“Why would anyone steal ideas from books?” I shot back.
“Yes, okay, the whole idea is absurd—but Betsy? We grew up together—I’ve known her practically my whole life. It’s true she can be a bit abrasive sometimes, and she’s not particularly fond of you. But she loves literature. She’s a book jumper through and through. Why do you suspect her of all people?”
I sighed. “It’s just that there aren’t very many book jumpers. And if it is somebody from Stormsay—”
“Perhaps it’s some megalomaniac book character.”
“Shere Khan says the thief smells of our island. And besides, we know there’s somebody using the portal at night. And the thing with Lady Mairead last night on the staircase … That was pretty weird, no?”
Will sighed. “Betsy has no motive.”
I wrinkled my nose grudgingly, because on that point at least I had to admit he was right. Betsy didn’t have a motive—none that I could think of, at least.
“There were tracks around the broken archway, by the way,” said Will. “I think someone used some kind of lever to roll that rock down the hill.”
I eyed the archway’s two remaining stone slabs. They looked incredibly heavy. These boulders had resisted centuries of wind and weather. “Do you think Betsy would be strong enough to move one of those things?”
Will snorted.
“Okay, okay.” I decided to drop the subject for the time being and snuggled deeper into Will’s sweater, which smelled lovely—of salty sea air and Will’s laundry shop.
We gazed at the starry sky overhead. Millions upon millions of little dots, glittering up there in the darkness. I tried not to think about how close together Will and I were sitting. Our shoulders touched; my knee rested on his thigh. And I noticed Will looking at my hair from time to time when he thought I wasn’t looking.…
“I saw somebody creeping around the grounds of Lennox House the other night, by the way,” I said at last. The silence was making me nervous all of a sudden.
Will looked at me. “Somebody in a hooded cloak?”
I shrugged. “I went down to have a look, but it was just Brock.”
“Brock?”
“Counting the gravel stones on our path.”
“Brock is definitely strong enough to have moved one of these boulders.”
“And Brock is a foundling.” I frowned. What if he hadn’t come from very far away at all? What if his mother or father belonged to one of the clans, and had abandoned him? Was that too far-fetched? “Might he have—” I began, but Will put a finger to his lips. With the other hand he pointed to one of the bushes on the opposite edge of the stone circle.
There was something moving there.
Something human.
A figure slipped out of the shadows and between two of the stone archways. She was wearing a long robe and her hair fell like a curtain across her face. She was small. She was not Betsy.
Facing away from us now, she crouched beneath one of the gateways. In her hands she held something barely any longer than a finger. It looked like part of the spine of an ancient book.
Will and I stood up. We moved silently toward the figure. Not until we were standing directly behind her did Will clear his throat. She turned around.
Her face was narrow, her nose pointed. And her long, dirty hair came down to her hips. There were leaves and bits of moss tangled in it. As she hastily stuffed the object she had been holding into a bag, I saw that her hands weren’t even half the size of mine.
It was a little girl.
A little girl, staring at us, eyes wide.
For the length of a heartbeat we looked at one another. Bewildered. Who was this girl? Where had she come from? What was she doing here in the middle of the night? But before I could ask even one of these questions the child recovered from her shocked paralysis, turned on her heel and bolted.
Ducking and diving like a fleeing rabbit, she sped down the hill and out onto the moor.
We sprinted after her. The girl was nimble, zigzagging this way and that. But we kept her in our sights. I ran as fast as I could, so fast I could hear my own heartbeat hammering in my ears. Eventually, though, I fell behind Will and the child.
The moor was vast, but the farther I ran the more familiar the bushes and pathways became. Will’s cottage soon emerged from the darkness. As I approached I could see that Will had managed to grab hold of the child by the upper arm and was attempting to maneuver her through the door.
The three of us stumbled inside the cottage. Will shut the door behind us. I switched on the light and was shocked by what I saw.
