The Mermaid's Call

by Katherine Stansfield

  Mrs Seldon was looking at us again, and looking stern at our whispering while the parson spoke. I picked up a hymnal and held it open before our faces. I couldn’t have read it, of course, but it would hide us from those we watched.

  But Anna snatched the book from me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘It’s so our mouths shall be hidden, and our detective plans likewise.’

  ‘That only works if the book is the right way up, Shilly.’ She turned it, and the letters on the front looked more like I knew them to be. ‘Now, what was I saying?’

  ‘We’re looking for those who haven’t come,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. And those who did come, how do they behave?’

  ‘So seeing who is scritching, then?’

  ‘And who isn’t. The signs of relief can be loud as those of pain. The same is true of guilt, Shilly.’

  ‘What does guilt look like?’

  ‘It can take many forms.’

  ‘Well we’ll have a job of it, then!’

  ‘Keep your voice down. It’s a delicate science. You must look for changes in sweating, in the colour of a face. See where gazes are directed.’

  That sounded a hard business to me, for weren’t people always blushing and sweating and looking about them? That was what bodies did, the guilty and the good. We were doing some of it now, looking at the parson. Where would it end? With everyone a detective?

  I shook my head and pushed the hymnal out of the way, into Anna’s face. I’d do my best. I could do no more.

  The church wasn’t even half full. Mrs Hawker was seated at the front, with her brother Captain Ians beside her. They had made friends again. He must have told her about the body. The Seldons, all three, were a few rows behind Mrs Hawker and the captain. And the rest of them in church? Working people. Farmers. Some labourers. No fishermen, there being no harbour nearer than Bude.

  Parson Hawker loomed over us all from the pulpit and his voice was loud enough for a full church, a bigger church, for the entire Kingdom of Heaven, where he said the poor wretch was bound. Beneath the parson was the coffin. A plain box, set on a trestle. No finery spent on the man inside, for until the day before he’d been thought a sailor washed in from far away. Anna and I had found the truth too late for anything better to be given him. Joseph Ians needed to go into the ground before the bad air of his body gave sickness to everyone in Morwenstow. The smell of the deadhouse was with us in the church, the wormwood no use against it. I pinched my nose and hoped the service would be swift.

  It wasn’t. The parson spoke lengthy of redeeming and rising and suchlike, and spoke of Joseph by name. Spoke of the prodigal son and the need for forgiveness. It looked to me that the captain and Mrs Hawker bent their heads lower at this, but perhaps that was what everyone did when such things were said at funerals in churches. Perhaps I should have done it too, were I not detecting.

  Then the parson said we would stand to sing and I was glad for the change, for I liked a song. Who didn’t? Those with moor stone for hearts. But church hymns were not so sweet as chapel ones. I’d sung both in my time. Church songs were gloomy as the buildings that housed the singers. I liked the cheerfulness of chapel tunes, the jounce of them. Tunes I was sure Mrs Seldon and her daughter liked. But that suspicion I was keeping in my pocket, for I didn’t think the parson could know of the Seldons’ ways or he wouldn’t have them in his house.

  But a song was a song and it would do us good to lift our voices to the Lord and stop the rooks’ noise outside being so loud. Guilt might be carried in singing as well as sweating, and I should find it there. I resolved to listen very hard.

  The hymn we were to sing was called ‘Ride On, Ride On, In Majesty’, the parson said. I didn’t know it but most in the church did as from the first it was sung quite hearty, with Mrs Seldon’s dreadful voice drowning out the others. Then another voice rose clear over the rest, over even Mrs Seldon’s squawk. It soared high above them all. A woman’s voice. One I knew.

  It was the voice that called. I pressed my head to the coolness of the wood to ease the thrum there once more. Would that it didn’t shape into my name. Would that no one called for that poor wretch—

  ‘Shilly?’

  There it was – she had called me by name and I would walk into the water. I put my fingers in my ears to stave off drowning long as I could.

  And then I was rising. The waves bore me up, into Mr Williams’ face, and Anna’s, there, beneath it. She who had hold of my elbow.

