The Orphan of Salt Winds

by The Orphan of Salt Winds (retail) (epub)

  Something has got through to Sophie. She’s still watching the car, but she keeps darting glances at the book in her hands.

  “Lorna? Lorna, as in your mother? As in the woman in the photograph?”

  “Yes.”

  Sophie leafs through to the next picture. She studies it properly this time, inch by inch, like someone hunting for clues.

  “So, you mean Lorna is the same person as F. L. Leonard? The artist who illustrated this book?”

  “Yes.”

  “The artist you worked for?”

  “Yes, yes. I told you that earlier; I’m sure I did. Leonard was her maiden name. Frances Lorna Leonard.”

  It’s Virginia’s turn to take a furtive look at the car. If it reverses down the lane and disappears into the night now, while the girl is distracted, then Virginia will be able to breathe again. Go, she wills it. Go. Why are those people lingering by the old harbor steps? What are they hoping for?

  “I don’t think you did tell me that.” Sophie is as mild as ever as she hands the book back, but there’s a kind of mutiny in her sidelong glance. Silly old bat, she’s probably thinking, and Virginia begins to doubt herself; to doubt what the girl does and doesn’t know. She knows she’s a Deering, doesn’t she? Yes, she does, because it was she who first mentioned it, up in the attic. But does she know what Deering means in this house?

  “You’re crying,” Virginia observes. It isn’t as if Sophie is trying to hide it, either: she’s sniffing and wiping her cheeks with her cuffs, and can’t seem to decide whether to turn the corners of her mouth up or down. Why should the child weep over this? Has something touched the Deering conscience after all this time? Three generations on? But Sophie isn’t thinking about the book. She stopped thinking about it the moment she handed it back and returned to the window.

  “It is them,” she stutters. “It’s my mum and dad. I never thought they’d guess, and then drive all this way to find me.”

  It’s obvious that Sophie’s going to break for the door, and Virginia is about to seize her by the arm, but her sleeve is so mucky with tears and snot that she wavers. A moment later the girl has her hand on the latch and Virginia is grasping at thin air. It strikes her as a sad sight: her own veiny claws reaching with such eagerness and catching at nothing.

  “Don’t go!” Virginia pleads, and by the tone of her voice you’d think she felt nothing but affection for the child. “You know what they’re like; they’ll invent a life for you. Law degrees and Oxford and all the rest of it. There’ll be no art school if you go!” Nor if you come with me, she might have added, but she pushes that observation aside for now.

  “They’re my mum and dad,” Sophie argues weakly, one hand still on the door. With her other hand she rubs her eyes, like a toddler who’s just about had enough for one day.

  “They’re Deerings.”

  “I know they’re Deerings.” Sophie shakes her head. “What do you mean?”

  Virginia glances into the night. The headlights are jolting about and getting bigger; the people must have got back in the car, and now they’re driving toward the house. Perhaps they are just strangers who’ve lost their way and want to turn the car around.

  “Do you know what your Great-Granddad Max did?”

  “No.” Sophie’s voice is small and her fingers are sliding off the latch. This is better; she’s paying attention at last.

  “He ...” The brutal truth—the specifics—are on the tip of her tongue, but Virginia catches Sophie’s eye and stops.

  “I’ll tell you what he did,” she continues, haltingly. “He tried to break Lorna into tiny bits and fashion her into something new; something better suited to his tastes. He very nearly got his way.”

  Sophie doesn’t move, but she’s taking it all in.

  “What stopped him?”

  There’s a question. Virginia waves the fairy-tale book, as if they were in court and this were her evidence.

  “Lorna did. Eventually.”

  Sophie seems to think Virginia is offering her the book, and she comes forward to take it. She looks at it properly this time: at the names on the cover and the contents page and the picture of the witch-princess.

  “Keep it,” says Virginia, unsure quite what she intends by such a gift. The girl doesn’t seem to understand either. She falls still and casts her eyes down, and there’s no Really? or Thank you! or Wow! None of that guff.

