Esme's Wish

Chapter 1-3

The strains of music faded as Esme climbed up through Picton Village, past shops and houses and the school she attended each day, now closed for the summer. At the sight of the dingy grey signboard, Esme couldn’t help but laugh. Her mood lifted for the first time that day. During the wedding reception, somebody had scratched out the ‘Z’ in ‘Penzance’:

PEN ANCE HIGH SCHOOL

She resumed her trudge up the hill. Rachel would have laughed at that too, she thought with a pang. Rachel, her only close friend from school, had left Picton Island a few months earlier. Now Esme was floating between groups, on the edge of things. Friendships had been few and far between since her mother’s disappearance, although it wasn’t for want of trying.

The villagers had never liked Ariane, and their antipathy extended to Esme, too. It was bad enough that her mother wasn’t Picton born and bred, but something else drove the islanders’ prejudice—something Esme could never quite put her finger on. ‘Stay away from that Silver girl,’ the villagers would warn their children. ‘There’s something wrong with the women in that family.’

Sometimes, in her lowest moments, she wondered if that was true.

At the crest of the village she stopped to catch her breath. Picton Island formed part of an archipelago, and hills rose up on every side of it. On approach from the water, it bore a faint resemblance to a permanently beached whale.

She cinched her long, ill-fitting dress up over her belt and began the long trek home. Her heart lifted at the sight of the lighthouse beam, sweeping across the northern end of the island. Her father had been employed as lighthouse keeper and ranger, here at Splinter Bay, for as long as she could remember. He and Esme lived in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, mere steps from the tower.

The sun had set by the time she reached the whitewashed gate of the cottage. The gate was shabby and in need of repair. The garden, too, had been neglected in recent months. But home still smelled like home. The tang of the sea mingled with the heady rush of lavender—her mother’s favourite—coming from the bushes nearby.

A dark shadow swooped overhead. Esme ducked, feeling the wind brush over her. It was only the sea eagle from earlier that day, the largest of the birds that frequented these cliffs.

You again?

It flew off toward the tower, its proud bearing briefly illuminated in the roving lighthouse beam.

Esme was no stranger to the local wildlife. Her father’s duties often involved rescuing injured animals from precarious situations, and from time to time, he enlisted her help in delivering them to the vet. The veterinary hospital was the one place in the village she did feel welcome. She watched as the sea eagle circled the lighthouse, its wings dipping in and out of the beam.

What were you doing down at the church today?

Birds such as this one often used the blue dome of the tower to rest, settle their interminable squabbles, and spy out food in the ocean below. Her mother had been especially fond of this particular sea eagle, and had even included it in one of her paintings.

You miss her too, don’t you?

Inside the cottage, she stopped in the hallway, before a dramatic painting of Poseidon, holding his trident up in triumph over a boiling ocean. Her finger traced the initials in the corner: ‘A S’. Ariane’s art covered the walls, her signature in every room.

Something brushed against her leg, and Esme automatically bent to scoop up her ageing cat, Reuben. He purred as she cradled him in her arms, warm against her breast. His once pure black velvet coat was starting to grey, but his green eyes held the same knowing look they always did. He had turned up on their doorstep one stormy day, a sodden mess, bloody and mewling for help after a fight with the village strays, and had never left.

Up in her room, Esme deposited Reuben on the end of the bed, where he curled up on the covers. She slouched her way out of her borrowed dress and tossed it in the corner. The only thing she liked about it was the colour: aquamarine, the same as her eyes. The taffeta dress, two sizes too big, had been thrust at her at the last second, after Penelope found out that Esme had been planning to wear something more suited to a funeral.

After changing into khaki shorts and a worn t-shirt, she slumped down on the bed. Her room was in its usual chaos, crowded with her own things and a few of her mother’s. Ariane’s wooden easel stood unused in the corner, crusted with dried paint, draped with clothes Esme couldn’t be bothered putting away. Paints and pencils lay forlornly in the corner. She had brought them up here with the vague idea that she might use them herself, but had never been able to sketch more than a couple of lines without scrunching it up and throwing it away.

She picked up one of her mother’s books from the bedside table and flicked through it. It was full of richly illustrated legends: stories of Greek gods shifting their forms to trick humans, and chasing sailors across the waves. She grimaced at the sight of Orpheus’s sorrowful face as Eurydice was carried away from him, ensnared in dark tendrils from the Underworld.

