It was later that afternoon that the doctor came to tell me the bad news.
‘It’s broken, Miss Smith,’ he said. ‘Your back. Broken in two different places, we think.’
I was falling through the air again with the chalk dust and the chunk of clifftop. Once more I felt the jolt as my body slammed into the ledge below. Broken. Broken in two places. There was only darkness – darkness and the song of the stones.
‘Will it heal?’ My voice sounded much braver and calmer than I felt inside.
‘The back itself will heal with time,’ he said. ‘But we don’t know yet about the nerves in your spine that are responsible for the feeling and movement in your legs. It may be that the nerves are just bruised.’ His expression changed then. ‘But it’s quite possible, Miss Smith, that they may never fully recover. It’s possible, I’m afraid, that you might never walk again.’
This had been my nightmare all my life, both sleeping and awake: to be frozen. Paralysed. Petrified. But this was not how I had expected it to happen. And there was something else unexpected too: I did not feel as helpless as I had thought I would. Do you know what the name Petra means? I can tell you now if you don’t know. It means rock. Stone.
I was a Daughter of Stone now.
And stone is strong.
The hospital was clean and comfortable, and the nurses were cheerful, but I had never been away from home before, and it wasn’t long before I started pining for the big skies of Stonegate and the bright sea air. It didn’t seem to matter that I couldn’t move about on my own – here in the hospital, inland, I was a fish out of water anyway. Every now and then I would hear the distant calls of gulls through the open windows and it made me ache even more than my bruises did.
I was allowed to return home a few weeks later, strapped into a heavy back brace. Grandpa Joe collected me and took me home in a taxi. He had arranged with the coastguard to take up his old job as lighthouse keeper again, so that he could look after me and my sister and we wouldn’t have to be evacuated. Mags made a sponge cake to welcome me back and Grandpa Joe bought me a beautiful new sketchbook and set of pencils. Every morning, he carried me up to the lantern room so that I could sit and watch the sea and draw the things I saw through the windows, and the things I saw in my mind too. I drew my whole story – from Mags’s black eye on the first day of the war through to the pink geraniums in the hospital window boxes. And while I sat up there, sketching and shading, bathed in summer light, the war continued – and so did life in the rest of the Castle. Barnaby still hunted rabbits every morning and dozed on my lap in the afternoons, but some other things had changed a great deal.
Mags was now a paler, quieter version of the heroic big sister I used to know. She volunteered with the lifeboat crew, and when she wasn’t working down at the harbour, she was out walking across the cliffs all by herself. She became dreadfully thin. When I looked at her I thought of the word dwindled – yes, that’s the word – dwindled. Like a dying fire. And it was all because of Michael Baron.
They had searched for Michael for days after the bombing. The police concluded that his body must have fallen all the way down to the beach below, and been swept away with the tide. Mrs Baron’s hair turned as grey as sea spray, and her eyes were no longer as bright as a kestrel’s. They were red and small, and seemed to have sunk deep into her skull.
The inquest returned the verdict of accidental death and there was a memorial for Michael in the church. Nothing was ever said about my accusation of sabotage, and I never told a soul what had happened before the air raid – Michael’s zealous speech about Hitler, and how he had tried to push me over the edge of the cliff . . . Now that he was dead, I thought it might be best to keep these awful things to myself. It wasn’t like keeping Pa’s secret, though – to protect his memory. This was different. This was to protect Mags.
We had never spoken about it, but I knew why Mags had lied about Michael having been there in Dragon Bay Cave after he cut the phone line, why she didn’t want to believe that he was a saboteur, why she wouldn’t come to the police station, why she was so angry with me, and why she was desperate not to be evacuated.
‘You loved him, didn’t you?’ I said, when I saw her all dressed up for his memorial, a layer of Mutti’s pancake make-up covering the purple hollows beneath her eyes.
She looked at me for a moment, and then she nodded.
‘Yes.’
She and Michael had been meeting for months – up on the cliffs or down in Dragon Bay Cave. I remembered that misty morning when I had followed Mutti and discovered that Mutti was following someone else. She had been following Mags after all. She knew Mags was meeting someone.
‘But why didn’t you say anything, Mags? Why did it all have to be so secret?’
She just shook her head. ‘I can’t explain, Pet.’
I helped her put her hat on, pinning it carefully and tucking the curls around her ears.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ I said. ‘You can push me in the wheelchair.’ But she shook her head again. And she went to the memorial alone.
One of the dreadful things about war is that it doesn’t pause to let you catch your breath. There is no time to grieve. It rattles on, like a monstrous juggernaut. Within the space of a few months, Mutti had been taken away, Pa had died, the bomb had fallen, Michael had been killed, and now my sister was disappearing in front of my eyes.
People said that if the invasion was coming at all, it would be very soon. I was a Daughter of Stone now – so, from up in the lantern room, from first light to twilight, I did what the Daughters of Stone do: I kept watch over our sky and sea. The weeks of summer went by and faded to autumn. There were flames in the sky nearly every day – flames and smoke and explosions and bullets like blazing rain and the furious battling of our planes against theirs. There were days when I watched from dawn, when the sea was still, misty and milky white, through the rolling blue of the morning, to the tufted waves and mackerel skies of midday. I watched the colours of the sea and the sky shifting together, like a beautiful dance of light. I saw all of this, and I thought about my poor lost Pa. I worried about my sister, drifting around the Castle and the clifftops as insubstantial as sea mist – as if the heart had been torn out of her. I thought about my Mutti far away from us, locked up in her internment camp. And I thought about the Rossis, and all the others who had been taken too.
A very sad thing happened to Mr Miller – the elderly German man who had been so kind and hopeful on the day of Mutti’s tribunal.
Despite being classed as Category C enemy aliens, he and his wife were eventually put in an internment camp anyway. Then Mr Miller was separated from his wife and was sent to Canada on a ship called the Arandora Star. The ship was sunk by a German U-boat and he drowned. Over eight hundred people drowned. I can’t say how many of those people were on the side of the Nazis – I expect some of them must have been, but everyone knew that Mr Miller was the sweetest, most harmless old man in the world, and there must have been others like him on the ship too: innocent people. The Millers had come to England for a new life because their home was not safe for them any more. ‘This is a good country,’ Mr Miller had said to my Mutti. ‘A free country. They will see the truth in you.’
Grandpa Joe just shook his head when we heard about the Arandora Star on the wireless. His blue eyes swam with tears.