  ‘You’ve never heard a soprano before?’ she said, and her words were things to cling to in the thrum of my head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The high notes – that’s a soprano, and a fine one at that. The parson was right.’

  ‘But that’s the voice I’ve heard, Anna – the one that calls me to the sea. That wants to drown me!’

  ‘Really? But …’ She looked to the front of the church, and I looked likewise.

  The singing was pouring from Mrs Hawker’s mouth.

  Was it truly her voice I’d heard in the wind? Was she the creature who waited in the swell, who carved bodies with her claws? When Captain Ians had dreamt it was a woman who’d lured his brother to his death, was it his sister he was thinking of?

  Anna’s face was all concern and I feared she might give me more of the laudanum, so I did my best to slow my breath, to think. Mrs Hawker stood, on two legs, so how could she be a creature of the sea? But if such creatures could change their shape when they had need, like the cunning women who ran themselves into hares to better outrun their chasers … The barman at the Bush had told me that the woman betrayed by the squire’s nephew had done the same. After her death she’d sunk through the earth of the churchyard and into the sea beneath. Who was to say that Mrs Hawker couldn’t do the same to change herself, and others like her in these parts?

  At last the singing stopped and everyone sat down again. The parson was in his pulpit, My Most Righteous Cat seated on the floor beneath him. The cat looked up at his master, as the parson looked up to his and called upon him, the Lord, to spare Morwenstow from the ravages of the sea.

  ‘For your servant is bowed by the task, for he is … he …’ The parson wiped his mouth and I peered at him in the gloom of the church. Was that sweat above his lip, around his nose? The sweat of guilt? A moan from him, cut short as he cleared his throat. ‘In the darkest of hours, we beseech thee, merciful Father, to look … look upon …’

  And then he was desperate to escape the pulpit, fumbling himself from its high wooden clutches, which sent My Most Righteous Cat racing to the back of the church, his tail high in alarm. The parson crashed onto his hands and knees, then laid himself flat on the cold slates. His face was pressed against them, his brown gown a puddle of cloth around him. He moaned again.

  I looked to Anna who was watching, her mouth wide open.

  ‘Is that what guilt looks like?’ I said.

  ‘It might be,’ she muttered. ‘But why does no one help him?’

  We were the only ones shocked by the parson lying on the floor, by his noise. The rest of those in the church looked on idly, if they looked at all. Most were talking to their neighbours, in quiet tones of everyday talk, not surprise. The woman in front of us said something about the beer gone bad at the Bush, and the woman with her cursed this news.

  ‘Should we help?’ I said. ‘It seems a cruelty to leave him there. He’s wretched.’

  ‘That he is,’ Anna said. ‘But it’s not our place to—Oh, there we are, look. Mrs Hawker is assisting him.’

  She was indeed. Mrs Hawker placed a hand on her husband’s back and leant in to his ear. I couldn’t hear her words over the rest of the talk in the church and they seemed to do no good anyway for the parson didn’t get up, only moaned louder.

  ‘Do you think his heart has given out?’ I said.

  ‘No – his jaw is working just as always.’

  ‘He’s confessing? Maybe we should get closer—’

  Anna pul
led me back. ‘Let’s wait. Something tells me this display is a regular occurrence.’

  Mrs Hawker said something to Captain Ians and he got up to help her, with some reluctance, I thought. The captain was very grey about the face. Together they heaved the parson to his feet. Mrs Hawker patted his cheek, which cheered the parson and he was on his way again as if nothing had happened.

  ‘You were right,’ I said to Anna. ‘He does do such things regular.’

  She shook her head in wonderment. ‘How long will he run on now?’

  ‘We might be here all day.’

  Now it was Anna’s turn to lift her eyes to the heavens. ‘Spare us that.’

  The service did indeed run on, and on, and on. There was no more of what Anna called thee at ricks, but not much to keep me watchful either. A man at the back took a newspaper from his coat. The cats had fallen asleep by the font. My eye was drawn to the slate slabs of the floor, for there were letters there. Now that I had some learning of them, I found that my eye often caught on letters, even when I wasn’t trying to see them. It was like they were stones in a path that tripped me. But this was a good kind of tripping for it was practice, and Anna said I needed that more than anything.

