by Jan Siegel
“I understand,” said the mermaid.
“Go then.”
He snapped the rope that held her and she pulled herself over the side, diving like a flying fish in an arc of silver, lost in an instant beneath hurrying waves. “You will not see her again,” said the boys.
But the fisherman clasped the lock of hair and smiled a smile without humor, confident and grim.
“I will see her,” he said.
On the afternoon of the third day the mermaid returned. The fisherman had lingered in the area against the wishes of his sons, although the body of the youngest was starting to putrefy and the sweet smell of death had begun to permeate the whole boat. By day they fished, but the nets which had been replete now came up empty: only a sprat or two twitched on the brine-washed deck among a few knots of weed, and some strange creatures which resembled living fungi and leaked a noxious ooze at the pressure of a finger. The wind had dropped; the sails hung limp as the drapes on a tomb; thin tides of cloud had seeped across the sky, blearing the face of the sun. Late that day the last rays, issuing from beneath the cloudline, filled the narrow space between sky and sea with a concentrated brilliance. The clouds were burned bronze, the air turned to gold, glancing fires sparked from every wave. The mermaid rose from a pool of dazzle, dark against the brightness, her long hair netting the sea-fire. She swam warily to the side of the boat, staying out of reach of both the fisherman and his knife. Her hands were hidden under the gilded water; her face was as expressionless as that of an animal.
“Where is it?” he demanded. “Where is my treasure?”
“I have it,” she said. “Where is my hair?”
One of his sons brought him the jar; he lifted the contents out and held them up for her to see. The single tress still twitched and twisted like the newly severed tail of a live serpent.
“My treasure?” he repeated.
Her hand emerged from the water; she stretched out her arm. The fisherman closed hungry fingers on a hard irregular shape, lumpy with tiny polyps, slimy with tendrils of weed. The touch of the mermaid’s skin was colder than the coldest fish. In the same instant one of his sons, bitter beyond any gold-lust at his brother’s death, started forward to seize her, knife at the ready. But she was too sudden and too slippery for him: she had broken free even before he tightened his grasp, before his father’s shout, before the knife had done its work. She was gone in a swirl of fractured sunlight, leaving only a wisp of blood—too little blood—uncurling beneath the bright reflections. The fisherman still clasped her violated hair. In the silence that followed he looked down at the object in his other hand, the small, jagged thing, coral-studded, begreened with weed: the treasure. It took him a minute or two to realize what it was. A key.
The fisherman was seized with a fury far greater than the anger he had known for the loss of his son, the pent-up fury of his toil-filled, empty-bellied, mean-hearted life, the fury of a dream shattered, of greed cheated, of hope extinguished forever. It distorted his mouth and dragged his features this way and that, it mounted in him like a tidal wave, it howled through him like a storm. His sons shrank from it; the very boards of the ship seemed to quiver in fear. Yet after the first terrible curse he grew quiet again; poverty had taught him the hardest lessons in self-control. “A key!” he said. “A key. And no doubt the lock that it should fit is fathoms deep, in a treasure chest accessible only to the crabs. God damn the lying nixie! May she writhe in a waterless hell for all eternity!” So saying, he went to hurl away his useless prize. Then, with an abrupt change of mind, he thrust it into a deep pocket and descended into the cabin, the fury set like stone in his face. When he returned he was carrying a tinderbox. He struck a light and held the tress of hair above it. The strands parted, billowing, fanning away as though trying to escape the lethal fire. Then he lowered the hair onto the flame and slowly, smiling, he watched it burn.
Deep below the surface the mermaid felt herself scorched with a sudden, impossible pain. Heat flared on her cold skin, bubbling it into blisters, searing into her flesh. Her bright tail blotched and blackened, molting poisonous spines that charred even as they fell. Water surrounded her, yet she burned. Her body arched and buckled, struggling to be free of the agony that invaded it. The last clear note of her clouding mind was one of utter incomprehension. Then the sea fizzed around her as her very substance withered, melted, and was dispersed, minute grains swept away on the many currents of ocean, feeding the unseen creatures who are the seeds of all life.
