The Mermaid

by Christina Henry

  They assumed poor old Jack had been taken by the ocean, as was not uncommon, and some of them even spared a kind thought for his wife, who watched for him day after day. But mostly they wondered when she would give up and leave, for she was not from that part of the world, and now that Jack was gone they thought that she, too, would go.

  But Amelia did not leave. She stayed there in the cottage on the rocks, year after year. The wood of the cottage became white from the wind and the salt spray, and Amelia’s dresses grew as thin as her face, but she would not leave.

  And she did not grow any older.

  The people of the village could not help themselves talking, for winters were long and brutal where they lived, and a mystery is good for many an endless night. They wondered what kept her there on those rocks, and where she might have come from, and if, perhaps, she might have come from the sea.

  This idea was met with less derision than that of Amelia dancing in the moonlight with the devil. These were an oceangoing people, and everyone knew that mermaids swam the ocean. Everyone knew that a mermaid might fall in love with a human man.

  And far from making the people frightened of her, this knowledge seemed to comfort them, for it meant that in her own way Amelia belonged to them. She, too, was part of the ocean that gave and took everything from them.

  Because she was one of them, they would protect her, and when she came into the village (much less often now) their eyes and their voices were softer than before. She was their Amelia, their wonder, their mermaid.

  But the rumors about this strange and unusual woman who never grew old, and who might be a mermaid, traveled from village to village and town to town, as they do, until they reached the ears of a man whose business was in the selling of the strange and unusual.

  * * *

  • • •

  His name was P. T. Barnum, and he’d been looking for a mermaid.

  Part II

  THE MUSEUM

  CHAPTER 2

  New York City, April 1842

  The mermaid was not, to Barnum’s way of thinking, anything like a mermaid ought to look at all. He’d expected something that looked a lot more like a woman, like those Italian paintings that showed them all bare-breasted and full-hipped with long flowing hair. Barnum knew quite a lot of God-fearing types who disapproved of those paintings. Disapproval, Barnum knew, meant controversy, and controversy sold tickets faster than the seven wonders of the world. Barnum didn’t mind controversy as long as he could sell tickets to see a real mermaid.

  This thing that Moses had brought him did not resemble those paintings in the least.

  “Levi,” Barnum said.

  Two men stood around the table with Barnum. Both stared at the object that lay there—one with optimism on his face and the other with his brow creased in consternation.

  “Yes, Taylor?” Levi said. Levi’s face was a study in careful neutrality except for that creased brow. He’d been a lawyer, Levi had, and he still had a lawyer’s face, a face that gave away nothing until he wanted it to.

  Levi was one of the few folks allowed to call him Taylor. Nobody called Barnum “Phineas.” He’d been named after his grandfather and his grandfather was Phin, but Barnum was always Barnum to everyone except to his wife and to Levi and to his family back in Bethel.

  “Does that look like a mermaid to you?” As he said this, Barnum gave the third man a narrow-eyed look. That man, Moses Kimball, shifted his weight and looked hopefully at Levi.

  Levi didn’t think much of the mermaid. Barnum could tell, and he felt sure Moses was bound for disappointment from that quarter.

  “Well, Taylor,” Levi said, “I’m a lawyer, not a naturalist, but I would say that thing is the body of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish.”

  And that was precisely what it did look like. It was only about three feet long, with skinny arms and a dried-up face and pendulous breasts, and covered all over with grey-black skin that looked as though it might flake off any second. The bottom half did not resemble the coy shining tail of myth but rather definitely that of a fish. It did not seem even particularly well preserved.

  Barnum nodded in satisfaction. He preferred to be correct, and he’d correctly assumed that the thing was not a mermaid and that Levi didn’t think much of it. “Not a mermaid, then.”

  Levi shook his head. “I shouldn’t say so.”

  Moses Kimball spoke up then, and his expression indicated he felt his reputation as a museum proprietor was at stake. He had a long bushy grey beard that moved up and down as he spoke.

