1
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS AN ISLAND
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WE STOOD, Alexis and me, chucking things into suitcases. Socks, sweaters, pants. I tugged handfuls of clothes from my wardrobe and flung them into the wheeled suitcase that lay open behind me, and Alexis did the same in the next room. We barely even registered what we were packing, whether we’d included our favorite clothes or not. The main thing was to get it done quickly. That’s what we’d agreed. Because if we’d taken our time over the packing and made a list, the way we usually did, we would surely have realized that what we were doing was completely and utterly crazy.
Everyone in my family was crazy. That’s what my mum, Alexis, always said anyway, when I asked her why she’d run away from her home in Scotland at the age of seventeen with nothing but a suitcase in her hand and me in her belly. She’d upped sticks and left for Germany—pregnant and not even legally an adult yet—and ended up in Bochum. I think she felt too young to be a mum, so she wanted me to call her by her first name instead, which I always had and still did. And now I was nearly seventeen myself (well, in fourteen months I would be) and it was starting to look like I’d inherited the “crazy” gene. That morning at breakfast—an hour ago now—I, too, had spontaneously decided to leave the country. We’d gone online and booked ourselves flights on a budget airline, departing that same afternoon. All we had to do now was pack. I rooted around in a drawer and hurriedly dug out a few bras and pairs of underwear.
“Bring your warm jacket with you, Amy,” said Alexis as she wheeled her suitcase (stuffed to bursting with clothes) into my bedroom and tried to squish my pillow in on top. Inside the case I could see her organic cotton corduroys and a shirt from Etsy decorated with a brightly colored apple print.
“I don’t really think I need a parka in July,” I muttered. My suitcase was pretty full by now, too—although mainly with books. Clotheswise I’d packed only what was strictly necessary. The way I saw it, it was better to take one less cardigan than have to do without one of my favorite books.
“I think you’re underestimating the weather over there,” said Alexis, eyeing the contents of my suitcase and shaking her mahogany-brown locks. Her eyes were red and swollen; she’d been up all night crying. “Just take your e-reader. Won’t that do?”
“But I don’t have Momo or Pride and Prejudice as e-books.”
“You’ve read both those books about a hundred times each.”
“And what if I want to read them for the hundred-and-first time while I’m there?”
“They’ve got more than enough books on that blessed island, Amy, believe me. You have no idea.”
I ran my fingertips over the cover of my well-thumbed copy of Momo. I’d often wished I had an enchanted tortoise like the one in Momo to guide me on my journey through life. I needed this book. It comforted me when I was sad. I needed it now more than ever.
Alexis sighed. “Well, make sure you fit the jacket in somehow, OKAY? It can get pretty chilly there.” She sat down on the suitcase and tugged at the zipper. “I’m worried this whole thing is a bad idea anyway,” she fretted. “Are you sure that’s the only place you’ll be able to take your mind off things?”
I nodded.
* * *
The tiny boat pitched in the swell, tossed back and forth as though the sea were playing ball with it. Lightning flickered across the sky, where dark storm clouds were massing, shrouding the ocean in a cloak of surreal gray pierced by sudden flares of light and ominous rolls of thunder. The water had turned the color of slate and the rain was coming down in sheets—heavy, biting gray raindrops that hammered down on the waves and sharpened their crests. What with the thunderstorm and the giant waves smashing against the cliffs that loomed on the horizon, Mother Nature was putting on a pretty formidable display. It was terrifying, awe-inspiring, and wonderful all at the same time.
On second thought, “wonderful” was possibly a bit of an overstatement. The problem was that I happened to be sitting in this tiny little boat, in the middle of this thunderstorm, clinging onto my seat for dear life to keep myself from falling overboard. Spray shot into the air and into our faces. Alexis tried gamely to hold on to our luggage, while the man driving the boat cranked up the engine till it roared.
The rain had come down quite suddenly and within seconds I’d been soaked through. I was also freezing cold, and all I could think about was arriving—I didn’t care where, as long as it was somewhere warm and dry. During our flight from Dortmund to Edinburgh, the sun had still been shining, in a bright, cloudless sky. And though a few clouds had appeared by the time we’d boarded the little plane to Sumburgh Airport on Mainland (the biggest of the Shetland Islands, off the Scottish coast), I certainly hadn’t reckoned with this apocalyptic scene.
