‘Oh, Miss Sarah, things are bad here.’
Sarah’s eyes softened in sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry, Lena.’
‘There are no visitors any more, and I worry for Mr Karl. The madam is angry all the time. Shouting for me, shouting for Mr Karl…’ Lena shook her head.
Sarah jogged their hands up and down to draw Lena’s eyes to hers. ‘Why don’t you come home? There will always be a place for you there.’
‘I can’t leave Mr Karl. No new girl will stay a single day with her. At least I know how things go in the house. I know what he likes to eat. I look after Mr Karl.’
Sarah pulled her into a hug. ‘Karl is lucky to have you.’
When Lena had left, Sarah poured tea and helped herself to a square of moist coconut cake. ‘Poor Lena. I don’t know what to do. Esme is so brittle, so thorny; nobody can get near her. She refuses to see any therapist, won’t consider medication. And she seems to be getting worse as time goes on, not better.’ She sipped her tea and stared out the window over the garden. ‘And, let’s face it, I’m the last person she’ll accept help from. I think she always felt threatened by me because I grew up with Karl. Because I got on better with his mother than she ever did. And then Marilie’s death just wrote me off, along with Alistair.’
Hannah had gone back to the cabinet and, kneeling, opened the linenfold drawers again. One was filled with all the random bits and pieces which accumulate in drawers. Rolls of ribbon, a pair of binoculars from the forties, an old biscuit tin with an assortment of fountain pens and elastic bands. The second drawer was deeper. Stacked on one side were some cardboard files, labelled with stickers that read, Tax, Banking, and Correspondence. From the other side of the drawer, Hannah drew out a large Bible. Its leather covers were worn soft, perishing at the creases where it had been opened and closed for a hundred and fifty years. Gently, she turned the first pages. The pages were tissue-paper thin, the writing in beautifully printed old Afrikaans. A few pages in, she came to the ragged edges of a page that had been torn away. She could see it had been some kind of register, faint, printed lines reaching the tattered ribbon in the centre. The next page was intact. A marriage register that began in 1850. Hannah ran her finger down the list and found the marriages of Rachel’s grandparents, her parents, then Wolf. Further down, she saw Gisela, then Karl and Esme, and lastly Marilie and Alistair.
‘These old Bibles usually used to have birth and death registers in them, didn’t they?’
Sarah turned to her. ‘I think so – have you found something?’
‘I think the birth and death page has been torn out. Such a pity. It would have answered most of our questions about the Badenhorsts.’
‘Now what?’ said Sarah, taking another square of coconut cake.
‘We’re still just guessing about Rachel. We have one picture, but with no name identifying her.’ Hannah sank into a velveteen rocking chair with her mug of tea. ‘That’s not much for Alistair, is it?’
‘It might have to be enough. Finish your tea, Hannah. We should go. We’ve been here a while, and I don’t want to trouble Karl.’
‘Should I find a recipe book to make our ruse slightly believable?’ Hannah grinned at Sarah, who nodded, colouring slightly.
Sarah picked up the tea tray and left to return it to Lena in the main house, while Hannah went through to the kitchen at the back of the little house. A rounded corner shelf sat near the old-fashioned stove and was stacked with recipe books. She pulled one off the top of the pile and left the house, pulling the door closed behind her.
Alistair wiped his wet hands on the back of his jeans as he approached his mother’s house. The pungent smell of roasting rosemary drifted from the kitchen, making him smile. Inside, Sarah bustled around the room, pushing a pan of sausages into the oven to bake alongside a tray of butternut wedges. At the table sat Hannah, paging through a book. Alistair stopped in the doorway, suddenly unsure whether to escape back to his house or enter the room. Neil, peeling potatoes, looked up as Alistair hesitated.
‘There you are,’ said Neil. ‘I was about to come call you.’
‘I followed my nose,’ said Alistair, watching Hannah look up and smile at him. He stepped into the kitchen and took the knife his father held out, beginning to cut the potatoes into a pot.
Glancing over at Hannah’s book, he noticed the pages were old and fragile, browned at the edges, and spotted here and there with marks and crusty bits.
‘What is that?’ he said.
Sarah opened the oven door to poke a skewer into the butternut. ‘We were at Karl’s today,’ she said. ‘We borrowed one of Gisela’s recipe books.’
Alistair caught Hannah’s quick smile for Sarah, before she turned another page. Then she jerked forward to peer at a page.
‘Sarah, it’s her! Rachel wrote this. It’s her bread recipe she speaks about in the journal.’
‘Let me look.’ Sarah took the recipe book, held it at arm’s length and squinted at the page. She then rifled through the rest of the book, stopping towards the end. ‘You see,’ she said, pointing to another page, ‘this is Gisela’s writing at the end. It could have been her mother’s book.’
‘Or even her grandmother’s, Wolf’s wife. That would put it in the same timeframe as Rachel.’ A smile spread across Hannah’s face and Sarah beamed back at her.
‘What’s going on?’ said Alistair, laying down the knife and moving to the table. Hannah turned to him, smiling smugly and handing him the open recipe book. At the top of a page, in neat spidery writing, was written and underlined in a sweep of ink, Rachel’s Best Bread.
‘A recipe? We’re going to open a can of worms over a bread recipe?’
‘It would seem we are,’ said his father, still patiently peeling potatoes.
Sarah swatted at him with her oven gloves. ‘We found an album with photographs of the old Badenhorst family, one with Rachel as a baby. And then this recipe book with the very recipe she talks about in Hannah’s journal.’ She waggled her mitted hand. ‘She was real, Alistair, which means the camp is likely to be real too.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Alistair raised his hands in surrender. Hannah’s face lit up with a smile, delight dancing in her eyes. She was clearly loving every minute of his defeat. He bowed a low, mocking scrape, offering the book back to Hannah like a medieval courtier. ‘What now, Captain, my Captain?’
She knocked him gently on his bowed head with the recipe book. ‘Now I shall call my brother to recommend an historian.’
‘Remember the deal though?’ Alistair straightened and folded his arms across his chest, his light mood threatening to unravel.
‘Yes, of course. No media, no strangers, no circus.’ Hannah’s grin was infectious and Alistair couldn’t help but smile back. Underneath, though, a niggle of dread began to uncurl. He had held his life so tightly for the past eight years, held it in a fist. Nothing had been outside of his control and he had felt safe. Until now. On so many levels. Giving strangers licence to his farm was enough to tip him over the edge but then there was Hannah. He shut down that line of thought. He wasn’t ready.
He kept the tone light that evening, hiding the churn inside and maintaining a friendly banter with Hannah and his parents. He liked seeing her there. Relaxed and laughing. He liked seeing his mum and dad respond to her, drawing her out further with talk of growing up in Cape Town, childhood holidays in Betty’s Bay. Maybe he and Hannah could manage a friendship. Maybe, if he kept his distance, they could keep it like this. Easy and light like warm water at the top of a sunny pool. She had kicked her shoes off under the table and, when she rose to help Neil carry the dishes through to the kitchen, Alistair watched her retreat bare foot down the passage, her legs long and slim in the old jeans hugging her hips. She lifted the dishes to dodge Grant bounding past her and, as she raised her arms, her T-shirt slid up a few inches revealing the small of her back and a hint of underwear, a line of lace sliding above her jeans. This was the problem, he thought. Friendly did not describe what she evoked in him.