by Ruth Ware
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Ruth Ware
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
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eISBN: 9781542022163
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
When Father began to build the wall, we didn’t understand at first. We thought it was to keep something in—not Woof, for he had free range of the island, just as we did. But the chickens, perhaps, who were apt to wander off into the woods and lay their eggs in makeshift nests under hedges and trees, or to get eaten by foxes. Or maybe to stop May from wandering. After her fall she was never the same, and she couldn’t always be trusted to look after herself. She would sleepwalk too, and Jacob and I used to worry that she would walk herself over the cliffs or fall into the well.
It couldn’t be to keep anything out. There wasn’t anyone on the island but us.
But as the wall grew higher and higher, we began to wonder.
There’s stone aplenty on the island, but not much around the farm, for all the stones worth building with had already been taken for the cottage or the barn. So when Father ran out of stones to build with, he pulled Jacob and me off our usual chores and told us to go seek rocks. Big ones—not stones you could kick with your foot. “Nothing smaller than your head” was how he put it.
Father had already scoured the fields and woods around the cottage, so we had to go far afield, down to the bay, where the rough sea had carved out as many boulders as you could carry. Cain let us have one of the ponies, but the steep path down to the beach was too narrow for the cart. We had to pull the stones up on a kind of bier, Jacob pulling and I pushing from behind, until we got the stones up to the rutted track and could load them onto the cart behind patient Flick.
By the end of that first day, my hands were so blistered and full of splinters that I could not hold my knitting needles, and Woof whined and pawed at my skirts, for he could not understand why I would not scratch him behind his ears as I usually did, but Father said nothing. The next day he bound up my hands with sacking and told me I would get used to it by and by.
I suppose that was true, in a way. It never became easy, but like the frog in the pan, you can get accustomed to almost anything.
“Why can’t we use wood?” Jacob asked. I knew he was thinking of the thick pine woods to the east of the cottage, and how quickly we could cut down a dozen trees and haul them back to Father.
But Father shook his head.
“Wood’s not strong enough for what’s coming.”
What was coming? We knew better than to ask Father, but we talked about it on the long walk back from the bay, Woof trotting obediently at our heels and Flick plodding along in front of us, the cart creaking beneath the weight of the stones we had gathered.
“It’s the war,” Jacob said. He looked over toward the mainland as he said it. You can’t see the mainland from the island—even on a clear day, it’s too far, over the horizon of the sea—but sometimes at night you can see the orange glow of the fires reflecting back at you from the clouds, or see the planes flying far overhead with their payload of bombs and gas. “It’s getting closer,” he said, and I nodded.
I don’t remember much about the war or the mainland—just the few nightmarish weeks before we fled. I was only four or five, but still I remember seeing news about bombs on the television, footage of children my age with dusty faces, crying in the rubble of their bombed-out houses. I remember not being allowed out to play because it was coming closer, Father and Mother arguing, arguing, arguing all the time. The schools closed, and Father explained that life was getting harder for people like us, that our freedoms were getting chipped away at and that soon we would not have any rights at all—and then one awful night it happened. I woke to the sound of fists thumping on wood. Father was shaking me gently, his hand over my mouth to stop me from crying out. He helped me to dress, shivering in the cold. The banging came again, setting everything in my bedroom jangling and jumping with the force of the blows, and when I peeked from my bedroom window, there were men in dark uniforms at our front door.
Father was ready. He grabbed the bags he had packed for just this eventuality and hustled us out of a window at the back of the house, over the fence, and into a waiting car with a blacked-out license plate. As Father turned the key in the engine, I heard a terrible loud bang like a gunshot, and the car leaped forward like a startled animal, and we were driving, driving through the night, Father glancing in his rearview mirror every few miles to check that we were not being followed.
We could not leave the country by any of the main ports or airports—they had been closed long since. But Father had seen this coming, and he had a boat ready for us, filled with supplies, in a little fishing port too small to be monitored. We got out just in time. “By the skin of our teeth,” Father said afterward, though I never did understand what he meant, because teeth have no skin. They are hard and white like bone. Did he mean that we did not get away completely?
Perhaps that is what he meant. For it was only when we got to the island that we realized Mother was not with us.
May noticed it first. She began to cry as Father unloaded her. “Want Mama,” she wept, and I looked around for Mother—and then I realized. She was not there. “Leah,” May wailed, putting up her arms to me, louder now. “Leah! Want Mama!”
“Where’s Mother?” I whispered to Cain, and he shook his head. “Jacob, where’s Mother?”
And then Father told us.
Mother had not made it. She had been killed by the soldiers. That was the shot we had heard as we drove away.
When I woke up the next morning, it was still dark, but I could tell it was close to dawn, because I could hear the cows mooing to be milked. Woof raised his head and barked softly, but the cows were Jacob’s task, not mine, so I turned over in bed, feeling May’s warmth to my left and Woof on my feet, the coziness made all the sweeter by the fact that I had only a few minutes longer.
