Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  At midwinter, in the dark aftermath of a heavy snow, men came to hunt us out. Even now, I wake whimpering and bleating like a seal cub from dreams of the fishermen breaking in upon us and clubbing my father until his blood pooled on the kitchen floor. Three of them came after Mother and me, their clubs uplifted and their eyes shiny with fear and lust. We roared and hurled ourselves at them. There was nothing in me of my father that night. We tore the throats from four of them, my mother and I, while the rest fled yammering from our cottage.

  When all was quiet, we bundled the torn bodies out of the kitchen and down to the ocean, where the tide took them out to sea for the fish to eat. We scrubbed the blood from the polished flags with melted snow and fine sand, and then my mother stripped off her shawl and her linen bodice, her woolen skirt and her petticoats, took the sealskin rug from the study floor, and wrapped it around her naked shoulders.

  I had always known that the rug upon which I sat and drowsed on winter days was Mother’s sealskin, for the pelt smelled of her and never wore thin or lost its living gloss. From time to time, it and she would disappear together to lie upon the ice floes, and I would spread an ordinary sealskin before the study fire to support the fiction of my father’s ignorance. But never before that day had I seen her go from woman to seal. One moment she was standing before the kitchen fire, a plump woman draped in a sealskin cloak. The next, she melted into the floor like candle wax and became a sad-eyed seal, sleek and whiskered. She whistled to me urgently and I helped her drag my father’s body across the rocky beach to the water, where she towed him out to sea under the solemn moon. When I saw her after, it was only as a brown seal swimming out in the bay. At high tide she might come near and leave a fish on the rocky beach, but she never came ashore again. After a few years she stopped coming altogether. I think the sealers must have taken her.

  I suppose the fishermen reckoned me dead or swum out to sea with my selkie mother, or were too afraid to check. In any case, they never returned. Suns rose and set, moons waxed and waned, snows fell and melted, and still I lived a maid on the shore, tending my mother’s sheep and garden, reading my father’s books, fishing for salmon and hunting for partridge and wild goose when I tired of shellfish and mutton. Sometimes I longed for some reason to use my power to an end other than charming fish to my hook—to call up a tempest or call down a storm, just to show that I could do it. But my father’s books had taught me what can come of power used for power’s sake, and I refrained.

  Time runs oddly for a wizard’s child who does not age like a human woman, so I do not know how long I lived alone. But it was many and many a long year before men came again to break my solitude and my peace.

  Again it was late autumn, the time of the worst storms, and a northeasterly gale hunted early snow across the uplands. The gale blew for three days, whipping the ocean to a terrible frenzy of freezing water and stinging foam, scouring the gulls from the sky and driving both me and my sheep into shelter. On the third day the wind turned northwest, as it always does in these latitudes, bringing to my bay high tides, floating islands of kelp, and an intruder.

  I had been gathering a harvest of seaweed to cover my garden, and near sundown was laboring back with it over the rocks. Although I am almost as strong as a selkie, the sodden bundle of kelp dragged heavily at my shoulders. As I set it down and stretched, my hands to the small of my back, I looked out over the bay and saw a ship—a clipper by her proud sleekness—three-masted, many-sailed, and badly maimed by the storm. Her mainmast was down, her mizzen was splintered, and only a few rags of canvas flew from her foremast. Wearily she rocked at anchor, and sailors swarmed over her like rats, cutting free the useless rigging and clearing the decks of debris.

  Among the bustle, one still figure stood aft by the taffrail and held a glass to his eye, transfixing me in its sights, arms akimbo, breasts thrust forward with unintended boldness. I felt his gaze, and its touch, even at that distance, was intimate and unwelcome. Shuddering, I bent to my bundle, hurried back to my cottage, and barred the door behind me.

  By nightfall I had fretted myself into a rage. Was I not the daughter of a magician and a skin-changer, a sorceress in my own right, mistress of word and song and woven pattern? Why should I fear a crippled ship and her exhausted crew? But memory mocked me with visions of a helpless fisherman and blood upon the kitchen floor, and I tossed between revenge and retreat, hatred and fear, until at last I fell asleep.