The child was standing in the middle of the room, looking around as if hoping to find an open window to escape through. Outside in the moonlight I’d hardly been able to see a thing, but now I saw that the child was skin and bone, and much dirtier than I’d first imagined. Her skin was covered with dried mud and stretched tight over her sharp cheekbones. Her blue eyes were set deep in their sockets, and the color of her dress was faded beyond recognition. It was threadbare and stained and so full of holes that the child’s skinny body showed through the fabric. Her ribs stuck out far too much. The hem of the dress was soaked with mud, which was dripping off onto the floor.
The child seemed to sense that she was trapped, and after a while she stopped looking around for an escape route. Instead she turned her eyes on us and pursed her lips defiantly.
“Don’t be scared,” I said. “We won’t hurt you. Who are you?”
“What’s your name?” asked Will.
She didn’t answer. She dug her bare, blackened toes into the rug without a word.
“How did you get to Stormsay?”
“How old are you?”
“What happened to you?”
The little girl turned away and started wandering around the room. She ran her tiny hand over the sofa upholstery, then spotted a loaf of bread and a jar of jam on a shelf by the window and reached out to grab them.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
The child fished out a slice of bread and tried to open the jam jar, but the lid was on too tight. Will took the jam and the loaf from her and started making a sandwich. The child stood on tiptoe and rocked forward and backward, spellbound, watching his every move. No sooner had he spread the first slice than she snatched it out of his hands and bit into it. She wolfed it down in a matter of seconds.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” said Will, spreading jam on another slice of bread.
“Perhaps she can’t understand us,” I mused.
Will shrugged.
“Hallo, mein Name ist Amy. Wie heißt du?” I tried in German as the little girl polished off her second slice. But to no avail. We tried again in French, Spanish, and Gaelic respectively, but none of them drew any response from the child. She gobbled up half the loaf in record time, then curled up on the sofa and instantly fell asleep. Will draped a woolen blanket over the tiny body, and then we sat down by the stove and pondered.
For a while the only sound was the crackle of the flames and the quiet bubbling of the stove at our backs, mingling with the child’s snores. At last, however, we began to speak in whispers.
“Who is she? Where does she come from?” I asked. “Do you think she got washed ashore too?”
Will put his head to one side. “Maybe. But look at her clothes. She must have been living out here on the moor for quite a while. Perhaps in one of the caves to the north of the island.”
I looked at the child’s gaunt face. “But who is she? I … she’s a kid, she can’t be more than about nine. How did she get here? Why would she hide?”
“No idea.”
The snores grew louder. The little girl rolled onto her stomach in her sleep, leaving one of her little arms dangling off the sofa. I gnawed at my lower lip.
“Might she—” I ventured at last, “might she … have come from the book world? Perhaps Betsy brought her here and now she doesn’t want to go back and—”
“If she was a
book character don’t you think she’d prefer to jump back to her story rather than starve to death here?”
“Hmm,” I said. “She seems frightened of something, anyway.”
Will put more wood on the stove. I rested my chin on my knees, which were drawn up close to my chest, and let the fire warm the back of my neck. I was lulled by the child’s steady snores. Will’s voice washed over me, saying something about a figure on the moor and a monster. Had he really just said monster? I was about to ask him what he meant when my eyes fell shut.
I was woken by my own shivering. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes, blinking in the gray morning light, was the underside of the coffee table. My back hurt: I’d fallen asleep in my chair and must have slid down onto the floor during the night and slept at a funny angle. Groaning, I struggled to my feet and realized the reason I was so cold was not only that the stove had gone out, but that a chill wind was blowing through the cottage.
The door Will had locked the night before was wide open.
The sofa was empty.
I turned and saw Will lying close by. He too had spent the night on the floor, and was still fast asleep. The child, however, had vanished.
I was by the door in a flash. The key was in the lock. The child must have pilfered it from Will’s trouser pocket.
“What’s the matter?” asked Will drowsily.
