The Mermaid's Call

by Katherine Stansfield

  But we did need some work. Anna said we did, to live on, even though we had five hundred pounds from Mathilda. That was hard to fathom. Five hundred sounded plenty to me.

  ‘The notice is still in the newspaper?’ I asked Anna while we waited for the kettle to boil.

  She nodded.

  ‘And it’s the same one as before, that you showed me?’ I said.

  ‘It is. Mathilda did a fine job of it.’

  ‘You mean her drawing?’

  ‘It’s more draughtsmanship, Shilly. It means—Never mind.’

  The notice was placed when we had first come to Boscastle, before I had started my reading proper, so I hadn’t been able to tell the letters then, but I had seen the smart lines Mathilda had put around Anna’s words.

  ‘Much good the advertisement is doing us, though,’ Anna said. ‘Not a case to speak of.’

  ‘That’s not true. There was the woman up Trequite Farm.’

  Anna made a noise of scorn. ‘That? You can hardly call that a case, Shilly. A farmer with shocking breath and a lazy eye thinks his much younger wife is possessed by a demon that makes her walk in her sleep. The only devil tempting that woman was lust for the cowhand in the barn.’

  ‘Her husband did pay us for finding that out, though,’ I said, remembering his tears as he handed me the coins. Were they from relief there were no devils on his land, or sadness at his wife betraying him? Either way, it was hard to see him weep.

  ‘Well yes, all right,’ Anna said. ‘Ten shillings for a night’s observation and a few traps. Not bad as a rate, but I suspect we wouldn’t even have had that work if it weren’t for Mrs Yeo taking pity on us and telling the delusional farmer we could help.’

  ‘Mrs Yeo is very kindly.’

  The kettle whistled so I lifted it from the fire with the cloth we kept close by for such a purpose. It was a scrap from Anna’s travelling case and I knew it to be the pattern of one of Mrs Williams’ dresses. My dresses when I was that lovely creature, for Anna wasn’t the only one who wore disguises. I was often in them myself.

  ‘Do you think it’s because of who we are?’ I said. ‘Not being men.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘That it’s because we’re women we haven’t had many cases, and so we can’t move to a better place with a sign over the door like you said we would have. A sign painted by Mathilda.’

  Anna stirred the tea with some viciousness, then clamped the lid on the pot.

  ‘I think it must be the same trouble you had before,’ I said. ‘In Scotland, when the men wouldn’t have you.’

  ‘It was Scotland Yard, Shilly. That’s where the new detective force is housed. And you might be right. I hold out no hope that north Cornwall will be any more enlightened than the streets of London, but still …’

  I patted her hand. ‘Still, we must try. It’s what we’re good at, and it’s better work than milking cows.’

  Anna smiled. ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘And after all,’ I said, and looked at her askance, ‘we’re not always women, are we?’

  And now she blushed. ‘Quite so, Shilly.’

  ‘Pass me your cup, then. We’ll drink to better times, shall we?’

  ‘We shall. Or at least the continuing kindness of landladies.’

  ‘To Mrs Yeo,’ I said, and raised my cup.

  Anna clanked me and we sipped.

  ‘Mrs Yeo might not be so kindly when we can no longer pay for a roof over our heads,’ Anna muttered, taking her pipe from the shelf above the fire.

  ‘We’ll have to go and work in the shop downstairs, then,’ I said. ‘You must know your way around a meat hook, Anna, you growing up in a butcher’s.’ I grinned, for I was playing the game along with her. Such talk of no rent could only be foolishness. We had all the money in the world since meeting Mathilda.

  I cleared my throat. ‘I know you say we must save the money Mathilda has given us—’

  ‘That she has invested, Shilly.’

  ‘All right, invested, for the agency.’ The smell of her tobacco made my nose prickle. ‘But we can use it to live on, can’t we? And it’s more than enough.’

  But Anna wouldn’t meet my eye and I saw she hadn’t been making a game of our rent. And that made my stomach drop to a cold, dark place, because we had been so careful with money, saving, that we should have most of it left. Shouldn’t we?

