Lettie filled a huge copper kettle from the tap. She lit a gas hob with a match and put the kettle on the flame. Then she took down five chipped mugs from a cupboard, and hesitated, looking at the woman. The woman said, ‘You’re right. Six. The doctor will be here too.’
Then the woman pursed her lips and made a tchutch! noise. ‘They’ve missed the note,’ she said. ‘He wrote it so carefully too, folded it and put it in his breast pocket, and they haven’t looked there yet.’
‘What does it say?’ asked Lettie.
‘Read it yourself,’ said the woman. I thought she was Lettie’s mother. She seemed like she was somebody’s mother. Then she said, ‘It says that he took all the money that his friends had given him to smuggle out of South Africa and bank for them in England, along with all the money he’d made over the years mining for opals, and he went to the casino in Brighton, to gamble, but he only meant to gamble with his own money. And then he only meant to dip into the money his friends had given him until he had made back the money he had lost.
‘And then he didn’t have anything,’ said the woman, ‘and all was dark.’
‘That’s not what he wrote, though,’ said Lettie, squinting her eyes. ‘What he wrote was,
“To all my friends,
Am so sorry it was not like I meant to and hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me for I cannot forgive myself.”’
‘Same thing,’ said the older woman. She turned to me. ‘I’m Lettie’s ma,’ she said. ‘You’ll have met my mother already, in the milking shed. I’m Mrs Hempstock, but she was Mrs Hempstock before me, so she’s Old Mrs Hempstock. This is Hempstock Farm. It’s the oldest farm hereabouts. It’s in the Domesday Book.’
I wondered why they were all called Hempstock, those women, but I did not ask, any more than I dared to ask how they knew about the suicide note or what the opal miner had thought as he died. They were perfectly matter-of-fact about it.
Lettie said, ‘I nudged him to look in the breast pocket. He’ll think he thought of it himself.’
‘There’s a good girl,’ said Mrs Hempstock. ‘They’ll be in here when the kettle boils to ask if I’ve seen anything unusual and to have their tea. Why don’t you take the boy down to the pond?’
‘It’s not a pond,’ said Lettie. ‘It’s my ocean.’ She turned to me and said, ‘Come on.’ She led me out of the house the way we had come.
The day was still grey.
We walked around the house, down the cow path.
‘Is it a real ocean?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said.
We came on it suddenly: a wooden shed, an old bench, and between them, a duckpond, dark water spotted with duckweed and lily pads. There was a dead fish, silver as a coin, floating on its side on the surface.
‘That’s not good,’ said Lettie.
‘I thought you said it was an ocean,’ I told her. ‘It’s just a pond, really.’
‘It is an ocean,’ she said. ‘We came across it when I was just a baby, from the old country.’
Lettie went into the shed and came out with a long bamboo pole, with what looked like a shrimping net on the end. She leaned over, carefully pushed the net beneath the dead fish. She pulled it out.
‘But Hempstock Farm is in the Domesday Book,’ I said. ‘Your mum said so. And that was William the Conqueror.’
‘Yes,’ said Lettie Hempstock.
She took the dead fish out of the net and examined it. It was still soft, not stiff, and it flopped in her hand. I had never seen so many colours: it was silver, yes, but beneath the silver was blue and green and purple and each scale was tipped with black.
‘What kind of fish is it?’ I asked.
‘This is very odd,’ she said. ‘I mean, mostly fish in this ocean don’t die anyway.’ She produced a horn-handled pocket knife, although I could not have told you from where, and she pushed it into the stomach of the fish, and sliced along, towards the tail.
‘This is what killed her,’ said Lettie.
She took something from inside the fish. Then she put it, still greasy from the fish guts, into my hand. I bent down, dipped it into the water, rubbed my fingers across it to clean it off. I stared at it. Queen Victoria’s face stared back at me.
‘Sixpence?’ I said. ‘The fish ate a sixpence?’
‘It’s not good, is it?’ said Lettie Hempstock. There was a little sunshine now: it showed the freckles that clustered across her cheeks and nose, and where the sunlight touched her hair, it was a coppery red. And then she said, ‘Your father’s wondering where you are. Time to be getting back.’
I tried to give her the little silver sixpence, but she shook her head. ‘You keep it,’ she said. ‘You can buy chocolates, or sherbet lemons.’
‘I don’t think I can,’ I said. ‘It’s too small. I don’t know if shops will take sixpences like these nowadays.’
‘Then put it in your piggy bank,’ she said. ‘It might bring you luck.’ She said this doubtfully, as if she were uncertain what kind of luck it would bring.
The policemen and my father and two men in brown suits and ties were standing in the farmhouse kitchen. One of the men told me he was a policeman, but he wasn’t wearing a uniform, which I thought was disappointing: if I were a policeman I would wear my uniform whenever I could. The other man with a suit and tie I recognised as Dr Smithson, our family doctor. They were finishing their tea.