My name is Lady Amelia Henrietta Elizabeth Worthington and I am eighty-seven years old. I am a collector of unique objects. I am the owner of Skein Island.
I close the file.
I stand up, and open the cupboard door.
Inside is a dark space, a wall of black, and I feel the depth of it, stretching back and back. There is a waft of warm air, musty, over my face. From deep inside, something shifts. It is moving. It moves towards me.
I slam the door.
Kay is standing a little way behind me. She says, ‘What?’
‘It’s a cupboard,’ I say. I can’t think of any other words to explain it.
‘We should get going,’ says Kay. ‘Guess what I’ve just noticed?’ She points above the cupboard door; in the corner of the ceiling there is, suspended, a small, black camera, with one blinking red light. ‘We’d never make professional burglars, would we?’
Rebecca was right. Nothing has been gained, and I have been caught in the act: the act of breaking yet another promise.
‘Ah, never mind, we’ll just say we were curious. No harm done.’ Kay takes my hand. ‘Besides, I bet they don’t even check it. If they were monitoring it, some security guard would have turned up by now, right? And it’s not even pointing the right way. At that angle all it’s picking up is this little bit of the room. Come on.’
I hold on to the folder, keep it safe against my chest, as Kay pulls me from the room, through the basement, and pushes me out of the half-open window. All is still.
This kind of darkness, I can cope with. It is not absolute, or consuming, like the black of the cupboard. Something about that cupboard has sparked my imagination, I tell myself, as Kay takes my hand once more and we begin to retrace our steps across the island. Imagination can do the strangest things to a person. It can crawl into a small space and make it grow. I’ve discovered something that should not have been found. I feel it.
We don’t speak, all the way back. We reach our bungalow. The lights are off; I’m sure Rebecca is lying awake in the dark, waiting for us to turn on the bedroom light so she can claim we woke her up and scold us like children. Instead Kay turns on her torch once more and shines the beam at the folder, still in my arms. ‘Is that one of the declarations?’ she whispers. ‘I thought we didn’t find one for your mother.’
‘This is someone else’s.’
‘So you’re just stealing random ones now? Weirdo.’
‘I’ll tell you about it in the morning.’
‘Aren’t you coming to bed too?’
‘Not yet,’ I tell her. She shrugs, hands me the torch, and wanders over to the bedroom.
I sit at the kitchen table and angle the torch on its surface so I can read in its light. I put the folder in front of me and run my hands over it. Skein Island library has stolen my mother from me, put her firmly out of my reach once more. But I have stolen something from it. Something important. The first declaration.
I open the folder, and I begin to read.
My name is Lady Amelia Henrietta Elizabeth Worthington and I am eighty-seven years old. I am a collector of unique objects. I am the owner of Skein Island.
In 1942 I was the most well-connected socialite in London, and I was in love with a man. He was German, and very rich – a Junker, as they were called back then; a Prince of Prussia. His name was Friedrich. Our wealth allowed us the privilege of not having to choose any side in that war but our own, and so we were following our mutual passion for antiquities through the Mediterranean, with plans to spend a few months in Northern Africa, digging over Carthage. I do not remember giving serious thought to the future. Friedrich was a member of the Nazi party, of course, as everyone was back then, but it meant nothing to him, or to me. You may think that we were selfish, and I wouldn’t deny it. But I believed then that every person, rich or poor, should be allowed the right to turn their back on the responsibilities that others mete out to them so easily. It always bemused me that my wealth alone incited others to demand certain behaviours: marriage, children, moral obligations that disgusted me. Some of our ideas change as we age. Only when we are old can we see that this change is not the weakness of humanity, but its strength.
Friedrich made no moral judgements, had no feigned superiority. I admired his tall, straight, thin body, deeply tanned, giving him a swarthy appearance that, combined with his rather large nose, could have led to suspicions of Jewishness in his home country if he had not been related to royalty. He had a deep interest in the Occult, and had spent time with Aleister Crowley and his cronies (a man I never could stand, either in polite conversation or in the bedroom), but Crowley was being kept busy at the time with MI6’s ridiculous notions of using astrology in interrogation techniques, and so I had Friedrich all to myself. He really was the most wonderful companion for me at that time in my life. We shared similar passions, including archaeology, tasting of exotic cultures and foods, poetry – he presented me with a beautiful edition of Homer’s Odyssey, on the understanding that only he should read from it to me.
I do believe I would have married him, although I had sworn against it. Neither of us was new to love, and I had certainly come to view it as an emotion born either of convenience or desperation. His presence was teaching me otherwise, until we arrived on Crete.
We had the intention of finding the Throne of Zeus on that war-torn island. Hitler had expressed an interest, and Friedrich made him vague promises in order to guarantee safe conduct through Crete, by then under Nazi rule, along with a ‘protection unit’ of thirty men. I am aware that the popular version of events places me on the island before war came to it. This is not the case; I arrived to dig for the Throne at Hitler’s behest. You may find this reprehensible and to that I can only repeat my earlier sentiment – back then I failed to see why I should be asked to be more morally upstanding than others on the basis of my personal fortune. If it eases the sting, I could tell you that I had no intentions of giving Hitler the Throne, if I had found it. I would have kept it for myself, as I have done with all my treasures. But we never did find it. We found something much more interesting.
There are a number of caves in Crete, but Pythagoras had described seeing the Throne, a vast construction of ivory and gold, at Zeus’ birthplace, and only two caves laid claim to that particular honour – the Dikteon Cave and the Ideon Cave. We started at the Dikteon, our first choice; vast stalactites and stalagmites greeted us, and an eerie, pervading humidity that dampened the clothes and the spirits in minutes. After two weeks in its depths with nothing to show, we moved onto the Ideon, without much hope of success.
Mount Ida, upon which the Ideon Cave was situated, was deserted, apart from the few remaining women in a local village. There were no men to be found; we assumed they were hiding in the mountains, as part of the local resistance, but we were never threatened directly. The women tried desperately to get us to leave, telling us it wasn’t safe. They spoke of horrors in the mountains, a monster that incited men to madness. Friedrich started to write down their stories in a black notebook he kept about his person at all times. I thought at first he was horrified, trying to make sense of such savage myths, but he took to reading the book at night, by the light of the lamp in the thin canvas tent we shared, before we made love. His body was gentle as ever but his mind was elsewhere, on a battlefield of its own making, rejoicing in blood and death. He was by no means alone. Half of the men assigned to protect us vanished during our ascent of Mount Ida. We thought we heard them shouting on the wind, from far above us, in the following days. Their words were unintelligible.