Читать книгу The Dark River онлайн

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"I had no time to grieve for her then. Hard it was to do all that had to be done, for I was very weak. But in the end, the mother lay in her bed as though asleep, with her pretty brown hair lying loosely around her shoulders. Death kept no memory of the pain she had suffered. All that had been smoothed away.

"I sat by the side of the bed with her baby in my arms, and when the time came I suckled the little daughter. My milk flowed strong and good. To feel that little mouth at my breast, and those tiny hands... it gave me a feeling of peace, Mama Taio, of deep happiness. I forgot the loss of my own. It is truth I speak: I could even believe, at moments, that the little daughter was mine. All the day I sat there, holding her, and so my father found me on the evening of that day. He had come, swimming the flooded rivers. It was a journey few men could have made in such a storm.

"I knew then what I would do. The need to lie was stronger than myself. It was so easy to explain. I told my father the child was mine and that it was Nina's that died. I seemed to have been given the power to claim it. My father believed at once, nor has there been the least doubt in anyone's mind from that day to this. My husband was in the Low Islands, at Hao. He came within the week, and there is no need to tell you how he loved the little daughter he believed his own. Never, till the day of his death, did he suspect that Naia was not his own flesh and blood. I felt neither shame nor guilt. I could believe that Nina herself would have wished it so, for who could care for that fatherless, motherless child as well as I? And whose need could have been greater than the child's and mine for one another?