The worm of jealousy slid out of the hole it had made in my heart. “Jack, I’m not Morwenna resurrected.”
“I know that.” His eyes narrowed, the lids clenching as if he were in pain. “I didn’t—I don’t—want you to be her. It was about trying to make amends, about saving a life for the one I’d taken.”
“But you didn’t take her life—it was an accident.” I searched his face. There was something there that I hadn’t seen before. It was the kind of look I’d seen in the eyes of patients on their way to the operating table.
“I . . . didn’t tell you all of it,” he said. “I couldn’t. Not then.” He glanced out to sea, scanning the breaking waves. “I’d been bottling it up—for years—and when I realized that you’d guessed the truth about Ned, all I could do was give you the bare minimum.” He let out a long breath. “You see, she didn’t slip on the ladder. There was an argument.”
I felt my blood surge. “What happened?”
“We were on board Firefly, talking about the money I was going to give her. I was stupid. Lost my head. I think it was the shock of seeing Ned in the flesh. I accused her of trying to trap me. I said I had no way of knowing if Ned was my child. That made her furious. She said she had a birth certificate, that the date would prove it. When she pulled it out of her bag, the wind took it. She tried to grab it as it went over the side. That’s when she fell.”
I saw it all in my mind’s eye: her hair billowing around her face, her body flailing as she went over the side. “But it was still an accident.” I breathed. “You didn’t push her—did you?”
“I didn’t touch her.” He pressed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “But the inescapable fact is that it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t doubted her. She would still be alive. Ned would still have a mother.”
The torture was etched in his face. I didn’t doubt that he was telling the truth that he hadn’t pushed her over the side of the boat—but in his mind he’d as good as murdered her. No wonder that brooding, haunted air seemed to follow him like a cloud.
I hardly dared to ask the next question, but I had to know. “Did you really doubt that Ned was yours?”
“When I first opened the letter, it struck me as highly suspicious that she’d waited all that time to tell me of Ned’s existence. But some part of me got carried away with the idea of having a child. I decided that the only decent thing to do would be to marry her.” His lips disappeared momentarily as he sucked them in over his teeth. “It would have been a secret marriage. My father was very ill by then. I couldn’t face trying to explain it to him.” He shook his head. “I had it all planned out. The wedding would take place on Guernsey, and Morwenna would stay there with Ned. I was so certain it was the right thing to do that I ordered a trousseau for her—a set of clothes and a wedding dress. I nearly got caught out, because the housekeeper opened the parcel. I had to cook up a story about them being for a cousin planning an elopement.”
I swallowed hard. So, that talk of a secret wife had been closer to the truth than the village gossips had realized. Something else dawned on me then. “Those clothes,” I murmured. “The ones you gave me—were they hers?”
He nodded. “They’d lain in a trunk, never worn, for three years. I’d taken them with me on Firefly to give to her, but when I got to Guernsey and saw Ned, I was confused. His hair and eyes were brown—like mine, not Morwenna’s: she had red hair and her eyes were green. But I had no idea whether Ned was the age he should have been if she’d become pregnant when we were together, in the spring of 1938. I didn’t know enough about young children to be able to tell his age. By the time we got onto the boat, I was so worked up I said things I shouldn’t have.” He rubbed his knuckles against the bristly outline of his jaw. “I can still see her face—that look in her eyes when I challenged her. They seemed to change color, like the sea when a squall blows up, from deep emerald to slate gray. ‘I thought you’d say that!’ She almost spat the words at me. That was when she produced the birth certificate.”
The scene he’d conjured was so vivid. I saw Morwenna, eyes blazing, like the mermaid in the church.
“When they were searching for her—during that week I stayed on Guernsey—I went to the public-records office in St. Peter Port. They had the original certificate there. The dates matched. He was born on the sixth of January 1939—nine months after we started seeing one another.” He shook his head. “I suppose you’re thinking what I thought, that a certificate doesn’t necessarily prove anything, that she could have been carrying on with some other man while she was seeing me. But there was something else.” He leaned closer, pushing back the hair that grew above his left ear. “Can you see this?” He moved his finger from the tip of his cheekbone to the place where the ear attached, just below the temple. I saw that there was a tiny puncture in the skin. “Ned has the same thing. It’s an extra sinus—quite rare and completely harmless—and it’s passed down through families.”