Sabrina & The Secret of The Severn Sea

by Guy Sheppard

  ‘You, too, Tina. I won’t tell you again. You know I can’t do without you today. Or have you forgotten that you’re one of the bridesmaids?’

  ‘Be right there, Ms. Kennedy.’

  Instead she started singing:

  ‘O where have you been, Lord Randal, my son?

  O where have you been, my bonny young man?

  I’ve been with my sweetheart, mother make my bed soon

  For I’m sick to the heart and I fain would lie down.’

  It was half a century since the bridge’s last girders and piers had come crashing down. All but this one. Since then the entrance to the surviving tower’s internal staircase had been sealed up with bricks which she could, she had just discovered, remove one by one.

  Randal’s phone rang again.

  ‘Please, Tina, we have to go back to the farm. Get ready. Mum says.’

  ‘Be right with you.’

  Randal took a few steps along the towpath in the direction of Sharpness Docks. He managed to peep over the seawall at the sandbanks and ribbons of silvery water in the distance.

  ‘How did my uncle Luke die again?’ he said, scratching yellow lichen off the wall with his stick.

  Tina frowned. A rumour was going round Berkeley that Reverend Lyons’s death was somehow unnatural.

  ‘In the end the coroner put it down to something he ate in Bermuda.’

  ‘Not murder then?’

  ‘Only the sea knows.’

  ‘You not sad?’

  ‘Should I be?’

  ‘I liked him very much. He once gave me an Easter egg.’

  With that, Tina broke into song:

  ‘And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my son?

  And what did she give you, my bonny young man?

  Eels boiled in brew, mother make my bed soon

  For I’m sick to the heart and I fain would lie down.’

  ‘Boys at school say he was bewitched by the goddess of the river,’ resumed Randal happily. ‘They say Sabrina killed him for a great treasure. If only they knew! Can’t wait to tell them it’s all ours.’

  ‘Ours?’

  ‘It’s half mine. I’m as rich as you are, remember.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I know that, Randal. But what is all the fuss about now? What’s your rush? You’re just a boy.’

  ‘I want my share, or else.’

  ‘Or else what?’

  ‘I tell.’

  Tina finished her folksong:

  ‘What will you leave your true love, Lord Randal, my son?

  What will you leave your true love, my bonny young man?

  The tow and the halter to hang on yon tree,

  And let her hang there for the poisoning of me.’

  She shunted the last brick to and fro in its hole. Nearly forgot to lock the door she was hiding.

  Something gleamed through its keyhole – it sparkled and glittered from the place where it rested deep inside the pier, in its tomb.

  ‘I want my breakfast,’ said Randal, baulking at the two and a half mile walk back to Floodgates Farm.

  Tina picked up her biscuit tin. She took her friend’s hot little hand in hers. Strolled beside him. She had just sealed the derelict tower’s forgotten doorway for the foreseeable future.

  No one else, least of all him, would ever tell what it held.

  ‘Don’t worry, Randal. Look, I brought these specially for you. You can eat them on your way home.’

  With that, she handed him a small plastic pot from her pocket.

  ‘Thanks, Tina. What’s in it?’

  ‘Your favourite.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Glass eels.’

  Epilogue

  Two leggy sun-worshippers lay naked on the deck of their large white yacht. They let hot rays beat down on their oiled bodies. One was exceptionally pale, nearly washed out, with a thin jaw, no make-up, a profusion of long red hair somewhat tangled and an elegant nose. Her silvery sea-green eyes were the colour of the deepest ocean. Two black Norwegian Elkhounds lay panting at her feet.

  ‘Mix me a Bermuda Rum Swizzle, will you?’

  The other sunbather’s eyes narrowed as if she might at first resent the order, but the moment passed without incidence. Slowly she rose from her towel, walked to the bar and began to gather together fruit juice, rum and bitters.

  With some crushed ice she began to stir the mixture by inserting a pronged stick into her pewter pitcher.

  She was soon rubbing it between the palms of her hands quite vigorously.

  ‘Don’t you ever tan, Sabrina?’

