Water Page 3

  The cries and splashes stopped for a while. Probably the sea-child was resting for a fresh attempt, and yes, when it came the swirl of the water was stronger and the slap of the body against the rock was louder, and the wail as the child fell back yet more despairing than before—so lost, so hopeless, that this time Pitiable heard it for what it was, and when it came again she felt it was calling to her, to her alone, in a language she alone knew, the language of a child trapped in a pit of despair by things too powerful for her to overcome.

  Weeping, she realised that she could not bear it.

  She dried her eyes and rose and climbed back up to the pool. This time as she watched the sea-child’s desperate leapings she saw that there must be something wrong with the other arm, which dangled uselessly by the slim body as it shot from the water. Still, one arm should be enough, if Pitiable could lean far enough to reach it, so she made her way round to the sloping rock, knelt and craned over.

  The sea-girl was on the point of leaping again. For a moment Pitiable gazed down at the wan, drawn face with its too-small mouth and its too-large dark eyes, but then the sea-girl twisted from her leap and plunged back below the surface, leaving nothing but the swirl of her going. Pitiable reached down, calling gently and kindly, telling the girl she wanted to help her, though they must hurry because her grandfather would soon be back. But the girl hid in the depths, invisible behind the sky-reflecting surface, and did not stir.

  Pitiable stood up and looked along the Scaurs, but there was still no sign of Probity. He must have reached Home Beach by now, but perhaps the men there were too busy with their boats to listen to him. Well, she thought, though I cannot swim, if the girl will not come to me, I must go to her. At its shoreward end the pool narrowed almost to a slit, into which a few boulders had fallen and wedged, so she made her way round, sat down and took off all her clothes. Then she lowered herself into the slimy crack and, using the boulders for footholds, climbed down to the water.

  Despite the hot summer it was chill from the storm, which had churned up the underdeeps and thrown them here ashore. The salt stung the weals where Probity’s belt had cut, but she forced herself down and down, clutching a jag of rock beside her. With her chin level with the water she spoke.

  “Please come. Please trust me. I want to help you. I will take you back to the sea.”

  Nothing happened. She was about to plead again, but then changed her mind and lowered herself a little further, drew a deep breath and ducked beneath the surface. Through closed lips she started to hum the music Mercy had taught her, and now she discovered why it needed to be hummed, not sung. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t open her mouth under water—the sea-people spoke with words, so they must be able to. It was because now her whole body acted as a sort of sounding-board from which the slow notes vibrated. She could feel them moving away from her through the water, and when she rose to draw breath and sank again, they were still there, the same wavering air that she had heard Mercy hum so often, but this time coming out of the depths where the sea-child lay hidden.

  Pitiable joined the music, weaving her own notes through it as she had learned to do with Mercy those last days, until she needed to draw breath again, but before she sank back, the surface stirred and the sea-girl’s head appeared, staring at her from only a few feet away, lips parted, desperate with fear.

  Pitiable smiled at her and hummed again, in the air this time. The sea-girl answered and moved closer, slowly, but then came darting in and gave Pitiable a quick, brushing kiss and swirled away. Pitiable smiled and beckoned. Now the girl came more gently, and stayed, letting Pitiable take her good arm by the wrist and wind it around her own neck and then turn so that the girl’s body lay along Pitiable’s back and Pitiable could try to climb out the way she had come.

  She gestured first, trying to explain that though they had to start inland, she would turn seaward as soon as they reached the top of the rock. The girl seemed to understand, and hummed the tune again, with a querying rise at the end.

  “Yes,” said Pitiable. “I will take you to the sea.”

  The great fish tail became desperately heavy as she dragged it from the water, but the girl understood the need and spoke and knocked with her closed knuckles against Pitiable’s shoulder to stop her climbing while she deftly swung her tail sideways and up so that it lodged among the fallen boulders and Pitiable was now lifting only half her weight as she climbed on. Pitiable’s small body was wiry from its household tasks, and since Mercy had fallen ill, she had had to learn how to lift and shift burdens beyond her apparent strength, so she strove and grunted up the cleft, with the girl helping as best as she could, until she could roll her out onto the surface and climb gasping beside her.