  Early next morning, I was started awake by a rapping at the door. The hair at my neck rose and prickled. Whoever it was knocked again, shy and soft, as though unsure of a welcome. Would a ravager, a pirate tap so mannerly? A third knock, weaker yet. Curious, I put on my shawl, drew the bolt, and opened. Before me stood a young man in a blue coat and a handful of ragged sailors with buckets.

  “Aye?” I said, folding my shaking hands under my apron.

  “Ma’am.” The young man bowed awkwardly. He was a full head taller than I, with a sailor’s blue eyes and a pale beard like a gosling’s down blurring his cheeks. “Captain Pelican’s compliments, ma’am, and may we please draw water from your stream? We’ve been a mortal long time at sea, and never a dipperful of clean water do we have aboard.”

  He was respectful, afraid only of frightening me, and my terror faded before his downcast gaze. Mistress of myself once more, I made a shooing movement with my hand as though he were a gosling indeed. “Help ’eeself, boy. Water’s free.”

  I was careful to speak the common coast dialect, as though I were an ordinary fishwife with nothing strange or wonderful about me that must be feared or spoiled. Still, the sailors eyed me as they dipped the water from my stream into small barrels, and I was grateful that the young man lingered by my door.

  “I am Thomas Fletcher, ma’am, first mate of the clipper Cape Town Maid. We sail from China, around the Cape of Good Hope to Salem with a cargo of gold, porcelain, spices, and silks. Our captain is Elias Pelican.” He faltered, reddened, continued. “He asks, ma’am, for grain if you can spare it, and news of forests with trees suitable for a jury mast, for we will never make Salem in this state.” Timidly, he smiled down at me, and I found that I was smiling in return.

  “There do be fir above, and pine. It be up along the moor and not easy found. I’ll lead ’ee,” I said.

  The shadows were short by the time we had trekked over the moorland to a respectable stand of fir, and had lengthened almost to dusk before we returned, for the seamen bickered over the choice of a tree, then bickered over the best way of felling and stripping it. My father had told me how seamen must work together, each individual becoming a part of a human mechanism called “crew,” harmonious in action as canvas and wind, capstan and rope. As I listened to the sailors curse and pick at each other, I thought that this particular crew was no more harmonious, either in action or in voice, than a beach of bull seals in rut.

  “Damn your eyes,” shouted Mr. Fletcher at last when two of them had nearly come to blows over the angle and height of the cut they were to make. “Do you want the captain ashore?”

  His words fell on the crew like a fog. Faces greyed; eyes dulled; voiced fell utterly silent. Working quickly now, the men felled the tree, stripped it, and hauled it across the moor to the beach. Only their bodies and hands spoke to me, who knew from my mother how to understand the wordless speech of wind and fish and sheep, and told me that they were afraid.

  Watching them stumble and fumble, I could not imagine how they had survived the passage of the Horn without hanging themselves on the rigging or tumbling from the crosstrees. Indeed some of them night have recently fallen from a lesser height, so stiffly did they move. One young man, with a bruised face and an angry eye, wore a shirt marked across the back with rusty stains that darkened and gleamed wetly as he worked.

  That night I dreamed of my mother standing by the shore, ankle-deep in the tide, changing. The strange thing was that she never became wholly seal or woman, but remained mutable: a woman’s face and torso might
end in a seal’s hind flippers; a sleek, whiskered head might dart above a woman’s full white breasts. I dreamed, too, of the bulls roaring on the beaches, of the remembered salt of human blood on my lips, the jar of human bones between my teeth. More than once, I woke sweating and trembling, only to slip again into uneasy dreaming. But when morning came, I opened the door to Mr. Fletcher’s knock and asked him in most civilly to take a cup of chamomile tea.

  He sat by the fire in my father’s chair, nursing the thick brown mug between his hands and casting curious glances at the polished wooden furniture, the woven cloths, the pewter and china ranked on the heavy oak dresser.

  “This puts me in mind of my mother’s kitchen,” he said at last. “You live here alone?”

  “Aye.” He was a lovely man, strong and clean-limbed. His sun-burnished face warmed my dark kitchen, and I wanted him to stay. “Our mam and dad drowned,” I went on. “It be three winters since, now.”

