The Mermaid's Call

by Katherine Stansfield

  It was time to take our leave.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ‘For someone who claims not to do any wrecking,’ Anna said, once we were away from the cottage, ‘Inchin Ben seems to know quite a bit about how one might go about it.’

  The sky was all dark clouds. The wind a damp breath on the back of my neck, chilling my sweat.

  ‘I don’t think Inchin claimed not to be a wrecker,’ I said.

  ‘No, you’re right, Shilly. He didn’t say one way or the other. But he did say a great many other useful things. If we take Inchin at his word—’

  ‘Have we any reason not to?’

  ‘Not that I can see. So, if we believe him, we now know that Joseph Ians was killed between dusk and daybreak.’

  ‘That’s a goodly length of time, Anna.’

  ‘True, but it’s something. And the light – if it was moving, if someone here planned to draw a ship onto the rocks and wreck it, then perhaps Joseph saw something he shouldn’t, and that’s why he was killed.’

  ‘I let you down with the light business,’ I said, feeling very low. ‘Me showing Inchin that I didn’t know ships would only follow a moving light in a storm, it ruined the disguise.’

  She clasped me round the shoulders. ‘You’ll get better at not showing your hand.’

  ‘I’m sorry all the same.’

  ‘It takes time, that’s all. Look at me, having to get used to … well, you. The things you see.’

  ‘You’re getting better. You don’t tell me I’m foolish so often. Or blame the drink.’

  ‘Can’t blame drink when you’ve given it up, Shilly.’

  ‘Which I have!’

  ‘I know. So that means that now you’re just you. No … diluting.’

  That one was new.

  ‘By which I mean watering you down,’ she said. ‘Like poor beer.’

  ‘Oh. That’s good then, is it?’

  She laughed. ‘I’d say so.’

  ‘And you believe me about the woman I hear calling? The woman who might be a mermaid.’

  ‘I do, though I wouldn’t claim to understand it, and I can’t believe Mrs Hawker is a mermaid, Shilly. I know you think her voice is the one you’ve heard calling, after hearing her sing at the funeral, but it can’t be true. She’s as flesh and blood as you or I.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think any more.’

  Anna held me close as the wind sought to take me from her. As the air grew wetter.

  ‘But it’s not just me,’ I said. ‘Others have heard the voice. The barman at the Bush, he told me people hear it all the time on the cliffs.’

  ‘Perhaps someone is out here,’ Anna said. ‘Someone with something to shout about. And speaking of the Bush – we need to find out if the light seen from the hut was moving. It was Captain Ians who told us of it in the first place. Let’s see if he has any further insights.’ She glanced at me. ‘You will be all right, going back there?’

  ‘I had no trouble yesterday, did I?’

  ‘That you didn’t.’ She squeezed my arm. ‘But if the temptation should become too much, just wait for me outside. It shouldn’t take long. Better a little wet from the rain than risk undoing all your hard work.’

  ‘It is hard,’ I muttered.

  ‘I know.’

  By the time we passed the manor houses again, dusk was closing in and the rain was hard upon us. My cheeks felt the heaviness of wet whiskers, and my hair, too, was heavy. Wigs were not so good in the rain as real hair. I was glad when the Bush came in sight, and not for the reasons I had felt in the past when making for inns. Today I wanted only to be dry. I had no longing for the inn’s waters.

  Anna went in first and I was following when I caught sight of a familiar face on the path that ran between the inn and the cliff, and coming this way. Nancy Seldon.

  She was a little way off and hadn’t seen me. She was walking into the rain, her head held high, as if she was enjoying the cold. No shawl or hat. She was twenty paces from me and bearing towards the inn. I didn’t think she would go inside.

  Anna had not come out to find me, so I guessed she was talking to the captain, likely thinking me fearful to join her because of temptation. I would put her right when she was done, but for now it was hard to look away from Nancy, though the rain had me wetter by the moment. Her every muscle seemed to strain into the wind, her mouth open, her jaw working, as if she was eating the weather.

