The Ingo Chronicles: Stormswept

by Helen Dunmore

  It takes me a beat to realise that my perfect sister Jenna can make up a very convincing story.

  “Jenna…”

  “Mm?”

  “I thought something awful had happened to you. I thought I heard you crying for help.”

  “When?”

  “Just before I came back.” I’m not going to tell her that it’s why I came back. She’d be frightened if she thought there was ever any other possibility. If Jenna even guessed how deep in Ingo I really was, she’d go crazy.

  “Oh, then,” says Jenna slowly. “You’re right in a way. Something awful had happened to me.”

  Visions of Aidan Helyer’s men hurting her make me feel sick. “What— What was it?”

  “I lost you. I didn’t think I was ever going to find you. I thought you’d drowned.” Jenna’s voice sounds as flat as if she’s talking about a trip to the shops.

  “So that’s why you cried out for help.”

  “I didn’t cry out. That would have frightened Digory,” says Jenna quickly. “It was just what I thought.”

  “You can’t get rid of me that easily,” I say, and I’m quite proud of the way I manage to keep my voice steady when I really want to burst into tears and cry and cry. But that would frighten Digory too.

  ’ve learned a strange thing about time. I suspected it before, but now I’m certain. It doesn’t work the same here in the human world as it does in Ingo. Sometimes Ingo time seems to go faster than human time, but other times it goes far more slowly. I thought Mum and Dad would have called the police and coastguards to search for Digory, because we’d been away so long. But what seemed like hours and hours to me wasn’t as long here. Time opened out like a concertina and then it squeezed shut again and we were almost back where we’d been. Not quite though. We’d been away for long enough that lots of people were out searching.

  It was horrible to see Mum’s face when we came back with Digory. She grabbed him and cried and cried as if he were dead instead of back safe. She didn’t even thank me and Jenna for finding him. Dad got out a bottle of whisky and started slopping whisky into glasses for everyone who’d been helping to look for Digory. Suddenly there were lots of people in the kitchen and it got very noisy with everyone shouting and laughing and Mum’s friend Rosie making sandwiches because everybody was hungry all at once. Mum didn’t even think about making sandwiches. She went upstairs carrying Digory and gave him a hot bath as if he was a baby, and then he came down wrapped in his duvet and curled up on Dad’s lap. Mum drank one cup of tea after another and kept going over and touching Digory as if she still didn’t believe he was really there. Digory was brilliant. He stuck to Jenna’s story and he was so convincing I almost believed it was what really happened.

  “I woke up and it was all dark… I was really scared, Mum… and then I heard Jenna and Mor calling for me…”

  Dad kept saying, “I knew he’d be all right, I kept telling you, Kerenza,” but from the way his hands were shaking as he poured out the whisky for everybody, you could see he hadn’t really known at all. He’d been just as scared as Mum.

  I watch them all. They are my family and friends. I’ve known everyone in the room since I was born, and yet it all feels so distant, like a bright clear image projected on to a wall. I hear and see everything. I taste the sharp damson pickle in the cheese sandwich Rosie gives me. I huddle as close to the fire as I can, because I’m cold right to the bone. The fire burns brightly but it doesn’t warm me through.

  Dad comes over. I look across and see that Mum’s holding Digory now. He’s nearly asleep. Dad still has the whisky bottle in his hand and for a wild moment I think he’s going to offer me some. But no.

  “You all right now, my girl?” he asks me quietly. Dad is good at noticing things about me that other people don’t notice.

  “Just tired.”

  “You did a good job, you and Jenna.”

  Better than you know, I think. There’s so much noise in the room I think it’ll cover our voices.

  “Dad.”

  “Yes?” He squats down beside me and holds out his hands to the flames.

  “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

  “Bad or good?”

  “Bad. But I think it’s going to come out good in the end.”

  “Go on then.”

  “Conan’s fiddle isn’t here any more.”

  Dad goes completely still.

  “Don’t say anything to Digory, Dad. He took it with him and now it’s in a safe place, but he can’t bring it back, not now anyway. But it’s safe.”

  The flames hiss and spurt. This is a new load of wood that Dad brought over from Marazance on Johnnie Tremough’s tractor last week. There’s another roar of laughter behind us as Dad leans close to me and asks, “You sure about this now, Morveren? It’ll come to no harm?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “You know what they say about Conan’s fiddle. If it gets lost—”

  “It’s not lost, Dad. I swear it. It’s somewhere safe but it can’t come back yet.”

  “Look at me, Morveren.”

  Dad’s eyes hold mine for a long moment. I don’t know what he sees in my face, but at last, slowly, he nods. “All right. That instrument’s a creature with a life of its own, I do know that. Always has been. And Digory’s safe back with us. But you take care now, my girl. We don’t want to lose you either.”

  I was cold before, but now I’m too hot. I slip out of the room, go to the front door and open it. I take deep breaths of the cold night air. It smells of salt and I think of the first time Ingo called me, pulling me away from the walls and down the path. But I didn’t understand what was happening then.

