The Brides of Rollrock Island (11 page)

I do not know how long it took; as I placed and straightened, the sea-sound washed away my sense of time and care of time. There was only care of placement, a fierce intention to make this shape rightly.

When I was done, there lay outlined—in parts with the black shells, in other parts only with the knots and filaments they had left—a roundheaded, faceless figure. She had arms but no hands; her two round breasts each bore a periwinkle nipple; her legs came together, then separated, not into feet, but into two lobes of a fishlike tail. This blunt personage regarded me, and I her, while one by one the periwinkles crept off, leaving her burnt to the rock, burning into the wind. I turned to face the sea, to feel the real breeze blow through the up-pouring mysterious one; I watched the sun coast slowly down and tip-touch the horizon. The periwinkle girl held firm to the rock behind me, streaming upward, changing everything.

Dad died not two weeks later, his lungs filling up and drowning him. With the first winter storms Mam sickened too, beginning with her stomach. Then her mind began to go. She took to her bed as if she never intended rising again. Both events brought with them a great deal of quarrelsome sister business. Bee and Lorel and Grassy Ella felt free to descend on me almost every day, with or without an armful of bab and a trailing of older children. They scolded me and their eyes went everywhere, looking for new evidence of neglect and carelessness that they could tell to each other. Give them a funeral and they blew in like thunder-clouds—the noise of them! The combined ill will! I had forgotten how they took over a house, how they took over my mind. With their pecking and remonstrations, my own will disappeared, and I went about dully, obeying this one’s commands, that one’s
counter-orders. I drudged through the winter, and as I shivered through washing myself those half-frozen mornings, joylessly I registered the return of the seals to Crescent Cove as spring approached. I all but forgot what I had done there, the lure I had left in the rock.

It was after a thorough nitpicking by Bee, as she swept out the door into the well-puddled slush, that Arthur Scupper’s children came running up the street, crying: “Come to Fisher’s! They’ve found a mermaid! Come and look!”

Bee stood out from the step to stop them. “A mermaid? But the boats did not go out today!”

“She walked into town, with not a stitch on!” cried Hex Scupper. He ran on, then called back over his shoulder, “Up from Crescent Corner!”

“A mermaid!” Bee exclaimed after them.

I hid the shaking of my hands in my apron. “What can they mean? Perhaps it is only some kind of malformed fish.”

“A fish that walked into town?”

“Let us go and see, then.”

I went to Mam’s doorway, pulling on my coat. “What’re
you
want?” she said. “Fetch that daughter of mine.”

“I am off down Fisher’s a moment, to see a sea-girl,” I said. “I will lock you in, just in case you take a mind to follow me.”

She glared and did not know me still—her knowing had come and gone a great deal lately. I could talk nonsense to her, or insult her outright, and she would forget a moment after.

I locked the door and Bee and I set off for Fisher’s, falling in with a crowd of others who spilled from their doors, donning
coats and pulling on shawls. I was glad of Bee, for she could take care of the talking—which she did, for along with all the other betrothed or married women, she had a great deal of anxiety to spill out, about this mermaid. I went quietly among them, nodding at what they said and making the right faces so as not to be noticed.

We met Doris Shingle, coming up. “Aye, she’s fair,” she said. “Fair strange, you ask me. Foreign-looking—as you’d expect, I suppose, for she’s not of this country.”

“Has she seaweed hair?” joked Abby Staines. “Has she suckerfingers like an octopus?”

“None of that,” said Doris. “Her sea-ness is quite gone. She’s fingers like you or me, only finer. And her hair is finer too, and as straight as if you took and ironed it.”

Pensive men we met too, who would not be drawn so much. Their silence did nothing to improve the wives’ tempers.

Then we were at Fisher’s. They had put the sea-girl in his back room there; two doors led to it from the main store, and the whole town was filing in one and out the other very slowly. Those coming out were some of them eager to tell us everything we were about to see; others sidled away, or went head down, and would not be pressed. The ones that did speak each had a different story—she was fair enough, she was ugly, she was the fairest thing ever made; her hair was like silk cloth, like rats’ tails, like a horse’s floppy mane; she was sulky, she smiled like an angel, she was the most radiant creature; she had swum from Spain, she was clearly of the sea, she had nothing about her of the underwater. I hardly knew what to expect when finally I pushed and shuffled into the back room with the others.

Fisher’s women had got the poor thing into a dress, but it did not fit her well; its puffed sleeves sat sadly out from her shoulders, and her long shins dangled below the hem, with the fine small bare feet that looked as if they would not hold anything up of substance. In the window light her skin had a greenish cast, and the dress was a particular yellow that set it off badly.

“She looks
ill
,” Hatty Marchant whispered to someone, behind my shoulder.

I was crowded along by those eager to enter, everyone breathing and murmuring. Mag Fisher was seated by the girl, looking about fiercely.

“Has she a voice like us?” someone ventured at last from behind me.

“I’ve a voice,” said the sea-girl, and I heard that clear enough. Her voice was low, and of course lovely, and held an accent of some kind, I thought. I wanted immediately to hear it again, to make sure.

“Will she be staying?”

“That’s enough of questions,” snapped Mag. “I’ve answered everything over and over. Go and ask those who already know. I won’t have the girl badgered.”

“We’re not badgering
her
, Mag. We’re badgering
you
.” A wicked titter ran among us.

