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“Hallelujah!”
“Godparents and sponsors, if you would now submerge the postulants.”
Gilbert Drake put a hand on the young boy’s shoulder and pressed down, till his head was completely beneath the waterline of the baptismal pool. For a few seconds Gilbert watched the boy’s jet-black hair swirl upward, lifted from his scalp by the water like the hair of a corpse.
How easy it would be to drown someone. To drown a child. All you had to do was stand there.
It was a sinful thought. Gilbert dismissed it.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
“Amen.”
“Now raise the postulants up, cleansed of sin, into the Light of the Lord.”
The children came out of the water as one, gasping a collective breath. The congregation cheered. In the pool, wet hugs were exchanged. Gilbert Drake’s godson looked up at him, gap-toothed and triumphant, his smooth Indian skin the only flash of brown among the other pasty-faced, East End boys.
“I did it, Uncle Gil! I did it!”
Gilbert Drake’s eyes filled with tears. “You did it, Nikil. Your big brother would’ve been so proud.”
The room Billy Hamlin rented in Kings Cross was dark and dank and depressing. A bare lightbulb hung pathetically from the ceiling, the plastic window blinds were broken, and the squalid single bed smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat.
Billy didn’t care. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes and a feeling of peace washed over him.
In a few days he would see her.
In a few days it would all be over.
He slept.
Chapter Fifteen
Roxie De Vere observed her naked body in the mirror and frowned. A small curve in her midriff bothered her.
I’m getting fat. If I stuck it out far enough, I’d look pregnant.
She tried it, edging forward in the wheelchair the physical therapists at Guy’s Hospital had designed especially for her, to enable her to take showers by herself. Turning sideways, she stroked her bloated stomach and struck a maternal pose.
“It’s as close as I’ll ever come,” she said out loud.
Roxie’s hatred for her mother was like a thing then, solid and physical, a teddy bear that she could clutch to her chest and nurture. At other times it felt more like a rock, something heavy and grounded that she could chain herself to while she screamed. One day she would do it. She would hurl that rock into the ocean of her own self-pity and drown. Then her mother would be sorry.
Or would she? Roxie didn’t know anymore.
All she knew was that Andrew Beesley was the only man she would ever love. And that thanks to her mother, Andrew was gone.
Wheeling herself into her bedroom, Roxie got dressed. It took a long time, but thanks to the inventiveness of her medical team, and the hundreds of thousands of pounds thrown at the problem by her father, Roxie could now manage almost all of life’s daily tasks for herself.
“You could live independently, you know,” Marie, Roxie’s chief physical therapist, had told her repeatedly. “Get your own place. You don’t have to live at home if you don’t want to.”
Roxie told Marie that she stayed on at Kingsmere for her father’s sake. “Mummy’s away so much. Darling Daddy would be desperately lonely on his own.” But the real reason she stayed was to spite her mother. As much as Roxie loathed living under the same roof as Alexia, she knew that Alexia hated it even more.
Why should that bitch have a peaceful, happy life with Daddy after what she did to me?
She should be punished. She should suffer.
Roxie pulled her blond hair back into a ponytail and dabbed blusher on her cheeks. She was still a beautiful young woman, despite her ruined body. Parliament’s summer recess was coming up. As usual, the De Vere family would decamp to Martha’s Vineyard for the holidays, with Alexia jetting back and forth to London as needed.
