The Mermaid's Call

by Katherine Stansfield

  The wind had dropped, and the rooks, for once, had left us. Even the sea was quiet, as if waiting, for a truth was coming clear. All three of us on the bench felt it.

  ‘Sad as it is, your loss, you have gained from your brother’s death,’ I said.

  ‘I have, Mrs Williams. I would not dispute that. But it is nothing to the loss of a brother.’

  ‘A brother you haven’t seen in more than forty years,’ Anna said. ‘A good trade, some might say.’

  He got to his feet and stumbled back from the bench. ‘You cannot think this money motivated me to … to kill my own brother?’

  We said nothing. We would lend him the rope to hang himself.

  ‘It is preposterous! I charged you to investigate Joseph’s death. Why would I do that if it was my own neck I risked in doing so?’

  ‘True,’ Anna said, and I marvelled at her calm in the face of such anger from the captain, who was, after all, the one paying us. ‘But it wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of possibility to employ an investigator to ensure someone else hang. But come, sit. We are speaking of generalities here. We make no charge against you.’

  Oh, but we might! And the captain wasn’t eased by her words. He stayed standing, his eyes wild.

  ‘Captain Ians, please. Mrs Williams and I meant no offence. We were speaking simply of the facts in this case.’

  ‘I—Quite so. But still, I would not have you think such things, even just to entertain them. Now, if you will excuse me—’

  ‘I have one last question for you,’ I said. ‘If you get Joseph’s money, what happens to his shares?’

  ‘They pass to Charlotte.’

  ‘And if Mrs Hawker should give Joseph’s shares to her husband,’ Anna said, ‘as well as her own—’

  ‘God forbid she would be that foolish,’ the captain muttered.

  ‘—then Parson Hawker would have the controlling stake in The Eliza,’ Anna said. ‘And I’d imagine that means he could force a sale if he wishes.’

  The captain nodded, his gaze on his boots. ‘He could. Which is why Charlotte must be persuaded to resist Robert’s demands. Any help you may give in that quarter, I would be indebted to you.’

  You’re already indebted, I thought.

  ‘For Charlotte’s sake, you understand. Not my own.’

  ‘Of course,’ Anna said.

  He took his leave of us then, and hurried away, back to the Bush Inn, and to his guilt? He had told us much, and not come out of it well.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘The funeral service might not have run quite as expected,’ Anna said, ‘but the parson did strike one right note. He heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. Joseph Ians had quite a heap of riches waiting for him.’

  ‘He wasn’t here by chance, then,’ I said. ‘He had a strong reason to come home to Morwenstow. But now he’s dead, his brother will do the gathering.’

  ‘A motive for murder if ever I heard one.’

  ‘But Mrs Hawker and the parson,’ I said, ‘they’re the same. Each stood to gain if Joseph should die.’

  ‘Which means we have three suspects to consider. And it’s a curious state of affairs.’ Her false teeth began to clack. ‘None would seem to be in competition for the gain. They each benefit from Joseph’s death without compromising the others. The captain gets Joseph’s earnings that have been saved for him, Mrs Hawker gets Joseph’s shares, and if the parson has his way, those shares will be made over to him in time. Could they be working together to see Joseph dead?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘The bad feeling between the captain and the parson seems truthful. They wouldn’t put their heads together. Mrs Hawker is likewise at odds with the captain and her husband has forbid her to talk of the other brother. There’s no peace between the parties.’

  ‘So each has their own motive,’ Anna said, ‘and we must assume they would act without the knowledge of the others.’

  ‘And now that we have found their motives,’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’ Anna looked at me with some eagerness.

  ‘We must discover what they were doing when Joseph Ians was likely killed. There is a word for it, I forget—’

  ‘Alibi, Shilly.’

  ‘That’s it. It means knowing the time and a person’s business and such.’

  ‘It does, indeed. The captain has already provided us with details of his whereabouts when Joseph’s body was discovered – on his way back to Morwenstow, and from the open sea off Portugal, no less. Though he stood to gain from his brother’s death, his alibi would seem to rule him out. We must ask Mrs Hawker and the parson for their movements.’

