Our Castle by the Sea Read online

  A Shelf Awareness Best Children’s Book of the Year

  A BookPage Children’s Top Pick of the Year

  A Kirkus Best Book of the Year

  A Telegraph Top 50 Book of the Year

  A Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book of the Year

  “From the first page, I was entirely smitten and compelled to read on until I finished this MYSTERIOUS AND POIGNANT story.” –Pam Muñoz Ryan, author of Echo and Esperanza Rising

  “In an IMAGINATIVE, COMPELLING first-person narration, Henry wraps her story in fairy tales, exposing her guilt, grief, isolation, and fear as she unravels the stunning secrets of Nightingale Wood. An EVOCATIVE, beautifully written, MESMERIZING debut tale with LUSH fairy-tale themes and A POIGNANT EXPLORATION OF MENTAL ILLNESS–ENTHRALLING.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “COMPELLING … Strange effectively weaves in fairy tales, poetry, and themes common to classic children’s literature, reflecting Hen’s love of books. A brave heroine propels this STRONG AND RICHLY LAYERED novel, a MEMORABLE portrait of grief, resilience, and rebirth.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Strange tells a LOVELY, EXTRAORDINARILY ENCHANTING coming-of-age tale.” –Shelf Awareness, starred review

  “This is a HAUNTING GOTHIC tale of LOVE, COURAGE, HEALING, and FAMILY.” –School Library Journal

  “POIGNANT … As with Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s The War I Finally Won, set during World War II, this EVOCATIVE novel explores a time period little known to American children … Young readers will nevertheless identify with Henry’s desire to find a way to hold her family together–and find hope again.” –BookPage

  “What looks like a ghost story turns into an appealing youthful gothic … the atmosphere of the rustic seaside town and the isolated rural house is perfectly suited for the tale, and the strictures of the era, with Henrietta communicating with her father only by slow letter, are used to maximum effect.” –Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

  “This is a thoroughly SATISFYING, old-fashioned-seeming story with a heroine all the more admirable for her gentleness, integrity, and dogged courage in a world of unreliable adults. Hen’s avid reading of fairy tales, Keats, and Victorian children’s books enhances the story’s RICH LITERARY TEXTURE.” –Horn Book Magazine

  “Lucy Strange’s modern take on a classic children’s literary narrative is REMINISCENT OF A LITTLE PRINCESS … It explores the powerful influence of imagination in coping with heartbreak, with absentee parents and a trip through the wood at the end of the garden full of songs, stories, poetry, fairy tales, and a witch in a caravan … A touching, sensitive portrayal of grief and the pain of trauma, as experienced through the eyes of both parent and child.” –MuggleNet

  “SUPERBLY BALANCED BETWEEN READABILITY AND POETRY … This is an assured debut.” –The Guardian (UK)

  “RICH WITH NODS TO CLASSICS … this OUTSTANDING debut explores family, grief and mental illness with great skill.” –The Bookseller (UK)

  “Highly recommended … LOVELY.” –Rene Kirkpatrick, Seattle University Book Store

  “[This novel] handles the effects of war, the reaction to grief, families coming apart–hard topics for all ages–WITH GRACE AND HOPE.” –Liza Bernard, Norwich Bookstore

  Praise for The Secret of Nightingale Wood

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two: Spring 1940

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Three: Summer 1940

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue: Spring 1941

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  South East Coast of England,

  Autumn, 1931

  I was very small indeed when Pa first told us the legend of the Wyrm and the Stones. It was Hallowe’en and he took us out to the standing stones on the clifftop to play snapdragon and tell ghost stories. This was my sister Magda’s idea, and we were almost out of our minds with excitement when Pa agreed. I carried the bowl of brandy-soaked raisins very carefully from the cottage, while Pa lit the way ahead with a lantern. Mags galloped giddily behind, drunk on the night air and fizzing with delight at being allowed out after dark. It was probably not long past suppertime, but I felt that it must be midnight at least—the witching hour. The darkness danced with specters.

  We wrapped ourselves up in blankets and huddled together on the clifftop, the four standing stones looming around us. Pa lit the brandy in the snapdragon bowl and the flames flickered dangerously, casting shadows on our faces. I had never played the game before. My father and sister started swaying backwards and forwards, grinning and chanting together; “Snip! Snap! Dragon!” They pinched the burning raisins from the flames. I did not recognize these strange, chanting, nightmarish creatures. I was half-afraid of them. I caught the rhythm of their words and joined in the game, pinching at the weird blue flames and gobbling up the burning-hot raisins.

  With his blue and lapping tongue

  Many of you will be stung!

  Snip! Snap! Dragon!

  After the game, when the flames had dwindled and our faces were lit only by the lantern, Pa told us the story of the standing stones.

  “Long, long ago,” he said, his face suddenly serious and skull-like in the lamplight, “a thick fog settled on this coast. It was very bad for the fishermen and their families, as they could not fish while the fog lingered, but it was even worse for the families of those aboard the Aurora. The Aurora had set out on the morning before the fog came, and she had still not returned.

