The Brides of Rollrock Island (17 page)

I was out of doors in my restlessness, in a little crowd of such mixed boys, when Nicholas Kimes brought his new wife up from Crescent Corner. Some of us wanted to watch the actual extraction of her, out of the seal-body, but that crow Misskaella had scowled and cawed at us to be off before she and Kimes went down there, and some lads would not go against her. They held us back from the cliff top, who might otherwise have spied on the magic over the edge. Brawn Baker had said you could feel the moment if you held yourself attentive enough, so we sat quietly in the grass against the wall and waited for that. Some said they felt something, a prickling of their skin and such, but nothing they claimed could not be sheeted home to the chill of the spring breeze, or the thrill of being here, so near to what was forbidden.

And all of us were surprised alike when Nicholas’s copper curls showed so soon, in the sunlight at the top of the path. He walked slowly, leading his lady. She was learning to balance and to walk as she came. She wore a land-dress, a plain shift, somewhat stiff in its newness. Her hand was locked in Nick’s, and she leaned to him in all her movements. The salt-and-seaweed breeze blew her shining hair, but could only lift strands of it, not the full weight, which fell as far as her thighs. Behind these two the witch struggled up into view like a block of cliff face come to life, stone-footed and clumsy yet.

As the three of them drew near, only the seal-woman seemed to see us—and then she looked to Nick to explain us, to give her our names. When he did not, but only gazed wondering and
wordless back into her beautiful face, she seemed to accept that too, that we were to be nameless for now, a crowd of gawpers to be passed on by. So on they went, as solemn a procession as if they came out of a church, as strange as if they had straggled off a shipwreck.

In my present deadness of heart, it was not so much the seal-woman who impressed me as Nick himself being so enchanted. I wished I could be as distracted as he, as readily taken up with another person. And there was no doubt she was beautiful; they all were, of course, but this one was fresh-risen from the sea, fresh-peeled into white wonderfulness. My skin goosefleshed at the sight of her, at the knowledge that magic had brought her. I could see a day when I might want a woman as willowy and bewildered as that, with such silken hair and such dark eyes, and such an inclination toward me as this one had toward Nick. The lads either side of me must have been thinking the same thing, the way they joined me in my silence, gazing after Nick and his bride walking, bound fast together and passing into their new life.

Fearsome Misskaella, her wrappings trailing, rocked along stiff-legged behind them, her red and white hair wisping from where she had quickly knotted it up out of the way while she did her magic work. She was the only red-woman on Rollrock besides my own mother. I was not, like these other lads, born of seal-maids. And I was not to marry one, hadn’t Dad said?
Men like us
, he had said, separating me off from these boys. Placing us above them, was he? Or did he feel, as I felt—sitting back so that, beyond Misskaella’s rags, I might see more of the new bride’s cloak of black hair, shivering at the sight of it shining and sliding across
itself—that neither he nor I would ever be fine enough for such wives as this, long-limbed and foreign from the sea?

We upped and followed, but timidly, keeping the three leaders always in sight, but never in hearing.

“How much does it cost you?” Salmon Cawdron whispered.

“No one will say,” said Neville. “You must bargain with
her
on the price. All I know is, Jerrolt Ardler took three years gathering the money, and not a drop at Wholeman’s did he drink all that time, and still he owed her more besides, after she brought up his Abigail.”

“It costs you your full life and manhood, says my dad,” said Howth Marten.

“Yes, there’s lots of Rollrock men still in debt to Misskaella, with a pack of sons needing food and clothing on top of the price.”

“Look at her, though!” We knew by his tone that Salmon was not talking about the witch. “She is not
goods
, that you put a price on—a sack of
flour
, a box of
tins
.”

“Oh, the price is not for
her
,” said Neville. “The price is for Misskaella’s bother. The price is the bringing. The money is about what happens on the land, although the reward comes from the sea.”

That night I made Mam something of a meal, bread and some cheese, a little smoked fish, and while I assembled it I told her what I’d seen, of Nicholas and his new wife and Misskaella going by. She was always quiet since Dad died, but this night as I spoke and served she spread a different silence about herself, and when I noticed the bright sound of my words ringing in the hollows of it I stopped speaking. I poured the tea and brought the cups to
the table, pretending not to notice how present she was in the room, how she was more motionless than usual, fixed on me with a watchful seriousness I had not felt from her in a while.

“Only I had never seen a mam straight from the sea like that,” I heard myself apologize.

“Oh, she is not a mam yet,” said Mam. “At least, not on land. Though she may have pups and pups that she’s left behind, living in the water.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Some of the stories say that, don’t they, how they are torn apart between the two kinds of children?”

“Stories?” she said. “If only they were but stories.”

I sat and nudged her tea toward her; perhaps I could send her back to quietness with this reminder of all the wearisome tasks ahead of her, the lifting and sipping, the endless chewing, and all the time the absence of Dad at our elbows, the room echoing with his un-uttered remarks, his un-laughed laughs.

But she kept her hands in her lap and only watched me. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Rollrock is no place for me without your dad. And no place for any young man who has a choice about it. You remember your Aunty Ames, and your grandmother, that visited from Cordlin?”

“A long time ago.” I sat over the plate I had prepared myself, wanting to begin on it.

“We will go and be with them, I think,” she said. “I am sure they will have us.”

I stared. Her words, each one small and sensible in itself, would not come together except to mean one thing, and that seemed outrageous, impossible to me, given the shape of our lives
to this point. “We would go to Cordlin? You and me? And be mainlanders?”