  ‘These seeds …’ Anna took out her little row of false teeth and poked at them with the stem of her pipe.

  I said nothing. She had shown me again that she was still the one who had the business of our earning and our spending, though she had said we were to be partners in the business of detection.

  A piece of wood dropped against the fire’s grate. From the harbour, a faraway shout and then a man’s laugh. And still I waited.

  ‘It’s fine, Shilly,’ she said at last. ‘I’m just looking to the future, that’s all. Mathilda won’t get much for her investment if we only have unfaithful farmers’ wives to deal with.’ A black speck flew from her false teeth and shot across the room. ‘There! Got it. That would have kept me awake all night. Speaking of which.’ She got up and stretched. ‘I’m going to try to get some sleep.’

  She put her hand on my shoulder. No squeeze, no stroke. But her hand there, for two breaths. Then she was gone.

  I stayed in the parlour for the fire to burn out for I was uneasy. The patch of damp on the wall looked to have grown, the swan shape fattened to a goose. I’d become so used to the damp being there I had stopped thinking of it as a bad thing, that we were living poor. But now, with Anna saying we’d have no money for rent, I saw the damp anew. And I asked myself, Shilly, why are you three living this way when you have Mathilda’s five hundred pounds?

  Because Anna says we must. And why is that?

  Surely the money was all right? It had only been six months since we’d come to Boscastle and we’d been so careful. I was used to thrift – my life before Anna had meant I’d had to be. But Anna herself … Who knew how she was with money? If she could be trusted. I still knew so little about Anna Drake.

  Apart from that I loved her.

  THREE

  Mrs Yeo woke me, banging the door at the bottom of our stairs.

  ‘Only me, my dears!’ she called out.

  She said that every morning when she brought the breakfasts, as if we might think someone else had come to visit. But no one had called on us in Boscastle, even with the advert in the paper.

  The door to the parlour was flung open by Mrs Yeo’s ample hip and she carried in the plates of bread and bacon.

  ‘Going to be a dirty one today,’ she said. ‘Weather’s turned. Miss Mathilda will need to take care on the harbour wall, what with the wind.’ She set the plates down.

  She was tall, unlike her stooped husband the butcher, and strong, too, for she worked in the shop, hauling the joints and using the cleaver. Her arms were thick as the hams she cured.

  ‘I think spring’s given up on us this year,’ I said. I was cold and stiff having slept in the chair and my bones went click click click as I stood.

  ‘I fear you might be right, but here’s something to warm you, Mrs Williams.’

  ‘Hm?’

  Mrs Yeo was holding something out to me. A letter. She was all eagerness, her face lit with excitement.

  ‘It must surely be about a crime! I said to my husband, it’ll be a murder. Mark my words. A dreadful one. And our ladies will find the truth of it! A letter for them can only mean one thing.’

  She pressed it into my hands, but I as soon wanted to push it away for it stung me. There was no other word for it. The letter was prickly in my hands. Mrs Yeo had seemed to feel nothing like this. To her it was just paper. But I could feel the words inside and they were sharp. The writing on the outside was not so curly as to be hard to read. It said Mrs Williams. This was the name I had taken but so few people knew me by it that the letter had to be for Anna, not for me.

  ‘You’re not going to open
it?’ Mrs Yeo said, unable to hide her disappointment.

  ‘I—’

  Anna herself came in then. She yawned good morning to Mrs Yeo, and that gave me the chance to drop the letter onto Anna’s chair. It was for her. But I would know what stung.

  Mrs Yeo had realised there would be no news of murder for the moment, so she took her leave, disappointed. She was back to the weather’s likely course as she went down the stairs. We were in for a bad day to come.

  Anna saw the letter on the chair and snatched it up. She tore it open and began to read but she didn’t need to read out loud to understand it, as I did, so I couldn’t hear the words. I looked at the paper over her shoulder, but the writing was too close together. If I could put my finger beneath the words and go slow—

  Anna saw me and folded the pages.

