other side of the world)—that’s why she didn’t wake up as she otherwise might. I asked her then, how she would know when she had finally woken up, and she tilted her head as if I might be simple: ‘When I open my eyes and see that I’m home again.’ Of course, her firm little face added.
Laurel flicked through the journals until, two weeks later, Katy Ellis revisited the subject:
I have been probing—delicately, of course—about this dream world of Vivien’s, for it interests me greatly that a child might choose to comprehend a traumatic event in such a way. I gather, from the titbits she feeds me, that she has conjured a shadow land around her, a place of darkness through which she must quest in order to get back to her sleeping self in the ‘real world’ of the creek bank in Australia. She told me she believes that sometimes she comes close to waking; if she sits very, very still, she says she can glimpse the other side of the veil; she can see and hear her family going about their usual business, oblivious to her standing on the side, watching them. At least now I understand why the child exhibits such a profound quiet and stillness.
The girl’s theory of her waking dream is one thing. I can well understand the instinct a person might have to retreat in-to a safe imaginary world. What disturbs me more is Vivien’s seeming gladness in the face of punishment. Or—if not glad-ness, because that is not it precisely— her resignation, almost relief, when met with reprimand. I witnessed a brief incident the other day, in which she was wrongly accused of having taken an elderly woman’s hat from the top deck. She was innocent of the crime, a fact of which I was certain, having witnessed the ghastly cloche take up with the breeze and dance right overboard. As I watched, though—stunned for a moment into silence—Vivien presented herself for punishment, receiving a tremendous tongue-lashing; when threatened with a strapping, the girl seemed quite prepared to accept it. The expression in her eyes as she was scolded was one almost of relief. I found my brio then, and stepped in to stop the miscarriage of justice, informing them in the chilliest of tones as to the hat’s true fate, before directing Vivien to safety. But the look I’d seen in the girl’s eyes troubled me long after. Why, I wondered, would a child willingly accept punishment, particularly for a crime they hadn’t really committed?
A few pages further, Laurel found the following:
I believe I have answered one of my own most pressing questions. I have sometimes heard Vivien shouting out in her sleep—the episodes are usually short-lived, ending just as soon as the girl rolls over, but the other night the situation reached a peak and I rushed from my bed to soothe her. She was speaking very quickly as she clung to my arms— the most effusive conversation I have yet had from the child—and I was able to gather from what she said that she has come to believe the death of her family was her fault in some way. A ridiculous notion, when held up to the yardstick of adult perception, for as I understand it they were killed in a motorcar accident while she was many miles away; but childhood is not a place of logic and measuring sticks, and somehow (I cannot help but think the girl’s aunt might have helped it on its way) the idea has stuck.
Laurel looked up from Katy Ellis’s journal. Ben was making pack- ing-up noises and she glanced, alarmed, at her watch. It was ten minutes to one—damn—she’d been warned the library shut for an hour over lunch. Laurel was clinging to any reference to Vivien, feeling she was getting somewhere, but there wasn’t time to read everything. She skimmed through the rest of the sea voyage, until finally she reached an entry written in shakier handwriting than those previous—written, Laurel gathered, as Katy Ellis took the train to York, where she was to be employed as a governess.
The conductor is coming now, so I will record quickly, before I forget, the strange behaviour of my young charge as we disembarked in London yesterday. No sooner had we cleared the gangplank, and I was looking this way and that in attempts to discern where we ought to go next, than she hopped down on all-fours—never mind the dress I’d specially hand-sponged