  “The fellow I bought it from, Eades, said his father exhibited it in England to great success.”

  “That may be so,” Barnum said, meditating on the so-called mermaid. “That may be so, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s nothing more than a humbug.”

  Moses’s face fell. Barnum sensed him trying to rally.

  “I think you could exhibit it here to great success,” Moses said. There was a little touch of desperation now, the need to make sure the trip from Boston was justified. “People want to believe in mermaids.”

  Barnum knew, better than anyone, that human tendency to want to believe, to want to see the extraordinary. He even knew that people sometimes enjoyed humbugs. All that business in the New York papers about winged men on the moon seen through a telescope! Everyone had believed it, and no one had really minded when it turned out it wasn’t true.

  That was because as much as folk wanted to believe, they couldn’t help doubting. If they kept themselves in a state of belief mixed with a little healthy skepticism, then they could never be wrong. Nobody liked to be wrong. Most people would rather be humbugged than be flat wrong. If they were tricked, then it wasn’t their fault, and they could always say they’d never really believed in the humbug anyway.

  He could probably make something of this stuffed monkey Moses had brought him—it wouldn’t be the first time he’d made something out of nothing—but he couldn’t deny that he was disappointed.

  He’d wanted something spectacular. This was not spectacular.

  “What if we put a girl in a tank with a fish costume on her bottom half?” Barnum said to Levi. “We could place her in with the fishes and the whale skeletons. You have to believe mermaids are real if she’s right there with all the other sea creatures.”

  Levi contemplated the idea for a moment before shaking his head in regret. “Bound to have some churchgoers complaining about indecency if you had a girl swimming bare-chested in a tank.”

  Barnum waved that away, warming to his idea. “We can cover her up with seashells or some such thing. That will make the church ladies happy.”

  “What about my mermaid?” Moses asked. Disappointment had settled on his shoulders like a cloak.

  Barnum knew Moses was thinking of the long journey from his Boston museum, seemingly for nothing if Barnum didn’t exhibit the monkey-fish in New York.

  “I’ll think on it,” Barnum said. “We might be able to use it in the exhibit with the girl. The body of one of her ancestors or some such.”

  Moses brightened a little. Barnum could tell he was pleased that his trip wouldn’t be wasted.

  “If you’re going to use a girl in a tank,” Moses said, clearly in better spirits now, “you ought to use one from somewhere far away. That way the girl’s family won’t go to the papers and expose you.”

  “Even with that I’m not so sure this would work,” Levi said. “How long can a girl hold her breath underwater? And you’d be lucky to find one who can swim. Most women can’t, you know. I don’t think most men can, come to that.”

  “You’re down on all my plans today, Levi,” Barnum said, frowning at him.

  “Dropping a girl in a big bucket of seawater isn’t the same as putting a shriveled old woman in a room and calling her Washington’s nanny. It’s a lot harder. You’d have to find a suitab
le girl, to start, and I’m pretty certain the sort who would swim half-naked in a tank isn’t the sort you want talking to the newspapers,” Levi said. His face was calm, but his tone was irritated. “And we got found out the last time, in the end. Imagine what everyone will say if Barnum tried to pull the wool over their eyes again.”

  Barnum didn’t like this reminder of the way the Heth exhibit had turned out. They’d sold her as Washington’s nanny and it seemed in the end that she was not as old as advertised, but it really wasn’t Barnum’s fault. He’d been lied to in the first place. Levi ought not to be bringing it up in front of Moses, anyhow.

  “Let me worry about the details,” Barnum said, frowning at Levi. “First thing is to find a girl who looks like she came out of the sea.”

  “All you have to do is go up to northern Maine. There’s supposed to be a woman up there who really is a mermaid,” Moses said, laughing.

  Barnum gave him a sharp look. “Whereabouts in Maine?”

  “Why?” Moses asked.

