A Brief History of Montmaray

by Michelle Cooper

  Heavens, what a snob I sound! But it’s not my fault I’m a princess (albeit one from an impoverished and inconsequential island kingdom that is miles from anywhere). I can’t help all the rules and regulations that govern those born into our noble and ancient family. And I can’t exactly tell Aunt Charlotte, “Sorry, I’m unable to accept the proposal of Erich Ludwig-Wilhelm, that young Habsburg you’ve managed to unearth—you see, I’ve fallen in love with the housekeeper’s son.”

  Oh, change the subject, Sophia!

  All right. I will look out the gatehouse window and contemplate the view. Yes, that’s better. Unlike me, it is very beautiful, especially at this time of year. I can only imagine how mysterious and menacing the island must seem to strangers. An enormous black rock looming out of the ocean, its jagged peaks circled by seabirds and wisps of cloud. Towering cliffs with caves gashed into their faces. A narrow, windswept plateau at one end. The grim memorial cross at South Head, dozens of dead men’s names etched into the stone under a single date. Abandoned cottages scattered along the edge of a dark, deep pool, their roof slates long blown away and great gaping holes where the doors and windows were. And then there is the castle, stark and forbidding, cut off from the rest of the island by a perilous chasm.

  But when one has lived on Montmaray all one’s life, when one’s family has lived here for centuries, it is simply home. That long stretch of rock spread thinly with grass, for instance—we call it the Green, and it’s where we build our Midsummer bonfire each year. The Great Pool is for summer picnics and swimming races. The line of rocks past the old cottages is where we gather mussels; the cove at the base of the most imposing cliff is the best place to sink lobster pots. Wild strawberries spring up around the base of the memorial cross each summer, sheltering under the rosemary bushes. The hill is spread with sweet-smelling briar and whispering grasses, with bright patches of asters and heartsease and Bartholomew’s treasure. Then, either side of the hill, there is the beautiful indigo sea, rolling on and on and up into the sky. As for the sky itself—well, infinity, that’s the only way I can describe it. Nothing interrupts it. Toby says that in London, there are places where one looks up and can only see a tiny square of sky, and it’s hardly ever blue. No wonder the people in city streets always look so grim in photographs. No wonder I feel grim at the thought of ever having to leave the island…

  And now I can see Veronica, striding through the tall purple grass and looking the very opposite of grim. She has her canvas satchel strapped across her front and a bundle of driftwood for the stove under one arm. She’s probably on her way back from visiting George in the village. We call it the village because of all the cottages, but really, only one family lives there now. Well, two—the Smiths and the Spensers—but they’re all related. The Smiths are Jimmy, who is a bit older than Henry, and his widowed mother, Alice. The Spenser family is Mary, Alice’s sister, and George, Jimmy’s great-great-uncle.

  No one knows how old George is, but he claims to remember the wedding of Queen Victoria of England (which, personally, I have my doubts about—it would make him nearly a hundred). But it’s certainly true that he knows more about Montmaray than anyone else alive, which is one of the reasons Veronica loves spending time with him. Another is that she can practice her Cornish with him, as he’s the only one left on the island who speaks it fluently. She writes down everything he says, in Cornish or in English, and then adds it to the mountain of paper in the library that will eventually become A Brief History of Montmaray. She has been hammering away at this for the past three years and says she’s barely made a dent in it. It’s very intellectual—she read me out a bit yesterday on the Portuguese-Montmaravian Alliance of 1809 and I barely understood a word.

  Normally Henry would be down at the village, too, but I think she went back to bed after breakfast (she did go out fishing last night, the horrible child). Henry is meant to do three hours of lessons every morning now that Toby is back at school, but she’s managed to avoid them so far. Not that Veronica or I have pushed too hard for lessons to resume, because we’re the ones who are supposed to teach her. When we were her age, we had a governess and tutors; but there was more money then, and besides, there was Toby to consider (it would have been quite embarrassing if he’d turned up at Eton unable to read). After Toby went away to school, Veronica and I mostly taught ourselves from books in the library. Veronica, of course, proved to be much better at developing her mind than I was. (One could argue that this was because she had a better mind to begin with. However, one could also argue that I’ve squandered countless hours reading romantic novels, planning my future trousseau, and daydreaming about Simon, hours that could have been far better employed learning French grammar or reading Plato.)

