Water (5 page)

sea-girl, judging her moment,—
was
able to convulse herself sideways into the backwash and

slither on through the foam to deeper water. In the haze of her huge effort Pitiable barely saw her

go, but when her vision cleared and she looked out to sea, she saw the girl beckoning to her from

beside the tip of the promontory.

Wearily she rose and staggered down. The sea-girl gripped the rock with her good hand and

dragged herself half out of the water. Pitiable sat beside her with her feet dangling into the wavewash. Her knees and shins, she noticed, were streaming with blood. The sea-girl saw them and

made a grieving sound.

“It’s all right,” said Pitiable. “It is only scratches.”

Face to face they looked at each other.

“You must go now,” said Pitiable. “Before he comes back.”

The sea-girl answered. She craned up. Pitiable bent so that they could kiss.

“I must dress myself before the men come,” she said. “Goodbye.”

She gestured to herself, and up the shore, and then to the sea-girl and the open sea. The sea-girl

nodded and said something that must have been an answering good-bye. They kissed again, and

the sea-girl twisted like a leaping salmon and shot off down the inlet, turned in the water, rose,

waved and was gone.

As Pitiable dressed, she decided that now Probity would very likely kill her for what she had

done, take her home and beat her to death, half meaning to, and half not. And then, perhaps, he

would kill himself That would be best all round, she thought.

And then she thought that despite that, she had done what Mercy would have wanted her to. It

was why she had told her the story of Charity Goodrich, though neither of them could have

known.

When she was dressed she shook her hair out and sat combing her fingers through it to help it

dry in the sun, but still he did not come, so she tied it up under her shawl and waited where he

had left her. Her mood of gladness and resignation ebbed, and she was wrapped in terror once

again.

The men came at last, four of them, carrying nets and ropes, a stretcher, and a glass-bottomed

box of the sort that crab-catchers used to see below the surface of the water. From their dress

Pitiable saw that the three helpers were townspeople, as they would have to be—Probity would

not even have tried to persuade any of the People to come on such an enterprise. From the way

they walked, it was obvious that even these men were doubtful. A tall, thin lad in particular kept

half laughing, as if he was convinced that he was about to be made a fool of. But Probity came

with a buoyant, excited pace and reached her ahead of the others.

“Has anyone been near?” he whispered.

“No one, grandfather.”

“And have you heard anything?”

“Only the gulls and the sea.”

He stood and listened and frowned, but by now the helpers had come up, so he told them to wait

with Pitiable and make no noise, and himself climbed up onto the ridge and crept out of sight.

After a while he climbed down and fetched the glass-bottomed box, and this time he allowed the

others to come up with him, but Pitiable stayed where she was. She heard his voice, gruff and

stubborn, and the others answering him at first mockingly and then angrily, until he came down

again and strode over to where she sat, with the others following.

Pitiable rose and waited. She could see how the others glanced at one another behind Probity’s

back, and before he spoke, she knew how she must answer.

“I tell you, the child saw it also,” he shouted. And then to Pitiable, “Where has it gone? How did

it get free?”

“What do you speak of, grandfather?”

“The sea-child! Tell them you saw the sea-child!”

“Sea-child, grandfather?”

He took a pace forward and clouted her with all his strength on the side of her head. She

sprawled onto the shingle, screaming with the pain of it, but before she could rise, he rushed at

her and struck her again. She did not know what happened next, but then somebody was helping

her to her feet and Probity and the others were shouting furiously—while she shook her head and

retched in a roaring red haze. Then her vision cleared though her head still sang with pain, and

she saw two of the men wrestling with Probity, holding his arms behind him.

“The wicked slut let her go!” he bellowed. “She was mine! Mine! You have no right! This is my

grandchild! Mine!”

His face was terrible, dark red and purple, with the veins on his temples standing out like

exposed tree roots. Then he seemed to realize what he had done and fell quiet. In silence and in

shame he let them walk him back to the town, with the young man carrying Pitiable on his back.

Though there were magistrates in the town, there was so seldom any wrongdoing among the

People that it was the custom to let them deal with their own. After some debate the men took

Probity to the Minister and told him what they had seen, and he sent for three of the elders to

decide what to do. They heard the men’s story, gave them the money Probity had promised them,

thanked them and sent them away. They then questioned Probity.

Probity did not know how to lie. He said what he had seen, and insisted that Pitiable had seen the

sea-child too. Pitiable, still dazed, unable to think of anything except how he would beat her

when he had her home, stuck despairingly to her story. She said that she had been looking at the

pool when Probity had climbed up beside her and looked too and become very excited and told

her to wait down on the shore and let no one else near while he went for help.

At this Probity started to shout and his face went purple again and he tried to rush at Pitiable, but

the elders restrained him, and then a spasm shook him and he had to clutch at a chair and sit

down. Even so, but for his story about the sea-child, the elders might have sent Pitiable home

with him. She was, after all, his granddaughter. But a man who says he has seen a creature with a

human body and a shining fish tail cannot be of sound mind, so they decided that in case there

should be worse scandal among the People than there already was, Pitiable had best be kept out

of his way, at least until a doctor had examined him.

