Chapter One #3
To the left of the patch of grass, half hidden by an overgrown bush, is a stone well.
“This here is the well,” Mrs. Dowling says, following her gaze.
“It’s deep enough that the water isn’t brackish.
You may want to clear some of this hawthorn.
” A pause, then, a little uncertainly: “I hope it’s to your liking. ”
Isabel is looking at the boats. They’re painted black and green and white; some have white sails, others red.
Gulls circle above them, squealing—they must be fishing boats, she thinks.
Two of the boats fly a black flag with a white cross on it.
She takes a deep breath, tasting the sea, salt and water, fish and seaweed. “It’s perfect,” she says.
Mrs. Dowling says she’s pleased to hear it. “I’m on my own, too,” she says. “My Harry died two years ago.”
Isabel thinks there’s something distasteful about the way she says “my Harry.” She could never imagine calling George “my George,” as if he belonged to her.
As if anybody could belong to another person.
Mrs. Dowling is older than her father would’ve been, had he still been alive.
Does she think that because they are both widows, they have something in common?
“Should you like to come visit sometime?” Mrs. Dowling says, as if this is a logical conclusion following the declaration that she, too, is on her own.
Isabel suppresses a sigh—there’s a difference in rank.
Then she catches herself: there isn’t any difference anymore.
She’s as poor as Mrs. Dowling. Poorer, because Mrs. Dowling owns Trevernan Cottage, and on her widow’s pension, Isabel can only afford to rent it.
She finds herself saying she’d be much obliged.
It isn’t what she wanted to say. Not because of any lingering difference in standing between them, but because she intends to keep to herself.
She hasn’t come here to make friends. She has come to get away from Greenwich, from the shame of her reduction in station and the turning of the rumor mill.
From George, too—from her memories of him.
Because staying right on top of them cuts into her a hundred times a day, still.
Three years have passed since the great Battle of Trafalgar and it has hardly gotten any better.
Their marriage lasted three years, too, before a bullet from a French musket ended it.
She was only seventeen, George eighteen, when they wed, and he was always at sea.
In the years that followed, she felt the absence of him all the more sharply for the knowledge that this time, he would not return to her.
In Greenwich, taking her tea alone in the breakfast room left her feeling hollow.
So did every walk in the park without him and the Sunday mornings in church, the place in the pew beside her empty.
Evenings grew long knowing he would not come in after a summoning to the Admiralty or a meeting with a friend; knowing her bed would be cold and that there would be no more letters.
In the three years of their marriage, they spent only five weeks and one day together.
That’s why it still hurts now, more than anything, because George was taken from her before any of it became real.
Mrs. Dowling goes ahead down the path, back into the cottage.
In the sitting room, she says, “I’ve laid a fire for you.
” There are several logs stacked in the hearth, with twigs underneath.
“I was surprised you instructed me not to arrange for any servants. Not even a cook or a scullery maid. Will you be looking to hire anyone now that you’re here? ”
The heat swarms in her cheeks. “I’m afraid my current situation requires that I do without the assistance I’m accustomed to. I can only hope I’m a quick study when it comes to household tasks.”
She feels the older woman’s gaze on her. Then, to her relief, Mrs. Dowling says only, “It’s not usually this cold in April. Shall I show you how to light the fire?”
Isabel says she’d be very grateful and Mrs. Dowling gets the tinderbox from the chimneypiece and shows her how to strike the steel on the flint, how to light the char cloth and with it, the match to light the fire.
“You’ll want to close the box quickly or you’ll lose half your tinder,” Mrs. Dowling says. “Here, you try it.”
Isabel removes her gloves and takes the box.
It takes her five attempts to light the fire.
At last, the twigs catch fire and the logs begin to smolder.
Isabel cups her hands and blows, carefully, the way Mrs. Dowling tells her to, and watches the glow spread.
She only just stops herself crying out in triumph.