My morning task was to rekindle the kitchen fire downstairs and have hot porridge ready for when Jacob came back from the milking shed and Father and Cain got out of bed. May used to help me, before she had her fall. Her job in those days was to go out into the yard and hunt down the eggs the chickens had laid, but now I did that too, and May stayed up in her room, knitting the coarse wool from the sheep and, when she could, cutting paper dolls out of the precious scraps of paper Father saved for her. Through it all, she sang the songs that Mother used to sing to us both when we were little. She had started to forget the words, mixing them up in her head with other songs and nursery rhymes. “I’m a dancing stream,” she would sing. “Strong and sweet, I am severing.”
“Seventeen,” I told her once. “It’s only seventeen, not severing. And it’s queen, not stream.” But she turned her wide, puzzled eyes on me, as if I had scolded her, and I didn’t try to correct her again.
Now I lay, listening to May’s gentle breathing on the pillow next to me, and feeling the ache in my bones from pushing the cart. My shoulders hurt. My hips hurt. Even my wrists. But there was no use in complaining to Father. He worked harder than
anyone.
The muscles in my back cramped as I forced myself to sit up, and I sat for a moment, letting them stretch out, before the feeling eased. Then I swung my legs out of bed and put my feet to the cold boards, searching for my slippers with my bare toes, wincing as I felt the frost.
Outside the cows mooed, waiting their turn, and I thought of Jacob huffing into his hands in the cold milking shed. I didn’t envy him, but I was glad of the milk he’d be bringing in.
Father had brought the cattle over as babies in the boat from the mainland, nearly six years ago now. That was before it became too dangerous to go back there for supplies. I always knew when he was going across, because he would come downstairs with his bulletproof vest on under his sweater, with the gun stuck into the waistband of his ragged jeans. I hated to see it—hated the reminder of what he was facing back there: the men with guns and bombs, the men who had killed Mother and would take Father from us if they could. I remember waiting for him on the beach, hour after hour, holding Cain’s hand and watching the horizon for the little boat to appear, my stomach knotted with fear in case Father had been captured or even killed. Those hours were the longest and worst of my whole life. But the moments when we saw the little boat bob into view, coming closer and closer until finally the shingle scrunched beneath its hull—those were some of the best. And there was always the excitement of seeing what Father had brought. Two little calves tied up in a sack to stop them from scrambling about the boat, their huge brown eyes wide and scared. A coop of chickens. Fishing wire. Ammunition. Grain, pasta, nails, tools, aspirin, antibiotic ointment—anything he could steal or trade for. There were even presents, sometimes, if he could find something in one of the looted-out stores that were dotted across the mainland. A comic book. A doll or some chocolate, buried beneath debris in a long-bombed-out gas station abandoned by its owners. And once—the best time—there was Woof, a little honey-colored puppy with eyes like molten gold.
The worst time was the last. Father did not come back at the usual hour, and we sat on the beach waiting and waiting long after the sun had set and the moon had risen, shivering with a mixture of cold and fear. When the boat finally came into sight, we knew something was wrong even before he docked, from the way he was rowing, all on one side, and then a great heave with the other oar to try to correct his course. As he got closer, we saw that the boat was not full of supplies, as it usually was, and Father was rowing with one arm and had blood all down his front.
“What’s wrong?” Cain asked as we dragged the boat up the beach to the high-water mark. “What happened? Have you been shot?”
Father only shook his head, but it was not in denial—it was his way of saying, Don’t ask me questions. There were some truths too terrible to tell, some things it was better not to know.
That evening we boiled water on the stove and filled the zinc tub in front of the fire, and Father cleaned his wounds. He shut the door, but I saw the water when he sluiced it into the drain in the yard. It was scarlet red with blood, and I felt very scared.
The next day he holed the boat, and there were no more trips.
That had been almost a year ago, and while I missed the chocolate bars, I did not miss waiting for Father on the beach. It was better to make do with what we had here on the island, rather than risk losing him as we had lost Mother.
And besides, we had enough here. We had milk and cheese and eggs and even meat, when one of the cows had a bull calf. Cain plowed the fields and grew potatoes and turnips and kale and a kind of wheat. There were wild raspberries and wood strawberries. Jacob fished off the rocks, and if all else failed, there were always mussels. We ate a lot of mussels that first winter, while we waited for the crops to come in. Mussels and rabbits and nettle soup. That was the winter that Jacob almost died. He got very sick, and none of the pills Father gave him did any good, and he cried out in the night until the blood ran out of his ear.
He got better by and by, but he was deaf in one ear after that, and when he didn’t want to hear someone, he would turn his deaf ear toward them and pretend that he could not understand. But he never did that to me.
As the weeks went on, the wall grew higher and higher, but Father didn’t let up; in fact, he drove us harder. When Flick got lame and couldn’t pull the cart, Father took Cain away from the fields and made him haul stone too, and when at last Cain refused, they had a shouted argument, right there in the yard.
