Ember Island (48 page)

I raced to the laundry, tipped out my dirty washing, and followed Joe and Stacy down to the boat shed.

They chatted ahead of me, no awkwardness between them. I thought about how Joe had said he loved me. I wondered how different he’d feel if I told him the truth about the Widow Wayland. What if he saw it differently from Stacy? I thought of the admiration he’d expressed for my creativity. He would be disappointed; he might even think I’m a liar.

The boat shed was dark and musty. I could see the new beams Joe had nailed in.

“You know you didn’t have to do this,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” he replied. “Julian broke the old ones.” He smiled. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“Consider me surprised.”

“The box is up in the back corner of the loft. I’ll go up and hand down the papers for you to put in the basket. Okay?”

“Okay,” Stacy said.

We watched Joe climb up on the new beams and haul himself into the loft.

“Be careful,” I said. “No more accidents in here.”

He came to the edge of the loft with the first handful of papers. “I’ve reinforced it,” he said.

Joe kept passing down handfuls of papers and we piled the papers as neatly as we could in the laundry basket, then took them back up to the house.

At the door, Joe hesitated, clearly hoping for an invitation to come in.

“Thanks, Joe,” I said, outside the door, my hand on the doorknob, my body barring the way in. “I didn’t even think of looking in the boat shed for more papers. Largely because I only recently found out I had a boat shed.”

Stacy, Joe, and I stood there for a moment in awkward silence,
then Stacy slipped past me with the laundry basket. “I’ll leave you to it,” she said.

When she was gone, I closed the door behind her, leaving Joe and me alone on the verandah. Joe smiled at me sadly. “So,” he said.

“So,” I replied.

“So you’ve been avoiding me and now you’re not going to invite me in?”

“I don’t think it can work,” I blurted.

“You still love Cameron?”

I nearly laughed. There was no way I loved Cameron, and my feelings for Joe were burning a hole in my ribs. “I don’t think it can work,” I said, with more conviction this time because it felt so true. I didn’t want him to know the truth about me, so I had to let him go.

He smiled tightly and, without a word, turned and left.

I took a moment to gather myself and went inside.

Stacy had the laundry basket on the floor of the living room. She’d moved the coffee table up against the wall and was slowly sorting. “You broke up with him?” she asked, her head bent over the box.

“There was nothing to break up.” I knelt next to her. “You know what I’m hoping to find, don’t you?”

“I’m half hoping you won’t find it,” she said.

We dived in.

•

Letters and short stories and poems and essays. We sifted through them all. They appeared to be in no order, as though the pages had been dropped, regathered haphazardly, and thrown in the box.

It was Stacy who found it.

“Widow Wayland!” she shrieked, snatching up a sheaf of papers.

I could see immediately it wasn’t a full manuscript, but I took them from her hands anyway.

“
Dark Horses
, a Widow Wayland Mystery,” I read from the front page. My hands shook.

“Go on,” she said, leaning into my shoulder.

“It’s not a full novel.” I already had the front half of a novel. I didn’t need this; I couldn’t use this.

“The rest might be somewhere else.”

But I went to the last page in the bundle and read the last paragraph aloud to Stacy. “And then the Widow Wayland became disillusioned because no man would publish—nor even read without some prejudiced idea of ‘women’s stories’—her manuscripts and so she ran off to Havana with a handsome young man and lived happily ever after. THE END.”

“What does that mean?” Stacy said. “Does that happen in the story?”

“Of course not. That was Eleanor, angry that she had been rejected.”

Stacy picked up a manila envelope, stuffed with folded papers. “Oh yes, she was rejected. There are dozens of letters in here, telling her to take her manuscript elsewhere.”

“And no doubt a copy of one of those letters is what has that nosy journalist interested,” I said. I read the last lines over and over. She gave up. Eleanor gave up.

Stacy touched my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“I’m going to have to write this book, aren’t I?”

Stacy looked at me, waited for me to finish.

