With a start, I realized that this must be the very place Euphemia had meant them to avoid when she’d warned them to stay on the beach. “Maybe we should go back,” I said.
“Shhhh!” Edward whispered. He turned to me. “We don’t want to frighten her.”
Were otters like bears, animals that could be dangerous if they felt cornered?
“I think we should go back.” This time I whispered. The passage was so tight in places that I had to turn sideways to slip through. Any animal at its far end would surely feel trapped.
The children pretended they hadn’t heard me. Suddenly, they stopped and crowded against one another.
“See?” Jane breathed.
I had to push against the children to peer into the dark space, but once my eyes were accustomed to the low light, I recognized at once the cave Jane had drawn. It was a low-ceilinged room, obviously formed when one boulder had crashed down upon three others that refused to give way. I’d expected some sort of burrow or nest, but although an animal stink hung about it, it was clearly the home of a human being. It smelled of smoke and unwashed skin and skeins of seaweed that hung from a crude wooden rack. Piled higgledy-piggledy about the floor were enormous abalone shells, their mother-of-pearl bowls exposed. Heaped in some were what I took to be tools: mallets and scrapers and pointed sticks. One shell was brimming with acorns, another with sharpened yellowish bones, another with round shapes I first took to be ivory buttons or clasps and then realized were vertebrae. Here and there were baskets as well, some flat-bottomed and some rounded, one in the shape of a cone. Most were finely woven of some light-colored plant material I couldn’t identify, into which dark patterns had been worked. Near the center of the cave was one piece of what might have been called furniture: skins stretched over a wooden frame to make a kind of platform that served, I supposed, as a couch or bed. Along the far wall, arranged in a pyramid, were brightly labeled cans of the kind I’d come to know well: green corn and tomatoes, sardines and plums, and at the apex, a hash made of beef and potatoes, its label bearing a large blue ribbon. The floor, covered in sealskins, was a lustrous brown. Folded in one corner was a navy wool blanket, Lighthouse Service–issue. Most astonishing of all was what was beside the blanket, arranged neatly side by side: my shoes and stockings.
“Who lives here?” I whispered, astounded.
“The mermaid!” Jane looked at me as if I were a simpleton. How many times did I need to be told?
“Well, we’re not entirely sure.” Edward looked to the others, as if uncertain how much he ought to reveal.
“She doesn’t have a tail,” Nicholas explained. “Just ordinary legs.”
“But she is a mermaid,” Jane said stoutly. “We saw her come out of the water.”
“She had a spear and a big rockfish stabbed right through,” Edward said.
I saw that the crevices between the rocks at the entrance were filled with fish vertebrae and that the stone surfaces were flecked with scales that shimmered like quartz.
Jane took a step into the cave, but Mary grabbed her crossed pinafore straps and pulled her back. “You know better, Janie,” she said. “It’s not polite to go in if she’s not at home.”
“Why isn’t she here?” Jane asked, a little petulantly.
“Probably because of Mrs. Swann,” Nicholas said. “It’s only that she doesn’t know you,” he added kindly.
“The things in your collection, in the box,” I said. “Did you steal them from her?”
“Steal them!” Edward was indignant. “Of course not!”
“They’re meant for us,” Nicholas said. “She puts them on the stones.”
“I told you,” Jane said.
“Ma doesn’t like it,” Mary said.
“It was my turn, and she threw it away,” Jane complained.
Mary sighed. “I gave you the feathers, didn’t I?”
“I wanted the necklace!”
“I told you not to wear it,” Mary said. “I told you to put it straight in the box.”
“She wanted me to wear it. She was sad when I didn’t have it. You know she was.”
I could hardly listen to them, caught as I was in my own conjectures about the creature who lived in this hole. Who was she, if, indeed, she was a woman at all?
I feared that a black-haired, seal-skinned banshee might come whirling down the narrow path, brandishing a spear. I glanced at the rock walls that rose high over our heads. There were dozens of crevices that, for all I knew, might hide a person.