  I shrank back into the doorway of the inn, which hid me, and then I remembered I was not myself that afternoon – I was a shipping agent. A man. So I could watch Nancy if I wished, for men watched women all the time without fear. It seemed to be their right to do so, when they chose to see us at all, and so I watched her, and I wondered.

  Her hair looked to be soaked, wetter, surely, than the rain could have made it. Her dress too – the cloth dark with water in patches. She must have been in the sea. Was Nancy afflicted as I had been since coming to Morwenstow? Did she hear a voice on the wind and find she had risen from her bed, her chair, left the hunting of flowers on the cliffs? If she did, then she was able to resist the thing I feared most – that I would get into the water and be drowned, or torn apart by a clawed creature, for here was Nancy walking by the cliff alone, daylight nearly gone. Here was Nancy, coming home.

  She passed me. She neither turned to see me in the doorway nor gave the sense she was purposefully ignoring me. I did not think she knew I was there. Should I call her?

  Then the door banged and Anna was at my side.

  ‘The captain was just back from a walk, fortunately, though he couldn’t—Shilly, are you quite well? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘A ghost? Not that.’

  Anna frowned.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘What did the captain tell you?’

  ‘He couldn’t say if the light seen at the hut was moving.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t see it himself, of course. But he did advise me of who we should ask about the matter. The name of the person who told him of the light in the first place.’

  ‘And who was that?’

  ‘Mr Seldon.’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  It was late by then. Too late to call at the farm to ask Mr Seldon about the light he had told the captain of. That would have to wait until tomorrow, so we started back towards the vicarage and as the cloth slipped between my legs I remembered how I was dressed. As a man.

  ‘I can’t go back like this,’ I said. ‘The Hawkers will think a stranger has come into the house!’

  ‘They will. Which is why you won’t be going very far as you are. And neither will I.’ Anna tapped the black bag we’d carried all the way to and from Coombe with no need, until now, to open it. ‘The church will do.’

  I half wondered if we would find Inchin Ben in the church, but he wasn’t there. No one was, but still we chose a dark corner to change ourselves. That time of day, the church had more darkness than light. And it was cold. I didn’t want to take my trousers off, but Anna said I must.

  ‘It won’t work otherwise,’ she said.

  ‘What won’t?’

  ‘This.’ And she ripped my trousers in half.

  ‘Anna! That’s so wasteful! We’ll never have money for the agency if you do such things.’ I still had on the shirt and waistcoat and coat on top, but my lower half was quite free. I stood in just my drawers and shivered.

  ‘Oh, ye of little faith. They’re not ruined, Shilly. Quite the opposite, in fact.’

  And I saw that the cloth hadn’t been torn. She had just pulled apart the hooks that ran down the seam of each leg. The trousers had become a single piece of cloth.

  She knelt behind me and wrapped the cloth around my waist. It fell to the ground.

  ‘Stand still while I do you up.’

  Her fingers moved nimbly from my waist down my legs as she did the hooks up again, but this time only one set, so the cloth became a skirt.

  She took off my coa
t. ‘Now, tuck your shirt and waistcoat into the skirt.’

  I did as she said. She walked a circle of me, hitching the skirt higher on my waist. From the black bag she took pins and pinned the skirt tighter, so that my waist was small and what was left showing of the waistcoat looked like a bodice, for of course it matched the print of the trousers that were now a skirt. Then she took a shawl from the bag and tied it over my shoulders, which hid all the shirt save for the collar and the cuffs. My hair was in the black bag too, or Mrs Williams’ hair, rather, and her red lips and the mole that sat by them. Anna put me back together and changed her hair to that of Mr Williams.

  ‘You won’t put his clothes on?’ I said. ‘The things he has been wearing most days?’

  I was thinking of Mr Williams’ cream coat, where she had stowed the letter that had come to the vicarage.

  ‘I didn’t bring them. Mr Williams can get away with this more fashionable ensemble, just for getting up the vicarage stairs.’