  I waited for her to speak, to say something of this letter that was an uncommon thing in our lives, but she didn’t. The only sound was the clack of her false teeth, which I knew to be her thinking sound. It had been the strange song of all our detecting so far.

  Mathilda came in then, her face pale and her hair tangled as a furze bush. She looked younger than her sixteen years. She looked a child.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked her.

  ‘Tired, a little.’

  She never spoke of her terrors after bad nights, and we never asked her. What good would it do? I told her to have some bacon before it went cold.

  ‘Mrs Yeo, she say the weather will be bad?’ Mathilda asked. ‘We cannot go to the harbour?’ In her way of speaking there was some echo of her German voice. The way she put her words together, and the gaps sometimes. The words that weren’t there. I had the same when writing, reaching for a word I knew but how to catch it, get it down in ink?

  ‘There might be work for us to do today instead,’ I said, and then to Anna, ‘Have we got a case?’

  ‘A case …’ Anna looked at the fire. Her fingers closed over the letter, made the pages crumple.

  ‘Yes, Anna. That’s what we do, isn’t it? Have cases and do the solving of them. Or have you forgot yourself since going to bed? Have some little folk been and changed you, like they do with babes?’

  That made Mathilda laugh, at least, but Anna … She still stared at the fire.

  ‘Here, Shilly. You pass this.’ Mathilda handed me a laden plate and I placed it in Anna’s lap.

  But when I tried to take the pages from her so that she could eat, she snatched them back and was all at once herself again.

  ‘You don’t want me to see it?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s nothing, Shilly. Have we some butter left from yesterday?’

  Mathilda said she would fetch it.

  ‘I should have let Mrs Yeo give me the letter as she’d wished,’ I muttered. ‘I am Mrs Williams, after all.’

  ‘Only in name,’ Anna said, which hurt me.

  Mathilda came back with the butter and we fell to eating, the only sound the shifting of the fire, the clinking of our knives. But there wasn’t the peace that was custom between us most mornings. This morning was different.

  It was true what Anna said. Mrs Williams was a name that Anna had given me, for of the two of us, Anna had been Mrs Williams first. Now I used that name and the story of that woman, who was a fic shun – that was the word Anna used. It meant lying.

  I had Mrs Williams’ long red curls to wear, and her little black hat. She had a dress of purple mourning too, for Mrs Williams had lost a husband. But only sometime was he lost. Sometimes he appeared too – another of Anna’s selves.

  I had met Mr Williams. That was Anna too, of course, though I hadn’t learnt that until later, to my great surprise, and then I had wondered, as I still wondered, if there had ever been a real Mr Williams, in London, where Anna had lived before. The letter come that morning wasn’t thick, which meant there could only be a little paper inside the packet. But the way it had stung me – that was because the letter had to have come from her other life. Her life before me. London. It was calling her back. I wondered who had loved her there. Who she had loved.

  But my wonder was bad and made me think bad thoughts of drowning such people in the Thames, which was a river Anna spoke of sometimes, of the bodies thrown in its waters and found by men in boats with hooks. I told myself, hadn’t Anna stayed with me here in Cornwall? She hadn’t gone back to London. There could be no one there for her now.

  A touch on my hand made me jump.

  ‘You are not hungry?’ Mathilda said, her eyes wide with concern, the lovely girl.

  I saw I hadn’t eaten a scrap, though my fork held meat.

  I forced myself to eat. Mathilda had enough worries. She didn’t need me to add to them. But I’d made up my mind. My name was Mrs Williams now, so it was only right I should read the letter. It might take me a good length of time, but I was getting better, and Anna kept saying I had to practise and so I stretched out my fingers, along the arm of the chair, a little further, reached in. The dryness of the paper, a slick of bacon fat thinning it.

  Quick as a blink Anna threw the letter on the fire, then turned to me with a smile on her face I didn’t know. A smile brittle as the first ice of autumn. If I touched it, it would shatter.

  ‘Honestly, Shilly, it was nothing. Nothing at all!’

