He came for their son amidst thunder and rain.
The knock sounded on the door of the house soon after dark. Edgar was in bed and, for once, sleeping soundly. Her breasts were sore. He was getting too big to be fed by the breast, though island women often did so well past the age of two.
Did she know, during those first two years, that this night would come?
She opened the door, and there was John. He had come alone. The rain had drenched his hair and face, water dripped down his nose and his oilcloth coat let water fall down onto the floor.
‘It’s time, Mina.’
He stepped over her threshold, she was pushed back, and it was the first act of violence between them, despite all the arguments of the last two years. When she had fallen pregnant, he had assumed she would come back to England with him, that they would marry and raise the child. Even when she had told him that her future was on the island, he had not raised a hand to her. He had not even raised his voice. He had simply frozen over, like a tray of water in an icehouse. She remembered the warmth of him in her hand. It was like a memory from childhood: warm, unclear, impossibly distant.
He walked through the parlour, dripping water as he went, towards Edgar’s room. She went with him, and began to pull back on his arms.
But even then, even while she pulled, she held back. She had known this moment would come. She knew her choices. Go with him. Kill him, or die trying. Or let him take her son.
Even now, those words ‘her son’ felt misaligned. Not wrong, precisely, but not quite right, as if the wrong planet had appeared in the wrong constellation. Her breasts still ached with the violence of the child’s feeding, and there was a bruise on her upper arm where his little hand squeezed her skin tight as he fed, his eyes on hers, determined and hungry. She had looked into those eyes countless times, and on the lonely nights when she and Edgar sat together in this distant house on the eastern tip of the island, the abandoned fort looking over them, on those nights she had tried to find it in herself to love this oddly intense little creature. And, as often as not, she had failed.
What was wrong with her?
She pulled back on John’s arms, and casually he stopped, turned, and smashed her away with the back of his hand. A hard, calculated, fierce blow to her face, it knocked her down both with its force, and with its meaning.
Keep away, bitch. You could have been my wife. Instead you have ruined me.
She stayed down on the floor while he went into Edgar’s bedroom. She watched the dark square of the opened door, heard his tender words to the child and the child’s sleepy wordless responses. Drawers opened and the wardrobe banged, and then John reappeared with Edgar wrapped in a blanket and held within his oilskin coat.
She stood then, propelled by what remained of the maternal instinct in her ravaged breast. The sight of the child looking out at her with its father’s eyes was almost too much to bear.
‘John, please.’
‘Come with me, then, Mina. It is not too late. Come with me, tonight, and be my wife. We’ll have more like him. We can live with my brother in Seal. We can prosper and be happy.’
His flat, unsmiling face told the lie of his words. He was speaking things he did not feel. A final speech, for form’s sake.
Except he was not the only one acting out a role. She was as dishonest as he. She knew, she had always known, that her place was here. Her obligation to her father was too strong, her sense of her family too unyielding, the burden of their history too, too heavy.
And this man and this . . . boy. They were not her family.
How could that be?
She looked at the child’s face. It looked back, a slight frown on its chubby brow. Its father’s red hair stood untidily from its scalp, threatening to thicken and lengthen as John’s had done.
It seemed to smile. Heavens protect her, it seemed to smile.
She looked down at the floor and though no words were spoken, her meaning would haunt the rest of her existence. She heard a curse, the slam of the door, and they were gone.