“We’d better go.” I didn’t wait for arguments but turned and began to make my own way back. This time they accepted my authority and followed without protest.
They would have dawdled along the beach—to them, apparently, the idea that a wild woman lived in a cave not five miles from their home was only a bit of distraction to spark up an afternoon, something like going down to the river to watch the drawbridge open had once been to me—but I hurried them on like a hen pushing her chicks toward the roost. This time I kept up with them as we straggled up the steep morro—I had learned to crouch low and use my hands as well as my feet, as they did—and I went with them all the way to their parlor.
Through the doorway, I could see Mrs. Crawley—Euphemia—reaching into the oven for a pan. On the worktable beside her were two cans of the blue-ribbon hash that had been so artfully displayed in the cave.
“Wash,” Mrs. Crawley called, and the children crowded past me and pushed into the kitchen.
“Mrs. Crawley. Euphemia.”
“Oh!” Startled, she let the hot pan clatter onto the stove. “Why are you lurking there? Come in.”
I stayed where I was. I wondered if she’d deliberately misled me about the otter, and I wasn’t sure how she would respond.
She advanced through the kitchen doorway and came toward me, wiping her hands on a towel. “What is it?”
“It’s a woman, I think. Or a person, at any rate. She lives in a cave in the rocks, not five miles from here.”
“They took you there? I told them—I told you—to stay on the beach!” She directed an angry look toward the kitchen, where the children were laughing and clattering the china. “Be careful with those plates!” she snapped.
“Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize what you meant until . . . Is she dangerous?”
“She’s mad,” she said firmly. And then she softened. “I don’t mean that she’s a lunatic, exactly, but she’s touched . . . different from you and me. She’s . . . unpredictable.” She paused, absently adjusting the wooden teeth and other items of wreckage on their lurid cloth. “It’s not so unusual around here, you know. This is the kind of place that attracts people who can’t get along in regular society.”
“How does she live? Won’t she starve? Or freeze? Isn’t she lonely?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. She knows better than any of us how to live. She’s been there for years, you know.”
“Since before you came?”
“No. Not that long.” She held me in her formidable gaze. “My children are not to go near her, you understand. And if I were you, I would stay away from her, too.”
∗ ∗ ∗
In my own kitchen, I pounded the chisel into two cans and poured their contents into a skillet, distractedly mixing oxtail and duck. Then I remembered that I’d neglected the stove all afternoon and let the fire go out. It would take at least an hour to warm it up again.
I set a plate of cold meat in congealed gravy in front of Oskar that night, and he began to eat without comment. I was too preoccupied to lift my own fork. I thought about the woman returning to her cave and wondered if she would smell us on the air and know we’d been there. I imagined her squatting on the rocks, scraping scales from a limp fish, or sitting on the sealskin floor, rolling acorns about. Who was she? How had she come to be there? Were there more like her?
“Oskar,” I said abruptly.
He looked up, raising his eyebrows slightly at the intensity in my voice.
“I saw something strange today. A sort of hideout in the rocks. Euphemia says a madwoman lives there.”
I was leaning forward, unconsciously heightening the intensity of my words, but he seemed unaffected. He continued chewing a cold oxtail for what seemed a long time. “It’s not all that surprising,” he said at last. “Didn’t the Crawleys say there was some crazy old hermit around here? I can see how this place could drive you insane, the damn wind, the damn waves, the damn foghorn, the damn rust. It all keeps worrying at you until you’re ready to do something desperate. You were right, Trudy; people aren’t meant to be here.” He pushed his plate away as he spoke and stood up from the table.
“Oskar, she doesn’t seem crazy to me. I mean, not really. Her things are organized. And some of them are beautiful.”
“Well.” He sighed. He was already halfway down the hall so that the walls muffled his words. “I suppose you’ll have to show me one of these days.”
