Our Castle by the Sea Read online

  Pa was up in the lantern room when I got back. I put the groceries away and took the newspaper up to him, along with a cup of tea. The lantern room was filled with a strange, metallic light. It had started to rain again, and the gray skies filled every window, wrapped around us like a band of iron. Should I say anything about seeing the police detective in the village? It was probably better not to.

  “I heard the German guns today,” I said instead.

  Pa nodded grimly. “Me too.”

  I put his cup of tea down on a ledge and handed him the newspaper.

  “Thanks, First Mate Pet,” he said, and gave me one of his cheerful salutes, but it wasn’t convincing at all.

  “Edie at the bakery gave us the newspaper, so we’ve saved a penny there,” I said, passing him a handful of change. “She said there’s nothing much in it today anyway.”

  Pa smiled a little. “Did she indeed? What—no half-price hat vouchers or free tickets to the pictures?” He shook the newspaper out and scanned the front page. Then his smile died completely.

  “What is it, Pa?”

  He didn’t say anything. He swallowed and frowned, reading very intensely. The paper buckled beneath the grip of his fingers.

  “Pa?”

  I stepped around him, putting my hand on his shoulder. I tried to find the headline that had caught his attention. And saw it straightaway.

  “TRAITORS TO BE HANGED”

  SWIFT PROSECUTION AND DEATH PENALTY FOR THOSE FOUND TO BE AIDING ENEMY—LORD BARTON COMMENTS ON NEW TREACHERY ACT

  My nightmare about the Wyrm that night was worse than ever. I was in the water, swimming frantically, and the jaws of the sea-dragon were right behind me. I dragged myself up onto the beach and it followed, squirming out of the sea. It somehow knew the way through the gaps in the barbed wire, and it clawed its way across the sand, up the cliff, into the cottage, and up into the lantern room of the lighthouse, where I was hiding. What was especially horrible about the dream this time was that I just gave up. I heard the hiss of its breath getting closer and closer, but I didn’t try to run anywhere or fight, I just accepted that this was how my life would end—as a sacrifice in the foul jaws of the sea dragon. I was so frightened, so broken, that I was ready to welcome the darkness.

  I woke up to the sound of arguing and the low burble of news on the wireless. The blackout blinds were down, so I had no idea what time it was, and the horror of my dream still pulsed through me like poison. I lay still, trying to steady my breath.

  “I’m going to go, Pa,” Mags shouted. “You can’t stop me!”

  What was she shouting about? Go where?

  “For the last time, Magda—I said NO.”

  Were they talking about Mutti? Did Mags want to go and see her? Yesterday’s newspaper headline was branded in white-hot letters across my every thought. Pinstripe had suggested that Mutti was a spy, but that wasn’t the only thing that now made me think she was guilty … There was something else too, something I had told no one else about.

  Late that last night, I had crept up into the service room to take another look at the newspaper article, and hidden away underneath it was the second page of Mutti’s letter. Pa had hidden it from us deliberately, and as soon as I read it, I understood why. From her final words to us, it was clear that Mutti would be hanged as a traitor, and there was nothing any of us could do about it.

  The missing page of the letter crackled softly beneath my pillow. My arms were wrapped tightly around myself beneath the blanket, but it didn’t stop my hands and feet from trembling.

  The voices in the kitchen rose up again: “You can’t possibly go over there by yourself, Magda—you’ll be killed!”

  “But thousands of our men will be killed unless we go and help them!”

  They weren’t talking about Mutti. What were they talking about? Something to do with the war … I got out of bed and went straight into the kitchen. It took a moment for Pa to notice me, standing there, all pale and barefooted in my pajamas.

  “Nothing to worry about, Pet,” Pa said, though his face told me something very different. “Your sister and I are having a discussion—”

  “About this,” Mags interrupted, turning up the volume on the wireless. “Listen.”

  “… the Admiralty is putting out a call for all men with boating skills,” the announcer said. “Especially those with a good knowledge of coastal navigation who are capable of taking charge of a yacht or motorboat. Volunteers will be required to cross the Channel to Dunkirk in France to help evacuate British soldiers. All seaworthy vessels …”

  “They’re trapped,” Mags said, switching the wireless off. “Thousands of our men are waiting there on the beaches right now—thousands of them!—cornered by Hitler’s army.”

  “Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,” I said, still haunted by my dream of the Wyrm.

  “Exactly,” Mags barked. “And I can help.”

  “Other people are going to help them, Mags, but not you. You’re too young. And …”

  “And what? And I’m a girl? Pa! You know I can man a boat better than most men in this village, better than most men in the country I bet!” Her hair was wild, her eyes shone. There was nothing to be done with Mags when she had the wind in her sails like this.

  Pa opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. He held out his hands instead, as if begging her to stop.

  “AGH!” Mags roared, exasperated. Then she flung the kitchen door open and stormed away. The wind slammed the door shut behind her.

  Pa collapsed into a chair and closed his eyes.

  I stood there for a moment, my feet freezing on the tiles, just looking at my Pa. After seeing the newspaper headline yesterday, he had spent most of the afternoon and evening frantically polishing every bit of glass and metal in the lantern room (and there was a lot of glass and metal to be polished in the lantern room), but he didn’t whistle as he usually did when he did that sort of thing. After dinner he had just sat there in his chair, exhausted, staring into space.

