The Mermaid's Call

by Katherine Stansfield

  The cart pulled up outside the vicarage. The driver was sore for he’d taken the case to the Bush first, where Anna had told Davey to send it, of course, and then he’d had to come on further, hearing that the owner was at the vicarage.

  He fair threw the case to the ground. It was more battered than the last time I’d seen it, as if it had been thrown from many other carts since it had been thrown from poor Davey’s. But it was locked still, so that was something. All Anna’s other selves stowed safe within it.

  As we didn’t know the way to Coombe, where we were to find Inchin Ben, I asked the driver. He had a young face but few teeth left in his head.

  ‘Two ways you can go,’ he said. ‘Along the cliff there, past the parson’s hut and only turn inland when you reach Duckpool. Or take the road here and go past Tonacombe and Stanbury. ’Tis the same distance.’

  ‘How long to walk there?’

  He licked one of his few teeth left. ‘An hour, I should say.’

  Anna came out then, and together we carried the case up to our room.

  ‘The driver said the way to Coombe is inland,’ I said. ‘The road.’ I wasn’t going back to the cliff edge if I could help it. If I should hear the woman’s voice again, then I wanted no chance to throw myself onto the knife rocks or cast myself into the sea. A field would suit me better if my body should act wilful against me. Turnips were not so bad to fall on.

  We set down the case and then my hand was on the door of our room ready to leave, for I was thinking we would be off now, as we had planned. But Anna stayed me.

  ‘I’ve an idea we should take others to see this Inchin Ben of Coombe, Shilly.’ She took the little key from the chain at her neck and opened the case. I remembered then the key I carried, the one found inside Joseph Ians, and felt for it in my pocket – a real pocket this time, not the one in my head. The key was still there, but we hadn’t yet found the lock.

  Anna threw back the lid of the case and clapped her hands. It was like she was greeting old friends, and in a way, she was. All these other parts of herself.

  And parts of me, too, for she said we should both go to Coombe as men!

  ‘You think Inchin Ben will like men better than women to talk to?’ I said.

  ‘It seems a safe guess. Mrs Seldon has led us to believe he’s a grizzled sailor made an outcast by his community.’ Anna knelt by the case and began to sort through the layers of cloth. ‘He mightn’t have had much to do with women. Better to assume his stance and go as men than risk going all the way to Coombe as ourselves and then be turned away.’

  I sat on the bed. I hadn’t ever passed as a man before. Anna had only lent me women, one woman, Mrs Williams, who was my great favourite. Anna enjoyed her men, I knew that. To put them on wasn’t just for detecting, for speaking to those who would spill their secrets more easily to men than to women. Men’s clothes gave her something else. Something I wished I could give her. If only she’d let me.

  ‘Ah – here we are!’ She pulled out a pair of short coats made of a dark-blue wool and laid them gently on the bed. Then she was back to rootling.

  I was handed two pairs of trousers, not breeches, for these were long. One pair was grey and the other cream. Then there were shirts and waistcoats, and a heap of white linen strips. I feared they would be tied around my neck.

  She eyed me poking the strips. ‘It’s not just the clothes, Shilly.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s who wears them. You’re always telling me. So, who will we say we are to get Inchin Ben to speak to us?’

  She took one of the coats into her lap and sat back on her heels. ‘Well, the belief hereabouts has been that the man found on the beach was a sailor washed in from a wreck. I doubt Inchin Ben will have heard the truth yet. Mrs Seldon made him out to be quite the pariah, so it seems unlikely he was at the funeral.’ Anna smoothed the coat’s cloth along her thigh. ‘If there was a wreck, then the owners of the vessel would make enquiries. They would send their agents.’

