The Metal Heart Read online

  Author’s Note

  Dear Reader,

  While inspired by real events and the construction of the Italian Chapel in Orkney during the Second World War, this is very much a work of fiction. As such, characters and places have been invented and the names of locations and timings of events have often been changed.

  Within this book, I wanted to give voice to the people who find themselves caught up in war, swept along by love and transformed as a result of circumstances beyond their control.

  While editing the story, I found myself in the midst of a global pandemic and months of lockdown, watching the world close in on itself: people confined to their homes, yet still reaching out to each other, supporting each other, offering love through everyday acts of kindness. I was struck, once again, by the ways in which people under pressure seek escape, the ways in which we create beauty through art and the places where we find love and light.

  Thank you for reading this book. I hope you enjoy it.

  Epigraph

  If the earth shook and the sea swept over the

  fields, it was the Stoor Worm yawning. He

  was so long that there was no place for his

  body until he coiled it around the earth. His

  breath was so venomous that when he was

  angry, every living thing within his reach was

  destroyed. People grew pale and crossed

  themselves when they heard his name, for he

  was the worst of the nine fearful curses that

  plague mankind.

  From Asipattle and the Stoor Worm, an Orkney folk tale

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  October 1941

  Early January 1942

  Mid-January 1942

  Part Two

  Mid-January 1942

  Late January 1942

  Late January 1942

  February 1942

  Part Three

  February 1942

  March 1942

  March 1942

  Part Four

  April 1942

  May 1942

  July 1942

  August 1942

  Late August, Early September 1942

  Part Five

  September 1942

  September 1942

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Also by Caroline Lea

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The girls, Selkie Holm, Orkney, September 1942

  Of all the ways to die, drowning must be the most peaceful. Water above, sounds cushioned, womb-dark. Drowning is a return to something before the knife-blade of living. It is the death we would choose, if the choice was ours to make.

  It is the death we would choose for others too – if we loved them enough.

  The sea is cold, filling our noses when we surface. We dive back beneath the water to tug the foot free. Everything is blurred as the waves crash into the barriers. We clutch each other, kicking furiously to stop ourselves being smashed into the rocks, watching the pale body drift back and forth with each tidal tug. Above the waves, the storm churns – people on land will be smothering their lights, shutting out the lashing rain, the threat from passing planes and unseen monsters. They will believe the Stoor Worm is in a fury.

  The body is silent now; motionless, apart from the movement of the waves. Our lungs burn. Moments ago, scrabbling nails had clawed at us and fingers had reached for our hands. A fierce, desperate tug. A final watery shriek. Then sudden stillness – the eyes fixed open, as if the body was alive and breathing brine, like some creature of myth.

  We help each other from the water, both sobbing. And then we work to get the body from the sea, to free the clothing where it has snagged on the rocks. We dive in again and again. Our lungs ache. Our muscles shudder. Our hands grow numb and our fingers slip from the body’s slick skin.

  Finally, it comes free.

  We drag it upwards onto the barrier that the prisoners built. We’d watched them laying down stone, unspooling barbed wire, changing the shape of our island and bringing chaos to our doorstep.

  Even before the war arrived here – before the guns and the guards and the iron huts full of foreign prisoners – Orkney hadn’t been a safe place. People have their own beliefs this far north: their laws are ancient and quick and brutal. These islands teeter on the edge of the world. Once, Orkney would have been a blank on a map. Terra Incognita – some skinny-shanked sailor’s drunken dream, the land rising out of the fog and disappearing again before he could set foot on the shape his finger traced on the murky horizon.

  There are a hundred sunken tombs on these islands where we could hide the body – deep pits in the ground, covered with rock and earth, surrounded by the ragged incisors of standing stones that rear skywards – but they are too far away. Instead, we begin to drag it towards the quarry, where there will be shelter from the wind’s bite, and rocks enough for a burial.

  The walls of the quarry rise dark around us; the wind snaps our hair over our faces, whipping tears from our eyes. We scrabble in the rubble, our hands wet and numb, until we find seven stones of a good size. We place them on the body, according to the ceremony. One on the forehead to still the beating thoughts; one on the chest to quiet the hammering heart; one in each hand and one on each foot, to end all movement; and a final pebble in the mouth to stop the breath. Without such precautions, the dead are restless and tormented and have been known to haunt the living. We say the rhyme:

  ‘Take blood and breath and flesh and bone,

  take all between these seven stones.’

  Finally, we take the metal heart from our pocket and place it on the chest, above the space where the living heart used to beat. We turn away so we cannot press our lips to the cold skin: the feel of that cooling flesh will be too much.

  It is finished. We can do no more to say farewell.

  The ground is rough beneath us as we sit next to the cold body, waiting for the last of the storm to die down.

  After they find us, we won’t see the sky again. It’ll be a private hanging in a dark cellar, last used to string up smugglers and fish thieves. Or perhaps we will see sunlight when they take us out to a quiet field at dawn, before they blindfold us and take aim.