  His pity was quick and sweet to hear. “Poor girl, so young to be left alone,” he said gently, not knowing that I was far older than he. “Why did you not leave this lonely place? There are fishing villages up and down this coast would welcome you.”

  “Here I were born, and here ’tis fitty I stay,” I said shortly. “Tell I, Mr. Fletcher, where be your mother’s kitchen and what set ’ee to sailing?”

  So he told me of the snug clapboard house in Gloucester, of his father who had followed the whales until his ship was lost, of his mother who had listened dry-eyed to her son’s decision to serve the same harsh mistress. He had been a cabin boy on a whaler, an apprentice on a merchantman, a boatswain, and a mate. “I’ve turned my hand to most things, and know how a ship should be run. My last captain advanced me when his first mate washed overboard, and it was as first mate I came aboard The Cape Town Maid, two years ago.”

  “Two years be a mortal long time afloat,” I said. “Hast a sweetheart?”

  He nodded, fumbled in his waistcoat and brought out a tarnished locket, which he opened and held out to me. “Nancy Bride,” he said, low and earnest. “The sweetest girl in Gloucester.”

  Being a black paper silhouette, the portrait cold have been of any young girl with a straight nose and ringlets, but I read in the angle of his head and the trembling of his broad hand that he saw his Nancy’s loving face and no other smiling from that anonymous snippet. Suddenly, I was out of patience, even angry.

  “Her be a clean-featured maid,” I said. “Does ’ee think her’ll have waited on ’ee all this long time?”

  Mr. Fletcher flushed, snapped the locket shut, and restored it to his bosom. “She’s as true as death, ma’am,” he said stiffly. “I’d stake my soul on her.”

  I hastened to make up the ground I’d lost. “I’m thinking her be a lucky maid. So ye’ll be a married man as soon as ever the banns can be called?”

  “No.”

  There was a long and uncomfortable pause. What ailed the man? He was stirring now in the chair as if preparing to leave. To keep him, I said, “’Tis an odd thing the captain’s not come ashore.”

  Mr. Fletcher mumbled something into his waistcoat that I asked him to repeat. “I said, ‘it’s not the oddest thing about him,’ ma’am.” He hesitated with the air of a sheep at a gate—afraid to move, eager to be on the other side—then began to speak.

  “Although he’s a merchant, he refuses to take passengers on board. He doesn’t seem to care how many seasoned sailors there are among the crews he buys from the crimps, providing they come cheap enough. Why, there’s hardly four men knew a belaying pin from a capstan spar when they shipped aboard, though they found out soon enough which falls the hardest on a man’s back.” He was through the gate now, and trotting. “Two years is a long time at sea, as you’ve said, ma’am, and it’s longer yet if you’re sailing under a captain like Pelican. He’s one who likes to put the cat among the pigeons just to see the feathers fly—never mind if the cat scratches or the pigeons peck. He’ll order the scuppers cleaned by the dawn watch if the fancy takes him, or the deck holystoned at midnight, and it’s twenty lashes for any sailor who might be slow at leaping to obey. He’s too free with the lash and too free with his fists and his knife. Flogging’s been against the law for thirty years and more, yet he’s ordered ten strokes for a dirty shirt, though the men have no place to wash their linen except the scuppers, and he’s filthy as bilge water himself.”

  Once Mr. Fletcher had begun, there was no more hope of stopping him than of turning a starving sheep from rich pasture. He was angry now, fairly flaming with it, and his sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks were a pleasure to see.

  “Round the Horn’s a hard passage, and you expect to lose a dozen men or so to sickness and accident, but we’ve buried that many from dysentery and lash weals gone septic, and lost as many again overboard. He tied Carbone high in the mainmast rigging once when a fever kept him from coming up with his watch. ‘The sea air’ll cure him,’ he said, and left him there all night. Next morning, Carbone was all but dead. Two days later, he died.” Mr. Fletcher shook his head.

  “Could’ee not have cut him down and bade Captain Bucko go whistle?” I asked curiously.

  Mr. Fletcher stretched his eyes wide. “But ma’am, that would be mutiny! It’s no part of a first mate’s job to countermand his captain’s orders.”

  I doubted it was part of a first mate’s job to flog his shipmates for no reason but the captain’s fancy. Though I said nothing, my scorn must have shown in my face, for before I knew it, he was on his feet, thanking me for the tea, and out the door.