  “There were four men aboard the Aurora and each of these men had a daughter. Each evening the girls climbed the path from the harbor hand in hand, making their way up to this very clifftop to light the signal fire, and they kept the fire burning all through the long, cold nights. They hoped that, if the Aurora was still afloat, if she was lost somewhere in the fog, the bright flames would help to lead the little boat home. By the fourth evening, everyone else in the village had given up. They said the Aurora must have been swallowed up by the Wyrm—the treacherous sandbank that lurked in the shadow of the towering cliffs. The Wyrm had wrecked many hundreds of ships over the centuries, and it was hungry for another sacrifice.

  “But the girls had one last hope. That night, as usual, they wound their way up the cliff path hand in hand. As usual, they lit the fire and tended it, and they sat and watched and waited for their fathers to return, but
on this night they did not make their way home again.

  “Here in the dark, on this very spot where we are sitting now, the girls sang a special song to the sea. They sang the sweetest, saddest song that has ever been heard. It was a song of love and loyalty and sacrifice, promising the greatest of gifts if only the Aurora were returned safely to the harbor. They sat and sang, and as they sang, they saw the fog begin to disperse. They kept singing and singing.

  “Soon it was dawn and the girls stood up together, holding hands as the darkness dissolved and the new sun started to rise over the sea. Their white dresses billowed like sails in the first breeze that had blessed the shores in four long days and nights. A ghostly little boat seemed to bob up from the gray waves, and the girls knew it was the Aurora. They kept singing—but singing with joy now as they watched the fishing boat sail towards the harbor below.

  “The Wyrm squirmed beneath the surface of the water. It had returned the Aurora, but now it felt angry and cheated and hungry. So it now took the great sacrifice the girls had promised: It took their souls. Tentacles of mist reached up from the sea, creeping over the edge of the cliff and into their hearts. As the sun rose over the glittering water, the four daughters turned to stone.”

  I shivered horribly. I felt all icy and strange. I looked at Mags and she was frozen, her mouth hanging open. For a moment I thought perhaps she had been turned to stone too, but then she blinked and swallowed. Pa was still talking, though his voice was very, very soft now—just a whisper.

  “People say that the Daughters of Stone stand here on our clifftop as a warning to those who sail these dangerous waters. If you close your eyes and listen very carefully, you might just be able to hear their sad, sweet, ghostly song …”

  A sea mist must have risen as Pa was telling the story; tendrils of it seemed to be creeping across the cliff. I was aware of the four stones surrounding us, watching us. I could almost hear them breathing. My heart was thudding in my throat now. I heard a whispered song, as soft as the hiss of sea foam over pebbles, the swish of a sea breeze through a long white dress.

  For my father and sister, the legend of the Wyrm and the Stones was just that—a legend—distant through the mists of centuries. But for me, it was different. From the moment I first heard the story, I knew it was much, much more. I knew it in the chill of my bone marrow and the crawling of my skin. I knew that the ancient magic of our cliffs was real and present and that I was destined—somehow—to become part of the legend too.

  Autumn 1939

  On the very first day of the war, Mags came home with a split lip. Her eye socket was swollen too and promised to ripen into a large, plum-colored bruise. Her knuckles were red and grazed.

  “What happened, Mags?” I gasped. “Was it one of the girls at school?” But my sister ignored me, storming down the footpath and into the cottage through the kitchen door.

  Mags is a fiery sort of person. Living with her is a bit like living with a half-tamed tornado, but for all her fierce temper she had never been in a proper fight before. Mutti made her sit down at the kitchen table. She gently bathed my sister’s eye, lip, and knuckles with warm water and witch hazel.

  I hovered just inside the door, watching.

  “Tell me who did this, please, Magda,” my mother said quietly.

  “It doesn’t really matter who did it,” Mags muttered. “It could have been any of them. They were all saying the same thing.”

  “What were they saying?”

  But Mags just drew in a long, shaky breath and would say nothing.

  I could see Mutti’s eyes were brimming with tears. She blinked them back, wiped her hands on her apron, and then got on with preparing dinner. She pushed her hair from her face with her forearm and quickly chopped an onion. I wondered if she really needed to chop an onion for dinner or if she just wanted to have something to blame her tears on.

  Pa took Mags outside into the darkening garden, and I followed a little way behind. I picked up the watering can and made myself look busy tending to the vegetables.

  Mags and Pa stood near the fence at the bottom of the garden, talking quietly—or rather, Pa was talking quietly and Mags was just staring at the ground with her arms folded across her chest. She kicked at the grass with the toe of one shoe. After a while I heard her say, “You didn’t hear them, Pa. You didn’t hear what they said about Mutti.”

