Chapter 1 #2
During the first three years of my childhood, Marina and I had lived alone together in our magical castle on the shores of Lake Geneva as Pa Salt travelled the seven seas to conduct his business. And then, one by one, my sisters began to arrive.
Usually, Pa would bring me a present when he returned home.
I’d hear the motor launch arriving, run across the sweeping lawns and through the trees to the jetty to greet him.
Like any child, I’d want to see what he had hidden inside his magical pockets to delight me.
On one particular occasion, however, after he’d presented me with an exquisitely carved wooden reindeer, which he assured me came from St Nicholas’s workshop at the North Pole itself, a uniformed woman had stepped out from behind him, and in her arms was a bundle wrapped in a shawl. And the bundle was moving.
‘This time, Maia, I’ve brought you back the most special gift. You have a new sister.’ He’d smiled at me as he lifted me into his arms. ‘Now you’ll no longer be lonely when I have to go away.’
After that, life had changed. The maternity nurse that Pa had brought with him disappeared after a few weeks and Marina took over the care of my baby sister.
I couldn’t understand how the red, squalling thing which often smelt and diverted attention from me could possibly be a gift.
Until one morning, when Alcyone – named after the second star of The Seven Sisters – smiled at me from her high chair over breakfast.
‘She knows who I am,’ I said in wonder to Marina, who was feeding her.
‘Of course she does, Maia, dear. You’re her big sister, the one she’ll look up to. It’ll be up to you to teach her lots of things that you know and she doesn’t.’
And as she grew, she became my shadow, following me everywhere, which pleased and irritated me in equal measure.
‘Maia, wait me!’ she’d demand loudly as she tottered along behind me.
Even though Ally – as I’d nicknamed her – had originally been an unwanted addition to my dreamlike existence at Atlantis, I could not have asked for a sweeter, more loveable companion.
She rarely, if ever, cried and there were none of the temper-tantrums associated with toddlers of her age.
With her tumbling red-gold curls and her big blue eyes, Ally had a natural charm that drew people to her, including our father.
On the occasions Pa Salt was home from one of his long trips abroad, I’d watch how his eyes lit up when he saw her, in a way I was sure they didn’t for me.
And whereas I was shy and reticent with strangers, Ally had an openness and a readiness to trust that endeared her to everyone.
She was also one of those children who seemed to excel at everything – particularly music, and any sport to do with water.
I remember Pa teaching her to swim in our vast pool and, whereas I had struggled to stay afloat and hated being underwater, my little sister took to it like a mermaid.
And while I couldn’t find my sea legs even on the Titan, Pa’s huge and beautiful ocean-going yacht, when we were at home Ally would beg him to take her out in the small Laser he kept moored on our private lakeside jetty.
I’d crouch in the cramped stern of the boat while Pa and Ally took control as we sped across the glassy waters.
Their joint passion for sailing bonded them in a way I felt I could never replicate.
Although Ally had studied music at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève and was a highly talented flautist who could have pursued a career with a professional orchestra, since leaving music school she had chosen the life of a fulltime sailor.
She now competed regularly in regattas, and had represented Switzerland on a number of occasions.
When Ally was almost three, Pa arrived home with our next sibling, whom he named Asterope, after the third of The Seven Sisters.
‘But we will call her Star,’ Pa had said, smiling at Marina, Ally and me as we studied the newest addition to the family lying in the bassinet.
By now I was attending lessons every morning with a private tutor, so my newest sister’s arrival affected me less than Ally’s had. Then, only six months later, another baby joined us, a twelve-week-old girl named Celaeno, whose name Ally immediately shortened to CeCe.
There was only three months’ age difference between Star and CeCe, and from as far back as I can remember, the two of them forged a close bond.
They were akin to twins, talking in their own private baby language, some of which the two of them still used to communicate to this day.
They inhabited their own private world, to the exclusion of us other sisters.
And even now in their twenties, nothing had changed.
CeCe, the younger of the two, was always the boss, her stocky body and nut-brown skin in direct contrast to the pale, whippet-thin Star.
The following year, another baby arrived – Taygete, whom I nicknamed ‘Tiggy’ because her short dark hair sprouted out at strange angles on her tiny head and reminded me of the hedgehog in Beatrix Potter’s famous story.
I was by now seven years old, and I’d bonded with Tiggy from the first moment I set eyes on her.
She was the most delicate of us all, suffering one childhood illness after another, but even as an infant, she was stoic and undemanding.
When yet another baby girl, named Electra, was brought home by Pa a few months later, an exhausted Marina would often ask me if I would mind sitting with Tiggy, who continually had a fever or croup.
Eventually diagnosed as asthmatic, she rarely left the nursery to be wheeled outside in the pram, in case the cold air and heavy fog of a Geneva winter affected her chest.
Electra was the youngest of my siblings and her name suited her perfectly.
By now, I was used to little babies and their demands, but my youngest sister was without doubt the most challenging of them all.
Everything about her was electric; her innate ability to switch in an instant from dark to light and vice versa meant that our previously calm home rang daily with high-pitched screams. Her temper-tantrums resonated through my childhood consciousness and as she grew older, her fiery personality did not mellow.
Privately, Ally, Tiggy and I had our own nickname for her; she was known among the three of us as ‘Tricky’.
We all walked on eggshells around her, wishing to do nothing to set off a lightning change of mood.
I can honestly say there were moments when I loathed her for the disruption she brought to Atlantis.
And yet, when Electra knew one of us was in trouble, she was the first to offer help and support. Just as she was capable of huge selfishness, her generosity on other occasions was equally pronounced.
After Electra, the entire household was expecting the arrival of the Seventh Sister.
After all, we’d been named after Pa Salt’s favourite star cluster and we wouldn’t be complete without her.
We even knew her name – Merope – and wondered who she would be.
But a year went past, and then another, and another, and no more babies arrived home with our father.
I remember vividly standing with him once in his observatory. I was fourteen years old and just on the brink of womanhood. We were waiting for an eclipse, which he’d told me was a seminal moment for humankind and usually brought change with it.
‘Pa,’ I said, ‘will you ever bring home our seventh sister?’
At this, his strong, protective bulk had seemed to freeze for a few seconds.
He’d looked suddenly as though he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Although he didn’t turn around, for he was still concentrating on training the telescope on the coming eclipse, I knew instinctively that what I’d said had distressed him.
‘No, Maia, I won’t. Because I have never found her.’
As the familiar thick hedge of spruce trees, which shielded our waterside home from prying eyes, came into view, I saw Marina standing on the jetty and the dreadful truth of losing Pa finally began to sink in.
And I realised that the man who had created the kingdom in which we had all been his princesses was no longer present to hold the enchantment in place.