Page 29 of The Island of Lost Girls

Mercedes is appalled. The world outside is full of danger. Everybody says so. Is there a woman who’s left La Kastellana who’s ever come back?

‘Donita!’ she cries. ‘You can’t!’

Donatella pushes her away and gets to her feet. She paces the limestone floor, looks out at the glimpse of sea through the old arched gateway. Near the horizon, a container ship, all black paint and rust, labours past Algeria on its way to the Malta free port. Closer to land, a white boat speeds across the rolling water towards the harbour, the size of a house but small to her eye, brightly coloured little figures basking like seals on the prow deck. Mercedes has seen passenger ships the size of cities pass by from time to time, the people laid out in row after row like corpses fished from the deep after some terrible disaster. She’s glad they never come here; that the harbour is too cramped and the sights not grand enough. She imagines that if all these people were to disembark at once, it would be like encountering a plague of locusts.

‘I can’t live like this until I die,’ says Donatella. ‘I just can’t. I would be praying for death to take me every day.’

Mercedes is chilled. ‘Don’t let St James hear you say that!’

‘Oh, please!’ Her older sister whirls back into the room and glares. ‘You don’t believe all that, do you?’

‘What?’

‘That St James will slaughter sinners as he slayed the Moor? Seriously? He’s been dead a thousand years!’

‘But he came back for the Battle of Clavio … ’

Donatella snorts.

‘But all those girls! Marcela Perez! Elena Heroux! Karisa Dracoulis … ’

Donatella rolls her eyes. ‘God, Mercedes, you’re so naïve.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They didn’t get taken by St James. They left. They just left.’