“You probably won’t remember me, Joe,” she said now, “but I knew you when you were little.”
Joseph glanced at her, then nodded, his eyes downcast again, and from the color that rose in his cheeks she realized that he must be painfully shy. She wondered if the family had stayed in one place long enough for either child to be enrolled in school.
“Your mummy wanted to see—” she had begun, when Gabriel spoke from behind her.
“Through there,” he said, gesturing towards the passageway that led to the galley and the sleeping cabins beyond. He stepped down into the cabin, Marie clinging to his leg like a limpet, and the small space seemed suddenly claustrophobic. For a moment Annie felt frightened, then she told herself not to be absurd. Gabriel wouldn’t harm her—and certainly not in front of his wife and children.
She followed his instructions, moving through the tidy galley and into the cabin beyond. Here, the curtain had been pulled back a few inches, enough to illuminate the figure lying propped up in the box bed.
“Rowan!” Annie breathed, unable to stop herself. If she had thought the woman looked ill when she had seen her yesterday, today her skin
seemed gray, and even in the filtered light of the cabin, her lips had a blue tinge.
Rowan Wain smiled and spoke with obvious effort. “I heard you.” She nodded towards the window that overlooked the towpath.
“I couldn’t let you go, thinking we didn’t appreciate what you did for us all that time ago. But there’s nothing we need now. We’re just fine on our own.”
Annie was conscious of Gabriel standing in the doorway, with both children now crowded behind him, but she tried to ignore their presence. As there was no other furniture in the small cabin and she didn’t want to talk to Rowan while hovering over her, she sat down carefully on the hard edge of the box bed. Gabriel had made it himself, she remembered, a fine example of his carpentry skills.
“You’ve got yourself a boat now,” Rowan continued with a smile.
“You and your husband?”
Facing this woman who had given her entire life to her family, Annie found herself suddenly unable to admit she’d abandoned her husband on what she suspected Rowan would see as a whim. “Finding oneself ” was a strictly middle-class luxury. Nor, aware of Gabriel’s hostile presence behind her, was she sure she wanted to admit to being alone. “Yes,” she said at last, nodding.
“But yesterday you were working her on your own. And well, too.”
“My husband—he had some business at our house in Tilston.” The prevarication came a little more easily, but then she remembered she’d told Gabriel she’d gone back to using her maiden name. Well, she’d just have to bluff it out as best she could. “He’ll be back soon,” she said with an internal grimace, knowing she had just marked herself out as someone who used a narrowboat for an occasional second home, a practice that earned little respect from the traditional boater. “I’m surprised I—we hadn’t run across you before now.”
Rowan looked away. “We were up Manchester way for a while, but the jobs dried up.”
From the silence of the generator, the mean fire, and the slight shabbiness of the boat itself, things had not improved on the Shropshire Union. The boat was so cold that Rowan was covered in layers of blankets over the old woolen jumper she wore, and when she spoke, her breath made tiny clouds of condensation. Annie said,
“Rowan, if things aren’t going well, I could—”
“No.” Rowan glanced at her husband as she cut Annie off. “We’ll do fine. You should g—”
Annie wasn’t going to let herself be fobbed off so easily. “Rowan, you’re obviously not well. How long has this been going on? Have you seen a doctor?”
“I’m just a bit tired,” Rowan protested, but her voice was breathy, a thread of sound. “With Christmas and all. I’ll be fine when I’ve had a rest.”
It was a game effort, but Annie now saw things besides the pallor—
the hollows under the woman’s eyes, the protrusion of the bones from the stick-thin wrists, the lank hair that had once been glossy.
“Rowan,” she said gently. “I think you haven’t been well for some time. You must get some help.”
“You know I can’t.” Rowan sat up, grasping Annie’s arm with unexpected strength. “No doctors. No hospitals. I won’t take a chance with my children.”
Annie laid her hand over the other woman’s fingers, gently, until she felt Rowan’s grip relax. “There’s no reason why your seeing a doctor should put the children at risk. They’re both well. You must—”
“You know what my records will say.” Rowan’s voice rose with urgency. “It never comes
off—you told me that yourself—even
though I was cleared. Someone will come, looking, prying, and this time it won’t be you.”
Annie closed her eyes and took a breath as the memories fl ooded back. The case had landed on her desk, one of many, and she’d seen enough abuse in her years as a social worker that at first she’d been predisposed to take the report at face value, a fact that now shamed
her. She’d held such power, to have taken it so lightly. If her findings had agreed with the doctors’, the Wains’ case would have gone to the civil courts. There, the family, marginally literate and with no funds for counsel, would have been helpless against the unlimited resources of the state and the testimony of so-called expert witnesses. It was almost certain that both Joseph and little Marie would have been taken into foster care, and possible that one or both parents would have faced criminal charges.
She had first interviewed the Wains aboard the Daphne. She’d been unexpectedly charmed by the boat, and by Rowan’s shy hospitality. The first niggle of doubt had crept in as she’d observed a mother whose devoted care of her son seemed in no way calculated to call attention to herself, a father who was surly to her but unfailingly gentle with the little boy. By this time, Joseph’s seizures seemed to have stopped, and neither parent displayed anything but heartfelt relief.
Although puzzled as she continued to visit the family, as she watched them time after time with their child, Annie became more and more convinced that the charges against them were unfounded.
So she had gone with her instincts, but it had taken her months of investigation, of interviews, of sifting through medical records, to come up with the means to prove herself, and them, right.
Their nomadic life had made the process enormously difficult.
They spent little time in one place, had no extended family, no intimate contact with others who could substantiate their accounts of little Joseph’s illnesses. But during one interview, Rowan told her about Joseph’s first seizure.
They’d been on the Grand Union Canal, below Birmingham, moored alongside several other boats. Gabriel had been on deck and Rowan in the cabin with the sleeping toddler when the boy had stiffened, his back arching, his arms and legs flailing. Then the child had gone limp, his skin turning blue. Rowan had lifted him, shaking him frantically while shouting to Gabriel for help.
Gabe had come plunging down the hatchway with Charlie, a quiet, lanky young man who drifted from one mooring to the next on an old Josher. But when Charlie saw the still child in Rowan’s arms, his indolence vanished. “Ambulance training,” he’d said shortly. Taking Joseph from Rowan, he’d laid him out on the cabin floor, and after checking his airway, had given the baby a quick puff of breath, then pressed on his chest. Once, twice, three times, and then Joseph’s body had jerked in a spasm and he’d begun to wail.
They had never run across Charlie again, however, and Rowan didn’t even know if he was still on the boats.