Maiden from the Sea

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  Genevieve did not answer. She tried to sit up, but her head felt muddled as if she were in a dream. Maybe I am, she thought.

  The young fisherman took a bent nail hanging from a loop on his loose trousers and placed it in her hand. It was tied to a piece of twine that smelled damp and fishy. Luke pointed to a rock on the beach. “You can sit there and jig smelts on nice days.”

  Genevieve turned to see, through the narrow opening of the lean-to, the blue waters of the cove from where the fishermen would sail out of sight.

  “And here’s a whistle fer yer.” He tossed her a piece of wood. “If you lose it, just cut off a small tree branch, wet it, then knock it and the rind will come off. Cut the centre away. It will give you sound when everyt’ing’s too quiet. I’ll leave you a knife and other t’ings when the old man idn’t lookin’. Look fer them after weem gone. There’s a few smoked herring and salmon here, and salted cod. We’ll take the rest of the cod to England. ’Tis easy to keep salted cod unspoiled for long voyages.”

  After Luke left the tilt with Genevieve’s heavy cape, she stripped off her dress and undergarments and wrapped herself in the warm sheepskin. The fire he had rekindled in a rock pit drew her out. She spread her clothes on a boulder by the fire. Soon the aroma of roasting fish and small carrots wafted her way. Luke looked at her intently. “Now mind what I’m tellin’ yer. Faeries and fire dance in this faery ring of stones. Faeries give the fire its breat’ and fire keeps the faeries warm and happy. Always keep the fire goin’, for you don’t want the faeries mad at yer.”

  The young man passed her a tankard of water, which she sipped slowly before passing it back. Luke put it to his own lips for a hearty swig. Then he broke off a piece of fish, blew on it, and handed it to Genevieve. She took it and settled on a high, flat rock. She had done with little substance and drink since the ship’s rations ran low. Still, her stomach was too unsettled to crave food. She ate slowly and sparingly, knowing that if she stuffed herself, the victuals would likely come back up, to be spilled for gulls flying around the cove.

  Luke stuck a tine into the fire and drew out a roasted carrot. He dropped it and more fish into a tin plate and passed it to Genevieve. She looked at him, feeling faint and far away, her ears still cracking from the salt water. While the men turned to each other with talk of gutting and salting the day’s codfish and sculling up around the point to load their catch on the Dark Wave, Genevieve concerned herself with eating slowly, staying close to the fire to warm her cold skin. The heat seemed to lift her on waves of sleepiness. She got to her feet and lowered her head to go inside the lean-to. She felt a wave of dizziness as she lay down on a springy mass of boughs, not caring whose bed it was.

  She slept in a calm steadiness that she hadn’t known for a long time, until a blade of light slipped between her eyelids. Its sharp probe stirred her, but her lids stayed closed under an apricot cast. She felt herself drifting in and out on a rising and ebbing tide of sleep until the sun was high in the sky. Elizabeth moves through her dreams . . . She does not turn . . . Genevieve sees only Elizabeth’s cascade of hair tumbling down her back, a soft wind lifting it like sea waves.

  Genevieve awoke with the words “Turn! Turn!” on her tongue, her arms outstretched with open palms. The image of a woman she knew was Elizabeth stayed in her mind as still and as solid as a cliff facing the sea. She leaped into a sitting position, feeling disconnected from place and self. Light streaming through the open doorway showed something dark folded across her feet. She picked up her dried clothes beside a long sheepskin cloak, its hood trimmed with fur.

  She slid away from the bough bed, exclaiming in gratitude, “A pelisse!” She pulled the sheepskin cloak around her and walked hunched to the outside of the tilt. Unlike where she had lived in France, there were no high dwellings to hide the rising sun. It slid up from the deep and hung above the ocean, a dazzling, orange gem lighting the sky with splashes of blue, apricot, and amber hues.

