Robert Goddard: Name To a Face

“It’s me,” said Hayley “Don’t worry. I’m in a call-box. I haven’t broken your rules. I just wanted… needed… to check you were OK.”

“I’m OK. Where are you?”

“Is it safe to tell you?”

“Oh yes. It’s safe.”

“We’re in Harrogate.” How far away was Harrogate? Harding wondered. A thousand miles? It felt at that moment more like a million. “When can we leave?”

“Anytime you like.”

“So, you’ve… dealt with Whybrow?”

“He’s been dealt with, yes.”

“And everything’s going to be all right?”

He had planned to return to London after visiting Carol, travelling via Munich in order to alter the statement he had made to the police and to retrieve Polly’s painting from the airport. He had been wondering how Hayley would react to her first sight of it. And wondering was all he could do now. He would have to tell her what had just happened-and soon. He did not know how to set about it. But he would have to find a way. There was something else he had to say first, though, something more important, more lasting. The future-their future-began here. He needed her to understand that. He needed her to believe it. “Yes, Hayley,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right. For you and me. For us. I promise.”

“I can hear a siren,” Carol called to him.

“What was that?” Hayley asked.

“That?” Harding gazed down into the clear blue water beneath him: a mirror of the sky; a vision of lightness, of liberation, from the past and present. He smiled. “That was nothing. Nothing important, anyway. Whybrow’s dead, Hayley. But that doesn’t matter. We’re alive. And we’re going to go on living. That’s what really matters.”

The Cornishman , Thursday, 9 March 2006:

BABY’S MIRACLE SURVIVAL

AFTER TRAGIC DEATH OF MOTHER

A Scillonian family was this week mourning one member and welcoming another after a tragic but life-affirming incident last Saturday when 21-year-old expectant mother Josephine Martyn died after falling downstairs at her home, Pregowther Farm, St. Mary’s.

A doctor who attended the scene with an ambulance crew detected a heartbeat in the womb and successfully delivered a baby boy by emergency Caesarean section eight weeks prematurely. The child was later transferred to the special care baby unit at Treliske Hospital. A spokesperson said medical staff were “amazed” by how well he was doing.

Many islanders will remember that Josephine Martyn, née Edwards, cheated the medical odds herself as a child by recovering from a particularly virulent form of leukaemia. Speaking on behalf of Josephine’s husband Frederick Martyn, Mr. Martyn’s brother, Alfred who also lives at Pregowther Farm, said the baby’s survival was a “miracle” that made Josephine’s death easier to bear. “It’s what she’d have wanted,” he added. “The family line will go on.”

The known facts concerning the loss of HMS Association and three other men-of-war off the Isles of Scilly during the night of 22/23 October 1707 are faithfully represented in this novel, as are the circumstances of the theft of an emerald-and-diamond ring from Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s body when it was washed up at Porth Hellick. There is no evidence either way as to whether this was the same ring later supposed to have been returned to the Shovell family.

Francis Gashry is a genuine if minor historical figure. He thrived under the patronage of Admiral Sir Charles Wager, whose Cornish estate he ultimately inherited. Born in Stepney in 1702, the son of a Huguenot perfumer, he held a number of posts at the Admiralty before securing his most lucrative appointment as Treasurer of the Ordnance. He served as MP for East Looe from 1741 until his death in 1762.

William Borlase, the famous Cornish antiquarian, was rector of Ludgvan from 1722 until his death in 1772. The construction of an extension to the rectory early in 1736 (to accommodate Borlase’s growing family) might well have obliged him to lodge a visiting antiquarian at his brother Walter’s house, Castle Horneck, on the outskirts of Penzance.

Historians are increasingly inclined to doubt that King Edward II died, as generally supposed, during his imprisonment at Berkeley Castle in 1327. His son and successor, Edward III, is now believed to have met his father in secret on at least one subsequent occasion and to have been successfully blackmailed by an Italian priest who possessed evidence of the former king’s survival. Where, when and how Edward II actually died no one can say.

ROBERT GODDARD is the author of nineteen bestselling novels, including Never Go Back, Into the Blue, Play to the End, Hand in Glove, Borrowed Time, Sight Unseen , and In Pale Battalions. He lives in England, where he is at work on his upcoming novel, Made to Be Broken.