“What do you think, Herman?”
The cat stared at me for a long moment, no doubt wondering if he had heard me correctly, then turned his back. He is a great fisherman and loves the outdoors, but not obsessive about any fish breakfast that meant getting wet from whiskers to tail.
“I think you’re right,” I said, closing the door. Herman and I would share an egg for lunch. I also ate all my dried apples and the rest of the jam.
In an effort to distract myself from my growing craving, I began to read voraciously. Once upon a time I would have been burned at the stake for possessing the contents of Fergus Culbin’s library, and a part of me had to wonder if I weren’t endangering my soul with it. Certainly my reading did nothing for my peace of mind.
I found a poem in one of the books, “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry.” It made me shudder with horror, a reaction that seemed extreme when I thought about it later. The poem is sad, of course, but I told myself that it had nothing to do with me and Lachlan. Still, it stuck in my head and would not go away.
I heard a mither calm her bairn, and as she rocked, and as she sang, she dwelledt sae hard upon the verse that the heart within her rang.
“O, cradle row, and cradle gae, and sleep well, my bairn within; I ken not wha thy father is, nor yet the sea he dwells within.”
It happened aen a certain day When this mither fell asleep, That in came her silkie lover And set him down at her bare feet,
And up then spake a gray silkie when he woke her frae her sleep, “I’ll tell ye noo where thy lover is: he’s sittin’ close on thy bed feet.”
“O, love, come tell to me thy name, Tell me where does thy homeland be?” “My home is great Sule Skerry, And I earn my livin’ aen the sea. For I am a man upon the land; but I am a silkie on the sea, and when I’m far frae ev’ry strand, my home is in Sule Skerry.”
“Alas, this is a woeful fate! This doom ye’ve laid aen me, That a man should come out of the sea And tae have a bairn wi’ me!”
“Now foster well my wee young bairn, For a twelve-month and a day, and when that twelve-month’s fairly gone, I’ll come and pay thy nurse’s fee.”
And soon the weary twelve-month gone, he came tae pay the nurse’s fee; he had a coffer fu’ o’ Spanish gold, and another fu’ o’ the silver money.
When he had taken of the silver and gold And he had put it upon her knee, He said “Gi’e tae me my little son, And take thee up thy nurse’s fee.
“But how shall I my young son ken when thou ha’ taken him frae me?” “The one who wears the chains o’ gold, among a’ the seals shall be he.
And now thou will marry a hunter good, and a great hunter I’m sure he’ll be; and the first shot that e’er he takes will kill both my young son and me.
And he shall come home wi’ a gift, chains of gold that he has won. And ye shall ken by these chains That he has killed yer lover and yer son.”
Humans did kill selkies, as immortalized in this poem. Perhaps with cause, if the song was right. But there were other legends too, and those said humans also used selkies by hiding their skins and forcing them to use magic to call fish and calm the sea.
Then a stray thought: Where did Lachlan hide his skin when he visited me? I prayed it was somewhere safe from both finmen and humans.
The poem continued to run through my head as I ransacked the kitchen, looking for something sweet. One verse especially bothered me, and it chanted itself over and over like a bully’s taunt:
“And now thou will marry a hunter good, and a great hunter I’m sure he’ll be; and the first shot that e’er he takes will kill both my young son and me.”
“My young son and me…” I said out loud.
It was only then that my last conversation with Lachlan came back to me. At first I assured myself it was only a dream, an unpleasant imagining of the type I’d had before, but the more the memory coalesced, the more certain I became that the conversation had been real. I had spent the morning tunneling along, as happy and as blind as any mole in the dark earth, but now I had popped out into the light and was forced to see what I had forgotten.
“Oh, my sainted aunt!” I said, sitting down hard on the kitchen stool. “Herman, could this be true? Can I be with child? And where has Lachlan gone?”
The cat looked at me sympathetically, but remained mute. I began to cry, unable to be happy, though I had been given my heart’s desire.
