Song of the Sea Maid (34 page)

As the child shrieked and would not sleep, as the hours went by – days like weeks, weeks like aeons – I felt myself losing my mind, at the worst times, holding the child coldly, believing it hated me and wanted to ruin my life, tempted to throw it down, or across the room, or into the sea. But enough reason remained in my addled sleep-starved mind to stop these impulses, and verily I did no harm to my child, though I dreamed of it sometimes; not of hurt, but of silence, of simply one moment to think, to listen to the birds, the sea, to be myself again and not only this servant of an imperious infant, to be Dawnay Price and not merely Mother, to be at peace. That first month there was snow in April – universal deep snow and such weather never recalled by the oldest person hereabouts – and I struggled to keep the baby warm, but she detested swaddling and fought to escape it. We were trapped in the house, unable to go for walks in the icy air. I lived in fractions of hours. The harsh white light of the wintry weather taunted me with its bleak clarity of view: this is your choice, your life now. There were no soft greens, fringes of leaves or even tight buds to soften it.

When the child was two months old, a knock came at my door and I opened it, babe on my arm as ever. Standing there were the Applebees, Stephen and Susan. I wept at the sight of them, upon which Susan took the baby and bade me sit. She handed the child to Stephen and set about making tea with sugar for us all, an expensive treat they had brought me as a present. I was in heaven, sitting with them, drinking the fresh, sweet, hot tea and watching my old friends take over, understand and give me much needed aid.

‘It has been so very hard,’ said I to Susan.

‘It is for everyone,’ said she. ‘But anything worth having is fought for. Your children make you earn your love for them through sacrifice. But once won, it resides in your heart and your soul, and no one can take it from you.’

My friends’ arrival lifted a great weight of sorrow from my weary shoulders. They would do any kind office for me. Susan shared many wise and helpful thoughts about motherhood. Stephen brought talk of the outside world and developments in science. At last the burden was shared, and I was able to discuss matters other than milk or sleep or excrement, topics suited to the adult brain and not the infant body. They stayed for a week and as my mood improved, I took pleasure in waiting upon Susan for once, preparing good food for her and serving her, as she had done for me so kindly in our past; after all my training with Matron as a maid-of-all-work and with Betty’s help, I have become quite the housewife. I made a currant tart and plum pudding, which Susan praised and they both ate with relish.

Stephen and I went for strolls along the beach, Susan very contented to be left alone with the child, ushering us out. We discussed my work, my publisher, the secret ideas I continue to formulate. I told Stephen I had changed my mind about coral gardens: that now I believe coral is a collection of many animals, sentient and predatory, not the design of ancient peoples, but architecture created by animals. And furthermore, I now doubt the existence of mermaids. The cave of the great sea maid I believe was not a depiction of nature, but a metaphor for it. It has occurred to me that the paintings were a kind of genealogy, these ancient people’s ideas of creation: the simple beings of the sea first – even the fossils of shellfish in the walls leading up to the cave play their part in this procession – the fish at the entrance, leading on to the mammals next – the seals – and finally the half-mammal, half-fish humans in the final, deepest cavern; as if they wrote a book on the walls of a cave, rather than parchment or paper;
as if they are writing their own Bible
.

Stephen listened carefully, then I said to him, ‘You know by now that I am aware of your past career, that once you were a man of the Church. I hope I have not offended you, in any of my ideas, my rantings against religion, my current theories. If I have, you have not shown it for a moment. But I would expect nothing less from such a gentleman as you, Stephen.’

He smiled, then replied, ‘There can be no offence taken by a person who seeks the truth. My mind had grown and changed alongside your own, Dawnay, and I have learned to question my old accustomed ways of thinking. It is only to the good that you too seek to question your own theories. The scientific mind must cast beyond the moon, into unknown territory, and thus may take a wrong turn from time to time. The trick is to recognise it and instead choose a better path to knowledge, just as a natural philosopher should.’

