The Brides of Rollrock Island (21 page)

“At this hour?” said Mrs. Flaming at the door. “We are all but abed!”

“I’ve important news for Kitty,” I said. “It cannot wait.”

“You young people, you
always
think it cannot wait. Come in, then, into the parlor.” Annoyed, she looked, and inconvenienced—and this was as kindly as she would ever look on me again. I watched her hurry away up the hall, and then I stepped into the parlor, which was aglow with the new electrics that the family was so proud of.

Every candlestick, every silk flower, every landscape on the wall had once held and increased the glamour of my love for Kitty, but now each object only seemed to speak, and rather smugly, of well-earned comfort and a kind of terror of not being thought tasteful. Look at those drapes! How many layers of cloth did you need at a window, how many tassels and fringes, to keep out the light and the cold, to thwart prying eyes? I crossed the room slowly toward the screened fireplace, the mantel loaded with pictures and figurines. I felt as if I carried the weight of it on
my own back. How had I made sense of such things before? My little time on Rollrock had emptied my head of rooms like this, the detail of them, the fuss and filling of spaces. What more did you need than a chair and a fire, and another chair with Neme curled up and dreaming across at you? What gave lovelier light than a spirit lamp, which left some mystery to linger in the darker corners?

Kitty’s hurried footsteps sounded in the hall; dread flooded my head and churned in my stomach. Then she was there in the doorway, and I lifted my eyes to hers. Her face was fresh and unguarded, as if she had been asleep, her hair hastily gathered up, fine curls falling from it. She had never looked prettier. She was pleased to see me, and surprised, and amused. She thought I had come because I could not bear to betake me to my rest without seeing her, holding her, asserting our bond once more.

I might reassure her with a smile. I might cross to her and embrace her—I knew exactly how she would feel, the bold curves of her that had once excited me. I could choose, coldly, to undo everything I’d done on Rollrock. I could confess to it, or I could keep it secret; I could invent an excuse to return to the island, give Neme back her skin and send her home to the sea. I could do my duty to this woman before me, and no one in Cordlin need be any the wiser.

I couldn’t put it off a moment longer. “I have taken me a sea-wife,” I said—softly, as if it would hurt her less that way.

All pleasure went from her face—I would never see it there again. She gave a little cry—“I knew it!”—and bent in the middle as if struck. Softer and flatter she spoke: “I should not have let
you go.” She straightened, took a few steps into the room, then retreated and sat in the upright chair by the door, and put her face in her hands. “Tell me,” she said into them. Then she looked up at me, haughty, white-lipped. “What has happened.”

“She came up from the sea.” I pressed my shoulder blades against the mantel. “Of her own choice.”

“Saw you standing there, did she? Could not resist you?” I could see how Kitty would be as an old woman, with this roundedness gone from her face, with this bitter tightness about her mouth.

“I found her on the beach.” I saw Misskaella bending to the seal praying, the flesh splitting deeply, shining wet in the moonlight.

“What were you doing on a
beach
—pacing up and down and hoping? You were supposed to be selling a house, crating up two chairs, not wandering about the island looking for trouble!” I could see how she would have scolded our children, the thin line of her lips.

“I had done all I could do that day. I had had supper with Shy Tyler and Fam—his wife, their little boy …” My voice faded on the disapproving silence.

“So,” she said. “You are here to tell me that you don’t want to marry me anymore.” She raised a hand and dropped it, almost with a slap, to her thigh.

“I wish I
could
marry you,” I said sincerely, “to avoid you the embarrassment—”

“I wish you could too, for better reasons than that.” Her voice was low and harsh. “I wish you could marry me out of love for me, love that you said you felt, and that was firmly enough set before
you stepped aboard that boat to Rollrock. You are not the man I thought you, if you can be pushed so easily from the path we had laid out for ourselves.”

“I am not the man
I
even thought me,” I said. “What can I say? I am bewitched.” I saw it cleanly, truly, then, for a moment: Misskaella’s work, Misskaella’s fault.

“You are
stupid
,” she hissed, “to have let yourself be enchanted. To have put yourself in the way of it.
Two chairs
, you told me.
It will be so nice for us to have them, side by side, Mam’s and Dad’s
. While all the time, I should not be surprised—”

I had crossed the room to her while she spoke. “Kitty, it was not like that! There was no forethought, no scheming against you, I promise! I am as surprised as you!” Though I should not be, I realized. Why else would Rollrock be so afraid of that witch, if not because she could snare us like this, whenever she chose?

Kitty’s eyes were dead; her lips pressed together. The freckles seemed to hover just in front of her face like a cloud of russet insects. “Yet you emerge from
your
surprise with a bewitching woman, and an island full of men clapping you on the back. While I come from
my
surprise with what? A crowd of people to explain to, a meal to pay for—a
cake
, for goodness’ sake! And the knowledge that I’ve been made a fool of, that my sweetheart all these years was never mine. A mermaid had only to crook her finger at him, and he’d be gone.”

“I swear, Kitty, I never wished for this! I never had such thoughts in my head!”

“Oh, this is not a matter of
heads
, Dominic,” she said with
something of a laugh. “Of reason, or logic. This is not civilized. This is barely
human
!”

Her tears surprised her, and for a moment her rage and horror fell away and her face held only pure distress. In that moment I could imagine loving her again, and I regretted that I could not use the power I had, to take her in my arms and set my affairs to rights once more. I had tight hold of the sea-penny Neme had given me, in my coat pocket; I squeezed it as if I wished to crumble it to dust there, and my attachment to Neme with it. At the same time I wished I could wring magical properties out of it, travel upon it as they say a witch can sail upon a nutshell if she chooses, out of this suffocating room and across to Rollrock where I belonged. The thing was done; I had betrayed Kitty and confessed to it; now I only wanted to be gone.

