low across the milky green water. As she reached the top, she sat down on a wide, flat rock to catch her breath.
A sense of lightness, something she hadn’t felt since being on Aitutaki, overcame her. She felt as if she could breathe again, fill her lungs, her chest expanding, ribs spreading outward. The cool, pure air smelled of seaweed and salt, wet wood and green, growing things.
She remembered drawing maps of islands as a child, fascinated by their possibilities: secret springs, hidden forests, buried treasure. Now she was older, she loved them for the sense of isolation that they brought. Self-contained and entire of themselves. Ringed by water. Navigable. Always an abundance of sea and sky. She began to think she could be at home here. Well as “at home” as she ever was anywhere.
After a while, the cold stone that she was sitting on began to numb her and she got to her feet, checking where the path ahead led. It didn’t occur to her to mind that she hadn’t seen a soul since setting out.
Chapter Seven
Little Embers, Autumn 1951
Esther awoke to the deep, brassy bong of a clock chiming. She swallowed, feeling the pull of her tongue across the dry roof of her mouth. She must have fallen asleep with her jaw hanging open. A seam of light escaping heavy curtains that had been drawn across a window came into focus and she raised her head to fully appraise her surroundings. She had no idea where she was. Beneath her, an eiderdown, on top of her a blanket, though she was still clothed. She tried to move her arms but found that they were securely wrapped around her waist. A coarse fabric chafed at her neck. She rolled to one side in an attempt to free her arms, but it was in vain. She had been bound. The design of the garment was such that it could not be torn, could not be loosened. She’d heard of such things, but never actually seen one: a straitjacket. The realization sliced through her and she cried out without thinking, a whimper at first and then louder. “John!” she called out. “John. Help!”
Silence.
She rolled herself awkwardly to a sitting position, threw her legs over the bed and onto the floor. She stood up and staggered to the window, pushing her head through the gap in the curtains and blinking at the brightness. Nothing in front of her save rippling grasses, steel-gray ocean, and the soughing of the wind as it caught on the walls of the house. A desolate landscape. The island. The house. Embers. Memories flashed back to her now, like the card game she sometimes played with Teddy. She tried to match them up. Scarlet poppies on charcoal serge. Jaunty flags atop a fishing boat. An olive-green armchair. A ruddy-cheeked face. Chestnut hair.
Had she perhaps fallen asleep—such an event was entirely possible, given her habits of the past few months—and then been helped upstairs to rest? But that didn’t explain the binding.
Esther went to the door but, with her hands useless, she could not turn the Bakelite handle. She knelt instead and attempted to peer through the keyhole, but there was a key on the other side of the mechanism blocking her view. She called out again, bending down and putting her mouth to the hole, and then straightened up and kicked the door, hard, with her foot, ignoring the pain it caused her stockinged big toe. “Help!” she bellowed, as loud as she could. “Help me! Someone! John! Where are you?”
There was only the answering sound of the wind as it gusted around the thick-walled old house. She collapsed against the door, her knees buckling underneath her as she slid to the floor. As the truth of what had happened began to dawn on her, the words puerperal insanity swam into her head. She’d first heard them spill from the doctor’s lips—another doctor, one who had visited in the days after the baby was born, the same one who later prescribed (“for your nerves, my dear”) the red pills that brought such blissful oblivion. Schoolgirl Latin meant she knew the word puer meant boy, and parere to bring forth. But she was confident that she was not insane by the mere fact of childbirth.
True, after everything that happened, she had struggled to get out of bed some days, had lost interest in all the things that she normally enjoyed, even, to her horror, becoming short-tempered with Teddy,