  From then on she could crawl, with the sea-girl’s arm round her neck and the chilly body pressed against her back and the tail slithering behind. The rock promontory that held the pool tilted steadily down towards the incoming tide. It had weathered into sharp ridges, painful to crawl on, but Pitiable barely noticed, because a tremendous thought had come to her and given her fresh strength. She herself belonged body and soul to Probity, to beat and use in whatever way he chose until he finally killed her. Until then she was utterly trapped in that pit, with no escape. But here, now, there was this one thing she could prevent him from doing. He would not have the sea-girl, to join her in the pit. Not now, not ever.

  So she crawled on. Soon the sea-girl was gulping and panting from being too long in the air, but she lay still and trusting as the sea came slowly nearer. At last one flank of the promontory sloped down with the small waves washing in beside it, and Pitiable could crawl down until the sea-girl, judging her moment, was able to convulse herself sideways into the backwash and slither on through the foam to deeper water. In the haze of her huge effort Pitiable barely saw her go, but when her vision cleared and she looked out to sea, she saw the girl beckoning to her from beside the tip of the promontory.

  Wearily she rose and staggered down. The sea-girl gripped the rock with her good hand and dragged herself half out of the water. Pitiable sat beside her with her feet dangling into the wave-wash. Her knees and shins, she noticed, were streaming with blood. The sea-girl saw them and made a grieving sound.

  “It’s all right,” said Pitiable. “It is only scratches.”

  Face to face they looked at each other.

  “You must go now,” said Pitiable. “Before he comes back.”

  The sea-girl answered. She craned up. Pitiable bent so that they could kiss.

  “I must dress myself before the men come,” she said. “Good-bye.”

  She gestured to herself, and up the shore, and then to the sea-girl and the open sea. The sea-girl nodded and said something that must have been an answering good-bye. They kissed again, and the sea-girl twisted like a leaping salmon and shot off down the inlet, turned in the water, rose, waved and was gone.

  As Pitiable dressed, she decided that now Probity would very likely kill her for what she had done, take her home and beat her to death, half meaning to, and half not. And then, perhaps, he would kill himself. That would be best all round, she thought.

  And then she thought that despite that, she had done what Mercy would have wanted her to. It was why she had told her the story of Charity Goodrich, though neither of them could have known.

  When she was dressed she shook her hair out and sat combing her fingers through it to help it dry in the sun, but still he did not come, so she tied it up under her shawl and waited where he had left her. Her mood of gladness and resignation ebbed, and she was wrapped in terror once again.

  The men came at last, four of them, carrying nets and ropes, a stretcher, and a glass-bottomed box of the sort that crab-catchers used to see below the surface of the water. From their dress Pitiable saw that the three helpers were townspeople, as they would have to be—Probity would not even have tried to persuade any of the People to come on such an enterprise. From the way they walked, it was obvious that even these men we
re doubtful. A tall, thin lad in particular kept half-laughing, as if he was convinced that he was about to be made a fool of. But Probity came with a buoyant, excited pace and reached her ahead of the others.

  “Has anyone been near?” he whispered.

  “No one, grandfather.”

  “And have you heard anything?”

  “Only the gulls and the sea.”

  He stood and listened and frowned, but by now the helpers had come up, so he told them to wait with Pitiable and make no noise, and himself climbed up onto the ridge and crept out of sight. After a while he climbed down and fetched the glass-bottomed box, and this time he allowed the others to come up with him, but Pitiable stayed where she was. She heard his voice, gruff and stubborn, and the others answering him at first mockingly and then angrily, until he came down again and strode over to where she sat, with the others following.

  Pitiable rose and waited. She could see how the others glanced at one another behind Probity’s back, and before he spoke, she knew how she must answer.

