‘I can do that myself. Or, at least, I have to learn how to.’
‘You do. And if you make mistakes, you have to learn from them, too. I can’t do that for you, nor is it right that I try.’ He shook his head in amazement. ‘Of course now I see this, it’s a wonder I had been so mistaken for so long.’ He smiled, a little sadly, then, ‘I look forward to seeing what you can do with your life, Marina.’
Even better was the fact that Commander Denham – now in charge of Room 40 – had insisted that Owen, too, be taken on as a pupil and be prepared for exams that would see him have a career in naval intelligence.
The Commander wrote to Mr Jones to explain that his son had saved lives by not letting the Sea Witch return to Portsmouth. As a thank you, he was offering to pay for the boy’s education. Mr Jones agreed, gratefully. But Owen was stubborn: his pride would not let him accept the offer of a place at the school in the forest. Only when his father pointed out that he could pay the money back out of his future naval salary did he accept.
Paddy barked at the sky. An airship floated serenely above. There was an army camp five miles down the road, and in the last few weeks the preparations for the war had intensified. Commander Denham’s mission had been a success, but it was not enough. A long and bloody conflict between Britain and Mordavia was inevitable.
In the early days of the conflict, a Mordavian submarine caused great trouble in the northern seas, harassing gunboats and warships alike. There were rumours that this craft, so reckless, so remorseless in its pursuit of enemy boats, was captained not by a Mordavian officer, but by a female submariner.
This woman was written about in the newspapers, with a sort of grudging admiration for her demented mission to sink as many boats as possible. She became known as the Sea Witch, and every man in the British navy breathed more peacefully in their berths when she was captured.
The newspapers reported that, when caught, the woman had to be forcibly dragged out of her submarine. She had then cowered before her captors, begging for mercy. ‘A pitiful sight, she was bedraggled and barefoot,’ the war correspondent wrote. He added that the submariner’s red hair was unkempt and that she was ‘more witch than woman’. But Marina knew that this was wrong, for Miss Smith would surely have climbed out of her submarine in her red boots and short skirt which showed an inch of calf; her lustrous auburn hair would have been artfully arranged, and her lips would have been curled in contempt and painted a scandalous red.
As the war dragged on, the stories of that dreadful, bitter conflict rushed towards the school in the forest and Marina’s thoughts were taken up with the sadness of others. Edward’s father joined the Artists’ Rifles, a battalion of sculptors, painters and writers. He was killed one bright spring day in a terrible battle, alongside hundreds of thousands of other soldiers who lost their lives that day. A month later, the kindly Finchin, too, lost his life. Two kind, decent, talented men dying for king and country amongst an infinite sea of casualties. Such is the waste of war.
The bloody conflict broke the world as it had been: change was violent and rapid. And in those years after her strange expedition on the Sea Witch, Marina prepared herself diligently, passionately, to claim her full part in this new world.
It wasn’t always easy: she was often frustrated and confused. There were times when she forgot the language of herself, that secret language she had been given by her mother. And those were the most unhappy times in her life. But somehow, Marina always found a way back to remembering who she was and what mattered to her.
She would be a new sort of woman, she determined, twisting the ice pearl she wore, like a talisman, at her throat. She would treat everyone as equals and speak to them with courage, love and kindness; she would use that secret, lost, ancient language her mother had given her, to imagine and create a different sort of world.
There were others, too, who felt this new way of speaking rising up from within them, and these young brave women spoke to others, more and more, their voices like waves held back for too long and now rushing towards the shore.
THE END
THE MERMAID
One night as I lay on my bed,
I lay so fast asleep,
When the thought of my true love came running to my head,
And poor sailors that sail on the deep.
As I sailed out one day, one day,
And being not far from land,
And there I spied a mermaid a-sitting on a rock,
With a comb and a glass in her hand.
The song she sang, she sang so sweet,
But no answer at all could us make,
Till at length our gallant ship, she tooked round about,
Which made all our poor hearts to ache.
Then up stepped the helmsman of our ship,
In his hand a lead and a line,
All for to sound the seas, my boys, that is so wide and deep,
But no hard rock or sand could he find.
Then up stepped the captain of our ship,
And a well-speaking man is he.
He says: ‘I have a wife, my boys, in fair Plymouth town,
But this night and a widow she will be.’
Then
