Tyringham Park (41 page)

The trip to Tyringham Park that Charlotte had set her heart on had to be ruled out, as Lochlann received his posting within the week.

She was already planning their long-term future there, picturing Mary Anne under Manus’s tutelage, Lochlann safely back from the war, practising as a country doctor, newly converted to
country pursuits, herself painting in between hunts, and Miss East in her old age being treated like a queen to make up for all the years she hadn’t gone to see her.

It saddened Charlotte to see the suppressed excitement in Lochlann’s bearing on the day he was due to leave to join the Medical Corps in the British Army. She tried not to read too much
into it. The male love of adventure was the least hurtful interpretation she could put on it, the most his wish to find Niamh – perhaps she had left the Ugandan mission by now to join the war
effort.

“I’d like a photograph of you with Mary Anne,” Charlotte said minutes before he was to leave. The words ‘Just in case’ were suspended between them. “Where did
you put the Brownie? I’ll go and get it.”

“No, I will. I know exactly where to lay my hands on it.”

Bloody hell. He had forgotten to deal with it.

Charlotte, with Mary Anne in her arms, followed him into the bedroom. The camera was in his unpacked trunk with all the unsorted letters, souvenirs and documents he had brought with him from
Australia. Only four photographs had been taken on the last reel, which featured the Hogan family with Alison Hogan, Mary Anne’s twin, in the foreground.

He delved into the trunk and pulled out the camera. “Right . . . here it is . . . let’s see . . .” He pretended to examine the camera, then glanced up and smiled at the baby.
“Look at the birds, Mary Anne,” he said, pointing out the window. “They’re chirping just for you.”

“She might be a genius, but I don’t think she understood what you said,” Charlotte laughed, taking the child to the window and supplying a few bird noises of her own.

Lochlann turned away, quickly rewound the film, took it out of the camera, slipped it into his breast pocket and, glad to discover a distraction there, pulled out a folded page.

“Dr Merton’s two friendly Englishwomen running a Sydney hotel,” he said, handing it to her. “Do you want to read about them?”

“Not really. What’s the point? It’s not as if we’ll be going back.”

“True enough.” He flicked the page into the trunk. “A pity but there’s no film in the camera. I’ll have to rely on you to take snaps of Mary Anne and send them to
me so I can follow her progress.”

Lochlann was tender when he kissed Mary Anne goodbye, and brotherly when he enclosed Charlotte in a hug and told her to mind herself and take good care of the little one.

On the mail boat crossing the Irish Sea Lochlann summoned up, he hoped for the last time, the three little faces that kept haunting him. He had tried to leave them behind in
Australia, but they had embedded themselves in his brain and followed him across the seas. Did Nell Hogan ever allow herself to acknowledge, as she tended Alison during winter nights or took her
around with her while she milked cows and fed poddy calves, that it was fortunate that Dolores hadn’t lived, as she was finding it so difficult to cope as it was? And when child number nine
and number ten came along would she be relieved Dolores had saved herself and Dan the worry of having an extra mouth to feed and the problem of finding money for boarding-school fees when the girl
reached the age of twelve and had to leave her isolated one-teacher bush school if she wanted a secondary education and didn’t win a bursary?

Three little newborns in three little cribs. Two alive, one dead. Could he hope for forgiveness because what he did wasn’t premeditated? Because his hands had frozen before they moved to
lift up the live child so that he wouldn’t have to witness Charlotte’s stricken face for the second time?

No.

Would he do it again under the same circumstances?

Yes, he would.

So there was no hope for him, for not only was he a sinner, but an unrepentant sinner at that.

Now he had been given the opportunity to make some kind of amends and he intended to use it. Giving no thought to his own welfare, he would court danger, work himself into exhaustion and be
brave to the point of foolhardiness in an effort to dislodge those tiny little faces from his brain.

Dublin
1943

How could she have known how easy it was to love and care for a child? Why had no one told her how all-consuming and satisfying tending to a child could be? Charlotte had
feared she would be as cold and distant as Edwina, as resentful and cruel as Dixon. Where was the exasperation, the grimness, the nastiness, the screaming, the beatings? At what age did the child
have to be before one turned on it, to frighten it and break its heart and spirit?

Every once in a while she thought of Mrs Hogan in Redmundo in Australia with her seven or eight children and she wondered how she was able to cope with all of them, as well as run the household
and the dairy, while with only one child she found her day overcrowded.

As she tended to Mary Anne’s needs with gentleness and delight, she often had memory flashes of the way Dixon used to drag a comb through her knotted hair, snapping her neck, and then
calling her ‘Cry baby’ when it brought tears to her eyes. Bath time was a particular dread. When Victoria was old enough the two children were put in an almost cold bath together. Dixon
would roughly lather their faces and hair and when Victoria cried out because of her stinging eyes, Dixon would slap her and leave a handprint on her wet, naked skin. The rinsing off was the worst
– a bucket of cold water was thrown on both of them and Dixon took her time drying them with towels that were small and threadbare and gave no warmth or comfort. Charlotte dressed herself,
but Victoria had to subject herself to Dixon’s rough handling – arms twisted to fit into armholes, chin snapped as a jumper with a too-tight neck was tugged over her head, nails dug
into her scalp as Dixon dried her hair.

Charlotte often thought of the shivering Victoria as she wrapped Mary Anne in a warm towel after her bath and cuddled her close, in front of the coal fire.

News of Harcourt’s death came as a shock. So much time had elapsed since his wounding that the family in the townhouse had grown confident he was recovering.
Harcourt’s superior, Colonel Turncastle, who had been a subordinate of Waldron’s in India, made a detour in his recruiting trip a fortnight later to sympathise with his old
commander.

