it to six, if required.”
“Six months?” This was worse than she had even imagined. Her mouth hung open in shock.
The doctor held up his hand. “Now then, please don’t distress yourself. As I said, initially it will be three months. Let’s work with that for now. You know, you might even come to enjoy your time here.”
“But this isn’t my home. I belong in London, not on this ridiculous speck of land in the middle of the bloody sea! Don’t I get any say in it at all?” Her throat constricted and she gulped in air. “And what about Teddy? My son? I cannot be away from him for that long. A child needs his mother.” Esther felt rage course through her like lightning, swiftly chased by a sickly tide of remorse. She hadn’t exactly been the best of mothers recently. She wanted to run to the jetty as fast as she could, to get back to Teddy. But that would be futile—there wasn’t a boat for another two days.
“Esther, I think you know as well as I that you are not, how would we say it, not quite yourself,” he said. “Don’t fret about the time away. John assured me that your son will be well looked after—you have a nanny, I understand?”
But there’s no substitute for a mother, she wanted to rail at him. Instead she bit her tongue, recognizing that it was pointless to argue. She would save her outrage for future battles.
Chapter Fourteen
St. Mary’s, Spring 2018
Rachel woke early. The night before, she’d walked the short distance home underneath a night sky awash with stars, and as the noise of the party receded, she had become aware of an absolute stillness, the quiet that she had never been able to find in cities or towns and had come to crave like a drug.
This morning, however, the raucous cries of gulls shredded the air, calling her to get up and get moving, for the tide waited for no one. She stretched and looked out of the window, spying blue skies. Even though it was a Saturday, she rarely observed weekends. She worked when she could and took time off when she felt she needed to and it all seemed to even out.
She was also conscious that the run of good weather she’d experienced since arriving on St. Mary’s could change at any moment and wanted to embark on her study without delay. Her first official report was due to Dr. Wentworth in a few days and, as yet, she had little to account for her time.
She sprang out of bed, pulled on her jeans from the previous night and a warm sweater and hurriedly brushed her hair. There hadn’t been much in the way of food at the party, so she set about making herself a large omelet. She intended to be out on the boat for most of the day and didn’t want hunger to distract her from her observations, so a good breakfast was in order.
She grabbed her waders and a clam gauge: a pair of calipers designed especially for measuring the length and width of the shells. She had also brought her camera with her, encased in waterproof housing, intending to photograph some of the clams up close in order to compare them with those taken five years earlier and she planned to take samples at one or more of the sites previously identified. Such was her rush to get out on the water that she forgot to check the forecast before leaving.
Her first destination was the curving sweep of Great Rock Beach on Tresco and she reached it easily, shooting across the water in the light little boat, the breeze ruffling her hair. Either the air temperature had warmed by a few degrees or she was acclimatizing to the weather, but for the first time since arriving, she wasn’t bothered by the cold. She cut the engine and coasted in on water as clear and aquamarine as a gemstone. Reaching the beach, she hopped into the shallows, pulling the Soleil up onto the white-sugar sand. The tide was ebbing, but she dragged it above the high-water mark just to be sure.
She consulted one of the maps that Dr. Wentworth had provided and compared it with the beach in front of her. At one end was a series of rocky shelves. Crab’s Ledge was where she needed to begin.
When she reached it, she shrugged off her daypack and removed the calipers, her notebook, and a