Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  I pull me hands free, and for a minute I have to close me eyes, ’acos if I was on a ship I’d be seasick. I hear meself saying, “Maybe he didn’t. But we do. We know now.”

  “No, we don’t! It still mightn’t be the wine—it could be any number of things.” He takes a deep, deep breath, plunges on. “Even if—even if that’s so, obviously it’s just a few, a very few, not one in a thousand, if even . . . I mean, you don’t see it happening everywhere, it’s just—it’s like the way some folk can’t abide shellfish, the way cheese gripes your gut, Ben, every time. It’s got to be so with the salt wine.”

  “Even one,” I says. It catches in me throat and comes out a whisper, so I can’t tell if he’s heard. We stand there, looking at each other, like we’re waiting to be introduced. Henry Lee reaches for me hand again, but I step away. Henry Lee starts to say summat, but then he don’t. There’s blood in me mouth, I can taste it.

  “I done bad things, Henry Lee,” I says at last. “I know where I’m going when I go, and none to blame but me. I know who’s waiting for me there, too—some nights I see their faces all around the room, plain as I now see you. But in me life I never done nothing, nothing . . . I got to get out of your house, Henry Lee.”

  And I’m for the door, because I can’t look at him no more. He calls after me—once, twice—and I think he’s bound sure to try and drag me back, maybe to gull me into seeing things his way, maybe just not to be alone. But he don’t, and I walk on home along the seafront, a deal slower than I came. And when I get there—it were a plain little house, nobbut the one servant, and him not living in, because I can’t abide folk around me when I rise—when I got there, I drank meself to sleep with me whole stock of good Christian rum. And in the morning I went to see Henry Lee’s lawyer—our lawyer—Portygee-Goan, he were, name of Andres Furtado, near enough—and I started working an old fool name of Ben Hazeltine loose from the salt wine business. It took me some while.

  Cost me a few bob, too, I don’t mind saying. We’d made an agreement long back, Henry Lee and me, that if ever I wanted to sell me forty percent, he’d have to buy me out, will-he, nil-he. But I didn’t want no more of that salt wine money—couldn’t swallow the notion, no more than I could have swallowed a single mouthful of the stuff ever again after that second time.

  So by and by, all what you call the legalities was taken care of, and there was I, on the beach again, in a manner of speaking. But at least I’d saved a bit—wouldn’t last forever, but leastways I could bide me time finding other work, and not before the mast, neither. Too old to climb the rigging, too used to proper dining to go back to cooking in burned pots and rusty pannikins in some Grand Banks trawler’s galley—aye, and far too fast-set in me ways of doing things to be taking orders from no captain hadn’t seen what I’ve seen in this world. “Best bide ashore awhile, Ben Hazeltine,” I says to meself, “and see who might be needing what you yet can do. There’ll be someone,” I says, “as there always is,” and I’d believe it, too, days on end. But I’d been used to a lot of things regular, not only me meals. Henry Lee, he were one of them, him and his bloody salt wine. Not that I’d have gone back working for the fool—over the side meself first, and I can’t swim no better than poor old Monkey Sucker. But still.

  So when Henry Lee’s young wife shows up at me door, all by herself, no husband, no servants, just her parasol and a whole great snowy spill of lace down her front, I asked her in like she were me long-lost baby sister. We weren’t close, didn’t know each other much past the salon and the dining room, but she were pretty and sweet, and I liked her the best I could. Like I tried to tell Henry Lee, I don’t belong in the same room with no lady. Even when it’s me own room.

  Any road, she came in, and she sat down, and she says, “Mr. Ben, my husband, he miss you very much.” Never knew a woman quicker off the mark and to the point than little Mrs. Julia Caterina Five-other-names Lee. I can still see her, sitting in me best company chair, with her little fan and her hands in her lap, and that bit of a smile that she could never quite hide. Henry Lee said it were a nervous thing with her mouth, and that she were shamed by it, but I don’t know.

  “We’re old partners, him and me,” I answers her. “We was sailors together when we was young. But I’m done working with him, no point in pretending otherwise. You’re wasting your time, ma’am, I have to tell you. He shouldn’t ought to have sent you here.”

