The Mermaid's Call

by Katherine Stansfield

  Anna picked up a handful and flicked through them. ‘These have been sent from all over – Sydney, Odessa, Istanbul.’

  I didn’t know these places but the wonder in Anna’s voice told me they were far away. The letters themselves looked like they’d been on long journeys. The paper was yellowed and stained, often torn. And amongst them, something else yellow, but brighter. I fished it from the paper. A flower, pressed flat between the pages. I put it to my nose. There was still a hint of sweetness there, though the flower was dried and had likely been in the box many months.

  Anna was flying through another clutch of the letters. ‘Izmir, Naples.’

  There were so many words, dancing across their paper in blue and black curves and lines and swoops. All of them crowding to be read. I put the flower back in the box, put my hands over my eyes to hide the silent clamour of the letters.

  ‘All of them signed Joseph,’ Anna said, ‘addressed to his beloved Crow.’

  ‘Crow like the bird? That’s a funny kind of name.’

  Anna checked a few more letters. ‘It’s the same in all of them. Crow. I don’t think it’s a real name. More of an endearment. A pet name.’

  ‘A crow would make a poor pet. And everyone here has a better liking for cats.’

  ‘It’s not the bird, Shilly! There’s no “w”. Look.’

  I did look, and I saw. Cro it was written. ‘Is Nancy Cro?’

  ‘I can only assume so. Why else would these letters be under her bed?’ Anna began reading again. ‘He tells her, he tells Cro, that in Odessa the stars shine bright as her eyes.’ She let that paper slide to the floor and picked up another. ‘And in Malta, all the rivers speak her name. He has found favour with the captain and hopes to make first mate, in time. Then he will have enough money to return and they—’ Anna looked at me. ‘They were engaged, Shilly. Joseph and Nancy were engaged.’

  ‘It must have been a secret,’ I said. ‘Nobody here seems to know anything about it. Not Nancy’s family or Joseph’s.’ I picked up a letter. I couldn’t read it. But I wondered if the feeling it held might be there still. Surely such love would leave a scrap of itself? Some beat that went on? How could it fade to nothing but paper thin as a first frost?

  Anna scrabbled on the floor. ‘Some of these have been delivered by hand. The dates are from before he left. No more than notes. Cro, I love you. Cro, we don’t need them. Cro, you must wait for me.’

  ‘So they were engaged before he left,’ I said.

  ‘But Cro, Cro,’ Anna was muttering. ‘Why did he call Nancy that?’

  My knees were beginning to ache from being on the floor, so I sat on the bed again. ‘There might not be a W in how Joseph spells it, but there is a C, Anna. Just as there was on the tattoo, and carved into the bench in the hut.’

  Anna dropped the letters she was holding. ‘It isn’t C for Charlotte, then. It’s C for Cro, whatever that word means to the pair of them. It must have been Nancy that carved the letters in the hut.’

  ‘Or the two of them together, before Joseph left Morwenstow,’ I said. ‘To mark them getting engaged?’

  ‘You’re forgetting that the hut isn’t as old as that, Shilly. Parson Hawker built it, and he came to the parish after Joseph had left.’

  ‘Nancy’s way of remembering him?’

  Anna spread the letters wide on the floor. ‘Remembered him, when he’d forgotten her. The last date I can see is 1823. He stopped writing more than twenty years ago.’ She looked at me. ‘Joseph never came back for her.’

  ‘And she never married anyone else,’ I said. ‘She believed him, believed he’d come back.’

  Anna eyed the letters scattered on the floor. ‘He told her often enough that he would, those first years after he left.’

  ‘He lied, then.’

  Anna sat next to me on the bed again. ‘Perhaps he meant to come back for her, but as the years went by and he saw more of the world, Nancy faded from his thoughts.’

  ‘But he didn’t fade from hers.’

  ‘The fact she’s kept these letters so long suggests not.’

  My eye strayed to the shelf above us, to the cup from the Bude Haven Hotel. The sad, dirty cup. Nancy had kept that, too. It must have some specialness for her.

  Then I looked at the letters on the floor, these sad treasures. The only proof that Joseph had loved Nancy. And the proof that he’d forgotten her. It felt wrong for the letters to be on the floor, for us to have touched them, so I put them back in the box, on top of the yellow flower. It was then I saw the many fingermarks smudging the pages. How often had Nancy read them as the years passed? As no more letters came?

