Our Castle by the Sea Page 17

  I was a Daughter of Stone now.

  And stone is strong.

  The hospital was clean and comfortable, and the nurses were cheerful, but I had never been away from home before and it wasn’t long before I started pining for the big skies of Stonegate and the bright sea air. It didn’t seem to matter that I couldn’t move about on my own—here in the hospital, inland, I was a fish out of water anyway. Every now and then I would hear the distant calls of gulls through the open windows on the ward and it made me ache even more than my bruises did.

  I was allowed to return home a few weeks later, strapped into a heavy back brace. Grandpa Joe collected me and took me home in a taxi. He had arranged with the coastguard to take up his old job as lighthouse keeper again so that he could look after me and my sister and we wouldn’t have to be evacuated. Mags made a sponge cake to welcome me back, and Grandpa Joe bought me a beautiful new sketchbook and set of pencils. Every morning, he carried me up to the lantern room so that I could sit and watch the sea and draw the things I saw through the windows, and the things I saw in my mind too. I drew my whole story—from Mags’s black eye on the first day of the war through to the pink geraniums in the hospital window boxes. And while I sat up there, sketching and shading, bathed in summer light, the war continued—and so did life in the rest of the Castle. Barnaby still hunted rabbits every morning and dozed on my lap in the afternoons, but some other things had changed a great deal.

  Mags was now a paler, quieter version of the heroic big sister I used to know. She volunteered with the lifeboat crew, and when she wasn’t working down at the harbor, she was out walking across the cliffs all by herself. She became dreadfully thin. When I looked at her now, I thought of the word dwindled—yes, that’s the word—dwindled. Like a dying fire. And it was all because of Michael Baron.

  They had searched for Michael for days after the bombing. The police concluded that his body must have fallen all the way down onto the beach below and been swept away with the tide. Mrs. Baron’s hair turned as gray as sea spray, and her eyes were no longer as bright as a kestrel’s. They were red and small, and seemed to have sunk deeply into her skull.

  The inquest returned the verdict accidental death and there was a memorial for Michael in the church. Nothing was ever said about my accusation of sabotage, and I never told a soul what had happened before the air raid—Michael’s terrifying, zealous speech about Hitler, and how he had tried to push me from the edge of the cliff … Now that he was dead, I thought it might be best to keep these awful things to myself. It wasn’t like keeping Pa’s secret, though—to protect his memory—this was different. This was to protect Mags.

  We had never spoken about it, but I knew why Mags lied about Michael having been there in Dragon Bay Cave after he cut the phone line, why she didn’t want to believe that he was a saboteur, why she wouldn’t come to the police station, why she was so angry with me, and why she was desperate not to be evacuated.

  “You loved him, didn’t you?” I said when I saw her all dressed up for his memorial, layers of Mutti’s pancake makeup covering the purple hollows beneath her eyes.

  She looked at me for a moment, and then she nodded.

  “Yes,” she admitted quietly.

  She and Michael had been meeting together for months—up on the cliffs or down in Dragon Bay Cave. I remembered that misty morning when I had followed Mutti and discovered that Mutti was following someone else. She had been following Mags after all. She knew Mags was meeting someone.

  “But why didn’t you say anything, Mags? Why did it all have to be so secret?”

  She just shook her head. “I can’t explain, Pet.”

  I helped her put her hat on, pinning it carefully and tucking the curls around her ears.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” I said. “You can push me in the wheelchair.” But she shook her head again. And she went to the memorial alone.

  One of the dreadful things about war is that it doesn’t pause to let you catch your breath. There is no time to grieve. It rattles on, like a monstrous juggernaut. Within the space of a few months, Mutti had been taken away, Pa had died, the bomb had fallen, Michael had been killed, and now my sister was disappearing in front of my eyes.