  “Oh, he did not sent me,” she says quickly. “I come—how is it?—on my ownsome? And no, I do not imagine you to come back for him, I would not ask you such a thing, not for him. But you . . . I think for you this would be good.” I gawk at her, and she smiles a real smile now. She says, “You come to us alone—no friend, no woman, never. I think you are lonely.”

  Not in me life. Nobody in me life has ever spoke that word about me. Nobody. Not me, not nobody, never. I can’t do nothing but sit there and gawp. She goes on, “He has not many friends either, my Enrique. You, me—maybe one of my brothers, maybe the abogao, the lawyer. Not so many, eh?” And she puts out her hands toward me, a little way. Not for me to take them—more like giving me summat. She says, “I do not know what he have done to make you angry. So bad?”

  I can’t talk—it ain’t in me just then, looking at those hands, at her face. I nod, that’s all.

  No tears, no begging, no trying to talk me round. She just nods herself, and gets up, and I escort her out to where her coachman’s waiting. Settling back inside, she holds out one hand, but this time it’s formal, it’s what nobby Portygee ladies do. I kissed her mother’s hand at the wedding, so I’ve got the trick of it—more like a breath, it is, more like you’re smelling a flower. For half a minute, less, we’re looking straight into each other’s eyes, and I see the sadness. Maybe for Henry Lee, maybe for me—I never did know. Maybe it weren’t never there.

  But afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I don’t mean her, not like that, wouldn’t have occurred to me. I mean what she said, and the way she looked at me, and her coming to see me by herself, which you won’t never see no Portygee lady doing, high nor low. And saying that thing about me being lonely—true or not ain’t the point. It were her saying it, and how I felt to hear her. I plain wanted to hear her again, is all.

  But I didn’t. It would have meant seeing Henry Lee, and I weren’t no way up to that. I talked to him in me head every time I saw one or t’other of our ships slipping slow out of the harbor in the morning sun, sails filling and the company pennant snapping atop the mizzenmast. And her hold full of poison. I had time enough on me hands to spend with sailors ashore, and shillings enough to buy another round of what’s-your-fancy, and questions enough to keep them talking and me mind unsettled. Because most of them hadn’t noticed nothing—no shipmates turning, no buyers swimming out to sea, no changelings whispering to them from the dark water. But there was always a couple, two or even three who’d seen summat they’d as soon not have seen, and who’d have to down more than a few jars of the best before they’d speak about it even to each other. Aye, I knew that feeling, none better.

  They wasn’t all off our ships, neither. Velha were still a fair-sized port then, not like it is now, and there was traders and packets and merchantmen in from everywhere, big and small. I were down the harbor pretty regular, any road, sniffing after work—shaming, me age, but there you are—and I talked with whoever’d stay for it, officers and foremast hands alike. Near as I could work it out, Henry Lee were right, in his way—however much of the salt wine were going down however many throats all over the world, couldn’t be more than almost nobody affected beyond waking next day with a bad case of the whips and jingles. Like he’d said to me, just a few, a very few, and what difference to old Ben Hazeltine? No lookout of mine no more, I were clear out of that whole clamjamfry altogether, and nobody in the world could say I weren’t. Not one single soul in the world.

  Only I’d been in it, you see. Right up to me whiskers in it, year on year—grown old in it, I had. Call
it regret, call it guilt, call it what you like, all I knew was I’d sleep on straw in the workhouse and live on slops and sermons before I’d knock on Henry Lee’s door again. Even to have her look at me one more time, the way she looked in me house, in me best chair. I’ve made few promises in me life, and kept less, but I made that one then, made it to meself. Suppose you could call it a vow, like, if that suits you.

  And I kept that one. It weren’t easy, whiles, what with me not finding nobbut portering to do, or might be pushing a barrow for a day or two, but I held to that vow right up to the day when one of Henry Lee’s men come to say his master were in greatest need of me—put it just like that, “greatest need”—and would I please come right away, please. Tell the truth, I mightn’t have come for Henry Lee himself, but that servant, trying to be so calm and proper, with his eyes so frantic . . . Goanese Konkany, he were, name of Gopi.