  My eyes are used to the darkness now. I see the glow of a pipe down by the gate, and recognise the outline of Jago Faraday. I’m not surprised. He would never come inside the house and join in the celebration, but even Jago must have been glad to hear that Digory was safely home. To my surprise, he calls across to me,

  “Come here, my girl.”

  He must think I’m Jenna. Reluctantly, I go down the path.

  “It’s Morveren, not Jenna,” I say.

  “I knowed that.”

  He’s silent for a while. “’F I go down the pub and tell ‘em, they’ll mock me again,” he grumbles at last.

  My mind leaps. I almost know what he’s going to say.

  “I been night-fishing,” he says, as if he’s talking to the dark. “I seen ’em again. Your people.”

  I stand still as a rock. My people.

  “I’m saying nothing down the pub this time. They’ll mock me,” repeats Jago.

  “Why are you telling me?”

  Jago laughs a hoarse laugh which turns into a cough. “Cos you already know, my girl. They gave you your name out of the old language, and rightly so. Morveren. Yes, that’s what you are. Sea girl. I was miles out on the water when I seen you. But I’m saying nothing. Only you mind and keep your sister safe. She’s not one of you and never will be.”

  I don’t answer. I am shocked and full of questions and yet at the same time, deep down, I’m not surprised. Jago Faraday’s long dislike of me had a reason, after all. He can see the Mer, and maybe hear them too. Maybe he knew, even before I did, that one day I’d find them.

  Jago draws deeply on his pipe. Its red glow lights up his seamed, cantankerous face. I don’t like him any more than I ever did but I know him now, just a little.

  “Can’t a man smoke his pipe in peace?” he asks in his old, cross voice. “Get on back inside with you, Morveren Trevail.”

  It’s a long, long time before Jenna and I go to sleep. We both squash into her bed, the way we used to when we were little. Neither of us wants to be alone. We talk a bit about what happened, but most of the time we just think. At last a rim of grey light begins to show around the shutters, and I hear Jenna’s breathing go slow and quiet, and I know she’s asleep. Jenna asleep, Mum and Dad sleeping exhausted in their room, Digory dreaming, still wrapped in
his duvet. He fell asleep downstairs and Dad carried him up. All our neighbours are at home in their own beds. Very carefully, so as not to wake Jenna, I creep out of bed, go over to the window and open the shutter just a little so the light won’t fall on her. It is grey and still outside. I can hear the sea. You can always hear the sea even on the calmest days. I wonder if Malin’s awake now, and if he’s thinking of me, as I am of him.

  There’s a movement. A figure slips round the corner of the cottage opposite ours. He has his head down and his hands in his pocket. Bran. He stands there, staring up at our window. He must have been awake all night, like me. I don’t move, but he sees me even though the shutters are only open a little bit. He raises his hand, a bit awkwardly. He wants me to come out.

  I pull on my jeans and a warm top, tiptoe as lightly as I can across the floor, open our door and creep down the stairs. Really I should become a burglar, I’m so good at getting in and out of houses without disturbing anybody. The front door squeaks a bit with damp. I freeze, listening, but no one stirs upstairs. I put the lock on the latch and let the door close very very gently behind me.

  “Bran?”

  He signals to me to follow him. There’s a porch on the side of the village hall where kids hang out sometimes, and that’s where he heads. Once we’re there, though, face to face, he doesn’t seem to know what to say. But for the first time ever, Bran’s looking at me without hostility.

  “Is your Jenna all right?”

  “She’s fine. She’s sleeping.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me neither. Are you staying at your nan’s, Bran?”

  He shrugs. “Got nowhere else to go, have I?”

  I wonder if he’ll ever be able to go back to his dad’s. It’s better for him if he doesn’t, I suppose. But all the same, to lose your mum and then your dad is harsh.

  “Won’t he come back for the pick-up? Your dad I mean?”

  “Nah. He’ll send a couple of the guys over with a tractor to tow it back. He won’t come here after what’s happened.” Bran looks terrible. Pale, with black rings under his eyes. “He won’t come,” he says again, “He’ll stay on the mainland doing what he has to do, and I’ll stay on the Island. You got to make your choice.”

  “Yes,” I say, thinking of last night and all the choices that were made. Bran’s here on the Island, because he decided to please his father by betraying Malin. But it didn’t work out like that. It all led to him making a different choice, and that’s why he’s here and I’m here too… It’s so confusing. It makes you wonder about what life would be like if just one thing went differently, out of a whole chain of events. Everything that happened afterwards would go in a different direction and you would end up a quite different person.

