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.