Chapter Seventeen
May the tempest never rest, Nor the seas with peace be blest Since they tore thee from my breast.
—“The Maiden of Morven”
Many parts of that day remain a blur to me. I do recall going out after the rain and looking out at the clumps of dead grass that surrounded the cottage and feeling overwhelmingly sad. I wondered many strange things that morning I had not considered before. Watching the brown grass being flattened by the wind I wondered: Does it hurt, do you think—to grow old, wither and brown, then have the wind lay you low? The grass bursts from the ground each spring with joyous color; is it sorrowful at the end? Does it know that it is dying?
My thoughts grew more grim and fanciful as day turned to dark. The night wore on and Lachlan did not come. Feeling nervous, I paced the cottage and twice stopped to wind the mantel clock and my father’s pocket watch; it seemed very important that I remain aware of the time. Finally, the cold compelled me to bed. My sleep was uneasy but there were no more tears.
The next morning, driven mad with the need for sweets and some companionship, I made the bike ride into the village in spite of the lingering rain and wind. It was there I heard that Bertie Stornmont, monger and sometimes rag-and-bone man possessed of no more than half his born wits, had chosen to end his rather unpleasant life the previous night by taking a long draught of some homemade kin of John Barleycorn and then following it up with another draught of lye. The latter had burned him badly about the mouth and, they said, the nose. But I recalled Lachlan’s description of how the finman would suck out his victim’s souls by latching his sharklike teeth onto the dying man’s nose, and wondered.
I was horrified enough at the news to draw Mistress MacLaren’s attention with a public display of gasping and swaying. She very kindly urged me to sit until I had regained my color, and I had no choice but to obey; my knees simply would not hold me up any longer. In that moment I wanted very badly to blurt out a warning to all those standing in the shop, but something held my tongue—probably fear of how these people would react. They were all to ready to believe in the Devil and his minions, and might turn their rage on Lachlan or me.
And where was Lachlan? Why had he been gone so long when he knew I must have questions? Did he know what had happened in the village? Was Bertie’s death part of the reason for his absence? Surely there was some excellent cause for his nonappearance. He could never have simply impregnated me and then disappeared without a word. Could he?
I swallowed hard, twice. Heartache doesn’t go down so easily when tears are welling up. Rejection and abandonment: These were my second skin, and I hated the familiar sight of them. I made myself a promise that I’d don that hair shirt only when all other possibilities were proven wrong; I didn’t want to believe that once again I had been used, judged and found lacking. I had grown fearful as the day and night progressed—and with perfectly good reason, given our murderous enemy!—but it was time to decide if I trusted Lachlan and his judgment. Did I believe he was the kind of person who would abandon a pregnant lover, especially when the finman was still at large and looking for the heart buried under her floorboards?
Even as I asked the question, my gut rejected the possibility. Lachlan might have left his family once they were grown, but he would not abandon me—not when I was carrying his child and the finman was still running free. Perhaps neither of us was searching for a spouse and a life of togetherness, but we were not irresponsible and heartless. So, his absence had to mean something else.
Unfortunately, the list of something-elses was unpleasant.
I found myself contemplating the idea that Lachlan could be in trouble. He could even be dead. That thought had me ducking my head and breathing slowly, again staving off a faint that made Mrs. Mac-Laren unbend so far as to pat my shoulder.
Lachlan was not dead! I ordered myself to quit being morbid. I had quite enough troubles without borrowing from remote possibilities; he had disappeared before this without there being any sinister reason. What I needed to be thinking about was the finman and his actions in the village. The Minotaur of Greek mythology had obligingly stayed in his maze and out of human sight, but our monster was out of his lair. Herman and I would have to contend. There was no other choice.
Perhaps I could briefly put off taking action, but what would I do if Lachlan were delayed for many days and the finman returned while I was alone? Could I kill the creature on my own, a beast who’d had his heart removed but still managed to walk about and kill with impunity? I did not currently have the knowledge to do so. Gaining that knowledge seemed the first order of business, and having the beginning of a plan stiffened my spine and put strength back in my knees.
