Our Castle by the Sea

by Lucy Strange

  I made myself fold my hands in my lap, and I looked up into the vault above us. I thought, as I had many times before, that it looked exactly like the upside-down hull of a ship. Perhaps Noah’s ark had capsized and we were all the poor creatures drowning in the flood.

  Then the vicar walked up the central aisle and stood in front of the altar. The church organ stopped playing, and we all stood up. There was a moment of silence. The vicar spread his hands and opened his mouth to welcome us, but he didn’t say anything—he just stared at the back of the church, his mouth a perfect O. The entire congregation turned around to see what had taken the vicar by surprise.

  A man had come through the church door. He walked up the aisle towards us, starched and upright in a patched-up old suit and boots that shone like black mirrors. It was Spooky Joe. What was he doing here?

  He must have attempted to tame his wild white hair; it looked exactly like the combed clouds in the sky outside. He nodded stiffly to a couple of people as he walked in, his jaw set tight and serious. The muttering began again, but it was a different sort of muttering now.

  He sat down on the other side of the aisle, just behind the Brights, and stared straight ahead. Then he nodded slightly to the vicar—just a downward shift of his mouth and a dipping of his hooded eyelids—and the service began.

  We sang one of my favorite hymns and two others that I didn’t know very well. The vicar spoke about those who had given their lives to help others and those who risked their lives now as the war continued. He spoke about light and darkness, about fighting together and the importance of standing up to the evil in our world. He said some nice things about Pa’s work as a lighthouse keeper, and he spoke about Sam Bright being the best batsman on the village cricket team. Bright, I thought, Sam Bright, and my Pa and his lamp—both of them shining in the darkness. Mal Bright and his wife, Sarah, stood together in the pew opposite ours, his arm around her shaking shoulders. Sam had been their only child.

  “The two men we say good-bye to today were nothing less than heroes,” the vicar said. I saw that there were tears running down my sister’s cheek and, instinctively, I linked my arm through hers. She didn’t pull away from me.

  Heroes? I thought, and I felt Pa’s terrible secret flutter in my chest like a trapped bird. No, Pa was a traitor. But I will never tell, I swore to myself, I will never tell Mags or anyone else what I heard through the speaking tube that day. My ribs ached under the strain of it. You need to be strong, Pet. You just need to be brave and strong.

  Outside the church, Mrs. Baron was waiting for us, hovering near the memorial for the Great War. Michael wasn’t there—he must have gone home already.

  “What’s the good news?” Mags demanded, buttoning up her coat. We were still some way down the path from Mrs. Baron, and I had the feeling that my sister was going to make a scene. “Do we really have to talk about it right now, Mrs. Baron?”

  “We’ve found space for you with a nice family in Wales,” the headmistress replied, beaming at us both as we drew nearer. She seemed to be ignoring my sister’s second question, and the tone of her voice too. “Well, they’ve got room for Petra, and they think you, Magda, should be able to lodge at a nearby farm.”

  “We’d be living in different places?” My sister had never been what you’d call protective, but I thought there was suddenly something fierce and maternal in her voice. On reflection it was probably just fierce. This was Mags, after all.

  “Nearby, we hope. We can’t promise, but lodgings for you nearby do look possible.”

  “I see. Well, given that we don’t really want to go anywhere at all, it sounds far from ideal, Mrs. Baron.” Where had this grown-up voice suddenly come from? “We’ll talk about it when we get home,” she went on. “And we need to discuss the supervision of the lighthouse with the coastguard too. I’ll let you know our decision next week.” Mags started to steer me down the path towards the gate.

  But the expression on Mrs. Baron’s face had changed. “I’m afraid that won’t do, Magda.” She stepped to the side so that she was standing in our way. I felt my sister’s arm twitch as she fought the urge to give our headmistress a shove. “It’s not up to you to decide, you see,” she went on. “I’m so sorry, but I have had to make the decision for you. Of course, I’d like to be able to take our time over this and pick somewhere perfect for you both, but we don’t have the luxury of time. You’re both minors and you are currently living in a very dangerous situation with no adult supervision—the lighthouse could well be a target—for German bombers or even saboteurs. We cannot risk something terrible happening to the two of you in your mother’s absence. And as you have no other family …”

  At that point Spooky Joe walked past us, his eyes fixed on the churchyard gate.