  People said that if the invasion was coming at all, it would be coming very soon. I was a Daughter of Stone now—so, from up in the lantern room, from first light to twilight, I did what the Daughters of Stone do: I kept watch over our sky and sea. The weeks of summer went by and faded to autumn. There were flames in the sky nearly every day—flames and smoke and explosions and bullets like blazing rain and the furious battling of our planes against theirs. There were days when I watched from dawn, when the sea was still, misty and milky white, through the rolling blue of the morning, to the tufted waves and mackerel skies of midday. I watched the colors of the sea and the sky shifting together, like a beautiful dance of light. I saw all of this, and I thought about my poor lost Pa. I worried about my sister, drifting around the Castle and the clifftops as insubstantial as sea mist—as if the heart had been torn out of her. I thought about my Mutti far away from us, locked up in her internment camp. And I thought about the Rossis, and all the others who have been taken too.

  A very sad thing happened to Mr. and Mrs. Miller—the elderly German couple who had been so kind and hopeful on the day of Mutti’s tribunal.

  Despite being classed as Category C enemy aliens, they were eventually put in an internment camp anyway, and then sent to Canada on a ship called the Arandora Star. But the ship was sunk by a German U-boat and they drowned. More than eight hundred people drowned. I can’t say how many of those people were on the side of the Nazis—I expect some of them must have been, but everyone knew that the Millers were the sweetest, most harmless old couple in the world, and there must have been others like them on the Arandora Star too: innocent people. The Millers had come to England for a new life because their home was not safe for them anymore. “This is a good country,” Mr. Miller had said to my Mutti. “A free country. They will see the truth in you.”

  Grandpa Joe just shook his head when we heard about the Arandora Star on the wireless. His blue eyes swam with tears.

  October was a cold, dark month and Hallowe’en was the coldest, darkest day of all—one of those very cruel autumn days that feel like a dress rehearsal of winter. All day long, the weather crouched over the lighthouse like a giant spider. Grandpa Joe went to Dover—to the magistrate’s court. Mrs. Baron called by in the morning and asked him to meet her there in the afternoon. She said there were some forms to do with legal guardianship that he had to complete, so he caught the bus just after lunch. I thought how kind it was of her to be sorting things out for us when she must have been grieving terribly for Michael.

  Mags baked bread. I sat up in the lantern room and listened to her moving around in the kitchen below, the dough thudding rhythmically into the flour on the kitchen table. Yesterday she said there was something important she needed to talk to me about, but she wasn’t sure if she was quite ready yet, and today it seemed that she could hardly look me in the eye. She had been spending more and more of her time out of the house. I watched her walking over the cliffs—through the rain or fog. I wondered if she went up to the south cliff to feel close to Michael, in the same way that I felt close to Pa when I was looking out to sea.

  At last I heard her footsteps coming up towards the lantern room.

  “Can I get you anything, Pet? A cup of tea or anything?”

  She could have asked me that through the speaking tube.

  “I’m fine, thanks, Mags. Is Grandpa Joe still not home?” I knew that he wasn’t.

  “Not yet.”

  She sat down next to me. She was wearing a pale yellow scarf that might once have belonged to Mutti. Her hands were folded in her lap, and that made me think of Mutti too—at the tribunal, her white hands twisted together.

  “I need to ask you something, Pet,” she said. “The day the bomb fell—you said some things
about Michael …”

  We had not discussed it since. I had never told her that he attacked me, that he was chasing me across the clifftop when the bomb fell. Her heart had been broken enough.

  “Were those things true, Pet? Was he really the saboteur?”

  What could I say? There are times when the truth can be so much more cruel than a lie. Mags was staring right into me, and I was so close to saying Yes, everything I said about Michael was true—and much worse besides, but then I said: “It must have been the fall. I can’t remember much about that last day. I can’t remember what I saw, Mags.”

  She looked at me for a moment longer—looked deep into me—then she nodded and turned to stare out of the window. The afternoon sun was a band of rose-gold light beneath the clouds. It shone warmly on her brow, her nose, the strong bones of her cheeks and chin. For a moment, she looked like the sister I remembered.

  “I need to go out for a while,” she said.

  “It’s getting dark, Mags.”

  “I know, but I shouldn’t be too long. And Grandpa Joe will be home soon.” Then she winked at me. “Stay right here, Pet.”