Mrs. Dowling says, “There are some candles in the larder as well as butter, eggs, bread, a jug of milk, and a little tea.” She adds in a meaningful tone, “We get tea at very good prices here. I shall tell you about it when you’re ready to purchase some yourself.
The nearest shop is in Manaccan, but then you know that; you wrote to Mr. Griggs. ”
Isabel found Mr. Griggs’s name in a local newspaper, especially brought to her for the purpose, and wrote him to inquire if he knew anyone letting a cottage in the area, preferably in the village of Helford.
If she had to go somewhere to disappear, she figured she may as well go to the place she was found and perhaps learn what happened that day.
Mr. Griggs wrote back within the week; less than two weeks later, she boarded the mail coach.
Mrs. Dowling continues. “There’s a market twice a week outside the Shipwright Arms, on the Tuesday and Saturday morning, which will have most everything you might need.
Bread’s to be got from John Lanyon, the baker, if you don’t make it yourself; fish every day when the catch is brought in; and for meats you’ll want to speak to Josh Angove at Elm Farm. ”
“Thank you very much. How much do I owe you for the food and candles?”
“Nothing at all, Mrs. Henley. You’ll find we take care of our own here. If you need help with anything, you know where to find me. Please knock whenever you like.”
“Thank you,” she says again. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.” She follows Mrs. Dowling to the front door.
Mrs. Dowling adjusts a hairpin. She’s on the doorstep, but she’s not going, not yet.
Her eyes glide over Isabel’s face, up over her hairline, and come to rest on some indeterminable point above her.
“I saw you that day,” Mrs. Dowling says.
“I saw you when you first came out. I was standing at the window and I saw you come up the road. You were barefoot and very small. Small for your age—that’s what we all said later; the girl was small for her age.
You wore only a shift, though they say it was of the finest cotton. Your hair was darker than it is now.”
She reaches out, almost reverently, and Isabel takes a step back too late: Mrs. Dowling’s dry finger runs along her forehead.
“It must’ve been darker because it was wet.
Mind you, I couldn’t see you were wet from where I stood.
I thought about going out to you, but I told myself you had to be someone’s child.
You must’ve wandered into the garden at Hardwick soon after.
” A pause. “Maybe if I’d known you were soaked to the bone, I would’ve gone out to meet you. ”
Isabel thinks there’s a strange undercurrent to the woman’s words.
All of a sudden, she feels as if it’s not widowhood that binds the two of them together in Mrs. Dowling’s mind, but this: the possibility that she might have been Mrs. Dowling’s daughter, if only Mrs. Dowling had gone out to her that day, nineteen years ago.
Preposterous idea, of course. She can’t imagine being anybody but her mother and father’s child.
She cannot remember anything from before that moment, when her mother swept her up into her arms, not caring that she was cold and wet through, and she, Isabel, buried her face into the silk of her mother’s dress. It’s as if the start of her life never happened; she was always meant to be theirs.
Isabel coughs to pry her tongue loose. “Came out of what?” she says.
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Henley?”
“You said you saw me when I first came out.”
“Why, out of the sea, of course. Mind you, not everybody believes it, that the Sea Bucca brought you.”
“Sea Bucca?” Her voice does an odd thing, rising and falling on the words as if she’s singing. There’s a whooshing in her ears. She can tell Mrs. Dowling is serious, deadly so. She must be mad. “What—”
Sensing her consternation, Mrs. Dowling pats her arm. “You didn’t speak a word of English, did you?”
“That can’t be right. My parents never mentioned it.”
Mrs. Dowling says, “You didn’t speak at all, that’s what they say.
Of course you wouldn’t have, what with the Bucca.
” Sounding exasperated, she says, “You don’t know about the Sea Bucca, do you?
He’s a merman about this high.” She holds up her hand just below her waist. “With the skin of a conger eel and seaweed for hair. Well, that’s what some say; I myself prefer a more romantic picture.