“She’s gone!” I called, rushing outside. But the child was nowhere to be seen.
“Gone?” said Will, stepping outside to join me.
I nodded.
The sky was blue and wisps of fog hung over the moor, gradually dispersing as the sun rose higher. Dewdrops glistened wherever a ray of sunlight had managed to pierce the mist. The summer morning smelled so fresh and new and peaceful that the memory of the darkness and the mute child suddenly felt unreal. Had there really ever been a dirty little girl roaming the island? Or had the thin form on the sofa been a dream all along?
I would have liked to believe that, but the footprints in the damp earth, leading away from the cottage, told a different story.
The child on the moor continued to haunt my thoughts as I tiptoed along the corridors of Lennox House. Who was the little girl? What had she been doing at the stone circle? I could almost hear my questions reverberating through the silent mansion. But I was being ridiculous, of course. Nobody could hear me. It was Saturday morning, after all, and only seven o’clock. Everyone would still be asleep—which was a good thing, too, since I didn’t really feel like explaining where I’d been all night.
I crept hurriedly up the stairs to my room, looking forward to my soft, warm bed. I would close the curtains and pull the covers up over my head and treat myself to a nice long lie-in. My plan was to have breakfast about midday, after I’d had a nap. Then later I might go and see Will, and we could look for the child together. Something inside me rejoiced at this thought and a kind of warmth spread through my chest—a warmth that fascinated and scared me at the same time. Or was it just tiredness?
I reached my bedroom door and had just laid a hand on the doorknob when I heard footsteps behind me.
“Ah, excellent—you’re already up,” cried Alexis, climbing the stairs toward me with a jam sandwich in her hand. “I was just coming to wake you up.”
“What?” I said. “Why? It’s Saturday, isn’t it?”
“Exactly.” Alexis beamed at me.
I raised my eyebrows. Was I missing something?
Alexis looked at her watch and murmured, “Perfect, perfect—this means we can get going straightaway. Go grab your jacket and I’ll wait for you here, okay? What is that baggy old sweater you’ve got on?”
“Er,” I said. I realized I was still wearing Will’s sweater.
“I know you like baggy clothes. But you couldn’t have found anything more shapeless if you tried, could you?!”
I shook my head. Alexis, seemingly unable to wait any longer, charged past me into my room without any further ado and fetched my jacket herself. Five seconds later she was already hustling me down the stairs.
“Um—so—where are we going?” I suppressed a yawn.
“We’re having a day out!” Alexis explained. “We’re going to Lerwick. I’ve already arranged the whole thing, as a surprise. Are you excited?”
“Lerwick?” I asked. “Isn’t that on Mainland? How are we going to get there?”
“By boat, of course.” Alexis laughed. What was she so chirpy about all of a sudden?
She practically dragged me down the stairs I’d climbed just minutes earlier, bundled me through the huge front door, and ushered me across the grounds. We arrived in the village at a run and hurried past Finley’s shop. Brock was sitting on the steps outside his house again. He was counting princesses today; he told us as we wished him good morning. Alexis was number one and I was number two.
“He’ll probably count us again on the way back,” said Alexis with amusement.
“What time will we be back?” I asked, thinking longingly of my four-poster bed.
Alexis didn’t answer. The jetty was in sight now and she was waving to somebody in a little motorboat. At first I thought it was the ferryman who’d brought us to the island when we’d first arrived, but then I noticed the blond hair and youthful physique.
It was Desmond.
He’d swapped his monk’s robes for jeans and a checked shirt, and grinned as we clambered into the bobbing boat beside him. I swallowed hard. It had just dawned on me that I was going to be spending the day with two lovebirds who—however unbelievable it still seemed to me—also happened to be my parents.