I blinked at the burning of the salt water in my eyes as another wave rocked our boat and nearly swallowed up Alexis’s handmade felt handbag. It was getting harder and harder to hold on to my seat. The ice-cold wind had long since numbed my fingers to the point where I could barely control them. Reading about a storm like this in a book was a far more pleasurable experience. When I was reading—even when I was scared, when I shuddered in horror, when the story plunged me right into the midst of the most terrible disasters—I never entirely lost that warm, cozy tucked-up-on-the-sofa feeling. There was no trace of that feeling now, and I realized that real-life storms, unlike literary ones, were most definitely not my idea of fun.
The next wave was even more savage than the last, and it washed clean over my head. At the same moment I gulped frantically for breath—not the best idea, as it caused me to choke on a huge mouthful of water. Coughing and gasping, I tried to empty my lungs of seawater while Alexis landed a few hearty thumps on my sodden back. This sent her bag sailing overboard. Oh, crap! But Alexis seemed to have given up on the idea of bringing all our possessions safely ashore anyway, and didn’t even spare a glance for this portion of her worldly goods.
“Nearly there, Amy. Nearly there!” she called—no sooner had the words crossed her lips than they were carried away on the wind. “We did want to come here, remember. I’m sure we’re going to have a lovely holiday on Stormsay.” It was probably supposed to sound cheerful, but her voice cracked with suppressed panic.
“We’re here because we’re running away,” I replied, although too quietly for Alexis to hear. I didn’t want to remind her or myself of the real reasons for our trip. After all, we were running away to forget. To forget that Dominik had broken up with Alexis and gone back to his wife and children. Completely out of the blue. And to forget that those stupid idiots in my year at school … No—I’d promised myself not to even think about it anymore.
The boat’s outboard motor howled as if trying to drown out the storm, and the rain grew heavier, beating down on my head and shoulders and lashing at my face. It was literally impossible for me to get any wetter. But I was relieved nonetheless to see that the island seemed to be drawing nearer. Stormsay, the home of my ancestors. Through a curtain of wet hair, I squinted at the shoreline and hoped the skipper knew what he was doing and that we were not about to get smashed to smithereens on the rocks.
The cliff face looked immense, jagged, and deadly. It towered nearly a hundred feet above the slate-gray waves and at its summit, way up high where the raging of the wind was at its most treacherous …
… there was somebody standing at the cliff’s edge.
At first I thought it was a tree. But then I realized it was a human being, leaning into the storm and looking out to sea. A figure with short hair, coat flapping in the wind, watching us from the clifftop. It had one hand raised to shield its eyes, and the other rested on the head of a huge black dog.
I stared back, shivering, as the boat hove to. We left the cliffs behind us and battled on, arcing around toward the eastern shore of the island. The figure receded into the distance, eventually disappearing from view.
And then, finally, we came to a jetty. It was half submerged and wobbled precariously, but our captain managed to moor the boat with a few deft movements and we tumbled out onto dry land. At last.
The embankment was slippery and the rain was still falling hard, but we’d reached our destination. Stormsay. The word tasted of secrets. It sounded somehow full of promise and slightly eerie at the same time. This was the first time I’d ever been to the island. For a long time Alexis had never even mentioned it to me—until at some point during primary school I’d realized that not all children learned both German and English from their parents, and that my name sounded different from everyone else’s. Amy Lennox. And even then Alexis had been reluctant to admit that we came from Scotland. When she’d left, in fact, aged seventeen, she’d vowed never to go back. And now …
We trudged along a muddy street, the wheels of our suitcases sinking into the sludge. On either side of us, scattered at intervals along the road, were little houses—no more than a handful of cottages, really, with crooked roofs and cob walls and windows of bulging glass, some of which flickered with yellow light. I wondered which one my grandmother lived in, and hoped that the little houses were more weatherproof on the inside than they looked from the outside.
The man who’d ferried us across to the island mumbled something about the pub and beer and disappeared through a doorway. Alexis, however, plowed straight on past the last of the cottages. She seemed determined to leave even these meager remnants of civilization behind us, and it was all I could do just to keep up with her. My suitcase had gotten stuck in yet another muddy puddle and I had to tug at the handle with all my strength to get it out.
