The Mermaid's Call

by Katherine Stansfield

  He looked from one of us to the other. Had Anna forgot herself for once? Forgot the kind of men we were? She had, because before I could remind her, she agreed to bring in some firewood, and so, of course, I helped. If she was taken ill, then I would be too, so I thought it the best course to get the business done quicker and so be away.

  There was payment for our pains, though. Anna asked where we might find Inchin Ben.

  The man was beset then by another coughing fit, which was only partly caused by his body. Part of it was shock.

  ‘You don’t want to see him,’ the man spluttered, once he could speak again. ‘He’ll take—’

  ‘We know,’ I said. ‘And we’re going to see him.’

  The man shook his head, as if we were the ones in need of pity. ‘Along a little way. The fine door. You can’t miss it. But sirs, if you do see Inchin.’

  ‘Yes?’ Anna said.

  ‘Don’t ’ee be coming back to my cottage again. We haven’t any luck to spare.’

  And with the little strength left to him, this poor, dying man shoved his broken door closed in our faces.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Captain Ians is wrong about his brother-in-law.’

  We started on our way again.

  ‘The parson might be short of money,’ I said, ‘but it’s not just from liking that tobacco and other fine things.’

  ‘Agreed. He clearly gives much to the poor of his parish. And they’re in need of it. Ah – but not all of them, I see.’

  Before us was another cottage, this one not so badly kept. Its door was closed proper but it was a strange door. The wood was dark brown and shining with oil, like it was made from the same wood as the fine furniture in the vicarage. And it was in two parts, like a stable door, but set with shiny metal and there was a curious round window, set high. I had never seen nothing like it. But Anna had.

  ‘That wood has seen other uses,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A ship. It would seem Inchin Ben takes more than just luck, Shilly. He takes wreck spoil too.’

  She knocked on the stolen door. It opened at once. As if the creature inside had been waiting for us.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Inchin Ben wasn’t as Anna had thought he would be.

  He wasn’t grizzled. He wasn’t old at all. The youngest man we had met so far in Morwenstow, saving the driver who’d brought Anna’s travelling case. I thought Inchin to be no more than twenty-five. His hair was brown and curly, his eyes were greenish. The colour of the sea in Boscastle’s harbour. A quieter sea than the one that surged about Morwenstow’s cliffs. And he was a quiet person, too. His voice was soft when he said yes, of course we could come in. I felt sure he would have talked to women as keenly as he would men. But luck could be taken from men and women the same, so I made sure not to touch any part of him, not his clothes even, as I passed him in the doorway. I would keep my own luck close.

  He said we should go through to the room at the back of the cottage. It was made of the same fine, polished wood as the front door. The walls, the floor, the ceiling – all was made of wood. Not all of it the same shade, though, or the same lengths. It made me think of the parson’s hut.

  I caught my shoulder on something sharp – the corner of a cupboard, set high on the wall. They were scattered about the room. Too many for such a small space. Each of them bore hooks and hinges and handles. But no locks. The key in my pocket would be no use here. And it was easy enough to know why. No one would dare creep into Inchin Ben’s house to steal, so he would have no need to lock anything away. He was the thief in these parts. A thief of luck.

  The metal of the cupboards gleamed gold in the lamplight, for though it was only afternoon and not yet dark outside, there were many lamps lit. And all of them fine-looking ones. There wasn’t a candle without a glass shade. The room was warm. My skin beneath my whiskers was damp with sweat, and I feared the sticky paste Anna used to keep them on my face would slide off, take my whiskers with it.

  ‘Please, sit,’ Inchin said, and we did so, on good chairs – narrow, they were, as if made to fit a tight space, but plenty of stuffing in the seats and fine curly bits on their backs.

  I looked at how Anna was sitting, with her legs a little apart and her hands clasped between them. That was how I must sit while wearing trousers. While I was a man. I thought I should put gravel in my voice too, so I shouldn’t be thought girlish. But then I said to myself, Shilly, no one has called you girlish in all the days of your life. There’s no danger of that now as you sit here in trousers and whiskers.

