Water (6 page)

worker, and he would have the farm. The second was clever, and was to be apprenticed to his

uncle, who was a clever businessman in the city. The fourth was grave and thoughtful, and

would go into the priesthood. The third was beautiful. His name was Robert.

He knew he was beautiful, and all the girls knew it. Jenny knew it too. She had loved him for

four and a half years, almost since the day that the blood that made her a woman first flowed,

and her mother had explained to her what this meant, and what would happen to her on her

wedding night. When she had understood, she had blushed fierily, and tried to forget. It had only

been three days before that she had seen Robert for the first time, and had wondered at her own

inability to think of anything else since, for such a thing had never happened to her before; boys

were just boys, and their differences from girls had never been terribly intriguing. It seemed to

her that her mother had just explained this too, and rather than feeling pleased and excited, she

felt it was all too much, and was frightened. None of this she told her mother, who might have

been able to reassure her; and she never told anyone of her feelings for Robert.

So she knew she loved this young man, but she had never done anything to draw his attention to

her. But she was now eighteen, and he twenty, and he was beginning to realise that he could not

go on merely being beautiful at his parents’ expense, and that it was time that he put his beauty

to what he had always known was its purpose: to find himself a wife who would keep him

comfortably.

He had known about Jenny for as long as she had known about him, for it was his habit to ask

about every girl he saw, and he had asked about her on the very day she had first seen him. But,

vain as he was, he did not know that she loved him, for she was that clever at hiding it. He found

her such a dreary, dim little thing that even though he did not forget about her, in the four years

since he had first been told about her parents’ farm and the fact that she was the only and much

beloved child, he had not been able to bring himself to flirt with her. There were other, prettier,

livelier girls that pleased him better. But this year, the year that she was eighteen and he twenty,

he decided the time had come, and he had steeled himself to do what he had by this time

convinced himself was his duty; and, looking for her at the harvest fair, had been astonished at

the change in her, at the sparkle in her eye and the straight, elegant way she carried herself.

Without inquiring about the source of the change, either to her or to himself, he found that his

duty was not quite as dreadful as he had expected. He flirted with her and she, hesitantly,

responded. She had seen him flirt with other girls. And he had to admit, by her response, that she

might be dim but she was not unintelligent. And so to keep her interest he had to ... put himself

out a little.

He came to call on her at her parents’ farm, and was charming to her parents. She had told him

that she was being sent off to stay a season with her parents’ relatives in the city, and while she

did not tell him why, he could guess. She told him that they were due to leave in a fortnight’s

time. The day before they would have left, he asked her to marry him.

The warmth of her kiss when she answered him yes startled him; and again he thought that

perhaps doing his duty would not be so dreadful after all, for if she was not as pretty as some,

still the armful of her was good to hold, and she loved him, of course, as he expected her to.

She did love him. And she believed that he loved her, for he had told her so. She thought she

would have known—for such was her acuteness about anything to do with him, and her mother

had many friends who came joking and gossiping around, and she always listened—if he had

ever proposed marriage to any of the other girls he had been seen with over the last four years.

And if he did not love her, why else would he have proposed? For marriage was for life, and a

husband and wife must come first with each other for all the days of it.

She knew, for she was not unintelligent, about the pragmatic facts of being a third son; but she

was also innocent, and in love. She could not believe that any man would take a wife wholly on

account of her inheritance.

Her parents saw that she was in love, and rejoiced for her, or they tried to, for they could not

rejoice in her choice, and they were put to some difficulty not to let her know their misgivings.

Their guess of the likeliest inspiration for his proposal was not clouded with love or innocence;

and they too knew about his position as third son. But, they comforted themselves, they knew

nothing against him, but that he was a bit over-merry in a way that they perhaps were wrong to

dislike, for they were old and he was young; and they knew also that he was not much given to

hard work; but this too might be on account of his youth, and his undeniable beauty, which had

encouraged people to spoil him a little. Naught had ever been said truly against him. He was only

twenty; perhaps he had realised it was time to settle down, and had made choice of their daughter

by recognising her real worth, including that she might settle a husband she loved—perhaps he

did love her, for that reason. Not for the sake of her parents’ farm. Not only for the sake of her

parents’ farm, for they never tried to tell themselves that the farm had no place in his

calculations. Many marriages, they said to each other, are built on less; and she loved him

enough for both, and perhaps he would grow to love her as much, for he was—he was goodnatured enough, they thought. There was no meanness in him, just carelessness and vanity.

But when he sat in their kitchen or sitting-room with them and their daughter, they did not like it

that he did not seem to notice when she smiled, he did not seem to love that bright look of

gentleness and humour and intelligence; he did not seem to see it. He petted her, as he might a

little dog that sat adoringly at his feet, and her parents tried not to like him less for enjoying that

their daughter adored him in such a way.

So it was; and so it went on. The wedding date was fixed, and the relatives in the city had had the

situation explained to them, and had promised to come to the wedding themselves, and suggested

that perhaps the young people could visit them some day. The plans for the wedding progressed,

and Jenny seemed no less in love, and Robert grew no less kind to her, even if it was the casual

kindness of a boy to a little dog.