  ‘And there’s another soul we must think on, Anna.’

  ‘Hm?’ She had stood and was using the edge of a grave to scrape mud from Mr Williams’ boots.

  ‘That Mrs Grey, the widow who owns the other quarter of the ship shares. Her with the pox.’

  ‘True, she might have an interest in Joseph’s fate,’ Anna said, ‘though it’s not clear to me yet what that could be.’

  ‘I’ll put her in my pocket for now, then.’

  Anna stopped her blasphemous boot scraping and frowned at me. ‘Your what?’

  ‘My pocket. For things that might be important but we haven’t the truth of yet, so we can’t know. If they’re important, I mean.’

  ‘I see. And what else is in your … pocket?’

  ‘Well, the captain’s dream is in there, and the mermaid, of course.’

  ‘It’s a big pocket, then,’ Anna muttered.

  I made out I hadn’t heard her. It was best to just press on when she went teasey about my way of looking at things. Forcing her to hear me was the only way. It was one reason I knew myself to be a louder person these days. I was sure I never had need of so much shouting before I met Anna Drake.

  ‘And the Seldons,’ I said, folding my arms. ‘They’re in my pocket too.’

  Now she was keen, now she was without scorn. ‘Really? Why?’

  And I told her of my suspicion that the mother and daughter working for the parson were Methodists, who were the parson’s most hated kind of person, and that though they hid it from him, I had spied it out.

  ‘It’s because they think me like them,’ I said. ‘For the way my voice sounds, for I’m only just learning to read and write. So they are less … less … Oh, what is the word!’

  ‘Guarded? They let their guard down?’

  I didn’t understand her. She tried again.

  ‘They are honest with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What they make of the two of us together then, I can’t think. This incarnation of Mr Williams might need to come down in the world. Or was he forced to marry his scullery maid? It seems unlikely. Or he could—’

  She could never stop her making of other selves. Anna herself had told me the word for such habits – com pul shun. It was like a lady I had seen in Blisland, where I was born. She would not take off her gloves, not even for eating, they said. My mother knew a woman who knew another woman whose sister worked in the lady’s house, and she told my mother that if this lady was made to take off her gloves then she would scrub her hands with a hard brush until the skin came away in folds and there was blood all down her arms. The lady had a compulsion to wear her gloves. Anna had a compulsion to be someone other than herself. And me? My compulsion was Anna Drake.

  ‘Well, well,’ Anna said, and took her pipe from her coat. ‘It’s not just the mysteries of life that you contribute to Williams and Williams Investigations. It’s religious learning too.’

  ‘Religion is a mystery, Anna.’

  ‘And philosophy too!’ she crowed. ‘Oh, Shilly, what a wonder you are.’

  And she leant down and kissed me, with her whiskers and her breath all the parson’s fine tobacco, but a kiss! As she went to pull away, I kissed her, hard and long, and she gave in to it, to me, as she wished to, I knew she did. I drew her onto my lap. What a pair we would have looked to anyone passing – a wo
man with a man on her knee, her hand at his waist, her hand at his breast.

  ‘Anna,’ I murmured into her cheek. ‘You love me, I know it. Why can’t we be as we were once before? What harm does it do? We are all the time together anyway. To be as married people are truly, not just these names we use, these rings.’

  She leant into me and I felt her boniness beneath her man’s coat and shirt.

  ‘Because … because I—’

  ‘What is it? I have kept from the drink, truly I have.’

  ‘I know, and I know how hard that’s been. But there is something I must tell you. Shilly—’

  ‘Whatever is the matter? It can’t be so bad to cry over.’

  She stood to wipe her eyes. When she was done, she had wiped away her willingness to tell me her secrets too.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, just the same as when that letter had come, back in Boscastle. Just as she’d said when she argued with Mathilda. Whatever it was she was keeping from me, it was keeping us apart too.

  She ducked inside the doorway and I knew her to be repairing the powder that had washed from her face with her tears. The powder that helped shape her face to that of Mr Williams. My husband, the stranger. Would that I could have her as a wife and so know her truly.