“Why are you doing this?” Cain cried in frustration. “You’ve lamed Flick, we’ve got no butter and no cheese because Leah can’t spend any time in the dairy, Jacob’s garden’s overrun with weeds, and the apples are rotting on the trees—”
“I’m keeping you all safe,” Father growled.
“Safe and starved?”
“I’ve had just about enough of your tongue. You will do as I say, boy,” Father told Cain, but Cain didn’t cower away as he used to. Instead he squared up to Father, his hands on his hips, and I saw for the first time what I must have known for a while but never noticed until that moment—Cain had grown taller than Father.
“Or what?” Cain said, and that was when Father hit him.
Father had hit Cain before—hit all of us in fact. When we first came to the island and there was so much work to be done, or starve, he had hit us often, to make us get out of bed when we would rather not or go into the cold fields to pull weeds when our hands were cracked and bleeding.
But once we understood what had to be done, life settled into an easier rhythm. We worked, and Father left us alone, as long as we did our piece.
Now, though, he hit Cain around the side of the head with the handle of the mortar trowel he was holding. Hit him hard.
Cain said nothing. He just stood, looking down at Father, with his hand to his ear, the hot red blood dripping between his fingers onto the ground. He held it until the dripping slowed and stopped. Then he turned and carried on stacking rocks as Father had told him, with his hands still red and sticky beneath the dust.
When he came in for supper, he washed the blood off his hands and ate in stony silence, and I knew that he had not forgiven Father. I thought perhaps that a good night’s sleep would put things right. But the next day, when I called Father and the boys for breakfast, Cain didn’t come.
“Let him sleep,” Father said gruffly. “If he misses breakfast, that’s his problem.”
But when I took May’s breakfast to our room, I went to the attic ladder and whispered up into the loft, very soft, “Cain.”
Cain slept in the attic. He used to share the bedroom next to mine with Jacob, just as I shared with May, but when he got to be thirteen or fourteen, he packed up his things and took them into the rickety loft. Father scoffed and laughed and predicted that he would come down fast enough when the frost set in—but he didn’t. I think he liked it up there. I think Jacob missed him, though he would never have said it, but he liked having the bed to himself.
Cain had said he would skin me alive if he ever found me poking in his things, but something made me slip off my woolen slippers and set foot on the ladder with my bare feet. I climbed silently, up to the loft hatch, and then I pushed it open.
His room was just as normal—work clothes strewn around, the stub of a candle on a saucer, a torn piece of newspaper that May had cut into a snowflake.
But one thing was wrong.
Cain’s bed was empty.
I didn’t believe it at first. Not until Jacob and I went down to the bay for stones and the boat was gone.
“But—but it was holed,” I said stupidly, but I knew, even as I said it, that boats could be mended. There was tar paper in the barn that Father used for patching the roofs when they leaked and wood aplenty, and Cain was always handy like that.
Jacob swore then. He said words I didn’t even know he knew, bad words, that would have had Father cuffing him around the head, bad ear or no bad ear.
“That motherfucking son of a bitch,” he said, and when I tried to say something, he pushed me a
way, and I saw that he was crying, though whether with rage or grief at being left or at fear for Cain, I didn’t know.
I was too numb to cry. I still could not quite believe that Cain was gone. Because where would he have gone to? To the mainland, with the fires still burning from the bombing, to scavenge a life among the debris of what was left? What was left for him there? And he hadn’t taken the gun or the bulletproof vest, which was still hanging from a nail in Father’s room. How would he survive?
“I don’t understand,” I kept saying, over and over, as we stacked rocks onto the bier. “I don’t understand. Where did he go?”
The hardest thing was telling Father. In the end, Jacob chickened out, and I didn’t blame him altogether. When Father looked up from the plate of stew I was ladling out and asked where Cain was, Jacob coughed and stood from the table, muttering something about shutting up the hens.
I glared at him, but I knew he was probably right. Father does hit girls, or at least he hits me. No one hits May. But he doesn’t hit me as hard as he hits the boys.
“Where the hell is he?” Father repeated, and I could tell he was actually worried. Accidents happen all the time on a farm. Last year Cain hit his head on a gate when a cow barged at him, and he was there in the field alone for more than two hours before Jacob went to see what was keeping him. “Has someone been down to the barn to check on him?”
“He’s gone, Father,” I said, and I took a step back involuntarily.
“Gone?” Father’s face was blank. I could tell he didn’t understand what I meant. “Gone where?”
“I—I don’t know. B-but he’s taken the boat.”
He didn’t hit me. But he pushed past me so hard that I stumbled against the wall and splashed hot stew all down my arm. He snatched the lantern as he went, and I stood in the doorway, rubbing my scalded hand and watching the little flame disappear into the darkness as he stormed down the track to the bay. I knew that it wasn’t that he didn’t believe me. He just needed to see for himself.