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‘Who would have been grown up,’ says Florence.
‘I think they were grandkids,’ says Evie. ‘The housekeeper called them “mah weans”.’
After we’ve eaten, we walk back to our rooms, dropping Evie off first. I pause outside Florence’s door, unsure of how to say goodnight. I have slept with this woman, but that feels like a century ago. Florence slips her hand behind my head and pulls me into a gentle kiss.
‘Goodnight,’ she says, lingering for a moment as her door closes. If this were a romantic comedy, I would raise my hand to knock, but the door would open simultaneously and we’d wrestle our clothes off and stumble across the room, tumbling into bed. I watched too many movies like that with my mother on wet winter Sunday afternoons, curled up in front of the gas fire. Romantic comedies have spoiled me for real life.
Alone in my room, I replay the events of the day, remembering conversations and trying to look for hidden meanings. I know how the Arianna avoided detection on the voyage to and from Spain. And I know how Evie escaped the sinking trawler, although Sean Murdoch didn’t confirm that he picked her up.
What did he call her? The runt of the litter. That was an odd term. It’s normally used to describe the smallest and weakest in a litter of puppies or kittens. Did he know that Evie had a sister?
Unless? Unless?
I have an overwhelming urge to talk to Evie – to take her back onto the trawler and have her relive the last moments with her mother and sister – but I can’t plant a seed in her mind that Agnesa might have survived. The idea is crazy. Dangerous. Cruel.
25
Evie
I dream of children playing in the garden and singing.
Ring-a-ring o’ rosies,
A pocket full of posies.
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
My history teacher, Mr Poole, told us this nursery rhyme dates back to the Great Plague and that a ‘rosie’ was a stinky rash that developed on sufferers, and that posies were put in pockets to conceal the smell. Once I knew the origins, it stopped being cheerful or playful.
I heard it first in the attic room in the big house. I stood on tiptoes, trying to reach the windowsill to pull myself up and glimpse the children who were singing in the garden. Were they like me? I wondered. Would I be allowed out to play one day when I could talk?
The room had a sagging single bed with brass knobs on the frame, a bedside table with wormholes, and a single wooden chair with a faded floral pattern on the cushion. By the end of my stay, I knew every cobweb in every corner. I knew when the sun arrived as a thin strip of light on the wall, and how it thickened and descended and crossed the floor.
The housekeeper came three times a day, bringing me food and medicines and emptying my chamber pot. She would straighten my bedclothes and fluff up my pillows and tell me not to speak.
‘I know yer don’t understand most of what ah’m saying,’ she said, ‘but I’ll keep talkin’ because you must get lonely up here.’
She would point to the tray of food. ‘Now eat everything. Ye’re skinny as a twig.’
Later, she asked, ‘Do you understand me?’
I nodded.
She touched her throat with her hand. ‘Does it hurt?’
I nodded again.
‘Less than before?’
Another nod.
The children were still singing. I looked at the window.
‘Sorry about the racket,’ she said. ‘Mah weans make more noise than a bagpipe being beaten to death with a broom.’
I didn’t know what a bagpipe was or why it had to be beaten with a broom. I made a writing gesture, wanting a pencil and paper.