  When she stepped back into the weak sun she was all business again. There would be no more sitting on laps and kissing. Not for a while, at any rate.

  ‘Alibis, Shilly.’

  Was she speaking of her own?

  We returned to the vicarage. Where there might be easier answers.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The vicarage seemed inhabited only by creatures. The cats slept on the fine chairs in the room where we had sat with the parson on our first night and which Anna said was a drawing room. The dogs slept under the dining-room table. Gyp the pig had stuffed himself beneath the stairs, wedged between an old trunk and what I took to be a tin bath full of shells and pebbles. His snores made the tin bath rattle.

  Anna went upstairs to see who was about, and I went to the back of the house, where at last I found a person, and that was Mrs Seldon, napping before the fire, her knitting in her lap. I let my foot clang one of the fire irons and she woke. I asked where the parson and his wife were to.

  ‘They’re having a rest, the pair of them,’ Mrs Seldon said. ‘Service this morning has taken it out of the parson. He do get quite upset with the burials.’

  ‘So I saw. Him falling to the floor!’

  ‘Today was a quiet one.’ Mrs Seldon picked up her knitting. The wool was red and lumpen. It made me think of the clotted blood on the body of Joseph Ians. ‘I can’t bear to see the parson like it any more,’ she said. ‘Some would say we’re cursed in Morwenstow, the number of souls who end up on the beaches. Parson says it’s the lack of faith.’ Click click click went her needles.

  ‘Would you say that?’

  She looked up from her needles. ‘Morwenstow is strong in believers.’

  ‘And what do you say of the dead man being Joseph Ians?’

  ‘I say it’s terrible sad. If it’s true, that is.’

  ‘You doubt it?’

  Click click click. The red wool twitching. ‘All I know is the way his body was torn to pieces. How you could tell anything of the poor wretch, let alone a name, is beyond me. But there we are. What do I know? I’m only the one that sees to all the bodies that wash in here.’

  ‘We found something that makes it certain the dead man is Joseph. A tattoo he was known to have. It was on the gobbet that washed in.’

  Her knitting slipped from her hands to the floor. ‘My husband told me about the flesh. I didn’t know nothing about it being Joseph’s tattoo. But he’d have no reason to come back to Morwenstow after all this time. What was there here for him?’

  Mrs Seldon didn’t seem to know anything about Joseph’s earnings from The Eliza. I wasn’t about to tell her either.

  ‘His sister, for one thing,’ I said. I picked up her knitting from the floor, and as I did so I saw there was something in the grate. A yellow flower, bright amongst the new wood waiting to be lit. I put it in my pocket inside my head.

  Mrs Seldon took the knitting from me. ‘The rows there were on him leaving, I wouldn’t have thought that would be enough. No, it can’t be him.’

  ‘But what about the tattoo?’ I said. ‘It was of a carving in the church!’

  She shrugged. ‘I daresay there’s plenty got them. Why, them carvings could be in all the churches between here and Australia.’

  I opened my mouth to tell her what I thought of that notion, but then I closed it, for could she have been right? The carving looked strange to my eyes, but perhaps it wasn’t. How was I to know?

  Mrs Seldon was murmuring to herself. ‘No, no. It can’t be him. It makes no sense. No sense at all.’

  She wouldn’t be convinced, but that didn’t matter. Convincing Mrs Seldon that the dead man was Joseph Ians wasn’t my work. I thought I would try a different track. I took the seat next to her.

  ‘You knew Joseph as a boy, Mrs Seldon, didn’t you?’

  ‘It was such a long time ago,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Hawker said he used to be great friends with Nancy.’

  ‘Did she now? Well, that’ll be her way of remembering.’

  ‘It’s not yours?’

  Mrs Seldon looked at me. ‘Different sorts of people see the world different, don’t they? See a person’s standing only when they want to. One thing I do know, all this talk it’s Joseph means we’ll have no peace in this house. You might want to shift yourself to the Bush, Mrs Williams. It’ll be quieter there, even with those who’ve given in to drink parading their wickedness.’ She got to her feet. ‘Something came for you. I would have told you at breakfast, but you were so late rising.’

