First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (18 page)

I’d only been on the widow’s walk a few minutes when I heard a new noise—a dull roar away to the east. At first, I couldn’t see anything that might be causing the sound. It seemed to come from the horizon where leaden sea and leaden clouds were welded together. Then I saw that the weld was expanding, becoming thicker. The ocean itself seemed to be swelling with the sound.

Suddenly the blue vault above me was snuffed out and the wind picked up so fiercely I had to grab the taffrail of the widow’s walk. That dull roar to the east had become louder and the line at the horizon was already a black ribbon. Soon it was a low, thick wall. The wind seemed to be trying to outrun it, howling with fright.

Now I understood exactly what was coming: that black wall was the hump of an enormous wave rushing upon the Island of St Jude.

I turned to open the door of the attic to warn the Chapmans, but the wind had pinned it shut. I pulled till the doorknob came away in my hand. I thumped on it with my fists, I shouted at the top of my voice. But no one knew I was out there, and I don’t believe they could have heard me
above the noise of the storm, and the squealing of the house timbers.

The rain was now battering me with numberless fists. I felt a severe pain in my temple, as though my head would burst. There was a popping and snapping from all around. The window boards, the windows themselves, the doors, then the walls were bursting. Behind me, the attic door splintered. I still couldn’t go inside, for nails were flying everywhere, popping out of the walls like an ambush. Then I felt the house under me gradually beginning to sink as though it were a balloon with a slow leak.

The whole world was sinking.

I had my back to the taffrail, holding onto it as the house disintegrated, when I was struck from behind, immersed, choking in the green belly of the wave, then bursting through its thick membrane into the screeching and the chaos. My hand still clung to the taffrail and the little platform was still under my feet.

But the platform was no longer attached to the Chapmans’ house. That much I knew, though it wasn’t easy to see: the time must have been only three o’clock, but it was like night. The widow’s walk had become a raft, swept along on top of the wave in the direction of the mountain. I could just barely see its vast outline in the dark. I hoped for a while the platform might be cast up on its slope and me with it. But as we came nearer, the ocean divided around it, and my raft hurtled past the south side. In the dim light I could make out some of the debris whirling along beside me: jagged timber, armchairs, sheets of plywood. I saw bodies, face down, their clothes torn from them. I saw a long wooden box with its lid open, half full of water. It was an empty coffin.

Just before dusk the next day, the bridge lookout of the SS
Nellie
, which had been hove-to during the worst hours, saw a peculiar piece of jetsam through his binoculars: a wooden platform and, his arm tied to a railing by a pair of suspenders, a boy. Me. The storm had outrun me or had worn itself out.

The
Nellie
picked me up and I slept in a dry bunk for twelve hours. When I woke, it was a sunny morning, and Mount St Jude was rising in the distance.

At noon, the ship anchored offshore and a rescue party landed with me as guide.

Where the town of St Jude had been, there was now nothing—it had vanished like the contents of a plate tipped into the ocean. The battlements were gone, even the lava boulders they were built on had been rolled away by the force of the wave. The Chapman house, like the other houses, had disappeared. All that remained of it and its neighbours were the ends of beams protruding like broken toothpicks from holes chiselled in the lava.

I told the officer in charge of the search there might be survivors on the mountain. I hoped, though I knew it was impossible, that we’d find the Chapmans there, safe and sound. We went past the place where the graveyard had been. It had been scooped out, leaving a rectangular hole the size of a football field. Further up, we passed the site of Aunt Lizzie’s cottage. There was no trace of it or the garden. The scene of the crime had been wiped clean.

As we reached the mountain itself, we could see debris from the wave, about fifty feet up. Then we heard voices shouting down to us. Out of a thicket, the survivors appeared: half a dozen children and adults. But the Chapmans weren’t among them. A moment later, the rest of the survivors stumbled towards us and I could hardly believe
my eyes: the first of them was Doctor Hebblethwaite, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Behind him came his wife. And after her, Maria!

I called out to her, and asked her if she’d seen the Chapmans. She shook her head. I went towards her, but Mrs Hebblethwaite stood between us.

