The Mermaid's Call

by Katherine Stansfield

  ‘To help others find them, find what happened to them.’ His voice was trembly with grief. ‘When the dead appear, if there is something with them, or lies nearby, I bring it here and I keep a record. People write, you see. Sometimes they come in person. If they know where a ship was lost, there’s a chance the bodies came ashore not too far away.’

  I thought back to our talk with him after Mr Good had come, and saw that we had made a grave error. When the parson had asked if we had found anything on the dead man to name him, it wasn’t because he feared such a discovery. It was because he wanted it for his room. To keep it safe.

  Anna was looking at the labels. ‘But these dates go back years.’ She turned a circle in the small, crowded room. ‘There are so many.’

  ‘Because so many have been lost, Mr Williams. I never knew, when I started, how many … But I can’t stop now.’ He stumbled forward and I went to help him. He leant heavily on me and I could feel the shakes running through him. ‘I can’t stop. If someone should come asking, a father, a wife …’

  ‘And these.’ Anna was going through a pile of papers, each of which bore a drawing. Strange shapes, with colours flooding them – more birds, flowers, things that looked like waves, and writing too. Names. ‘Tattoos,’ she said. ‘You record them.’

  ‘I am no great artist,’ the parson said, ‘but they are the best way to identify the lost. More distinctive. Personal.’

  He used the tattoos just as we had done, to find out the name of the dead man. He was his own kind of detective. And a sad one at that, for what a burden to bear, being the keeper of the dead. And every time the wind rose, knowing more would come, torn, as Joseph Ians was torn, and nameless. Parson Hawker had given his life, and his health, I feared, to tend the memory of strangers lost far from home. He buried them and cared for their belongings. He mourned them. It was no mystery he was as he was.

  He was sobbing now. Anna put down the papers and took both our candles. I helped the parson back onto the landing, and Anna shut the door. The parson had been right in his warning to me. Better to keep the belongings of the dead hidden. It was the only way to keep living.

  We had asked the man who drove us back from Bude to wait outside, for we would return to Boscastle that night. Though it was late, I was fretful to be home. To stay another night at the vicarage was a poor doing, now that our work was done. I felt that even more having seen the parson’s room. I wanted to be away from the dead.

  Anna and I packed the travelling case, and between us we carried it down to the hall. Captain Ians was awake. Even that little sleep had done him some good, for colour had come back into him. His eyes were easier. Not so darting and fearful.

  He and Anna talked of the fee he owed us, and she was happy enough that he would call on us before the week was out, to pay it.

  ‘Will you return to your ship?’ Anna asked, pulling on her coat.

  ‘I doubt the owner will welcome me, given my abandonment. And even if he is willing, I fear my days at sea might be over.’

  ‘With your brother’s earnings from The Eliza, life will be easier for you,’ I said.

  He nodded but would not meet my eye.

  We took our leave of him, and of the parson and Mrs Hawker. We were all but out of the porch when Mrs Hawker said we must wait.

  ‘Mrs Williams – forgive me. A letter came for you, this morning.’ She had turned back into the hall and was sorting through the papers there. ‘With all that happened, I quite forgot.’

  The look that was on Anna’s face, I had seen it before. Before we left Boscastle. She made to stumble after Mrs Hawker but I got there first. I would know what it was she was hiding.

  ‘Ah – here it is.’ Mrs Hawker held out the letter to me. ‘To think you nearly went without it. Are you quite well, Mr Williams?’

  Anna had caught the post at the bottom of the stairs and leant against it. ‘Shilly – don’t!’

  ‘Shall I fetch you some water?’ Mrs Hawker said, fussing Anna. ‘Dear me. Robert – help the poor man!’

  I let them fuss. I had to know what was in the letter. Some secret from her past. The man she’d spoken of at the harbour in Bude. It was from him, this letter. Her husband. The real Mr Williams. I tore open the letter and tried to read the words as quick as I could. They were a mess of lines, curls. Anna was standing, reaching out to me.

  ‘Shilly – I’m sorry!’

  She hadn’t helped me with reading, though she’d promised she would. It was to keep me from finding her secrets and now I couldn’t read this page though I wanted to, so bad my eyes were water with the trying of it. Dear God, I wanted to kill her!

  And then a word came clear through the water.

  Yeo. The letter was from Mrs Yeo.

  I blinked my eyes clear and tried to make myself slow down. The voices of the Hawkers buzzed like bees, far away and not for me. The words I cared about were on the page in my hands. I could do it. I just had to try very hard.

  Mrs Yeo was writing to tell me she was so ve ry so rry. That we must come back to Boscastle at once.

  Mathilda was dead.

  The paper fell from my hand. There were more words on it but I couldn’t read them. I had forgotten how. I stared at Anna. I could not speak to tell her.

  She was reaching for me. I could see her hands were scrabbling at my dress, but I couldn’t feel them there. Her voice was a babble, not her own.

  ‘I’m sorry, Shilly! He made impossible demands. All would be ruined if I didn’t pay what he asked, and we had the money. Mathilda’s money.’