  That was when I had crept upstairs to the service room and found the hidden letter.

  Pa sat in front of me now, his arms limp in his lap. His eyes were still closed, but I knew he wasn’t asleep. It was as if something that had been pulled tight inside him for months and months had finally snapped.

  “Would you like a cup of tea, Pa?” I said.

  He nodded, but his eyes remained shut.

  Usually I would have left Mags alone for a while—she needed time to cool down—but too much was at stake now. Too much had spiraled out of control already, sucked down into this terrible whirlpool. I had to try to forget about my suspicions and all that stupid business with Spooky Joe and Michael Baron, and the note that was screwed up into a ball in the pocket of my coat. None of that mattered right now. Besides, how could Mags be the spy? Here she was, determined to sail across the Channel all on her own to rescue British soldiers. What sort of traitor would volunteer to do that? The only thing I really understood in that moment was the sickening fear that had wrapped its tentacles around me. My family was in terrible trouble, and if we didn’t help one another, we would all be lost.

  “Mags,” I said when I found her, sitting behind the lighthouse among the standing stones. “Please don’t be angry with Pa—he’s so worried about Mutti.” My sister was right by the edge of the cliff, plucking at a tufty bit of grass. I sat down next to her. “He’s so worried, Mags, I don’t think he can bear to be worried about you too.”

  “I know,” she said.

  We sat there in silence for a while, and I sifted through the events of the past few days, trying to make sense of it all, but everything was too stirred up and muddied with fear. Mags held up her hand, letting some scraps of grass fall from her fingers. The wind blew them away from us, out over the cliff towards the cool gray sea. Towards France.

  A little seaside town just like this one … I thought about the German guns I had heard yesterday, and the radio an
nouncement about the thousands of men trapped on the beaches. Just twenty miles away. I squinted at the horizon to try to see the outline of the French coast.

  The sky was clearer than it had been the day before, but there was a strange haze over the water. It wasn’t a sea mist, though—it was smoke. Something rumbled in the distance, and we saw the tiny silhouette of a plane moving across the sky, but it was too far away for us to see if it was ours or the enemy’s.

  “It was that newspaper article about the Treachery Act that really upset him,” I said.

  Mags nodded—she had seen the article too.

  “He thinks they are going to prosecute her,” I said. “He thinks they’ll find her guilty.”

  Mags shook her head, furious: “But what proof have they got?”

  “They don’t need proof, Mags.” And my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. “They’ve got her confession.”

  “Her confession?”

  My heart was beating in my throat as I passed my sister the piece of paper that had been concealed beneath my pillow.

  “What’s that? Another letter from Mutti?”

  I shook my head. “It’s the same letter. This is the second page. I found it on Pa’s desk last night, hidden underneath yesterday’s newspaper.”

  “He hid it from us?”

  “Yes.” I recalled the shocked expression on Pa’s face when I had walked into the kitchen, and the peculiar way in which Mutti’s letter had ended: PS Remember …

  Mags read the missing second page:

  … that I have told the detective everything he needs to know. I am ready now to write everything down and sign it. I will write that I am guilty. This is really the best way. I love you all so much.

  “But she can’t be a spy … Not our Mutti …”

  “I know,” I said.

  When Mags gave me the piece of paper back, I saw that her hand was shaking, just like mine.

  She must have noticed the same thing. She put her arm around me and gave me a squeeze. She hadn’t hugged me for months. Suddenly I couldn’t hold back my tears.

  “I don’t understand any of it, Mags,” I sobbed.

  “No,” she said, “but if she’s making a confession to the police, she must have done something, mustn’t she?”

  Pinstripe’s ominous words echoed through me: Sometimes, good people do bad things … This is something you are going to need to come to terms with. Very soon.

  Perhaps he had even received her written confession already. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and then sat for a moment.

  “What do you think will happen now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It wasn’t likely that the police would be looking for another suspect now—my sister, or Spooky Joe, or anyone else for that matter. They had a written confession from my Mutti—what more did they need? I didn’t say anything about Joe’s coded note or the fact that her initials had been on it; as far as Mags was concerned, the scrap of paper had been lost somewhere between the south cliff and Dragon Bay.

  Mags sighed. “We just have to wait to see what the police will do. Mutti will probably be transferred from the camp to a prison, and then there will be a trial …” I stopped. I didn’t want to think about what happened after that. TRAITORS TO BE HANGED … The sea below us was swilling back and forth against the cliff—I was a ship in a bottle being tipped this way and that.

  “There’s nothing we can do right now, Petra.” Mags paused. “Nothing we can do for Mutti anyway …” And I saw that she was looking towards France again. She must have been thinking about all those poor soldiers caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  “You want to go and help them.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. Now more than ever.”

  Mags got to her feet and held out her hand to pull me up beside her. We stood there together quite still, hand in hand, looking out to sea, and I became aware of a strange, high-pitched resonance, a fierce energy filling the air all around us. Just for a moment, there weren’t four Daughters of Stone on our clifftop: There were six of us.