  There’s something you should know about my family and, specifically, about Mutti. You might already be wondering why we call her Mutti and not Mum or Mother. Mutti was born in Germany and grew up there. German is her first language, and she taught it to us too. Mutter is German for mother. The fact that our Mutti had been born in Germany was never important to us—it was normal after all, as normal to us as living in a lighthouse—but now that the war had started, other people seemed to think it was very important indeed.

  Mutti called us all in to dinner, and we sat around the kitchen table in silence. Mags touched the corner of her lip and inspected her finger to see if it was still bleeding. It wasn’t like a normal dinnertime. There was something else at the table with us—something tense and waiting, like a gun that had been cocked but not yet fired—the fizzing gunpowder trail of the conversation Pa and Mags had started but not finished.

  My sister had a library book in her lap—Essential Motorboat Maintenance—but her eyes didn’t seem to be focusing on the pages as she turned them over.

  Pa moved his chair closer to Mags and leaned towards her a little. She pretended to be very interested in a diagram of a propeller. Mutti and I pretended to be very interested in our dinner. Mags frowned down at her book, refusing to look at Pa.

  “You’re too old for playground scraps, Magda,” he said. “You’re nearly sixteen now.” Then he sighed, and when he spoke again his voice was softer. “Try to let it go, Mags,” he said. “Next time they start saying things like that, just try to let it go.”

  Mags said nothing.

  “You have a choice,” he went on. “You don’t have to react.”

  “You’re right, Pa,” Mags said at last, closing her book and turning to look him dead in the eye. “I have a choice.”

  And the conversation was over.

  After dinner, Mags shut herself in our bedroom. She wanted to be by herself, so I took my sketchbook up to the lantern room. Perhaps I’ll draw the sunset, I thought. There were some wonderfully dramatic clouds that evening—dark and jagged against the red sky.

  You can see the Daughters of Stone from the top of our lighthouse. In fact, it feels as if you can see the whole world from up here. On a clear day you can see right across the yawning sea to the outline of the French coast. The harbor is down there to the right, and our village, Stonegate, is tucked away just behind it, in the lee of the cliffs. When the tide is out, you can just see Dragon Bay—that long, thin, sandy beach below the chalky south cliff that runs most of the way from here to Dover. If you turn and look the other way, the English farmland stretches out in an enormous patchwork of green and gold—hundreds of oddly shaped fields all stitched together with hedgerows and dark woodland. Little groups of houses cluster around church spires, clinging to the roads that thread between the fields.

  Because there are windows all the way around the lantern room, you can keep turning and turning, and soon the sea and fields, sea and fields, sea and fields become a blue-green blur, and you have to sit down.

  If you go through the door and out onto the walkway, and if you are brave enough to look down, you will see the standing stones beneath you. The wind out there is nearly always fierce and blustering, even in the summer. The four stones wrap around the seaward side of the lighthouse like part of an enormous clock face, half-buried in the green turf of the clifftop. I think the stones are the main reason that our lighthouse has always been known as the Castle. From a distance, the Daughters of Stone seem to be buttresses or guard towers, or even stony sentinels, facing out towards the sea and the storms, watching for enemies.

  I had a
lways liked the fact that there were four standing stones, just like the four of us—Mutti and Pa, Mags and me. The symmetry pleased me—each of us had our own stone. The smallest one was mine—farthest to the left, pointed at the top like a diamond. When we were little, Mags and I would pretend the stones were mountains to climb, or islands in a sea churning with predators—and we would use ropes and rocks and bits of wood to get from one stone to the next without getting our legs bitten off. I remember Mags brandishing a toy sword, using it to slash at the slimy tentacles that had twisted around me and were dragging me down into the inky, blood-black depths of the ocean … Pa told us to be careful. He said the stones were megaliths, they were thousands of years old and if we wanted them to last another thousand years, we probably shouldn’t be scrabbling about all over them.

  Pa said people who were experts on megaliths had all sorts of theories about the stones—ideas to do with druids and rituals and the summer solstice. They believed the stones must have come from another part of England altogether, or maybe even France; they aren’t local rock, as our cliffs are chalky and these stones glitter with granite.

  I’ve dozed in the long grass between the stones on many a summer’s afternoon. I’ve lain there for hours, listening to the lullaby of the sea and watching the slowly dimming sky. Mags doesn’t believe me, but I’ve heard them singing—on those still, dark dawns, when the sun struggles to rise through the fret or the fog. It’s a strange, distant ghost song, high and resonant, like four different tuning forks buzzing their soft notes from deep within the rock. It feels as if they are singing only to me.

  Sometimes I speak to the stones—a sort of whispered, pagan prayer. I remember doing that on the evening of Magda’s fight. As I drew their four, rain-rounded shapes and the dark daggers of cloud that hung above them, I asked the stones to protect my Mutti and my Pa, and my stupid, surly sister. I have always believed that the Daughters somehow guarded our Castle, and in a way I think they do, but I know now that it is much more complicated than that. This sort of old magic is not loyal to anyone or anything. It has its own laws. It is as cold and unknowable as an ancient god.