  I locked the box and put it back under the bed. Anna’s teeth were clacking – her thinking noise.

  ‘What if their engagement wasn’t a secret?’ she said. ‘Joseph left Morwenstow under a cloud. What if he and Nancy became engaged and the Ians family disapproved. It could hardly have been the desired match for them. What if Joseph’s parents forbade him to marry Nancy, threatened to cut him off, and instead of giving in, he did what he had planned and went to sea, to earn his fortune? Everything we’ve heard about him suggests he was something of an idealist. Remember Mrs Hawker telling us he thought there was copper under Coombe? That he dug up the old wall?’

  ‘And he wanted to grow flowers – Anna, that’s it!’

  She frowned. ‘That’s what?’

  ‘Cro!’

  ‘Slow down, Shilly. I don’t follow your—’

  I grabbed the box again and found the flower. ‘I saw another of these in the grate in the kitchen. A fresher one. Mrs Hawker told us that Joseph wanted to grow flowers in Morwenstow to send to London.’

  ‘My God, you’re right. And the kind of flowers Mrs Hawker spoke of were crocuses. This kind!’

  ‘That’s why he called Nancy Cro,’ I said.

  Anna took the dried crocus from me and twirled it between her fingers. ‘So Nancy was to be the endeavour that came good. And then he forgot her, and no one here even remembers they’d promised themselves to each other. Time has removed her from the story.’

  ‘Surely she must have feared he’d died?’ I said. ‘All that time with no word. Death would have been easier to bear than him not keeping his promise to come back for her.’

  ‘But then he did come back, Shilly, didn’t he?’

  ‘More than twenty years later, half Nancy’s life gone.’ I thought of that morning she and I had talked, on the landing of the vicarage. I’d told her of my learning to read, how I feared I’d never master it. And what was it she had said then? This world can be cruel. Sometimes waiting isn’t enough. ‘Nancy would be more likely raging than pleased to see Joseph when he did finally come back.’

  ‘I think we have our motive, Shilly.’

  ‘We have something else, too. Something that shows Nancy was there, with Joseph’s dead body.’

  I held out the key. The key that opened the box of letters beneath Nancy’s bed.

  The key to Joseph Ians’ death.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Mrs Seldon was no longer in the room downstairs. There was no sign of her outside either. I feared we’d spent too long with the letters, working things out. Mrs Seldon had likely gone to the vicarage to warn her daughter that others were suspicious of her. We hurried past the graves, making for the vicarage.

  Something was troubling me, some tail we hadn’t caught. I spoke my fears quickly, as the front door of the vicarage came into sight.

  ‘The lantern hidden in the hut, the light shone over this way – who did that?’

  ‘Joseph – it must have been. He and Nancy could have arranged it between them beforehand, by letter. She left him the lantern, left the initials so he’d know where to find it. He flashed the light to let her know that he had finally returned.’

  ‘Yes, but only after more than twenty years. Why would they need all that hidden business now, Anna? Joseph’s parents are long dead. His brother is an old man himself. Joseph could have knocked at
Nancy’s front door and carried her away. No one would have minded.’

  Her teeth clacked again. ‘True. So what happened that night? We’re missing something. But if we can just get Nancy to—What’s this? Locked?’

  She had made to open the door to the vicarage, which had never been locked since we’d arrived. But it was locked now.

  ‘Something must have happened,’ I said.

  Anna banged on the door. I peered through the dusty squares of the porch window but could see only the shoes and boots. Nothing beyond. None of the cats or the dogs. And no sign of a person.

  ‘We’ll go round the back,’ Anna said, setting off. ‘The kitchen door.’

  We passed Gyp the pig but he didn’t come and ask us for food, or ask to be let in himself. He was lying half in, half under a flowery bush that he’d squashed to ruins. I had the feeling he was hiding. That was a bad sign.

  Anna tried the kitchen door with care. It opened. The room was cold. The fire had been allowed to go out. The makings of supper were on the big table, and so were the cats. Two of them licked the joint of meat left there, while another had the butter.

  ‘This doesn’t bode well, Shilly.’

  And then we heard it – crying.

  We crept through to the hall and then to the dining room, following the sound. The door was shut. I pushed it open. Before we could see into the room, Mrs Hawker’s voice rang out.

