The Mermaid's Call

by Katherine Stansfield

  A clang then, beyond the room. A pan dropped in the kitchen. Murmured voices. Nancy and her mother, I guessed.

  ‘But not dead on Morwenstow’s shores?’ Anna said.

  ‘A sad coincidence that would be,’ Mrs Hawker said. ‘And one I find hard to believe. Frederick’s determination that the sailor is Joseph, it’s not healthy. Frederick has been at sea too long. This last run has done something to his mind.’

  ‘How so?’ Anna said, and I could hear the concern in her voice, for we were talking of our employer. The one who’d brought us here.

  ‘His letters have begun to read like those of a madman,’ Mrs Hawker said. ‘He distrusts his men, believes the cook to be a poisoner bent on killing him and taking over the ship. And now he has left his post! I doubt the owner of The Severn will let my brother resume command after this, and who else will give him such opportunity? He has ruined himself over this business of the dream. He has told you of it, I suppose?’

  Anna nodded. ‘An unusual aspect of an investigation, I’ll grant you.’

  ‘It’s madness, my dear Mr Williams, that’s what it is! And I must ask you, beg you, not to indulge his delusions. It won’t help him recover his mind, and I can’t bear any more talk of Joseph. I can’t!’

  She was upset now, and sounding like Captain Ians himself, him she thought mad – her own brother! The cat wanted to get away from her panic, but she held it down, pinned its back. The purr became a growl.

  ‘I have to make Frederick see he’s mistaken. I have to—’

  A low cough. It was Mrs Seldon.

  ‘There’s a visitor.’

  Mrs Hawker’s grip eased and the cat leapt free, knocking over the milk jug as it went. ‘Heavens. Put them in the drawing room, Margaret. Will you excuse me, my dears? We’re rich with visitors today! My husband will be delighted.’

  She was bustling off, the dogs awake and with her, but then Mrs Seldon’s words brought her up short.

  ‘It’s the parson he’s wanting,’ Mrs Seldon said. ‘Says he won’t wait. Won’t come inside even with the wind got up. He’s that teasy.’

  ‘Oh? Who is it, Margaret?’

  ‘The coroner.’

  FIFTEEN

  He was outside the front door, his back to us. He wore a well-made coat to keep out the wind but it was muddy, and one pocket looked to be hanging off. His collar was grey and only half tucked into his coat. His hat he held, and banged against his leg. So soon arrived and yet ready to be off again.

  Mrs Hawker welcomed him, and at this he turned, and when I saw his face I went cold.

  His face – I knew it.

  This man, the coroner, it was the same man who had laid his rough hands on the body of my first love when she lay cold and gone from me. The same who had decided on the manner of her death, who had told the magistrates of it, then gone to the courthouse to tell the judge and the jury men.

  Mr Good. He who spoke the names of death.

  He didn’t know Anna, for though she had used the name Mr Williams when they had met and talked of cuts and blood and all the rest of it, she had looked very different then. But he knew me, of course, for I had told the magistrates of spirits. He didn’t seem a man to forget such a thing.

  ‘You?’ he said. ‘Whatever in the world—’

  ‘Samuel Williams,’ my new love said, and grasped the coroner’s hand before he’d had chance to offer it, for my new love could see I was in a poor way. ‘Here on behalf of Captain Frederick Ians. My wife, Mrs Williams, who I believe you know.’

  ‘I have had the pleasure,’ he said, with great sourness. ‘Married, you say?’

  Mr Good looked from me to Mr Williams and back again, for he had known me as the Shilly who worked on a farm and owned only the dress she stood up in. Mrs Williams was a different creature, and her husband the kind of man who could buy her many dresses. It pleased me to confound him. It pleased me to be so changed.

  ‘We will need to witness the inspection of the body,’ Anna said, in such a voice that meant no countering. ‘And I would be keen to hear your thoughts on the manner of death.’

  ‘If you wish to hear about the ravages of the sea, I’d be only too pleased to share them with you,’ Mr Good said, sounding anything but pleased.

  ‘But you haven’t looked at him yet,’ I said. ‘How can you know what killed him?’