  “Good morning to you, Mr.…” Mrs. Baron began, but he just waved dismissively, as though swatting away a housefly—and kept walking.

  Mrs. Baron blinked. She was used to being treated with respect. Her face flushed hotly beneath her neat black hat. There was to be no reasoning with her now; with his one, cold gesture, it seemed that Spooky Joe had sealed our fate.

  “The bus leaves just after five o’clock this afternoon. You’ll have to transfer onto the London train at Dover, and then change again in London onto the overnight train to Wales. I’ll telephone ahead to make sure someone is there to meet you in the morning when you get to Wrexham. Right now, you need to go home and pack. I’ll give you more details when I meet you at the bus stop. Five o’clock sharp, please.”

  We walked home in silence.

  The morning’s flock of white clouds had been shouldered out of the sky by a herd that was fatter, darker, angrier. The wind whipped at the sea, and a cold salt spray stung our eyes as we made our way back up the cliff path to the Castle.

  “What are we going to do, Mags?” I said. “Are we really going to pack our bags and go to Wales like Mrs. Baron said?”

  When my sister looked at me, there was a wild look in her eyes that made my stomach go all cold. “Over my dead body,” she said.

  This was the plan. We’d pack up our things, take food and blankets too, and we’d go to Dragon Bay Cave to hide out there. Mrs. Baron and the other authorities would just assume we had run away in order to stay together.

  It wasn’t exactly a solution to our problem, and we hadn’t considered what we would do when we ran out of supplies or clean clothes, but Mags said it would at least buy us some time in which we could—hopefully—come up with a better idea.

  I was ready before Mags was.

  “Don’t forget to lock up the main door to the lighthouse, Pet,” Mags called to me from our room.

  “I won’t.”

  I put down a bowl of food scraps for Barnaby and some fresh water too. I thought perhaps I could get a message to Edie and ask her to come and look after him while we were away. He was nowhere to be seen, though. Out chasing rabbits, as usual, I thought. It felt wrong that we were leaving without saying good-bye to him.

  I waited outside the kitchen door with my bag at my feet, my heart feeling tight and unfamiliar in my chest. It was just after half past four. Soon, Mrs. Baron would be heading to the bus stop to meet us. What would she do when she realized we weren’t coming? I knew the answer already. She would be very cross. She would come here to look for us straightaway. I felt a spasm of fear in my stomach.

  I turned to look through the window at the time on the kitchen clock. Twenty to five now. We didn’t have long. “Hurry up, Mags!” I called.

  I cupped my hands around my eyes, peering through the window to see if there was any sign of her.

  It was when I stepped back again that I saw something odd reflected in the glass. An unexpected shadow behind me. A dark flash of movement. I turned quickly, but there was no one there.

  It couldn’t be Mrs. Baron. Not yet. She’d be waiting for us at the bus stop, surely?

  “Mags?” I called, wondering if, for some reason, my sister had decided to use the ma
in lighthouse door instead of the kitchen door. I walked around the side of the cottage towards the cliff edge. Hundreds of feet below, the sea churned chaotically, hurling itself against the chalk walls that our Castle stood upon. The dark sky seemed to be drawing down lower and lower, like a great black theater curtain.

  More quietly this time: “Mags?”

  There was a noise to my right, and as I snapped my head around, I thought I saw a figure disappearing behind the nearest standing stone.

  Then a hand fell heavily on my shoulder and I screamed.

  “Pet—good grief—it’s only me!” My sister was behind me, all buttoned up and ready to go. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing—I thought I saw someone. There—by the stones …”

  But the only movement to be seen near the stones was the dancing and bending of the long, pale grasses that surrounded them.