Alexis and Desmond greeted each other with a kiss, while I pretended to be picking a bit of fluff off my sleeve. Then Desmond started the motor and Alexis burbled something about our first-ever family outing together. The boat glided out onto the open sea, which was far more kindly disposed toward us today than it had been last time. The water was clearer than I would have expected in these latitudes, and sparkled in the sunlight. If it hadn’t been for the cool breeze that played around our faces and tugged at our hair, we could’ve been forgiven for thinking we were somewhere in the tropics.
The journey to Mainland took almost two hours and the farther we got from our island, the less I thought about the child on the moor. The memory of her skinny, dirty body faded with every mile we put between ourselves and Stormsay.
Lerwick Harbor, where we eventually moored the boat, was small, as was the town itself. But after weeks on Stormsay it felt like a buzzing metropolis. There were people everywhere, and shops and supermarkets and cafés and a bank. Lerwick was tiny in comparison to Bochum, but it felt almost hectic to us now. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed this hectic pace of life. Alexis and I plunged into the colorful hustle and bustle, browsing the shop windows and watching the passersby. Only Desmond looked uncertain, surrounded by all these people. He held Alexis’s hand and jumped whenever somebody went by on a motorbike or a baby started crying. “I haven’t been here for nearly a hundred years,” he said quietly, his eyes glued to a shop window full of plasma TVs.
“Well then, it’s about time,” said Alexis, with a sideways smile at him.
Ten minutes later we were standing in a clothes shop, with Alexis pulling one brightly colored sweater after another off a pile and holding them up against me. “This one is Scottish lambswool,” she told me. “That’ll keep you warm.” I sighed and nodded, having already realized that she would not rest until she had purchased me a particularly flamboyant specimen. I resolved simply never to wear it. Desmond seemed to have opted for the same strategy; when she thrust a plastic bag containing a bright yellow raincoat at him he merely muttered something about his monk’s robes, which were apparently very waterproof, and took the bag from her anyway.
Around noon we went into a bookshop in which perfectly ordinary people were buying perfectly ordinary books to read in a perfectly ordinary way. In the children’s section I spotted an illustrated edition of The Jungle Book a
nd suddenly Stormsay and the book world felt like a dream. A lovely dream, from which it would hurt to wake up.
I turned away from the children’s books. Alexis was buying a new vegan cookbook; Desmond had stopped by a shelf full of volumes of medieval poetry and was gazing at them wistfully. An elderly lady, meanwhile, was waving a copy of Pride and Prejudice around under one of the shop assistants’ noses. She declared furiously that the story was not as she remembered it and that Elizabeth Bennet’s broken leg was an outrage. I gulped.
“Okay,” said Alexis, returning from the till and pulling out a shopping list, “now the health food shop?”
Desmond was still looking at the poetry books and didn’t seem to have heard her. I yawned. “Or a coffee?” I suggested—I was so tired by now that I reckoned a sizable dose of caffeine was the only thing that was going to stop me falling asleep on the spot.
Alexis nodded. “Let’s split up, then.”
So while Alexis set off in search of biodegradable shampoo and vegan sandwich paste, Desmond and I sat down outside a tiny red building with a stepped gable at a tiny round table. I ordered us two cups of coffee and a double espresso, which I downed straightaway.
There was a busker standing outside the building opposite, playing a jazz piece on the saxophone. It was the music that finally brought Desmond out of his reverie. He smiled suddenly. “Your mother and I danced to this song on her sixteenth birthday,” he said.
“Really?” In my mind’s eye, a younger version of Alexis whirled around and around in Desmond’s arms. Her red hair flew out behind her. They were both laughing.
Desmond nodded and looked as though the same film reel was playing in his head. But his smile quickly gave way to a bitter expression. Was it really the age difference that had kept him and Alexis apart, or something else? I remembered the look on his face just now in the bookshop. “Do you find it very difficult, being here?”
He cleared his throat. “Well—I’m not used to so many people.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Desmond cupped his chin in his hands and hesitated for a moment. “I don’t belong in the outside world,” he said slowly. “I don’t fit in here, and that will never change. But I still…”
The Book Jumper Page 16
