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‘If I say that I envied you…’
She looked up at him. ‘Then I’d say that you haven’t heard the whole story. One evening a young girl came to the clinic. She’d run away from her husband, who’d beaten her pretty badly. She’d run away before, back to her family, but they’d sent her back to him. She was fifteen years old, and pregnant.’
‘What did you do?’ Lucas tried to drive the image of Ava from his head. Just a year younger than a girl who’d seen more than anyone should have to.
‘I should have passed her over to the hospital authorities and let them work things out.’ She shrugged. ‘As foreign aid workers, we had to be careful not to interfere in cultural matters. But I knew that she’d probably end up either back with her husband or in disgrace with her family, and I couldn’t just watch that happen. So I hid her.’
‘Where?’
‘I was living in a house with two Australian nurses. They were both away so I took her home. Gave her something to eat and put her to bed. She was so frightened that I’d turn her over to the police; her husband’s cousin was the chief of police for the area. I found a women’s shelter in Dhaka and arranged a place for her there, and two days later I borrowed a car and took her to the railway station. I bought her a ticket and gave her what money I had, and put her on the train.’
‘So she got away safely?’ Lucas was clawing for some part of a happy ending here, because he knew from Thea’s face that there was more, and it wasn’t good.
‘I don’t know. The woman from the shelter was meant to be meeting her at the other end…’ She shrugged. ‘I never knew. Her husband had come to the clinic, looking for her, and I thought I’d done a pretty good job of convincing him that I didn’t know where she was. But when I arrived back from the station he’d called in the police and they’d searched the house. They arrested me.’
‘For helping a fifteen-year-old girl who shouldn’t have been married in the first place?’
>
‘It happens. The official marriage age in Bangladesh for girls is eighteen, but fifty per cent of young women are married before that age.’ Her voice became calm. As if the cold, hard statistic was somehow protecting her.
She couldn’t retreat from it now. Somehow he had to keep her in touch with her feelings, however devastating.
‘What happened to you then?’ She shook her head, and Lucas rose, kneeling in front of her, taking hold of her hand. ‘What happened to you then, Thea?’
‘They locked me up. The husband said I’d kidnapped the girl.’
‘What was her name, Thea? Say her name.’
The pain in her eyes was almost unbearable. ‘Ayesha.’
‘And they wanted you to tell them where she was?’
‘Yes. They questioned me the next day, for hours. They said I’d be charged and I’d go to prison for a long time.’
‘Did they hurt you?’
She looked up at him, a ghost of a grim smile on her face. ‘No, they didn’t beat me up or anything. Prisons and police cells in Bangladesh aren’t very nice places, but they treated me fairly and I had a lawyer. Not that he did very much. Just told me that I ought to say where Ayesha was.’
Perhaps this was the thing that she’d hidden all these years. The guilt of betraying a helpless child.
‘I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to even try to hold out against them.’
‘I knew that if it ever came to trial I’d have to defend myself. But in the meantime I tried to convince myself that I really didn’t know where she was. Repeated it to myself over and over again at night.’
The words hit Lucas like a blow to the chest. Thea hadn’t told them. She’d locked herself away behind a protective shell, which had become as much of a prison to her as physical walls. ‘How long…?’
‘Two weeks. It wasn’t so bad.’
‘Don’t say that. I’m not stupid, I know it must have been horrible.’
She nodded. ‘There were rats. At night they used to turn the lights out and I could hear them scratching in the dark. I just had a mattress to sleep on, and it smelled. There wasn’t enough water to wash properly. And they just kept shouting questions at me.’
She covered her ears, squeezing her eyes shut, as if to block it all out. Lucas pulled her towards him, holding her tight. ‘It’s all right. It’s okay, Thea. You’re safe now.’
‘No. I’ll never be safe. You don’t understand.’
Holding her now was too little and too late, but it was all he could do. ‘You did a very brave thing, Thea. I couldn’t have done it.’