  I smiled. Where else could I go?

  An hour or more passed. It was dreadfully lonely up there, and dreadfully cold too. The tide was high but starting to drop now. The shape of the Wyrm twisted beneath the waves like a ghostly serpent. It was hungry. I became aware of a faint, high note buzzing in my chest—the song of the stones—a warning … But then, as I looked at the sea, I thought I saw something else too—in the deeper water beyond the sandbank. A long, dark shadow. I squinted at it through Pa’s telescope. What could it be? It was no use, though—it was getting too gloomy to see anything clearly now.

  As night closed in on the Castle, it began to rain—heavy drops hammering on the lighthouse roof and strafing the windows—and I wished with all my heart that Grandpa Joe would come home. What can have happened to him? There was a dogfight happening several miles out over the sea—I could hear the whining of the engines and the rattle of the guns. Every now and then there were bright showers of light in the sky, like fireworks. The feeble wail of the village air raid siren seeped in through the edges of the windows, but I knew that I couldn’t get down to the coal cellar by myself.

  Perhaps Dover has been bombed, I thought, perhaps that’s why Grandpa Joe hasn’t come home. But then I shook the thought from my mind. I can’t start thinking like that, not when I am all alone here in the dark—I’ll drive myself mad. I closed my eyes and started counting, promising myself that either Mags or Grandpa Joe would be back by the time I got to one hundred.

  But I didn’t get to one hundred.

  The darkness of the lantern room and the sound of the rain somehow cocooned me. The violence of the world outside was so muffled and so very, very far away … My mind slipped sideways into a dream of underwater shadows …

  There are creatures slithering down here at the bottom of the sea—pale, squirming serpents, fish and eels—disgusting and tortured and suffocating in this liquid darkness. I try to swim away, aware that a huge mass has shifted beneath me—the ocean floor itself, lifting up, stretching out its scaled neck and tail, opening its foul, yawning jaws. It is following me through the black water—my lungs are bursting—I have been holding my breath for a thousand years. I stumble out of the water onto the sand, and I hear its hissing, rasping breath behind me. I scramble away. Its heavy, wet footsteps follow me, its long claws scratch against the rocks. I can feel its rancid breath on my back as it lunges forward, reeking of salt-water corpses and rotting flesh—it has killed so many already—what made me think that I would be the one to outrun it? There is nothing special about me. I fall to my knees, sobbing and panting for breath. I know it will happen now. The bony jaws of the Wyrm are about to close around me and it will all be over …

  But that moment never came. I was suddenly completely awake, my ears ringing with the appalling noise that had woken me. Gunfire.

  I looked around in the darkness, my heart still banging from my nightmare. I strained my eyes to check every inch of the lantern room, listening for noises in the lighthouse and the cottage beneath me, but I knew the answer already. Grandpa Joe had not come back, and neither had Mags.

  There were planes over the sea, just beyond the cliffs—four, five of them maybe—they were roaring at each other like mechanical dragons, spitting out fire and fury. The world beyond the lantern room was a blurred chaos of smoke and rain and noise.

  If I can just fall asleep again, surely the others will be home soon and everything will be fine … But I couldn’t. Something felt dreadfully wrong. I managed to lift myself up in my chair a little and twist around to look out of the window behind me. Everything was velvet black—I couldn’t even see the outline of the cottage roof—until an explosion in the sky illuminated the world like a ball of lightning, and then I saw something horrible. It was long and pale and yellow, and it was lying on the grass just outside the kitchen door. Everything went dark again instantly, but I knew exactly what I had seen. It was the scarf Mags had been wearing earlier. And the door to the kitchen was standing open. And there was something else there too—a lifeless shape slumped on the wet ground.

  Mags.

  I heard something several floors below, and my heart started to thump hard. Who can it be? Burglars? A saboteur? An enemy parachutist? What if this was the beginning of the invasion? I couldn’t hide. I couldn’t do anything or go anywhere. Another flash of fire in the sky outside, and I closed my eyes tightly. What is happening? What has happened to Mags?