  She closed her eyes, letting the sun’s imprint roam the insides of her eyelids. Its shadows undulated under her lids with each blink. She opened her eyes and made her way to the beach. She wanted to thank the fishermen for saving her life, but there was no sign of them or their boat. They must have gone fishing early in the morning. She tried to remember what they had said yesterday about leaving. She hurried up the steep incline, hoping the men had banked the fire so it would spring to life when stirred. She broke off an alder rod and dropped to her knees, reaching to stir the ashes. At the sight of cinders, she blew frantically, urging them into an orange glow. She looked around muttering, “If the men are really gone, I hope Luke left me his tinderbox.”

  She piled the fire with birch rind and twigs she pulled from a stack of wood to the side of the tilt. Then she walked to the top of grey cliffs, keeping her distance from the edge. A gale of wind could land her in the briny, cold mouth of an ocean she was glad to have been rescued from. She imagined Luke and his father in their small boat, the sculling oar making swift cuts through blue water under Luke’s muscled grip. The fishermen would have gone around the point of land stretching out from the cove up to Ship Cove to help load the big ship before it weighed anchor for the ride home. How strange it was to be alone after so many weeks on a crowded boat, without a moment and space to call her own!

  Suddenly she didn’t care that she was alone. The day was hers to do with as she pleased. She felt content to be able to do nothing but sit on a huge boulder splotched with grey lichen. She watched the ocean at her feet, alive with movement and changing colours, stretching away past the speck of a small island to a distant horizon, its creamy rim edging the sky.

  The stillness wrapped Genevieve like a peaceful presence as she sat in the lap of autumn. Lichen-blotched maple and white birch trees were ablaze with red and yellow leaves peeping through evergreen fir and spruce trees. She turned to a rustle at her back. Branches came alive with gusts of wind tossing coins of leaves into the air. As the wind coaxed them from trees, they spun in heady flight and tumbled to the ground. Some leaves lay still, while others stood on end like monarch butterflies. Tree limbs would soon be swaying like bare bodies in dance. She stood up thinking, If Monsieur and Madame Laurier could see me idly strolling along cliffs, their voices would be sharp. Monsieur Laurier would warn, “You weren’t born to be a flâneur,” and Madame Laurier would call, “Now get back to work.”

  She shouldn’t care why she was sent away. Now she was free to think without interruption. Her daydreams were no longer driven off by other people’s voices cutting into her thoughts, leaving them hanging inside her mind until she stopped pondering. For so long she had been confined by other people’s commands to fetch one thing or another. Their voices often pounded her ears. She was caught in the fury of their temper and reprimanded often until all her feelings coiled inside the dark place her mind had become. Around her, there had always been the clatter of dishes and utensils in the nobleman’s serving rooms and servants’ quarters. At night there was the chatter of the chambermaid who shared her small straw bed. Her roommate talked until she fell asleep and then she snored loudly against Genevieve’s ear. Sometimes, Genevieve slipped out of bed and slept on a bear rug on the stone floor. On winter mornings it was still dark when she was called up to scrub and wash the dirty works of the place. She felt relieved to be gone from the noise and restrictions of the nobleman’s house. Only God knew what else would have followed had she stayed in the house of Monsieur Laurier.

  The wind drew back, limbs of trees poised: the intermission to a dance. In the small village of Leclair there had been few trees. Most had been cut for fuel, leaving nature’s scents to be overtaken by house and hovel odours. Genevieve could never have imagined this place: an ocean with sweet, berry-scented winds caressing her. They could never bite into her with such foul breath as those in France sweeping over sullen pools of human and animal waste. There, she never knew where the winds’ tongues had b
een before stroking her face. Here, she sensed a mysterious wholesomeness as winds came against her ears in roars and squeals and whistles. Birds lifted and dropped, all in a chatter, wind in their wings.

  She walked along a bare run of rocks across towering cliffs rising above a seething sea, and across grey rocks, their language written in white loops and squiggly lines, deep enough to have been chiselled by earth’s own geographics. In the valley of the cove, she stopped at the sight of berries: some freckled, others solid red. She lifted one to her mouth, hoping it wasn’t poisonous. She looked around in case it was her last look at this wild, cliff-edged world with its wheeling gulls. The berry broke under her front teeth and her tongue felt a sharp taste that startled her. She let the tiny contents slide down her throat. She waited, her heart pounding in her ears, waited for stomach cramps. But there was no sudden heaving or sign of sickness, and she snatched up berries, filling her mouth and then the red kerchief from the cloak’s pocket she had knotted around her neck. She would take the berries back to the lean-to and come back for more. She would forget the pessimism of her past and ponder the best way to scrounge for her sustenance.