Part One
The Key
I
She had been standing in front of the picture for several minutes before she began to notice it. The other paintings in the gallery were purely abstract but as she stared at this one, waiting for her father, passing the time, shapes began to emerge from the field of nondescript color, vague as shadows on smoke: disconnected fragments of stair, random archways, openings into nowhere, ghostly glimpses of an unfinished labyrinth. Here and there a detail was highlighted, a splinter of sky beyond a broken vault, a segment of window with branching latticework, eye blinks of clarity which seemed to flicker into being even as her gaze skimmed over them. The artist drew her attention to and fro with a skill that was almost disquieting, letting her roam the boundaries of image, then pulling her gradually toward the focus, where an irregular patch of vividly contrasting color was set like a gaudy postage stamp at the very center of the picture. Initially the truncated rectangle, perhaps three inches high, appeared so crowded with microscopic detail that it resembled a vast and complex mosaic, miniaturized until all coherence was lost. But as she studied it, either because her vision became acclimatized or by some contrivance of the artist, the tiny shapes seemed to shift, like a kaleidoscope falling into place, and she found herself looking through a doorway or casement out over a city. Wide streets lined with columns and colonnades, clustered roofs hiding secret alleys, glistening domes, steeples, spires, palaces and terraces, temple-walls and tavern-walls, courtyards, backyards, fountains, gardens. Everything was bathed in the gold of a falling sun, enriching paintwork and stonework, touching the gilding on the domes with pure fire. She did not know what city it was yet it looked both ancient and timeless, a Rome that lived on free of traffic and tourism, a new-built Jerusalem unscarred by warring factions, the seat, maybe, of a higher civilization, older than history, fresh as the world in which it flourished, whose ruins had since crumbled to dust and whose wisdom had long been forgotten. She was not a fanciful girl, or so she told herself, yet her dormant fancy was stirred: she was pierced by a nostalgia for a place she had never seen, for the fairy-tale realms she had always rejected.
“Do you like it?” inquired a voice behind her. “You seem to be rather absorbed.”
She turned abruptly. The gallery was carpeted and the owner—she was sure he must be the owner—had approached so quietly she had not heard him. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t decided. It’s very interesting.”
“So you don’t believe in impulsive judgments.” The voice was as smooth as pouring cream with a faint intonation of mockery, but whether lofty or merely teasing it was impossible to tell. There was little humor visible in his expression. Glossy pale gray hair framed his face like a steel halo; his café-crème complexion was unlined, creating an effect of careful preservation rather than enduring youth; his eyes were almond-shaped and flecked with glints of yellow light. He was delicately suave, discreetly elegant, gracefully tall. She disliked him immediately, on impulse. “It’s an etching,” he went on. “Did you know?”
“No, I didn’t.” Of course she didn’t. “I thought etchings had to be in black and white.”
“The technique is very complex.” Once again, that trace of superiority. “Bellkush has always favored the most difficult approach. The effect, I think, is almost unearthly—those diaphanous layers of subtle color. Almost unearthly. Appropriate, perhaps, to the subject matter.”
“What is it called?” she asked, rather as if the question h
ad been wrung out of her.
“Lost City.” There was a pause while she felt herself drawn back to the contemplation of that crowded portal. “Are you here to buy?”
“I’m waiting for my father.” She dragged her eyes away from the picture. He must know who she was: he had seen them arrive.
“Ah . . . yes. Robin Capel’s daughter. And your name is?”
“Fernanda.”
“How pretty. Also unusual.” Her name might have been a piece of bric-a-brac which had attracted his wandering attention.
“I had a Spanish grandfather,” she explained, lapsing into her routine excuse. It was untrue, but she had always felt such an exotic appellation needed more justification than her mother’s erratic taste. She did not approve of foreign names without foreign blood to back them up.
“Fern!” Her father, his discussions concluded, came toward them, wearing his habitual expression of slightly anxious goodwill. The young woman who worked at the gallery followed in his wake. “So you’ve met Javier. Er—terrific. Terrific. What were you chatting about?”
“The pictures.” The man answered for her.
“I’m afraid you must have found my daughter’s taste a bit— well, conservative. She’s a very down-to-earth young lady, you know. Likes sitters in portraits to have all their features in the right place, trees to be the proper shade of green—that sort of thing. Only abstract painter I’ve ever known her to admire is Mondrian. She says he’d make nice kitchen wallpaper.”
