They are calling to me now William telling me its time to come home.
The people who run the home are going to help me as well they said.
In the assilum. They’ve got some treatments for girls like me. Becuse I am still only sixteen they will do a girl like me. What am I like? Whats a girl like me mean? Some one who beleeved a boy when he gave her a ring? I just no this isnt my baby but they said they could help me with that and its very common for a new mum to get deppressed after having a baby and then not wont the baby. Is it? How can it be? He was my prince, the most beutifull baby in the world and I loved him more than I have ever loved anything. Im not calling him William any more. Hes not mine and I cant love him. So Im going to call him Billy. It soots him.
Maybe if I get treated he will be William again and I can love him.
Jenna
Ben stretched a hand back and rested it on his lowered, blond head. ‘I can see the lights of Benhar ahead.’
‘Turn ours off and go in dark.’
‘Is that the last one? She went voluntarily, Nik. She believed they could help her.’
‘Yes, I suspect they thought they could help a lot of young women who needed anything but that. There’s one more. It’s undated, but it was at the back of the stack. The handwriting is almost unreadable.’
William
They took us over the coorsway today and I saw this girl in a room she was younger than me and she had just had this treatment they were going to give me because I am so sad and so angry and so confused all the time. But she looked like she had been in a terrible storm and drouned. She couldnt get to a toilet in time and she just stood there with it all coming down her legs and she was larffing and larffing and then she fell on the floor and started flopping around.
I am not going to let them do that to me. They say Billy will be best off here. There are other children like him here and they dont live very long anyway so it doesnt matter.
I am not leaving him here and I am not having the treatment. He’s not my baby but he is all I got now and I am all hes got. I dont know what I am going to do.
I think I will take us both to Lyonesse. It will be easy. Staying alive is whats hard.
Im so sorry William.
Im not as brave as I thort I was.
Jenna
‘That’s it. That’s the last one.’
‘But then William came for her.’
‘Yes, William came for her. I would imagine getting these letters all in one go would have been something of a shock.’
Ben slowed their speed. ‘Do you think she was just mad? That it was all in her head? Depression?’
‘No, Ben. I think what you think.’
‘Fucking hell.’
‘I agree. Fucking hell.’
‘They wereswapped.’
‘Yes, they were swapped, and William understood that and saw the danger she and Billy were in.’ He folded the letters. ‘Theroyalbaby, the heir, was born with Down’s Syndrome. They knew through the nanny that there was an unmarried girl about to give birth on La Luz—and that she was entirely alone in the world. Untethered and unprotected. Obviously it wasn’t just a coincidence that the nanny came for her little holiday in Guillemot with her sister just after the royal birth. She probably came to see the girl for herself, like they check horse’s teeth—good breeding stock.’
‘How did they think they could get away with something like that?’
‘I think it would have been easy if it were not for the storm. If the nanny had been there when Jenna actually gave birth, they could have swapped the babies before she ever got to see her own son. But she had two days to bond with him, learn his face, and so when they gave her Billy she knew. And then she tried to get people to listen to her, and they couldn’t have that, so it was a lobotomy for her and the asylum for Billy.’
‘The Christening was cancelled—that makes sense now. Do you remember what Phillipa said—when she went up with the gift?’
‘Yes. I think Billy was still there then. Phillipa gave MacArthur to Nanny One. The nanny brought the bear with Billy when she brought him from London to Jenna. Maybe she wasn’t entirely heartless, and thought he could at least keep his teddy bear—given what else they were taking away from him. Maybe they genuinely believed that giving him to Jenna, to a mother, was better than what else they might have done with him. They were all sent to institutions then, Ben. It was the way—still is in my country. Phillipa told me once that her mother’s sister—another of the queen’s cousins— had been shut up in an institution when she was only five, but that no one talked about it, and it was put about that she had died.’