  Jenna and I aren’t the same sisters we were before I found Malin in the sand dune. We’re closer, but at the same time we know more about how different we are. Conan’s fiddle has gone. It’s not lying safely on top of the bookshelves as it has been since I was born. I’ve got so used to waiting for Digory to be old enough to play it. It’s not gone for ever, I tell myself quickly, and the Mer will take good care of it. If Bran hadn’t followed us and spied on us and then taken that photograph of Malin to show his dad, everything would have been different. And then Bran changed direction and Malin escaped instead of being tied up in the back of Aidan Helyer’s pick-up truck and lugged over to Marazance and then who knows where. Wherever there was the highest market for a Mer boy, I suppose. Bran stopped it from happening, and the consequence is that he’s lost his father, at least for now. He can’t go home.

  I chose too. Jenna over Malin, the Island over Ingo, and so now I’m here instead of far away in Ingo where I wanted to be. Where I still want to be. Where I would always wish to be, until the day I die, says a voice deep in my mind. I’m at home on the Island but I don’t feel at home. Dad said, We don’t want to lose you either. Maybe he guessed something. I don’t want to lose him either, or Mum, or anyone here. Jago Faraday said your people, and I was glad he thought that I belonged to them, but I knew it wasn’t the whole story. Mum, Dad, Digory, Jenna. Above all, I can’t risk losing Jenna. But why can’t I put the two parts of my life together and make them into one?

  Because it doesn’t work, that’s why. They were pulled apart a long time before I was born, when the flood came and the blind fiddler passed on his instrument to Conan. The two worlds began to separate then. Different languages, different customs. Forgetting some things and remembering others. My ancestors became Islanders, and Malin’s became Mer. But we’re joined somewhere, way back. Maybe one day all that long chain of differences will knit up again… It’s something to hope for, anyway. A world when I can have my sister by my side and Malin and I can swim free. An impossible world, if you look at it logically.

  Maybe Bran and I are alike, in a weird way. We both want things which can never fit together. He almost pulled himself apart, trying to make his father love him.

  “Your Jenna,” Bran says at last, with difficulty, “she won’t be wanting anything to do with me now.”

  “But I thought you sorted all that out last night. She said she’d talked to you. She’s not angry with you any more—”

  “Yeah. But that’s only the way Jenna is. Nice about everything, because that’s her nature. She’s not going to want to have anything to do with me, not for real, not after what I did. We won’t ever be friends like we were.”

  He thinks he’s lost everything. His dad and his home, and Jenna’s friendship too.

  “Jenna’s not like that,” I say, and Bran looks at me with a flash of hope in his face.

  “You reckon?”

  “I know her. She’s very…” I try to put into words the quality about Jenna which is different from nearly everybody I know, and is the reason why people want to be with her. “She doesn’t hold things against people. She starts again, every day.”

  “You think she’ll start again with me?”

  “I know she will.”

  He looks down so I won’t see his expression, and then shakes his head, not in denial but as if he wants to clear all the bad stuff out of it.

  “I used to hate you,” he remarks.

  “I know. I could tell, strangely.”

  He glances at me suspiciously in case I’m laughing at him, but sees that I’m not.

  “You heard the music too, didn’t you?” I ask, in a flash of daring. Somehow it’s easier to ask a question like that out in the cold grey dawn, when it doesn’t seem to be real time yet.

  “What music?” he asks, so quickly and defensively that I know I’m right.

  “You know what I’m talking about. Not our music, not Ynys Musyk. The other. Digory told me you heard it, when you and he were down on the shore that day.”

  Bran looks away. He’ll be remembering that day and how he threatened Digory, and how I probably know everything that he said.

  “Oh,” he mutters. “That music.”

  “Yes, that music. Those musicians you heard that day – well, they played again at Adam Dubrovski’s funeral, when we were all out in the churchyard. I heard them. Jenna was there, but she didn’t hear anything. Not a note. I was watching her.”

  I watch Bran just as carefully as I did Jenna that day. I catch it: a flash of recognition as Bran grasps what I’m telling him. He’s always been clever – cleverer than me and maybe even than Jenna. I expect him to pretend that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but he surprises me. A slow smile crosses his face.

  “No, she wouldn’t hear it. Never will. Not Jenna. She’s a hundred per cent got her feet on the ground, hasn’t she?”

  He’s right. Jenna is planted on earth. She belongs to it. She won’t be torn in half by longing when she hears music coming from far out at sea. She won’t hear anything to disturb her.

  “Yes, Jenna’s certainly got her feet on the ground,” I agree, and Bran nods.

  “Not like us,” he says, so quietly that at first I’m not
sure I’ve heard right.

  “What?”

  “Like us,” he repeats patiently, “You and me both. I said it already, Morveren. I did hear that music, and maybe once you’ve heard it there’s no going back.”

  I have no idea what to say. Fortunately, Bran doesn’t seem to expect a response. He whistles softly to himself. It’s a sweet and tuneful whistle and I recognise the melody.

  It’s the music of Ingo.

  Copyright

  First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins

  Children’s Books 2012

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  Copyright © Helen Dunmore 2011

  Helen Dunmore asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  HB ISBN 978-0-00-742492-4

  TPB ISBN 978-0-00-7455416

  EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780007468003

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