The Death of Mrs. Westaway

But Hal is about to become an adult now, and I can’t hide behind excuses anymore. The only way I can lose her now is if SHE chooses to cut herself off from me. I would not blame her if she did—God knows, I’ve lied to her for so long, though I told myself my motives were good. I have deceived her unforgivably—I just hope that she can, in fact, forgive.

There is much that I will never forgive you for, Mother. But in spite of that, you have kept my secret faithfully these past few years, and I felt that you deserved to know the reasons for my decision. I don’t know what Hal will do with the information—it’s hers to decide. But it’s possible she will come and seek you out. Be kind to her, if she does.

Yours,

Maud

Hal let the letter fall to the sheets, feeling her eyes well with tears, wishing that she could reach out and hug her mother, back through the years.

How had Mrs. Warren come by this letter? Had it ever reached Mrs. Westaway? Or had Mrs. Warren intercepted it? Either way, someone had told Ezra. And for the second time in his life, but not the last, her father had killed an innocent person to protect himself.

If only, if only her mother had not sent the letter. It seemed unbelievably naïve—to give up such hard-fought-for anonymity, to warn her mother of what she was about to do.

Had Maud underestimated Ezra? Or had she simply trusted Mrs. Westaway too much? They had been corresponding for a while, that much was plain from the letter. Perhaps she had slowly trusted more and more—thinking that if her mother had kept her secret safe thus far, she could trust her a little further, until at last she had entrusted Mrs. Westaway with a secret she could not keep.

But Hal wasn’t sure. There had been something about Mrs. Warren’s attempts to warn her . . . a kind of long-held guilt. She thought of that sitting room, the framed photographs of the cherubic little boy Mrs. Warren had loved for so long, and the man he had turned into.

Perhaps, for the sake of that little boy, she had written a letter—warning Ezra to be careful, to keep away.

And only afterwards realized what she had done.

Hal would never know the true chain of events. All she knew was that this letter was the first piece in a swift chain of betrayals that led to a hot summer’s day, and the screech of a car’s brakes, and her mother’s crumpled body on the road outside her own house.

She closed her eyes, feeling the tears squeeze from between the lids and run down the sides of her nose, and she wished, more passionately than she had ever wished anything before, that she could go back and tell her mother, It’s okay. There is nothing to forgive. I trust you. I love you. There is nothing you could do to change that. Whatever angry things I might have said or thought or done, I would have come back to you, in the end.

“Are you awake, my darling?” A Cornish accent broke into her thoughts, and Hal opened her eyes to see an orderly standing there beside a tea trolley, a white china cup in one hand and a metal pot in the other. “Tea?”

“Yes please,” Hal said. She swiped surreptitiously at the trickle beside her nose, and blinked away the rest of the tears as the woman poured her a cup.

“Ooh, homemade cake. Aren’t you the lucky one? I’ll give you another saucer,” the woman said, and she helped Hal to a generous chunk, and put it on her bedside tray.

After she had gone, moving on to the next person, Hal broke off a piece and put it between her lips, the buttercream melting on her tongue, soothing her sore throat, and taking away some of the bitterness of her thoughts.

She could not dwell in might-have-beens, she could only move forwards, to a different future.

The letter was still on her lap, and she folded it up carefully and laid it on the locker beside her bed. As she did, her hand knocked against the Golden Virginia tin, lying there, and on a sudden impulse she opened it up, closed her eyes, and shuffled the cards.

With her eyes closed, she might almost have been at home, in her little booth on the pier, feeling the soft frayed edges of the cards between her fingers, feeling their polished backs slide over each other, every movement changing the possibilities life dealt out, asking different questions, revealing different truths.

At last she stopped, holding the cards between her cupped palms, and then she cut the deck and opened her eyes.

A single card stared back at her, upright—and she found herself smiling, in spite of the tears that still clung to her lashes.

It was the World.

In Hal’s deck the World was a woman of middle age with long dark hair, looking directly out at the querent. She was standing tall, her legs planted firmly apart, in the center of a garland of flowers. At the corners of the card were the four symbols from the Wheel of Fortune—showing that, like the wheel, the world was always turning, and the way that however much one might journey, in some sense one would always end up where one began.

The woman was smiling, though with a hint of sadness. And in her arms she held, almost as if cradling a child, a globe of the world.

Hal had had no question in her mind when she cut the deck, and yet here was her answer.

She knew what she would have said, had she turned up this card for someone in her booth.

She would have said: This card shows that you have come to the end of a journey, that you have completed something important, that you have accomplished what you set out to do. The world has turned—the cycle is complete—your quest is at an end. You have endured hardship and suffering along the way, but these have made you stronger—they have shown you something, revealed a truth about yourself and your place in everything.

Because the way that we see the world from above in this card, cradled in the arms of the woman, shows that at last you can see the full picture. Up until now you have been traveling, seeing only a part of what you wished to see—now you can see the whole system, the world, and its place in the universe, your part of the whole scheme.

Now you understand.

And it was true. It was all true. But it was not what Hal saw when she looked at the card—or not only what she saw. As a child, Hal had called that card by a different name. She had called it the Mother.

There was no mother card in tarot—the nearest thing was the Empress, her golden, abundant locks symbolizing femininity and fertility. But when Hal looked at this card, at the fearless dark-haired woman cradling the world in her arms, Hal saw her mother’s face. She saw her dark eyes, full of wisdom and a little cynical; she saw her capable hands, and the sadness in her smile, as well as the compassion.

She had seen her mother in the World because her mother had been her world.

But the truth was, the world was stranger and more complicated than she had ever imagined as a child—and so was she.

She felt suddenly tired, immensely, unbelievably tired, and she pushed the cake away, packed the tarot cards back into their tin—all but the one she held in her hand—and then lay down on her side, her cheek against the cool white pillow, with Maggie’s tarot card propped beside the locker, looking into Maud’s face.

Her eyes drifted shut, and sleep began slowly to claim her.

As she lay there, she seemed to see patterns against her closed eyes—fiery shapes that changed from drifting sparks into spiraling leaves, and then into a flock of birds, bright against the red-black darkness, and she thought of the magpies at Trepassen House, wheeling and calling against the sky, and of the rhyme that Mr. Treswick had quoted that first day, as they drove up towards the house.

One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for a girl

Four for a boy

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a secret

Never to be told

And she thought of all the secrets down the years—of Maggie, tearing pages from a diary; of Maud, lying to protect her, in order to keep her safe from her own father. She thought of the secrets her father had kept, hugging his guilt to himself, until it had grown into a poison that had shaped his whole life.

She thought of Mrs. Westaway, and Mrs. Warren, living year after year with the terrible truth of what their darling boy had done, and the ugliness that lay in the leaf-strewn darkness of the boathouse.

And she heard the voice in her ear, her own voice now, firm, uncracked, unchanged by all that had happened. No more. No more secrets, Hal.

She had the truth. And that was all that mattered.