‘Maybe I really am stuck in the past,’ she muttered to Reuben, who fixed her with his inscrutable stare, his eyes green pools of light.

On another page, she caught a glimpse of Narcissus, staring at his own reflection in a pool. Mired in her own pool of misery, Esme shut the book and noticed something poking out the back of it. She pulled out the dun-coloured envelope and stared at it glumly.

Her end of year report card. She must have forgotten to give it to her father, although she couldn’t remember whether she’d forgotten on purpose. Either way, he’d been too busy trailing around after Penelope to ask for it. As usual, she had scraped through in every subject, just enough to avoid having to repeat. Except in art and history. Even with minimal effort, she still came close to top of the class in those.

On her dressing table, sketches of creatures, both real and make-believe, dotted the mirror’s border—a summer project from long ago. Esme let her hair out of its elastic prison and it fell in tangled disarray over her shoulders. It needed another comb and a tidy-up; but then, it always did.

‘Found you on the beach one day. Washed up on shore,’ her mother used to say, as she coaxed endless knots out of Esme’s hair, hair as stringy as seagrass matting, and the same colour: a washed-out brown. Esme had seen dried-out kelp on the beach that was better behaved.

A snow globe at the back of the dresser glinted up at her. She tilted it, and watched white flakes drift over a miniature city of canals. Her mother had often held exhibitions elsewhere, on other islands—places where her art was more appreciated. From time to time, she would bring home gifts like this, as well as stories, both real and imagined.

She peered into the globe. It seemed, in the corner of her eye, that the city’s liquid streets were moving, too; but when she looked closer, saw they were nothing more than paint and glue.

The night her mother had given her this snow globe, Esme had pestered her with endless questions about the city contained within. She had beguiled Esme with stories of a place where waterways shone, boats moved of their own accord, and people made magic with music.

‘The boats really move on their own?’ Esme had asked. ‘With dragons on them? But don’t they burn the boats?’

‘No, silly,’ her mother had laughed.

An image of Ariane’s dark, glossy hair floated back—as did her laugh, low and gentle. Her heart-shaped face and dimpled chin, reflected in Esme’s own features, were easy to recall.

‘Every boat has a dragon on the prow, but it’s only a wooden one,’ she had said. ‘But there are real dragons, sea-dragons, high up in the sky. And there are people who can make the water move, the way it does in Splinter Bay.’

Beside the globe lay another of Ariane’s gifts: a bell with a brass fishtail wound around its handle. It, too, often whispered of enchantment, but for now it only reminded Esme of the peal of the church bells, ringing out the successful nuptials.

Her stomach growled, reminding her of how little she had eaten at the reception. She headed downstairs to fossick for food, Reuben swishing his tail beside her. After feeding him, she ate too, watching the pale moonlight stream into the kitchen. It glanced off the lighthouse key that hung on the rack by the door.

On impulse, she grabbed the key and left the cottage. Reuben was too fixated on the remains of his meal to follow.

Outside, the clouds had blown away, and the moon was at its zenith, cloaking everything in a soft, unearthly glow. The lighthouse stood twenty yards away, anchored on the edge of the cliff. On the leadlight panel set into the top of the door, a blue whale swam beneath the words: ‘Olim Periculum Nunc Salus’.

Once perilous, now safe.

She jiggled the key in the lock, and it gave way.

Moonlight bathed the steps, filtering in through narrow window slits cut into the thick stone walls. At the top, Esme flicked on the light to the service room.

Neglect hung in the air. A layer of dust covered the logbooks on the desk, and the clock was stuck on half past the hour. A large storage cupboard, behind the ladder to the lantern room, caught her eye. The door, usually locked, was ajar.

She opened the cupboard door wide and stepped back in shock. The past came rushing back. The air hummed with loss. The cupboard was full of her mother’s paintings, ones she hadn’t seen for years.

Esme pulled out the canvases and propped them up against the round walls of the service room, immersing herself in her mother’s world: oceans and lakes, beaches and caves, rivers and waterfalls; dolphins, whales, and ancient deities of the sea, with the power to call forth raging storms and split ships in two.

Ariane’s presence filled the space. Each painting shimmered with a life of its own. In one, a golden-scaled dragon emerged from the ocean, spraying drops of water high into the air. Another depicted an elusive finned creature, swimming by a rocky cave.

Footsteps on the stairs broke into her reverie.

‘Esme?’