  ‘It’s a blessing you’ll never know.’

  ‘You look like one of those ivory-coloured mermaids that you see in those dreadful pictures painted by frustrated Victorian artists. You know, all shipwrecks and bare-breasted sirens in wet sea caves and slippery rock pools. You’d look good in a Burne-Jones.’

  ‘You not sorry I got you into this, Eva?’

  ‘Clearly that bastard priest outsmarted us both.’

  ‘Forget the Swizzle. Bring me a Dark n’ Stormy.’

  She gave a smile that was peculiarly penetrating and provoking.

  ‘Eva Greene at your service, Your Highness.’

  ‘Don’t scrimp on the ginger beer this time.’

  ‘You know why it’s called a Dark n’ Stormy?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It’s said that a sailor invented the name because the drink is the colour of a hurricane. You wouldn’t ever want to sail towards it.’

  ‘That a fact?’

  Eva licked cheese sauce off a chunk of lobster.

  ‘Hey, Sabrina. You want some breakfast?’

  ‘This slice of rum cake will do just fine.’

  ‘Do you ever eat much at all?’

  ‘I’m on a diet.’

  ‘You look marvellous but even a belle like you can’t live on air alone.’

  ‘How long have you known me now?’

  ‘You’ll never look rosy about the gills.’

  ‘Eva, my love, you’re so amusingly tiresome.’

  So saying, Sabrina, too, rose to her feet and walked to the front rail of the boat. Eva did ask her what she meant by that.

  Instead Sabrina refused to look back at her rather stiffly as though she were spontaneously annoyed with something she’d done or failed to do.

  She could be certain that at least it was not a rebuff.

  ‘What now?’ said Eva. ‘Did he not say he’d make us rich?’

  ‘As rich as Croesus.’

  ‘I can’t tell you what it means not to have what’s rightfully mine.’

  ‘A tedious point.’

  ‘It was his plan, mostly.’

  ‘What can I say?’

  ‘You could say sorry.’

  ‘Eva, that’s not kind. That’s not fair.’

  ‘I just can’t believe a man of the cloth could be so downright deceitful.’

  ‘You got that right.’

  ‘Of course we should never have believed him when he said the treasure was in Bermuda.’

  ‘Men are such liars.’

  ‘Don’t forget he as good as stole your ship.’

  ‘How was I to know he’d go back for his dog?’

  ‘You have to forget all about that now.’

  ‘Let it not be said that I, Sabrina ap Loegres, will ever fail to take unfair advantage of someone just because I suspect that he is particularly vulnerable, susceptible or downright ill.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘H’m, well, yeah, a woman has to be persistent, doesn’t she? All’s fish that come to her net, aren’t they?’

  Eva moved to the bow of the boat but Sabrina only stared ever harder at the water. Her lover’s attitude forced her to concentrate her own attention on the brown weed that floated on the sea’s surface and encased the side of the hull.

  They’d been becalmed like this for a while now.

  ‘According to legend many a sailor of yore was ensnared by the Sargasso Sea,’
said Sabrina with a wry smile, ‘never to be seen again. Columbus and his frightened men thought the weed was land when they were nowhere near.’

  Eva said nothing at first – did not know how to justify anything she could say. She found the other’s smile peculiarly penetrating and provoking. Yet it was no less so than her eyes, which were unblinking. In a few seconds she came to her senses. Stood her ground in the growing disturbance before the boat’s bow.

  ‘Shit. What is it?’

  Sabrina extended one arm to the sea. She lowered a lantern into the pale shadows cast by the white hull where she began to scan the berry-like air bladders of the sargassum. Weed suddenly began to stir and gleam. Thousands upon thousands of eyes sparked sudden glints of glass – shiny black pupils stared up at her as a mass of snake-like heads broke surface, like jewels.

  She was delighted.

  ‘See, Eva. The eels are getting ready to spawn.’

  Each gracefully thin, serpentine body that tapered to its tail slipped and slid against the next eel’s slimy contours. They glided over one another with continuous, frictionless ease as they intertwined. They revolved like one big serpent.