  Mathilda’s money? Why was Anna talking about that now? She took my face in her hands and she was afraid. But there was only one thing that mattered now. I gave her the letter. She snatched it up but before her eyes had even turned to look at the terrible words it bore she was gabbling again.

  ‘He made me do it, Shilly. I had no choice. You have to understand that. Mathilda found out that the money was gone and then she—’

  ‘Read it, Anna!’

  She seemed uncertain, her mouth all a-quiver, her wig more askew that she would ever allow usually. But this was not a usual day. This was the end of the world.

  ‘It’s not what you think it is,’ I said.

  What that was, I couldn’t bear to guess. The argument with Mathilda – it was about the money, about Anna giving it away, for something I didn’t understand. But Mathilda was dead.

  The Hawkers were staring at us. I had forgot them. Had forgot where we were. A cat ambled past, as if all was well.

  Anna read the letter. She looked at me. ‘Mathilda – dead?’

  From some clear, sharp place in my thoughts, I saw that she did not know Mathilda was dead before this moment, and that was a good thing, but …

  Mathilda. Gone.

  ‘How?’ I managed to say. ‘How did she die?’

  Anna’s gaze fell to the letter again. ‘Mrs Yeo says Mathilda didn’t recover from the chill. That she worsened and then … Then there was sickness.’ Anna looked at me. ‘Mrs Yeo fears Mathilda was poisoned.’

  I lay down on the cold slate and called Mathilda’s name. Called it with every bit of strength I had, as if that could bring her to me, there in the vicarage in Morwenstow. Not far, we had never been far from her left behind in Boscastle. But it had been far enough for someone to take her life while we were gone. My poor girl. My poor, poor girl.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Mermaid’s Call is a work of fiction though it is set in a real place and some of the characters are based on real individuals. Chief amongst these is Parson Robert Stephen Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow from 1834 until his death in 1875.

  Hawker is a fascinating person: poet, antiquarian, mystic, devotee of animals, bibliophile, a believer in mermaids. I have long wanted to write about him, and when Shilly and Anna were bound for a new case, it seemed the right time to introduce them to Parson Hawker. He has already featured in their lives, of course, though they didn’t know it: Hawker’s poetry lies beh
ind the story of The Magpie Tree, the second book in this series.

  Today, Hawker is perhaps more well known for his reputed eccentricities than for his poetry or religious acts. He was a complicated and mercurial man whose life in a remote coastal parish in north Cornwall was at times quiet and lonely, and at others rich in incident, not least due to the many shipwrecks that took place on his doorstep. Patrick Hutton, in his excellent study of Hawker’s life and poetry, I Would Not Be Forgotten (2004), provides this sobering statistic concerning wrecks: between 1824 and 1874, over eighty ships were carried ashore between Bude and Morwenstow. Hawker’s efforts in tending to the bodies of the dead who washed up in his parish, often horrifically damaged by rocks and in advanced states of decay, were Herculean. I have always felt that this work deserves greater recognition, rather than the tall tales that still swirl around his memory.

  It must be acknowledged that, during his lifetime, Hawker had a hand in his own myth-making, to some degree enjoying and feeding his reputation as an eccentric. That aside, the chief architect in creating the legend of Hawker that persists today must surely be the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould – another fascinating individual who deserves to be the subject of a novel in his own right.

  The two men were contemporaries, both ministers of the established church in the same part of the world – the border between Devon and Cornwall – and with shared interests that included the saints of the early church. On Hawker’s death in 1875, Baring-Gould rushed to produce a biography. His book The Vicar of Morwenstow was published within six months of its subject’s passing and was hugely successful, with a new edition appearing almost immediately in 1876. It remains a controversial work for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that some of Baring-Gould’s text was Hawker’s own published work, used without proper attribution: see C. E. Byles’ introduction to The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker (1906), which he edited – Byles was Hawker’s son-in-law. And yet, The Vicar of Morwenstow has, and continues to have, a huge influence on contemporary imaginings of Hawker. Mindful of this, as well as the caveats against the work, I have drawn on Baring-Gould’s work for my fictional Hawker, but as part of wider research. It should be noted that the sermon that features in the novel is based on that reproduced as an appendix to the 1913 edition of The Vicar of Morwenstow.

  In addition to the works already mentioned, Piers Brendon’s Hawker of Morwenstow: Portrait of a Victorian Eccentric (1975: 2002) has been a key source for this novel, as has Jeremy Seal’s The Wreck at Sharpnose Point (2003). I have also drawn on In the Footsteps of Robert Stephen Hawker by H. L. Lewis (2009), Morwenstow Church by Philip Docton Martyn (n.d., fifth edition), and The Church of St. Morwenna and St. John the Baptist, Morwenstow: A Guide and History by E. W. F. Tomlin (1982: 2003). Hawker’s own words, too, have helped shape the parson of The Mermaid’s Call. I have drawn on the Life and Letters, as mentioned above, as well as Hawker’s book Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall (1870: 1948).