  ‘I’ve nothing left! Nothing! Have mercy – please.’

  ‘Do not fear, Mrs Hawker,’ Anna said, opening the door wide. ‘It is only my wife and I. Good heavens!’

  Mrs Hawker was cowering in the corner of the room. ‘Oh, Mr Williams, thank the Lord.’

  Her right arm hung limp by her side, the sleeve darkened. We rushed to her, and something clattered under my foot. A little knife, the blade wet with blood.

  Anna tried to tend the woman, pressing a napkin to the wound, but Mrs Hawker wouldn’t stay still.

  ‘You have to stop her,’ Mrs Hawker said. ‘She’s taken it all. When Robert finds out … Please, go after her!’

  ‘Mrs Hawker, don’t upset yourself so,’ Anna said. ‘You are hurt. If you would let me see—’

  She shook off Anna’s care. ‘It’s nothing! The money’s more important.’

  ‘What money?’ I said, and put the bloodied knife on the table. It stained the white cloth soon as it touched. The blood bloomed.

  ‘Joseph’s money! She’s taken it – Nancy has taken it.’

  ‘If she’s here in the vicarage,’ Anna said, ‘rest assured we’ll—’

  ‘Of course she’s not here. She’s run away, hasn’t she? With the money.’

  ‘Mrs Hawker,’ I said, nice and firm, ‘if you want us to help you, you have to tell us everything. Now, this talk of your brother. You told us you’d not heard from him for many years.’

  She wouldn’t look at me, remembered then the cut on her arm and grabbed the napkin from Anna to staunch it.

  ‘Did you lie to us?’ Anna said. ‘Have you been in touch with Joseph?’

  She looked to each of us. ‘If I tell you, you promise you’ll go after Nancy?’

  ‘It would be our pleasure,’ Anna said.

  She let me help her into a chair. ‘Joseph wrote to me. Five years ago now. I’d heard nothing before then. Not since he’d gone. He needed money. I sent him some, the little I could save from the housekeeping, but then Robert found out and … I had to stop. All he’d heard of Joseph was bad. None of the good in him. Robert said there shouldn’t be charity for a wastrel such as him. And we couldn’t spare it anyway, what with Robert’s …’

  ‘Overspending?’ Anna said.

  ‘But if you had nothing to send Joseph,’ I said, ‘what’s this money Nancy has now?’

  ‘It’s because of the shares! Those wretched shares. I wish The Eliza had been wrecked.’ She covered her face and sobbed. Through that noise, some words came clear: my fault. My fault.

  Anna eased Mrs Hawker’s hands from her face, then crouched beside her. ‘Mrs Hawker, what is it that you blame yourself for?’

  ‘For Joseph’s death! It’s my fault he came back here.’

  ‘You told him of the money owed him, didn’t you?’ Anna said.

  Mrs Hawker nodded. ‘A share of the money earned by The Eliza was his. I only wanted to do what was right.’

  ‘But your actions weren’t entirely selfless, were they?’ Anna said. ‘Because Joseph’s earnings were a means to make him come back here. Did Joseph ask you to send the money instead?’

  Her lack of answer was answer enough.

  ‘So you refused him,’ Anna said, ‘told him he could have the money only if he returned to Morwenstow. It was your way to bargain with him.’

  ‘And he did come back,’ I said, ‘only to die.’

  At this Mrs Hawker sobbed again.

  ‘But he couldn’t come to the house,’ Anna said, ‘not with your husband so ill-disposed to him. And you couldn’t risk him being seen by anyone else. I see it now. You arranged to meet him at your husband’s hut, well into the evening. You had it all worked out beforehand, with the lantern stowed beneath the bench so he could signal to you when he’d arrived, the letters carved into the bench so he’d know where it would open. Did you agree a signal for the light, so that you would know for certain it was him?’

  She blew her nose on the bloodied napkin, which I took for yes.

  ‘You couldn’t have known the weather would be so dirty on the day Joseph reached Morwenstow,’ I said. ‘That was bad luck.’

  ‘That certainly didn’t help.’ Mrs Hawker sniffed. ‘If Robert were to learn of what I’d planned, he’d say the Lord sent that weather on purpose to show me my sin.’

  ‘But the Lord didn’t send quite enough wind and rain to stop Joseph, did he?’ Anna said. ‘Your brother was able to send his signal, and from what we’ve heard from the others who saw a light at the hut that night, it would have been around ten.’