  The agents’ wigs went back in the bag with my coat, which she folded carefully to fit. And we were ready.

  As we left the church, I told her she was very clever to make clothes work so many ways. For men’s things to become women’s.

  ‘Would that I could make more than men’s clothes work for us, Shilly,’ she said sadly.

  I kissed her. But it wasn’t enough.

  The vicarage was quiet on our return. It was dark, too. I fell over something in the porch. As I picked myself up, my fingers found glass – a little pane. And round it, something hard and smooth. Bone, was it? I lifted it back to where it had been, propped up against the wall – the parson’s lantern. But no light it gave us tonight. There was only one lamp left burning in the hall, and that turned low. Anna carried it as we sought something to eat, and the light made the house a sea of shadows that we swam through.

  The long table in the dining room was empty, the cloth unmarked. If the parson and his wife had eaten supper, all was put away. Mrs Seldon had gone home to the farm on the other side of the churchyard, I guessed. We were free to wander as we wished. I found some bread in the kitchen and we warmed it over the fire’s embers. Mrs Seldon had forgot her knitting. The wool was a puddle of lumpy blood on her chair.

  As we crossed the hall and started up the stairs to bed, Anna said, ‘Under other circumstances I would fear our hosts thought us rude not returning for supper.’

  ‘And for going off all the time. For having private business.’

  ‘That too. But with Joseph Ians identified, the Hawkers have much to occupy them.’

  ‘Have we done them a service, us coming here, or given them a curse?’

  ‘I suppose that depends on your point of view, Shilly. If the truth brings opportunity or merely pain.’

  ‘Or both,’ I said, thinking of the ship shares, thinking of the earnings of the ship.

  ‘The least we can do tonight is ensure we don’t disturb the Hawkers’ slumber.’

  We had reached the landing. There were no lights left burning upstairs. The passages that led away were dark mouths. Anna lifted the lamp brought from downstairs and our door loomed before us. All at once I had a strong need to get on the other side of it and shut out the rest of the house, the rest of Morwenstow, the sea beyond. To be in a very small place where I could see all the walls at once.

  ‘Shilly!’ Anna hissed. ‘You’re catching at my heels.’

  I kept as close to her as I could without jumping into her arms. My hand was on our door.

  A sound. On the landing behind us.

  I was all for rushing into our room but Anna had the light and she turned away. Towards the sound.

  A rustle, of paper? Drawers opened and shut. And a man’s mutter.

  It was coming from the corner of the landing. The parson’s locked room.

  ‘Shilly, look – a light under the door.’

  As I looked at the strip of light it grew larger, for the door was opening! The sea was all around us then, as if someone had taken a great gulp of spray and blown its salt on us. And then there was a pair of stockinged feet in the light, and a hefty set of legs, and the long brown gown of Parson Hawker.

  It was he who screamed, thinking us devils, of course.

  When he saw we weren’t, just his house guests who spent more time out the house than in it, he began to breathe again. And shut the door of his secret room behind him.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I was …’ He shook his head and the candle he carried shook likewise, sending waves of shadows across his jowly face and the pencil tucked behind his ear.

  ‘It is we who must beg forgiveness,’ Anna said. ‘Startling you so when you have urgent business to attend to.’

  ‘Business?’

  ‘That which keeps you from your bed so late,’ she said, and nodded at the door to his secret room, now closed on us.

  As if her words had reminded him, he quickly locked the door, then put his hand to the wood and gave a great sigh. With relief, that whatever was inside was safe from us?

  ‘My dear?’

  We all three jumped at that, but it was only Mrs Hawker, coming to see what the upset was about. I caught a glimpse of her face before the parson swept her back down the passage, wishing us a night of good rest. She was pale as the moon, apart from her eyes. They were red as Mrs Seldon’s knitting wool.

  Anna and I went to our room then, at last, and I made to lock it, but there was no lock to do so!

  ‘You were closer to him than me,’ I said to Anna in a whisper. ‘Did you see anything in there, before he shut the door?’