“That would be a very expensive kitchen,” said the man called Javier. Robin and the woman both laughed.
“Daddy, don’t make me sound so boring,” Fern said, wanting to leave.
“Just a joke, darling. Oh—I’d like you to meet Alison Redmond. We’re definitely going to collaborate on the witchcraft book. She’ll organize several of the artists here to do the illustrations. It should be a big success. Alison, my daughter Fernanda.”
They exchanged a polite handshake. Close up, the woman was not so young: her face was long and pointed with an incongruously full mouth adorning its thin structure and pale narrow eyes between heavily mascaraed lashes. Her off-blond hair was waist-length and worn loose. Had Fern not been too prosaic for such comparisons she would have thought her father’s future collaborator resembled a witch herself.
“Terrific,” murmured Ms. Redmond. Possibly Fern imagined the same elusive mockery in her voice that she had detected in Javier’s smooth accents. For a moment, seeing her father standing between them, she was visited with the illusion that he was somehow trapped, hemmed in by two predatory figures, the man with his superior height and superior smile, the woman with her warmth of manner and coldness of eye. The impression of danger, though fleeting, disturbed her because it seemed out of all proportion to the actual threat. In the six years since her mother died Fern had monitored her father’s love-life with the skill of an international statesman, dismissing a succession of unsuitable candidates out-of-hand. The menace here was surely similar, the standard hazard of marauding huntress and hapless prey; she had dealt with it a hundred times, and she had never before experienced any doubts or premonitions. But then, Fern did not believe in premonitions.
Robin shook more hands in farewell, while she resisted an irrational urge to drag him away.
That was the beginning, she decided long afterward. The meeting at the gallery, the sense of menace, the picture. The incident seemed trivial enough at the time but it left her feeling vaguely perturbed, as if the outlying penumbra of some far-flung shadow had brushed the borderline of her bright safe world, or she had caught a few isolated notes of an eerie music which would soon come booming from every corner of the universe, obliterating all other sound. The events of that extraordinary and terrifying summer became perhaps easier to assimilate because she was in some sort prepared: from the moment of that initial encounter an unfamiliar atmosphere began to seep into her life, unsettling her, unbalancing her cultivated equilibrium, making her vulnerable, unsure, receptive to change. She was sixteen years old, well-behaved, intelligent, motivated, a product of the Eighties in which she lived, viewing the world with a practical realism engendered by the early death of her mother and the responsibilities which had devolved on her as a result of it. Her father’s easygoing manner had acquired its undercurrent of anxiety from that time, left alone with a small daughter and smaller son, but it was Fern who had gradually taken charge of the household, trading au pair for housekeeper, seeing the bills were paid, bossing her surviving parent, attempting to boss her younger brother. She had coasted through puberty and adolescence without rebellion or trauma, avoiding hard drugs, excessive alcohol, and underage sex. Her future was carefully planned, with no room for surprises. University; a suitable career; at some point, a prudent marriage. She thought of herself as grown-up but behind the sedate façade she was still a child, shutting out the unknown with illusions of security and control. That summer the illusions would be dissipated and the unknown would invade her existence, transforming the self-possessed girl into someone desperate, frightened, uncertain, alone—the raw material of an adult.
The day after their visit to the Holt Gallery they collected her brother from school and drove out of London to see the house. That was the next thing. The house. On the death of a distant relative Robin had inherited a property in a remote part of Yorkshire, and before putting it on the market his accountant had suggested he might like to take a look at it. “Good idea,” Robin had responded. “Could do with a break. Nice for the kids. They’re a real pair of townies: need a taste of the country. Never know, might decide to keep it, do it up a bit, that sort of thing. Use it for weekends and holidays. Good idea.” Perceiving too late the pitfalls ahead, his accountant’s heart sank visibly. Robin Capel had a flair for turning potential assets into costly liabilities. Fortunately, Fernanda could be counted on to veto the additional expense. Robin ran a small but lucrative publishing company producing coffee-table books of the type bought by the illiterate as a substitute for reading, but although he was an excellent editor with a genuine enthusiasm for the banal, financial management was beyond him.