  The car pulls up outside the front door and a woman gets out. Even in the dark you can tell she’s moneyed, and it’s not just because of the purring car at her back. It’s the way she holds her shoulders, and the way her hair falls when she pushes it off her face. It’s the way she walks and looks up at the house.

  The woman knocks on the door and turns her back immediately, as if she’s already decided there’s nothing to wait for.

  The man stays in the car, staring straight ahead in the direction of the marsh. Virginia can’t see much of him: just a heap of darkness, and the glint of an eye, and knuckles tight around a steering wheel.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE 1941

  Master Theodore Deering requests the pleasure of your company on the occasion of his twelfth birthday.

  Wednesday, 31st December, 1 o’clock till 4.

  Thorney Grange, Tollbury Point.

  RSVP

  The wording was almost identical to last year’s, except for the jaunty note at the bottom, which read: Lorna—Don’t bother walking up, I’ll pop down in the car at a quarter to one to collect her. No mishaps en route this time!

  Mishaps. Virginia had been repeating that word to herself ever since the invitation arrived last weekend, and it had lost its force through overthinking. It had become a jumble of letters, and she could hardly remember what it meant or why it had hurt so much to begin with.

  For a while, she’d hoped that the invitation might be allowed to sink under the pile of mail on the hall table, never to be seen again, but Lorna had fished it out and propped it up against a vase. Apparently there was no getting out of Theo’s birthday party this time—the expectation that she’d attend was so absolute, she didn’t know how to resist, let alone dare try—but at least she was determined not to have another ride in Mr. Deering’s car. She would walk by herself, mishap or no mishap.

  At a quarter past twelve on the afternoon of the thirty-first, Virginia snatched the invitation off the hall table and stuffed it in her coat pocket. She tried to fit Theo’s sweets and birthday card in her other pocket, but they wouldn’t go, so she carried them loose.

  “Bye?” she called, with a querying rise, to the empty downstairs rooms. There was no reply; they couldn’t hear her in the attic. She slammed the front door shut, and as she walked along the lane she crumpled the invitation up as small as it would go and shredded the edges with her nails.

  The wind was galloping off the sea today: breakneck, black, and scented with rain. Virginia clambered onto the wall and stood to face it, Lorna’s green dress rippling at her shins. Of course the dress was too big, but there’d been nothing else for her to wear—or nothing smart enough, anyway. She was like Alice in Wonderland, veering from one proportion to another and never quite finding her proper self. In the red dress she’d been lumpen and fleshy, but this green one swamped her and turned her back into a stick-limbed child, foolish in plaits and scuffed shoes.

  The cold was making her eyes stream. She ought to get on, before Mr. Deering came gliding down the lane in his car to pick her up. “The evil baron,” she whispered to herself with a secret smile. The evil baron in Jozef’s story had yellow eyes and a fork at the end of his tongue, but in every other particular she was sure he looked exactly like Mr. Deering.

  “Dark rumors swirled about him,” she declaimed into the wind, quoting Jozef’s story word for word. “It was said that the rooms of his palace were painted black, and that he dined every night on raw gulls’ eggs. It was said that he’d had a wife, many years ago, and that he’d kept her in a cage.”

  It was hard to tear
her gaze from the horizon. It wasn’t that she believed in Jozef’s “Curlew”—she was twelve years old and knew a made-up story when she read one—but a part of her wanted to, and over the last four months she’d begun to keep a lookout, just for fun. Just because it was hard to tell what might be lurking in that strip of haze where marsh and sky met and mingled. Nothing, of course—or at any rate, not the enchanted ship that Jozef’s story kept leading her to believe. She knew that. But there was no harm in standing still from time to time and making sure.

  It was the church clock that roused her. As the chimes struck the half hour Virginia jumped down from the wall and broke into a run; after a minute, and a few stumbles, she slowed to a resolute march.

