?” he asked, shocked, when he saw me.

The warder deposited me on the stairs where I kept sobbing.

“She says she saw Miss Lejeune walk into the field, right before it lit up.”

I didn’t see Papa’s face because I was sobbing into my knees, but the silence was long and I heard his pain in his breathing, as he tried to find his voice. “Find her,” he managed, croaking across pain so brittle it threatened to break his throat. “Get everybody out there to find her.”

He yanked me to my feet, heedless of my pain in the heat of his own. “Are you sure? Are you sure?”

“I saw her from the tree. I ran down to catch her.”

“The tree is a long way from the cane fields.”

“I saw her red dress.”

He looked at me, horrible realisation in his eyes. Then he pressed me hard against him and I sobbed into his chest.

They are still looking for her. But there will be nothing left of her to find. Papa is out there and he still believes she might be safe. I am in the house alone. I do not know what has happened to 135, but I can only presume she was hiding in the cane ahead of whatever they planned. But my heart doesn’t hurt for the prisoner. I blame her. Somehow, she put Tilly under a spell. And she killed my Tilly as sure as she killed her husband.

I
couldn’t stop talking about the diary to Joe, as we unlocked the boat shed the next day.

“I mean, I’ve enjoyed reading all the little bits of diary, but this one was incredible. Prisoners escaping and people in burning cane fields. Like a novel, not a diary.”

“Maybe she made it up,” he said, pulling open one of the doors while Julian attempted to pull open the other. “Here, let me do that, mate,” Joe said, securing the door on the hook in the brickwork.

“I don’t know. Perhaps you’re right. I couldn’t sleep after reading it, though. Who was Tilly? Was she the governess? Eleanor mentioned her teaching Latin and Greek. Or was she the superintendent’s girlfriend?”

“Maybe she was both.”

“Oh, stop! How romantic. Like
Jane Eyre
.”

He smiled at me. “Okay, can you take Julian out of the way while I hook up my car and pull the boat out?”

“Come on, Julian,” I said, taking the little boy’s hand. We moved over to the sandy gully, where Julian found a perfectly round rock.

“Look at this,” he said, holding it perilously close to my eyes.

“It’s a beauty.”

“It’s almost like a marble,” he said. “I haven’t played with my marbles for a while. Do you play marbles?”

“Ah . . . I did for a while, when I was a child.”

“Maybe you could come and visit Dad and me sometime, and we could play marbles.”

I smiled at his artlessness. “That could be fun.”

“You like being with me and Dad, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

He grinned back at me, and I had the distinct feeling I had passed some kind of test. Joe called me and I joined him at the boat with my phone, ready to take photos to put on a boat sales website.

“Now I haven’t the faintest idea what kind of things sell boats,” I said.

“Just take photos of everything and choose the most flattering ones later,” he said.

“Dad!” Julian called from the boat shed. “Can I play in here?”

“Sure, mate. Just don’t climb anything. It’s old in there, okay?”

Julian nodded and disappeared into the shed.

“There isn’t anything in there to climb, is there?” I asked.

“There’s a platform, almost like a loft. Lots of old fishing nets and paddles and things stored up there.” He extended his hand to me. “Here, let me have the phone for a minute.”

I handed him my phone and he took some close-up photographs of the motors and the dashboard dials.

“That rip in the vinyl seat doesn’t look great,” he said.

“I suppose we could shoot around it.”

“No, go sit on it. Look happy.”

I laughed and climbed up into the boat, sat over the tear, arms extended across the back of the seat, and smiled. Joe took several photos, then helped me down.

“Is that false advertising?” I asked.

“No, we’ll say in the description that it needs some minor repairs.” He thumbed through the photos. “You certainly light up every picture you’re in, Nina.”

I watched him, his head bent as he looked through the photos, and experienced a surge of affection and longing that nearly winded me. He glanced up; I was about to say something—I don’t know what, but it would have been something foolish—when we heard a loud crack, a yelp, and a horrible thud from the boat shed.

Joe went white. “Julian,” he gasped, before turning on his heel and sprinting for the boatshed. “Julian! Julian! No. No no no.”

I was a second behind him, out of the bright light and into the dark boat shed. In an instant, I could see what had happened. The loft that Joe had spoken of was half hanging down, the wooden beam that had supported it cracked in half. Julian lay on the ground, still and not breathing. Joe bent over him, but had lost his ability to speak or think. He said, “Oh, God, oh, God,” over and over, too shocked to do anything else.

I quickly pushed in front of him. The rough wooden floor scraped my knees. I had basic first-aid training from my years working in day care, but I had never had to use it. “Call emergency,” I said to Joe.

My command snapped him out of his shock. He still had my phone in his hand, and I heard him talking to an emergency operator while I checked for a pulse then went to work on Julian: breathing into his soft damp mouth, compressing his little bony chest. Adrenaline sparked through me, flushing me with intense
heat. Life had become suddenly more real than usual; the edges of everything were sharper, the light brighter. “Come on, Julian,” I said, pressing rhythmically on his chest. Then down again to breathe air into his lungs.

And in a moment that seemed like a miracle, he gasped and started breathing on his own.

“Oh, thank God, thank God,” I said.

Joe pushed me off. “Julian? Julian? Hang on, little buddy. The helicopter’s coming.” His frantic fingers brushed the hair off his child’s forehead as he rolled him gently on his side. “Hang on, okay? You’re going to get a free ride in a helicopter.”

Julian’s eyelids flickered, his eyes rolled, then he closed them again. His color was coming back as his breathing resumed.