” Her smile has something of a little girl’s, the way her laughter did earlier, but she vanquishes the effect with her next words.
Fixing her milky blue eyes on Isabel, Mrs. Dowling says, “Some say you are his daughter.”
Tersely, Isabel says, “My mother told me there must’ve been a wreck.
Or perhaps I’d wandered off; perhaps somebody didn’t pay attention when they should have.
” An accusation lay in her mother’s words.
Alice Farnworth knew she would never have let her attention slip from her child, if the Good Lord had seen fit to bless her with one of her own.
She called Isabel a gift so often that Isabel felt her shortcomings all the more.
Mrs. Dowling says, “Perhaps your mother tried to protect you from the truth. Word has it she couldn’t leave Helford fast enough once she found you.”
Ice, sliding down her spine. People have been talking about her here, too, just as they have in Greenwich, albeit for different reasons.
They’ve been talking about her for almost twenty years.
She staggers further back into the cottage.
She wants to say, that’s outrageous and how dare you speak of my mother like that.
But in the end she only says, “If you’ll excuse me, I really must unpack. ”
“Of course. Please let me know if there’s anything else you need.” Mrs. Dowling says it in the most normal of tones, as if they haven’t just been discussing mermaids.
When she shuts the door behind her, Isabel sees there’s a gap under it on one side, while the other is so flush with the doorstep it scrapes whenever the door moves.
She waits a few minutes and opens the door again.
The gravel path is empty. The fresh sea-river air pushes in, inhabiting the rooms, forcing out the musty old house smell.
She’s on her own and it doesn’t hurt—yet.
Maybe it’s the newness of the situation that’s keeping her calm.
Maybe it’s the sea. She can hear it through the open window—not the rush of the surf breaking on rocks or the crash of waves, but a constant quiet lapping.
She finds a comfort in it. And a promise, maybe, though of what she doesn’t know.
She finds a knife in a wooden box on the counter and a plate in one of the cupboards, and sitting by the fire, she eats a slice of bread with butter for an early supper.
The bread is coarse, but it has a good, strong flavor, as if some herbs were used in the baking.
The glow of the fire spreads inside her.
She lit it herself—that’s something, isn’t it?
Halfway through the meal, she realizes she shouldn’t have used as much butter.
When she has finished, she puts the plate on the stone counter.
She should wash it, but she’s too tired to get water from the well.
Instead, she opens her travel case and gets out her worn copy of Robinson Crusoe.
The book falls open on the page she keeps the newspaper clipping from The London Chronicle, October 20, 1789.
Her mother kept the entire paper, most of which was filled with news from France, where the Revolution had begun three months before, but Isabel cut out the one small article that read:
Falmouth, Cornwall. A child approximately four years of age was found on the wild and beauteous Coast of Cornwall late last month without any Family to claim it.
The populace believes the Child to have Risen from the Sea after a Wreck, although there has been no report of such.
Unless a Relation comes forward, the Child shall be adopted by Admiral and Mrs. Farnworth of Woodbury House, Norfolk, and raised as their Daughter.
If anyone has any information regarding this Child, please write to Messrs.
Enright and Pickering, Solicitors, Mayfair, London.
The unease grows in her again until it roars. Mrs. Dowling’s story about the merman fuels it, as does the knowledge that even here people have been talking about her. Why was Mrs. Dowling so interested in her past? Does she suspect something? Impossible, she tells herself.
Her nerves disagree, jittering under her skin.
Clipping in hand, she goes to the door and opens it wide.
It’s growing dark outside. The wind pushes against the door, the young tree next to it sways.
Down the gravel path, the river dances in the last of the sun.
A reminder that she’s close to the sea—so close.
Breathing deeply, she tastes it: salt, water, the tang of wet seaweed.
Gradually, a quietude envelops her, made of waves and foam, ebb and flow, the current steadying her.
By the time she closes the door again, a renewed sense of purpose courses through her.
She’s going to make this her home, come what may.