Blitz’s heavy civilian toll, Jenkins found it impossible to accept that his wife’s death could have come by such a mundane cause. In retrospect, Jenkins’s rather wild claims—that there was foul play involved in Vivien’s death, that she’d been targeted by shady con-artists, that she would never have visited the site of the air raid otherwise—were the first indications of a madness that would ultimately claim him. He refused to accept his wife’s death as a simple wartime accident, vowing to ‘catch the people responsible and bring them to justice’. Jenkins was hospitalised after a breakdown in the mid 1940s, but sadly his mania was to last the rest of his life, leading him back to the fringes of polite society and eventually to his lonely death in 1961, a destitute and broken man.
Laurel slammed the book shut as if to trap its subject between the covers. She didn’t want to read any further about Henry Jenkins’s certainty that there’d been more to his wife’s death than met the eye, nor his vow to find the person responsible. She had a rather pressing and unwelcome feeling that he’d done just that, and that she, Laurel, had witnessed its result. Because Ma, with her ‘perfect plan’, was the person Henry Jenkins blamed for his wife’s death, wasn’t she? The ‘shady con-artist’ who’d sought to ‘take’ something from Vivien; who’d been responsible for drawing Vivien to the site of her death; a place she never would have visited otherwise.
With an involuntary shudder, Laurel glanced behind her. She felt conspicuous all of a sudden, as if unseen eyes were watching her. Her stomach, too, felt as though it had turned to liquid. It was guilt, she realised, guilt by association. She thought about her mother in the hospital, the regret she’d expressed, her talk of ‘taking’ something, of being grateful for a ‘second chance’—they were stars, all of them, appearing in the dark night sky; Laurel might not like the patterns she was beginning to see, but she couldn’t deny that they were there.
She looked down at the biography’s seemingly innocuous black cover. Her mother knew all the answers, but she hadn’t been the only one; Vivien had known them, too. up to this point, Vivien had seemed a whisper—a smiling face in a photograph, a name in the front of an old book, a figment who’d slipped through the cracks of history and been forgotten.
But she was important.
Laurel had a sudden burning conviction that whatever went wrong with Dorothy’s plan, had everything to do with Vivien. That something intrinsic to the other woman’s character made her the very worst person with whom to become entangled.
Katy Ellis’s account of the child, Vivien, was kindly enough; but Kitty Barker had described a ‘snooty’ woman, a ‘bad influence’, who was superior and cold. Had Vivien’s childhood suffering broken something inside her, hardened her and made her into the sort of woman—beautiful and wealthy—whose very power was in her coolness, her interior- ity, her unattainability? The information in Henry Jenkins’s biography, the way he’d been unable to live with her death and had searched over decades for those he held responsible, certainly suggested a woman whose nature exerted great influence over others.
With a slight dawning smile, Laurel opened the biography again and flicked quickly through the pages until she’d found the one she was after. There it was. Fumbling the pen a little with excitement, she scribbled down the name ‘Katy Ellis’ and the title of her memoir Born to Teach. Vivien might not have needed or, indeed, had many friends, but she’d written letters to Katy Ellis, letters in which (was it too much to hope?) she might’ve confessed her deepest darkest truths. There was every chance those letters still existed somewhere—many people might not keep their correspondence, but Laurel was willing to bet that Miss Katy Ellis, renowned educator and author of her own memoir, wasn’t one of them.
Because the more Laurel turned it over, the clearer it be-came. Vivien was the key; finding out about this elusive figure was the only way to unravel Dorothy’s plan; more importantly, where it all went wrong. And now—Laurel smiled—she’d caught her by the corner of her shadow.
Part Three
VIVIEN
Twenty-two
Tamborine Mountain, Australia, 1929
VIVIEN WAS PUNISHED in the first place because she had the great misfortune of being caught out front of Mr McVeigh’s Main Street shop. Her father hadn’t wanted to do it, anyone could’ve seen that. He was a soft-hearted man who’d had the last of his