CHAPTER 22
THAT NIGHT THE rain began to fall so thickly and heavily, it seemed as though the bowl of the ocean had risen into the sky and upended itself. It went on for weeks, the deluge pausing only to reveal more vast columns of gray to the west, their winds screaming as they advanced, so that the chickens had to be staked to the ground with a bit of string around one leg to keep them from being blown right off the morro. I diverted the children by reading The Tempest to them, from the Shakespeare the tender had delivered, and together, we loosely adapted it into a piece they could perform at Christmas.
To my surprise, Euphemia abandoned an afternoon’s work to help us fashion the costumes, and these delighted the children more than the story itself. As Ariel, Jane got two lace handkerchiefs tacked to the shoulders of her dress to suggest wings. Every few minutes she would jump into the air to make them flutter. Edward assumed a dignified expression in Oskar’s wedding jacket and didn’t look ridiculous with my muff tied over his chin as a beard. Archie Johnston donated a sheepskin rug for Nicholas to wear as Caliban, and Mr. Crawley’s indigo nightshirt, together with a crown Euphemia constructed from empty tin cans, was his costume as the prince. I had the perfect dress for Mary’s Miranda.
Though I’d not opened our steamer trunk since the day I’d feverishly collected laundry, now I stood it up on its end and parted its halves, allowing the colorful fabric of my former life to spill forward, crushed but still lovely.
“So pretty.” Jane unself-consciously stroked the sleeve of the blue silk I’d worn to the panorama.
“Yes, that’s the one.” I held it up to Mary’s scrawny chest.
“Not really!” Mary covered her mouth with her hand. She looked almost terrified at the thought.
I floated the dress over her head. The garnet buttons met far too easily at the front, and both girls giggled at the bustle, but when I’d loosened Mary’s braids, I could glimpse the woman she would become.
“She’ll trip over the thing,” Euphemia said, shaking her head. As she combed her fingers through the girl’s hair, I saw that her dismissal disguised both pride and sorrow at her daughter’s maturation.
Little Jane insisted on trying the dress, too. She looked absurd, drowning in silk, but Euphemia indulged her, patiently arranging the folds of material around her feet, making her look as if she were standing in a pool of water.
“I’m a mermaid princess!” the little girl announced.
Our Christmas party, Euphemia hinted, would be an occasion worthy of the fine table linen stored in my trunk, unused since it had left Milwaukee. We would gather, we decided, in my parlor, since it was less crowded with furnishings and bric-a-brac than the Crawleys’, and we would need space for the plank table and for the entertainment. From her hoard of provisions, Euphemia produced a bottle of tawny liquor. We would make rum balls and a large rum cake from her mother’s recipes.
Early on the morning of Christmas Eve, the men rode the steam donkey down the morro in the rain, and by early afternoon, they returned with their quarry. Johnston dangled three ducks by the neck; Mr. Crawley had strung two large rockfish together through the gills; and Oskar had his arms around a sweet-smelling pine that he crowded into one corner of our parlor. Although popping corn was among our stores, Euphemia had never taught the children to string it nor to make paper chains out of strips of old catalog pages. I set them to work on these decorations while Euphemia and I erected the table, covering it with two of my mother’s fine white cloths and laying out the full set of lighthouse china. It was a simple spread, without the niceties of compote dishes or pickle forks, but inviting nonetheless. A bottle of wine glowed in the center with a ruby luster.
At the other end of the room, the children and I strewed evidence of a shipwreck, courtesy of their mother’s collection, and arranged some of the larger rocks and specimens, lengths of driftwood, and coils of dried kelp from our own stash to suggest the island. The players hid in the hall, whispering and giggling as the audience took their seats, while Mr. Crawley went around with the rum that remained after our baking.
“Must you pour so much, Henry?” Euphemia was wearing more than one petticoat under her skirt—she couldn’t know that it was a style long out of date—and it made her appear even larger than usual.
She was right that the tumblers were overfull, given the strong nature of the drink. Mr. Crawley was clearly not in the habit of serving liquor.
“Now, Effie,” Archie said placatingly. “It’s only one night a year.”