  And she laughed, a high strange laugh, and then I knew something terrible had happened. But what it was, she wouldn’t tell me.

  FOUR

  My thoughts at the letter coming were bad so I said I would go out. Mathilda said she would come too, that we would go to the harbour together. But I wasn’t good company, I could feel it. Could feel the sting of the letter, still, in my hands that had touched it. Mathilda’s face was all sorrow at being left behind. Anna didn’t even turn round when I said I was going.

  The wind was a fierce creature today, fiercer than I had known it since we had come to Boscastle. The street with the butcher’s shop sloped down to the water, and the houses flanking my path sloped likewise. The wind blew the cloying smell of meat away and coated me with fish instead. That was a much better smell. When I had first come to Boscastle, the air had tasted so much of fish I couldn’t think how it would be to live here and swallow it every day. And now I was doing it, and I found I liked it. It was the same with the sea, this change in me.

  The harbour came in sight. It was two walls that made it, and they didn’t quite meet, one set a little back from the other. Almost touching, as if reaching, but that gap between. Like Anna and me. How to bring us closer to one another when we seemed as unyielding as these moor stone walls built into the sea? I turned away from them. Walked on alone.

  Anna had asked me to work with her for I could see the parts of the world she couldn’t. The parts that were hard to see for they had to be looked at askance. They were dark and strange, rooted deep in the earth where by rights they should remain. They were long ago deaths and deaths still to come. They were devils and unquiet souls. Where Anna saw the cuts a knife made in a young girl’s throat, could tell the kind of knife it was, I felt the dead girl’s anger like a hot brand on my own breast. When Anna saw things that could be touched and smelt, I saw beneath them.

  This talent had been gifted me by my first love, though there were days it felt more like a curse, for the things I saw were frightening and hard to fathom, and there was nothing I could do about them by myself. Only see, only weep. I needed Anna to help me understand, and Anna needed me to help her put all the pieces together. Then we could have things like suspects and motives and all of that detecting business.

  But Anna couldn’t help with my worst fears, for if I could see the darkness in other people, and in the places where they lived, did that not mean I was a dark creature likewise? Some beast, like the ones the chapel preachers said should be cast out? This thinking left me jittery.

  I found I had stopped and was at the inn by the bridge, the Wellington, where I tried so hard not to be. Every day I tried. I hadn’t touched a drop since we had come to
Boscastle, and it was all for Anna. She was right to keep me from it, I knew, for it did me no good, but my hands were ashake all the same.

  I scrambled up the cliff path. I would not be again as I had been before.

  The wind grew fiercer the higher I climbed but I pushed into it to drive out the devil that plagued me. Up up up, walking into the clouds. My hair got free of its knot and streamed around me so I could not see where to put my feet, but the path guided me.

  A crash, a boom, and I saw that I’d come to the top of the cliff and the sea was a way away below, surging a white fury that was like the inside of my head. I scraped my hair from my eyes and forced it back into a knot. Some order here, Shilly. Take some care of your poor self.

  And then I saw her.

  A woman in the water right below me, in all that mess of waves and drag-about. She must have fallen from the very spot where I now stood. How could I fetch help before she went under? I was cursed to watch her die, and watch her I had to, for what unkindness it was to leave a person to die alone when you could be with them and see their final breath, see them go to wherever it was we went. I couldn’t look away. And it was so watching I saw that she didn’t go under and drown. Her head and her arms stayed clear above, and she moved with the waves rather than fight them.

  She was swimming.

  I could tell she was a woman from that distance by her long yellow hair that trailed behind her, and by her breasts, which were bare. What would the fishermen make of such a catch if they should pull up their nets and find her inside? They would be lucky souls, that I did know, for she was a fine creature.

  Now that I didn’t fear she was drowning I could watch her in peace, admire the way she spread her hands and carved the water, how her skin gleamed, how her legs pushed her forward, as if they were one bit of body. I wondered if she was something for Anna and I. If this was our next case, finding us, and me glimpsing it early, as sometimes happened.