  ‘We’re here on behalf of Goodwin Grant,’ Anna said, ‘a company trading out of Wapping. You have heard of them?’

  Inchin hadn’t, and I wasn’t surprised for Anna had no doubt made them up. She was good at quick lies. Too quick, I often worried.

  ‘We believe one of our ships was lost in these waters recently. Our task is to find if any of her cargo survived. Or parts of the ship herself.’ She looked about the room. She smiled.

  ‘And why do you think I can help you?’ Inchin said, but still soft, still gentle.

  ‘It was you that found the dead man on the beach near the vicarage,’ I said, feeling this an easy thing to say. There was no difficult ship business yet. I would turn shy when that came. And what was the word Anna had said? Aloof. That too, if needed.

  Inchin blinked several times, but didn’t look away. ‘I did find him, yes.’

  Silence then. He was in no hurry to tell us what had happened.

  ‘We believe,’ Anna said, ‘that this man may have been crew of our vessel. If you could share the circumstances of discovery, I would be grateful.’

  ‘You could have spoken to the parson,’ Inchin said. ‘He’d have told you. Why come here, to my door?’

  ‘We take our instruction from Goodwin and Grant, and that instruction is to go to the horse’s mouth, so to speak. To pursue a thorough investigation.’

  Silence. Those green eyes blinked.

  ‘Forgive us for disturbing you,’ Anna said.

  ‘Nothing to forgive,’ he said. ‘There’s not many that come calling.’

  ‘So we’ve heard,’ I said, and Anna shot me a look. I supposed that might be thought rude, though it was the truth. ‘I only mean that, there’s talk about you in these parts. About your—’

  ‘Luck?’ he said. He shook his head. ‘My luck being the luck of others that I’ve taken to preserve myself?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I muttered.

  ‘Would you think it luck to have no company in life, sir? To be shunned?’

  ‘To be living at all, after being wrecked,’ I said. ‘That is luck. I should think I’d be grateful for having that.’

  He studied his hands. ‘Ah, you would, would you, sir? I don’t blame you for saying so, if you’ve never faced it.’

  ‘Drowning?’ Anna said.

  ‘No, sir. The land. Seeing it, I mean, so close. So close you could all but reach out and touch it.’

  And he did reach out, as if there was something before him, and as he did so the lamps flickered. All of them. Anna grabbed my arm.

  ‘There’s agony in it, to see the land, lights, houses. People too, on the cliff, watching. And none of them able to help for you’re trapped, see, once the lee wind blows.’ His voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘There’s nothing will stop a ship being driven onto the rocks once a lee has her.’

  The lamps were a flicker, a flicker, and I could feel a draught blow in. A storm must have got up and the wind was coming down the chimney. But there was no chimney in this room. There was no hearth. Only the wood. The wood of wrecks.

  Inchin was whispering. ‘You think, I’ll get up the mast. I’ll tie myself on. The others there with you. And when she leans, I’ll lean with her, and we’ll jump clear.’

  And the wooden room was no longer a room in a cottage safe on land. It was the belly of a ship. I saw how it would be, pitching in the swell, the world shaking. Thinking, this, this is how I
go.

  ‘You tell yourself, come on now. ’Tis only a few feet. You’ve jumped further to cross a stream.’

  Shadows and light, shadows and the wind across our faces. I could taste salt. Anna was hunched into me. I held her tight. I wouldn’t let her fall.

  ‘And you want her to lean so bad, like you’ve never wanted anything more. And then you hear her start to go. You hear it before you feel it. The crack, like bones breaking but slow. Then she’s shifting, leaning, and down you go, the land coming nearer. Your mates screaming. You can see the grass on the cliff. The little yellow flowers. And you jump.’

  As if his last word was a charm, the lamps steadied. Every one of them. The room came back to itself. I blinked in the light. I expected it to be all topsy-turvy after the storm, the wood splintered, the chairs floating. And us? Torn to pieces.

  But we were seated as we were before. The wood of the walls and all the cupboards was the same. Not a nick in it.

