The Sea House: A Novel (5 page)

But now, I work in the Reverend’s house. He it was who found me half starved in a winter ditch and brought me here and gave me boots and taught me the English. It was a great shock and hard on a body’s pride to see in his mirror what he had been seeing all along, and, I have to confess, a disappointment when I did realise it was me. My hair had got matted and wide like a dirty sheep’s fleece, and my face was dark and lined with the peat smoke. But the Reverend saw I could be cleaned up, and he got me a dress and other things from Mrs Macleod, who came and instructed me in the ways of his fancy kitchen and made sure I didn’t kill him off with my cooking. But I am fast to learn, and soon it was me that was showing her how to manage the flue on the stove.

And now I would die for this good man. I set the fires before he wakes and I make the
brose
in the morning for his breakfast. I wash his white shirts, and I strip the milk cow’s udder in the byre so well that she gives enough milk to make curd cheese. And when he frets and sighs in his library over his books and his notes, because he cannot see the sea lady with his own eyes, and because he can find no one new to tell him more stories of sea ladies and seal men, then I make up stories for him, about sea ladies visiting our island. He writes them down in English, in beautiful curled letters like the flight of the kittiwakes over the sea.

I do not tell him my true stories because they are too sore for me to speak. The telling of such things raises up a great sadness in me and then I do feel again that I am but a ghost in this place. Then I must climb to the top of Toe Head and try and see our island, and imagine that I see it there, a blue smudge of cloud on the far horizon just before it tips over the edge of the world.

And my mind will not stop itself from going back to all our pain. And I think then on how our end was slow coming, but it fell upon us hard, when the dogs began to bark in the night, because they could smell the rot in the potatoes before it got to our noses, like something burned and then wetly rotting. So we must loan money from Lord Marstone to buy our flour to eat, and when we cannot pay it back, then he has his opportunity to turn us out of our village and clear the island for his fat, white sheep.

His Lordship said he would transport only our essentials. But it was hard to see what was to be essential for our new lives; not the barrels for salting the birds over winter, not the table that my grandfather made. But my father trusted to the landlord’s promises of a steady future, a cottage with some land on the big island – so long as we signed on the paper, never to come home.

The cattle and as many sheep as they could catch were all loaded in another boat that stood low in the water. We never did see any money for our beasts. The landlord claimed it as forfeit to pay for the evacuation. And still my father hoped for our new future, trusted.

My father was a proud man. He was the bard in our village, and he remembered all the old stories and told them in a deep voice that made everyone come near and listen. But when he saw the hovel the landlord’s factor led us to, then he understood what we had become in the eyes of the world. No man, not even my father, could wrest a living from that sour soil. He considered us lower than the beasts, Lord Marstone. He left us to die one by one, and slowly, so that we could grasp how truly we did not matter in this world.

Now I must find a way to show that man his grave error. I shall show him my strength, how I do stand here on God’s earth, and the last thing he will see shall be the glint of my knife. I will make him understand that I cannot be denied and I shall crush the life from his old windpipe. Or perhaps the knife is a better plan.

I do not know yet how this plan shall come about, except that since it is now me that looks after his Reverend, I must return here after to care for him, and so it must be done in secret. It has taken me several days to dry out his clothes and get rid of his fever but thanks be, he is now up and about and worrying at his books again.

And while I am skinning a rabbit, which I got by my own means, though the Reverend does not notice, the Reverend himself comes into the kitchen as I am thinking my plans and says, ‘Dear little Moira. How few troubles you have in your head, always so patient with your lot in life. Humming your little tunes.’ And he goes off sighing about his sermons and his mermaids. And I am smiling so very much because I have seen his beautiful face once more, which is as handsome as God ever intended for mankind, created on a day when He was feeling well disposed to our race. He is so young, my Reverend, with his hair as black and glossy as the little Kerry cow, and his eyes that do startle you, as blue as the sea between here and Taransay.

My English is not perfect enough yet to say things well to the Reverend, but then his own Gaelic is not so much better – and much worse than he believes – so I am not so very sure that he writes down the stories just as I am telling him. But it does not matter if he writes this or that down a little incorrect, since lately, I am but making my stories up – now that I have used all the old ones.

CHAPTER 5

Alexander

Dear Alexander,

I received your letter and read it with growing amazement. I myself have a mind open to the many and endless possibilities in God’s Creation, and hold that following the example of Mr Darwin, we must bravely face the evidence before our eyes – and yet a mermaid!

My dear Alexander, you know how difficult it is of late to be taken as seriously as those career scientists Huxley and Lyell; the Reverend palaeontologist who dabbles in fossils is now all too easily overlooked as a mere amateur – an epithet that makes me boil with rage since I would attest that a certain moral strength proves the theologian a rigorous scientist committed to the necessary minutiae of detail. Many were the happy days we spent assiduously examining the variety of forms of molluscs and cetaceans along the east coast, and I had the highest of hopes that your continued studies in your new parish in the outer isles would bring further discoveries, but little did I expect a proposed treatise upon the divergent linkage between fish and man, and never did I anticipate a study of the mermaid. And though it makes my heart quicken with some romantic hope that such a thing could be true, and though I have every confidence in your judgment and integrity, I urge you to present this to no one else until you have some evidence.

It is chiefly your own reputation that I fear for at present. You must be aware of how such credence in fairy tales could quickly do great damage to your standing among your peers. If you must in all conscience follow this enquiry, then do so in private, nay in secret. And should you find proof, then my friend, on that day blaze forth and astonish the world.

I was so intrigued by your letter that I took myself to the university library and searched for any book or pamphlet that might refer to the condition we term mermaids or mermen. The librarian brought to my attention an intriguing article in
The Times
newspaper of 1809. With some misgivings I enclose a transcription for your interest.

