Water (10 page)

ignored them, keeping her face resolutely down, determined to pass without acknowledging the

rider whomever it was. But this proved impossible, for a once-familiar hand reached out and

seized her mare’s bridle, and Robert swung his horse around to walk next to hers, clumsily, for

he was still holding her rein, and his leg ground against hers in the saddle. It was a heavyish

blow, and his stirrup leather pinched her calf above her low riding boots and beneath the thin

cloth of her skirt; but that was not the reason she cringed away from it, sending such a message

to her sensitive mare that Flora curvetted away, fighting the strange hand on her rein, and

threatening to kick. Robert had to let go.

By the time Jenny had her mare under control again, she realised there was no point in running

away, although this had been her first thought Gruoch was moving in that painstaking, measured

way that a hound expecting the command
Go!
moves, and while Jenny did not believe that even

with such a command her gentle bitch would leap for Robert, she was careful to keep her own

gestures placid. She patted her mare’s neck, but Flora was no fool, and did not drop her head, but

kept her neck and ears stiffly upright, and pranced where she stood.

“Jenny,” said Robert, and all of his twenty years’ experience of playing to his audience was in

his voice. No one could have stuffed the two syllables of her name more full of anguish.

How could I ever not have known? she thought. She risked a glance at his face, and saw anguish

beautifully arranged there too. It was a splendid performance, but it neither moved nor amused

her. She felt low, and stupid, and humiliated.

“Forgive me,” he said. He was already a little dismayed by her unresponsiveness. He was so

accustomed to being able to get what he wanted by careful handling and dazzlingly distracting

displays of charm that he had forgotten that some people are simpler in their habits and more

straightforward in their reactions. Since there was a little real anguish in him—although it was

about the loss of the farm more than about the careless error that appeared to have lost him her—

he felt that he was expressing genuine pain.

That, at least, was easy enough to answer. “No,” she said, and turned Flora’s head; but he

thought he knew what the roles were, now, and he kicked his own horse to block her passage.

Flora reared, not liking any of this at all, and spun around twice on her hocks, and Robert would

have liked to do something heroic, but he was not much of a horseman. Jenny brought her mare

down alone, and the effort steadied her, and she realised she was going to have to hear Robert

out. She would not enjoy it, but she could bear it.

She was not interested in his explanations of a momentary madness, of the depth of his real

passion for her, of how his—aberration—was in fact caused by the agony of the delay of their

wedding; here she actually curled her lip, and he hastened on. He even shed tears, and she

watched, fascinated in spite of herself. He called her cruel, first still in anguish, and then, as he

realised he was getting nowhere, in anger. How dare she set her paltry will against his? She

wasn’t even pretty.

He exhausted himself at last, and she risked letting Flora go forward. The mare danced sideways

as they passed Robert’s horse, but he had run out of drama, and let them go. She wanted to put

Flora to the gallop as soon as they were clear of him, but she was afraid that he would read in

this a flight worth pursuing; and so she let her mare break only into a trot, and worked to keep it

leisurely, although Flora fussed at the bit, and her ears lay back. Gruoch loped casually beside

her.

She never saw Robert again.

She went to bed early that night, but there was little rest for her in the long continuous dreams of

the land under the sea; and now she was seeing her sea-prince arm in arm, as lovers should be,

with a sea-princess, who had golden-green hair that lay in curls behind her, suspended on the

silvery, ripply water that was their air. She saw them kiss, and she thought her heart would break;

and it had broken once already. She did not know if she could recover, this second time, so soon

after the first. She woke in cold, grey dawn, imagining her prince telling her of his betrothed, she

the land-girl of whom he was so fond, just like a sister to him. He would offer to let her meet the

sea-princess, and the sea-princess, who had a good heart, would ask that Jenny be godmother to

their first child.

She almost did not go to meet Dreiad the next day, but she had promised, and they had never yet

broken promise to each other; and “what she feared had nothing to do with promises. So she

went, but she knew that her eyes were shadowed, and that smiling made her face hurt, and she

did not know what she could give him as an excuse, for she had promised herself that she would

not tell him the truth. If he was happy, she wanted him to be happy with no hindrance from her.

She did not think of telling him of the meeting with Robert as a reason for her depression of

spirits, for she had forgotten it herself.

But as it happened, Dreiad was too full of something else to notice her mood: too full of the same

suppressed excitement she had seen in him two days before, only it was much stronger now, it

was as if he moved carefully for fear it might burst out of him without any decision from him to

yield to it. They must already be betrothed, she thought drearily.

He held out a hand as if to take hers, and then dropped it, remembering; she had made no

answering motion, having not forgotten. “I have something to tell you,” he said.

“Yes?” she said, and was pleased to notice that her voice was calm, even cool.

He looked at her in a little puzzlement, as if first taking in that perhaps not all was well with her;

but the excitement bubbled up again and “would not be stoppered. “I “went to visit someone

yesterday, which is why I could not be—with you.

This is someone I have been looking for for some time, someone who could answer my dearest

wish.”

She nodded, her hands clasped at her belt

“And I have found her!” He laughed as if he could not help himself, but then, looking at Jenny,

the puzzlement came back for a moment. “Can you not guess?” he said, but in a quieter voice;

and again his hand reached to touch hers and withdrew, and again hers had made no motion to

meet his.

She made herself smile. “Yes, I think I can guess,” she said, but the tone of her voice was wrong

and he heard it, and the puzzlement deepened, and the excitement sank out of his eyes and some

uncertainty crept in, and distress with it

“I—” he said, and paused. “I was so sure you would be as pleased as I. It is the answer, you see.