  The letters I saw on the slates were put together to make words, and some of them I knew. There was LORD – that was carved many times, and likewise ‘rest’ and ‘wife’. Beside them were other shapes I knew were numbers, but I hadn’t got to learning them properly, and I didn’t think they were so important as words for knowing things. I wouldn’t trouble myself with them. There was only so much a body could do in a day, and one who was meant to be detecting too.

  Reading the words on the slate left me glum for they made me think of Mathilda still in Boscastle, and my letter to her still unwritten. I would make Anna write it later. As soon as Parson Hawker had freed us from the church. He’d been in such a hurry to get the dead man buried, rushing Mr Good to come and look at him, and now he was taking all the time in the world to commend the corpse to the Lord. The air was more fouled by the minute from the corpse’s seeping, and I was more tired, for detecting was hard.

  Sometimes it was more than I could bear.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The funeral had at last ended and all in church had followed Parson Hawker and the coffin to the churchyard. We were the last to leave and found the captain not far from the church door. He leant on an old slate gravestone that was itself leaning. He still hadn’t slept – I saw that in his eyes, on his skin. Somehow smelt it on him too. Could he not bear to be at the graveside as his brother was lowered into the earth? Looking at the state of him, it might have been he just wasn’t able to walk that far.

  ‘It must be some comfort to know your brother has been laid to rest in the soil of his home.’ I looked over to where the parson stood beside fresh-turned earth, Mrs Hawker with him. ‘He’s not being buried under the trees on the south side, where the sailors go, those whose names aren’t known. There’s many denied such mercy in this world.’

  ‘Mercy, Mrs Williams? I suppose so,’ the captain said. ‘To think that if you hadn’t discovered the gobbet and proved my belief about Joseph being the dead man, my brother would have been buried in sight of the family plots but not with them – that would have grieved me. You have done both he and I a good service, but you must forgive my low spirits. It is difficult to find relief in my brother’s final resting place when it was coming home that killed him.’ And the captain, too, looked across at his sister and his brother-in-law by the graveside. ‘Joseph came back to Morwenstow and he was murdered.’

  ‘Tell me, Captain,’ Anna said, in a voice made to sound reasonable but which was anything but. ‘When you engaged our services, why did you not tell us that Parson Hawker was brother-in-law to you and Joseph?’

  He was confused by this. ‘I didn’t think it important. It made no odds. Joseph was dead. That I knew.’

  ‘But it is a significant detail to omit, Captain, that the deceased may be related to a suspect in the case.’

  ‘A suspect? To whom do you refer?’

  Anna didn’t answer straight away. A useful breath to take. Then she said, ‘Why, the parson, of course.’

  He straightened and made some effort to brush down his quite filthy coat. ‘Perhaps it was wishful thinking on my part not to mention the connection between myself and Robert.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘In a perfect world I wouldn’t find myself brother-in-law to Robert. He is not a relation one would wish.’

  ‘He is an eccentric, I’ll grant you,’ Anna said. ‘His behaviour in church today …’

  The captain shook his head. ‘Such things I could bear, if he behaved with decency towards my sister.’

  ‘He hasn’t?’ I said.

  ‘Not since the day they met.’ The captain turned his face from the churchyard, and from the couple now making their slow way home. ‘He has used her poorly, squandering her inheritance on lavishness he can ill afford.’

  ‘You mean the things he has built here – the school, the vicarage,’ I said.

  ‘And the lives they live. You are staying with them. You cannot fail to have noticed.’

  He looked to each of us in turn, and I wondered if Anna regretted the fine port and finer tobacco she’d enjoyed the night before.

  ‘And as if that wasn’t enough, I find it unconscionable that he should live in such a manner when his parishioners, the very people he is here to minister to, suffer such hardships as they do. Look around you. This is a poor parish. And yet the parson,’ and here the captain allowed himself a brief but hate-filled glance towards the vicarage, ‘smokes the finest tobacco and demands his own unique supply of writing paper from the most expensive firms in London! He’ll be in the poorhouse himself before long. That I could countenance, but the fact he will take my sister with him …’

  This speech was too much for the captain in his weakened state, and he clutched the gravestone. How long until he was in his own grave?