Fanny and I find ourselves extremely snug in the house that accompanies my new tenure as curate of All Souls parish in a very pleasant suburb of Edinburgh, where I can continue to pursue my study of river flukes around the Firth, alongside Carfax and McGreevy in the science faculty.

My dear friend, you must know that you have left behind more than one broken heart here in Edinburgh and it is a cross you are given to bear, that in spite of your will to cast off all worldly impediments, the females of our species do find themselves much taken by your person. If you should meet a young lady of your rank who might please your heart, then I can greatly commend to you the state of matrimony. Our molluscs and our mermaids may well intrigue, but they do not have the kind heart or the warm dry cheek of a small wife sitting behind a tray of tea and unconscionably delicious cakes and scones. I am, I regret, as a result, a greater man than when we last met, and become shockingly lazy about getting out into the fields and along the shores to follow my research.

I await your response with great interest.

Your devoted friend,

Matthew

I unfolded a hand-copied transcript of a letter published in
The Times
newspaper, dated the 8th of September 1809.

Dear Sir,

It has taken me some years to find the courage to report an incident that I witnessed while working as a schoolmaster in the village of Reay. Though I anticipate considerable censure, I will relate the incident exactly as it occurred.

In the month of August, 1797, in the course of walking along the nearby sands of the Pentland Firth, being a fine warm day in summer, my attention was arrested by the appearance of a figure resembling an unclothed human female, sitting upon a rock some hundred feet out to sea, and apparently in the action of combing out its hair, which flowed around its shoulders and was of a light brown colour.

The rock upon which the creature was seated was entirely cut off from land by a deep gully where the surf pounded against the rocks in a manner that prevented any human from reaching the rock without loss of life. The creature however sat in possession of its rocky seat, with no concern for the surf dashing around the rock’s slopes. Clearly, this could be no human creature, and yet its upper portion was an exact replica of a human figure, with a human face and perfectly proportioned arms. Before I could examine the long tail, the sea person saw me and slid swiftly into the surf around the rock, submerged and then reappeared some yards distant where it made haste to propel itself away until it could be seen no more.

I have kept this sighting to myself for some twelve years. As a schoolmaster and a person of some standing in the community, it did not behove me to put myself in a position of ridicule before those I was called upon to instruct. But now I have the leisure of my closing days to reflect upon what I saw that day and the conviction has never dimmed that I have looked upon one of the race we term mermaids.

I have thus decided, that it is fitting that I make report of my observations. If the above narrative can in any degree serve towards establishing the existence of phenomena hitherto almost incredible to naturalists, or to remove the scepticism of others, who are ready to dispute everything which they cannot fully comprehend, then you are welcome to it.

From, dear Sir, your most obliged and most humble servant,

William Munroe

When Moira came in with a plate of fried eggs, scorched at the edges but the dryness of the yolks an improvement on previous breakfasts, she found me with the letter in my hand, staring out of the window towards the sea, in a stupor of amazement.

‘Come here, Moira,’ I told her. ‘Look at what this says,’ and I spread out the neat copperplate of the transcript on the white cloth.

She considered it for a while and nodded her head sagaciously, but she seemed to be admiring the general beauty of the note, rather than to be at all engaged with the content.

‘Oh, but Moira,’ I said, ‘I expect there are words you do not understand yet in English. Look, let me explain for example, “phenomena”, it means unexpected things that occur, which are natural and which we cannot yet explain; or then “scepticism”…’

I glanced up at her and saw that her cheeks were burning red. She never likes to be put in the wrong, our little Moira. Her cap was skewed from the exertions of breakfast, and she has begun to take on a faint kippered smell of peat smoke now that she sleeps in the bothy with old Mrs Kintail, since it has been made clear to me that in spite of my charitable intentions, it is not entirely seemly for a single man to have a young single female sleeping on the settle of his kitchen each night, even though the likelihood of the evils implied in such a supposition makes me smile.

‘I do understand English words,’ said Moira. ‘I understand English words very well, except for the ones I do not need to use or have never heard of before, and then I work them out very well, thank you.’

Then it was my turn to blush. How clumsy it was of me to embarrass the poor girl so. I had seen Moira pull books from my shelves as she dusted them, open them and gaze at their pages. It had never occurred to me that she could not read them.

‘Why don’t I read this aloud, since I am so fond of my own voice and rather love to have an audience, if you can spare me some of your time?’

‘Well, I suppose I can wait a while,’ she said, and she listened haughtily while I read out Munroe’s letter, and by the end of it she was transfixed, her eyes shining.

‘I wish I had seen her,’ she cried. ‘I wish with all my heart.’

‘Why, so do I, Moira,’ I told her.

‘How I wish I were one of the sea people. Perhaps then they would show themselves to me.’

‘Well,’ I told her with a smile and a shake of my head, ‘I am one of the sea people, a Selkie, if my grandmother is to be believed, and so far no sea people have shown themselves to me.’

This made Moira sit down on the tapestry chair and stare at me with wide-open mouth.

‘And you have never, never breathed a word of this to me,’ she cried. ‘A Reverend Minister who is descended from the
sliochd nan ron.
How can it be that you have never said this, while I prattle on and on with my sea stories, trying to amaze you, and all the while you were holding on to your secret?’

‘It is really no great matter,’ I told her, trying to lead her back to some composure. ‘It was a fancy of my father’s mother who grew up on Uist. She would hold forth to all and sundry that her distant ancestor was truly one of the sea people who become men on the land. Sadly, the truth is that this fancy of hers has been an embarrassment to the family. My own mother forbade me to speak of it, and indeed I forgot about it until I took the parish here, whereupon it has rather come back to haunt me.