Mina didn’t like the man from the Company. Taylor, her father called him, always with a splash of venom in his voice. She thought her father didn’t like Taylor either. She wondered if he’d seen the way Taylor’s greedy face darkened whenever he saw her, like he wished to do her damage of some kind.
When Taylor was in the house, she usually made herself scarce; she’d plead with Fernando to take her down to the bay, or to accompany her down to James Town, where she’d sit in the square and watch the people go by while Fernando hid in the hills, as was his way. She enjoyed it when the children of James Town approached her with their insidious intent, and she told them she knew the Cannibal of whom they often spoke, and they ran away shouting.
Sometimes a boy (never a girl) would stay behind, fearlessly saying he didn’t believe her, and then she’d take the boy up into the hills above James Town, and Fernando would rise from the rocks and the boy would scream and run away, and she’d watch him while she laughed and held on to Fernando’s only hand. She never told her mother or father about this sort of thing, and Fernando kept it to himself.
Childish games, these were. She wondered if tonight those childish games had come to an end. Taylor sat in her mother’s chair, and that was enough to anger her, but she didn’t say anything. Her father had told her often enough that she was to be polite to the man from the Company.
It had been ten minutes since her mother last screamed.
‘How is the King?’ she asked, as sweetly as she could manage. Her question seemed to shake the Company man from whatever thoughts he was thinking. He seemed very distracted, this evening. He frowned at her.
‘The King? Which King do you mean, child?’
Now it was her turn to frown. Surely England only had one King? Even a lonely little girl on St Helena knew that!
‘Why, King George, sir. Is there another King?’
‘King George is dead, child. His grandson has replaced him.’
‘Oh. How sad.’ And it was sad. She hated to think of men dying. ‘And what is the new King’s name, sir?’
‘King George.’
‘They could not think of a new name for him, then?’
Taylor didn’t answer that, and she decided that this meant he wanted to hear no further questions. She considered asking some anyway, just to annoy him.
There was still no sound from her mother’s room.
Taylor stood up, and began looking along the bookshelves. He often did this when he visited, and she wondered what book he looked for. Once, he had exclaimed joyfully at finding something, only for his face to fall when he took it down and opened it. When she went to look at the book later on, the only words she saw were in Greek. She could read a little Greek and Latin – her father had been teaching her – but it was not sufficient to decipher what Taylor had found.
There was a movement at the library entrance, then. Her father appeared there. She looked into his face, and saw nothing but emptiness. Taylor stepped towards him, and the two of them went away, leaving her alone with the books and the yawning silence.
Eventually, she decided to go to bed. Sometimes she wasn’t sure when the best time to go might be – she usually just waited until exhaustion pushed her bedwards, or her mother insisted. She could pretend it was whatever time she wanted it to be, if she didn’t go outside. But now her bed felt like a refuge, a comforting soft shelter from the strange emptiness of feeling she felt in the air. As if something had departed.
She climbed into her bed without bothering to undress, her clothes smelling of the sand and salt of the bay where she had spent most of the day, gazing up at the endless blue sky and imagining flying up into it, away and over the endless ocean to those far parts of the world that she saw only in books and in the stories of her mother. She often dreamed of flying. It seemed the only way she would ever get off this island. Her family had been here for almost two hundred years, her father had told her, and he’d made her memorise all her forebears, even the ones named Aakster who spoke Dutch and had names that seemed to her to come from the Bible.
She tried to sleep, but couldn’t, and waited for her mother to come to her, to kiss her cheek and read to her and sit beside her until tiredness seized her and dragged her away.
But her mother did not come. It was her father who came and sat on her bed. He didn’t touch her as her mother did – didn’t stroke her head or her face – and she thought about taking his hand and putting it on her head but something about the way her father sat beside her stopped her doing it. He looked at the corner of the room, and she wondered if he could see anything there.
‘Your mother is dead,’ he said, eventually. ‘Your brother, too.’
Her brother, whom she had never met, who had only been a promise inside the blossoming girth of her mother’s belly. She felt cheated by his non-arrival, even while she tried to wrestle her understanding into some grip on the words ‘your mother is dead’.
‘We must start work tomorrow, Mina,’ he said, and now he did look at her, and she wondered when her father had become so old and so lost.
‘What work, Papa?’
‘Memory work, Mina. You have a very great deal to learn.’
‘Learn about what?’
‘About the reason we are here, my child. Now sleep well. Tomorrow, your life will not be as free as it has been heretofore.’
He did not kiss her as her mother had done, but he did shift a stray hair from across her forehead, and she thought that would have to be enough.