A Brief History of Montmaray (2 page)

Besides, Veronica has refused to go – and I can’t even
contemplate
the idea of being separated from her. We’ve shared a room ever since I was born. We’re closer than even sisters could be. And then, the thought of leaving Montmaray is so horrible. It really
would
be leaving, because only FitzOsborne sons get to stay here after they marry. The daughters have to go wherever their husbands live, there’s simply not enough room on the island for everyone. Anyway, I am far too young to get married, despite what Aunt Charlotte says about our ‘advancing age’.

And yet, how can we possibly ignore Aunt Charlotte’s orders? We have to do as she says, she’s the only proper grown-up left to look after us, even if she is all the way over there in England. Officially, the head of our household is Uncle John, who is Aunt Charlotte’s brother and Veronica’s father (and the King of Montmaray), but he’s rather distracted on his good days, and downright alarming on his bad ones. Besides, Aunt Charlotte’s the only one with any money – she married an elderly coal magnate named Sir Arthur Marlowe, who promptly died and left her a fortune – so we rely on her to pay for Toby’s schooling and just about everything else. I’ve never met her, but based on her letters and Toby’s reports, I can’t imagine anyone actually saying ‘no’ to her. Except Veronica, of course.

It’s at moments such as these that I almost wish I was religious – then I could pray for guidance, leaving the decision in heavenly hands. But even though I’m fond of many bits of the Bible – the Garden of Eden, baby Moses in the bulrushes, the Nativity – I find it hard to believe that a real God is behind them. Isn’t it enough that they’re beautiful stories? Besides, religious people can be so unpleasant. Rebecca this morning, for example, screaming that Henry was the spawn of the Devil and swiping at her with the rolling pin, just because Henry chalked a hopscotch grid on the chapel flagstones. One can’t blame Henry, those flagstones are exactly the right size and there’s lots of room now the pews are gone (we used up the last of them two winters ago when we ran out of firewood during a tremendous storm). The rest of us were just relieved Henry had found a way to expend some of that excess energy of hers.

And speaking of Henry, where on Earth is she with my candle? She’s been gone half an hour. Either she’s fallen down the loo and drowned, or she’s gone out fishing with her friend Jimmy from the village. It really is
too
bad of her. Why can’t she use her own candlestick-holder if she’s going to go wandering across the island in the middle of the night? She’d better not drop it, it’s the last silver one we own. (I’m not concerned about Henry,
she’s
pretty much indestructible. She fell off a cliff once and didn’t do anything but scrape her elbow a bit.) She always runs wild once Toby leaves for school each year – not that she’s much better behaved when he’s here at Montmaray. Here is my New Year’s Resolution, then, ten months late – I resolve to be firmer with Henry.

And now the moon has shrunk behind a cloud and it really is much too dark to see. I’m going to lie under the blanket and have a good think, and if I think anything particularly profound, I’ll have to write it down tomorrow.

I DID HAVE SEVERAL thoughts last night after I put my book away, but they were pathetic rather than profound. They were, I must admit, mostly about Simon Chester, Rebecca’s son. My thoughts have been wandering relentlessly in his direction ever since his last visit, at the start of summer. He is not exactly a
visitor,
having lived at Montmaray for all those years before he went off to London. However, that was so long ago that I can’t help imagining how he must see us now. Not that he
does
see me. And no wonder he barely notices I exist – I’m so dull compared to the others. Veronica is clever (even Simon acknowledges that, and the two of them loathe each other). Toby is charming, funny and handsome. Henry is like a Force of Nature. I am neither pretty nor strong-willed nor particularly talented at anything, which doesn’t usually bother me except when Simon is here. He makes me feel so dissatisfied with myself! Except I have no idea how to go about improving the situation, so I just berate myself silently, which makes it worse, like picking at a scab.

(Note: Whenever I feel like this, I must pretend to be Veronica and say very firmly to myself, ‘Who on Earth cares what
Simon Chester
thinks anyway?’ Then think very hard about some other subject.)

All right.

Lovely weather we’ve been having lately.