She smiled at how dazzled I was. “It will be an opportunity for you, Dominic. Perhaps you can become something other than a fisherman. Not that your dad was not quite happy on the sea, but who knows what awaits his son?”

I pushed her teacup a little closer to her. “While it is hot,” I said, to bring us both back to the present, to this meal, in case we had already dreamed more than we could ever hope for. In another part of my mind I was thinking, Of course, of course. How
right
it will feel, with everyone red, Mam not mismatching anymore! This at least was a pleasure I could imagine; the rest was too enormous, too out of my experience, for my mind to regard with more than blank surprise and excitement.

“I will write to them tonight,” she said. “It can go on tomorrow’s boat. We will wait to hear from Aunty Ames before we make any plans. I’ve no reason to doubt she will take us in, but it’s best not to court disappointment.”

She picked up her tea and took her first sip, as if the action did not weary her in the least.

After Rollrock, Cordlin town was an enormous whirling fairground of a place, full of strangers and strange objects and animals, machines and habits. I grew up there, and up, and up, into a gawkish boy, and then I filled out and was a young man. I made my mam proud, as she lay in the last of her several illnesses, by
getting myself a job at the market; I wore a white apron down to my ankles and pushed a trolley back and forth all day, loading up crates of vegetables and fruit, buckets of flowers, boxes of fish layered with ice. I was happy enough there, though part of me knew that my Potshead fellows would think little of any living not made on the sea. I had some money and some mates, and once I put on flesh and muscle I found that girls quite liked me.

By that time I had just about forgotten the day Nick Kimes’s wife had walked past us boys on the Crescent road. No, it was the girls right here in Cordlin who had my attention, and after one or two small heartbreaks I found myself Kitty Flaming, who worked in the market office over the books, with whom I was comfortable right from our first conversation at the market employees’ picnic, and with whom I settled to regular walking out, and dancing, and picture shows, and the other kinds of entertainments that young couples get up to about a port town like Cordlin.

I was very pleased to have Kitty as my sweetheart. Mam and Gran and Aunty Ames loved her, and she was a fine-looking, proud girl who knew exactly how to dress and behave for any occasion and any group of people, whether they were above or below her in station or exactly matched. She’d a straight eye and a good laugh and such energy, she fair whisked you up and carried you along with her, whatever place or project she was set on. She swept me toward the altar without ever once mentioning it; she let everyone else do the talking. “When are you going to marry that lovely girl?” they said to me. “She’ll not wait forever, you know.” More and more often they said it, as a year went on, and then another year.

We strolled by the quayside, the sunshine softening toward autumn. We’d just met and parted from Jeannie Grace, who had told us of her brand-new engagement to my friend Thomas Parsnall.
It’s hardly news to anyone
, Jeannie had said,
and yet everyone seems surprised, and takes pleasure in it, and looks at you properly, as if they had never seen you before
.

Now I said to Kitty, “People say
we
should be married, you and I.”

“To each other, you mean?” she said with a wicked smile.

“Of
course
to each other.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Which people are these, who say this?”

“Let me see—Aunty Ames, Tom Geoghan and Mister Bryce at work. Windy Nuttall, your Uncle Crowther. Everyone.”

“Really. How funny of them. I daresay marriage is not on your mind at all. I hope you tell them fair and square what to do with their opinions?” Her face was raised to meet the breeze, a look on it as if she never wanted to do more than enjoy that freshness on her skin.

I was full of doubt, in an instant. I walked along beside her, listening to her words again in my head. “Do you not want to marry me, then?” I said eventually.

“Who’s asking
me
?” she said, pretending astonishment. “Isn’t it up to you and those
people
to decide?”

I took her hand and walked close beside her. “Come, Kitty, don’t fool with me now. Will you marry me or no?”

She shrugged, looked away toward the Heads. “I probably will” drifted back over her shoulder. I was about to throw away her hand and stamp off when, “Don’t you think?” she added. And
she turned and looked at me, sweet and sly, and into her kiss, a quick one because we were in public, she put all that she was not admitting in her words: surprise and excitement and a little terror.

We walked on, and everything was different, just as Jeannie had said—outlined in gold, things were, in the late sunshine, funnel- and mast-shadows crisply black on the sunlit storehouse walls. Every gull flew in a more purposeful arc, or arranged its folded wings more importantly; every stone and plank went toward making a different stage of life from the one that had passed on from us, moments before. “This is the day you tell your grandchildren about,” I said, and Kitty squeezed my hand.

We reached Cobalt’s store and turned back. “One thing,” Kitty said. Again she looked away from me. Between the Heads, the clouds hung puffy, gleamed golden. “Your house on Rollrock.”

“You want to live on
Rollrock
?”

“I most certainly do
not
,” she said. “I want you to rid yourself of that house. It gives me the shudders just to think of it there.”

“Why, ever? I’ve not been back in years!”

“Still, the house is there, and it’s a place for you, among those men and their … what they’ve married. I never want to go there, and I never want you to think that you can go. Go
back
, you know, and belong.”

“I’ve never for a minute!”

“I know you’ve not,” she said a little gentler. “But that’s not to say you never would, while you had that house. Will you sell it, please, Dominic? To settle my mind?”

“Why on earth would you be afraid—”

But she
was
afraid. She was not sweet and sly now; she was all
grave attention to me. “It’s the one thing I worry about with you, your connection to that place. Will you sever it, for me? For our
sons
, should we have any?”

I saw then how far she had taken this in her mind, while outwardly she had seemed carefree, accepting of everything about me. I saw, in her thoughtful, firmly held face, that she was prepared to forgo me, if I chose not to do as she asked, it mattered so much to her.