  “I tell you, the child saw it also,” he shouted. And then to Pitiable, “Where has it gone? How did it get free?”

  “What do you speak of, grandfather?”

  “The sea-child! Tell them you saw the sea-child!”

  “Sea-child, grandfather?”

  He took a pace forward and clouted her with all his strength on the side of her head. She sprawled onto the shingle, screaming with the pain of it, but before she could rise, he rushed at her and struck her again. She did not know what happened next, but then somebody was helping her to her feet and Probity and the others were shouting furiously while she shook her head and retched in a roaring red haze. Then her vision cleared though her head still sang with pain, and she saw two of the men wrestling with Probity, holding his arms behind him.

  “The wicked slut let her go!” he bellowed. “She was mine! Mine! You have no right! This is my grandchild! Mine!”

  His face was terrible, dark red and purple, with the veins on his temples standing out like exposed tree roots. Then he seemed to realize what he had done and fell quiet. In silence and in shame he let them walk him back to the town, with the young man carrying Pitiable on his back.

  Though there were magistrates in the town, there was so seldom any wrongdoing among the People that it was the custom to let them deal with their own. After some debate the men took Probity to the Minister and told him what they had seen, and he sent for three of the elders to decide what to do. They heard the men’s story, gave them the money Probity had promised them, thanked them and sent them away. They then questioned Probity.

  Probity did not know how to lie. He said what he had seen, and insisted that Pitiable had seen the sea-child too. Pitiable, still dazed, unable to think of anything except how he would beat her when he had her home, stuck despairingly to her story. She said that she had been looking at the pool when Probity had climbed up beside her and looked too and become very excited and told her to wait down on the shore and let no one else near while he went for help.

  At this Probity started to shout and his face went purple again and he tried to rush at Pitiable, but the elders restrained him, and then a spasm shook him and he had to clutch at a chair and sit down. Even so, but for his story about the sea-child, the elders might have sent Pitiable home with him. She was, after all, his granddaughter. But a man who says he has seen a creature with a human body and a shining fish tail cannot be of sound mind, so they decided that in case there should be worse scandal among the People than there already was, Pitiable had best be kept out of his way, at least until a doctor had examined him.

  Pitiable spent the night at the Minister’s house, not with his own children but sleeping in the attic with the two servants. First, though, the Minister’s wife, for whom cleanliness was very close indeed to godliness, insisted that the child must be bathed. That was how the servants came to see the welts on Pitiable’s back and sides. Her torn knees they put down to her fall on the beach when Probity had struck her. The elder servant, a kind, sensible woman, told the Minister. She told him too that if the child received much more such handling, she would die, and her blood would be not only on her grandfather’s hands.

  The elders did not like it, but were forced to agree. A home would have to be found for the child. As a servant, naturally—she was young, but Mercy Hooke had trained her well. So on the second day after the business on the Scaurs, a Miss Lyall, a very respectable spinster with money of her own, came to inspect Pitiable Nasmith. She asked for a private room and the Minister lent her his study.

  Pitiable was brought in and Miss Lyall looked her up and down. Not until they door closed and they were alone did she smile. She was short and fat with bulgy eyes and two large hairy moles on the side of her chin, but her smile was pleasant. She put her head to one side and pursed her lips and, almost too quietly to hear, started to hum. Pitiable’s mouth fell open. With an effort she closed it and joined the music. At once Miss Lyall nodded and cut her short.

  “I thought it must be so,” she said softly. “As soon as I heard that story about the sea-child.”

  “But you know the song too!” whispered Pitiable, still amazed.

  “You are not the only descendant of Charity Goodrich, my dear. My mother taught me her story, and the song, and said I must pass them on to my own daughters, but I was too plain for any sensible man to marry for myself, and too sensible to let any man marry me for my money, so I have no daughters to teach them to. Not even you, since you already know them. All the same, you shall be my daughter from now on and we shall sing the song together and tell each other the story. It will be amusing, after all these years, to see how well the accounts tally.”