  Anna wasn’t holding on to me. I was holding on to her. She pushed me quickly away, for what men from shipping companies did such things?

  This man that I was. A fearful man. A man who had seen a glimpse of Inchin’s life, and his near death.

  ‘And when you’ve lost the maziness of it,’ he said, ‘when you can move again, you find there’s grass between your fingers. You look about you and see that you alone are saved. And that, my good sirs, is a burden like no other.’

  ‘How many times have you escaped shipwreck?’ Anna said.

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘And each time the sole survivor?’

  He nodded. ‘The others were all got by the rocks. They was as close to living as I was, as close to getting that grass between their fingers. And yet the sea chose to drag them over the rocks, back and forth, until they weren’t whole men no more.’

  ‘Like our friend on the beach,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Like our friend.’

  He hadn’t wept, he hadn’t wailed. But in his voice was pain.

  ‘We appreciate your candidness, Mr … Ben,’ Anna said. ‘You’ve clearly seen much of the ravages of the sea.’

  ‘That I have. But the man I found didn’t come in off a ship.’

  ‘Really?’ Anna said, and did a good job of finding some surprise, for of course we shared this way of thinking with Inchin Ben. We, too, believed Joseph Ians had been killed on land.

  ‘No trace of any ship out there,’ Inchin said.

  ‘And you would be looking?’ I said.

  He said nothing, but then he didn’t need to. The signs were all around us. We were sitting on them. And I didn’t blame him.

  ‘If you don’t believe the man was killed by the passage of coming into shore,’ Anna said, ‘what would you say did for him?’

  Inchin shrugged.

  ‘Could it have been a mermaid killed him?’ I said. ‘That’s what people are saying round these parts.’

  ‘They are indeed, sir.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And there’s reason for it,’ he said. ‘The voice people hear when they’re near the cliffs, a woman calling. It’s enough to make you believe the stories.’

  ‘What does she call?’ I whispered.

  ‘Ah, now, there’s many answers to that question. Some say she calls the squire’s nephew, him that left her. Some say they hear their own names called, because the mermaid knows they’ve lost someone close to them and she’s looking to trick them. Others, they’ll tell you it’s just the wind.’

  ‘Which do you think it?’ I said.

  The lamp nearest him had begun to smoke. He blew it out. ‘There’s a great many things about this world I wouldn’t claim to understand. Why was I saved seven times, and all those with me drowned?’

  We none of us had an answer to that.

  THIRTY-THREE

  But there were other things we could ask. Easy questions, about known parts of life. Safe parts. Those of clocks.

  ‘Tell me,’ Anna said, ‘what time did you discover the body?’

  ‘Early,’ he said.

  His face was dry when mine felt awash with sweat. It was running down the back of my shirt and I cursed my waistcoat and coat over it. I started to take the coat off, but the flappy sleeves of the shirt got caught and I was like a fish tangled in a net. Anna pinched my leg and I knew I’d best give it up. It seemed it didn’t do for shipping agents to take off coats indoors.

  ‘Could you elaborate?’ Anna said.

  Inchin scratched his cheek. ‘Well, let me see. It would have been … not long after daybreak. And the poor wretch can’t have been there too long before that.’

  ‘Oh? Why?’

  ‘Because I’d been the same way the evening before. About seven I walked that path, along the cliff, coming home from Morwenstow. He weren’t there in the evening, but the next morning, first thing, coming to Morwenstow again, I saw him. Right below the parson’s hut. I went straight to the vicarage to tell the parson, for he collects them, for burial. He’s a good man, Parson Hawker.’

  ‘And what were you doing on these walks?’ I said.

  He said nothing for a moment, then looked away, at the cupboard door nearest him. ‘I was going to church.’

  ‘Morwenstow church?’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘But the times you say you were walking,’ Anna said, ‘there are no services held at Morwenstow then.’

  ‘That’s why I go.’

  ‘Forgive me, I don’t—’

  He got up so quick he made his chair start back, and then went to the window. ‘I go when I know the church will be empty. I must give thanks for my salvation.’

