holding something precious that had somehow vanished. ‘That woman did come,’ she said quietly. ‘It was inevitable, I suppose I always knew that and he did too, but what he hadn’t expected was that she wouldn’t want him. He would have left me if she had. He wasn’t only infatuated with her, he was obsessed with her, I think he even stalked her until her husband threatened to report him to the police. Even that didn’t stop him wanting her, if anything it made him more determined to win her. He was, quite literally, crazy about her and when I found out who she was …’ She broke off and her quiet laugh was drowning in sadness.
‘I advised you a moment ago,’ she said, ‘to think about the others who are being hurt by the betrayal. Your family will always feel your pain, even after it’s over for you. For them the trust will never come back, and even if you can forgive your husband don’t expect them to do the same. In my case, it was my brother who couldn’t go on watching me suffer each time David went away. They used to be good friends, but he couldn’t stand what this new obsession was doing to me. He wanted to confront him, to tell him that it had to stop, and though I didn’t think it would do any good I agreed to let him try.’
Freda paused for a beat before continuing, her hands shaking slightly.
‘He and David were both keen sailors,’ she continued, speaking faster now, ‘So it wasn’t unusual for them to take a boat out together. On this particular day, less than a week after David had been threatened with the police, the conditions were perfect for a bracing sail out into the channel. David had no idea that my brother had other things on his mind, and I don’t know if he ever got to find out what they were … but I suspect he did.’ She swallowed and took a shallow breath. ‘We’ll never know for sure what happened – a fight must have broken out, and one of them went overboard. And then when the other tried to rescue him … I’m sure there would have been a rescue attempt, no matter who went in.’ She said this more to herself than Joely. ‘The police and coast guard were alerted. Their bodies were found not far from each other, about a mile along the coast from here. The search took hours.’
Joely sat watching her, sensing the ache in her heart, the terrible fear she’d have known during the wait for them to come back. It seemed to be with her now, the pain of losing two people she loved so deeply that it had obviously changed her life, turned her into a hermit to live with a grief that she hadn’t even tried to escape.
Joely understood now why she’d advised her to look at who else the betrayal was hurting. ‘Your brother,’ she said softly. ‘You haven’t mentioned him in the memoir.’
Freda shook her head for some time and when she finally looked up there were shadows in her eyes that Joely didn’t understand. ‘Christopher wasn’t a part of that story,’ she said, ‘and I realize you think David is Sir, but you’re wrong. They shared many of the same qualities, for sure, their passion for music, their gentleness of character, and the same name, but they are not the same person.’
For some reason the admission caused Joely’s heart to twist. ‘So is any of it true?’ she asked, suspecting she’d been deliberately misled to this point and knowing she’d be angry if she had.
‘About my husband and brother? Every word of it.’
‘And was your husband’s name really David?’
‘Yes, but we called him Doddoe. David Oswald Douglas Donahoe. It was a name he got at school and it stuck.’
Yet throughout the story she’d just told, she’d referred to him as David, so she had been deliberately misleading.
‘Are you disappointed?’ Freda asked. ‘I think you are, but this is what happens when you make assumptions, you get it wrong. Or you could say I set a trap for you and you walked into it.’
Joely couldn’t deny it.
‘I’ve told you about my husband now,’ Freda continued, ‘to make you forget your belief, or suspicion, that he and Sir are one and the same. Sir was somebody else entirely … Somebody who made the world a beautiful place to be, as long as he was