Her father entered the room, still dressed in his wedding suit. Aaron’s face had furrowed in recent years, and his black hair was shot with grey. The pink rose in his lapel had browned around the edges. Esme’s eyebrows rose a fraction when she noticed that he had added a sprig of lavender beside it.

She braced herself for a blast. He must have walked all the way up here from the village, getting angrier and angrier with every step.

Instead, he wrapped his arms around her in a hug. ‘I’m glad you’re okay. I’ve been worried about you ever since the ceremony.’

Esme flushed. ‘Back at the church—I’m not sure what I was thinking. It’s just … it felt like the right thing to do at the time.’

He didn’t meet her eye-to-eye, something she was grateful for. He merely nodded, while taking in the art strewn around the room. ‘I see you’ve found your mother’s paintings. There wasn’t enough space at home, so I stored some of them up here.’

Esme joined him in front of a canvas depicting dolphins riding the waves—silver-grey streaks amongst the white.

‘It’s good to see them again,’ she said. ‘I helped her with this one … or at least, I tried. That swirl was mine. The brush slipped and made a mark right across it. Mum just laughed, said to leave it. She thought it made the painting more interesting.’

His face relaxed. ‘She was right.’

Aaron paced around the room, reminiscing about when and where each artwork had been painted. After a while, though, his manner began to irritate her. He sounded so distant, like a museum curator talking about a long-dead artist.

‘How come you can remember all this, when you don’t even think about her these days?’

Aaron flinched. ‘Of course I think about her.’

His face crumpled and he stepped away, opening the door to the balcony that ringed the lighthouse. The sounds of Splinter Bay flooded in. Esme followed him outside. The moon and the sweeping lighthouse beam lit up the ocean; the skies crowned the vista with stars. Her father was cradling the sprig of lavender in his hand, his face ashen.

The sight was heart-wrenching. Years back, she had sometimes found him like this, late at night, sitting alone at the kitchen table, walled over with grief. The strain of the past seven years was etched permanently on his face.

‘I was up here last night, looking at the paintings. I guess it was my way of saying goodbye.’ His voice was almost inaudible over the crash of the waves below. ‘I know how much you idolised her,’ he continued. ‘How much you still do. We both do. But we have to move on.’

He gripped the railing, and the purple sprig of lavender fell into the darkness.

Her shoulders slumped. Maybe it was too late. Maybe she had missed her chance. Maybe she should just accept the words on the cenotaph as the closest approximation of the truth. Her father patted her arm but she shook him off with an irritated shrug.

‘No,’ she said, more to herself than him.

I have to find out the truth for myself.

She turned to face him square on. ‘I haven’t had the chance to move on,’ she said firmly. ‘I haven’t been able to go look for her, the way you have.’

His face tightened. ‘I don’t want you going anywhere near Spindrift.’

‘Why not?’

He said nothing, then changed the topic—the way he always did. The way he had for years. ‘Penelope will be good for us,’ he said. ‘She’s got plenty of family and friends and she’s nothing like—’ He stopped, mid-sentence, with a slight shake of his head.

‘Nothing like what? Like who?’

Her words didn’t reach him. He had already disappeared back into the lighthouse. Esme remained outside, staring out to sea. For once, she found no solace in the sights and sounds of the night: the crash of waves against the cliffs below, the circling lighthouse beam, the stars of the night sky scattered carelessly across its inky face.

A rush of wings, close by, made her jump. The sea eagle had returned. It landed noiselessly on the railing, and inclined its beak toward her.

Esme blinked at the bird. Her mouth fell open.

A sprig of lavender hung from the eagle’s beak. The same sprig that had just fallen from her father’s hand.

How …?

The bird dropped it on the deck before her, and flew off into the night. Stunned by its strange gesture, Esme froze for a moment. Then her heart, and mind, started to race.

Is this some sort of sign?

As she picked up the stalk of lavender, a current ran through her, crackling like an electric storm. The night pulsed, charged with possibility. For almost half her life, people had been keeping things from her—her father, especially. She couldn’t take it anymore, and now she didn’t have to. She no longer needed protecting from whatever unpalatable truth was out there.

‘I’m going to find out what happened to you, Mum,’ she said out loud. ‘No matter what.’

The wind carried her words across the water, where the lighthouse beam lingered over the wine-dark sea. As the searching beam swung back round, it seemed to wink at her, like a secret conspirator, before flying out of sight once more.