  I didn’t run there, like I’d last done—didn’t even ride in the carriage he’d sent for me. I walked, and I took me own time about it, too, and I thought on just what I’d say, and what he’d do when I said it, and what I’d do then. And before I knew, I were standing on the steps of that fine house, with no butler waiting but Henry Lee himself, with both hands out to drag me inside. “Ben,” he keeps saying, “ah, Ben, Ben, Ben.” Like Monkey Sucker again, saying Mr. Hazeltine, Mr. Hazeltine, over and over.

  He looked old, Henry Lee did. Hair gray as stone, all of it—face slumped in like he’d lost all his teeth at once—shoulders bent to break your heart, the way you’d think he’d been stooping in a Welsh coal mine all his life. And the blue eyes of him . . . I only seen such eyes one time before, on a donkey that knew it were dying, and just wanted it over with. All I could think to say were, “You shouldn’t never have left the sea, Henry Lee—not never.” But I didn’t say it.

  He turned away and started up that grand long stair up to the second floor and the bedrooms, with his footsteps sounding like clods falling on a coffin. And I followed after, wishing the stair’d never end, but keep us climbing on and on for always, never getting where we had to go, and I wished I’d never left the sea neither.

  I smelled it while we was still on the stair. It ain’t a bad smell, considering: it’s cold and clean, like the wind off Newfoundland or when you’re just entering the Kattegat, bound for Copenhagen. Aye . . . aye, you could say it’s a fishy smell, too, if you care to, which I don’t. I’d smelled it before that day, and I’ve smelled it since, but I don’t never smell it without thinking about her, Señora Julia Caterina Five-names Lee, Missus Henry Lee. Without seeing her there in the big bed.

  He’d drawn every curtain, so you had to stand blind and blinking for a few minutes, till your eyes got used to the dark. She were lying under a down quilt—me wedding gift to the bride, Hindoo lady up in Ponda sewed it for me—but just as we came in she shrugged it off, and you could see her bare as a babby to the waist. Henry Lee, he rushes forward to pull the quilt back up, but she turns her head to look up at him, and he stops where he stands. She makes a queer little sound—hear it outside your window at night, you’d think it were a cat wanting in.

  “She can talk still,” says Henry Lee, desperate-like, turning to me. “She was talking this morning.” I stare into Julia Caterina’s pretty brown eyes—huge now, and steady going all greeny-black—and I want to tell Henry Lee, oh, she’ll talk all right, no fear. Mermaids chatter, believe me—talk both your lugs off, they will, you give them the chance. Mermaids gets lonely.

  “She drank so little,” Henry Lee keeps saying. “She didn’t really like any wine, French or Portuguese, or . . . ours. She only drank it to be polite, when we had guests. Because it was our business, after all. She understood about business.” I look down at the quilt where it’s covering her lower parts, and I look back at Henry Lee, and he shakes his head. “No, not yet,” he whispers. No tail yet, is what he meant—she’s still got legs—but he couldn’t say it, no more than me. Julia Caterina reaches up for him, and he sits by her on the bed and kisses both her hands. I can just see the half-circle outlines beginning just below her boobies, very faint against the pale skin. Scales. . . .

  “How long?” Henry Lee asks, looking down into her face, like he’s asking her, not me.

  “You’d know better than me,” I tells him straight. “I only seen one poor sailor, maybe cooked halfway. And no women.”

  Henry Lee closes his eyes. “I never . . . ” I can’t hardly hear him. He says, “I never . . . only that one time on the river, in the dark. I never saw.”

  “Aye, made sure of that didn’t you?” I says. “You’ll know next time.”

  He does look at me then, and his mouth makes one silent word—don’t. After a bit he gets so he can breathe out, “Aren’t I being punished enough?”

  “Not nearly,” I says. But Julia Caterina makes that sound again, and all on a sudden I’m so rotten sorry for her and Henry Lee I can’t barely speak words meself. Nowt to do but rest me hand on his shoulder, while he sits there by his wife, and her turning under his own hands. Time we leave that sea-smelling room, it’s dark outside, same as in.