  At first look, the sky above the cove was an uncluttered, blue scape. Then fluffy, white clouds billowed across it. Genevieve threw back her head, her eyes following them until she felt their pull and a feeling as buoyant as if she were sailing through the sky. She thought she could stay forever, her mood tuned to the sea. But as the day wore on, the restless sea grew dark, the sun distant and the earth less warm. Bull birds flew over the land like leaves tossed in the wind, and tickleaces, in flight over choppy waters, became dark drifts in the sky, their ragged cries connecting them to Genevieve’s disquiet. Gulls became silver flashes above the muted roar of the sea. They descended like dark spiders in a web of wind and twilight. Light and heat seemed to leave the earth almost suddenly, and she was drawn into the night’s shadowing grip.

  In stunned apprehension she watched the change, feeling a wrenching aloneness as petering darkness fell and the sea’s dark roar struck her ears, its damp breath in her face. Then sea and land became one presence wrapping her in its cold embrace. A sweeping wind became a disturbing force mantling her, its coldness biting her bones. The night sky pressed down, binding her in a claustrophobic strength, its blackness seeping in through her pores, filling her. She’d give anything to be sitting on a tabouret with her mistress’s feet in her hands, cleaning her toenails of the dirt she gathered roaming around the outdoor grounds in her bare feet. At least the stool would be soft under her derrière and she would hear a human voice, even if it came as a scold. She wouldn’t care about the noise of carts bumping down the narrow lane beside the house, voices shouting, laughing, calling, waking her after she’d gone to bed for the night.

  She began to cry, startling herself. Howls ripped up through her, filling her like a pain. Any crying she had done in Madame Laurier’s house had been muffled, kept as close to herself as possible. Now howls ripped up through her throat, their sounds bursting out into the night, and coming back in echoes.

  “Alone! Alone!” she cried, willing her voice to echo, skip like a flat stone across water. The aloneness swept her up as if into an empty, open space with no place to land above the sea: a mammoth restless spirit, its salty breath cold and damp, a great heaving beast regurgitating water against pitted cliffs. Her heart thumped like a fist against her ribs, bringing a panic she found difficult to bear. It swept through her like waves. She could not fathom the possibility of having to live day after day—forest and ocean cutting her off from other humans. And then her heart seemed to crash with the awareness that she might not be alone. There were living creatures in the sea and in the air, and, likely, in the forests. Perhaps there were people who did not leave with the ships sailing away from the island, and now they were staring at her from the forest, planning unimaginable assaults on her.

  She moved as fast as she could toward the lean-to and the tiny flicker of light left from the fire. She hurried inside the shelter and lay on her bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, her face pressed into tree branches, breathing the sweet tang of balsam fir. She wondered if, after she was missed from the ship, anyone had stood on deck searching the ocean for the sight of her. Captain Greeley would tell them, in his gruff voice, as he had before when others on the ship had disappeared, that the sea swallows people and takes them deep inside its belly; it sometimes gives them up—rarely still living.

  Shivering violently, she jumped up to go to the firepit. She gathered scattered alders and threw them on coals still hot. The fire flared and sprang like a fringed chiffon kerchief, pushing back the cold black face of the night. She turned to face the forest beyond the hills, tree branches rustling, whispering. She imagined the stealth of creatures in the shrouded distance beyond the cove, strangers who would grab her and snuff her breath. “Faeries!” Luke would likely say.

  After a time the fire settled and she busied herself scooping loose dust left on the ground from wood cut by the fishermen’s bucksaw. She banked the fire, leaving holes for air. “You have to get a good hot fire goin’ and bank it wit’ clay or sawdust, leaving holes for the fire to breathe,” Luke had told her. “Bushes—dem wit’ yellow flowers—grow in sandy sides of cliff and bes easy to start a fire. Widdies too—small willow bushes on the side of a stream or lake. Sure, you ken make a fire anytime from them.”