This was how it would be, then: the women pretending this was everyday, that she was not much of a girl to look at, while her enchantment went to work upon the men. I could see it, their eyes fixing and following the length of her hair, of her limbs, of her slimness under the awful dress, their lips parting. I began to see the size of what I’d accomplished that evening at the Crescent.
What chance did these men have against my faceless, heartless periwinkle girl? Poor defenseless fools. And poor wives and mothers! They were no more than encumbrances now. They could titter and screech and weep as much as they liked, in the weeks and months to come. They would not be paid any mind.

Was she beautiful, the sea-maid?
Fair strange
, Doris had said, and I thought that was a fine assessment. I had seen her face before, of course, or very like it: the portrait in Strangleholds’ attic, the Spanish dancers on my brother’s postcard. Their hair, like hers, was neat dark wings either side of their faces; their eyebrows too were drawn clear-edged against skin that bore not a freckle or a fleck. This girl’s eyes, like those others’, were wide and dark; her hands were long, the fingers slender and longer than the palms. Her mouth was like my own, only beautiful; looking upon it I could see why whoever-it-was had asked could it speak, for it seemed to be made only for people to admire, for ornament: curve-edged, bruise-colored, plump, heavy. I looked about me at the small mouths, hardly lipped at all, spattered with freckles, little pinch slots into the women’s worried, or disagreeable, or frankly afraid faces. Any man seeing this maiden’s lips would want to lay kisses on them; he would want to roll in the cushions of those lips, swim the depths of those eyes, run his hands down the long foreign lengths of this girl. Oh, I thought, women of Rollrock, you are
nothing
now.

Next morning there came a knock on the door.

“Who is it? Who is it? Are they here already?” Mam cried
weakly. Lately she had been trapped in memories of her wedding day, terrified that she was running late for the service. Her anxiety had grown much worse since she stopped being able to raise herself from her bed.

“Oh, you’ve plenty of time, Mam,” I said as I passed her door, hurrying through from the back. She was beyond being explained to, brought forward into the present; it was easier to talk to her in the language of her delusions.

I opened the door. It was not, as I had feared, one of my spouting sisters, or a child of theirs come to ask favors. Able Marten stood there, his coat flapping in the spring breeze, his hair out sideways, loops and locks of it, crimson almost, it was so dark with grease. Just the sort of low fellow I’d thought would walk into my trap.

“What are you up to, Able?” He had been one of the teases, up at the schoolhouse. He had poked my belly once with his grubby finger:
Here’s a nice fat chicken
, he’d said.
Plenty of flesh on this one
.

But now he was tall and a young man. “I’ve a word with you?”

I let him in, waved him toward the fire. He perched himself on Dad’s sunken chair. It was a startling thing, to have a live young man in the house.

Cautiously I sat opposite. He leaned forward at me. “You go down Fisher’s yesterday and see that mere-girl?”

“I did, as did everyone.”

“I went down again this morning. A lot of us went down, for another look at her.”

Good. They were well and truly fascinated, then. “And she had slept well, in her land-bed?”

“She had not,” said Able. “She had got out, and taken her coat, that Fishers had retrieved, from the cupboard where they hid it—she bled all over, fighting her way in to find it. She took herself back to the sea, and Fishers all sleeping so soundly above, you’d have thought they had seven pints apiece in them, even the women.”

I was only relieved that his sneering was for Fishers, not for me. “That was careless of them,” I said gently.

“Very careless,” said Able self-righteously.

“So now she is gone, and we can all go back to living as we lived before yesterday.”

“Like heck we can.” He would have uttered worse than
heck
, had he not wanted a favor of me.

I tipped my head and refrained from smiling. “Well,
I
can. What is wrong with you?” Able held my eyes a long glance, but I made sure they told him nothing. “Come along, Able. You have never come uptown to gossip with Misskaella Prout before. What is it you’re after?” I wanted to see him in discomfort, begging.

“Well.” He was not embarrassed at all, the insolent thing. “People say you have the gift. I wondered if you could fetch me a seal.” And when I did not answer, he added, “A woman
out
of a seal, I mean, like that one yesterday.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Can you do that?”

I looked into my hands, still a little earthy as they were from pulling radishes. So different, this was, this bald question, from the nightful of sea-shush and magic, and the bull seal hefting himself up the rock.

“Because if you can’t, I’m wasting my time.” And he scraped his feet forward and took hold of the armrest to push himself to standing.

I let him start on that bluff, then said, “Why would I?”

“What do you mean?” He plumped himself down again.

“People are uneasy enough with me—if I start bringing up sea-wives, they’ll take against me good and proper.”

“It could be secret.”

“Could it?”

“I could tell a tale. I could say she came up like this first one, by herself.”

I gave a little snort, examined my earth-smeared apron. “And once you have her, what then?”

“What then? Why, I’ll be happy then. And you’ll be well paid.”

“Oh, and that’ll be all, will it? No other men will want a pretty, when you start parading yours about the town?”

“They’ve got the girls here, no? They don’t need one. I am driven to this; none of these bitches wants me.”

“None?” I said. “I don’t recall your ever asking me.”

That was amusing, to watch him wake to me, then blush, then look about at everything else. “Listen,” I said, full of scorn. “Every lad in town is spelled stupid by that maid. That’s a fairy lass you’re talking of there, Able; you see her, you want her, and one of our girls hasn’t a chance against her.”