  Aunt Charlotte did continue to dispatch tutors to us at irregular intervals for a while, but they didn’t tend to last long. Often it turned out their agency had neglected to mention that we live on a small island in the middle of the Bay of Biscay, and they didn’t cope very well when they ran out of cigarettes or face powder and realized that the nearest shop was two hundred miles away.

  Or worse, we were sent the sort of girl who thought that living in a castle would be madly poetic, who pictured herself drifting along the wall-walk in a flowing gown whilst reciting Keats, or trailing her fingertips in the moat as swans glided by. We don’t have a moat, just a rickety drawbridge that connects the castle to the rest of the island. There is water beneath the drawbridge, at the bottom of the Chasm, but it contains sharks rather than swans. Furthermore, climbing the ladder to the top of the curtain wall while wearing a flowing gown would look very undignified, especially in howling gales and torrential rain, which is our usual weather for a great deal of the year. Even when one of these girls managed to last more than a fortnight in the absence of hot baths and electric lights, something always happened—Henry would accidentally-on-purpose lock her in the Blue Room with the ghost, or Uncle John would tip his soup over her, or Veronica would catch her mixing up her ablative and her accusative during Latin translation and be very scathing. It always ended in tears, and the tears were rarely ours.

  Anyway, I decided that this morning was not the time to confront Henry on the issue of lessons. So much for my resolution to be firmer, but I’m never at my best first thing in the morning and I was feeling especially wobbly today because I had that dream again last night. Perhaps I should have written “nightmare.” I don’t know whether it is or not—I see the same thing each time, and sometimes I feel quite calm about it and other times I wake up gasping and trembling and longing to shake Veronica awake for a dose of her logical comfort.

  Last night was somewhere in between. As always, I was alone in a small boat, rocking back and forth with the slap of the waves, my fingernails digging into the damp wood. The sky was black and silver, but there was no wind, no lightning, nothing truly threatening—and yet the back of my neck began to prickle with dread. I knew that whatever I did, I mustn’t look down into the water, but I couldn’t help myself and there it was. That thing. Long and white and unraveling, just beyond my reach, drifting slowly towards the ocean floor.

  I never manage to figure out what it is. Sometimes I’m almost certain it’s a fragment of sail wrapped round a sinking mast. Other times I think it’s a dying sunfish. Or a shark. Last night, I could have sworn a part of it moved sluggishly against the current, as though it were trying to signal to me.

  But then I woke up, shivering.

  And now Veronica is marching across the drawbridge, which makes me shiver all over again. I always step very warily, taking care not to look down through the gaps where the slats have rotted away (it’s not heights I mind, so much as depths). Peering further out the gatehouse window, I can make out the green-and-white swell of the sea below her, deceptively calm today. “The spent deep feigns her rest,” as Kipling would say. It makes me picture all the torn-apart ships and picked-clean skeletons shifting about beneath the waves, victims of Montmaray’s treacherous rocks.
Oh, all those poor dead sailors, eels slithering through their staring eye sockets …

  What’s that noise?! Oh. It’s probably just some of Toby’s pigeons nesting in the chimney. It couldn’t be ghosts; ghosts don’t make cooing noises, and besides, I don’t think anyone ever died up here. (Note: Ask Veronica about this.) I wouldn’t really mind if there was a ghost, so long as it was friendly—the one in the Blue Room is. Anyway, a ghost would keep Rebecca away. She’s fearfully superstitious; it’s one of her many faults.