“Keep that boy away from us,” she said to the officer. “He’s nothing but trouble.”

Doctor Hebblethwaite frowned at her.

“I’m afraid we didn’t see the Chapmans, Andrew,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

The Doctor told the officer from the
Nellie
that there were only ten survivors in all. Two other families who’d been with them on the mountain had decided, during the lull in the storm, to go back to their homes. They’d begun the trek across the lava plain and were almost halfway to the town when they realized the killer wave was coming. They’d turned and started running back towards the mountain. The wave caught them with ease and swallowed them up.

The Hebblethwaites and the others had watched this from high above the water level.

That night, as the
Nellie
began her voyage northwards, I lay on my bunk, trying to sleep. I couldn’t at first: my mind was like one of those sharks that never rests. I wondered what would become of me now. I mourned the deaths of the Chapmans. My thoughts turned to the hostility of Mrs Hebblethwaite towards me—I wondered if Maria had told her about our walks to the cove. But her mother had disliked me from the first time she saw me at the door of The Motte. Maybe she believed I was the one who lived outside the walls of the town and would bring ruin. So many awful things had happened wherever I was: the deaths of my
sister, my father, my mother, my aunt, my uncle, and now the Chapmans. The obliteration of St Jude. Maybe I was a walking time bomb, a booby trap to be avoided at all costs.

These thoughts exhausted me. Sad and desperate, I once more became a castaway: this time on the wide, dark ocean of sleep.

D
URING THAT LONG
sad voyage north, the Hebblethwaites and the other islanders kept well clear of me: my meals were served to me in my cabin. The Captain of the
Nellie
, a friendly man with a burnt face and hooked nose, made it clear I was under no circumstances to communicate with them. I was frustrated at knowing Maria was so near. But their cabins were on the deck above mine. At the top of the connecting flight of stairs, an iron barrier door, pressure-locked from the other side, was as good as a prison wall separating me from Maria. I could still go out on my own deck and stand at the rail, just as I had three years ago on the voyage south. But now there was no Harry Greene and my watches were lonely: just the vast empty sea.

Occasionally, if there was no one around, I’d slip up the stairs and check the barrier door, hoping it might be open. It never was. Till late one night, in mid-voyage. When I tested the handle, it turned and the door opened with a little squeal. I stepped over the sill and stood in the dimly lit passageway where the Hebblethwaites and the other survivors of the great storm at St Jude were quartered.

But what was I to do now? There were ten cabins along the corridor, and I’d no idea which one might be the Hebblethwaites’, or Maria’s: or whether she shared a cabin with her parents. I might just as well give up and go back to my own deck before someone caught me.

Someone did.

“Andrew! Is that you?” The words were barely louder than the hum of the ship’s motors. I looked back. A small figure in a white gown appeared in the shadows beside the companionway and came into the light of the dim overhead bulb.

It was Maria.

She put her finger to her lips and beckoned me to follow her back along the passage out to the deck. I did, and we found a dark area under a lifeboat hanging from its gallows. We stood, not touching. I felt very nervous.

“What are you doing up here?” she asked. I could smell the soap from her hair.

“I came up to look for you,” I said.

She laughed quietly.

“And what about you?” I said. “What are you doing out here?”

“My parents and I are in the same cabin,” she said. “Sometimes, if I can stay awake till they fall asleep, I come out and unlock the barrier door. Just for a few minutes: I hoped you might get up here some night.”

It was a cloudy night, and we were away from the deck lights, so I couldn’t see her face. There were so many things I wanted to ask her. But all at once, I felt her hand on mine in the dark and all questions went out of my mind. We put our arms around each other and just stood there kissing. My heart was pounding so loudly I thought it would waken the whole ship.

And it might as well have. For suddenly we heard a cabin
door thrown open, and a bright light came on in the passageway, Mrs Hebblethwaite appeared at the end of it in a nightgown, adjusting her wire glasses.

“Maria?” she called. She must have seen something, for she was looking towards us in the shadow of the boat. “Maria?”

I stepped forward.