  “I might want to take a gander at the lady,” Barnum said. “See if the stories are true.”

  “Come now, Barnum,” Moses said. “You can’t possibly believe that some widow who practically lives in Canada is a mermaid. It’s just a story told by fishermen to pass the time while they drink.”

  “You can’t possibly believe that people will pay a dime to see a stuffed monkey-fish,” Barnum snapped. “Just tell me about the mermaid.”

  Barnum listened closely as Moses told him about a woman who lived up the coast in a cottage by the sea. He said the villagers who lived near there noticed she seemed to come from nowhere and that she had lived for many years with her husband and had never grown older.

  “That doesn’t mean she’s a mermaid. That might make her immortal, though,” Barnum said. “Or at least, we could say she’s immortal. Can’t really be immortal, of course.”

  Of course, he didn’t say how intrigued he was by the story of the eternally young woman. After all, he’d been raised to believe that immortality occurred in the afterlife, when those who were chosen lived forever in heaven.

  But the possibilities of this girl . . . She might make an even better exhibit than a mermaid would—imagine the scientists wanting to come and examine her! He’d make a fortune charging them for her hair and blood and whatever else they wanted to look at under their microscopes.

  Of course, the trouble with Joice Heth had happened because he’d given his word about her autopsy. True, he hadn’t had to charge the public to watch it—that had made it impossible to suppress the truth that the lady was not as old as he’d claimed she was—but he couldn’t resist the chance. Barnum thought all publicity was good publicity, and even if folks thought he was a con artist, then at least they knew the name of Barnum.

  “Or the lady is just a dab hand with her lotions and potions, and not an immortal at all,” Levi said.

  “You’d have to be able to prove she’s lived as long as she says she has,” Barnum mused, thinking of Heth again. He’d been just as fooled by her papers as anyone else had, really. Of course he wouldn’t have exhibited the woman if he thought she was only 80 years old, not 161. “People don’t believe anything like that without papers and certificates and what-all.”

  The trouble, too, was that a forever-young woman was a lot like saying an old black woman was older than she actually was. The public might not pay for the same humbug twice. And above all, Barnum wanted people to pay.

  “But I haven’t told you the best part yet!” Moses said. It was clear from his manner that he didn’t think anything of this story but was enjoying the telling of it all the same. “One of the men who told me the story had heard it straight from a fisherman who claims he saw this woman shed her clothes on the beach at night and step into the ocean. Right after that she disappeared under the water. A few minutes later, he says, he saw the flash of her silver fin.”

  “And how much whiskey had this fisherman drunk before he saw a girl turn into a fish?” Levi said.

  Barnum wished Levi would stop interrupting and let the man finish his story.

  “It wasn’t so much what he said, but what the villagers did after,” Moses said. “He came into town raving about what he’d seen under the moonlight. You’d expect that folk would be curious about a story like that, wouldn’t you? Even if it was only to scoff at?”

  “Yes,” Barnum said. He had a feeling growing in his belly, a feeling that told him there was more to this than some tale that came out of a bottle. He’d learned over the years to trust that feeling.

  It meant that something great was going to happen—or he could make something great out of nothing, even if it didn’t seem so at first. This woman, whoever and whatever she was, was going to make people remember him.

  “The fisherman told my friend that not one person expressed interest in his story,” Moses said. “Not one. They all pretended not to hear a thing he said. They changed the subject or gave him a blank stare. And he found the next day that he couldn’t sell any of his catch in the village no matter how hard he tried. Soon, he went down the coast to friendlier waters.

  “There he heard that some of the people of that village had told tales of the woman years before, that she danced with the devil to keep her face young and other such nonsense. Those stories had been passed from town to town as they do in those parts. But then the woman’s husband died—gone missing at sea—and the stories just stopped.”

  “Until this fellow, this friend of a friend, came talking about a mermaid,” Barnum said.

