Ember Island by Kimberley Freeman Read Free Book Online

painter’s canvas he had put down. It made it difficult to see if there was any other water seeping down the wall, so I ran my fingers along it. They came away dry. I found a torch in the drawer under the coffee table and shone it carefully on the wall up high, running it along the pattern of the mortar.
    Which is when I saw it. I would have missed it if I hadn’t already seen the same thing in the fireplace two days ago. A thin sheaf of papers. Standing on the coffee table, I couldn’t get my fumbling fingers into the crack to remove it, but with the help of a butter knife I set them free. I scanned the first page. More of her childhood diary; and while I was disappointed, it lit the fire of hope within me. There were a lot of bricks in Starwater, and I would simply get Joe to strip the wallpaper and plaster off them.
    If there were stories in the walls, I wanted to find them. I needed to find them all.

FIVE
     

Waiting on a Letter
     
1891
     
    T he last mail service for the day came and went, and Tilly finally conceded defeat. Another day without a letter from Jasper. That made twenty days in a row now.
    She slid away from the window, where she had been watching Mrs. Granger, the housekeeper, greet the postman with the most recent letter Tilly had written. But the postman had nothing to give her in return.
    Twenty days. Twenty letters she had sent. And nothing from her husband, nothing at all.
    Tilly sat on her bed for a few moments, struggling against her anxiety. In her darkest moments, she imagined Jasper dead, her letters being delivered to a silent house. But she couldn’t let Grandpa see her anxiety. He was so ill, hanging by such a fine thread, that if he believed his beloved Tilly was in some kind of distress it might very well kill him in an instant.
    She gathered herself, found her smile, and left her bedroom. She crept down the hall, listening for Grandpa’s breathing. Inthe quiet, she heard the turning of a page. He was awake and reading.
    Tilly knocked lightly, and Grandpa looked up. His pale face was lined and his cheeks drooped. She smiled at him, and he managed a breathless, “Hello, Tilly.”
    “Would you like me to read to you?” she asked, indicating the book.
    He nodded, and she pulled up a chair next to the bed. The late afternoon sun caught in the filmy white curtains across Grandpa’s wide windows, yellow-gold and soft. The night rolled in late at this time of year, which seemed cruel to Grandpa who was so very tired and needed soothing dark to sleep well. Tilly took his book from him—it was Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la Mer , one of his favorites—and began to read. Latin and Greek she had learned from the stern governess who taught her in her youth, but her French was from Grandpa. It was a language he adored, and he had taught it to Tilly in the precious, private hours they spent together since he had taken her in, orphaned, at the age of four.
    She read as the shadows lengthened outside the window. Grandpa’s turn at the wedding had been the start of an alarmingly fast decline. Tilly had made the decision—with Jasper’s unequivocal blessing—to stay with Grandpa and nurse him in his last days. Her husband had returned to his home in the Channel Islands, unable to take any further time away from his business.
    “I will write to you every day,” she’d said.
    “As will I, my dear,” he replied, and she’d believed him. She’d watched the carriage go and she’d believed him. And when the first week passed with no letter, she presumed the sea between her home and his had slowed it down and his letter would arrive in the second week or the third.
    Now she didn’t know what to presume. Where had his lettersgone? Where under the stars was her husband and did he know she was worried about him?
    “That’s enough, Tilly,” Grandpa said. His wheeze had become a terrible rattle. “I’m tired now.”
    “Do you want me to draw the curtains so it’s dark enough to