“We never take a holiday in England, Daddy,” Fern pointed out en route north. “We generally rent a villa in Tuscany in the summer and go skiing in France or Switzerland in winter. You can’t ski in Yorkshire and they don’t make very good Chianti. It just isn’t sensible to keep a place we’ll hardly ever use.”
“You’re obsessed with being sensible,” said William from the back seat. “Women go through life with a shopping list, and when someone gives them anything that isn’t on it—even if it’s something really precious—they simply throw it out of the basket.”
“Who said that?” Fern asked sharply.
“Mr. Calder. History.”
His sister shook her head. “You’re slipping, Will,” she said. “Last time you made a nasty remark about women you attributed it to the English master. You can’t expect me to believe all your teachers are male chauvinists.”
“Why not?” he retorted, unabashed. At twelve, he was as tall as his sister and slight and supple as a whip. His face had that quality of luminous clarity, common to elves and angels, which the unwary so often mistake for innocence. He changed the subject without apology or embarrassment.
“If Great-Uncle Edward barely knew you,” he asked Robin, “why did he leave you his house?”
“No one else to leave it to,” Robin surmised. “He wasn’t really my great-uncle. Or yours. My grandfather’s cousin. Might make him my great-cousin, I suppose. Maybe a couple of greats.”
“One will do,” said Fern.
“He must have been awfully old,” Will mused.
“Youngest of his family,” Robin explained. “Lots of sisters. Story goes, he ran away to sea when he was a boy—merchant navy—and didn’t come back till they’d all died. Part of the Capel legend. Don’t know if that’s what really happened. None of the sisters married—unless some of them were widowed— anyway, there
were no children. Ned Capel didn’t marry either. Overdosed on women at an early age, I expect. The sisters all lived in that house until they sort of faded away and then he came home and vegetated there too. Must have been about ninety when he died. The sisters were fairly ancient as well. Remember visiting once with my grandparents: I think I was about Will’s age. There were three or four of them left by then: Esme and Deirdre and Irene—don’t recall any other names. Esme—no, Eithne—they called her the baby. Seventy-five at least. Very small with a wrinkled little face all eyes, like a marmoset in flowered chiffon. ‘I made the seedcake myself,’ she told me. Frightful stuff. Tasted of sand.”
“What’s seedcake?” asked Will, intrigued.
“Told you,” said Robin. “Sand.”
They arrived in Yorkshire around ten that evening. Fern, normally a faultless map-reader, was in an edgy mood after losing them twice. Although it was May the weather was cold and a thin drizzle misted the windscreen whenever Robin tried switching off the wipers. The lights of a straggling village glittered through the rain as they crossed the Yarrow and climbed uphill; few lights and far between, lurking behind deep-set windows and close-drawn curtains, not unwelcoming but distant, keeping themselves to themselves. Following directions conveyed by Ned Capel’s solicitors they left the village and continued on into the dark, turning off at last up a steep drive which proved to be more like a cart-track, their rough passage shaking the Audi until its Vorsprung seemed about to come unsprung. The drive widened and leveled out in front of the house and Robin stopped the car. Little of the façade was visible through the rain-swept gloom except for the tall windows, many of them arched, black in the gray wall. The former housekeeper, a local woman, had been informed of their advent but there were no lights showing, no indications that they were expected. The house might have stood unoccupied for years. It looked dour, unfriendly, desolate as the surrounding countryside, hugging itself around the hollow darkness of its dusty rooms. Fern produced a flashlight and the roving beam picked out the entrance, tag-ends of creeper casting wavering fingers of shadow across the front door. In the blurred lozenge of light this was seen to be of unvarnished oak, splintered and weather-bleached, and as solid as the door to a dungeon. A modern Yale lock had been added, but the key turned reluctantly and the door creaked open under duress, scraping over bare boards. The hall inside was chilly and almost pitch-black. Fern took a long time finding the lightswitch: the skittering beam glanced over the lower treads of a winding stair and flicked in and out of curious niches and past angled doorways, blinking back abruptly from the depths of a stained mirror. Low-wattage illumination did little to improve matters, showing the details of cobwebs trailing from ceiling and lamp-shade and patches of discoloration on walls which might originally have been painted white.