  Maybe he would get his mermaid after all. A mermaid was a much more spectacular exhibit than an immortal woman. A mermaid wouldn’t require papers to prove her magic to the gaping crowds. It would be visible for all to see—no need for tricks. At least, no need for tricks that the human eye could see. Of course Barnum didn’t actually believe this nonsense about the mermaid being real. But if there was a story about her, it would make things easier. It meant that if anyone went looking into the woman’s background, they would find mermaid rumors. It’s easier to sell a half-truth than a complete lie.

  “What’s the name of this town, again?” Barnum asked.

  Moses told him, and Barnum said, “You’re right; that is almost in Canada.”

  “You’re not going to go all the way up there to find out if this woman is a mermaid,” Levi asked.

  “No,” Barnum said. “You are.”

  Moses looked from Levi to Barnum and clearly made a decision that concerned discretion and valor. He bundled his dusty mermaid into the bulky carrying case he’d used to bring her from Boston. Then he extracted a promise from Barnum to use the mermaid in whatever exhibit was finally established in the American Museum.

  “What kind of terms do you want?” Barnum asked.

  Moses glanced at the thundercloud on Levi’s brow and hastily said, “We can talk about it later, Barnum.”

  Levi kept his temper until Moses trundled out the door with his case.

  “I’m not going to some godforsaken town up north just because a drunk fisherman says he saw a mermaid once,” Levi said. “I won’t do it, Taylor.”

  The trouble was, from Barnum’s point of view, that Levi wasn’t Barnum’s employee, so to speak. He paid Levi for certain jobs, and by the job. If Levi didn’t want to go look for this mermaid girl, then there wasn’t anything Barnum could do to force him.

  Levi had helped Barnum with the Joice Heth humbug, and Barnum wanted his help attracting folk to the museum. Levi could be quite convincing—the boy should have taken up acting; he was that good at it—and it was his performance that had given so much credibility to the exhibit of the old woman. Barnum knew that if Levi went up north to find this widow, he would be able to convince her to return to New York with him. Levi just had a way about him.

  But Barnum would have to convince Levi to help him first.


  “Now, Levi,” Barnum began.

  “Don’t think you can ‘now, Levi’ me, Taylor,” Levi said. “I hate boats. I hate the ocean. I hate the smell of fish. I’m not going to Maine.”

  “Levi, if we pass this girl off as a mermaid, we’ll make more money than we even dreamed of with Joice Heth.”

  “You’ll make money, you mean,” Levi said.

  That stung, at least for a moment, until Barnum privately acknowledged that he ought to have given Levi a larger share last time. It was Levi whose face everyone saw, Levi who did all the talking to the paying guests.

  “You’ll get your fair share,” Barnum said. “I give you my word.”

  “Why don’t you go if you want the girl so badly?” Levi asked.

  “One of the museum exhibits can’t just get up and walk out,” Barnum said, gesturing around them.

  Barnum’s office was, in fact, in the third viewing saloon of the museum, right between the waxworks and the mirrors. The museum was closed now, the comforting murmur of the crowd disappeared. Levi had often asked Barnum how he could work with everyone gawping at him like that, but there was nothing Barnum loved better than the sight of the paying public.

  “You could leave if you wanted to,” Levi said. “There are plenty of other things to look at here besides you.”

  “I can’t leave Charity and the girls,” Barnum said, lying through his teeth. He thought it might be the only argument that would convince the other man, who, despite his bachelor status, had a healthy respect for the sanctity of the family.

  Levi gave him a look that said his gambit was weak.

  “Have a heart, Levi,” Barnum said. “We’re living inside the museum, for heaven’s sake. I can hardly leave Charity alone here while I go off to another state for weeks looking for a mermaid.”

  Barnum and his family were, in fact, living in a former billiard hall on the first floor, as Levi very well knew. But it was only temporary, Barnum promised himself. Temporary until he made his fortune. Then he’d live in a fine house, like all the other fine people in New York, and they would have to greet him like their equal for he would be just as good as they.