CHAPTER ONE
Dorothy Louise Walcott was twenty-three years old and still felt like a child. She stood on the pier, chewed fingernails clasping the handrail, watching the grey warbling waves. Salty wind bit at her skin and the gulls cawed periodically, their songs ghostly, almost swallowed by the sea.
She should have died when she was fourteen.
She should have drowned right here by the pier.
She hadn’t.
The aftermath of that event echoed in every recess of her, in every languid step and stifled laugh.
Though she was taller than average, Dot held herself at such diminutive angles that people often believed she was shorter than she was.
Every moment, an apology. Clutching each wrist, her shoulders a little hunched, drawing herself inward, always, like a whirlpool collapsing into nothing.
She did it now, alone and shivering in her waitress’s dress, one hand holding her wool hat against the wind.
‘I suppose you’ve forgotten how to read the time.’
Her brother’s words smacked her.
‘Willard,’ said Dot, whirling around. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Is it late?’
‘Is it late?’ Willard let out a hollow laugh. Their mother had sent him to fetch her, she was sure.
Dot glanced about. The sun had set. How long had she been staring at the water, exhausted from her day of washing plates and cleaning tables at the Divers’ Café?
She was cursed, she thought, to return to this spot where the wind shrieked like dying girls.
It was an atonement, perhaps. Or, perhaps, there was simply nothing else to do in Seafarthing.
‘Hurry up,’ said Willard.
Despite his quarter of a century, her brother still looked boyish.
His curly blond hair, the same as hers, rolled back and forth in the wind like sea foam.
He had a factory worker’s build with thick arms, which he had used for swatting, pinching and hitting in all their childhood games.
Dot still had fractured veins upon her arm from where he had smacked her after a game of checkers.
She had been twelve, then. The welt had left behind a starburst of ugly purple vessels, thin and jagged like the tentacles of a jellyfish.
Her brother stomped back down the jetty. She followed.
Willard knew better than most the constraints of Dot’s illness and yet he walked too briskly, leaving her lagging as she trod on every third slat of wood. She did not ask him to slow. She knew he would not.
In that way, they wandered through the gloomy village of Seafarthing. It was a morose little fishing town constructed of white cottages and crab nets beside the jetty, the air reeking of dead fish and brine. The roads were gravel and hard sand, for only a handful of the residents owned motor cars.
She looked out at the cove.
The year the Prohibition began, Dot found an anglerfish washed up on that beach.
A grim, monstrous thing, all teeth and faded scales with its odd little light gone out.
And though she had been barely out of babyhood, she had felt a kinship with that slimy, dark creature which she could not explain.
Almost two decades later, as she trotted after her brother through their dank town – the lamps flickering on, illuminating the wind-beaten cottages from within – she was reminded of that anglerfish: once deep in the belly of the ocean, ugly, cold, alone, trying in earnest to hold up its own small light against the enveloping darkness.
At last, they arrived. Theirs was the cottage at the end of the lane beside the river mouth. Crickets chirruped. The neighbour’s spaniel barked. Dot was breathless from the walk. She grabbed the windowsill beside the front door, bulbs of darkness swelling in her vision.
‘You’re fine,’ said Willard without looking at her. He let the door slam behind him.
Dot did not blame him for his bitterness. He was her brother. That meant he loved her. After all, he had been hurt more than she had that day – the one when she was fourteen. Dot opened the door.
Her mother stuck her head into the hall. ‘We were meant to start dinner thirty minutes ago, Dorothy Louise.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Dot said, skirting past her mother and into her bedroom. She shut the door and as she did the floor swam up to greet her, hitting her full in the face and chest as she collapsed. Dot groaned as quietly as she could, lying against the comforting stability of the cold slate.
With some effort, Dot rolled over and looked up.
Her eyes trailed over the crack in her ceiling; the swirling woodgrain of her wardrobe; an illustration of Saint Penelope’s Cathedral stuck to her wall; and beside it, pride of place, a picture she had purchased two years earlier from a carpet seller on the main street. It was a photograph of a tea shop.
‘Dottie?’ Her little sister Celia’s voice was sharp through the door. ‘Grandad left the potatoes in the oven so they’d be warm for you and now they’re burning.’
‘Grandad’s back?’ asked Dot, heart leaping.
No reply. Celia’s footsteps receded.
Dot took hold of her bedframe and pulled herself up.
