26

Ifed Barnaby. I polished the lamp. I cleaned the cottage from top to bottom. I weeded the vegetable patch. I washed clothes and mangled them and hung them out to dry. I mended my torn coat. I did every little job I could find that needed doing, and it was still only four o’clock. The cottage was horribly quiet.

I locked up the main door to the lighthouse. We never really bothered locking the cottage door, but keeping the lighthouse secure was one of Pa’s strictest rules.

I found my pencils and sketchbook in my room, and went to sit out on the clifftop. I had hardly drawn anything since Mutti had been taken away, but my head and my heart were so full this afternoon that it was the only thing I could think of that might make me feel a bit better.

I settled down on the dry grass with my back against the smallest standing stone. I drew the cliffs, the clouds, the water – flat, barren and grey – and the dull shape of the Wyrm, sleeping just below the surface. I drew myself as a tiny, hunched figure looking out across the sea towards the empty horizon. I’ll draw the Daughters of Stone, I thought. But, when I did, something very odd happened. My hand didn’t draw four ancient standing stones – it drew four girls, dressed in long white gowns. They were upright, defiant, their hair blowing in the wind, and their arms stretched out towards the sea. They stood, two of them either side of the tiny, hunched figure of Pet Smith. I rubbed out that pitiful little shape, and drew myself again, standing up with the Daughters, my hair blowing in the wind just like theirs. A high note trembled in the air like a thread of silver.

My skin prickled.

I drew a boat on the water, and another and another and, when I next looked up at the sea, I saw that something magical had happened. I dropped my sketchbook and pencils on the grass. A miracle.

The first one was white. Just the spray of a wave, perhaps, or a spark of reflected evening sun, but then it became clearer: an angular little shape, like folded paper, carving its way through the navy sea. A sailing boat. And after the first one, the other boats started appearing on the horizon – three, five, eight, twenty, fifty or more – just like my drawing . . . There should be singing, I thought, a chorus. There should be a fanfare of trumpets. They are coming home – just look at them!

Fishing boats, steamers, yachts, trawlers started to emerge from the haze. The decks of the larger ships and steamers were dark with army uniforms – hundreds of men crowded together. As the boats approached the coast, they fanned out – each heading to its own home harbour. I imagined the view from the perspective of one of the soldiers: the white cliffs of England opening up before them like a mother’s arms. I waved to one of the boats, but I couldn’t see if anyone waved back. I must have been a tiny little shape to them. The sun was setting behind me now. They would only be able to make out a dot on the clifftop. A dot, a tower and four old boulders.

Then I recognized one of the larger boats: the Margate Queen. She was a paddle steamer we had been on once during a summer excursion to Margate. It was so odd to see her in this way. The Margate Queen meant fish and chips, Punch and Judy, buckets and spades . . . And yet here she was – a warship: an enormous lifeboat, saving the lives of hundreds of men.

As the sun faded, it became colder up there on the clifftop. I fetched my blanket from the cottage and wrapped it around my shoulders and over my head to make a sort of tent.

What do I do if they don’t come back tonight? my mind whispered anxiously. What do I do if they never come back? Will I wait here for ever?

What was the alternative? I couldn’t face the idea of going back to sit in the empty kitchen by myself. It was better to wait here on the cliffs with the stones. I felt closer to Pa and Mags somehow.

Another cluster of boats. Then a long gap and a boat on its own, but it wasn’t Faith or the lifeboat either; it was a little dinghy.

I gazed at it as the world darkened around me. Its sail was ragged with bullet holes and it felt like a terrible omen. There were no more boats on the horizon.

I pulled the blanket tightly around me and lay down on the cold grass. I should try to get a little sleep, I thought. But then I looked up at the thousands of stars in the vast sky above and shuddered. I closed my eyes tightly. I don’t think I can.

But I must have, because when I opened my eyes again, I was stiff with cold, and the light had changed from black to a cool milky grey. A few pale stars still freckled the sky, but it was almost morning.

Had there been a shooting star? I couldn’t remember if I’d seen it as I was falling asleep or if I’d dreamt it. I felt hollow and lost, haunted by the hours of dark, silent loneliness since Pa and Mags had left. I pressed my hands together, trying to squeeze some warmth into my freezing fingers. A strange, low mist crept across the sea.

They aren’t coming home. They would be back by now if they were coming.

Then, without any warning, the idea was there in my head and I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to sing. Fear shivered through me as I turned towards the Daughters of Stone.

The fishermen’s daughters sang a song of love and loyalty and sacrifice to bring their fathers safely home. This was the moment that I had always known about in my bones, ever since Pa first told me the legend. This was the moment in which I would finally become part of this ancient story. The sky wrapped around me, grey as fate, enveloping me, together with the stones and the cold-smoking sea.

I stood up, and started to sing. It was the German lullaby Mutti used to sing to me when I was a baby. My lips were dry and my voice shook – I had barely spoken out loud for a day and a night. I sang about the moon and the stars, shadows and mist – ‘the world in stillness clouded, and soft in twilight shrouded’. I sang about being ‘in His keeping’ – protected and safe through the darkness . . .

I was aware of the stones all around me as I sang. I knew from the quickened pulsing of my heart that the ancient magic was not dusty and sleeping: it was alive, it was awake. I didn’t need to look at the stones to know they were listening to me, their granite glittering like frost in the dawn light. Their song floated in the air with mine, a song like gauze or thistledown – I couldn’t hear it; I felt it: fine and strange. The back of my neck prickled and my skin turned to goosebumps. My hair streamed in the wind, just as it had in my drawing. The sea breezes flapped around me like the beating of feathered wings, whipping the words from my mouth and carrying them away – out over the sea. Was the magic working?

Then I saw it. A boat, emerging from the mist, heading for our harbour.

I could hardly breathe. I just watched the boat coming closer and closer to the shore. If it is the lifeboat, I thought, or the motor boat – if it is Pa or Mags – what will happen to me now? Will the Wyrm take my soul? Will I turn to stone? I wrapped my arms around myself. My skin felt numb – rough and goosebumpy. Perhaps it was happening already.

Fingers of mist reached up towards me from the sea . . .

It is the lifeboat! And, for a moment, I really believed that it was.

Your brain can do terrible things to you when you are in that sort of state – when you are desperate for something to be true. To this day, I could swear that I saw the dark blue and white paintwork, the red trim, the little flag at the front . . .

But I saw no such thing. It was not the lifeboat at all. It was Kipper’s fishing boat.

Kipper was safely home, then, but not Mags, and not my Pa.

The sun kept rising slowly. At least it seemed to – I couldn’t see the sun itself – it was hidden, like a burning face behind a widow’s veil of smoke. The horizon glowed red and the sky reddened too. The scraps of cloud drifting above were as ragged as the sail of that little dinghy, shot through with bullets, crimson.

Two figures were walking slowly up the cliff path towards the Castle. A gull screamed in the blood-red sky. I squinted in the gloom. Pa? Mags? But I hadn’t seen either of their boats return . . .

It wasn’t Pa.

It was Kipper and, leaning heavily against him, was Mags.

She had a blanket wrapped around her, her jumper was ripped and she had a cut on her arm. She walked as if her legs could barely take her weight. Kipper helped her up the steep slope to the Castle. I ran to my sister and clung to her tightly. Her clothes were cold and wet. Her face, beneath blackened smudges, was bloodless.

She looked as if she needed to say something, but she couldn’t say it. She just stared at me.

I stared back, a huge sob rising painfully in my chest as I realized what this meant. I put my arms around my sister again, pressing my face into her shoulder as I said the words she couldn’t say.

‘Pa isn’t coming home, is he.’