  ‘Not chapel, then?’ I said, sure there would be a meeting house closer to him than Morwenstow’s church.

  He bowed his head. ‘They don’t let me in. Fearful, they are. But the church is always open, and the parson, he’s—’

  ‘—a good man,’ Anna said. ‘So you’ve told us.’

  Inchin spun round. ‘Because it’s true! He’s shown me kindness when few would. And not just me.’

  ‘The family a few doors away,’ I said, ‘them coughing. Parson has tended them?’

  ‘More times than I can count. He’d give the Sanders the shirt off his own back.’

  That might be all he has left before too long, I thought.

  ‘Round here,’ Inchin said, with anger in his voice now, ‘people have little enough as it is. If the harvest is poor, if they’m taken ill, they can be dead sooner than folk like you can imagine.’

  ‘Such suffering is a blight on this land,’ Anna said. ‘But some have found ways to survive in these coastal parts. To thrive, even.’

  ‘What the Lord chooses to bring to shore is the Lord’s business,’ I said. My shipping agent was taken with religion, I decided.

  ‘But it’s another matter if a light is struck to lure a vessel in,’ Anna said.

  The lamps flickered. I wished she hadn’t spoken of such a thing. It was like saying someone was a murderer, and that was taking a chance when you didn’t know the person you were calling such. When you didn’t know if they was really a raging person behind those cool green eyes. A man too full of luck might try anything. But Anna wasn’t afraid.

  ‘I understand a light was seen the night before the body was discovered,’ she said. ‘At the hut.’

  Inchin didn’t move from the window. ‘It was still daylight when I passed that way late afternoon, and daylight again by the time I saw the dead man the next morning. Daylight alone was the only light I saw. But there was something …’

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘In the evening, when I was leaving the church. There was someone there.’

  ‘Inside?’ Anna asked.

  ‘No – the church was empty save for me. But when I opened the door, there was someone there. They hared off, soon as they saw me. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but then he turned up, the man on the beach, so badly cut, when I knew no ship had gone down. And now you’re here.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Asking me questions.’

  ‘Did you see who they were,’ I said, ‘the person at the door?’

  ‘No chance to. He was all cloaked, the weather being so dirty.’

  ‘Did you see which way the cloaked figure went once they’d left the church?’ Anna said.

  ‘Opposite way to me. I went over the stile and started on my way back here, past the parson’s hut. The man went left from the church.’

  ‘Towards the vicarage, then,’ Anna said.

  Inchin shrugged. ‘I didn’t stop to find out.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘I wanted to be home before the daylight went. It don’t do to be on the cliffs in the dark.’

  ‘It is a treacherous path in places,’ Anna said.

  ‘It’s not the path you need worry about,’ Inchin said. ‘It’s what’s on them. There’s a good reason the parson carries his lantern everywhere with him.’

  ‘I see,’ Anna said flatly. ‘And on the subject of lights, we’re no clearer on that which was seen on the cliff.’

  ‘Well that’s your lookout,’ Inchin said.

  Anna smiled. ‘Or is it yours?’

  He shook his head. ‘You’ve asked me plenty questions today, sir, and I’ve helped you best I can. Now I got a question for you in return.’

  ‘Have you indeed?’ She looked at her nails.

  ‘I have. Was this light moving?’

  Anna and I shared a look.

  ‘No one has said so,’ I said. ‘Far as we know it was fixed.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Inchin said, ‘it wasn’t used to lure a ship onto the rocks. No ship’s captain worth his salt would plot a course by a still light in a storm.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Because he don’t want to come into shore. That’s where the most danger lies. He’s safer in deeper water, isn’t he? Wait it out. And if he should lose his bearings, he’ll make for a moving light, because a moving light means—’

  ‘Another ship,’ I said. ‘Because a ship is always moving, even if it’s stopped in the water. The water around it never stops jouncing about, so the ship jounces likewise.’

  ‘It does,’ Inchin says. ‘A still light is no light for a wrecker.’ He leant against the wall and folded his arms. ‘But I would have thought agents like yourselves would have known that.’