The Brides of Rollrock Island (15 page)

“Lift the latch, Nase. It’s too late for any of that now.”

“Curse you, Mam,” he said, nearly weeping.

“Curse yourself, boy. You brought this down entirely on yourself.”

He opened the door, and we went in. It was so quiet inside, so warm! I closed the door behind us and we were stiff-still, all three of us. The front room was empty, the fire low; Dad must have sent the boys to bed and gone to do work out the back. Naseby wrung the seal-girl’s hand. The girl, the nameless girl, radiated beauty there; our house looked like the house of peasants, and Mam and even Nase looked wrinkled, reddened, worn out from rough living, peasant work and the endless scouring of the wind.

Mam took off her coat and handed it to me.

“Excuse me.” She edged around Nase and the girl. Through to the kitchen she went. There was the scrape of a bowl taken from the shelf, the clack of the ladle in the pot of kale-broth we had had for supper; Mam liked to see us all fed and then be left in peace to her own meal. “Odger?” she called out. The bowl clunked to the table, the spoon rang down beside it, a chair was pulled out and sat in. I realized how motionless we were, here in the front room, and tried to break the spell, hanging up Mam’s coat and then my own.

Dad came in the back door. “What do you want, woman!”

Mam must have made some gesture, for he filled up the doorway there, came out to us. His face as he stepped into the room? He knew. He had known all along.

He saw me realize, my face between the two faces. “Where did you find them?” he called back down the hall.

Mam gave no answer but a pointed clink of her spoon in her bowl.

“Where did she find you?” he said to Nase.

“Cave Cove,” he said.

“Anyone see you, coming here?”

Naseby shook his head.

Dad would have said more, if I’d not been there. Instead, he started back along the hall, turned to make some reassuring sign to Nase, saw me again and was gone into the kitchen. Leaning on a chair back, his shoulders around his ears, he spoke a word to Mam.

“No,” she said.

He spoke louder. “There’s still a way. Nobody saw you, Nase says—”

“Sophie must be told,” Mam said. “And I don’t care who else. I really don’t, Odge. It’s time Naseby faced his follies. And time you admitted his uselessness.”

I realized I did not want to leave the front room, which was full of the seal-girl’s wonderful wild smell. It was as if the whole ocean had pooled in here, fish and salt water, weed and whale, seabirds slicing through the fresh air above. Could a
girl
fall under a seal-girl’s spell? A little knifing of fear cut me free, and I forced myself up the hall to the kitchen doorway, to the comforting sight of Mam eating supper, perhaps tireder-looking than usual, but to all other appearances living through an ordinary evening.

Dad twisted in his chair to look over his shoulder. “Go to
bed
,” he said, as if it were the last straw for him to see me.

Mam glanced at me unperturbed. “She may as well hear; they may as well
all
know. Wake up your sister, Bet. Get the boys out.”

“Don’t you
dare
,” snapped Dad.

“And then go out in the street and bellow it about town. Tell all creation.”

Dad’s shoulders sank and he shook his head and turned back to deal with her. While they looked hatred at each other I slid forward into the kitchen, and peered back along the hall to see if Nase would bring his girl through.

But no. I had never seen two people so close-wound together; certainly I’d never seen Nase hold to Sophie so.

“Look,” said Dad to Mam behind me, as if he were bringing a whole new complexion of sensibleness to the conversation.
“Look, he
knows
he’s done wrong, the lad—you’ve only to look at him. She can be gone by morning, and all this over, his lesson learned.”

“And Sophie never know,” said Mam in a dead voice.

“And Sophie never know!” he said, as if that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?

“Just you, and I, and Nase, and Bet there know.”

“Just us! And we would never tell—”

“And Nase when you fill him with kickwater, and his whole soul falls out his mouth onto the table—who would know then? Who would be standing by?”

“That need not happen, Nance. I’m telling you, he knows the enormity of it—”

“And
this
one?” She nodded at me. “When all the girls are sharing secrets and she has this juicy one to share? Who’ll be there? What other little gabmouths?” I was insulted, but she was right—she knew us girls and what went on among us.