“My darling,” Joe said, not for an instant taking his eyes off his little boy. His tears fell on Julian’s face. “My son.”

I sat back and waited for the welcome beating of the helicopter’s blades.

•

My own problems were dim and small after watching Julian and Joe helicoptered off the island, while Lynn and Dougal stood beside me holding each other and crying with shock and fear. They went straight down to the jetty for the afternoon service back to the mainland. I made them promise to call me the moment there was any news, but I only realized later that they didn’t have my number and my phone hardly ever worked anyway.

So I wandered around my house, from verandah to verandah, completely disengaged from my work and my worries, all my mind bent on the fate of that little boy. I couldn’t stop thinking
about the feeling of his ribs under my palms, about Joe’s anguished voice.

Around nine at night, there was a knock on my door. I answered it with my heart in my mouth. It was Donna from the local shop.

“Oh,” I said, “I hadn’t expected—”

“Lynn called me and asked me to come up and see you.” Outside, a light rain had moved in, and I noticed Donna’s hair was damp. “She wanted to call you but she didn’t have your number.”

“Julian?” I asked, breathlessly.

“He’s stable. He’s got a couple of broken ribs and a bad concussion and they’ve got him in an induced coma, until some of the swelling in his brain goes down. But they say he’s going to be fine. Just fine.” Donna touched her hand. “You saved his life, Nina. Lynn said she didn’t know how they were ever to thank you.”

I started crying too. It was the first time I’d cried for a long time.

•

Life was quiet without Joe around. He was staying at the hospital until Julian was good to come home. I missed him. I missed him more than I had expected to miss him. Lynn and Dougal had been up to give me the biggest bunch of flowers I had ever seen, but I hadn’t taken them up on their offer of dinner yet, and the flowers drooped and died because I forgot to change their water. I was writing. Not much, but I was writing, every day, under the watchful eye of Eleanor’s wooden cat. I still had no hope of meeting my deadline, and I decided it was time to let Marla know and see what consequences would come.

I went to the pay phone in the bright noon of the week my
manuscript was due. I dialed her number and waited, my heart thudding hard in my throat. Marla’s secretary answered and put me straight through.

“Nina, how are you?”

“I’m . . .” Words got stuck in my throat.

Marla sighed. “I’m not an idiot,” she said. “I’ve already got you a stay of execution.”

“You have? How long?”

“Another six weeks, but that will take us up to nearly Christmas and I doubt anybody will be looking for that manuscript before January.”

Relief flooded my body. “How long have you known about this?”

“Over a month. But I didn’t want to tell you because I don’t want you to think this means you can cruise.”

“I am not cruising,” I said, hurt. “I promise you, nothing about this feels like a cruise.”

Her tone became gentle. “Nina, my dear, you’ll have to forgive me. A lot of publishing schedules have been disrupted and I’ve had to stave off some very ferocious inquiries about your fitness to produce this manuscript. I trust you. Don’t let me down.”

I wanted to tell her. I wanted to say,
Don’t trust me
. But I didn’t. I said, “I won’t let you down.”

“Now, I need to talk to you about something else.”

I leaned my back against the glass wall of the phone booth, winding the phone cord around my fingers. “Go on.”

“A journalist has been looking for you.”

A little jolt to my heart. “Elizabeth Parrish?”

“Yes, her.”

“Don’t talk to her, please. I have nothing to say to her. I think she’s getting ready to do a terrible hatchet job on me.”

“You want me to take care of it?”

“Please. Fob her off. I have nothing to say to her.”

“Consider it done. Now, get back to your desk, stay on the island, and
please
finish that book.”

“Consider it done,” I echoed, hoping and hoping that this time it would come together.

•

That afternoon, Elizabeth Parrish sent me a final text.

If you won’t talk to me I will start talking to others about you.

I ignored her. We would have to have a conversation eventually, but not now. The Widow Wayland was solving a crime, and I wasn’t about to stop her.

•

Then, finally, Joe came back.

I heard footsteps on the front verandah just after I’d turned the kitchen light on to start making dinner. A storm front had moved in, making evening come early. I was at the door before the knock came.

“Hi!” I said, too enthusiastically.

He smiled back at me. “Hi. Long time no see.”

The rain started to fall. Thunder grumbled in the distance. “How’s Julian?”

“He’s at home, in the spare room at Mum’s, with a
Young Avengers
comic and a packet of chips. We got back this morning.”

“I’m so relieved.”

“Can I come in?”

“Absolutely.” I stood aside and then closed the door behind him.

“Look, I need to apologize,” he said, before I could even invite him to sit down and pour him a glass of wine.

“For what?”

“That day. I didn’t even say thank you. In my defense, I was out of my mind.”

I touched his shoulder. “I want you to know that I have never once, in the days since the accident, thought that you should have remembered to say thank you.”

I withdrew my hand, but he caught it, and rubbed my fingers softly, almost absently, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to do.

“The crazy thing is, I know how to do CPR. I could have saved him myself, but all I could think was
he’s dead, he’s dead
.” His voice caught.

“It must have been awful for you.”

He gathered himself, met my eyes. “But you were there. Thank God for you, Nina.”

I smiled back at him, the moment gathered itself and intensified. The anticipation was real and thrilling. He pulled gently on my hand and I was in his embrace, my arms around his neck. The heat of him, the smell of him. And then his lips on mine, soft and firm all at once, insistent and gentle. My body bent back, his hands caught me in the curve of my spine and the warm passion flooded me.