  My father always said that confession was a relief to the soul, but telling me of the horrors aboard The Cape Town Maid did not relieve Mr. Fletcher. After that morning’s confidences, he stayed well away from my door. He was certainly nowhere to be found when six of my sheep were stolen from the fold and slaughtered on the beach. “Captain’s orders,” one squint-eyed runt told me when I stormed out to confront the butchers. “Ye mun tak’ it up wi’ he.”

  I glared out at the Maid, rocking quietly in the swell. A tall figure stood in the stern, the sun winking from the barrel of his glass. Outraged, I shook my fist at the brazen eye, went back to my cottage, and barred the door.

  The next day they were finished at last. The mast had been trimmed, banded with iron, floated out to The Cape Town Maid, stepped, and rigged. There was much going back and forth from shore with barrels and game and strings of fish. By sundown the strand was empty at last, and I ventured out to care for my remaining sheep.

  The clipper lay at anchor, her masts rerigged and proud against the rosy sky. Across the quiet bay came the boom of Captain Pelican’s harsh voice haranguing his men. Though I rejoiced that they’d be gone by morning so that I could sleep easy again, as the night fell I found myself staring out my window at the Maid’s moon-touched shadow, restless and angry and sure that my anger would not simply sail with the clipper out of the bay.

  Here, I told myself, was a reason to use my powers at last. Perhaps I would send lightning to strike down the cruel captain as he strutted on the poop; perhaps I would simply call up a storm and sink The Cape Town Maid with all her thieving hands aboard. I was still debating alternatives when Mr. Fletcher knocked once more on my door.

  He was cold, still, correct, as though his indiscretion and my scorn still rankled in his mind. “Seeing as you’ve been so kind, ma’am, and so generous with the water and the sheep and all, the captain asks you to come on board to view the cargo, take a glass of sherry wine, and be properly thanked. He will not take ‘no’ for an answer.”

  I looked past Mr. Fletcher at the faces of the men who accompanied him. They looked uneasy, but some looked eager as well, their eyes bright and flat like the eyes of those fishermen so many years ago.

  “Nay, sir, no need for thanks,” I said. “Water’s free, I told ’ee, and help is too. Though the captain could pay for they sheep, come ’pon that.”

  “The captain wishes to convey his thanks himself, ma�
��am,” Mr. Fletcher repeated stubbornly. “He’ll settle the matter of the sheep with you on the Maid.” And he began to extoll the value and beauty of the cargo as if to dazzle me with the prospect of some rare and unnamed reward for my kindness.

  Was the man daft, or did he think I was? A glass of sherry wine, indeed. If I went out to that ship, I would never return to the shore. A woman is not bad luck while a ship is at anchor, and no doubt the captain intended me to be dead and overboard long before the Maid sailed on the dawn tide.

  So I listened, or seemed to, and made no response. Mr. Fletcher began to sweat and his voice took on a pleading note. He seemed to have settled with himself that he would not force me out to the ship. If he could persuade me, well, then, I would get what I deserved. But if he had to pick me up and carry me, protesting, his conscience might prick him to defiance.

  Briefly I considered pressing Mr. Fletcher into making a choice between the two sides of his sense of propriety. But I had a curiosity to meet this Captain Pelican, so, “Thank’ee kindly sir,” I said as his eloquence began to run dry. “I’ll be pleased to take sherry wine with your captain.” And I set briskly off down the strand, trailed by Mr. Fletcher and the sailors.

  They helped me into the stern of the longboat and rowed out to the ship. As we approached, I could see her figurehead clearly: a naked woman supporting her massive breasts in her hands and leering out at the innocent sea. Then we were alongside the ship, a ladder was lowered, and dozens of hard, eager hands pulled me onto the deck.

  Captain Pelican was on the bridge, and Mr. Fletcher led me up to him ceremoniously. The captain was an imposing man, over six feet tall, fleshy in a salt-stained frock coat. Above his high collar and frayed cravat, his face was dark, craggy, pitted like granite; his iron-colored hair hung lank around his ears. “Pleased to meet you,” he said and spat a brown stream of tobacco juice at my feet.