  Mr Good shrugged. ‘From what the parson has told me, in his many letters since the man was discovered, asking me to make haste, there seems little doubt.’

  Anna made a noise that was two parts mirth and one part anger.

  ‘I’ve sent word to Captain Ians at the Bush,’ Mr Good said. ‘He’s the one who has caused this examination to take place, so I think it only right he’s present, in the hope of putting his mind at rest.’

  ‘I hope to God it will,’ Mrs Hawker said.

  ‘Speaking of which, will the parson be joining us?’ Mr Good said. He’d started banging his hat against his leg again. A dull flap, as if he was one of the rooks.

  Mrs Hawker’s hands fluttered to her throat – no rook she, but a wren. ‘I think it best if he doesn’t. His health …’

  ‘Would you come in the parson’s place?’ I asked her, to a great tut from Mr Good.

  Mrs Hawker backed into the porch, stepping on a cat’s tail in the doing. ‘I’m sure the coroner doesn’t need anyone else getting in his way.’

  ‘No he doesn’t!’ Mr Good said loudly.

  ‘And I … I have something I must see to this morning. Forgive me.’ She hurried off into the house.

  ‘I hope the parson doesn’t expect me to keep her indoors.’ It was Mrs Seldon. She must have followed us all to the porch.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  But Mrs Seldon only shook her head and held out a handkerchief to Anna. ‘I should take this, sir. My husband and I did our best for the poor wretch washed in, but this one was looking for the earth long ago.’ Then to Mr Good, ‘I should think you’ll be in and out quick enough this time, Coroner.’

  Anna thanked her and asked if she had another handkerchief for me.

  ‘You surely don’t plan to enter the deadhouse with us, Mrs Williams?’ Mr Good said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well … It’s no place for … ladies.’

  I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself. He didn’t wish to call me a lady, but he didn’t give himself a choice. What he meant was a woman. But I was sore, too, even in my laughing, for here was the reason Anna passed as a man, the reason she couldn’t be her true yellow-haired self who I loved best. It was men who had the keys and decided who should pass.

  ‘Mrs Hawker has the right idea,’ Mr Good said, with such a poor attempt at a smile that it made his face strain. ‘Why don’t you wait quietly in the parlour?’

  ‘My wife must attend,’ Anna said. ‘She is here at Captain Ians’ instruction.’

  Mr Good sighed. ‘Let’s get on with it, then,’ and he was striding away.

  Anna and I went after him. He took the path that cut through the gravestones, climbing all the time. In the daylight the church was there, and beyond that, the sea. The wind was all about us, making the tops of the trees whisper loudly, almost as loud as the rooks who swayed in them. The foulness of the air the night before was worse this morning, and I feared we were making for the cause of it.

  ‘Surely the parson should be here for this?’ I said to Anna. ‘He’s been wanting the coroner to come so badly.’

  ‘And yet now the coroner has come and the parson keeps away.’

  To my surprise, Mr Good didn’t go to the church. He headed back the way Anna and I must have come the night before, towards the road. On the road’s other side, a broad, squat building, whitewashed, with neat windows. Other buildings round it, a tumble of them.

  ‘That must be the Seldons’ farm,’ I said. ‘Is that where the deadhouse is?’

  But Mr Good did not go so far as the road and the farm beyond it, for there was a little roof in the churchy
ard, half hidden by the trees, and as we drew close I saw that it was a small dwelling, with a gate and stile next to it, which marked the proper way into the churchyard. This, then, was the deadhouse, where the parson stowed his dreadful finds.

  And this was where the stench was coming from. The rot couldn’t be held inside. It was so bad it had pushed through the walls, into our mouths. The taste of the dead was hot bile.

  Leaning against the door was Captain Ians. It was only a little time since he had come to Boscastle to see us – two days. But he looked to have grown more fretful since we had spoken. His fingers plucked at his clothes, the same he had worn in Boscastle – the ink stain on his shirt front. He had left the Bush without his coat, though the wind was cold off the sea.

  He greeted me like an old friend. Perhaps he didn’t have many in that part of the world, his sister thinking him mad, his brother-in-law talking so hard against him.

  ‘This is my husband, Mr Williams,’ I said to Captain Ians, ‘who you haven’t met,’ but meaning, of course, that he had, for it was Anna beneath the whiskers.