The Applebees’ visit was medicine to me. When they were leaving, I begged them to stay, though I knew they could not. Their son Owen was by now married and set up in his own home, doing very well; so they are more at liberty than they once were. But life intervenes and they must return to theirs and their work, and I had to resume the life I had chosen also. The days after their departure were my loneliest yet, and I missed the comfort of their company in my very bones. And motherhood returned to me as a trial and perpetual vexation.

Yet, as the first months waned and spring proper came, as the child settled, as I grew to know Betty more, as I ventured out into the village, down to the beach, discovered the wealth of ancient life in its rocks which I had suspected but was overwhelmed actually to lay eyes on: all these gradual processes – requiring time, patience and faith – began to tell on me and ease my sense of solitude.

I remember one grim day, when Alexandra had not slept for over fourteen hours and I was near distracted with exhaustion and half weeping, half racked with anger and complaining bitterly to Betty of all my troubles, she waited for me to quiet down, then said, ‘One day, you and your girl will be the best of friends. She will be your helpmeet and your darling.’

And I looked at Alexandra and my eyes brimmed with tears of joy – a deep knowledge settled then and told me: now, you have it, now you have a person in this world who is for ever connected to you. It was not that I owned her, never that, as since the earliest flutterings in my womb I knew she was other, she was herself and – though a part of me, though of me – she was completely her own person and would go her own way in life. But that she would always be my daughter and I would always be her mother. And nobody else in this world – not now nor for ever – holds that station but
me
.

Now we live through simple days, a plain cottage within the sound of the sea, ordinary food and drink, happy uncomplicated days together. We always have a fire, even in summer. I like a good fire. Sometimes, news of the war with France is spoken of in the village, and papers come from the capital with news of notable battles and victories for the British. But I do not pursue news of the war, or the navy, or seek out news of a certain person, as I have my new life now and resolved I would put my past behind me, and so I do. I look only to the deep and dim past of ancient time and forward to the unravelling future. The latter is a new sensation for me, as I was always too impatient to consider the far future, only the present moment, as Stephen knew too well of me. Yet since I have had a child, my outlook of the years ahead stretches out beyond my life to hers, and to her children, and her children’s children, and beyond – a line of mirrors reflecting mirrors into eternity. It is parenthood that gives one the longer view. It is a relief to think of another before oneself. Alexandra and I are two stars side by side, forever orbited by others yet never moved from our own fixed station in the sky. I work and she plays; I read Voltaire and she paws at picture books and the alphabet. We talk, I tell her about the birds and beasts, the way people are, draw her pictures of islands and apes and sea cows – try every day in some small measure to feed her unquenchable thirst for knowledge. She is three years of age and luminous with life.

It is a pleasure to look upon her and see that wishful inkling of my brother. His note to me I have kept all these long years and framed behind glass and put on my dressing table. I show it to her from time to time and tell her, ‘This was a present from your uncle, my brother.’ Just saying the words fills me with pride and sadness in equal, exquisite measure. The loss of him, the silhouette where my mother should have been, and my father more shadowy still – these blank spaces, this hollow in the heart of me, I see now it has driven me onwards, to seek, to find, to be found. For years I harboured a fantasy that my brother would track me down to the asylum, would speak to Matron who would surely recall me, would find his way to my benefactor and appear at our door one glorious day. I pictured his face, his features lengthened by age and hard experience, yet his eyes the same as those I knew as an infant, that smiled kindly upon me. But it never came to pass. I know it never will. Yet I still dream of his face from time to time and wake in serenity. Alexandra has inherited some of his character too, methinks. She is certainly kind and tender, like him, bright and quick too.