  ‘Only a piece of furniture. Or a dark shape that could be furniture. A bureau?’

  ‘Wreck goods?’ I said.

  ‘Ah, you smelt it too, then.’

  ‘You mean the sea water?’

  ‘I thought it fishier than that,’ she said. ‘The parson loves his cats, doesn’t he?’

  ‘So?’

  She set the candle in the window and I thought of false lights. False lights that needed to move to do their dark deeds.

  ‘So,’ Anna said, ‘the parson might keep the cats’ food in that room.’

  ‘But why be so creeping about that? Fish for cats is no crime.’

  ‘Not for most people, I’ll grant you, Shilly. But the parson is a peculiar individual.’

  ‘He is, but … I think there’s more to the parson’s room than that, Anna.’

  She climbed into bed and the creak was dreadful loud. ‘Something connected to the death of Joseph Ians?’

  ‘It could be,’ I said. ‘Even Nancy said she never sees in that room and she’s here all the time.’

  ‘Why aren’t you getting into bed, Shilly?’

  ‘There’s no lock on this door.’

  ‘And do you think we need one?’

  ‘If she should call me, if she should say my name …’ My words turned to water with my sobs.

  Anna sprang from the bed. ‘You’re not getting out of this room, Shilly. Not if I have anything to do with it.’ And with no care for the shriek it made, she dragged the chair from the corner and wedged it under the door handle. ‘There. If you try to move that in your sleep, I’ll know about it.’

  ‘And you’ll stop me?’

  She put her arms around me and led me to the bed, as I had dreamt for so long that she would. All those cold and lonely nights in Boscastle, fearful she would never love me again.

  ‘Of course I will. No harm will come to you while I’m here, Shilly.’

  My sleep was warmed, and quiet, knowing she believed me.

  I woke in the night, but not from a woman calling me to my end. It was my needing to piss. That call I didn’t mind. When I tucked the bowl back under the bed, I caught sight of Mr Williams’ cream coat hanging on the end of the bedstead. Anna was still asleep, her head mostly hidden under the coverlet. I reached into the pocket of her coat.

  The letter she had stowed there was gone.

  Had she known I would try to read it and so hi
dden it, burnt it? What was it she didn’t want me to find out?

  Anna’s letter might be gone but I would have another – a letter for myself. I would write to Mathilda. But I had no paper, no ink. No matter. I would choose the words tonight and then in the morning I would write them down. Somehow, I would find a way, even if Anna gave me no help.

  I got back into bed and thought to begin. But what was the way to start a letter? What came first? My name. Mathilda would want to know who the letter was from so I would first write Shilly. Shilly is writing. And then Mathilda’s name, so she would know it was for her. Shilly is writing to Mathilda. My eyes had closed. I quickly opened them. What to put next? I am not asleep. I am thinking of you. Are you better now? Can you come to Morwenstow? I yawned. I am not yawning. I am awake. Mrs Hawker is kind and will speak German with you. I am awake. I am awake.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The sun woke us, for in the surprise of Parson Hawker coming out of his secret room the night before, we’d forgot to draw our curtains. But it was good to rise early, Anna told me, as she slid from my arms.

  ‘We can catch Mr Seldon at the farm before he starts for the day.’

  My head was heavy as Anna’s travelling case, and felt as tightly packed too. I buried my face in the pillow and spoke into its soft crush. ‘Why do we need to go to the farm? I’ve forgotten …’

  ‘Because Captain Ians said it was Mr Seldon who told him of the light on the cliff. Someone was out there the night Joseph was killed. It might be the same someone Inchin Ben saw fleeing the church. If we can find that person, we might have our murderer. The light is where we must start.’ She laughed. ‘I sound almost biblical. The parson must be having an effect on me.’ She put her hand gently, almost fearfully, on my back. ‘You didn’t try to get out of the room last night. She didn’t call you, the woman you hear?’

  ‘No. I got up, but it was only to piss. Then I wrote to Mathilda.’