Or I hoped it was.”

She did not hear his words, but she saw the distress and was sorry. She was breaking her promise

already. She tried to smile. “Tell me,” she said.

But the excitement had left him, and he stumbled over what he had to tell her. “She lives far

away, and at first I only—knew the rumour of her, and I couldn’t ask openly, of course, but

everyone is accustomed to my having strange fits of curiosity about this and that and I didn’t tell

anyone why I wanted to find her, of course, and I was able to at last, without telling anyone, I

mean. I had to tell her, of course, but it won’t matter, soon .... I mean, I thought it wouldn’t

matter .... I thought ...” He looked at her, miserably.

His misery touched her, for she did love him. And her hands made the same gesture that his had,

twice, wanting to reach her, touch her. Her hand reached towards him and, remembering,

retreated. “Tell me,” she said again, her voice stronger. “I do want to know.”

“It’s only that she told me how you may visit under water,” he said in a rush. “Visit
me.
”

It was so completely not what she was expecting that her mouth dropped open; and when he saw

that she had not guessed what he had to tell her, he laughed for pure relief. “She is very old, and

will not tell you her name; I believe nobody has known her name for centuries; she is very old

even by our standards. And she says that it is not that she doesn’t want to help anyone, it’s just

that almost everyone has such silly ideas of what they have to have help with, and she got tired

of sending silly people away, and so now she is very hard to find in the first place. She says

sometimes the silliest people are the most stubborn, and she wonders if some of the people with

the problems she really could help with simply decide that it is their fate and stop trying; but then

maybe if that is their attitude, it is their fate. But when I found her, and told her about us, she was

perfectly willing to help, but she said it was an unusual situation and she could remember only

one other case, but it was a long time ago, and she would need time to remember what she knew

about it. That’s why I couldn’t tell you last time. I wanted to wait—just in case she couldn’t

remember, couldn’t help us, though I was pretty sure she could, she had all but promised that she

could.”

Jenny was responding to his excitement without, still, really taking it in. All that she understood

clearly was that this
she
was not his betrothed sea-princess, and that Dreiad was calling himself

and her, Jenny,
we.
And so she listened to the tone of his voice and was happy. But when he

came to the end and drew breath, she still didn’t know what she was happy about

“She’s really very nice,” he said, finally, “and it’s funny, because she likes to talk. It’s not that

she doesn’t like people or anything. I’ll take you to meet her. You’ll like her too.”

Jenny couldn’t speak. She stood, smiling, her misery evaporating like fog in sun.

“Well,” he said, beaming at her. “Will you come?”

“Come?” said Jenny, still thinking,
He calls us
we. It was too absolute a thing, the division

between land and water, the division between her and him. By tomorrow she would have figured

out a way to see even this as merely a putting off of the inevitable, putting off their eventual,

absolute parting; he was offering her a visit to his land, like the visits he could make to hers. That

was all. That was why she still resisted taking it in, because of what would follow.

“With me,” he said. “To my home.” And then his self-possession broke, and his hands reached

for hers and seized them, and he said, “Oh, Jenny, I love you so!” Her hands had reached too, to

seize his the sooner, and the clasp was as if their two hearts met, for neither noticed that one was

too warm and too dry, and the other too cool and too wet. He drew her into his arms, and

wrapped them around her, and hers went round him, and she laid her face against his cool wet

shoulder, and his damp hair brushed her flushed cheek.

But after a moment, solemnly, he took a step back from her, though he kept his hands around her

waist. “It is a risk for you,” he said.

“I care for no risk,” Jenny said, and realised that she meant it; at this moment she could have

slain a dragon, defied any number of sea-kings and their curses. “What is this risk?”

“You must believe that I love you,” he said, gravely, looking at her.

She laughed. “Do you love me?” These words had never passed between them before: the fact

that they could not touch each other felt as if it precluded such words, negated the feelings

behind them—till now, till just now, when he had told her that he loved her, when he had told

her that he had learned of a way that she might visit his underwater country. And yet she knew

that she was still of the land; if she stayed in his arms for long, much as she wished to be there,

she would grow cold and faint; already she felt colder than she had, despite the warmth of joy.

“Yes,” he said, and while he tried to say it solemnly, his eyes lit up with the excitement she had

taught herself to fear. “I love you.”

“Then I believe you,” she said, joyously.

And he kissed her.

His kiss was cool, and damp, like his skin; but when he dropped his arms from around her and

took her hand, it did not feel so cool or so damp as it had done only a moment before. He led her

down, into the water, and her wet clothes bound her legs, and she paused: and Gruoch had leaped

in after her, drenching them both with spray, and she felt the drops pour down over her face and

found them refreshing. Gruoch thrust her nose into Jenny’s hand and shivered; and Jenny stroked

her head and said, “You must wait for me here, little one, for I will return”; and she knelt down

in the cold sea-water and looked deep into her bitch’s eyes, and she could see Gruoch giving up

whatever it was she needed to give up, as a good dog will do for the person it loves, and Jenny

stood up again while Gruoch waded back to the shore. She looked over her shoulder then, but

Jenny pointed away, and the tall hound trotted to where Flora stood tied in the shade of a tree,

happy to browse over the summer grass without care till her lady returned and set her saddle on

her back and asked her something she understood. Jenny watched Gruoch he down-back

obediently to the shore—and then she turned again to Dreiad, and put her hand in his, and

walked deeper and deeper into the sea, till the water closed over her head.