“This is it. She stopped. She gave up, Stacy. But I’m not going to. I am absolutely not going to give up. Eleanor was writing at a
time when it was so difficult for women. Everything’s been easy for me and all I do is whine. I have to finish this book, and then write another and another. For Eleanor. Because she couldn’t.”

Stacy leaned in to hug me. “She would have been so proud.”

“Except for the part where I plagiarized her,” I said, through a mouthful of Stacy’s dark hair.

“You mean the part where you took her unpublishable manuscript and made millions of people read about the Widow Wayland and see her on the television?” Stacy sat back. “Don’t tell me she wouldn’t have been pleased.”

I felt a smile curl the corner of my lip. “Maybe you’re right.”

•

I called the journalist myself. I wasn’t going to hide behind Marla anymore. Down at the pay phone, with Stacy hovering in the background patting a dog tied up outside the coffee shop. The warm sea breeze and the smell of seaweed that had become familiar to me. Like home.

“Elizabeth Parrish speaking,” she said.

“Hello, Elizabeth. It’s Nina Jones. Sorry I’ve been a bit hard to catch. I’m on an island with no Internet and very poor phone reception.”

I could hear her roughly and quickly gathering papers. “Nina. Thanks for calling me. Do you mind if I record our—”

“There will be nothing to record.” I launched into the little speech that Stacy had drilled into me. “I’ll be sending you a photocopy of a partial manuscript my great-grandmother wrote about the Widow Wayland. As you will see, it bears no resemblance to any of my books and she never finished it. I took the title character from her and that was all. If you want to write an
article about how difficult it was for women to be published in the early twentieth century, I think that would be a fine thing for a journalist like you to do. Aside from that, I have nothing else to say to you.”

“Wait, I just want to ask—”

But I hung up the phone, my heart thudding. I bent over and grasped my knees. Stacy was behind me, rubbing my back. “Well, that’s done.”

“Then why do I feel so unhappy?” I said, straightening up and pushing my hair out of my eyes.

“I expect it’s because you still have to write the book,” she said.

But it wasn’t that. I had an extension of my deadline and, now I wasn’t holding out for another of Eleanor’s manuscripts to rewrite, I believed I might stop second-guessing myself and finally get on with it.

I was unhappy because I was in love with Joe.

•

Stacy walked me down there that evening, to Joe’s shed. I could see muted lights on at his parents’ house, behind pale blue curtains. But Joe’s place appeared to be all in darkness.

“I don’t think he’s home,” I said, hesitating on the road.

“I can see a flicker of light. Maybe he’s watching television,” she said. She poked me in the ribs. “Go on.”

“This is a bad idea. He’s going to hate me.”

“If he hates you, then he wasn’t worth having, dear.” She dragged me to the door and knocked on it hard.

“Stacy!” I hissed.

But then Joe opened the door. I could see Julian on the floor
with his PlayStation controller, with another controller lying beside him. The sound of explosions came from the television.

“Hi,” Joe said curiously.

“I’ve come at a bad time. You’re busy.”

Joe glanced over his shoulder to Julian, who was completely absorbed in the video game, then back at me. “I’m playing a video game. I’m not busy.”

Something blew up and Julian rolled over groaning. “Dad, come back. We are getting owned by these aliens.”

Stacy stepped in. “Will you show me how to play, Julian?” she asked, and even the eight-year-old boy was captivated by her eyelashes.

He sat up and offered her a controller and started showing her the buttons.

“Come for a walk?” I said to Joe.

He turned to Julian. “I’m off for a little while, mate. You okay with Stacy?”

“Sure.”

“If he gets worried, my mum and dad are next door,” Joe said.

“I’ll be fine,” Julian said, getting comfortably cross-legged and mashing the keys on his controller. “I bet Stacy is a better space marine than you.”

Joe turned back to me. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Down to Seven Yard Beach,” I said. “I need to tell you something.”

The last blush of dusk was in the east, over the lights of the mainland. The sea breeze cooled off the land, and palm fronds rattled all along the road. We walked down to the beach in silence, then sat on the sand side by side but not too close. I wrapped my arms around my knees and looked out at the waves, breaking softly on the shore.