“Your mum does live in an actual, like … house, right?” I grumbled, wondering why I hadn’t questioned Alexis more closely as to what exactly it was that was so crazy about my grandmother. After all, “crazy” might mean she ate tree bark and wore clothes made of pinecones and lived out in the wild with the creatures of the forest.…
Alexis didn’t answer but simply gestured toward something in the darkness ahead of us and beckoned to me to follow her. At that moment my suitcase suddenly came unstuck with unexpected force. I was splattered from head to toe with mud. Brilliant!
While Alexis still looked gorgeous, even with her wet hair (as if she’d stepped straight out of a shampoo ad), I was starting to feel more and more like a drowned rat. I muttered away to myself crossly as I trudged on.
The road soon narrowed into a track and grew even muddier. The lights were far behind us now. We could barely see the little village at all anymore, though the icy wind still blew alongside us like a faithful friend and wormed its way through all the little gaps in the knit of my woolly sweater. Raindrops whipped into my face as I caught up with Alexis. We really were heading out into the wilderness.
“There was somebody up on the clifftop. Did you see?” I said breathlessly, trying to distract myself from the feeling that any minute now I was going to freeze to death.
“On Shakespeare’s Seat? In this weather? I’d be very surprised,” murmured Alexis, so quietly I could barely hear her. Then, from the top of a steep little slope she’d just clambered up, she offered, “Here—let me take your suitcase.”
I heaved the case into her arms and scrambled up after it. When I reached the top, I realized we were standing on a sort of plateau. In the distance I could see another cluster of lights, and towers that looked like the turrets of a castle etched against the night sky. And there were lights close by, too, in some of the windows of a huge mansion to our right. We were standing at a fork in the path. Straight ahead, the track carried on across the moor.
But Alexis took the right-hand fork and marched up to a wrought-iron gate between two hedges, behind which I glimpsed something like a park or a gravel drive with a fountain in the middle. These big houses (in the movies, at least) almost always had gravel paths flanked by crisply clipped shrubs, statues, climbing roses, and often a classic convertible for good measure. You had to have an imposing backdrop for the lovers’ kiss, or the tracking down of the murderer.… The house behind the gate looked pretty grand, at any rate, even from this distance. The walls were studded with countless bay windows, and a whole host of little towers and chimneys jutted into the sky, grazing the storm clouds. Behind the windowpanes hung heavy curtains, with flickering candlelight shining through the gaps between them.
The rain grew heavier again now and the individual raindrops merged to form a veil as if trying, at the last moment, to hide the mansion from view. But it was far too late for that. We’d landed on the island, and there was no going back now.
Alexis laid her fingertips on the ornate handle of the gate and took a deep breath. “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” she murmured at last, pushing open the gate.
“What?” I said.
“Oh—it’s just the first line of a novel I often used to … read here.” She sighed.
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t really. My teeth were chattering so loudly by this time that I could hardly think straight.
We hefted and hauled our luggage across a small park made up of gravel paths and crisply clipped shrubs, past a fountain and several climbing roses, and up a flight of marble steps. The only thing missing was the classic convertible. Without further ado, Alexis rang the doorbell.
A gong sounded loudly inside the house.
But it was still a long time before the oak door swung open and a large wrinkly nose emerged from behind it. The nose belonged to an old man in a suit, who eyed us keenly over the top of his glasses.
“Good evening, Mr. Stevens. It’s me, Alexis.”
Mr. Stevens gave a curt nod. “Of course, ma’am. I can see that,” he said, stepping aside. “Were we expecting you?”
“No. But I’d like to speak to my mother,” said Alexis. Mr. Stevens nodded again and helped her heave her battered suitcase over the threshold. When he reached for my case with his liver-spotted hands, I quickly sidestepped him. I’d lugged the thing this far, I could carry it the last few feet without dumping it on an old man who must surely be even more of a weakling than I was! But Mr. Stevens gave me such a stern and un-old-mannish look that in the end I let him take the suitcase and stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets instead. And indeed, the weight of our luggage seemed to give him no trouble at all.