  ‘Why? What good would it do once the ship had been lost?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re familiar with the concept of insurance, Shilly, but it’s a significant matter. If a ship is lost, the owners can make a claim for her value. Can get their money back. Or some of it, at least. But they need information about the circumstances of the loss to make that claim.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about lost ships,’ I said, thinking this might be part of her past. This might be her way of telling me who she was, what had been her life after her foundling start with the butcher and his wife. For all I knew she might have been a sea captain herself. I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  But she just shrugged. ‘Such matters are often in the papers. It’s a common enough occurrence, sadly. But that will help us today. Inchin Ben will find no strangeness in such visitors as shipping agents.’ She stood and held out her hand to me. ‘Time to get dressed.’

  My trousers were too long so she pinned them. Likewise the shirt, which bagged about my shoulders and looked foolish with the waistcoat on top, the shirt all puffed out. I wasn’t made for Anna’s men, and I told her so, hoping she wouldn’t make me do it, for I had no wish to be rid of Mrs Williams’ long red curls, her fetching mole painted by her mouth.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Shilly. These clothes weren’t cut for you, that’s all.’

  ‘Who were they cut for?’

  ‘Why, for me, of course!’

  But the stitches in them told another story, one I saw by detecting – the very thing she’d taught me. I saw the tucks and the darts. Anna had made the clothes in her travelling case fit her, using her gift with needle and thread. Because they hadn’t fitted her so well before that. Because they had belonged to someone else, and who were those souls that now went without their coats of good wool, their silken petticoats? Perhaps she was a thief as well as a seamstress and a sea captain. My list of Anna Drake’s talents was getting longer by the day.

  The waistcoat had some curious ties on the inside of the cloth, and the trousers were made likewise too, for all down the seams of the legs were little buttons and loops. I had come across such things before with Anna’s clothes. They were made to turn to purposes most other clothes didn’t, and I was sure those purposes would come clear soon enough.

  She bade me put the coat on then tied one of the linen strips around my neck, just as I had feared. A stock. And it was as if someone’s fingers were at my throat and they were trying to crush my breath.

  ‘It’s too tight,’ I said, scrabbling at it. ‘Can’t my shipping agent have lost his stock?’

  ‘No, he can’t. And you’ll get used to it.’ She stepped back and eyed me. ‘I wasn’t sure this would work, but you know, you make a convincing man, Shilly.’

  I didn’t take that as a kindness.

  ‘It’s fortunate you don’t have much fat on you,’ she said, and resettled the coat on my shoulders. ‘Your shape is very …’

  ‘Very what?’ I felt I could barely get enough air to make my words come.

  ‘Flat,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Well thank you very much!’ I put my hands to my chest. She was right, of course. Barely anything to cup. ‘It would be harder for Mathilda, I suppose.’

  She was rootling in the case again and didn’t answer.

  ‘Her figure is more fulsome than mine,’ I said. ‘You’d have to bind her breasts.’

  She took two small bags from the case. Bags of hair, I knew.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said.

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘We must write to Mathilda today. Promise me we will.’

  ‘Of course.’ But she wouldn’t meet my eye.

  ‘I can’t do it by myself yet. You know I can’t. You must help me.’

  ‘Lean forward. I must take these hairpins out.’

  I did as she said, for the pins held Mrs Williams’ hair in place and I couldn’t very well wear that as a shipping agent. Leaning thusly meant I could no longer see An
na’s face.

  ‘Please, Anna. I need to know she’s well.’

  ‘Mathilda is in safe hands with the Yeos. You mustn’t worry, Shilly.’

  ‘But I saw her, in a dream. She was—’

  ‘It would be harder with the three of us here, wouldn’t it? And needlessly so. We’re better as a pair, you and I.’

  ‘You mean for detecting? Only for detecting we should be without her?’

  A pause. My heart began to race.

  She yanked a pin free. ‘Got it. Of course I mean for detecting. You mustn’t worry. Now, lift your head.’

  Mrs Williams’ hair was taken from me. In return, I was gifted a wig of black hair that hung long and ticklish to my ears. Anna put on one of yellow.

  ‘The colours are to work with our own features,’ she said, ‘rather than against them. Now, the final touches.’