There was a small, green phial of tonic on her bedside table.
She took a sip. The acrid medicine pinched her throat but, after a moment, her limbs lightened.
The room ceased spinning and she stumbled mildly, righting herself with the dexterity of a girl used to traversing the earth as if it were a boat bouncing upon a choppy sea.
Dot took a flannel from her bureau and wiped her face. A slight dizziness clung to her, but she steeled herself and went out into the kitchen.
‘There’s my girl!’
In spite of her sickliness, Dot grinned. ‘Hello, Grandad.’
Archibald Walcott ambled forward to give her a gentle hug.
Dot’s grandfather was shorter than her and stocky in his old age, but his eyes twinkled.
He had the Walcott nose: large and aquiline, its bridge rising high in a rounded bump.
This, he had passed down to Dot and none of his other grandchildren.
‘Why is she your girl?’ asked Celia, pulling potatoes from the oven.
‘You both are,’ said Archie, but when Celia’s back was turned, he winked at Dot.
He spoke with the faded accent of his homeland, which clipped his vowels and softened his ‘r’s.
He’d been twenty years old when he had stumbled off the boat from Eyre, changed his name and bought the land on which they now lived.
What a different country Calléum had been then, before the cinema and the radio and the Prohibition on magic.
‘Good haul this time,’ said Archie. He prodded a parcel wrapped in brown paper on the counter beside him. It was ambergris, freshly procured for Dot from the South Sea. ‘Year and a half’s worth of tonic right here.’
Dot’s smile faded.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry you have to—’
‘No,’ said the old man, ‘won’t hear none of that.’ He patted her on the shoulder and turned to take a bowl of steaming cockles from the counter. ‘Teatime now.’
The seven of them sat at the table. Her mother, Martha, and father, Patrick, down one end, Willard and his young wife, Florence, at the other. Celia, with a plate of mostly potatoes, sat opposite Dot and Archie, reading a novel.
It was very nearly a table of eight. Florence, with her bulging belly, was due in only a few days.
That had to be the reason for Willard’s mood – the stress of a baby he wasn’t sure he wanted.
Still, he seemed content enough now, his arm on the back of Florence’s chair.
Dot watched him chuckle as Florence whispered in his ear, her hands on her belly.
‘Make sure you’re eating, Dot.’
Archie rolled his eyes at his daughter-in-law. ‘She is eating, Martha.’
‘Dad,’ said Dot’s father.
‘Yes, Patrick, my boy?’
The two men stared at each other, caught in the kind of unspoken tug-of-war that can only exist at the family dinner table.
Patrick Walcott, the headmaster of the local school, was a quietly terrifying man, quick to anger.
All it took was a stern look from him to put the fear of the Saints into any of his students – and into Dot.
Patrick shot her one of these glances now, and Dot skewered her carrots and shoved them in her mouth.
When her plate was cleared, she turned to her grandfather.
‘So,’ she said, ‘did you find them?’
Archie grinned. This was their tradition. A question repeated every time he returned from the sea.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘We did find some fossils off the Island of Calbris. Getting closer, Dottie.’
Celia looked up from her book. ‘You’ve been “getting closer” for years, Grandad.’
‘That’s better than getting farther away,’ said Willard, and Florence let out a snort of laughter.
‘How close are you, really?’ Celia asked her grandad.
‘One day, Cece, my love, you won’t be sixteen anymore and everything won’t seem so terribly inconvenient to you.’
‘I was seven when you started looking for the South Sea cuttlefish,’ said Celia. ‘Seven! Miss Harris told me off for fibbing, remember? Because I told the other girls so many times they weren’t extinct.’
‘You remember all that,’ said Dot’s father, ‘but you can’t remember to clean up after you make your porridge in the morning?’
Celia scowled and returned to her book.
When dinner was over and the dishes had been done and all of them had retired to the little living room to sit beside the fire – for even in the spring, it was cold in Seafarthing – Dot found herself perched, as usual, at the edge of the room.
‘What happens,’ asked Florence, ‘if I’m mid-push and the lights go out? The midwife said the hospital would sort the electric, but knowing my luck, the next outage will happen right as the little one is bursting into the world.’
Willard laughed and his mother sipped her port and lemon, a knowing smile on her lips. ‘You’ll have to keep pushing, love,’ said Martha. ‘You’ll have little choice otherwise.’
Across the room, Celia was curled up next to her father while he read her school essay.