  She thought of Lorna and Jozef, cozy in the attic with the blackout cardboard tacked up and a gas fire hissing. Their book was pretty well finished, and they were going to spend the afternoon drafting letters to publishers.

  Lorna had been so pleased yesterday when Virginia announced she was going to walk to the party. “Good idea!” she’d said, looking up from her latest print with a frank smile. It meant she wouldn’t have to spruce herself up for Max and come downstairs to say hello.

  Hours later, when she was scrubbing her hands at the kitchen sink, she’d remembered to add, “You’ll be all right, will you? Walking to Thorney Grange on your own?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I suppose one of us ought to give him a ring and let him know?”

  Virginia had crossed her fingers behind her back. “All right,” she’d lied. “I’ll do it.” She’d tried not to imagine the novelty of speaking to Mr. Deering on the telephone; of voluntarily pressing his voice to her face and allowing it to caress the delicate folds of her ear.

  Virginia trudged to the end of the lane and turned, one last time, to look back across the marsh. The great silence, as she’d thought of it on her very first evening, when Clem was bringing her home from Sinclair House. The great, secret silence.

  It was tempting to do something else with this Wednesday afternoon. Hide inside St. Dunstan’s and take a proper look at the nativity scene. Catch the bus into town and see what they were playing at the cinema. Walk across the marsh, polishing off Theo’s birthday toffees as she went; walk all the way to the brink where magic might—or might not—be; where sky, sand, and water dissolved into nothing and nowhere.

  In the end she turned onto the main road and made her way to the village, and Thorney Grange. Not today. But if the worst came to the worst—if Lorna and the evil baron really did get married—she knew where her refuge lay.

  Every time Virginia came face-to-face with Thorney Grange she wondered whether Mr. Deering employed someone to scrub the walls. It was a genuine question—though doubtless he’d think it was cheek—otherwise, how did those red bricks stay so clean? There were no weeds poking out of the mortar, no mossy stains, no mottling, not even the ghost of a creeper. Every single brick was shiny and smooth, as if he wrapped them overnight in tissue paper. It was the same with the roof tiles and the windows and the white gravel in the drive. Even the lawn looked dusted and polished. There were horse chestnut trees in the churchyard next door, but Virginia had never seen a horse chestnut or a rusty leaf on Mr. Deering’s grass. Maybe one of the servants kept watch and rushed outdoors with dustpan and brush if anything untoward drifted over the wall.

  She dithered again on the edge of the drive, standing between the stone lions, pretending to check her pockets. She’d been here a few times for afternoon tea, and once for dinner, but always with Lorna—never alone. Just as well it was a party. However dire the prospect of an afternoon spent passing the parcel with Theo and friends, at least there’d be safety in numbers.

  “Virginia?” Mr. Deering was scrunching across the gravel driveway with his hands in tight fists.

  “Virginia? What are you doing here so early?” An elderly couple emerged, arm in arm, from a cottage across the way, and Max hid his fists inside his jacket pockets. “I was just about to get the car out. I told Lorna I’d fetch you; that was the plan.” He was doing his best to sound amused, but his pockets kept twitching.

  “We didn’t like to trouble you.”

  She followed him up the drive and he ushered her inside, murmuring something in her ear as she brushed past.

  “You know, you could be more gracious when a fellow offers you a compliment,” he said more loudly, as the door closed behind them and the sound of the wind was replaced by plush silence. Apparently his humor had improved.

  “What?”

  He laughed as he came up behind her and peeled the coat from her shoulders, like the good host he was. The housekeeper—pale-faced Mrs. Bellamy—bustled by with a tray of jellies, her lips tight with concentration. Mr. Deering waited till she’d gone before he ran a finger around the nape of Virginia’s neck, snagging his nail on the little hairs that didn’t fit into her plaits.

  “I was complimenting you on your dress, you little goose.”

  You’d think he’d have jumped or faltered when his son came thundering down the stairs, but he merely straightened and smiled, and kept his hand on Virginia’s shoulder.