When I was able, I left the store with all the dried fruit and withered apples Mistress MacLaren had in stock. I stowed these in the basket of my bicycle, not sure how long they would hold back the cravings that roared in my belly. Perhaps I should have been more fearful of my standing in the human community, considering the circumstances. After all, a sudden pregnancy would be very hard to explain, and the judgment upon immoral women, even widows, could be very harsh indeed here. I might be shunned. Yet, this did not trouble me as much as it should have; at that moment, my mind was more consumed with the idea Lachlan could be in trouble (this in spite of my gut’s fierce insistence that nothing had harmed him) or that there might be something wrong with the baby inside me—a child that could be little more than a thought in size but was already a reality to me in every other way.
Rather than returning to the cottage, which was feeling less a fortress of safety than a prison of unhappy thoughts, I went instead to the beach made visible with the tide at ebb, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lachlan. Instead I found a seal’s carcass on the shore and had a moment of terror. But while it was not Lachlan, the poor beast had been attacked by sharks: I knew those bites now. Had the creature encountered the finman coming ashore to murder Bertie Stornmont?
Rising from the body, I noticed the low-tide beach was covered with silent seals huddled against the cliffs, as far from the water as topography would allow. Their eerie silence, so like Herman’s on the night the finman first appeared, had the small hairs at the back of my neck rising in alarm. A frantic spin to look for danger revealed nothing, but I did not feel calm or safe. The water was too close.
I approached the seals slowly. Speaking in a voice only loud enough to rise above the wind, I said, “If any of you know Lachlan, please ask him to come back to me. I need him.”
Part of me felt very silly doing this, but I did it anyway. Maybe they were just seals, but how else was I to get a message to a seal man?
The seals’ heads all turned in my direction and exhaled in unison, their breath a mist that shut out the rest of the world. The earth and air shifted, and my orientation twisted and blurred as if through the lens of a spyglass focused upon something near, then something afar. Though previously inaudible, around my legs the marron grass whispered its dying secrets as it passed under the scythe of the besieging wind, not to rise again until spring. Or perhaps never. No matter what the calendar said, in an instant winter had overtaken fall, and the decades of darkness put off by its burial had caught up with the village in a matter of days. Like Dorian Gray’s doomed portrait, age and decrepitude were racing in upon it. The evil beneath the village was seeping out, ensnaring everything it touched, and I could see this with my mind if not my actual eyes.
In this vision, as I watched, icy crystals of hoarfrost—what Grandmother had called cranreuch—bubbled out of the ground and decorated the terrified seals, sealing up their noses and mouths. It also grasped my feet and legs, raced up my body and then closed in over my head, nearly shutting out the morning light. I felt cold in a way I had never experienced, and knew it for a winter of the soul and not just the frosty season that chilled the flesh. Unable to stop a small sob of terror, I nonetheless used every bit of will within me and pushed the vision away. My frozen limbs were clumsy as I ran for my bicycle, but I forced myself to go on and not look back, just in case it wasn’t all a waking dream but actually the end of the world.
Chapter Eighteen
Or have we eaten of the insane root That takes the reason prisoner?
—William Shakespeare
Back at the cabin, my second night of uneasy dreams came and went, and it was with relief that I rose in the morning and saw that there was a break in the storms. Determined to take in some sun—and, yes, to stop behaving like a vaporish ninny who faints when she had better take action—I put on a cloak, a scarf, some old leather gloves and sensible boots, loaded my pockets with apples, and then set out for the beach to dig for cockles. During the night I’d had a sudden conviction that raw cockles drenched in honey would be delicious. Some species are poisonous, but I was convinced that I would be able to tell which kinds were safe. And I had to do something. The hunger was ravening, and the apples that I indelicately gobbled as I wrapped my scarf tightly about my neck and head barely appeased it.