  ‘I take it you’ve shared these fears with Mrs Hawker?’ Anna asked.

  ‘I’ve tried. My letters receive only defensiveness in return. All I’ve achieved is to drive a wedge between us and so deepen my sister’s love for this devil of a man.’

  ‘And this has worsened since you returned,’ I said, ‘with the claim the dead man was Joseph?’

  ‘It has, Mrs Williams. And so I fear to say more, which leaves me spouting bitterness to strangers. Forgive me. I must learn to guard my tongue, or it will be my fault the shares are lost.’

  ‘Shares?’ Anna said.

  ‘That’s all my sister has left of her inheritance. And not for long, if Robert has his way. But perhaps …’ His gaze darted between us. ‘Perhaps you could help me in my petition, make my sister see.’

  ‘If you would tell us a little more about the share arrangement,’ Anna said, ‘then I’m sure we could find our way to—’

  ‘I am grateful to you, truly,’ he said, and he looked so pitiful, this old sea captain, clinging to a gravestone, looking quite dead himself with tiredness.

  ‘We’ll sit over here, shall we?’ I led the way to the bench beside the church where we would be sheltered from the wind, and from unwanted gazes.

  When we were seated, the captain began.

  ‘There is a ship that trades from Bude, The Eliza.’ Captain Ians rested his head against the wall of the church but did not close his eyes, despite the tiredness that lay so heavy on him. ‘She’s a small concern, moving slate, sand for the fields, but she’s a reliable old girl and has served our family well for many years.’

  ‘You own her?’ I said.

  ‘In part. She’s divided into shares, which are owned equally by four parties – myself, my sister Charlotte, and Joseph. Our father left them to us.’

  ‘And the fourth in the partnership?’ Anna said.

  ‘Sally Grey, a widow. She was a dear friend of both my parents and tended my mother in her last illness. Such
kindness my father didn’t forget, and he left provision for her in his will – a quarter of the shares in The Eliza.’ The captain looked across the fields, to the sea beyond. ‘I’ve not been a good friend to Mrs Grey since leaving. My father would be ashamed at my neglect. But after so long away … Well. I must call on her soon, once all is settled here.’

  ‘Mrs Grey is nearby?’ I asked.

  ‘At Coombe,’ he said. ‘She has been unwell lately, so Charlotte tells me. A bad case of the pox.’

  ‘Best you do stay away, then,’ I said. ‘You’ve got enough to concern you without that.’

  ‘And what is the parson’s position in this business of the shares?’ Anna said.

  The captain gripped the side of the bench. ‘He pesters Charlotte to make her shares over to him, but that would not be … wise.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Because Robert would be forced to sell them before too long. Though The Eliza’s trade is small, she brings in a healthy annual sum. My mind is made easier knowing that Charlotte has that income to defray Robert’s expenses. Without it …’ He shook his head. ‘The wisest course would be for my sister to make her shares over to me for safe keeping.’

  ‘Which would give you the controlling share,’ Anna said.

  ‘True, but there’s safety in that.’

  Safety for you, Captain Ians, I thought but didn’t say. What I did say was, ‘And what of Joseph’s earnings from The Eliza? You’ve not seen hide nor hair of him for years. Where’s his money gone?’

  ‘It’s been saved for him,’ the captain said. ‘Charlotte and I have been very careful in that regard. We did so in the hope he would return, or at least send word of his whereabouts.’ The captain quickly wiped his eyes. ‘And now we know exactly where he is.’

  ‘What will happen to Joseph’s savings now?’ Anna said.

  ‘In the terms of the agreement, as laid down by my father, the money saved for Joseph will come to me.’

  ‘And do you know the sum of this legacy?’ Anna said.

  After a pause, the captain answered, and quietly at that. ‘It is somewhere in the region of two thousand pounds.’