  “You and your imagination, Pet. There’s no one there. Come on—we need to get down to the cave before Mrs. Baron comes looking for us.”

  I tried to convince myself that it was an adventure. As we squeezed our way through the tunnel with an assortment of bags, I tried to pretend that Mags and I were playing some kind of childish game. We were camping out for the night; we were being smugglers or pirates; we were running away to sea. When we got to the cave, I lit the oil lamp while Mags found the driest part of ground and made us up two beds out of the blankets she had brought. Then she opened one of the bags from the kitchen and produced a pile of freshly made jam sandwiches wrapped in paper. I suddenly realized how hungry I was. We sat down together on Mags’s bed and devoured the sandwiches.

  I looked at my sister then—with a big blob of jam at the side of her mouth—and I saw a flash of the old Mags. I grinned, pointing at the jam, but my mouth was too stuffed full of bread and butter and strawberry jam to say anything coherent, and we both ended up laughing through our noses.

  We could have been any two sisters laughing together in that moment, but beneath the silliness of the moment and the excitement of our escape was the numbing fear that we were completely alone now; we had no idea what was going to happen to us.

  I don’t know what made me think of it then, but I went to my bag of clothes and brought out the photograph from Mutti and Pa’s wedding. I had taken it from the coal cellar that morning, just before the funeral, thinking I might keep it in my bedroom, and I had decided to pack it at the last minute. To be honest, I just couldn’t bear to leave it behind.

  “Look, Mags,” I said, unwrapping the soft, woolly sleeves of an old sweater from around the chipped frame. “It’s Pa and Mutti when they got married.” I held it out to her.

  She looked at it, and her eyes filled up with tears. “Oh, just look at our Pa,” she said, touching the glass. I looked at the young man with his gentle face and sticking-out ears and I felt tears starting in my eyes too.

  “Isn’t Mutti’s dress lovely?” I said, my throat aching.

  Mags nodded and sniffed, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “And that’s Mrs. Fisher, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I think so. She always wore that awful hat.”

  “Who’s that?” She pointed at the fair-haired man with the little beard.

  “No idea—I’ve never seen him before,” I said. “A friend of Pa’s? A relation we’ve never met?”

  We looked at the picture together for a while.

  Then Mags said what we were both thinking: “There’s no other family there.”

  “No.”

  I looked at my young father’s eyes, and I realized that there had always been something sad in them, something haunted, even when he was smiling. He had carried some kind of secret grief around with him every single day—right up until the last time we said good-bye.

  “I found it in the cellar,” I said. “Why do you think they put it down there?”

  She shrugged. “Because it should be happy picture, but for some reason it feels like a sad one.”

  “Yes.” That was what I thought too. I considered how people always thought of wedding days as such joyful occasions, and how romantic stories always ended with the couple getting married and living happily ever after …

  “Do you think you’ll ever get married, Mags?”

  I was expecting some sort of jokey, scoffing response—perhaps even an “over my dead body”—but instead, my sister shrugged silently and stared out towards the sea through the cave’s gloomy gray eyes.

  Had I said something wrong? There was a wall between us again.

  I got up and tidied away the buttery bits of paper from the sandwiches. When I turned around, I saw that my sister had curled up on her bed and closed her eyes. She must have been very tired. I pulled one of the blankets over her gently and went to sit at the front of the cave, peering out at the world that lay beyond.

  I felt close to Pa here, looking out over the wind-glazed waves. He was part of the sea he loved. He was in the water and the wind. I imagined his voice telling us stories of shipwrecks and sea monsters, the legend of the Wyrm and the Stones …

  I had been feeling guilty about tricking Mrs. Baron, but now, in this strange, still moment, I knew that Mags and I had done the right thing. How could we have gone to Wales and left our Pa here? How could we have abandoned our lighthouse? I thought about what Mrs. Baron had said—that the Castle could be a target for bombers or saboteurs. Something tugged at my mind like a fish caught on a line. Saboteurs? I thought of the dark reflection in the kitchen window, the figure I thought I had seen darting behind the standing stone. What if someone was lurking around the lighthouse, waiting for us to leave so that they could break in? What if they wanted to set fire to the lighthouse, just like the village hall? I imagined it burning down like a giant candle.