She knows how to wield a quill, one of my first gifts to her once she could hold a spoon. No child of mine will be deprived of writing, however young. I continue to write, part for my living – books on my past travels, on my drawings of the natural world, and more recently on children’s primers in science – and in the evenings, once Alexandra sleeps, I write my own private ideas. One day perhaps the world will be ready to hear my hypothesis; it may have evolved sufficiently to accept it from a woman and an orphan, even. But for now I do not attempt to broadcast my dangerous ideas, as I will not threaten my daughter’s future by willingly risking her mother’s place by her side, of removal to the pillory or to prison. I’ll be damned if she might ever know the smallest part of what it feels to be a foundling. I have made more than simply a domicile for us here. My child came into the world in this little house and will always know it as her birthplace. One day, I intend to travel again – to see those exotic creatures I imagine in unknown lands – and Alexandra will come with me. Together we shall seek evidence for my theories in hidden caves and hollows, jungles and oceans, as yet unexplored, undiscovered; beyond the edge of the map, where the sun sets. Yet wherever we journey, like a shell on her back, my daughter will carry the memory of home.

One late March afternoon in 1760, a week or so after her third birthday, we are rambling on the beach, Alexandra running ahead as ever, stopping to hold aloft fossil prizes to show me then placing them in the bulging pocket I have sewn on to her smock for just that purpose. There is a warm breeze this day that blows the surface of the sand in rushing waves upon waves, as if alive – a bright shadow on the sea-damp surface. A figure arrives way down at the end of the beach, near the great dark cliff that looms above us; come from the coastal path, it steps out on to the mingled pebbles and sand. Clothed in a dark coat and broad tricorne hat, Robin Alexander stands on Charmouth beach and scans the scene, his head turning this way and that among the other strollers and fossil-seekers this bright spring day, and then he finds me.

As I walk towards him, he stands straight and serious, not moving. Only as we approach – as Alexandra curves in her circuit and runs to me, hands me the fossils she has no room left to store, then is off again on her own aimless path – can I see his eyes turn to her, a golden-headed ball of energy whisking this way and that with the sea breeze, crunching across the pebbles and talking to the clouds. He watches her, cannot take his eyes from her every move, and only when I am close enough to see there is white in his hair now, and that his left arm is shorter than his right, that indeed his left hand is missing, does he turn to me and meet my gaze. We stand apart, almost four years and convention between us.

‘Are you angry I have come?’ says he.

The sound of his voice, the tone of it, how I had practised the timbre of it for many months in my head, until it faded and at last I had forgotten its exactitude, and now to hear it again is like song.

‘Never that. Does it hurt you?’ I ask, looking at his arm.

‘Not any more.’

‘How did you lose it?’

‘In a mighty sea battle, at Quiberon Bay.’

I had heard of it. Last winter, our navy had routed the French and put paid to their invasion plans once and for all. ‘Our local lord put on a day of festivities in Bridport
.
’

‘Did you attend?’

‘I did not.’

Years of painful separation and we speak of such trivialities.

Say I, ‘Thank you. For fighting for England, for keeping us safe.’

‘I did my duty.’

‘And did it exceedingly well, I warrant. Can you continue, as a captain, I mean, with your injury?’

‘It is possible. There is an understanding that I could retire honourably, take up a position on land, in Greenwich or suchlike. I have had my fill of war.’

‘How fares your family?’

‘My wife is well. She is very active in society. My boys are now fourteen and have entered the navy, insisting that they serve together on the same ship, against my wishes. They are hearty, brave boys, but they will not be parted for all the world.’

‘They are twins. They are bound to each other.’

There is a fervent silence between us and we may gaze upon each other. I dearly wish to touch him. I take a step forward.

Says he softly, ‘All is dust and ashes without you.’

Alexandra squeals as she has found a sandworm and is dangling it for my approval.

‘Be kind to it,’ I call.

Robin stares at her, then looks to me. ‘You are married now?’

‘You do not know?’

He glances at Alexandra again.

‘How did you find me?’ I ask.

‘I went to visit Woods. He said you had moved to the country, to the West Country in fact, to pursue your studies of the natural world. I do believe he misses your company exceedingly, as he reminisced at length about your younger days. I could extract no further information from him as to your exact whereabouts, without raising suspicion. But as I was leaving, the cook pulled me aside and handed me a slip of paper, your dwelling written on it. We did not speak one word. Excepting that you are here, I know little else.’