The two farms lay on the opposite outskirts of two towns. The distance between was

considerable, and when the young people wished to visit each other, thought had to be taken

about time and weather, and who would do the work left undone. Both towns lay near a small

cup of harbour, one on either side, each on a little rise of ground with the harbour at the low

point between. It would have been much the quicker for anyone wishing to go from the one farm

to the other to go down to the harbour and up the other side; but no one ever did go that way.

There was still an old, broken road that led over what had once been a wide bridge for heavy

trade and traffic between the towns at the head of the harbour, but it had lain untouched for three

generations.

There is rarely much contact between sea-people and land-people, but for a while there had been

a wary association between them in the vicinity of this harbour. No one remembered how it had

begun, but for many years there was a limited but profitable trade in certain luxury items: the

sea-people loved fine lace, for example, perhaps in part because it perished so quickly under

water, and bright flowers preserved in wax or glass. The land merchants preferred pearls and

narwhal horns. Neither side was able to trust the other, however, saying that each was too

strange, too alien, that they could not—indeed should not—be comfortable in each other’s

company. This lack of confidence grew with time instead of easing, and no doubt trouble would

have come sooner or later. But when trouble came, it was grievous.

Three generations of land-people ago, a greedy merchant had cheated the sea-people who had

rescued him from drowning, and they had been angry. But when they asked the town councillors

to right this wrong, the town councillors had said that as the merchant was of the land, like

themselves, they would not decide against him.

The sea-people are no more cruel than those on land. But they had lost several of their own in the

storm that had foundered the false merchant’s ship, and they guessed—correctly—that the landmerchant’s faithlessness was for no better cause than a desire to recoup financially. So then the

king and queen of the sea-people had let their wrath run free, for they had asked for redress to be

offered honestly and had been denied.

The water had risen in the harbour and beaten against its walls till all the ship docks were washed

away. And the sea-people said: This is what you have earned, for your greed and your treachery,

that this kind harbour shall never be kind to you again, and the merchant trade of which you have

been so proud is denied you for as long as the sea-people shall remember you and your decision,

and the sea-people’s memory is long. If any shall set a boat in this harbour, it shall be

overturned; and if any shall set foot on the bridge at the head of the harbour, then shall a wave

rise up and sweep them off and into the sea where they shall drown, as your merchant might

have done.

And so it was. At first the towns, who had been rich and fat for a long time, could not believe it;

and they set to work rebuilding the docks, and repairing their ships, and repaving the bridge at

the head of the harbour, and they grumbled as they did it, and particularly they grumbled at the

greedy merchant who had brought them to this pass. But in a year’s time they had all but

bankrupted themselves, all the merchants of both towns, and the banks that had loaned them

money, and the outfitters that had provided the goods; and there were no longer any workers who

would take jobs on docks or ships either, because there had been too many freak waves, too

many sudden storms, too many drownings.

Over the three generations since then, the towns had shrunk back from the harbour, and looked

inland for their commerce, and the farmers, who had once been considered very much inferior to

the merchants of the sailing trade, were now the most important citizens. The merchants and

bankers and outfitters either died of broken hearts or moved away; and the hired workers learned

to cut a straight furrow instead of a straight mast, and the sailors mostly went north or south,

although a goodly number of them, too, went inland, and became coopers and cordwainers. It

was said that the original merchant who had caused the trouble changed his name, and took his

family to the other side of the world, but that bad luck had pursued him even there, and he had

died in poverty.

Jenny’s family had been farmers on their farm for many generations, and were little touched by

the change in their status. They were farmers who cared about farming, and what the people

around them thought of farming seemed to them only amusing, because everyone must eat, and

that is what farming is for. Perhaps they had a few more cousins on the town council in the three

generations since the collapse of the sailing trade than they had previously, but this did not

greatly change their outlook either, so long as the towns continued to provide markets and fairs,

and enough hungry and prosperous folk to buy farm produce. There had never been any sailors

or fisherfolk in their family, and they believed in their blood and bone that the sea was an

unchancy thing at best, and better left alone. Even the tale of the sea-people’s curse could not stir

them much; it was too much what they would expect of sea-people, had they ever thought about

it.

A system of longer inland roads sprang up to connect the two towns, for even without the

harbour their people had too long been closely involved with each other to break off relations

now. The new connecting road curved far inland, staying high on the ridge above the harbour so

that the road might cross while the stream that fed it still lay underground, and as a result it was

an hour on a fresh horse even between the two towns, and nearer three between outlying farms.

Once the betrothal had been officially set and posted, the parents of Jenny and Robert relaxed, a

little, about letting them visit each other; and if Robert rode over to see Jenny in the afternoon,

her parents expected to put him up overnight and he rode home the next day, and vice versa.

There were some words spoken between Jenny and her parents, for her parents felt that it was not

proper that she ride all that way alone, and sent someone with her, usually right to the gate of

Robert’s family’s farm; and let her know further that they would still not allow this at all if it

hadn’t been clearly understood that there was a sister still at home as well as Robert’s mother,

and that Jenny would share the sister’s bedroom. Jenny, scarlet with shame, said this was

nonsense, and that furthermore it was unnecessarily tiring and tedious for whoever was sent with