  Well, whatever the mysterious sound is, it’s not very good at repelling Rebecca after all, because she’s just shouted up the ladder that she needs me to go down to the village for the milk. Isn’t that supposed to be Henry’s job? Bother. Will write more later …

  No idea what the date is, 1936

  Rebecca has been in a lather of cleaning all week. She usually gets the villagers up to help, but I think she’s had another row with Alice, so there was No Escape for me. It is very annoying; I haven’t had five seconds to myself to think about Aunt Charlotte’s plan, so I still have no idea how I can convince Veronica to go to England—or even if I really want to leave Montmaray. Also, now I reek of scouring powder and ache in muscles that I didn’t know existed. However, I have just enough energy to sit up in bed and write a page or two. Veronica has generously donated her candle (mine is less than a stub, and we are down to only five for the whole castle). Handing it over, she told me how wonderful it was to see a FitzOsborne taking the trouble to write a detailed account of life on Montmaray and how historians in two hundred years’ time would praise my name. I don’t think she was entirely joking, so I haven’t had the heart to explain that my journal is subjective and rambling and will be completely useless to historians, especially as I can’t even remember the date (I think it may be November by now, but can’t be bothered to get up and look at the calendar).

  Poor Veronica—it’s a source of enormous frustration to her and her Brief History that most of our ancestors seem to have been either illiterate or wild fantasists. Take, for example, Edward de Quincy FitzOsborne, the family’s only writer of note. His most famous work is an epic poem that describes how Bartholomew FitzOsborne (then merely a baron) was forced to flee his Cornish estate in 1542, sailed south, tangled with a sea monster for a day and a night, defeated it valiantly, and then washed up on the shore of an uninhabited island halfway between France and Spain. This he declared his new kingdom, which he called Montmaray.

  In fact, no large ship has ever washed up in one piece on Montmaray—the rocks and the currents are too dangerous. Most likely Bartholomew was shipwrecked as he made his way to Spain, but managed to salvage enough to survive until he could send some men off for supplies. Edward also completely avoids the question of what Bartholomew did in the first place to so enrage his King, Henry the Eighth, that he was forced to flee. (Although Veronica has pointed out that Catherine Howard, Henry’s then wife, was beheaded that same year for adultery, which may not be a complete coincidence.) Furthermore, Montmaray—mangled Latin for “Mountain of the Sea”—was not named until nearly forty years later. Possibly there was some initial dispute over whether Bartholomew was truly entitled to call himself a king. I believe the usual method is to lead an army into bloody battle and emerge the victor, having slaughtered anyone who might disagree with one’s claims to royalty. Still, it wasn’t as though there were any people here to conquer—just a lot of puffins and lobsters. At any rate, they must have sorted it out, because Queen Elizabeth referred to Bartholomew’s son as “King John” when she thanked him for helping her defeat the Spanish Armada. We have the letter in the library, not that anyone can read much of it except the “Elizabeth R” at the end (penmanship wasn’t her strong point).

  Also, George did tell Veronica that he once saw a giant squid while he was fishing off South Head as a boy. He said it wrapped its tentacles around their gig, then seemed to realize that long wooden boats are not at all tasty and vanished in a cloud of black ink. So perhaps there is some truth to the sea monster story after all. And even if there isn’t, it does make a nice tapestry over there on the far wall of our bedroom, beside the wardrobe. The sea monster is picked out in silver thread and is devouring one of the sailors headfirst. The other sailors are lined up glumly along the deck of the ship, awaiting their turn. Bartholomew himself is clinging to a mast and brandishing his longsword—the very sword that Rebecca made me polish earlier this week. It is named Benedict and hangs in the Great Hall over the chimneypiece. In those days, swords were always christened, because they were in the shape of a cross and therefore holy. Isn’t that interesting? Sometimes I quite understand why Veronica spends all her spare time interrogating George about ancient customs and poring over crumbling bits of parchment. She also told me that after Bartholomew died, his son stuck the sword up on the wall of the Great Hall and declared: “Benedict will protect the House of FitzOsborne, now and for eternity!”

  Except he said it in French, which is what all noblemen spoke in those days, or possibly in Latin, so it must have sounded even more impressive. In any case, this has been translated to mean that we need to keep it razor-sharp at all times, no matter how many nicked fingers I end up with whenever I take it down for polishing.