  The man who appears in these pages is in many ways as fictional as the legends Hawker spun from his imagination, and the man part-fictionalized by Baring-Gould. This novel is in no way an attempt to present a biographical subject and the same is true for his companion. Little is known about Hawker’s first wife, Charlotte I’ans (whose family name has been changed to Ians in this book) and no image of her is known to exist. We do know she had three sisters, and these I have replaced for the purposes of this fiction. The only other character with a real-life starting point is Mr Good. Readers of the first book in the series may remember Mr Good’s previous appearance as the coroner in the case of Charlotte Dymond’s murder in Falling Creatures. Hawker was in regular contact with a coroner of this name and I have no reason to believe they are not one and the same.

  Hawker’s antiquarian interests were widely shared during the mid to late nineteenth century in Cornwall when there was a concerted effort to record the county’s folk stories. The two leading lights in this movement were Robert Hunt and William Bottrell, and it’s their tales that Shilly and Anna often experience in this series. In The Mermaid’s Call, the story of the titular fishy creature is based on the folk tale ‘The Mermaid’s Vengeance’, which appears in Hunt’s Popular Romances of the West of England: The Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall (first series, first published 1865). Also playing a part is a tale of star-crossed lovers that features in many British folk traditions. I have drawn on Hunt’s version ‘The Lovers of Porthangwartha’ and Bottrell’s retelling of the same story ‘A Legend of Pargwarra’ from Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (first published 1870).

  Another important source to mention concerns a real-life mystery: a sea captain’s prophetic dream reputed to foretell a murder. In 1840, as Edmund Norway’s ship drew near St Helena, he dreamt that his brother Nevell was set upon by two men on the road, back home in north Cornwall. In the dream, Nevell was beaten to death, his body left in a ditch. Shortly afterwards, Nevell was murdered in the manner dreamt by his brother. The resulting investigation led to the arrest and trial of another pair of brothers, the Lightfoots, who were found guilty and executed at Bodmin Gaol. My source for this strange story was Cornish Murders by John Van der Kiste and Nicola Sly (2007: 2013).

  Other stories have loomed over this novel and were part of the motivation to write it. Whenever the subject of Cornish shipwrecks arises, so too does the charge that vessels were deliberately wrecked by the inhabitants of coastal communities. Morwenstow is no exception to this suspicion, and the sheer number of wrecks there has given the parish a certain notoriety, to which Hawker’s eccentricities have contributed. This has meant that the trauma Hawker and his parishioners experienced when the dead washed up in Morwenstow has often been overlooked in favour of wild stories about false lights and shipwreck survivors being slaughtered. And though Captain Ians is right when he says there has never been proof of deliberate wrecking by the Cornish, this myth persists. There’s an important difference between impoverished communities making use of the bounty offered them by wrecks, and intentionally causing those wrecks to happen. For more on this, see Bella Bathurst’s excellent book The Wreckers.

  For those wishing to see the real Morwenstow, there’s no better place to stay than Hawker’s vicarage, which is now a fantastic B&B owned by Jill Welby. The Old Vicarage provides a wonderfully evocative experience of Hawker’s home, filled with period furniture and images of the parson and his family. Jill welcomed me so warmly and shared with me her extensive knowledge of Hawker, as well as useful texts for this book. I hope she will forgive a novelist’s liberties.

  A short walk from the vicarage is Hawker’s hut, the National Trust’s smallest property, which is open to the public. It’s quite something. The buildings that appear in the novel as the Seldons’ farm are now the Rectory Tea Rooms – a place that sustained the research trip for this novel, as did the nearby Bush Inn.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to all at Allison & Busby who have kept Williams and Williams Investigations in business, especially my editor Kelly Smith. Thanks, too, to my stellar agent Sam Copeland at Rogers, Coleridge and White.

  Thanks to Dave for listening to my endless Hawker facts, for spending his Easter holiday braving the heights of the coastal path around Morwenstow, and sorting me out when I dreamt Hawker’s ghost was wandering the vicarage (Shilly and I share a capacity for vivid dreams).

  Thanks to my mum and dad, John and Veronica, and my sister, Lil, who, along with Dave, walked with me to Hawker’s hut on a very cold and wet Christmas Eve through thick mud. Thanks for always saying yes to these trips, whatever the weather.

  Thanks to my readers, whose insights made all the difference: Katy Birch, Carole Burns, Katie Munnik, Kate Wright, and Dave again.

  Thanks to the Royal Literary Fund for awarding me a Fellowship during the writing of this book, which gave me much-needed time.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KATHERINE STANSFIELD is a novelist and poet whose first Cornish Mystery, Falling Creatures, was published to great acclaim in 2017 and whose sequel, The Magpie Tree, won the Holyer an Gof Award. She grew up in the wilds of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff.

  @K_Stansfield

  katherinestansfield.blogspot.co.uk

  By Katherine Stansfield

  Falling Creatures

  The Magpie Tree

  The Mermaid’s Call

  COPYRIGHT

  Allison & Busby Limited

  11 Wardour Mews

  London W1F 8AN

  allisonandbusby.com

  First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2019.

  This ebook edition published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 by KATHERINE STANSFIELD

  The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.