  And I didn’t stir out of that house for the next nineteen days. Seems longer to me betimes, remembering—shorter too, other times, short as loving a wall and a barmaid—but nineteen days it were, with all the curtains drawn, every servant long fled, bar Gopi, him who’d come for me. That one, he stayed right along, went on shopping and cooking and sweeping; and if the smell and the closed rooms and us whispering up and down the stair—aye, and Henry Lee weeping in the night—if it all ever frighted him, he never said. A good man.

  Like I figured, she never lost speech. I’d hear them talking hours on end, her and Henry Lee—always in the Portygee, of course, so’s I couldn’t make out none of it, which was good. Weren’t for me to know what Henry Lee was saying to his wife, and her changing into a mermaid along of him getting rich. He tried to tell me some of their talk, but I didn’t want to hear it then, and I’ve forgot it all now—made bleeding sure of that. I already know enough as I shouldn’t, ta ever so.

  Nineteen days. Nineteen mornings rising with me head so full of that sea-smell—stronger every day—I couldn’t hardly swallow nowt but maybe porridge, couldn’t never drink nowt but water. Nineteen nights lying awake hour on hour in one of the servants’ garrets—I put meself there, ’acos I don’t dream in them little cubbies the way I do in big echoey rooms such as Henry Lee had for his guests. I don’t like dreaming, to this day I don’t, and I liked it less then. Never closed me eyes until I had to, in that dark house.

  Seventeenth night . . . seventeenth night, I’ve just finally gotten to sleep when Henry Lee wakes me, shaking me like the house is afire. I come up fighting and cursing—can’t help it, always been that way—and I welt him a rouser on the earhole, but he drags me out of the bed and bundles me down to their room with a blanket around me shoulders. I keep pulling away from him, ’acos I know what I’m going to see, but he won’t let go. His blue eyes look like he’s been crying blood.

  He’d covered her with every damp towel and rag in the house, but she’d thrown them all off . . . and there it is, there, laying out on the sheets that Henry Lee changes with his own hands every day, and Gopi takes to the dhobi-wallah for washing. There it is.

  Everything’s gone. Legs, feet, belly, all of it, everything, gone as though there’d never been nothing below her waist but that tail, scales flickering and glittering like wet emeralds in the candlelight. Look at it one way, it’s a wonderful thing, that tail. It’s the longest part of a mermaid or a merrow, and even when it’s not moving at all, like hers wasn’t just then, I swear you can see it breathing by itself, if you stand still and look close. In and out, slow, only a little, but you can see. It’s them and it’s not them, and that’s all I’m going to say.

  Now and then she’d twitch it a bit, flip the finny end some—getting used to it, like, having a tail. Each time she did that, Henry Lee’d draw his breath sharp, but all he said to m
e as we stood by the bed, he said, “It’s made her beautiful, Ben, hasn’t it?” And it had that. She’d always had a good face, Julia Caterina, but the change had shaped it over, same as it had shaped her body. There was a wildness mixed in with the old sweetness now—mermaids is animals, some ways—and it had turned her, whetted her, into summat didn’t have no end to how beautiful it could be. I told you early on, they ain’t all beautiful, but even the ugly ones . . . see now, people got ends, people got limits—mermaids don’t. Mermaids got no limits, except the sea.

  She said his name, and her voice were different too—higher, yes, but mainly clearer, like all the clouds had blown off it. If that voice called for you, even soft, you’d hear it a long way. Henry Lee picked her up in his arms and put his cheek against hers, and she held onto him, and that tail tried to hold him too, bumping hard against his legs. I thought to slip out of there unnoticed, me and me blanket, but then Henry Lee said, quiet-like, “We could . . . I suppose we could put her in the water tonight, couldn’t we, Ben?”

  Well, I turned round on that like a shot, telling him, “Not near!” I pointed at the three double lines on both sides of her neck, so faint they were, still barely visible in her skin. “The gill slits ain’t opened yet—drop her in a bathtub, she’d likely drown. Happen they might never open, I don’t know. I’m telling you straight, I never seen this—I don’t know!”

  She looked at me then, and she smiled a little, but it weren’t her smile. I leaned closer, and she said in English, so softly Henry Lee didn’t hear, “Unbind my hair.”