  The clouds drift away, revealing the last of the stars, their signs and warnings unread by those islanders hiding in the blackout or sleeping in their beds. This is the time of salt laced outside doors to warn off sea spirits. The land, pockmarked by dropped bombs and groaning under skeins of wire, smells of doused fires and explosives from the quarry. Had we knocked on any of those darkened doors tonight, we’d have found it barred.

  We wait.

  ‘How long, do you think?’

  We draw a shuddering breath. It doesn’t matter now: the unseen days and weeks and years unravel blankly ahead of us. Light will bleed out over this water nightly; day will settle in again and again. We won’t know.

  The first glimmer of sunrise brightens the sea, picking out the skeletal shadows of the wrecks from the last war. We used to swim down to them: ships full of dormant bombs and bleached bones. When the tide shifts, the jaws on some of the skulls clack open and shut, as if there is something they still want to say.

  A figure finally walks along the barrier – Mr Cameron, with his rope-tied trousers, his grey skin, his hacking cough.

  He is ten paces away before he sees the body.

  ‘Christ! What have you . . .? Christ!’

  His face pales and he stumbles back along the bar
rier, not towards the houses of Kirkwall, just across the water, but up towards the camp, with its spiked fences and metal huts.

  Now would be our chance to escape.

  We don’t move. The cold from the ground seeps up into our bones, rooting us.

  This is where we belong.

  We squeeze our hands together as if we could become a single being. As if we could return to the time before the war. Before we knew about love and death and envy.

  We count two hundred shared breaths before they come for us – not the police, but one of the guards from the camp, black-booted and in a pressed uniform of dark green: a practical colour to hide mud and bloodstains.

  We stand and turn, face him and hold up our hands – the blue-white skin on our wrists identical, indistinguishable, even to our own eyes.

  And with one voice, we say, ‘She didn’t do it. I did it. It was me.’

  Part One

  Friday I held a seaman’s skull,

  Sand spilling from it

  The way time is told on kirkyard stones

  From ‘Beachcomber’, George Mackay Brown

  October 1941

  Midnight. The sky is clear, star-stamped and silvered by the waxing gibbous moon. No planes have flown over the islands tonight; no bombs have fallen for over a year. The snub noses of anti-aircraft guns gleam, pointing skywards. The cliffs loom like paper cutouts, hulking shadows above the natural harbour of the bay. Everything is flattened by the darkness, as if the sea around Orkney is a stage set, waiting for an entrance.

  The German U-boat glides between the rocks that lead to Scapa Flow. It is alone, on a mission that cannot be accomplished.

  People have told Commander Pasch that he is mad, that he is risking his crew, his vessel, his own life. His men snap commands to each other in broken sentences. They touch the pictures of wives, children, lovers.

  One of the men whispers, ‘Vater unser in Himmel . . .’ Our Father in Heaven.

  Around the boat, the water shifts and sighs: so close to winter, the sea temperature would shock the air from the men’s lungs. Inside is safety. This boat has carried them through enemy waters, past icebergs and monsters of the deep. Their living home, snug, bullet-shaped, fuggy with their breath, thick with their laughter.

  The submarine slides past the clean-picked bones of ships long-sunk. A maze of broken-ribbed vessels, stretching steel to snag them. Beyond, the navigator can make out a dark mass of ancient rock. Beneath the waves, one land looks much like any other; friend and enemy soil are the same in the darkness. But the man has studied this land, this route, these remote islands.

  Orkney.

  And above their heads, floating like ghosts in the moonlight, are the massed ships of the British Royal Navy. They will be full of men at ease: sleeping, dreaming of home. Their portholes will be open. No one will expect an attack.

  But it is best not to think of the men. Best to focus on the instruments, on loading the torpedoes, on setting the sights on the largest boat at dock. HMS Royal Elm. It hangs, suspended in the water above them, bobbing like a bloated corpse.

  The Orcadians sleep in their beds with half an ear open for bombers, which might still whine overhead for all it’s just past midnight. It’s rumoured that the Germans are developing a new plane, which can fly entirely silently, and they’ll be testing it on Orkney first. It’s been said that the Germans will overrun them.

  ‘Hush, you,’ the mammies whisper, when their children repeat the horrors they’ve heard in the schoolyard.

  ‘The Germans will peel off our skins, Mammy!’

  ‘We’ll no have Germans here.’ But their brows are creased as they smooth covers flat and kiss foreheads and press the blankets more closely around the windows to block out any light that might call to a passing plane.

  There are many different islands, some clustered closely enough that you could swim from one to another, or shout insults across the water. The only safe secrets are concealed under the ground or beneath the sea.

  They are a cold, closed people here. Hard-faced and with a single lonely beating heart. They survive as one. They weather storms and winds and bad harvests together. They know each other’s middle names, whose baby is teething, or whose children are in need of a sharp slap and some manners. They know when a couple has fallen out, or when someone has taken ill, and they deal with both problems the same way: a loaf of bread on the doorstep, like a promise, and an expectation that the matter will be resolved.