  She got her paintbox and greased me. No redness on my cheeks and lips now, as Mrs Williams enjoyed. Instead, my eyebrows grew thicker, darker, and my lips paled. My cheeks grew whiskers, as did Anna’s. I looked at my hands. Though she hadn’t touched them, they looked different somehow. They didn’t seem my own. And my stockinged feet likewise. A flutter came into my belly. A flutter that was good and bad, sad and keen.

  ‘Take a turn about the room,’ Anna said, and she sat on the bed to watch me walk up and down beside it. The trousers gave a strange feeling to my legs, for there was cloth sliding between them, but, I had to own, they were kind to moving. I had no bunching like I did with my skirt.

  ‘I should think it would be easy to run in such clothes,’ I said. ‘Easier than skirts.’

  Anna nodded, and lay back on the pillows. There was a look on her face I hadn’t seen for some time. For too long. A look that made me slow my walking. Made me run my hands up and down my coated chest.

  ‘And better to climb things too,’ I said. ‘Trees and such.’

  I lifted one leg onto the bed and leant into the stretch. Leant towards Anna. I ran my fingers up and down my thigh. And then her hand joined mine and she reached for my trouser buttons.

  ‘Come here,’ she said, and caught me.

  I let her pull me from the clothes she had dressed me in. She took my breast in her mouth, put her fingers to the part of me she knew better than any other. I closed my eyes. In that darkness, I was made a shining thing.

  THIRTY-ONE

  We were later starting for Coombe than we’d meant, but neither of us minded. If darkness should fall before we were back at the vicarage and we stumbled to our ruin, I found I didn’t care. I didn’t fear it. For Anna and I had lain together. If today was the day my life ended, so be it. I would die in happiness.

  The vicarage was still quiet as the pair of shipping agents crept down the stairs. They were light on their stockinged feet as they made their way to the porch and found their boots. One of them whispered to the other, what of that letter left on the hall table for you? Who is writing to you, Anna? Is it one of your other loves, some stranger before me? But the yellow-haired man kissed his companion’s words away before the front door and all was silence again.

  And then the door was opened, and they were two men on their way to see about a ship. If their hands should touch as they walked, their fingers brushing as if seeking the heat and scent of each other still on their skin, well – who was to know? Only those two – a secret shared.

  As I closed the door behind us, I heard a woman, sobbing, deep within the house. Mrs Hawker mourning her brother. Time for us to find Inchin Ben of Coombe, the taker of other people’s luck and the finder of Joseph Ians.

  We walked close to one another. Closer than we had in many months. I carried with me the feeling of her lips on my breasts. And she – did she feel, still, the flick of my tongue between her legs? She wouldn’t speak of it, and that was no surprise, for she couldn’t, didn’t have the words. Never had done, for as long as I had known her. But that didn’t matter. What was between us wasn’t silence. It was speaking without words. It was breathing without breath.

  It was us. It was we. And on we went, together, to Coombe.

  The road took us past some large, grand houses on the way. Anna told me that the signs at their gates bore the names the driver had given me as landmarks. Stanbury and Tonacombe. Manor houses. And we passed some low houses, too, poor things of moor stone with windows no bigger than my two hands placed together. The kind I had lived in. Before Anna. I walked closer to her still. Thankful.

  She took out her pipe and filled it. The air around us was soon rich with a smell I recognised.

  ‘The parson had some of his fancy tobacco to spare, then?’ I said.

  Anna blew a plume of smoke into the air with great joy. ‘He did! And for that I’m so thankful, I might just offer up a prayer.’

  There were not many people about. Few passed us on the road, and none of them on a horse or in any sort of carriage. They were all working people, their corduroy and their worsted muddied and patched. And I one of them, hid twice over – a working woman passing as a better man.

  It was a pleasant enough walk through fields and along lanes. Much better than the drop of the cliff, the wind seeking to whisk us into the sea. Much better to have the trees lining our way. But the trees were bent over, stunted things, like old men broken by work. As I imagined my father to be, if he were still living. I didn’t often think of him. It laid me low. So I sent the thought away by telling Anna I knew nothing of shipping agents and would likely be no use at all in making Inchin Ben believe I was one.