Herman appeared to approve of this outing, so I assured myself that the finman couldn’t be nearby. The cat and I went to the shed together to fetch a spade and pail.
I soon discovered that there was a new acuity to my senses that was sometimes actually painful to experience. Sight, hearing, and especially my sense of smell were all now particularly intense. I was grateful that the air was fresh and crisp and the sun slightly veiled by clouds, because even the limited light made my eyes hurt.
My mind, like my stomach, seemed oddly empty. Fear and morbid rumination had been banished somehow, and I was existing solely in the moment. Occasional thoughts of the happenings in the outside world and its new uncertainties would enter my brain, but perhaps these cares felt lonely with no accompanying thought or ambitions beyond acquiring food, for they did not stay long to trouble me. My only companions were the raspy-voiced skuas that watched Herman and me closely as I worked and cheered my successes. Sometimes I would throw them small cockles, which they quickly learned how to open. Herman was polite and didn’t chase the birds away, perhaps because I shared with him also.
Perhaps this harder life would be good for me. As I dug deep holes, I made note of the fact that I was getting stronger. Certainly I had no trouble digging through the wet sand to claim my prizes, though the task had always exhausted me before. Nor did I have any trouble finding the buried cockles; I knew where they were as surely as if I had a treasure map. It was as though my muscles and bones and all my senses were finally being put to proper use after a long sleep. For a long while, even the cold did not bother me, though the wind molested my hair and clothing.
A large shadow fell over shoulders as I worked, and I rose quickly to my feet, my spade held in what might have been a slightly threatening position. I looked about for Herman, but the cat was gone. He’d been helping me dig for cockles only a moment earlier, but as always, he was gone whenever someone else appeared. The skuas had fallen silent.
The man before me was quite tall and lean, and made me think of a racehorse. His clothes were old and his worn shirt barely hid his muscled chest and arms. I should have been alarmed at the proximity of this stranger but was not. He smelled good. He smelled a little like Lachlan, which was to say he was some mixture of spice and sin. I did not know if this pleased me or not.
“Latha math. I am Eonan. Lachlan’s…cousin.”
Certainly there was a general resemblance in the dark hair and eyes, though I sensed that this male was worlds younger and less serious than my missing lover.
“It is a verra great pleasure tae know thee,” he con
tinued.
“Latha math,” I replied. “I’m Megan Culbin, Lachlan’s…not cousin. And I am sure it will be a pleasure to know you too.” I lowered the spade and stuffed it into the sand.
Eonan smiled—an expression devastating to any female heart, and I found my own breath stuttering as I took it in. “I’ve come tae look in on ye. Lachlan is gone tae Avocamor and may be a bittock longer than expected.” When I looked blank, he explained, “He’s gone tae see his family. They shall be…astonished at his return.”
This news was a relief but was followed immediately by another uncomfortable thought. Lachlan was seeking rapprochement with his family? The ones who thought him dead?
“Good god. Why?” I asked baldly. “I mean, why now? Is something wrong?” More specifically, had I done something to cause this?
Eonan’s smile widened. “Wrong? Nay. He’s there because of yerself. And the bairn.” The young man’s smile faded at my silence. My own faded a bit too. This did have something to do with me. And our postcoital conversation hadn’t been a hallucination; I was pregnant and Lachlan knew it as well.
“Lachlan doesnae want tae lose anither child. The bairn will be safest in Avocamor. If it is allowed…and it shall be.”
“Good god,” I said again, this time more weakly. I wasn’t ready to admit to anyone that I was pregnant, let alone some strange relative of the father. I also did not know how to react to this news of Lachlan’s making arrangements for me and my child that sounded like the rankest high-handedness. And what did Eonan mean about being allowed? Was this more of the prejudice Lachlan and Eonan had both mentioned, the bigotry that had kept Lachlan’s clan from accepting his human wife? And if so, how was he so sure it would all turn out well?
The Selkie Bride Page 14