A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

Beachy Head is the tallest chalk cliff in Britain, and from the bottom of it, Benji understood for the first time what that actually meant.

He had come down the zigzag path from the clifftop at low tide, when a wide shelf of pale rock lay exposed along the shoreline beneath the cliffs — chalk platform, scoured smooth by centuries of tide, dotted with rockpools and the occasional stranded frond of kelp. Above him the cliff went up and up in a single sheer white wall, gulls wheeling against it in lines too small to matter against all that chalk. And below, standing square in the shallows on its own little island of rock, the lighthouse: red and white banded, solid, patient, the automated beam already dark in the daylight but somehow present anyway, the way a held breath is present.

Benji had read, once, that there had been an older lighthouse — up on the clifftop itself, built in 1834, until the keepers realised that the very thing that made a clifftop lighthouse seem sensible was the thing that ruined it. Fog gathered at the top of the cliff long before it touched the sea. Ships couldn't see the light through it. So in 1902 they built a new one down here instead, at the foot of the chalk, where the beam could shine out clean across the water no matter what the mist was doing further up. Sometimes, Benji thought, the safest-looking place isn't the place that actually works.

His red collar was pale with sea-spray as he picked his way along the chalk shelf.

And then he saw her.

She lay on the shingle just above the tideline, quite alone, quite still — a grey seal, her coat a soft marbled pattern of dark and pale that seemed, in the flat morning light, almost exactly the colour of the chalk and shadow around her. Her eyes were enormous and dark and entirely open, watching him without alarm and without much of anything else either.

Benji stopped a respectful distance away.

"Hello," he said carefully. "My name is Benji Booboos."

The seal considered this with the unhurried attention of a creature who had nowhere urgent to be. "Marble," she said eventually.

Benji looked along the empty shingle in both directions. No other seals. No grown shape hauled out nearby, watching over her.

"Are you—" he began, and stopped himself, because he had learned, over a great many mornings and a great many creatures, that rushing toward an assumption rarely helped anyone. He tried again. "Is your mother close by?"

"No," said Marble, without any particular distress. "She left."

Every instinct Benji owned wanted to do something about this immediately. He held very still instead, and looked, and listened, the way Naia had once told him to on a warm Sussex pond — urgency is very loud. It makes it difficult to hear what is actually there.

"Left when?" he asked.

"Some days ago," Marble said. "I don't count them exactly."