morning we found him lying in bed. The tape was going round and round in the machine, but no sound except the hum of the speakers turned up full. We played it again afterwards. There was no sound on that tape, only the spindle squeaking—”
“Gulls,” said Sophie. “It was the gulls outside the window.”
“There was a trickle of blood coming from Neil’s ear. When we woke him he didn’t seem to know who he was. He couldn’t hear us at all. They said he had a perforated ear drum. As though a grenade had gone off just by his head, they said. Only none of us had heard a thing …”
“You can’t think Calypso would do a thing like that deliberately,” Sophie muttered.
“And something else. His arm was covered with little scratches and bite marks. A stoat, Davy Jones thought. But—”
“Don’t tell me, there are no stoats on Sweetholm,” Dominic said.
Sal grimaced. “Calypso has no guile. When Sophie asked her, she didn’t try to hide it. She just said, ‘But Mummy, he pushed you! He pushed you, Mummy!’ Those big eyes staring. It broke my heart.”
“What do you say, Sophie?” asked Dominic at last.
Sophie sighed. “I knew Calypso had done it – done it somehow. For me she’d taken on that bully and flushed him out. Oh, it frightened me. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach it sickened me. But … I was proud too. That power streaking from her!” She stopped and eyed him with dull hostility. “But you’re the last person to understand.”
Dominic looked puzzled.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? My whole life I’ve been pushed around – by Mum and Dad, by teachers. And by you, Dominic—”
“Sophie!”
“Don’t say you hadn’t noticed! You were always so sure what you wanted. You always saw everything as your duty, God’s will. How could I compete with that? I’m not blaming you – it was easier to fit in. I was just ordinary, you see? Nothing special about me, till Calypso came along.”
“Till Joe swam into the rip tide,” Sal corrected her.
Sophie spread her skirt about her, with the fleur de lys. “I guess.” Her gaze lingered on Calypso. “And now that’s turned sour too.”
“Not if we can help it, Sophie.”
“You see,” Sophie said, suddenly urgent, “she doesn’t understand at all. She’s only a child. It’s not her fault she’s the way she is.”
“I know that,” soothed Dominic. “I came to help her, Sophie, if I can.”
“I suppose once they would have called her a witch. We’d both have been for the bonfire in those days. Now, no one knows what to do with us. When she was born …”
“Yes? What is it, Sophie?”
Sophie tried again. “When she was born she was so small, with that coat of downy hair all over her scarlet body. The doctor kept giving her to me to hold, saying she would lose the hair in a few days, that it was nothing to worry about, it was commoner than you’d think, it was all right. He was scared I’d reject the little scrap, you see?”
“He didn’t know Sophie,” said Sal proudly.
“After Neil, Sal persuaded me to take Calypso back to the mainland for tests, but it was still the same. They looked at her and all they saw was the fur on her legs, the eyes, the webbing of her toes and fingers. I overheard the nurses discussing her.‘How’s the Beautiful Freak today?’ they said.”
“She hated hospital,” said Sal. “They were talking about plastic surgery, grafts and all sorts. But when they lifted up her hand her fingers clenched so tight … It was pitiful, Dominic. She cried every time Sophie left the room. She wouldn’t use words, just shrieked like an animal. And of course their instruments began to go haywire. That’s when I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That we had to leave. They’d done all their tests, you see, dozens of them and they were trying to think of more. They didn’t have a name for what she was and they couldn’t stand it – not having a label for her. They were going to poke her about until she gave them a name. And I thought: this is an interrogation.”
“And Calypso was a suspect, a criminal,” said Sophie. “That’s why I ran away …”
Between them they finished their confession. Dominic stared down the bridge of his nose into his glass.
“You suspect something yourselves, it seems,” he said.
Sal hesitated. “You’ve been at Lasithi, in the camps. You’ve seen how the Red Leprosy strikes there. We’ve only heard rumours, the radio tells us nothing. But they say the children develop gifts sometimes. Prophecy, second sight. As if nature were trying to compensate them …”
“And you’re wondering if that’s true of Calypso?” Dominic shook his head. “Believe me, no. I’ve seen cases like that often. Those children! The eyes are cataracts, mother of pearl and weeping. But their magic is usually no more than a fakir’s trick. They stick a red-hot needle through a limb where there is no feeling. They are cunning and pathetic, but their ambitions stretch no further than the coin in your pocket. Calypso here is a different case entirely.”
“Calypso is not a case.”
“Sal, if you knew! I have to think that way, to keep sane. But Calypso—”
“Quiet!” cried Sophie. “I’m sure I heard her calling!”
Sure enough, Calypso had flung her shutters wide and was singing from the bedroom window above their heads:
“White bird featherless
Fell from paradise,
Over the garden wall …”
Her voice was a silken filament of sound, drifting in the air. It coiled invisibly about the garden, and silenced them.
“Here comes Lord Landless,
Takes it up handless,
Rides away horseless –
Off to the King’s Great Hall!”
Dominic came in for breakfast, which in the Manor was taken around two long trestle tables, at no fixed hour. He sat near two young men who were helping themselves to cereal from an economy-size packet. He tried again to discover what kind of house he was staying in.
“Have you lived here long?” he asked them.
“Nine months,” said one of the men.
“Nine months, one week and two days,” added his friend. “To be precise.”
“If you want precision.”
“Otherwise,