Pitiable spent the night at the Minister’s house, not with his own children but sleeping in the attic

with the two servants. First, though, the Minister’s wife, for whom cleanliness was very close

indeed to godliness, insisted that the child must be bathed. That was how the servants came to

see the welts on Pitiable’s back and sides. Her torn knees they put down to her fall on the beach

when Probity had struck her. The elder servant, a kind, sensible woman, told the Minister. She

told him too that if the child received much more such handling, she would die, and her blood

would be not only on her grandfather’s hands.

The elders did not like it, but were forced to agree. A home would have to be found for the child.

As a servant, naturally—she was young, but Mercy Hooke had trained her well. So on the second

day after the business on the Scaurs, a Miss Lyall, a very respectable spinster with money of her

own, came to inspect Pitiable Nasmith. She asked for a private room and the Minister lent her his

study.

Pitiable was brought in and Miss Lyall looked her up and down. Not until they door closed and

they were alone did she smile. She was short and fat with bulgy eyes and two large hairy moles

on the side of her chin, but her smile was pleasant. She put her head to one side and pursed her

lips and, almost too quietly to hear, started to hum. Pitiable’s mouth fell open. With an effort she

closed it and joined the music. At once Miss Lyall nodded and cut her short

“I thought it must be so,” she said softly. “As soon as I heard that story about the sea-child.”

“But you know the song too!” whispered Pitiable, still amazed.

“You are not the only descendant of Charity Goodrich, my dear. My mother taught me her story,

and the song, and said I must pass them on to my own daughters, but I was too plain for any

sensible man to marry for myself, and too sensible to let any man marry me for my money, so I

have no daughters to teach them to. Not even you, since you already know them. All the same,

you shall be my daughter from now on and we shall sing the song together and tell each other the

story. It will be amusing, after all these years, to see how well the accounts tally.”

She smiled, and Pitiable, for the first time for many, many days, smiled too.

The Sea-king’s Son

by Robin McKinley

There was a young woman named Jenny who was the only child of her parents. Her parents were

not wealthy as the world counts wealth, but they had a good farm and were mindful and thorough

farmers; and since they had but the one child, they could afford to give her a good deal. So she

had pretty clothes and kind but clever governesses and as many dogs and cats and ponies and

songbirds as she wanted. She grew up knowing that she was much loved, and so she had a happy

childhood; but the self-consciousness of adolescence made her shy and solemn. And she found,

as some adolescents do, that she was less and less interested in the kinds of things her old friends

were now most interested in, and so they drifted apart. Now she preferred to go for long solitary

walks with her dogs, or riding on the fine thoroughbred mare her parents had bought her when

she outgrew the last of the ponies. Her mother had to forbid her to stay in the kitchen through the

harvest feast, where she would have gone on bottling plums and cherries from their orchards

with her mother and the two serving-women till all the dancing was over; and at the next fair her

mother sent her on a series of errands to all the stalls where the young people would be working

for their parents. But Jenny only spoke to them as much as she had to, and came away again.

Her parents had hoped that she would outgrow her shyness, as she had grown into it, but by the

time she was eighteen, they had begun to fear that this would not happen. They worried, because

they “wanted her to find a husband, that she might be as happy with him as they had been with

each other; and they hoped to leave their farm in their daughter’s hands, to be cared for by her

and her husband as lovingly as they had cared for it, and given on to her children in the proper

time. They worried that even a young man who would suit her well would not notice her, for she

made herself un-noticeable; and they feared that it was only they who knew that, when she

smiled, her face lit up with gentleness and humour and intelligence.

They decided that they would take her to the city for a season, and that perhaps so drastic a

change in her usual way of life might bring her to herself. They had relatives in the city, and this

could be done without discomfort. They told her of their plan, and she would have protested, but

they told her that they were her parents, and they knew best.

But because of her knowledge that she was to go away, she carried herself with more of an air

during the next weeks—it was an air of tension, but it made her eyes sparkle and her back

straight. She looked around her at her familiar circumstances with more attention than she had

done for years, as if this trip to the city were going to change her life forever. And she knew well

enough that her parents hoped that it would, that they hoped to find her an acceptable suitor: and

what could change her life more thoroughly than marriage?

They were going to the city a little after the final harvest fair of the year, when the farm could be

left to look after itself for a while, with none but the hired workers to keep an eye on it; and

when, as well, the best parties in the city were held, after the heat of the summer was over. The

letters were written, and the relatives had pronounced themselves delighted to have Jenny for a

season and her parents for as much as they felt they could stay of it. Her parents permitted

themselves to feel hopeful; even the possibility that Jenny would fall in love with some city boy

who loathed the very idea of farming seemed worth the risk.

But things did not turn out as Jenny’s parents had planned. For at the harvest fair she caught the

eye of a young man.

This young man lived in a neighbouring village, and was one of four sons, third from the eldest.

His family too held a good farm, like hers, but they had four sons to think of. The first was a hard