“Wow,” I gasped the moment we stepped in out of the rain.
The entrance hall to the mansion was bigger than our entire flat. When you stepped into our hallway at home, you found yourself in a dark, narrow tunnel with ancient daisy-patterned wallpaper peeling off the walls. Alexis had tried to spruce it up a bit with a beaded curtain and an indoor palm tree but the tower block apartment remained stubbornly unglamorous. The living room, which also served as Alexis’s bedroom, the kitchen with its ’70s tiles, the bathroom, and my bedroom, where the carpet had bunched up with age—they all felt like boxes. Concrete boxes with tiny windows, in which even bookshelves and colorful polka-dot teapots couldn’t counteract the gray.
My grandmother’s hallway, on the other hand, was incredible. The ceiling arched so high above our heads that looking up at the paintings on it almost made me dizzy. Instead of fat naked angels on clouds and other such popular motifs, the artist had painted pictures of people with books. Some of them were reading, some were pointing toward bulging bookcases, and others had placed open books across their faces. Interspersed with the pictures of people, the same coat of arms appeared again and again: a green stag with huge antlers, perched proudly atop a pile of books against a wine-red background. A chandelier hung at the center of the entrance hall, its arms made up of strings of golden letters. Matching lamps were mounted at regular intervals along the wood-paneled walls, and between them were more stag coats of arms. The floor was spread with brightly colored Oriental rugs, with letters woven into them that I’d never seen before, and on the opposite wall a staircase swept upward, its oak banister fashioned from carved books. It was just possible I’d inherited my love of reading from my grandmother, I reflected.
“Follow me, if you please. I shall attend to your luggage shortly,” said Mr. Stevens. For a man of his age, his back was remarkably straight, and his polished shoes made not the slightest sound on the opulent rugs.
We, on the other hand, left a squelching trail of muddy footsteps in our wake. “Um,” I whispered to Alexis, “do you think maybe we should take off our…?” But she shook her head distractedly. Only now did I notice that her fists were clenched around the fabric of her woolen coat. She was chewing at her bottom lip and her eyes flicked nervously back and forth.
Oh well. We had to get a move on anyway, to keep up with the butler. But I still felt bad about making such a mess in the most beautiful hallway I’d ever set foot in, and I tried to pick my way around the edges of the rugs. At least the glossy wooden floorboards underneath would be easier to clean.
They were certainly a lot more slippery. I’d only gone a few steps when I lost my balance on the sheet of mud and rainwater beneath the soles of my sneakers and my feet slid out from under me. For a split second I teetered in the air (one flailing arm grazing Mr. Stevens’s pomaded coiffure, and ruffling its cement-like surface), before landing heavily on my bum. Oh, crap!
The butler turned to inspect me through his now wonky glasses, eyebrows raised, but said nothing. The hair on the back of his head stood up in spikes like the feathers of a cockatoo.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
Alexis, without a word, put out a hand to help me up. She was used to my frequent accidents and liked to console me, at times like this, by calling me her “little giraffe,” because it sometimes seemed as though my arms and legs were simply too long for me to control. And I did often feel like a giraffe compared to all the other girls my age, who’d gotten curvier over the past few years instead of taller and thinner like I had. A giraffe with roller skates strapped to its clumsy feet.
I let Alexis pull me to my feet and refrained from rubbing my bruised bum, trying to preserve the last shred of my dignity. Mr. Stevens (whose hair, incredibly, had already regained its former bombproof glory) carried on walking. We’d crossed the entrance hall now and he led us through a door set into the wood paneling, onto a long corridor, up some stairs, along another corridor … I was just starting to think that if I ever got lost in this house I’d never be able to find my way out again, when we finally arrived at a sitting room containing a silk-upholstered divan.
“Please.” He motioned to us to sit down and busied himself lighting a fire in a large grate. But we didn’t sit down because the fire, which was soon crackling merrily, was far more inviting. Alexis and I stationed ourselves as close as possible to the hot flames, while the butler disappeared from the room. The heat almost sizzled as it met my skin. It sank slowly into my hands and face in what felt like a series of tiny little electric shocks. I closed my eyes and relished the reddish-orange glow that shone through my eyelids. But where the heat of the fire met my wet clothes it bounced off as if from a suit of armor. Only in one or two places did it manage to work its way—slowly—through the fabric.