She fought to contain her tears. Another fell, and she all but smacked it away from her cheek.

“I won’t ask you to forgive me,” I said.

“Good!” She flashed me a hot glance. “Because I won’t, ever. All the people I have to face and tell! Not to mention what you have done to
me
!” And she knocked at her chest with a fist, as if trying to wake a heart stopped within.

“All I can say is, I am sorry this has happened to us.”

A silence fell in her struggling breathing. What had I said? She raised her eyes to me and they were as dry as if they had never wept, and never would again, even as her cheek carried the sheen of the tear she had struck away.

“
Happened
to us, Dominic?” Her voice was deep with scorn. “Let there be no mistake about this, Dominic: nothing
happened
to us.
You
did this thing, to
me
. You chose that creature above me; you left me embarrassed in this town on the very eve of our betrothal celebration. Don’t tell yourself it
happened
; don’t console yourself that way.”

She glared up at me. There was no point in my protesting that indeed this
had
happened to me, had
been done
to me, as I was just beginning to see. On Rollrock, in Neme’s arms, I had thought myself to be waking from a state of confusion, my engagement to Kitty being but one aspect of my uncertainty; I had seen my destiny laid out before me strange but clear, frightening but full of beauty. I did not want to let go of that revelation in favor of this new one, of myself as Misskaella’s puppet.

“Do you know?” Kitty’s eyes glittered.

I bowed my head to receive whatever blow she would next deliver on me.

“I am
glad
you found her in time. I’m
relieved
that you showed me you are this sort of man, before I was locked to you forever in marriage. These years we were together I was well fooled, Dominic. Perhaps I wanted so strongly for you to be what you could never be—honorable, you know, and loyal, and with some strength of mind, some integrity—that I missed all kinds of tiny clues that I should have noticed, glances at this woman or that, which I thought were quite innocent, words you said that I might have read another way.”

She paused as if to let me protest again, to deny it. But she was so entirely mistaken, and so energetic in putting together her mistaken view, and so
trapped
—as I had been—in Cordlin life and the Cordlin mind, that I could not see where I should begin
in countering her. Besides, I did not want to; I had done what I had done. I deserved every chastisement she heaped on my head.

“It doesn’t matter,” she went on. “Everything’s clear now, and I see you for the weakling you are and the traitor, and the toyer with my affections. You can go,” she said, rising. “And I will thank you never to approach me again, or any friend of mine or member of my family.”

She left the parlor and stood aside from the doorway to let me pass out into the hall. Her face was chalk, her body iron; the slippers she wore had a rose embroidered on each toe, and the dressing gown an arabesque on each lapel, but neither detail at all softened this general impression.

I paused before her, looked her in the face. She held her gaze aside from me as long as she could, then flicked me a glance. “Go,” she said. “I don’t want you here in my house.”

“I’m sorry to have hurt you, Kitty.”

“Well, that is very gentlemanly of you, I’m sure.” Her voice was loud in my ear as I turned aside from her scorn. “But I am still hurt, and I will stay hurt longer than you will stay sorry. Go and find your consolation in that monster’s arms. Be sorry there. The spectacle of your sorrow makes me
sick
.”

She might as well have spat on me. She brushed past me and pulled open the door. The front porch was electric-lit too; I had often rung the bell and stood there in that golden glow, waiting for the family to admit and welcome me, looking forward to the sight of Kitty dressed for dancing, hurrying down the stairs.

I stepped out; I turned in time to see the door close with quiet finality on me. She left the light on until I closed the gate, perhaps
to make the point that she still held to a system of civilized manners, however far I had left it behind.

I walked away dazed. I took out the sea-penny and pressed it to my lips, tried to drink up some sea-scent from it, but it smelt only of my nervous sweat. I put it back in my pocket and walked on.

I had left turmoil behind me in that house. I had never made myself so unwelcome in a place, and I stung with all the things that Kitty had said. I was shaken, unable to tell which of her words were true and which were only her bitterness coloring her view of me. I felt I hardly knew myself. Perhaps I had
never
known myself very well. Could I really be so evil, and have remained ignorant of it?

I grasped after the thought of Neme for some consolation, but she scarcely seemed real; Kitty was so hard and bright and vituperative in my mind, her voice clawing away my confidence in myself, that I could not think past her to gentle Neme, to the moment Neme had handed me the sea-penny on the beach, to the nights Neme and I had had together. A mermaid, Kitty had called her, and a monster; how could I want to be married to a monster?

But Neme was no such thing. She was my Neme, spelled to me as I was to her, awaiting me on Rollrock, in that humble, isolated, sparse-furnished home where I belonged. She was all I had, and all I needed. I walked through Cordlin to my aunt’s house, where tomorrow, before I left, I would deliver the same news as I had just imparted. As I walked I breathed out Kitty, and Cordlin, and the mainland fuss and frippery I had furnished my life with, and I breathed in the simplicity I was returning to, the cold wind straight off the sea, the smell of the spirit lamps, the tang
of woodsmoke—and, at last, the damp-seaweed smell of Neme’s hair. I closed my eyes and buried my face in it; I felt her slim arms around me, heard her low voice, so absent of hatred and accusation.
Find your consolation in that monster’s arms
, Kitty had said. But it was not consolation I was after, it was truth, the truth of myself, a man who did not pretend and strive after this fine house or this rare object or that impressive friend; a man who was complete, and steady in himself, and clear as to what he was, however shameful or regrettable that might be.

That is what I told myself, walking closed-eyed through the Cordlin night, running my thumb tip over the ridges of the sea-penny, recalling to my lips the touch of Neme’s warm, silken skin.