Oh, it’s no good. I might as well write it down – it’s not as though anyone else is going to read this (I’ve found an excellent hiding place for my book). I’m not sure that it’s
love,
exactly, what I feel for Simon. Perhaps it’s just a peculiar and embarrassing type of curiosity. His last visit, for example, I found myself staring at his strong fingers curled around the salt cellar and entranced by the precision of the comb furrows in his shiny hair. It could simply be that he’s the only young man I know who is not related to me, but it’s all very awkward. For one thing, Veronica would be horrified if she found out and it’s awful not being able to speak with her about something important. Usually we talk about absolutely everything. Not that Simon’s
really
important – I mean, it’s not as though I’m planning to
marry
him. But I’ll have to marry someone, at some stage, and if I’m this inept at being charming and interesting around Simon, then my prospects of attracting anyone better are fairly dim.

Heavens, what a snob I sound! But it’s not my fault I’m a princess (albeit one from an impoverished and inconsequential island kingdom that is miles from anywhere).
I
can’t help all the rules and regulations that govern those born into our noble and ancient family. And I can’t exactly tell Aunt Charlotte, ‘Sorry, I’m unable to accept the proposal of Erich Ludwig-Wilhelm, that young Habsburg you’ve managed to unearth – you see, I’ve fallen in love with the housekeeper’s son.’

Oh, change the subject, Sophia!

I will look out the gatehouse window and contemplate the view. Yes, that’s better. Unlike me, it is very beautiful, especially at this time of year. I can only imagine how mysterious and menacing the island must seem to strangers. An enormous black rock looming out of the ocean, its jagged peaks circled by seabirds and wisps of cloud. Towering cliffs with caves gashed into their faces. A bleak, windswept plateau at one end. The grim memorial cross at South Head, dozens of dead men’s names etched into the stone under a single date. Abandoned cottages scattered along the edge of a dark, deep pool, their roof slates long blown away and great gaping holes where the doors and windows were. And then there is the castle, stark and forbidding, cut off from the rest of the island by a perilous Chasm.

But when one has lived on Montmaray all one’s life, when one’s family has lived here for centuries, it is simply
home.
That long stretch of rock spread thinly with grass, for instance – we call it the Green and it’s where we build our Midsummer bonfire each year. The Great Pool is for summer picnics and swimming races. The line of rocks past the old cottages is where we gather mussels; the cove at the base of the most imposing cliff is the best place to sink lobster pots. Wild strawberries spring up around the base of the memorial cross each summer, sheltering under the rosemary bushes. And across the drawbridge, on the far side of the Chasm, the hill is spread with sweet-smelling briar and whispering grasses, with bright patches of primrose and heartsease and Bartholomew’s Treasure. Then, either side of the hill, there is the beautiful indigo sea, rolling on and on and up into the sky. As for the sky itself – well,
infinity,
that’s the only way I can describe it. Nothing interrupts it. Toby says that in London, there are places where one looks up and can only see a tiny square of sky and it’s hardly ever blue. No wonder the people in city streets always look so grim in photographs. No wonder
I
feel grim at the thought of ever having to leave the island...

And now I can see Veronica, striding through the tall purple grass and looking the very opposite of grim. She has her canvas satchel strapped across her front and a bundle of driftwood for the stove under one arm. She’s probably on her way back from visiting George in the village. We call it the village because of all the cottages, but really, only one family lives there now. Well, two, the Smiths and the Spensers, but they’re all related. The Smiths are Jimmy, who is a bit older than Henry, and his widowed mother, Alice. The Spenser family is Mary, Alice’s sister, and George, Jimmy’s great-great-uncle.

No one knows how old George is, but he claims to remember the wedding of Queen Victoria of England (which, personally, I have my doubts about – it would make him nearly a hundred). But it’s certainly true that he knows more about Montmaray than anyone else alive, which is one of the reasons Veronica loves spending time with him. Another is that she can practise her Cornish with him, as he’s the only one left on the island who speaks it fluently. She writes down everything he says, Cornish and English, then adds it to the mountain of paper in the library that will eventually become
A Brief History of Montmaray.
She has been hammering away at this for the past five years and says she’s barely made a dent in it. It’s very intellectual – she read me out a bit yesterday on the Portuguese–Montmaravian Alliance of 1809 and I barely understood a word.