“Effie” was so incongruous a name for Euphemia Crawley that I didn’t dare to meet Oskar’s eye for fear I would burst out laughing.
The show itself was both charming and tedious, as children’s performances must be, and as I’d hoped, it took the sting out of a Christmas so far from the ones I remembered. We dimmed the lights, and Janie and Nicholas made a fine storm, drumming with spoons on pots and running back and forth with my dark shawl held over their heads to suggest the tossing wind and the waves. Prospero relinquished his magic stoutly, if a bit stiffly. Miranda handled her gown with surprising grace. Ariel sucked on the strings of her long dark hair—though we’d tied it in rags overnight, it wouldn’t hold a curl—while she delivered her song about coral bones and pearl eyes with only a few whispered prompts, and Caliban growled with delightful fierceness. I’d given Nicholas some lines from the famous speech about the sweet noises of the night, and he spoke them with an appropriately wistful air.
When he’d finished, Archie turned to me. “I see I was right about your being a good teacher,” he said disarmingly. “Although,” he added, glancing at his sister, “you chose the wrong one to play the wild thing.”
Euphemia’s face hardened. “You see, Henry?” she said, plucking the bottle of rum from the floor where it had wandered.
“I only gave him a glass, same as everyone,” Mr. Crawley said.
“Why didn’t you include ‘Be not afraid of greatness’?” Oskar murmured.
“Wrong shipwreck play,” Euphemia said with her usual efficiency.
I admit I was as surprised as Oskar that she would know such a thing. I hoped it didn’t show on my face as it did on his.
“One reads,” she said.
The players, luckily, took no notice of their audience’s inattention, but entertained themselves to the finish, and then we all sat down to eat. Euphemia, with uncharacteristic attention to aesthetics, had added to the table a series of short candles whose flames dipped and straightened in the draft that seeped through the windows. This time it was she who took the bottle around, splashing a few dark drops of wine into each of our glasses.
“Now, Effie, don’t deprive us of our Christmas cheer,” Archie coaxed.
Euphemia frowned. “You don’t always wear it well.”
“I’ve been a good boy all year. Haven’t I, Henry? Tell my sister how good I’ve been, now, c’mon.”
“He hasn’t caused any trouble, Euphemia,” Mr. Crawley said. “It’s true.”
“And I’m entertaining,” Archi
e said. “Look!” He’d hung his spoon from the end of his nose, and it dangled there ludicrously, making the children scream with laughter and begin applying their spoons to their own noses with clattering results.
“Well,” Euphemia acquiesced, tipping the bottle, “I suppose if you must have it, now’s the time.”
She poured a bit more into each of our glasses while Mr. Crawley served the duck with a fairly steady hand and Oskar, Mr. Crawley, and I lavishly praised the meat and its currant glaze, to appease both brother and sister. Soon we were all festive, the men enjoying themselves by loudly reviling Spain as Euphemia and I peeled oranges and cracked walnuts for the children without insisting that they first finish their peas.
There were no curtains in our parlor windows, and happening to catch a glimpse of my reflection in the dripping glass, I was conscious of how we would appear if anyone—a passing angel, perhaps—could see us from the outside. Much like the lighthouse itself, we, gathered in this little room, were a warm and bright spot in a vast space of cold blackness. I scanned the flushed and happy faces of the people I’d come to know this half-year, grateful that I had a part in this family now that I could no longer be with my own.
Oskar must have been feeling much the same, for he raised his glass, which had been refilled a second or perhaps even a third time, since Mr. Crawley had produced a second bottle of wine, seemingly from under the table. “To Christmas!”
Archie raised his own glass with unwarranted energy, and the liquid in it sloshed alarmingly. “We’ve not heard anything about the noble experiment in a great while,” he said with a smack of his lips. “What’s happened to all the electricity around here? Have we lost it?”
Cravenly, I kept my eyes on my plate, wondering how Oskar would respond. Archie Johnston was rude, and I didn’t like to see my husband embarrassed, but I, too, wished for answers to questions somewhat like these.
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