  I should have heated a smooth beach rock for my bed, she thought as she untied the piece of ship’s sail that had been bound to a witherod beside the lean-to’s opening. She was letting it fall behind her over the entrance of the lean-to when the wind’s ghostly breath touched her neck. For an instant she felt as if she wasn’t alone, that someone or something was stalking her. Her legs almost buckled in fear and the skin on her head prickled. She scravelled inside the tilt and lay panting on the bough bed.

  It’s better to be alone with Luke’s faeries, she thought wryly, than to be stalked by a savage or a wild animal. She tried to occupy herself with thoughts that would take her away from her quivering body. The past spiralled inside her mind like a periwinkle shell. There were seventeen years of times and places, memories that could lift laughter out of her like a tickle in the belly or restrict her breath like a corset pulled tight against her ribs. The latter she banished with a sigh. The effort stretched her out under the spell of sleep. Elizabeth moves through her dreams. There are whispers of her name . . . She is someone without a face, then with only a side silhouette. She does not turn to Genevieve, who sees only the cascade of hair tumbling down Elizabeth’s back, a soft wind lifting it like sea waves.

  “Turn, turn . . .” Genevieve whispered, her eyes opening to the morning and a sense of déjà vu.

  The worried-looking face of her mother glanced off Genevieve’s memory as she stared, her countenance dark. Will my mother ever find out what happened to me? she wondered. Will I ever discover what happened to her?

  Chapter 3

  Abandoned

  Genevieve was blowing on embers to revive her fire when she felt a presence. She straightened up and stood stock-still, her insides quaking, her mind pressured by an almost unbearable fear. The sound of gravel scattering caused her to turn in time to catch the shadow of someone or something disappearing into the forest.

  She tried to forget the sight and the mystery of it as she walked down to the beach, looking for driftwood to pile against the lean-to. She gathered briss: pieces of furze, blasty boughs lopped off trees, and small, grey sticks. She brought the kindling inside the shelter to spare it from rain. She did this over and over until her body was heated by her effort. Tired, she went back to the side of the beach fenced by towering cliffs and sat on a hummock rising above sand and stones. With the rote of the sea in her ears and the calm peace of the land around her, she stooped to pick up pebbles. She became captivated with multicoloured rocks: ochre red, grey, marbled, spotted in white and black, and a tooth-tone one
speckled in glistening silver. She minced her way across a straddle of cliff sticking up out of the cove like the teeth of a lipless sea monster holding its head under water. She found herself in a small cove. A straight bluff of green-capped land stood out from it in the sea, feathered with a flock of birds that took to flight when she splashed flat stones across the water. She gathered blue and purple seashells, open and showing creamy, blushing surfaces like a summer sky. She stepped on dried starfish and broken urchin shells. Laughing waters rippled over beach stones, seabirds paddled through the sky or dipped for cranberries on the cove’s headland. The sea lay dappled in gold, comforting, refreshing, amicable. It was almost too much beauty. She sat tossing stones over her hand in a game of knuckle, and thinking, I could stay here forever if the day was always like this.

  When she started to walk back, she saw that the water had risen, choking her path. She was afraid to go through for fear a rush of frothing waves would take her into the deep. Frantically, she hollowed out the earth, scattering sand and pebbles. She lifted sand to the sun to warm it and then she laid handfuls over her feet, working her way up over her body until it was covered. She slid her hands beneath the sand and pebbles, leaving her face free. The sky darkened, and as the sun slipped from the day, the earth cooled. Hoping her own heat would keep the pebbles from cooling in the night air, she pulled her hair back over her face. With only her nose showing, she fell asleep and stirred to a strange dream.

  Against towering cliffs, Ochre Cleft Cove is haphazardly edged by knuckle-legged poles stuck in sea rocks under long wooden stageheads stretched out over water. The weather-grey stageheads hold roughly made tables, hooped barrels, puncheons, and fisherfolk.