  When we went back into the kitchen, Pa was still sitting in his chair. He was doubled forward now, with his head in his hands. He didn’t even look up when we came in. “I can’t take it, Mags,” Don’t ask me again. I just can’t …”

  Mags looked at him. For a moment, I was afraid that she was going to swear or storm out again, but she didn’t. She knelt down on the floor next to Pa. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “I want to help, Pa—we can’t just let this happen, can we? I can’t join up to fight, but I know how to man a boat. This is something I can actually do to make a difference. Please, Pa.” She put her hand on Pa’s arm. “We can’t help Mutti right now, but we can do this—we can help them.” Pa was still looking at the floor, his hands pressed over his eyes. When he looked back at my sister, I saw that his face was wet with tears. I had never seen my father cry before. A vast pit of fear opened up inside me.

  “I’ll go, then,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’ll go. And you can help me, Magda. Is the motorboat in working order yet?”

  Mags shook her head. “Not really, Pa.” I could tell she was angry and disappointed that she wouldn’t be going too, but she didn’t want to upset Pa again.

  “Then get down to the harbor and give the old lifeboat the once-over for me.” He swallowed hard. “I’ll set off with the tide first thing tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” Pa said. He sounded determined now. “Tomorrow. There’s something very important I need to do first.”

  With Mags down at the harbor working on the old lifeboat, and Pa up in the service room, I was left in charge of dinner. Since Mutti had gone, we had taken it in turns to cook, and I wanted to make the three of us a special meal that night as a surprise for Pa. The trouble was, the more I tried to make it special, the more it felt like a last supper. I kept finding myself blinking back tears that welled up out of nowhere.

  I was peeling potatoes at the sink when I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye—someone was in our garden—and then, before I could catch my breath, there was a sharp rapping sound on the door. I jumped, and the potato knife slipped in my wet hand, slicing through the soft pink skin under my thumbnail. I cursed under my breath and dried my hands as best I could, wrapping a clean cloth around my bleeding thumb. By the time I opened the door, my heart was flipping about like an eel.

  It was Pinstripe.

  “Oh. Hello,” I said.

  “Hello.”

  And then Pa’s voice was in the kitchen behind me. “I wasn’t expecting you to come up here to find me, Inspector,” he said. His voice was oddly formal—the same tone he used when he spoke to the Admiralty on the telephone but more stilted.

  “Well, I thought I’d save you the trouble of coming down to the station,” the detective said, removing his hat. “And there was always the risk that you might … change your mind.”

  Change his mind about what?

  Pinstripe gave me one of those looks that grown-ups are particularly good at. “Perhaps you could leave us to have a little chat in peace, Petra?”

  I looked at Pa. What’s going on? Is it something to do with Mutti? But his face wore a strange, hard expression—all closed up. His hands gripped the top of the kitchen chair much too tightly.

  I went away, leaving them to their “little chat.” I didn’t go to my room, though; I unbolted the heavy door that linked the cottage to the lighthouse, feeling the chill of the concrete through my woolen socks. I crept up the stairs.

  Up in the lantern room, I went straight to the speaking tube, carefully removed the brass whistle, and put the funnelled end to my ear. I sat down, trying not to breathe too loudly. I stared out through the glass into the blue of the day, and listened.

  “I had been waiting to hear from you, Mr. Smith.” That was Pinstripe. He must have been sitting a bit farther away from the speaking tube—on the other side of the table; his voice was quiet
er than Pa’s.

  “Waiting? Then you knew?”

  I caught my breath. Knew what?

  “I’ve had suspicions since I came here to the lighthouse on the day of your wife’s tribunal. We took one of your old logbooks, and I’ve been comparing your charts with the diagrams we seized.”

  “Ah.”

  A cold, sick feeling started spreading through my body.

  “I needed stronger proof and was about to bring you in for questioning when I received your telephone call.”

  Proof? Was he saying it was Pa? That Pa was the traitor? But …

  “I only sent that one package, sir. Just one package of information.”

  My heart pounded so hard I thought it might burst. I saw that the blood from the cut under my thumbnail was soaking, bright red, through the cloth.

  “But why, Mr. Smith? You’re not on the side of the Nazis, are you?”

  Of course he’s not, I wanted to scream down the tube. Of course he’s not! I pressed my clammy hand over my mouth to stop myself from screaming it out loud.

  But Pa didn’t say anything.

  “Why now? Why tell me the truth now?”

  Pa cleared his throat. “You know why. My wife has made a confession. And with the new Treachery Act—the sentence … It’s all lies of course—her confession—she must be trying to protect me. She must have found out somehow.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” Pinstripe said. “She is certainly trying to protect someone. I went to see her yesterday and told her we wouldn’t be using her confession as evidence, as it clearly wasn’t true. She was not able to replicate the diagrams or even explain the meaning of the shipping coordinates.”

  The world beyond the window was a swimming haze of sea and sky. I felt as if I were clinging to the top of a mast, swaying sickeningly above the real world. It was all too much—Mutti’s confession, and now Pa’s. It seemed now that Mutti’s life was saved, but Pa—my Pa …