comes from somewhere.”
“She don’t seem to speak much, Doctor – just her name,” said Mary.
“Came up out of the sea, I heard,” the doctor went on, lifting her eyelids one by one, “like a mermaid, eh? Well I never.” He reached out and lifted up the bottom of the blanket, uncovering her knees. He crossed her legs, then tapped her knees, one after the other. He seemed satisfied. “Don’t you worry, Mrs Wheatcroft, once she’s better, she’ll speak soon enough, and we’ll all know more. She’s in deep shock, in my opinion. But I’m here to tell you that I am quite sure she can’t be a mermaid – because she’s got legs. Scratched they might be, but she’s got two of them. Look!” They all smiled at that. “That’s better. We have to be cheerful around her, you know. It’ll make her feel better; cheerfulness always does. But now comes the question: who’s going to look after her? And what about when she gets better? So far as we can tell, it’s not as if she belongs to anyone, does she?”
Mary did not hesitate. “We will, of course,” she said. “Won’t we, Jimbo? All right with you, Alfie?”
Alfie didn’t say anything. He was hardly listening. He could not take his eyes off the girl. He was so relieved she was alive. He was wondering now who this strange little creature was, how she got herself on to St Helen’s in the first place, and how she had managed to survive over there all on her own.
“She’s got to belong to someone, Mary,” said Jim. “Every child’s got a mother or father somewhere. They’ll be missing her.”
“But who is she?” Alfie asked.
“She’s called Lucy,” said Mary, “and that’s all we need to know for the moment. As I see it, God has brought her to us, up out of the ocean, sent you and Father over to St Helen’s to find her. So we look after her for as long as she needs us. She’ll be one of us, for as long as she has to be, till her mother or father comes to fetch her home. Meanwhile this is her home. You’ll have a sister for a while, Alfie, and your father and me, we’ll have a daughter. Always wanted one of them, didn’t we, Jimbo? Never quite managed it till now, did we? We’ll nurse her back to health, Doctor, feed her up, put some colour in her cheeks.” She brushed away the hair from the girl’s forehead. “And then we’ll see. You’ll be all right with us, dear. Never fear.”
The doctor left soon afterwards, saying he’d be back in a week or so to see how Lucy was getting along, telling Mary very firmly that if the fever got worse she was to send for him at once. He took his pipe back off Alfie before he left. “Horrible habit, my lad,” he said. “Don’t you ever smoke, hear me? Bad for your health. Nasty habit. Else you’ll have the doctor calling round all the time, and you don’t want that, do you?”
He hadn’t been gone more than an hour or two before they had their next visitor. Big Dave Bishop, Cousin Dave, was at the door, and knocking loudly. “Uncle Jim! You in there, Uncle Jim?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He burst in, filling the room with his bulk, his voice loud with excitement. He was cradling an untidy-looking bundle in both arms. “I been over there, Uncle Jim, to St Helen’s, just like you told me,” he said. “No one else there, not so far as I could see. I went all over. Lots of oystercatchers, and gulls, and a seal or two on the rocks. Didn’t find no one else. But I did find this.” It was a blanket, a grey, sodden-looking blanket. And then he unfolded it. “There was this too, Uncle Jim. Just lying there in the corner of the Pest House, it was. S’one of they teddy bears, isn’t it? Hers, isn’t it? Got to be.”
Mary took it from him. Like the blanket, it too was bedraggled and wet through, with a soiled pink ribbon round its neck, and one eye was missing. It was smiling, Alfie noticed.
Suddenly Lucy was sitting upright and reaching out for it. “Yours, is it, Lucy dear?” Mary said. The girl grabbed it from her, clutching it fiercely to herself, as if she’d never let it go.
“Hers all right then,” Jim said. “No doubt about that.”
“And there’s something else an’ all,” Cousin Dave said. “This here blanket, it’s got some funny foreign-like writing on it, like it’s a name sewed on, or something.” He held it up to show them. “I don’t do reading, Uncle Jim. What’s it say?”
Jim spelt the name out loud, then tried to pronounce it. “Wil… helm. Wilhelm. That’s the Kaiser’s name, in’t it? I’m sure it is. Sounds like William. Kaiser Bill – he’s called that, isn’t he?”
“The Kaiser!” said Cousin Dave. “Then it’s German, isn’t it? Got to be. And if it’s German then that’s where that girl comes from then, isn’t it? Stands to reason, don’t it? She’s one of them. She’s a lousy Hun. Could be the Kaiser’s ruddy daughter.”
“Don’t talk soft, Cousin David,” Mary said, pulling the blanket away from him. “And I don’t care who she is, whether she comes from Timbuktu. We’re all God’s children, wherever we come from, whatever we’re called, whichever language we speak. And don’t you never forget it.”
She walked right up to him then, and, looking him right in the eye, she spoke very softly. “You listen to me, Cousin David. I don’t want you never saying anything about the name on this blanket. You hear me? Not a word. You know what it’s like these days, with all this tittle-tattle about German spies, and all that. Nothing but poisonous nonsense. This gets around, and people will start talking. Not a word. We keep it in the family, right? You promise, promise me faithfully now.”
Cousin Dave looked away, first at Jim then at Alfie, hoping for some help. He was clearly nervous. He didn’t seem to know quite where to look, nor what to say. Mary reached up and took his face firmly in her hands, forcing him to look at her. “Promise me? Faithfully?” she said again.
It took Cousin Dave a while to reply. “All right, Aunty Mary,” he said at last. “I shan’t say nothing about it. Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
But Jim didn’t trust him. Everyone knew that after a drink or two Big Dave Bishop would say almost anything. “We won’t say a word, will we, Cousin David?” said Jim, and with just enough menace in his tone that Cousin Dave would understand that he really meant it. “You went over to St Helen’s and you found the teddy bear, and you found the blanket, just an ordinary grey blanket. That’s all you say, like your Aunty Mary told you. And you don’t want to upset your Aunty Mary, do you? Cos if she’s upset, then I’m upset. And I get nasty when I’m upset, don’t I? And you don’t want that, right?”
“S’pose,” Cousin Dave replied, shamefaced.
All this time Alfie had been staring at Lucy. “I never saw anyone who was German before,” he said. “No wonder she don’t say nothing. She can’t speak English. And she can’t understand a word we say, can she? Not if she’s German, she can’t.”
But, as he was speaking, Lucy looked up at him, and held his eyes just for a moment. But it was long enough for Alfie to know for certain that she had understood something – maybe not every word he had said, but something.
LUCY’S MYSTERIOUS APPEARANCE FROM OUT of nowhere had been the talk of the islands for weeks now, eclipsing even the news of the war from over in France and Belgium, which had been the main anxiety and preoccupation of just about everyone in the islands since the outbreak of war nearly a year before – every islander except Uncle Billy, that is, who lived his life in another world altogether, seemingly quite oblivious to the real world around him.
All the news they read in the newspapers, or picked up from any passing sailors coming into port at St Mary’s, dashed again and again their hopes of an early peace, and confirmed their worst fears. To begin with, the papers had been full of patriotic fervour and cheery optimism, every headline