“Then tell her not to, Nance. Impress upon her. I’m telling you, none of this need happen!”

“Well, I’m not sitting twitching the rest of my days, hoping it won’t, are you? Oh, you are, I can tell, you fool.”

“What are you saying? That we bring Sophie down here to see?”

“Did I say that?”

“Should we troop up there, then—is that what you want? Him and her and—I don’t know, all of us? You want Geedre and the lads to come too?”

“Nor that, did I say. All I said is, Sophie must be told. I don’t
care how you go about it, but I’ll not have this hidden. That’s my part played. Sort it out yourselves from here.” And her spoon moved in the broth, rang again against the bowl.

Dizzy from the scent of the seal-girl, I went and leaned in the mouth of the hall. I closed my eyes and they all melted into the sea-smell: Geedre flat as a sleeping fish on the other side of that wall; Dad and Mam either side of the table, which was like a slab of rock or the side of a sunken ship; Nase and his girl there like two twined strands of sea-ribbon, tilted in the flow. I opened my eyes before I should drown, and there was the house again, walls and air, the tintype hanging there of Great-Grandmother Winch, in her baskety chair, just as cross as ever.

Now Dad almost spat. “You sit there so
smug
.” I had never heard that thickness in his voice. Fright blossomed up my spine. Would he strike Mam? I had heard of dads who did hit mams. I turned in the doorway so as I should be ready to run forward and grab him if he tried.

“Nothing smug about me,” said Mam calmly. “Do you think
that
pleases me?” She tore bread, ate a piece.

“Stuffing your face,” said Dad.

“I was hungry,” she said around the bread, as if she didn’t notice how far she had pushed his temper. “I was hungry
before
I set out.”

“You don’t know everything,” he said quietly.

“Did I say I did?”

“You acted like it. You always do. You think you are so sharp? You think we’re fools, me and Nase, that can hide nothing from you?”

“Well, Nase has done a poor job, certainly.” She was not afraid at all. Perhaps she did not
care
if she goaded him to hitting her?

Dad growled; after a moment I heard the words in it: “You would shame our son, would you?” His voice was squashed from him hunching over at Mam.

She did not lean or shrink from him. “He has shamed
himself
, in my book.”

“And would you shame me the same?” He brought his palms to the tabletop, his shoulders up around his ears again.

She gave a little laugh. He had unsettled her. A short silence passed. “If you
did
the same as him, you would shame
yourself
the same.”

He pushed himself up from the chair like a spider launching itself high onto its legs, and sidled around the table. He wore a joyless grin; he looked entirely a stranger. He caught Mam’s arm above the elbow. I cried, “Let her be!” and leaped to her side and took her other arm.

But, “Hush.” Mam watched him, and rose from her seat, and went where he drew her, slowly, resisting him, but going with him still. I held to her, and followed.

He forced us, crept us, through the scullery, out the back door, from the dim warm lamplight into the moon’s bright frosting of everything. We crossed the moony flags to his toolshed. He let go of Mam, and I went close and held her, shivering. My father, eyes wide and teeth bared, opened the shed and backed into it.

Some weeks back, he had built a cupboard against the side wall. I had watched him build it. The door opened to the back of the shed; I had told him how foolish it was.
It cuts off all the
light
, I’d said.
You’ll never find anything in there
! He had only smiled and done as he pleased, and now I saw why. He had only ever intended keeping a single object in this new safe place, and he needed no light to find it. Now he reached in, and drew that thing out among us by its narrow white hand.

“Come out, Helena-Grace,” said Dad, his voice softening, saddening. Mam jolted and trembled; I held her tighter and tighter. I squeezed my eyes shut, as if by not seeing the woman emerge, I could make her not be there. The summer-sea smell rolled out the shed door; Mam gasped, and so did I, at the loveliness of it, at the awfulness.

