Chapter Five #4
The Shipwrights Arms is shadowy and empty but for two craggy men sharing a jug of ale at a table by the window.
Everything inside the inn’s common room is brown: the wooden planked floor and wall paneling, the tables, the chairs, the cabinet where the spirits are kept.
It smells brown, too: tobacco smoke and ale.
The only things not brown are the stumps of candles mounted on the walls and the black residue left on the paneling where they’ve burned for a hundred years or more.
The glass in the windows is better than that at the cottage. The river lies behind it like a torpid silver snake and beyond that waits the sea, beckoning.
“Mrs. Henley!” Tom Holder exclaims when he comes out of the back room. Bowing, he says, “To what do I owe the honor?”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Holder.” She inquires after his family; Richard, doing well, he says, and the little ’uns—there are four of them, between three and eight, and his wife, Mary. Then he offers her what he calls “a sip of something,” saying he’s got ale and various spirits.
“No, thank you,” she says. “I’ve come to…”
The two men at the window have stopped talking. She lowers her voice: “I’ve got a message for your friend from the cove.” She has gone over it in her mind countless times, yet it still comes out wrong. “News,” she says quickly. “I’ve got news for your friend from the cove.”
“Do you now, Mrs. Henley?” he says with a smile that seems equal parts amused and astonished.
“I dare say you’ve come to know my friend very quickly.
You must feel at home here in Helford.” The way he says it—he’s enjoying this, she thinks.
He feels it’s part and parcel of living here.
A sign she belongs. She remembers Lieutenant Sowerby’s words, they’re all in on it.
Maybe they are. It’s wrong, but maybe a tax of 100 percent on tea is wrong, too.
Just a month ago, she couldn’t have fathomed doing what she’s about to do.
She remembers Lieutenant Sowerby’s other assertion, too: they’re aiding the French.
She doesn’t want to aid the French, but she does want to help Jack, and she likes the idea that people may be able to buy sugar and tea, things they couldn’t otherwise afford. She herself, too.
Most of all, she wants the war to end, and with it, the high taxes.
George and his friends, his fellow officers, used to jest about it.
They dreaded the moment when, in their words, “peace would break out,” taking with it all chance of promotion and prize money—Jack wasn’t wrong about the latter.
In the midshipmen’s mess, they’d toast “a bloody war and a sickly season.” When George told her, she merely smiled, but she felt cold at the thought.
All she wanted was for the war to end and George to stay home with her.
It hurt to know he wished for the opposite.
Perhaps, she thinks, Jack is right not to marry.
“So what’s the news?” Tom Holder says.
“Yes,” she says. “Just that…yes.” Yes, I will let you use the shed for storing contraband. Yes, you have corrupted me into aiding smugglers like you, Jack. Yes, I want to see you again—yes, yes, yes.
Tom Holder nods. “My friend will know your meaning?”
“He will.” She hesitates, then says, “Mr. Holder, do you remember the day I arrived in Helford?”
“I certainly do. It was only a fortnight ago, wasn’t it, you got down from the coach?”
“I meant the day I first arrived, as a little girl.”
“Ah, then.”
One of the men at the table asks the innkeeper for another jug of ale.
Tom Holder pours the brown liquid from the barrel into the jug, then says, “I do remember it. I didn’t see you that day, but the story spread around the village like a fire in a hay barn.
I wondered about it for a long time—we all did.
Not just about how you were found, wet through, but also about the luck of you running into Mrs. Farnworth that day.
You could’ve been any of our daughters instead. ”
She has thought of this, too. How different her life would have been, for its first twenty-three years, at least. “Did anyone ever come forward to say they were missing a child? Years later, I mean?”
“No, madam. You would have heard if they did.”
“Of course.” She nods. “Thank you, Mr. Holder.”
“You know what they say about you, don’t you? About you being the Bucca’s child?”
“Yes. I can’t understand why anyone would think it.”
The innkeeper scratches his chin. “It’s hard to say. Strange things happen in the country, Mrs. Henley.”
“Strange things happen everywhere. That doesn’t mean there are mermaids.”
Tom Holder says, “I understand why you’d say that, madam, but we here know differently.
My brother Gerens is a fisherman; he could tell you some things.
And Jori Penrose’s boat would’ve sunk in a gale two years ago if it weren’t for the Bucca, who lifted the thing clear off the cliffs when it was about to be smashed to pieces. ”
“Did Mr. Penrose see the Sea Bucca?” she asks.
Tom Holder holds her gaze. “It was too dark,” he says eventually. “But the boat was lifted free against both wind and tide. Jori owes his life to the Sea Bucca and he knows it.”
She’s looking at him, not saying anything.
Would she have believed him had he said that yes, Mr. Penrose saw the Sea Bucca?
Most probably not, she decides. Still. There could be other explanations for such an event, reasonable ones, but something about the story touches some place inside her, as if it’s rooting around for memories to latch on to.
Of course she’s not the Sea Bucca’s daughter.
How could she be, when there’s no such thing?
Only, it would explain the way the sea calls to her. Her dreams, too.
Tom Holder says, “Well. I’ll let my friend from the cove know your news. Do be careful, Mrs. Henley. There are people who do not like my friend and they take against his friends also.”
“I shall. Thank you, Mr. Holder.”
Outside the inn, she purchases the fish, a small pollack, enough for two suppers.
She looks around for Jori Penrose, who was saved by the Sea Bucca, but doesn’t see him.
She walks home wondering how long it will be before she hears anything about the shed.
Will Jack himself contact her? He’ll still be resting, recovering from his wound.
Three weeks’ rest, the doctor said. Still, he may send word.
Or will the smugglers come at night when she’s asleep and she’ll never even know they were there? She hopes it won’t be long.