She is on her way back from cleaning the Bowery when she hears the sound. The small light notes of a child’s voice. One child, then another. No, she thinks, it is not possible. It has happened before, this error—wrongly thinking that another child is her own. Nor is the mistake limited to human voices; she hears the call of her children in animals and inanimate objects—the distant howl of a dog, whining pipes. Surely not, she thinks, yet still she waits. All is quiet. Then comes the patter of feet and the small, rising notes of the voices again. Laughter, a curling, playful squeal. She steps off the path onto the damp grass and moves closer to the tree that stands at the edge of the courtyard. She presses her body against the tree and peers around, her heart thumping, the smooth cool bark against her cheek. There is the flash of blue cloth. The streamer of a pink hair ribbon. She tilts her face to see out across the lawn. Yes—yes. How could it be, but yes—the flash of their dark little eyes, the leap of leg over grass.
She feels her knees give and crouches down, biting her lip to keep from crying out. May is tugging off flower heads, squishing them between her fingers, then rubbing them onto her wrist and sniffing. Lucie is building a house out of sticks and leaves; she runs back and forth between the trees, gathering supplies—mud, stones, twigs. Her old rag doll, Bessie, watches on, propped up against a purple-flowering hebe bush. Lucie runs and ferries and runs and ferries, her small cheeks red in the cold and her hair loose and damp. She is tall for a three-and-a-half-year-old. And she is a good little runner, her Lucie, fast and light, but her eyes are up in the sky, then casting back towards May, then darting left to where a gardener works up a pile of leaves for burning. She is not looking at the smooth, worn, tangled knot of roots rising up in her path. Just then Lucie’s toe catches the loop of a tree root and her body crashes down. Charlotte pulls back, out of sight. May trots over to her sister and then there is the voice of a man. “Are you okay there, sweetheart? Where’s your mummy?” It is Mr. Jones, the head gardener. Of course he does not know who they are, and if he did he would know that they have no mummy, or that they do not know where their mummy is. Charlotte hears May say exactly this: I don’t know.
She knows she should leave before she is discovered but Lucie is squealing and holding her ankle as if it were sprained or broken. Mr. Jones is saying, “There now, there now. Can you move it? It will be better soon, little one. Where’s your daddy?”
From out of nowhere comes Henry’s voice. Luu-cie? Lu-cie! He is running, taking great heavy strides, his voice bouncing in his chest then exploding over the grass. Lucie! Charlotte peeks around to see him hitching up his trousers and bending down, gathering Lucie into his arms. There he is, with our child, Charlotte says to herself, with our child. Lucie’s long legs are bunched up in her father’s lap, her red face pressed to the soft cloth of his shirt.
It only takes a few inquiries on Charlotte’s part to discover what has brought the children to the garden. Henry has a small apartment that looks out over that very courtyard and has been there now for two months. He has a book coming out, the porter—a friendly man who prides himself on knowing such particulars—tells her, and is in Cambridge on a fellowship, making final changes to the manuscript while he works on a series of lectures that he is to deliver later in the year. Some annual series, a great privilege to be asked, and so on and so forth.
“Do you know him?” the porter asks.
“Oh no,” Charlotte says. “No, I saw him with his children the other day and thought I recognized him for an old acquaintance, but it seems I was wrong.”
The following week the roster changes and she is assigned to clean his rooms. Charlotte suggests that she’d be of more use in the undergraduate rooms. “Not at all,” the college manager says, thinking he is doing her a favor. “You’ve got enough of those. Although if it’s a question of too much work—”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Well then,” he says, “there’s no problem?”
“No, sir, none at all.”
The next morning she takes her mop and bucket and waits under the archway until she sees Henry leave, one child hanging on to each hand and a rucksack of books on his back. Then she dashes up and cleans as fast as she can. It is not long before she learns their routine. They leave the college at eight thirty. At eight forty-five he rings the doorbell of a house on Adams Road. It is an enormous house set back from the footpath, the garden dense with apple trees and tall weeds. A woman comes to the door. Henry hugs and kisses the children, then hurries back to the library, where he works until a little after lunch. He and the girls return home in the afternoon and Henry carries on at his desk. If she is to trust the light in the window, he works late into the night. She reasons that if she arrives at nine each morning she could, at a push, be out by ten or ten thirty. This way they could run a little late or come home early and she will still be safe.
Henry’s rooms smell like their house used to smell: old books, lemony washing powder, the fat from fried meat. Where to begin? she thinks. Should she begin? The carpet by his bed is covered in paper; there are piles of notes, pages of typed passages, several stacks of periodicals, books bent open to mark a place, cuttings from newspapers with notes scribbled in the margins. His belongings are in chaos, and she assumes that he cannot possibly know where anything is in all those mounds of paper. She imagines he does not even know the photograph is there, and because of this will not miss it. It only comes to her attention by accident. She is throwing the bottom sheet over the mattress, and as it billows out the breeze disturbs a stack of papers on the bedside table. The first few papers drift to the floor, and as she tidies them up she notices the corner of a photo sticking out from the bottom of the pile. She eases it from its place and sits down on the bed. It is of the three of them, her and May and Lucie, just days after May’s birth. May is wrapped up against Charlotte’s chest while Lucie leans over to peek at her sister’s scrunched-up face. Charlotte has one arm around Lucie and the other under May, her head tilted towards the older child and dropping down to gaze upon the new.
She can’t remember seeing the photo before. It is clear from her disheveled appearance that she did not know it was being taken, the milk leaking through her nightshirt, her hair unbrushed. She has no photos of them, of the children, or of Henry—she left everything behind, and how often she has regretted that decision. She peers closer, to better see the look of love on her own face. Then she presses the photo into the pocket of her apron, makes the bed, and leaves as quickly as she can.
It is only a matter of time before her first theft leads to others. She takes a dress from Lucie’s wardrobe, a ribbon from May’s top drawer. She takes a book that she remembers as once belonging to her. She starts arriving earlier and leaving later, spending the extra time sifting through her children’s possessions.
Charlotte has accrued quite a collection of items by the time Henry makes his complaint. Of course she denies it, and points out that the keys to the college rooms are available to a great many staff.
“But you are the only one,” the head porter points out, “who has regular access to the rooms.”
“May I ask what is missing?” she says.
“Items of a personal nature,” he replies.
“How do you know Dr. Blackwood hasn’t simply misplaced them? He is on his own, you know, with those children. Things get lost,” Charlotte says. “And he is not exactly orderly.”
“I don’t care what is missing or why,” the porter tells her. “We can’t have this kind of incident. If you don’t know where the things are, then I suggest you find out. You have until Friday,” he says, then picks up his bangle of keys and waddles out the door.
The complaint was made on Monday. This exchange takes place on Tuesday. Charlotte is too afraid to clean his rooms on Wednesday, and come Thursday she stands trembling in the archway, awaiting Henry’s departure for the day. It is freezing. Soon, she thinks, there will be snow.
Twenty minutes pass, half an hour. A lamp glows in the window. She doesn’t see them leave; it is late, perhaps they’ve gone out already and forgotten to switch off the light. She is about to drop the box of stolen items outside the front door, then all of a sudden she knocks. It is a small, accidental knock, a thing of habit. She pulls her hand back as if she’s touched something hot. Quickly she turns to go, her coat swinging out as she makes for the stairs, but just as she steps away she hears a key click in the lock. The door opens.
“Charlotte?” Henry says. “Charlotte?”
The girls are sick. Of course he is at home.
“Yes, Henry,” she replies, turning slowly back to face him. “I came to return your things.”