I don’t know how long I stood there willing the heat to filter right through to my bones. Perhaps it was only a few moments. Mr. Stevens returned much too soon, at any rate. “Mairead Lennox, Lady of Stormsay,” he announced.
I forced myself to open my eyes and turn away from the fire.
Like all the women in my family, it seemed, my grandmother was tall. She was even taller than Alexis and me. Or did she just look taller because her white hair was drawn up into an imposing knot on the top of her head? She had the same dark eyes as me and Alexis, anyhow, shining in a nest of fine wrinkles. Her nose was a little too long, her lips a little too thin. But she must have been very beautiful once upon a time. In her dark green silk dress, fastened at the neck by a white collar and a brooch, she seemed—like her house—to belong to a different era. On a ribbon around her neck hung a slim pair of reading glasses, the frames set with tiny red stones.
For a while, she and Alexis looked at each other in silence. Alexis, standing there in her very wet, very colorful clothes, kneading the fabric of her coat so hard she wrung little droplets out of it. I’d always thought of Alexis as a sort of vegan reincarnation of Pippi Longstocking. Strong, brave, different from everybody else. A friend who I called by her first name. A mother who didn’t give a crap if people snorted contemptuously to see her walking along the top of a wall, singing loudly, as she took her five-year-old daughter to kindergarten. It wasn’t like her to be nervous. But she was now.
Alexis moistened her lips as my grandmother’s gaze shifted to me. She looked searchingly at me, and an unspoken question hung in the air between us, although I had no idea what it was. Alexis, too, remained silent. I swallowed, and Lady Mairead raised her eyebrows expectantly. The fire behind us crackled, and outside the rain drummed against the windowpanes. The climbing roses and the manicured shrubs rustled, bracing themselves against the storm that was howling around the house. My grandmother’s nostrils flared as she breathed in. The water from our hair and clothes trickled off us and formed puddles at our feet.
Still Alexis didn’t say a word.
This was unbearable!
“Um—so—I’m Amy,” I ventured finally. “Nice to meet … er … to make your acquaintance,” I stammered, and then, as no response was forthcoming, I added a “Mi … lady?” for good measure. Everyone knows aristocrats can sometimes have a bit of a thing about their titles. At the same time, entirely of their own accord, my legs twisted themselves into a kind of mangled curtsy. It wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of elegance. I felt the blood rush to my face.
The ghost of a smile played around the corners of my grandmother’s mouth. “Is this your…?” she asked Alexis. “Can it really be true?” She took a step toward me and ran her fingertips down my cheek and along the line of my chin.
Beside me, Alexis nodded. “I got pregnant very young.”
“Indeed,” said Lady Mairead, and now she smiled in earnest. “Well then, Amy—I suppose I must be your grandmother,” she declared, adding, in a language I assumed was Gaelic, “Ceud mìle fàilte!” Luckily she switched straight back to English. “A thousand welcomes to Lennox House, Am—”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Alexis interrupted her. “That’s not why we came back.”
“No? Why, then?”
Alexis took a deep breath, as if speaking to her mother was a great effort. “We needed to get away for a bit and we didn’t know where to go,” she began. “Perhaps we were being a bit hasty, but … Anyway, we just want to stay here for a while and … recover, that’s all. It’s Amy’s summer holidays. We have to go back in a few weeks.”
Alexis knew perfectly well, of course, that I hated my school now. I never wanted to see my so-called “friends” again. But when we’d decided to flee abroad we hadn’t talked about how long we should stay. And I supposed we might have to go back to Germany at some point. After all, I was still planning to do my A-Levels there and study medicine afterward. But I didn’t want to think about that right now, and my grandmother too batted away Alexis’s objections with a sweep of her slender hand. “If you want to stay, you know what my condition is. She has to read. As long as you are here, she will read, and when the holidays are over, she can decide for herself.”
“Read? What do you mean?” I asked. “Why do I have to read?”
Alexis sighed. “It’s a long story, treasure. It’s to do with our family, but it’s not important. We—”
“She doesn’t know,” said my grandmother flatly. “She doesn’t know.” Her lips tightened as if she’d just bitten into a lemon.
