The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant - Kayte Nunn Page 0,45

her grandmother stirring. She walked the few steps to her side, hearing a gasp and drew closer, leaned down, her eyes searching her grandmother’s face. It had lost the calmness of sleep, was scrunched up, lips pursed, a deep furrow between her eyebrows. She was shaking her head from side to side, as if fighting something off. Under the blankets, her legs jerked.

“Robbie. Robbie. The orchard . . . can’t breathe. No air . . .”

A flash of alarm arced through Eve. Was her grandmother having a turn? She wondered if she should summon help.

Then, as suddenly as it had come over her, she was still again, her expression relaxing, the folds of skin settling around the bones of her face.

Eve waited for several minutes to reassure herself that it had been nothing more than a bad dream.

Eventually, she left the room. Tea could wait. But who was Robbie? It wasn’t a name she’d ever heard before. Was he the “R” who’d given Grams the brooch?

Chapter Eighteen

Little Embers, Autumn 1951

Esther’s motives for getting out of the house were not simply the need for exercise. She wanted to reacquaint herself with the jetty, for she had been counting the days until the boat would call again. After digging for clams and filling the bucket that they had brought with them, they walked onward, the hard sand and tidemarks of dark seaweed crunching beneath her shoes. At the far end was the jetty. “So there’s no boat on the island?” she asked.

“I must confess, I never learned to sail. Bit of an oversight, all things considered,” Richard replied.

“So you are as stuck here as we are?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it like that exactly.”

“And the supply boat comes once a week?” she said, stopping to catch her breath.

“That’s right. Every Friday. Except in really bad weather.”

“In the morning or afternoon?”

Richard looked sideways at her. “Depends on the tide—she needs high tide to be able to dock at the jetty. Why? Is there anything you particularly need?”

“Oh no, nothing really. Idle curiosity.” She wasn’t sure he believed her, but she had the information she needed, for now.

* * *

When Esther woke on Friday she went straight to the window to check on the weather. For the first time, the nurse had not wrapped her in the straitjacket the night before. The weals on her arms and torso had healed well, and she noticed no new damage as she pushed aside the curtains. To her relief, the sun shone faintly through a thin layer of clouds. The boat would come; she just had to make sure she didn’t miss it.

The day before, she had asked the doctor for some notepaper and a pen, saying she wanted to begin to write down her feelings about the events that had brought her to Embers, that it might help. It had been a lie. She used the paper to write to John, to insist that he come and get her. She wrote, her hands flying over the pages, telling him how much she missed both him and Teddy, and that Teddy surely needed her. She implored him in the strongest possible terms to allow her to come home, promising that she was quite better and ready to be a wife and mother again. When she was finished, she folded the note carefully, wrote the address on one side and sealed it with several drops of wax from her candle. The letter was her only hope of escape from this infernal place.

In the days since her arrival, she had become fond of the other men, and even Robbie’s ruined face no longer shocked her as much as it first had. In turn, they treated her with politeness and respect, and were rather amusing company at mealtimes. Robbie, in particular, had been kind. One morning, she had ventured to the vegetable garden—a large rectangle that featured orderly rows of cabbages, purple heads of broccoli, spinach, leeks, Brussels sprouts and the golden tops of onions, their green shoots tied off for winter—and watched him digging potatoes from the dark, loamy soil. He began to tell her what had brought him to the island. “I flew Wellingtons, a nice big kite, but do you know, when I crashed all I felt was the sheer relief of not having to fly the damn thing anymore. I don’t know how we got out of the plane—I was unconscious and the bloody thing caught on fire. Broke my tibia, fibula, mandible, not to mention melting