  She smiled, and Pitiable, for the first time for many, many days, smiled too.

  THE SEA-KING’S SON

  There was a young woman named Jenny who was the only child of her parents. Her parents were not wealthy as the world counts wealth, but they had a good farm and were mindful and thorough farmers; and since they had but the one child, they could afford to give her a good deal. So she had pretty clothes and kind but clever governesses and as many dogs and cats and ponies and songbirds as she wanted. She grew up knowing that she was much loved, and so she had a happy childhood; but the self-consciousness of adolescence made her shy and solemn. And she found, as some adolescents do, that she was less and less interested in the kinds of things her old friends were now most interested in, and so they drifted apart. Now she preferred to go for long solitary walks with her dogs, or riding on the fine thoroughbred mare her parents had bought her when she outgrew the last of the ponies. Her mother had to forbid her to stay in the kitchen through the harvest feast, where she would have gone on bottling plums and cherries from their orchards with her mother and the two serving-women till all the dancing was over; and at the next fair her mother sent her on a series of errands to all the stalls where the young people would be working for their parents. But Jenny only spoke to them as much as she had to, and came away again.

  Her parents had hoped that she would outgrow her shyness, as she had grown into it, but by the time she was eighteen, they had begun to fear that this would not happen. They worried, because they wanted her to find a husband, that she might be as happy with him as they had been with each other; and they hoped to leave their farm in their daughter’s hands, to be cared for by her and her husband as lovingly as they had cared for it, and given on to her children in the proper time. They worried that even a young man who would suit her well would not notice her, for she made herself unnoticeable; and they feared that it was only they who knew that, when she smiled, her face lit up with gentleness and humour and intelligence.

  They decided that they would take her to the city for a season, and that perhaps so drastic a change in her usual way of life might bring her to herself. They had relatives in the city, and this could be done without discomfort. They told her of their plan, and she would have protested, but they told her that they
were her parents, and they knew best.

  But because of her knowledge that she was to go away, she carried herself with more of an air during the next weeks—it was an air of tension, but it made her eyes sparkle and her back straight. She looked around her at her familiar circumstances with more attention than she had done for years, as if this trip to the city were going to change her life forever. And she knew well enough that her parents hoped that it would, that they hoped to find her an acceptable suitor: and what could change her life more thoroughly than marriage?

  They were going to the city a little after the final harvest fair of the year, when the farm could be left to look after itself for a while, with none but the hired workers to keep an eye on it; and when, as well, the best parties in the city were held, after the heat of the summer was over. The letters were written, and the relatives had pronounced themselves delighted to have Jenny for a season and her parents for as much as they felt they could stay of it. Her parents permitted themselves to feel hopeful; even the possibility that Jenny would fall in love with some city boy who loathed the very idea of farming seemed worth the risk.

  But things did not turn out as Jenny’s parents had planned. For at the harvest fair she caught the eye of a young man.

  This young man lived in a neighbouring village, and was one of four sons, third from the eldest. His family too held a good farm, like hers, but they had four sons to think of. The first was a hard worker, and he would have the farm. The second was clever, and was to be apprenticed to his uncle, who was a clever businessman in the city. The fourth was grave and thoughtful, and would go into the priesthood. The third was beautiful. His name was Robert.

  He knew he was beautiful, and all the girls knew it. Jenny knew it too. She had loved him for four and a half years, almost since the day that the blood that made her a woman first flowed, and her mother had explained to her what this meant, and what would happen to her on her wedding night. When she had understood, she had blushed fierily, and tried to forget. It had only been three days before that she had seen Robert for the first time, and had wondered at her own inability to think of anything else since, for such a thing had never happened to her before; boys were just boys, and their differences from girls had never been terribly intriguing. It seemed to her that her mother had just explained this too, and rather than feeling pleased and excited, she felt it was all too much, and was frightened. None of this she told her mother, who might have been able to reassure her; and she never told anyone of her feelings for Robert.