Page 28 of The Island of Lost Girls

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Their grandmother’s house was once a Roman sepulchre. Although Heliogabalus’s pleasure palace was torn down stone by stone and hurled into the sea when he died, the other villas remained. Those excellent foundations, the mosaic floors, the underfloor hypocausts (excellent storage!), the drainage, the baths, the courtyard gardens, the rainwater cisterns, were too good for practical people to waste, whatever the historical resentments, and became the basis of Kastellana Town.

And, after a couple of hundred years, the Roman graveyard, a small collection of square, domed buildings a short walk along the cliffs with a lovely view of the sea, lost its ghostly mystique, and people added a room here and a subdivision there, and surreptitiously dropped the urns over the cliff edge and made little homes where the bodies used to lie. And this little clutch of hovels up above the town are special in one particular way. Because they were a cemetery long before the dukes came to power, they are the only buildings on the whole island that are freehold. On the rest of the island, the death of a leaseholder will trigger a reversion to the duke, and the family left behind must petition to be allowed to take the lease over. To assume another generation of indebtedness for a house they’ve paid for over generations. But the cemetery houses simply pass from owner to heir, and though they have no monetary value – you need a population that has money for anything to be worth money – or running water, or drainage, they carry enormous status.

Larissa’s mother left hers directly to her granddaughters. She saw the way the wind was blowing with her son-in-law.

Mercedes finds Donatella in the old kitchen, huddled against the wall, her legs curled beneath her, crying.

‘Oh, Donita.’ She flings herself down on the ground to hold her. ‘Oh, kerida.’

Donatella winces as their faces touch. The bruise from their father’s fist is swelling, and her eye will soon be black. Donatella is fifteen now, and everyone knows that fifteen-year-old girls need discipline, to save them from hell. It’s how it’s always been. How it always will be.

Mercedes reaches up and brushes the wound with her fingertips. Donatella hisses. ‘Does it hurt?’

Mercedes is only twelve. Her punishments rarely stray above the buttocks. They don’t yet need to be performed for the solteronas to see. She knows her time will come, but for now she just looks at her sister’s pain in fascinated horror.

‘Of course it bloody hurts,’ snaps Donatella.

‘Hold on,’ says Mercedes. Pushes herself to her feet, finds their grandmother’s blunt old kitchen knife in its place on the ledge above the stone sink, and ducks out into the daylight. A big old aloe grows near the door, pushing up through a battered mosaic pavement. Mercedes saws a few inches from a spike, strips off the leathery skin with its rock-hard thorns until she’s got a nice wedge of juicy flesh, then scrambles back indoors and holds it out to her sister. ‘Here,’ she says.

Donatella takes it and presses it against her cheek. Winces again as it touches, then holds it there.

‘I’m so sorry,’ says Mercedes, sympathetically. Then, ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing,’ says Donatella, and sobs again. ‘Nothing!’

‘You must have done something. You don’t get punished for nothing.’

‘Shut up,’ says Donatella. ‘Just you wait till it’s your turn.’

‘If you just did what you’re told, you wouldn’t make him angry,’ she tells her. Island opinions, passed down unthinkingly.

Donatella’s lip curls. ‘Even when what he says is stupid?’

She feels her head jerk slightly. Their father? Stupid? Of course he’s not stupid. He’s their father.

‘If he told you to put your hand in a pot of boiling water, would you do it?’

‘He wouldn’t do that, though, would he? Don’t be ridiculous.’

Donatella shakes her head, disgusted. ‘Oh, God, forget it. You’ll learn.’

Donatella frustrates her so much. She has everything before her. She gets more beautiful by the day. She’s witty and smart, and their family is blessed in comparison with so many others. If she’d only embrace the womanly virtues, be more modest, not answer back …

‘You really think that’s all you need? Just to be obedient and then everything will be all right?’ Donatella shifts her aloe to the inner corner of her eye. The bridge of her nose is beginning to swell. Once she’s back at the Re del Pesce, serving frijolesand rabbit pasta al’arabais, the whole island will know that the Delia girl has got above herself again.

Mercedes shrugs. ‘Anything for a quiet life,’ she says. Their mother’s favourite maxim.

Donatella drops her hand, punches her thigh. ‘But I don’t want a quiet life!’ she cries. ‘Do you really think that this is all there is?’

Mercedes is shocked to the core. ‘What do you mean?’

‘This! This … littleness! This … everything the same? This, forever?’

She’s puzzled. They have lived like this for a thousand years. Why would they change it? ‘But what else is there?’

‘Everything!’ cries Donatella. ‘There’s a whole world out there!’ She hisses with pain and puts the aloe back.