  ‘I saw it from my bedroom window. I’d been looking out all that week, expecting him. When I saw the light I nearly fainted with relief.’

  ‘And then you went out there to look for him,’ I said, ‘while the parson was sorting his socks.’

  ‘I couldn’t leave straightaway. Robert had gone downstairs for something and it seemed to take him an age to go back up. I had to wait. I couldn’t risk him seeing me leave the house.’

  ‘And when you finally did get out to the cliff,’ Anna said, ‘did you find your brother?’

  ‘There was no sign of him, or the light. The lantern was back in the bench, as if it hadn’t been used. I wondered if I’d dreamt it.’

  ‘Or the parson’s devils had come to play their tricks,’ I said.

  Mrs Hawker gave me such a look I stepped away from the table, thought of picking up Nancy’s knife to guard myself.

  ‘What happened then?’ Anna said.

  ‘I came out of the hut and I heard … I don’t know if I can describe it.’

  ‘Try!’ Anna said, quite harsh, I thought.

  Mrs Hawker closed her eyes, as if that would help her find her words. ‘It was awful. As if the wind had somehow found a way to speak. A woman’s voice.’

  ‘What did you hear this woman say?’ Anna asked.

  ‘It was closer to a cry, or, what’s the word? A keening. She was keening. I’ve never heard anything like it. The pain, the anger. And then one word. I heard her cry one word.’

  ‘Which was?’ Anna said. We were both of us leaning forward. I barely noticed as a cat came in and sat by Mrs Hawker’s feet.

  ‘His name. She called Joseph’s name.’

  The mermaid’s call. I knew it. The hairs on the backs of my arms stood up and my belly pitched. Here was the truth of it. I opened my mouth to say so, but Mrs Hawker was speaking again.

  ‘The sound was so evil that I ran straight home. When I was back inside, in bed, with the curtains drawn, it all felt so foolish. I thought it couldn’t possibly be his name I’d
heard. It was a trick of the storm. It had to be the storm. Joseph hadn’t come back yet. It would still be all right.’

  ‘But then in the morning you saw different,’ I said. ‘Inchin Ben came with news of a dead man beneath the hut.’

  ‘You knew the dead man was Joseph all along, didn’t you?’ Anna said.

  She picked up the cat and pressed her face against its fat stripy cheek. ‘I suspected, but I hoped to God I was wrong. I didn’t go and look at him. There was no cause to, it would have made Robert suspicious. I hoped and hoped it was some other wretch. But then Frederick arrived, quite suddenly, and him knowing it was Joseph.’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t know what that meant. His dream … Now I know it was Nancy. Nancy Seldon killed my brother!’

  ‘Did Nancy tell you that herself?’ I asked.

  ‘She didn’t need to! The way she went after me with that knife, taking the money – it’s clear as day she’s fleeing Morwenstow because she killed my brother and knows she’ll be hanged!’

  ‘Nancy’s flight could have been prevented if you’d revealed that Joseph was the dead man,’ Anna said. ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because it was my fault he’d come back!’ The tears came again and the cat jumped away from her. ‘Robert would have been livid if he’d found out, and I feared for myself, too.’

  ‘Feared the parson?’ I said.

  ‘Feared her, the woman I heard, whoever she was. The anger in that voice … And now I see that I was right to be afraid.’ She waved the bloodied napkin at me by way of proof.

  ‘But what made Nancy do this to you now?’ I said. ‘Joseph’s been in the ground for days.’

  ‘I don’t know! Her mother rushed over from the farm and then Nancy was on me with the knife. She wasn’t making any sense, but she feared she’d be hanged. I got that much clearly.’ Mrs Hawker narrowed her eyes. ‘You pair. It’s you who caused her to attack me – she feared you were close to the truth.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘she was right, and here we are. But saying it’s our fault is a bit—’

  ‘The money,’ Anna said loudly. ‘How did Nancy know you had it for Joseph?’

  ‘He must have told her before he died. No one else knew I’d cashed the savings in advance of him coming. It wasn’t a lie – I really would have given him the money once he’d come back.’ She stood, with a shake in her legs, but her voice was firm. ‘Now I’ve told you everything and you promised you would go after Nancy. You mustn’t waste any more time!’