  And then a terrible thought struck me hard.

  I had forgotten to lock the main door to the lighthouse. Mags had reminded me, and I had said I would do it, but I had forgotten.

  I thought about Pa’s service room full of papers and records, logbooks and shipping charts, and I thought about the telephone with the direct line to the Admiralty. Then I thought about that flashing light I had seen on the north cliff before the bomber crashed—someone had been trying to signal to the enemy … and I had left our huge lantern unguarded.

  I tried to steady my breathing, looking down at the sea. There was the Wyrm—barely visible beneath the choppy waves and the churned-up sea foam. I could just make it out—a squirming, squid-like sea dragon with the dark shapes of swallowed things lurking in its pale stomach. A cold surge of nausea rolled through my body. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that someone had been there up amongst the stones, watching me, watching the lighthouse. I tortured myself, imagining the lighthouse being used as a beacon for German bombers. I pictured the white cliffs reduced to a pile of chalky rubble … And it would all be my fault.

  I had to go back.

  I glanced at my sister—fast asleep now. She would be angry if I woke her to say I’d forgotten to lock the lighthouse door after all. If I could just nip back there quickly, she would never even know that I had gone …

  There was no sinister figure lurking near the Castle, and there was no sign of anyone having been inside the lighthouse either. I locked the heavy door and then I went back outside, moving around the wall of the cottage carefully, keeping an eye out for the mysterious dark figure, and for Mrs. Baron too. The last thing I wanted was to be caught and sent away all by myself, without Mags. There was no sign of Mrs. Baron, though. If she had come looking for us, she must have been and gone already. The only sounds were the cries of seabirds in the heavy sky above and the gusting of the stormy air.

  But then there was another sound. There, entwined delicately about the rushes of the wind, was a high, piercing thread of song. The Daughters of Stone.

  I went straight to the stone on the left—the stone that was pointed at the top like a diamond, the one that had always been mine, ever since I was tiny. The song was stronger here—not
louder, just, somehow, stronger—sharper and clearer. I put my hand flat against the stone, and it seemed to vibrate beneath my palm, like the heartbeat of an alarmed animal. It felt like a warning.

  I thought then about that long, lonely night I had spent on the clifftop, and of how the stones and I had sung to the sea in the eerie dawn light, praying for my father and sister to come safely home. I had made a solemn promise, just as the Daughters had so many centuries before. Pa had been killed, but miraculously, Mags had come home to me. What did that mean? Was there a price to be paid or not? Would I end up being turned to stone?

  Mags would have dismissed the idea as superstitious nonsense. She would have laughed. But I knew that the magic was real. Was it faith, or fear? That terrible, quiet knowledge I had possessed deep in my bones ever since I had first heard the legend: My fate was somehow entangled with the Wyrm and the stones and there was nothing that could be done about it.

  In that moment, a herring gull landed on top of the stone. I noticed that its beak and eyes were exactly the same shade of vivid yellow as the nose of the German fighter plane. The gull looked right at me with its cold yellow eyes, opened its beak, and let out a piercing peal of screams before flapping its wings and launching itself out over the sea.

  The dark clouds were right above me now. The song of the stones seemed to have faded away, or was it just lost amongst the fierce gusts of wind? I pulled my coat closed, doing up the buttons with cold fingers. I fished around in the pockets, hoping I might find a scarf or something in there, but my fingers closed around a crumpled piece of paper instead. A shopping list? No. I knew exactly what it was. It was the piece of paper Mags had taken when we were spying on Spooky Joe. In the chaos and grief of those last few weeks, I had forgotten all about it. I smoothed it out and looked again at the mysterious letters and numbers.

  MB—TB

  0617 040540