  I also asked Veronica tonight whether anyone had ever died in the gatehouse. She said the nearest she could recall was when one of King Stephen’s sentries got drunk on shipwreck brandy and fell through the murder hole, breaking his leg.

  “But did he die?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m sure he did eventually die of something,” said Veronica. “Everyone does in the end, you know.”

  The murder hole is a square cut into the gatehouse floor and covered with a trapdoor. It was built so castle defenders could pour hot sand on enemies who managed to make it across the drawbridge. Apparently hot sand can get inside a suit of armor better than anything and is absolutely agonizing, so I’m glad no enemies ever got that far. Imagine how malevolent their ghosts would be. Anyway, the pigeon theory is now looking much stronger than the ghost theory, regarding the mysterious noises coming from the gatehouse chimney. Homing pigeons were one of Toby’s seven-day enthusiasms last year. He and Henry built a loft—more of a pigeon palace, actually—but a few of the birds escaped. Henry looks after the remaining half a dozen, and makes me include detailed reports on their well-being whenever I write letters to Toby.

  However, I’m neglecting today’s most important event—the Basque captain’s cargo ship stopped by. Henry, Jimmy, and I rowed out in the Queen Clementine, our little rowboat, and traded a bucket of Montmaray mussels (Captain Zuleta is inexplicably fond of the horrid, beardy things) for proper food, namely:

  1. Two pineapples

  2. A tin of cheddar crackers

  3. A box of Turkish delight, tied up with pink and gold ribbon.

  He also gave us some newspapers that he indicated he’d found lying around the ship—he knows what little news we get of the outside world. He really does seem a very nice man, even if I can barely understand a word he says.

  We gave Alice one of the pineapples and half the crackers (it was only fair; Jimmy had gathered most of the mussels). I do love visiting Alice—I wish she’d been the one, rather than Rebecca, to come up to the castle to take care of us after my parents were killed. Alice is soft and sweet-natured instead of bony and sharp-tongued; also, she can cook. Today her cottage smelled of thyme and shallots and sweet peppers and codfish, all bubbling away over the fire. One of her cats was crouched beneath the rocking chair, dabbing at a hermit crab with a curious paw, and the other was washing itself on the hearthrug. Sitting down in a puddle of sunlight at the table, I felt a bit like purring myself, it was so warm and cozy (although it’s probably not at all cozy in the middle of a storm—I bet her roof leaks even worse than ours).

  “Well now,” said Alice after she’d finished exclaiming over the pineapples (neither of us had a clue what to do with them, but I promised to ask Veronica and report ba
ck). “And how are things up at the castle, Your Highness?”

  I keep asking Alice not to call me that—it’s ridiculous when there are now as many Royal Highnesses on the island as there are subjects—but she’s very old-fashioned and it’s no use. So I helped her shell a basin of peas and told her what had been happening, which was not much. (Henry had dropped a jar of honeycomb and the tabby cat rolled in it and glued itself to the pantry floor; the hens had somehow got into the chapel.)

  On the way back, we passed Mary, who was weeding the vegetable garden, and George, who was sitting on his doorstep, mending a fishing net. George looked rather disappointed to see us without Veronica. He’s fond of Henry and polite to me, but Veronica’s the one he adores. I’m not sure whether it’s because she’s the only one who’ll sit for hours listening to his stories, or because she’s the King’s daughter. George was manservant to our grandfather when he was King, so George is even more old-fashioned than Alice when it comes to royalty. Dear old George! He’s gaunt and leathery-looking, pickled in salt water and rum, but still agile and sharp-witted. And so knowledgeable about the rocks and the currents and the fish and so on—Henry and Jimmy are quite in awe of him.

  Speaking of Henry, she made a great ceremony of presenting the Turkish delight to Veronica when we reached the castle. Veronica didn’t go out to meet the ship this time because she was cleaning out Vulcan, our ill-tempered stove. Henry claimed the Basque captain had sent along the sweets as “a totem of his affection.”