The screen door swings open and Emmett enters with the kettle. After handing it to his grandmother, he slips silently onto his chair and takes up the construction of the tiny house.
Ephraim pats his grandson on his head. ‘You’re a good boy, Emmy.’ He ruffles Emmett’s dark hair and tweaks his nose. Emmett fixes his steady blue/brown gaze on his grandfather and wrinkles his nose.
‘You’re a funny one with your brown hair and that brown eye, b’y.’ Ephraim bends over with a grunt and tugs at the laces of his boot. ‘You must get those from your mudder’s side. The Parsons and Mam’s Inkpen side are all blond and blue-eyed. It’s those Vikings hittin’ up the Brits all those years ago.’
‘He gets his dark hair from my mother,’ Ellie says as she chops up the onion. ‘She had dark eyes, too.’ Probably best not to tell them she was a half-French Catholic. Agnes would have a field day with that.
‘It’s a fairy blast,’ Agnes says as she hands out mugs of steaming tea to the men.
Ellie looks up from the pork fat she’s begun to cut into chunks. ‘A fairy blast?’
‘He must’ve got touched by a fairy when he was a baby. Some around here takes it as a bad sign, but I thinks it makes our Emmy special. The fairies gave him a brown eye to leave their mark on him, so the other fairies knows to leave him be.’
Ellie laughs. ‘Surely you don’t believe—’
‘There was that little girl went missin’ in Colinet back in ’Fifteen,’ Ephraim interrupts as he eases his feet out of his boots. ‘A year old or so. Disappeared out of the kitchen when her mudder’s back was turned. Showed up twelve days later six miles away sittin’ under a tree in the forest, not a mark on her. Happy as a duck on a fresh pond.’
Ellie shakes her head. ‘Someone must have brought her there.’
Agnes’s eyes narrow behind her wire-rimmed glasses. ‘T’was the fairies. They took the child and kept it alive. It couldn’t happen any other way.’
***
Ellie turns over in the bed and pulls the covers up to her neck.
‘Aren’t you getting into bed, Thomas?’
Thomas sits on the edge of the bed in his undershirt and his long johns, contemplating the dark room. ‘You didn’t believe the fairy story, did you, Ellie Mae?’
‘Of course not. It’s silly superstition.’
He looks at her over his shoulder. ‘The Rock’s a funny place sometimes. The fog rolls in, and the whale song drifts in on the breeze. It’s an odd sound, that. Clicks and groans. They say you can only hear it properly under the water, but I swears I’ve heard it out on the boat. Clear as a baby’s cry. Sometimes, something shifts out on the water. I can’t explain it. Then you hears it. The clickin’ and the groanin’. It’s like you drop through time into a different place.’
‘But you know that can’t happen. You’re just hearing sounds.’
‘It can happen, Ellie Mae. It happened to me once. I was out on the boat by myself. It’s before I signed up for the infantry. I had to tell Mam and Dad, but I didn’t know how to do it. I took the boat out and floated around the coast for a bit. It was September, just like now. There was a full moon and the stars shone like diamonds in the black sky.’ He leans back onto his pillow and looks over at Ellie. ‘Not that I knows what diamonds looks like, mind you. But you can imagine.’
‘Of course you know what diamonds look like.’ Ellie wiggles her finger with her engagement ring.
‘Oh, maid. That’s not a real diamond. Where would I gets the money for that? Think they called it … what was it? A zircon, that’s it.’
Ellie looks at the large square-cut zircon. ‘Oh.’
‘Pretty like a diamond, though, don’t you think? I promised you a beautiful ring, didn’t I? It’s the best I could find with the money I had.’
‘It’s lovely, Thomas. Really.’
‘So, anyways, I was bobbin’ along on the water – I could see the lighthouse up by the cape. It was a clear night and the light reached far out over the sea as it spun around in the lighthouse. Suddenly a fog rose up off the water like steam. Like someone put on the kettle to boil. And the sea went flat as glass and the light disappeared. Then this sound filled the air like somethin’ from another world. Like singin’ and cryin’ at the same time. If fairies sang that would be the sound they’d make, Ellie Mae.
‘I’m sittin’ in the boat and don’t know what to think about what’s goin’ on. Then I feels like I’m not alone. And I sees him. The great head risin’ up beside my boat. And the eye lookin’ at me. And he just rose out of that water higher and higher until he fell back through the fog and it was the most thunderous crash. And just likes that the fog rolled away and the boat started bobbin’ along, and the lighthouse light appeared again. Just like nothin’ had happened. But somethin’ happened out there. It’s like we’re sittin’ on the edge of the world here. And sometimes, when somethin’ shifts, we see things that are normally hidden from us. There’s a kind of magic here on The Rock, but I’m not always sure it’s a good thing.’
‘You’d probably just fallen asleep and had a dream.’
Thomas’s eyes sweep over Ellie’s face. ‘How’d you suppose Emmy really got his brown eye?’
Ellie sits up against her pillow. ‘What?’
‘I was away a long time, Ellie Mae.’
‘Thomas, what are you saying?’
‘Emmy’s birthday’s in August. He should have been born in September.’
‘That’s not so unusual. He was early. I hadn’t heard from you in
