‘I wish he hadn’t gone.’
‘He has his orders, Marina.’
‘Oh, you and your stupid orders. You’ll do anything if it’s an order. Would you jump off the ship if I gave you the order?’
‘If you were my commanding officer, I’d have to.’
Marina sighed. ‘It’s all so stupid.’ She felt cross and out of sorts.
Jones picked up some snow and made a snowball. He threw it towards the water. ‘Your father will return soon, and then we can head back to Portsmouth.’
‘I’m not sure I want to go . . .’ she said. ‘I’ll get sent away to that wretched school.’
‘I’d do anything to be sent to school,’ Jones said quietly.
‘What are you talking about?’ She sat up, a bonnet of snow on her dark hair.
‘I’d like to learn all sorts of things,’ he muttered, looking embarrassed. ‘If I went to school, I could even be a university man. Like your father. Then I could work in Room 40.’ He sighed. ‘It will never happen, of course. My family don’t have the money. They need me to work. Need me to earn.’ He shifted uncomfortably. ‘I mean, I’m proud to help them, I really am. Bryn – he’s the littlest – is getting new boots. He couldn’t use the ones we all had because they’re worn out.’
Now Marina felt ashamed. Of course. There would have been no money for this boy’s education. It wasn’t just girls who had very little say in what their life might be. Boys from families such as Jones’s could not hope for a life of their own choosing. Their lives had already been chosen by those in charge – the pit- or mill-owners who owned the towns and villages their workers lived in.
‘Do you think we’ve disappeared?’ she asked him. ‘Like those other fishing vessels? It feels like we’ve fallen through the bottom of the ocean to some other world.’ A world between dreaming and waking, she thought. Between the dark and the light, between the world she knew and some other, forgotten realm.
On board, Brown had brought out his accordion, and his sad song about a boat being sung to the bottom of the sea drifted across to them.
‘It’s a strange place,’ Jones said. ‘I could never have imagined anywhere like this. It feels like the place you’d come to after you’ve died.’ He blew his breath out in a cloud. ‘I can’t shake the sadness. Do you feel it? It’s like a sea mist that’s fallen around me.’
‘Perhaps you just miss your family.’
‘Perhaps.’ Jones was quiet for a moment and then asked, ‘Where do you think your mam is?’
‘I don’t know.’ But Marina wanted to think that her mother was in a place like this. It seemed like an enchanted realm of deep magic and possibility, where silence, at last, might sing.
Restless and unable to sleep, Marina found herself outside the door to her father’s cabin. She wrinkled her nose as she caught the faint acrid scent of his tobacco. Where was he now?
She tried the door; it swung open. That was odd, because her father was normally so against leaving his doors unlocked.
She went inside and sat down on her father’s narrow bed. It was as if no one had ever slept there, so entirely had his presence been removed.
She patted the bed and Paddy jumped up to sit next to her. She reached for her father’s pillow and hugged it close to her body.
Something hard dug into her chest. She reached into the pillowcase and pulled out a notebook. She was going to put it back, but, holding it in her hands, tracing his initials stamped in gold on the cover, she thought she might just look at the first page.
She felt bad as she opened it, as if she were stealing something, but that didn’t stop her. She remembered how she had crept into her mother’s room when her father had returned from some voyage at sea. She couldn’t have been more than seven, and her mother’s locked room exerted an influence over her that she couldn’t shake off. Ivy had completed her weekly dusting and airing and had left the room unlocked. Marina had slipped in and run her fingers over the cut-glass scent bottles on her mother’s dressing table. One still had a dark liquid inside. The bottle was heavy and Marina’s fingers were clumsy. The bottle had slipped through her hands and smashed on the floor. The scent that surrounded her – dark, mysterious and heavy as water – almost paralysed her. It was only her father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs that shook her out of herself and forced her to hide behind a chair. Her father ran into the room. ‘Annabel?’ he called, his face alight, expectant. But when he saw the bottle, he shouted to Ivy to come and clear up, and retired to his study, slamming the door.
Marina settled herself on the bed and took a deep breath. She thought that she could, even now, still smell her mother’s mysterious perfume on the pages of the notebook.
The opening pages were as she might have expected: handwritten charts of Pechorin Island and lists of coordinates of the sort used to plan a sea voyage covered the paper in her father’s neat, square handwriting.
But the next few pages were held together by a rusty paper clip. She pulled it off and the leaves sprang apart.
Her father could draw, she knew that. When he spent months at sea, his letters home to her were always decorated with an exquisite line drawing of a three-masted ship, which appeared to sail on the waves of his handwriting below. But the drawings Marina was looking at now were quite different. The small pages were almost entirely covered with ink drawings of sea creatures, all in exquisite detail. There were starfish and whales and seals – those she could recognize. But there was another, troubling hybrid creature. It had an arrestingly beautiful face and hair that trailed