  My brain spun through the dark maze of thoughts, and it came to its terrible conclusion at exactly the same moment that a noise from the service room made me gasp and open my eyes and turn towards the stairs: Someone is inside the lighthouse. Mags must have got in their way. And that same someone was now coming for me.

  There was a sound on the stairs—a soft, wet sound, but unmistakably a footstep, and it was soon followed by another, and then another. Something scraped along the wall as the footsteps ascended the stairs—closer and closer—and I could hear another sound now—the hissing of its breath. I shook my head, struggling to breathe as the familiar terror took hold of my heart and lungs. It can’t be the Wyrm, it can’t be … My nightmare had finally come to life—I had conjured it into existence with my dream and my fear. I stared in horror as the shadow of the Wyrm now appeared on the wall in front of me—exactly as I saw it in my nightmare. It was a huge, distorted shape with the unmistakable long, cruel muzzle of a dragon. It hissed again and I tried to control my panicked breathing, telling myself that I would be waking up soon—I always wake up at this part, always—I will wake up at any second—any second now … But the shadow grew larger, and the hissing of its breath grew louder, and my arms were full of pins and needles. I closed my eyes tightly and waited.

  It made its last heavy, wet step up onto the concrete floor of the lantern room, and then there was just the slow hissing of its labored breath. I pictured it there—scaly and pale and terrible—searching the darkness for me. I could hear the sound of a child sobbing in fear, and it took me a moment to realize that it was me. I thought of Mags, lying there on the ground outside and I was nearly sick: The Wyrm has killed her! It has bitten her to pieces with its needle-sharp teeth! I forced myself to open my eyes and saw, not a ghastly sea monster at all, but something very different.

  It was a slim, dark shape—a human shape—dressed in a long black raincoat and carrying a lantern. Its face was covered with something I mistook in silhouette for a dragon’s muzzle, something I should have recognized immediately. It was a gas mask. There was another long hiss as the figure drew its breath through the mask. Then it reached up with a black-gloved hand, and pulled the gas mask from its face.

  Mrs. Baron. It was my headmistress, the local magistrate and ARP warden. She was dressed in black from head to toe, and she was staring straight at me with her red-rimmed falcon’s eyes. “It’s you,” she said, and she alm
ost laughed, dropping the gas mask on the floor. “I was worried for a moment that your grandfather had come home. I should have known it was only you. He’ll still be stuck in Dover—furious by now that I’ve sent him on a wild-goose chase. He will have been waiting outside my office for hours and hours this afternoon—just long enough to miss the last bus home—and then the air raid sirens would have started …” She tutted sarcastically. “Such unfortunate timing!”

  I wrapped my arms tightly around myself, trying to make sense of what was happening. Mrs. Baron deliberately lured Grandpa Joe away from the Castle so that she could come here—but why?

  “I’ll put you to sleep in a minute—just like your sister,” Mrs. Baron said softly. “Just a drop of chloroform—it won’t do any harm. I was planning on getting the two of you evacuated to get you out of the way permanently, but this will have to do for now. It will buy me enough time to finish my work here.”

  “Work?” It came out as a croak.

  Mrs. Baron had found the crank handle for the optic. She fitted it and started turning it with both hands, winding up the mechanism. Her nest of salt-gray hair nodded crazily back and forth. The optic started spinning in the darkness like a ghostly merry-go-round. What was she doing? She couldn’t possibly be planning on lighting the lamp—not when there were German planes in the sky.

  “It’s going to be tonight,” she said, breathless with emotion. “The invasion! The U-boat will need a bearing to avoid the sandbanks.”

  The U-boat? I thought about the shadow I had seen, lurking out there in the water. Oh God …

  “This bit is particularly important,” she gloated, nodding to the spinning optic—a manic spark in her eyes. “The light has to be flashing to give a positive signal to the U-boat. A steady light is the agreed signal to abandon the landing.” She cackled then. “When we practiced the signal with the Luftwaffe, I had to make do with an oil lamp, up on the clifftop—but this lamp! What could be better than this? My husband would have been so proud of me.”