  Anna grasped the captain’s hand with great firmness, and as she shook it she made sure to look him square in the eye, giving him chance to realise who Mr Williams truly was. ‘Captain Ians, a pleasure,’ she said loudly, for Mr Good’s ears.

  The captain’s eyes widened in his tired, worn face, but he had the sense not to exclaim his understanding.

  ‘Have you slept at all?’ Anna asked him.

  ‘How can I?’ the captain said. ‘If I should dream of death again, who knows what horror will befall some innocent soul?’

  Mr Good gave the captain a dark look at these words, then took a handkerchief from his pocket. Anna and I tied each other’s handkerchiefs across our faces.

  ‘If you should faint, Mrs Williams,’ Mr Good said, his voice a little muffled by the cloth, ‘be so good as to do it in the corner, out of my way. And if there’s any talk of spirits—’

  ‘We haven’t got all day,’ Anna said.

  With a humph, Mr Good opened the door.

  I had smelt the like before, when rats died beneath the floorboards of the cottage where I’d lived as a child, but I’d forgotten how the smell of death could make you wish you were dead too, and I was all regret for my fulsome breakfast. Anna, too, looked to find it bad, but she had seen many bodies in London, for that was a place of murder, so she took my hand and we stepped inside the deadhouse.

  Mr Good had been right about the tightness of it. A table took up nearly all the deadhouse. I couldn’t look at what it bore, so I looked at everything else. Behind the table, a bench, and shelves above, crammed with jars and pots, heaps of nails. A ball of string. In the corner, a rake. Two pails. The deadhouse was a shed for keeping outdoor things, as well as for bodies on their way to the ground.

  I looked at the table, couldn’t look away any longer. It was fashioned from planks set over two upturned casks. And on this table was a lumpen shape covered by sheets, with boots poking out one end. Sand on the boots still. Little crumbs of it, and that was terrible to see. It made me think of this man as walking, breathing, thinking. He had been on the sand. He had touched the sand, and now he lay here, dead, but the sand was still on his boots. The sand was still in this world though the spirit of the man who’d touched it was not.

  Mr Good stood at the other end of the sheets. There were patches of brown on them that made me think of the damp on our parlour wall back in Boscastle, but these patches were stinking. It was the seeps from the body beneath.

  Mr Good took the sheet in his hands and made ready to pull it off but Captain Ians was at his elbow, in his way. With gentleness Anna guided the captain back a pace, to stand with us. He swayed on his feet.

  ‘If everyone is quite ready?’ Mr Good said, his voice muffled by the handkerchief.

  Anna nodded. I told myself, be brave, Shilly.

  Mr Good pulled back the sheet.

  SIXTEEN

  The boots, Shilly, look at the boots. That was what I said to myself. The boots were ordinary things – the leather, the sand. Then I looked a little up his legs. Trousers, of some soft cloth. Dirty, but not torn. And then to his waist – a belt, a buckle, still fastened. But then things became bad. His shirt was torn, and so was his flesh beneath.

  This man had been carved to pieces.

  I made myself keep looking. Up to his chest, raked open, the gouges inches deep, red and wet. One arm hacked back, the white of bone where a chunk had gone completely, as if some huge creature had bitten him. But there was something there. Some mark on the last bit of the skin before the bite. Green, it was. No bigger than a shilling. I tried to look closer but the light was too poor and then Mr Good bustled me out of his way. The dead man’s other arm was only a little slashed about the shoulder. A nothing wound, when seen with the rest.

  His neck, which was strangely as it should be, no marks at all. A mole, I saw there. The lump where his Adam’s apple had come to lay, the last time he’d swallowed, when he was screaming, surely, in pain at what was done to him? I let my poor eyes rest, looked to the window, to the snip of sky there. Then I made myself set off again in the looking at the body, the last part of the climb.

  There was his head, not his face, for that was gone. No eyes. No nose. A deeper gouge where his mouth had once been. A fleck of white there – a tooth? His ears left, but they looked so strange, without the other parts a face should have, I almost wished they’d been taken too. And up to his hair. Some tufts left, matted with blood. That would have been harder for Mrs Seldon and her husband to wash out. How in the Lord’s name had they tended this poor soul? Poured buckets of water over him. Sluiced him clean.