“We can close this now,” said Dad to his sea-maid. “You need never go back there.”

Now it seemed cruel to hide my eyes and make Mam endure the sight alone; as well, the smell promised cleansing, and horizons, and sky, a flying-out from this, a floating-out, an altogether larger, fresher way of living than we’d so far been cramped up in. I looked around in hope as much as in horror.

Side-on to us, Dad kept grinning, kept eating up Mam’s distress. The sea-maid watched us more calmly. One breast announced itself through the fall of her hair; a patch of blackness sprouted at her cleft, as unconscious as the breast of how it should be private. She was narrowly built, yet what curves she had were full, and her narrows were beautiful too, her wrists and hands, her ankles, her neck. Her face was as lovely as that other’s, Nase’s girl’s, and just as unaware of what it was doing to our mam, to our family; she looked out on us with the same shy lack of enmity or vanity, expecting neither harm nor welcome
from us, and needing nothing. I wished I was her, in this little group of us, rather than myself clinging to my mam, rather than my dad waiting gleeful and horrified for Mam’s rage to crash down, rather than Mam herself, shuddering in my arms like a lidded pot on the point of boiling and gushing over, drowning the fire beneath it.

Dad bore the girl forward by her hand and elbow. They made a monstrous bride and groom in the doorway of their church, our shabby shed. The seal-girl moved all long and relaxed like a queen or a heron, or indeed like a bride trailing a heavy train behind herself.

Mam and I shrank across the flags before them. We retreated just as stiffly-slowly as we’d advanced, into the house, through to the kitchen, back up against the kitchen chairs, Dad thrusting the maid at us all the way.

And now I saw a seal-girl’s face, straight on and lamplit, for the first time. Not quite human, she was all the more beautiful for that. Her dark features sat in the smooth skin like a puzzle of stones and shells; I wanted to look and look until I had solved it. The mouth began hesitantly to smile, full-lipped and shapely.

“Pack your things, Bet,” said Mam. “Everything you will ever need. Wake your sister and the boys and tell them to pack theirs.”

I peeled myself from Mam, and hurried to the bedroom.

I shook Geedre hard. She was wide-eyed in an instant, and I hissed Mam’s command in her ear. “Light the candle,” she said.

The boys complained more when I woke them, but as soon as they heard what had come upon us, they went silently to the task of gathering all they owned that they could carry.

“But where are we going?” Geedre said softly, casting about for what to take. “And for how long?”

“Forever, is my thinking.”

She stared at me across the candle.

“Looking at Mam’s face,” I said. “So take it all, coat and boots and all.”

“That
smell
!” said Byrne, awestruck.

“Don’t breathe it,” I said. “Block your nose, or you’ll be bewitched. I nearly was myself.”

“Bring your blanket,” Mam said, pausing at the door as we gathered. “Sophie has few enough.” And she was gone again.

“Sophie?” murmured Geedre. “We’ll never all fit at Nase and Sophie’s.”

“Nase won’t be there,” I said hollowly.

“She must mean just for tonight,” said Snell, “and the boat in the morning.”

We all paused silent at that, looking among ourselves, disbelieving one moment, knowing it was true the next. Then Geedre snatched the blanket from the bed and folded it quickly, badly, as if she were stealing it.

We carried out our bundles to the front door and stood there hugging them, our hairs all awry. The sea-smell poured down the hallway from the kitchen, almost a wind. Nase and his girl sat at the kitchen table, their chairs pulled close together. Dad held his sea-maid on his lap, a shield between him and the rest of us, between him and Mam. Naked still, she had laid her arms loosely about our father’s neck.

Then Mam obscured them, stepping from the bedroom into
the hall. Snell went and brought her to us with her bundles, and I did not look toward the kitchen again.

Mam searched and silenced each of our faces; she seemed both greatly tired and freshly flowered. Then she proceeded among us, and we gathered in after her. She opened the door and walked out onto the step and down into the street, and all we could do was follow.