  They have their own names for people from different islands: folk from Flotta are called Fleuks or Flounders. People from Hoy are Hawks. South Ronaldsay dwellers are called Witches. Nothing sinister in that – it’s an age-old name and no one asks for reasons.

  There’s another, smaller, island too, Selkie Holm, named so for the creatures that are rumoured to swim in its waters: half woman, half fish. Until recently, no person had lived there for more than a hundred years. The only building is a broken-down shepherd’s bothy, which squats on the hill like a decaying tooth. It was uninhabited by anything except sheep until a few months ago, when the Reid twins moved in.

  The inlet of Scapa Flow, which runs between the island of Selkie Holm and that of mainland Orkney and Kirkwall, has been used as a naval base since the Great War. No one is happy to see the ships come back, but what’s to be done? The English sailors are loud when they come ashore. There is less food for everyone and the small town of Kirkwall is crammed with young men, who drink too much beer, then whistle at the local girls. Only last week, a sailor grabbed a woman around the waist and tried to kiss her. She shrieked and cuffed him about the head. There was talk later that a group of Orcadian men were going to storm one of the boats and teach the sailor some manners. Nothing came of it – just old men and flat-footed youngsters making threats – but, still, the air has a frayed-rope feel, close to snapping.

  Most of the young Orcadian men have gone off to fight. The islands are full of grandfathers, women and children – or young men unfit for combat. Those who remain feel raw and exposed, and huddle together against the gathering storm of war.

  In the warmth of a Kirkwall pub, five men crouch around a table. They should have gone home an hour before, when the pub closed, but they have paid the barman well to lock the doors and keep the beer coming. They have cards and stories, which they share by the light of a single candle; they would barely be visible to anyone passing outside.

  The old tales are told, one by one, as the cards are dealt: the mists that have been seen around the shores of Hoy, and the shapes stirring within them that one fisherman took for selkies; he steered closer, only to have his boat hit a rock.

  ‘He had to swim to safety. Spent the night clinging to the cliffs.’

  The men laugh, but huddle closer to the fire.

  Then Neil MacClenny looks over his shoulder and tells them he’s seen something else, something that doesn’t make sense, and just tonight too, when he was walking to the pub. The moonless sky was lit by the flare of the aurora – the Merrie Dancers – and MacClenny saw something moving just beneath the water out in the bay.

  A dark shape. Like some beast, he whispers, leaning forward.

  But MacClenny, with his drinker’s nose and his bloodshot eyes, is a gullible fool, even when sober, so the other men clap him on the back and buy him another whisky.

  All the same, the story sobers them, quiets their chatter. There is something stirring – they can all feel it. They bid each other farewell quickly and quit the warmth of the pub soon afterwards, running past the sea, hardly daring to look at the water. They arrive home gasping, rushing upstairs to check on their children, and on their wives, who are indignant at having been woken and roll their eyes when they hear MacClenny’s tale. The men look at their sleeping families and laugh softly at their own foolishness. All the same, they snuff out their lights, check the bolts on their windows.

  So, after midnight, the ships are silent in the bay and no one is watching when the periscope of the German U-bo
at snakes above the water, just long enough for Pasch’s trembling crew to load four torpedoes and fire them.

  Dorothy

  I am nearly asleep when the world catches fire.

  I had been lying awake for hours, blinking at the grainy darkness, wishing for sleep, but every time I closed my eyes, I found myself counting: we had enough oats to last two weeks, but only enough butter for one. The meat might last ten days, if we were careful. But many of those things could only be found in Kirkwall, and returning there always sets Con to shaking, and stirs nausea in my gut.

  Earlier that day, Con and I had rowed across from Selkie Holm to Kirkwall to buy supplies to repair our new home – an old shepherd’s bothy. The door is coming off its hinges and we need wood to repair the broken beams. We also have to find slate for the roof – it would be bearable sleeping half under the stars in the summer, but we’ll freeze this winter.

  The war has made it a struggle to find anything for sale. But we had some wool and eggs to exchange, and another supply of washed and rolled bandages to be taken back to the Kirkwall hospital, so I was hopeful, as we moored in Kirkwall – or I was trying to be hopeful. Con’s mouth was downturned, but she wouldn’t argue with me again.

  She climbed out of the boat and I squeezed her shoulder. She smiled reluctantly and I could feel her thinking, You wee bampot! It was something our parents used to call us. We both laughed, as if she’d said it aloud. Impossible to argue with someone when you know their every thought.

  There were fewer motor-cars than there used to be, because of the rationing of petrol, and most people walked with their heads down. It was still strange to see the streets empty of young men – they’d left gradually, at first, but then in a flood, as the war came closer and the rumours of the horrors and violence elsewhere grew. With the streets half empty, you’d expect the shouts of children to be louder, but the mothers kept them close to their sides and shushed them. It was as if everyone was waiting for the next blow to fall.