Home studio sample - mastered
Top Talent
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
British (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Chapter one. The singing I was digging in the garden when I heard it a strange wild singing on the wind. I sat back on my heels, a carrot dropping from my mud splattered hands. No one sang here, not on this island. Perhaps I'd misheard. No, there it was again, a lilting line, distant but clear. It lasted hardly longer than a heartbeat, but it left me certain of one thing. It was more than a girl's cry. I'd heard it was a song, but who was singing it? I glanced over my shoulder. It nori hunched over a cabbage bed, a grave frizzle poking out from underneath her linen cap. As far as I knew, she was the only other inhabitant of this lonely Atlantic island. But it couldn't have been nori, I had heard for if there was one rule that my guardian set above all others, it was this one. There must be no singing ever sing, and the darkness will find you. We were still dripping from the shipwreck when Norrie first told me this. She had repeated. It often sinks then, but there was no need the terror in her eyes that first time had silenced me immediately that on my own grief so deep I was drowning in it. The sea had taken my mother on, had almost taken me. That was enough darkness to last me a lifetime. I had no desire to call up more. Not that I could recall very much about the shipwreck itself. Even the ship that had carried us off from England seven years ago had left no impression on me. Was it stout or shaky? That vessel had it founded on rocks. Had storms broken its masts? I did not know we had boarded that ship in 16 60 when I have been eight years of age. Surely H was old enough to remember. Yet my only recollection of that night came in broken fragments, slivers that were more sensation in sense, the stopping scratch iness of wet world against my cheeks, the bitter sea wind snarling my hair into salty whips. The chill of the dark waters. I slip through it, Hush child, Norrie would say whenever I dared mention any of this. It was a long time ago in a terrible night, and you were very young. The least said about it, the better but my mother, she's lost to Islam, lost to the wind and the waves. Nori's face would always pucker in sadness, as she said this before her voice grew brisk. It's just the two of us now, and we must make the best of it. When Norrie took that tone, there was no refusing her. So make the best of it. We did. And if life on our island was not easy, it was far from desolate.