  ‘Something for me?’

  ‘A letter. I left it on the table in the hall.’

  Another letter. And it had found us here, at Morwenstow. Whoever was writing to Anna, she had given them this address.

  Before I could say anything more, Anna herself appeared in the kitchen. From the pallor of her face I thought she must have heard Mrs Seldon tell me of the letter, but Anna didn’t speak of it. Instead she asked the old woman who it was that had found the body on the beach and brought the news to the vicarage.

  ‘Inchin Ben,’ Mrs Seldon said, with some dislike for the words, I thought. If she had been a church person, of Parson Hawker’s kind, she would have crossed herself. ‘And no surprise that was!’

  ‘Is he one of the watchers?’ I said. ‘The parson told us he pays men to look out after a storm, to see the bodies come in.’

  ‘No he is not!’ Mrs Seldon said, and scooped her knitting onto the table with force. ‘Inchin Ben is nothing to do with anyone, and that’s how it should be.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Anna said.

  ‘Well, he draws the luck from others,’ Mrs Seldon said. ‘He’s been saved from that many ships going down. It ain’t natural.’

  ‘You would rather he’d been drowned?’ Anna said, barely able to hold fast to her scorn.

  ‘It’d be more proper than him living when so many with him didn’t. You ask anyone round here, they’ll tell you. Inchin Ben is bad luck for he’ll take the good luck from you. I’d keep away from him, if I were you.’ And here she looked at me for she liked me best, I thought, for she thought me poor.

  ‘And if we were to risk our luck,’ Anna said, ‘where would we find this man?’

  ‘Coombe,’ Mrs Seldon said. ‘But don’t expect to come back again if you do go and see him. You’ll be over the cliff edge, and it’ll be him to blame.’

  ‘Mrs Seldon, wait,’ I said.

  She turned in the doorway.

  ‘His name – why’s he called Inchin Ben?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  Anna and I looked at one another.

  ‘He’s taking a liberty,’ Mrs Seldon said, as if we were soft, ‘taking people’s luck. Creeping, he is. Creeping f
or all that’s good. Inchin for it.’ And her shoulders shook as if someone had just walked over her grave.

  Once we were alone, Anna said, ‘I definitely want to meet this man now.’

  ‘You think there’s more to learn from him of the body?’

  ‘We can’t rule it out. But there’s something else in your pocket that we must now take out and examine, Shilly, with the help of this Inchin Ben.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The light that was seen on the cliff, the night before Joseph Ians was discovered on the beach beneath. We need to know who lit it, and to what purpose. I’m hopeful this curious man can help with that.’

  ‘But what if Mrs Seldon’s right and he does take our luck?’

  ‘He’ll be lucky to find any between you and I. Come on. We’ll need to be back before the daylight goes if we’re to avoid the fate Mrs Seldon has foretold for us.’

  ‘Anna, you mustn’t joke about such things! You might not mind falling onto them knife rocks but it’s not the way I’m going, I’m telling you.’

  We were back in the hall, heading for the door.

  ‘Oh yes? And how will you go, Shilly?’

  ‘In bed with you, my heart giving out with pure joy.’

  She blushed, just as I’d hoped.

  ‘Go and get your boots on,’ she said. ‘I just need to …’

  And she was away to the table. To collect her letter. Into the pocket of her cream coat it went. If she couldn’t find the words to tell me the truth of what was going on, I would have to find it out myself. I would have to read that letter.

  THIRTY

  Anna must have thought to read the letter herself before we left, for she was some time coming to the front door. I had my boots on and thought I’d wait for her outside. The porch smelt too much of dog, and maybe pig too. I had to move the parson’s lantern out of the way to open the door and when I did I saw a cart coming down the narrow lane from the road. And on the back of it, a sight I knew well. Anna’s travelling case. My thinking had brought it. Anna had no sense of the good things I could do for her.