  Even Varg and Freya raised their heat-struck heads to sniff the sudden smell that rose from fish and weed.

  ‘See how beautiful they are,’ said Sabrina and pointed to the pairs of pectoral fins just behind each eel’s shiny head. ‘Watch them breathe through their gills.’

  Eva made a face.

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Seriously, Eva, I don’t know why you don’t like them.’

  ‘What should I like?’

  ‘Their magic?’

  ‘I’m not feeling that.’

  Undeterred, Sabrina witnessed countless long back and anal fins merge with tail fins to create a mass of wriggling, soft-rayed fringes that madly fanned the sea. Silvery white bellies rolled over and over, as if doing her homage.

  She smiled.

  ‘The females are the biggest. They can be three or four feet long.’

  Eva cast a cursory glance over the side of the boat.

  ‘I don’t see the difference.’

  Sabrina grinned her peculiar grin.

  ‘Look again. The females have the broader noses. They acquire those on account of their excessively developed jaw muscles due to voracious eating.’

  ‘I’m happy for you.’

  With that, the eels all opened their shark-like mouths in the gyre; they and the ocean stream became one seething mass of life and activity. Soon sharp little teeth bit the air as Sabrina swept her hand to and fro across the circulating currents on the otherwise calm blue water. Thus had eels been known to lay eggs in this mysterious sea, but rarely if ever had the exact moment ever been seen.

  Her stance, as she leaned lower and lower over the boat’s rail, impressed upon Eva some awful urgency. Her obsession appealed to her with a ruthlessness of purpose about which she knew nothing, yet she sensed that she would share it at her peril.

  ‘Please come away from the rail, Sabrina and eat your breakfast.’

  ‘Don’t you see we’re in the presence of something truly wondrous.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I know that. But what is all the feverish commotion? What’s the rush here?’

  ‘These eels will all die. Their elvers, however, will float all the way back to England to grow into eels to repeat the cycle.’

  ‘Really, Sabrina, I don’t know how you can be so nonchalant. Reverend Luke Lyons promised us a fortune.’

  ‘So what, he’s dead by now for sure.’

  ‘Tell yourself that.’

  ‘You would have thought that he would have wanted what was rightfully his. Did he even know where to find any fucking treasure?’

  ‘Never trust a man who can’t trust himself.’

  ‘What is true wealth, anyway?’

  ‘As someone famous once said, there is no wealth but life.’

  ‘They got that right.’

  ‘You any good at cooking a Bermuda codfish breakfast?’

  ‘I don’t know. You?’

  ‘Please, Sabrina, do help me peel these potatoes. I’m hopeless.’

  ‘Give me a moment.’

  ‘What now?’

  Sabrina watched the eels’ razor-sharp teeth snap at her fingers as she dangled her lamp a little lower to draw them closer. Suddenly those million eyes flashed again like diamonds. She peered into more spaces between the clumps of sargassum. Lit the seething dark water far below.

  ‘Don’t you just love the hidden riches of secret places? I do.’

  *

  Six months later Jorge stood high on the cliff overlooking the River Severn. He watched its silvery currents coil between the black, gleaming mudflats far below while Ellie and Randal called to him at the unfenced drop into the ship canal. He called back.

  He saw the vista encompass sky and water for as far as his eye could see and listened to Sasha sniff the briny breeze beside him.

  Then he advanced to the void where all twenty-two iron girders had once spanned the estuary. Braved his vertigo.

  Before him Ellie held out a jar to him in a gesture both generous and kind.

  She smiled wordlessly.

  Jorge took it and returned the smile equally silently.

  They faced the flaming red sunrise that anticipated high tide by less than an hour. They stood before the coming of the new day, shoulder to shoulder.

  They watched noisy feral greylag and Canada geese fly by on the wind off the Atlantic. In their thoughts they recalled Luke’s love for this wild place that had once been his home, as it was about to be again, forever.

  Jorge held aloft the urn whose ashes Ellie had asked him to scatter. He held it up to sun, air and water as a final offering. And then he opened it.

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  © Guy Sheppard 2017

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