Mrs Hebblethwaite saw me and Maria behind me.

“You!” she shouted at me. “Get out of here! Get away from here and don’t you dare come back!” Then to Maria: “Go back to the cabin immediately!”

She shouted this so loudly, it caused a commotion. I heard footsteps running on the deck above, and a sailor shouting over the rail, “Is everything all right down there?”

I hurried past Mrs Hebblethwaite along the passageway and down the stairs. When I was back in my own cabin I sat waiting for the knock at my door. But there was none.

The next morning, the Captain sent for me. He didn’t seem at all angry when I came into his cabin.

“I hear you got through the barrier door,” he said. “Well, well. I wonder how you managed that.” But he didn’t ask how. Instead, he said: “Don’t go up there again. The little girl’s mother’s very upset.”

Then he changed the subject. “We have to make plans for what’s to happen to you after we reach Southaven.” He asked if I’d any family: someone who’d look after me at the end of the journey. I told him I’d like to go back to Stroven. I was thinking I’d surely find a home there: perhaps even with Doctor Giffen. The Captain said he’d notify the authorities and arrangements would be made by the time we docked. As I was leaving, he said one last thing.

“By the way, I promised the girl’s mother I’d make sure
the door won’t be unlocked again.” He smiled. “Nothing personal.”

And indeed, though I checked the door on many nights afterwards, I never found it open again.

Soon enough, we left the warmer weather behind and the
Nellie
battled her way into grey seas. On a chilly March morning, a pilot boarded us and guided the ship into the dock in Southaven. I stood at my porthole watching as the Hebblethwaites and the other survivors scurried along the pier to waiting taxis. Maria stopped once to look back towards the ship, but her mother pulled her by the arm. The Hebblethwaites got into a taxi and it moved away slowly, dragging its smoky tail through the dock gate and out of sight. I felt awful: I believed that was the last time I’d ever see Maria Hebblethwaite.

An hour later, I was sitting in a draughty office on the dock, being interviewed by a man from the Ministry of Social Services.

“Your request to go back to Stroven’s out of the question,” he said. “The mine closed down two years ago.” He was a brusque, cold man and his words were ice-cold. “In fact, no one lives there any more.”

A
NOTHER BUS JOURNEY
. The driver was instructed to let me off near the village of Waltham Close, which we reached after two hours of rolling grassy hills. Another ten
minutes and the bus squealed to a stop, let me off and went on its way.

A woman was waiting for me by the side of the road. She wore the black robes of a nun, but they were a little unusual. The front of her stiff, white hood was tubular and stuck out twelve inches in front of her face. Along this tube, I could see her face: a stern face with silver-rimmed glasses. She couldn’t see much that wasn’t right in front of her—like looking at the world through a porthole. Sewn over the left breast of her robes was an image of a yellow sun giving off snaky flares.

“Mister Andrew Halfnight, I presume,” she said. When she put out her hand to me, I noticed a strange lilac scent coming from her robes. “I’m Sister Rose.” Her hand was dry and cold. She spoke again and her voice echoed slightly along the tube. “You have no luggage? Follow me. We’ve a short walk.”

We walked a hundred yards along the main road and then up a driveway lined with spruce trees. At the end of it I could see a large, red-brick building; it was as big as some of the factories we’d passed as the bus went through the outskirts of the City. Sister Rose turned and focused her tube on me.

“This will be your new home. I hope you’ll be happy here,” she said. “But it’s not necessary that you should.”

This building was called the House of Mercy, and in it I was to spend the next two years of my life—along with four hundred other orphans.

The House was especially designed to keep a large number of orphans under the control of a small number of nuns. It was built in the shape of two wheels connected by a corridor. The wheels were called the Boys’ Circle and the Girls’ Circle. The hub of each wheel was a tower with walls
of darkened glass. The circumferences of the wheels were four storeys high, and divided into little segments, each of which was an orphan’s room. The inside wall—the one facing the hub—was made of ordinary glass and had a glass door. The nuns, who worked in pairs, sat invisible in the central towers, and could see into every room just as though they were looking into a doll’s house.