“What do you need to tell me?” he said at last. “I don’t mean to hurry you, but I have an inkling Stacy’s not going to be such a great space marine after all.”

I turned to him, the wind tangling my hair. His eyes were almost black in the evening dark. “I have lied to everybody.”

He frowned. “About what?”

So I told him everything, the raw truth without tidying it or polishing it, as quickly and as simply as I could.

When I finished he said, “And that’s it?”

“That’s a lot,” I said. “I’ve presented myself to you as some creative genius with a big international career.”

“No you haven’t,” he said. “We’ve barely talked about your career. And since we met you’ve told me repeatedly how you are anything
but
a creative genius. Nina, I don’t care about what you do, how many books or babies you can or can’t produce. I care about who you are.”

I was momentarily speechless.

“I love you, Nina. The woman sitting here in front of me. The woman with the golden-brown hair and the silky skin and the gentle hands. The woman you are, Nina. The real you.”

“Wow,” I said at last. “I was sure you wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”

“Then you don’t know me very well,” he said, pulling me against him. “And I’m looking forward to you getting to know me better. A lot better.”

I turned my face up to kiss him and dissolved against him, warm with happiness. Tomorrow I would sort out the book. Tonight was about the summer breeze, the fresh smell of the sea, and the giddy thrill of new love.

S
terling stood outside the little schoolhouse, the sun in his hair and a swell of apprehension under his ribs. He told himself he didn’t have to walk up the front path, he didn’t have to knock. But it had taken him many weeks to track her down; he couldn’t possibly walk away now.

This little house, which had once been a bed-and-breakfast, had been converted into a school for local children in a bequest when its owner had died. Mr. Richard Hamblyn had been a friend of Tilly’s and had charged her with setting up and running the school.

Sterling knew all this because the man he had paid to find Tilly had told him. He still remembered the prickle of surprise and delight at knowing that, all along, she had been just across the water.

He straightened his collar, took off his tall hat, and made his way up the path. If Nell knew what he was doing . . . ah, well, she would find out soon enough if things went as he hoped they would. Hardly a day passed when his little girl didn’t talk of Tilly. Little girl? No, she was a young woman now. He often wondered
if Nell spoke about Tilly so often because she somehow knew Sterling loved her.

He loved her. He had never stopped loving her. The business with the escaped prisoner was fading from the institution’s memory. Hettie Maythorpe had never been found and eventually they had stopped looking. And with a change of chief warder and visiting surgeon, the gossip about Tilly’s role in the escape had long stopped spreading.

And still he loved her. Every morning he woke up expecting himself to be cured of it. Instead, he woke up with the same cold pebble in his heart, the same bruising ache.

Thus, the only practical course of action became finding Tilly. Sterling had expected it to take much longer.

He rang the bell and waited, his pulse hard in his throat. The door opened and a matronly woman with gray hair stood there.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“I am here to call on Miss . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence. What did she call herself now? Miss Lejeune? Miss Kirkland? Mrs. Dellafore? “Tilly,” he managed. “Is she in?”

“Miss Kirkland is taking a class,” the woman said. “But she will be finished in a few minutes if you’d like to wait here on the verandah.”

Sterling hesitated. He could go. He could run away from this and never have to face the possibility of her rejection. It had been nearly a year since she left. Was there any chance at all she still loved him? He had treated her so ill. He burned with shame for it. He didn’t deserve her love . . .

“Sir?”

Sterling shook himself. The woman had asked him a question. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Would you like tea?” she repeated.

“No. Thank you,” he said. “I will wait here for her.”

“Your name?”

“Sterling Holt.”

“Very good, sir. She’ll be along shortly. Please take a seat.” The woman went back inside and closed the door behind her.

Sterling didn’t want to sit; couldn’t sit. He needed to keep moving so he descended the stairs into the front garden. The neat garden beds had him wondering if Tilly had planted and tended them. On reflection, he could trace the moment he’d started falling in love with her to her asking for a chance to work in the garden. A woman as pretty and accomplished as Tilly would ordinarily recoil from soiling her hands. But there had always been something charmingly natural about her.