  “Theodore! Your first guest!”

  Theo scowled. “I thought it was Robert. He said he’d come early.”

  Max pushed her forward and Theo kicked the banister. The silence that followed was awkward for the children but not, apparently, for Mr. Deering, who stood at ease with his arms folded, watching and waiting.

  Virginia held out the birthday card and the squashed box of sweets, and Theo took them begrudgingly. Not a word was exchanged.

  “Isn’t that kind?” Mr. Deering murmured. “Hmm?”

  The children weren’t free to breathe until the doorbell rang and Theo ran to admit his friends. Virginia loitered by the stairs, unsure what to do with her hands now that she had no pockets and no present to hold.

  “Robert’s here!” shouted Theo. “And he’s brought Charles!”

  “Good, good,” said Max under his breath, and she could feel his gaze fixed on her neck, and on the little pulse that throbbed under her jawbone.

  The boys didn’t invite Virginia to come upstairs but she followed them anyway, breaking into a run to keep up. There was a little sign on the first door they came to—a flimsy thing made of wood and decorated with bumblebees—that said Juliet and Theodore’s Playroom. Theodore scowled at Virginia before opening the door and elbowing his friends inside. She hated to trail them, but she could hear Max’s velvety tread coming up the stairs, and there was nowhere else to go.

  The playroom was long and light, with diamond-bright windows and a table groaning with party food. Balloons had been tied to every available mooring—chairbacks, table legs, the fire screen—and they couldn’t have been the normal kind you blow up yourself, because they were floating upward on their strings, the way they do in picture books. Mrs. Bellamy was fussing over the table, arranging plates of sandwiches and jugs of lemonade, and she regarded the four of them sharply as they trooped in. Theodore shrank a little under her gaze and stuck his hands in his pockets.

  “My father had a proper cake delivered from Fortnum’s,” he told his friends, and they all looked with interest at the creamy creation in the center of the table.

  “You could layer bricks with that icing,” Mrs. Bellamy sniffed. It was hard to know whether or not she was trying to be funny. One of the boys chuckled appreciatively, but Theo just scuffed the floor with his heel.

  Virginia sidled to the nearest window. The playroom was at the side of the house, with a view over the main street so she could see the post office and the pub, and if she stood on tiptoe she could just make out the weathervane on the school roof. There were two old men chatting in the doorway of the Black Horse, and a woman was pushing a pram along the opposite pavement.

  More guests edged into the playroom. Boys—all of them boys—scrubbed up and slicked down. They handed over their gifts as quickly as possible, or slid them onto the table, as if t
here was something shameful about colored paper and ribbons; as if to say I wouldn’t have bothered, you know, but my mother insisted. It seemed to her that they were still individual people for the moment, with their own ways of seeing—but she knew it wouldn’t last. Any second now they’d shed their singularities and meld together as a gang. You could see them searching for a way in: jostling one another; trying out grimaces and lame jokes; looking for Theo’s approval.

  Mrs. Bellamy surveyed the table—and them—with her arms folded across her chest. She seemed unhappy, especially when her eyes fell on Virginia, as if she’d have liked an explanation for this odd one out. Virginia pulled discreetly at her unfilled dress, and wondered whether she should have resisted shredding the invitation inside her coat pocket. She would have liked to produce it now, to prove her right to be here.

  “Are you going to play something nice?” demanded the housekeeper. “Come on now, Theodore, you’re the host. You should organize a game while you’re waiting for everyone to arrive.”

  The boys gathered into a whispering huddle and a bark of laughter rose from their midst—then another, and another. One or two turned to stare at Virginia, but their eyes carried the gaze of the whole pack. She ran a finger inside her collar and turned back to the window. The wind was speckling it with rain.

  “Theodore?” Mrs. Bellamy’s voice had developed a warning tone.

  “We’re going to play hide-and-seek,” Theo replied, daring the housekeeper to object. He and his friends were waiting openly for her departure now, insolent in their unity, and she gave in.