  What else could you do with such a body that was more outside itself than in? But what had gone with the wiping and the water? What traces of the truth? Anna had taught me the importance of these.

  Captain Ians was staring down at the ruin of the man he believed his brother. The man who his sister thought a stranger. The captain seemed unmoved, just stared, swayed, and I wondered if he’d fallen asleep at last, on his feet with his eyes open. But then he sniffed and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and I knew he was awake and made mute by grief.

  Mr Good was peering at the cuts, poked them with a little stick he’d brought with him.

  ‘The damage is extensive, I will grant the parson that. His letters didn’t exaggerate. But this is consistent with a body dragged back and forwards across the rocks. You’ve seen the rocks offshore here?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Go down there. This kind of injury, it’ll soon make sense.’

  ‘Show me on the body,’ Anna said.

  He looked at her, she looked at him, then he seemed to decide he’d be quicker away if he gave in to her. He used his stick to push back a flap of skin on the man’s chest.

  ‘See the gradations here?’

  Anna looked but I didn’t dare.

  ‘It’s the sawing action of the rocks.’ He let go the skin and it landed with a wet flop. ‘Quite as expected. Very few of the poor souls the parson collects are drowned.’

  ‘Really?’ Anna said.

  ‘The rocks get them before the sea has its chance.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Anna said. ‘There – by the rib. A shine.’ She peered this way and that in the ruin of the man’s chest.

  ‘Nothing significant, I’m sure,’ said Mr Good. He put his hat back on. ‘I’ve seen all I need to—’

  ‘We need more light. Shilly, get that candle lit.’

  I did as she asked and then I held it for her, trying not to look at the now gleaming parts of the man beneath it. Anna grabbed Mr Good’s stick.

  ‘Now, see here,’ he said, but she wasn’t listening. Of course she wasn’t, because this was her best work – things to see and touch and shine lights on.

  She used the stick to pry out the thing she had seen, that now revealed itself in her poking – a thin bit of metal. Two inches long. She got h
old of it and held it to the candle.

  A key.

  ‘And how would you explain this?’ Anna said, handing the key to Mr Good.

  He shrugged. ‘The deceased likely had it on his person when the rocks carved him up, drove it into his chest.’

  Captain Ians gave a low moan.

  ‘My apologies, Captain,’ Mr Good said hastily.

  ‘Even as the water was swirling round him?’ Anna said. ‘Through him, even.’

  At this, the captain sank to the floor, but Anna carried on.

  ‘I do not believe this key could have remained inside the corpse as it was washed in to shore. It must have been left with the body after death, either by design or accident. Surely you see—’

  ‘It is of no consequence,’ Mr Good said, and tossed the key onto the bench. He snatched the stick back from Anna. ‘The rocks did the damage.’

  ‘But there are no signs the body spent time in the water,’ Anna said. ‘If the rocks were responsible then he would have been in the water for at least some time to come into contact with them.’

  ‘Ah, but you see,’ Mr Good said, moving to the door, ‘the speed a wreck can happen, he might have been washed straight in and discovered before the tide could get hold of him again. I’m sure the captain will support that view. Captain?’

  Captain Ians was still slumped on the floor, his back against the wall. He murmured something that sounded like yes.

  ‘There we are, then,’ Mr Good said.

  ‘The time death took him?’ Anna asked.

  Mr Good hmmed and hawed, and was about to speak when Captain Ians lurched to his feet and said, ‘He has been dead three days.’

  ‘And how can you be certain of that?’ Mr Good said.

  ‘Because of the dream!’ the captain insisted.

  At this Mr Good looked at me, thinking this to do with spirits, I guessed. And it might have been, for what were mermaids but a kind of spirit?

  ‘The dream was what brought me back here,’ the captain said, ‘but the death had yet to happen then. I arrived in Morwenstow as the body was brought up from the shore and I knew from the dream that he’d been killed the night before. The time elapsed was the same in dreaming and in waking life. He was killed, then found almost at once, and has been here ever since. Three days dead.’