  ‘For you’re always telling me, Anna, the clothes aren’t enough. The wearer has to speak the right words, have the right learning for such a person.’

  ‘True,’ she said, and drew on her pipe. ‘But your young man could be rather shy.’

  ‘Oh, could he?’ I said.

  ‘I think he might have to be, Shilly. Or aloof.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He thinks himself better than others. Takes on an air of coolness. Not friendly. Can you manage that?’

  ‘It’d be easier than knowing about en sur ance.’

  ‘I dare say it would, and a person can be crafted from silence as much as they can from their noise.’

  ‘So they can. You yourself, Anna.’

  ‘Take this for a stretch, would you?’ She handed me her black bag that she took everywhere detecting. It wasn’t heavy, but it was bulky and made difficult to hold with all that was stuffed in it.

  ‘What have you got in here?’

  ‘Essentials, Shilly. You’ll see why later.’

  ‘Letters?’

  She wouldn’t meet my eye.

  ‘There’s something in them you don’t want to share,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  She walked a little faster. ‘You’re right. I don’t want you to read my correspondence, but that’s simply because it concerns a private matter. A trifling, dull, tedious matter, but one that is mine alone. If you had letters, I wouldn’t try to read those.’

  ‘I don’t get any letters.’

  ‘But you will one day! Just because words exist, it doesn’t mean you have a right to all of them, Shilly. Not all the letters in the world are for you.’

  I supposed she was right. Wasn’t she allowed her secrets? She had let me know her again today, in a different way, a better way, and that was all that mattered in the end.

  The road sloped down and then there were more cottages, and these were poor indeed, with holes in the thatch and foul-smelling water pooled at the walls. As we walked on, there came coughing. It came from a dwelling ahead of us. We heard the burden of the lungs of the people living there before we had even passed their door. There sounded many. A whole family, perhaps. The door itself had fallen open. It looked to be missing hinges. Anna’s steps slowed as we came level with it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  ‘Surely we should see if they need help.’ She peered in the doorway. ‘Hello?’

  The air was bad within. It made my no
se burn. I grabbed Anna’s arm and pulled her back onto the road, put myself between her and the door.

  ‘There’s poor people everywhere, Anna. If we stop to help them, we’ll never get to the end of this case.’

  Anna shook me off. ‘That’s a hard line to take. What if there’s someone in there who just needs a drink of water, something to help their throat?’

  ‘And what if there is and they give you that cough?’

  That stopped her going in, but she didn’t start walking again.

  ‘I’m disappointed at your lack of charity, Shilly. It behoves us to—’

  A noise within the cottage made us both start.

  A figure shuffled into the doorway. A man, dreadful thin, with long hair and a long beard, both these bits of him straggly.

  ‘Forgive me, sir. I was up with the children. You’ve come from the parson?’

  There was a light of hope in his crusted-up eyes. He had a blanket wrapped round his shoulders, and as he came closer, he leant into a corner of it to cover his cough. The blanket’s colour, its weave – I knew it. It was the same as was on our bed at the vicarage.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Anna said. ‘We were simply passing and heard signs someone was unwell.’

  As this pitiful creature stood before us, these words seemed foolish. Unwell – the man was surely dying! And more of them inside, too, for the coughs above rattled down to us below like terrible rain.

  ‘Ah, there we are.’ The man shuffled back. ‘He’ll be along later himself, no doubt.’

  ‘Parson Hawker? He visits you often?’ I said.

  ‘When he can, though he’s none too well himself, dear of him.’

  He began to cough and doubled over, and once again I saw Morwenstow’s bowed trees made man before me. Anna moved to steady him, but he waved her off and propped himself against the ruined door.

  ‘He’s a good man, the parson. When he heard we was wisht again, and my youngest taken, he came on his little pony with all he could carry.’

  ‘How kind of him,’ Anna murmured. ‘And what kindness may we do you?’