Harcourt hadn’t died from his original wounds, the colonel told the assembled family. The young doctor, not properly healed himself, volunteered to travel to France to bring back a
valuable Special Operations Executive agent who had been captured, severely tortured, and left for dead. Because of the presence of three ladies in the room, the colonel gave only the bare outline
of the facts. He would fill in the details for Waldron later if the old soldier indicated that he wanted to hear them.

Harcourt tended to the agent until he judged him well enough to be flown back to England without a doctor to accompany him, then he stayed on and became caught up in one of the projects the
agent was working on at the time. He assisted a Resistance explosives expert in blowing up a bridge at the exact moment a trainload of German soldiers was crossing it. Over a hundred perished. The
Germans put a price on the head of the perpetrators. Harcourt and fifteen Resistance members were betrayed, rounded up and shot.

“So you can see why I wanted to travel over to tell you myself. ‘Killed in action’ would give you no indication of the extent of Harcourt’s bravery.”

The colonel stayed for dinner and during the course of it outlined a new development in the war. While he was talking, Charlotte had the feeling he was appealing directly to her.

The authorities had decided to recruit women agents in the field in France, he explained, holding her gaze, because so many male agents had been lost to capture or death. Each agent had to work
alone: no uniform, no back-up, and no protection under the Geneva Convention. If caught, agents were regarded as spies who could be eliminated, rather than prisoners of war. Those were the rules,
or lack of them, under which Harcourt had been executed.

Double agents were the biggest danger. It was suspected one of those had been responsible for betraying Harcourt. So many Special Operations Executive agents had recently disappeared within
their first week of arrival, it was assumed there was at least one who was privy to the secret workings of the organisation. If the Germans seized a wireless they could torture passwords and codes
out of the agent and, using that same wireless, send misleading information back to Britain.

Charlotte pictured herself taking up the challenge of finding the double agent. How thrilling and important that would be. It could avenge her brother’s death and might even change the
course of the war. Think of the lives saved, the false information stopped at source. The colonel could give her the details and she could enlist tomorrow.

“Young Charlotte here would be perfect for the job. I hear she speaks French like a native,” he said as if reading her mind.

“She does, thanks to the tutoring she received from Cormac Delaney, a protégé of mine –”

“Is that what you called him?” interrupted Edwina with heavy sarcasm.

“. . . and the time she spent in finishing school in Paris,” Waldron concluded, ignoring his wife’s comment.

“I would love to go. More than anything in the world,” said Charlotte, meaning it. “But I have to think of my daughter. I can’t leave her without anyone to look after
her.”

“What do you think nannies are for?” Edwina exploded. “Only common people look after their own children. I was sent over from India at the age of four to go to school and saw
my parents only twice after that up until the age of eighteen, and before that I was looked after by a nanny – and it never did me any harm.”

“Nor me,” chimed in Verity.

“If Hitler wins the war your child won’t have much of a future, full stop.” The colonel leaned towards Charlotte as if to add emphasis to his words. “Thousands of women
have already sent their children to places as far away as Canada and Australia for years so they can concentrate on the war effort.”

“Any idiot can look after a child,” said Waldron. “In my opinion they all turn out the same way, no matter what you do to them. Even though you are only a female, you would be
much better employed serving your King than hiding away in the nursery, Charlotte. There is a lot of family honour resting on your shoulders now that you are the last Blackshaw.”

Verity rushed in with, “What about the Cork family?”

“Not the same. They’ve been diluted. They don’t have Blackshaw blood on both sides.”

To preclude Waldron from using a more offensive term than ‘diluted’, Charlotte didn’t state the obvious – that Mary Anne was the last in the line at the present
moment.

“We all have to make whatever sacrifices are necessary,” the colonel continued, fixing Charlotte with his unblinking stare. “Think of Harcourt’s example.”

“I’m glad Harcourt took a few down with him before he went,” Waldron glowed. “This medical patching-up business is all very well, but a few dead Huns are more helpful to
the cause.”

They all think I’m a coward, using Mary Anne as an excuse to stay at home, Charlotte thought, anguished.

The two men went back to talking about the mechanics of war until the end of the meal. Before leaving, Colonel Turncastle gave Charlotte his address and said when she changed her mind and
contacted him, he would, because of her background, make sure her name was put on the top of the list.

Charlotte determined to remain unmoved and bear any disapproval directed at her for the sake of Mary Anne.

Lochlann’s letters were censored, and he himself was so cautious that the only thing she knew for sure after reading each letter was that he was alive. As wonderful as it
was to know that, Charlotte wanted to know more – where he was, how he was, what conditions he was working under and, most particularly, if any female doctors were working in the vicinity.
All letters from war zones were collected and taken back to London to be posted, so she didn’t even know in which country he was serving. Each time she asked the question “Have you run
into anyone you know?” it was left unanswered.

Without fail, she wrote to him every day, sometimes enclosing one of the many snapshots she had taken on the Brownie, concentrating on two main topics – Mary Anne’s development, as
could be traced in the photographs – and the friendship that was flourishing between herself and his sister Iseult. The two women saw each other every other day and, in contrast to previous
times, had no shortage of things to talk about. The playful tone that Charlotte adopted when describing how much more intelligent and advanced Mary Anne was than Iseult’s Matthew, despite his
being older by two months, was a cover for how seriously she held the belief that Mary Anne was indeed superior to her cousin and to all other infants she came into contact with.

Charlotte’s world had narrowed, but in many ways she felt as if it had expanded. If Lochlann returned from the war to join her, not only out of love for Mary Anne or a sense of duty to
her, but in the certainty of having made a correct choice, she would consider herself the most fulfilled of all women and would look forward to supplying Mary Anne with a brother or sister.

Sydney
1943

Elizabeth Dixon received a letter from Teresa Kelly, postmarked Coogee, a suburb of Sydney.