“What don’t I know?”
Lady Mairead was about to explain, but at that moment Alexis finally overcame her uncharacteristic nervousness. “Not tonight, okay?” she told my grandmother. “I’m just not up to it right now. Amy’s soaked and frozen half to death, as am I. Things haven’t been easy for us these past few weeks and getting here in this storm definitely wasn’t. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
At first it looked as though my grandmother was about to object, but she seemed suddenly to realize that I was still shivering. “Very well,” she said. “Mr. Stevens will make up your rooms and run you a bath.”
A little while later, Alexis and I were lying in a bathtub the size of a swimming pool. When I stood up the water reached all the way to my waist, and if I tucked my legs in tight enough, I could even swim one and a half strokes from end to end. But as it was we were far too tired to do anything remotely sporty. Instead we just bobbed about in the hot water, thawing out our numb toes. Fragrant drifts of bubbles floated between us. From the ceiling of the marble bathroom hung another chandelier made of golden letters.
As we’d negotiated the mansion’s intricate web of corridors, I’d asked Alexis why she and Lady Mairead had such an issue about whether I should read or not. It was a no-brainer, after all—I certainly wasn’t going to not read for the whole of the holidays. For years now, working my way through the contents of the city library had been my favorite pursuit. But Alexis had only shrugged and said, “This entire family is crazy, Amy—you know that.”
Now we relaxed wearily into the heat of the water, which felt almost painful against my cold skin. Its warmth spread slowly through my body, right to my core. I let myself sink just below the surface and, without moving a muscle, watched my long, thin hair as it wafted and coiled through the water in slow motion. Its rusty sheen was only a pale echo of Alexis’s wild mane; when my hair was wet, you could barely even tell it was red. Still, I did feel a little bit like a sea anemone on a tropical ocean floor. That must be a nice life—nothing to do all day but sit around being caressed by the warm current.
It had just occurred to me that on second thought I was quite glad I wasn’t a sea anemone because I’d probably get bored pretty quickly down there on the seabed without any books, when the gentle lilting of the water grew choppier; Alexis was on the move. First she paddled all the way across the bathtub; then she took a deep breath and dived down under the water. She crouched on the bottom of the tub for nearly two minutes, and when she resurfaced her eyes looked as if she was trying hard not to cry. She was probably cursing the day she’d twisted her ankle on the pasture of the organic farm where she worked, and had a splint put on it by a good-looking doctor in the ER. Dominik had found his way into her heart, and our family, far too quickly. The two of them had been together less than a year, but he’d become part of the family straightaway. He’d cooked steaks for himself and me, in our otherwise vegan kitchen; he’d come ice skating with us.… I missed him. He was the only one I missed.
“I’m sure we’re going to have a lovely holiday on Stormsay,” I said, quoting Alexis. And I meant it. Because anything was better than sitting around at home, where everything reminded you of everything. Where Alexis had had her heart broken and where I risked running into kids from school—a school where people were not very forgiving toward a girl with straight As and a flat chest.
Alexis blinked back her tears. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you’re right.” She looked at me for a few moments. Suddenly she grinned and scooped some of the bubbles toward her. “Hey, Amy, could there be any more perfect start to a holiday than a full-on bubble fight?”
I smiled and started stocking up on soapy ammo.
Later, as I lay in bed cocooned in a warm quilt, I listened to the storm outside my window. Through the howling and raging of the wind, I was sure I heard another sound, like a child sobbing. Was somebody crying out there on the moor? No—it must be my imagination.
The princess lived in a castle with silver battlements and stained-glass windows. It stood on a hill from which the whole of the kingdom could be seen.
Every day she climbed to the top of the highest tower and looked out across the land.
She knew her kingdom, knew it well.
But only from afar, for she never set foot outside the castle.
Since her father the king and her mother the queen had died, she no longer dared venture outside.
She thought the meadows and lakes too dangerous, the forests too impenetrable. An old fairy tale, which her subjects had long ago ceased to believe, told of a monster lying in wait somewhere, hidden deep in a cave.
The princess feared the monster.
Text copyright © 2015 by Mechthild Gläser
Translation copyright © 2017 by Romy Fursland