Usually Henry would be down at the village too, but I think she went back to bed after breakfast (she
did
go out fishing last night, the horrible child). Henry is meant to do three hours of lessons every morning now that Toby is back at school, but she’s managed to avoid them so far. Not that Veronica or I have pushed
too
hard for lessons to resume, because we’re the ones who are supposed to teach her. When we were her age, we had a governess and tutors, but there was more money then and besides, there was Toby to consider (it would have been quite embarrassing if he’d turned up at Eton unable to read). After Toby went away to school, Veronica and I mostly taught ourselves out of the library. Veronica, of course, proved to be much better at improving her mind than I was. (One could argue that this was because she had a better mind to begin with. However, one could also point out that I’ve squandered countless hours reading romantic novels, planning my future trousseau and daydreaming about Simon, hours that could have been far better employed learning French grammar or reading Plato.)

Aunt Charlotte did continue to dispatch tutors to us at irregular intervals for a while, but they didn’t tend to last long. Often it turned out that their agency had neglected to mention that we live on a small island in the middle of the Bay of Biscay, and they didn’t cope very well when they ran out of cigarettes or face powder and realised that the nearest shop was two hundred miles away.

Or worse, we were sent the sort of girl who thought that living in a castle would be madly poetic, who pictured herself drifting along the wall-walk in a flowing gown whilst reciting Keats, or trailing her finger tips in the moat as swans glided by. We don’t have a moat, just a rickety drawbridge that connects the castle to the rest of the island. There
is
water at the bottom of the Chasm, beneath the drawbridge, but it contains sharks rather than swans. Furthermore, climbing the ladder to the top of the curtain wall while wearing a flowing gown would look very undignified, especially in howling gales and torrential rain, which is our usual weather for a great deal of the year. Even when one of these girls managed to last more than a fortnight in the absence of hot baths and electric lights,
something
always happened – Henry would accidentally-on-purpose lock her in the Blue Room with the ghost, or Uncle John tip his soup over her, or Veronica catch her mixing up her ablative and her accusative during Latin translation and be very scathing. It always ended in tears, and the tears were rarely ours.

Anyway, I decided that this morning was not the time to confront Henry on the issue of lessons. So much for my resolution to be firmer, but I’m never at my best first thing in the morning and I was feeling especially wobbly today because I had
that
dream again last night. Perhaps I should have written ‘nightmare’. I don’t know whether it is or not – I see the same thing each time and sometimes I feel quite calm about it, and other times I wake up gasping and trembling and longing to shake Veronica awake for a dose of her logical comfort.

Last night was somewhere in between. As always, I was alone in a small boat, rocking back and forth with the slap of the waves, my fingernails digging into the damp wood. The sky was black and silver, but there was no wind, no lightning, nothing truly threatening – and yet the back of my neck began to prickle with dread. I knew that whatever I did, I mustn’t look down into the water, but I couldn’t help myself and there it was. That
thing.
Long and white and unravelling, just beyond my reach, drifting slowly towards the ocean floor.

I never manage to figure out what it is. Sometimes I’m almost certain it’s a fragment of sail wrapped round a sinking mast. Other times I think it’s a dying sunfish. Or a shark. Last night, I could have sworn a part of it moved sluggishly against the current, as though it were trying to signal to me.

But then I woke up, shivering.

And now Veronica is marching across the drawbridge, which makes me shiver all over again. I always step very warily, taking care not to look down the gaps where the slats have rotted away (it’s not heights I mind, so much as
depths
). Peering further out the gatehouse window, I can make out the green and white swell of the sea below her, deceptively calm today. ‘The spent deep feigns her rest’, as Kipling would say. It makes me picture all the torn-apart ships and picked-clean skeletons shifting about beneath the waves, victims of Montmaray’s treacherous rocks. Oh, all those poor dead sailors, eels slithering through their staring eye sockets...

What’s that noise?! Oh. It’s probably just some of Toby’s pigeons nesting in the chimney. It
couldn’t
be ghosts, ghosts don’t make cooing noises, and besides, I don’t think anyone ever died up here. (Note: Ask Veronica about this.) I wouldn’t really mind if there
were
a ghost, so long as it was friendly – the one in the Blue Room is. Anyway, a ghost would keep Rebecca away. She’s fearfully superstitious, it’s one of her many faults.

Well, whatever the mysterious sound is, it’s not very good at repelling Rebecca after all, because she’s just shouted up the ladder that she needs me to go down to the village for the milk. Isn’t that supposed to be Henry’s job? Bother. Will write more later...