Sea Hearts (20 page)

‘No, my wife will want to stay in Cordlin,’ I said. ‘And she will have no work, being married, so we will need the money from the house, towards a Cordlin house for ourselves.’ I thrust my hands into my coat pockets, and we both of us looked everywhere but at each other in the dimness.

‘Goodbye, Dominic Mallett,’ said Fametta. Baby James was a sleeping bundle at her shoulder. Her face floated like a beautiful mask in the night, her lips full shadows, her eyes dark pools, each with a moon-gleam on the surface.

‘Goodbye, Fametta,’ I said. ‘It was lovely to meet you.’

I set off home, but the clap of the cold sea air had woken me, and at the end of their street, as I heard Shy’s door close behind me, instead of turning uphill I turned down. I walked easily through those lower lanes, confident that I would not meet anybody at this hour and glad of the peace of that. Down to the sea-front I went, and along it north past the mole-end, and on to where the paving ended and there was the choice whether to struggle up through the dunes to the Crescent road or to slither down to the firmer sand of the beach. Down I went, and set out along the silvered sand past the ripples that broke the moonlight into pieces, and the wider waves that curled over and crushed the pieces to blackness.

It was a fine feeling to walk fast and breathe deeply, to leave Potshead and people behind me — and more- than-people, or less, or whatever the sea-wives were. I rescued Kitty from the place deep in my mind to which Fametta and James had banished her.
Look, there is all
this of me, too!
I exclaimed to her.
And perhaps it
is
unusual,
but is it quite despicable?
I wished dearly that she were here beside me so that I could talk to her, because in truth she had faded a little, as had Cordlin and its excitements and stimulations, cleared from my mind by Rollrock’s simplicity, its straightness and its strangeness, as the tide smoothes the day’s footprints and drag-marks from a beach.

‘Hoy!’

I thought I had misheard the sea as a voice, and I looked out that way, in case there should be a person there, requiring saving.

But ‘Hoy!’ sounded again behind me, and I spun, and there, lit starkly by the moonlight, sat two things that brought my heart jumping into my throat. Thrippence’s bothy, a furry black mound high among the dunes, sent smoke slanting from some invisible chimney. And on the steps from bothy to beach sat a shadow-mound smaller in size but mightily more fearsome than the bothy: the witch Misskaella, waving an arm to summon me.

I glanced back along the beach, searched the shadows of the Forward cliff ahead, but no one walked nearby who might be summoned to help me, or even to share this dread. Slowly I paced up the hard wet sand and into the softer, wishing it were more soft and difficult so that I might never reach Misskaella. What could she want of me? Why did I not have the strength to walk away, along the beach, ignoring her? Come now, I told myself, what harm can she mean you, an old woman, sleepless in the midnight? She is probably only in need of some company, and curious about this passing stranger.

‘Good evening,’ I said as I neared her.

She watched me glinting-eyed. Her dark rags looked as if they had grown out of her rather than being created from cloth and put on. Her face — the face of my childhood nightmares — turned up at me as I drew closer, the moon unkind upon every whisker and wrinkle and mole.

‘Misskaella,’ I said, to show that I knew her, that I had the measure of her. She stared up at me, clearly feeling no compulsion to speak.

‘My name is Dominic Mallett,’ I said. ‘I come from Cordlin.’

‘Mallett? You come from Potshead. You cannot fool me; I remember your father. How he looked down on everyone!’ She made a horrid noise in her throat, and spat the hawkings off to one side. She reached into the neck of her garment, and worked or scratched at something on her shoulder. ‘What are you back for, to sneer at us some more? Oh, your little round mam, I remember her too, so lonely and so pure. You think yourself pure as well, I have no doubt?’

‘Of course not. What do you mean?’ I knew very well what she meant, and I was cross with her for having seen me so clearly. ‘I am here on business, to make some arrangements, about property.’

‘About property,’ she said in exactly my affronted tone, and grinned up at me, showing the terrible state of her teeth.

‘Yes, I am selling my house.’

‘Are you now, my love?’ She shrugged and tweaked at her upper garments as if dislodging fleas, or preparing a moment of madness when she might fling off all her clothes and stand naked and appalling before me. ‘Cutting your ties?’ she crooned up at me. ‘Hoping to escape us forever?’

‘I’m sure there’s no ill-will in it, Misskaella,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’m sure not!’ she said sweetly. ‘Such a nice young man, with his mainland manners. Have you anything for me, Dominic Mallett?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘“I’m sorry?” Look at him. People bring me gifts. People leave me offerings. Sometimes it is a nice fish that they catch, or a loaf their wives have made. A blanket for the winter? A leg of a lamb for my supper? People here,’ she said, ‘respect a woman like me and know how to keep her good-tempered.’

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I was only walking by, taking the air. I didn’t have it in mind to visit you; if I had thought about it I would have guessed you were asleep.’

‘Oh, they bring their gifts while I sleep, just the same,’ she said. ‘That is no obstacle. How
is
your sainted mother?’

‘My mother died, several years ago.’

‘Ah, ah…’ Even she would not make merry with a mother’s death. ‘These things happen. So. You are wanting for companionship.’

‘Of my mother, yes. But I have friends, and an aunt.’

‘Friends, and an aunt.’ How foolish she made my words sound. ‘There are some things that friends and an aunt cannot provide you, as I’m sure you know.’

‘I am to be married very soon,’ I said, perhaps too hurriedly.

She laughed. ‘Oh, I see you understand me. She is all red hair and sharp words, your betrothed?’

‘Not sharp at all,’ I protested, though in truth, by contrast with Fametta… ‘She is a fine girl, and kindly too.’

‘Kindly.’ Misskaella pushed out her mouth, as if kindliness were a very suspect virtue. ‘And you’ve tested the limits of her kindliness, have you?’

‘Why should I do that?’

She straightened and looked at the sea beyond me. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It is useful to have the measure of these things, don’t you think?’

I wished I could run away from her; I did not like the way she pulled my words apart and laughed at me through the shreds.

‘Let us try an experiment, shall we? Help me up.’ She took up the stick beside her and put out her hand, a filthy claw, beyond which she was such a mass of flesh and cloth that I felt sure I could not lift her.

On the second attempt, my hand sliding on the greasy fabric of her sleeve, her claw painful around my wrist, I managed to pull her to her feet. She swayed there, steadying herself with the stick. I could not believe she would not topple, her bare feet with their ragged toenails were so small.

She set off as though I were not there, and quickly I stepped aside to make way. Her rising had released from her clothing a strong sour smell from her body. I stifled an exclamation and followed her, straight down the beach towards the water swimming with moonlight. What did she mean,
testing the limits
of Kitty’s kindness? Would she throw herself into the waves, maybe, and expect me to save her? Why did she think Kitty would care about the fate of a mad old woman, and one so closely allied with the sea-wives she despised? Perhaps I should flee, back along the beach — look how hard Misskaella found walking! Surely she could not catch me up. But what might she do instead — lightning-strike me? Throw up a magical stone wall in my path? I lagged behind her, to one side, and veered slowly toward the town.

And then I stopped, unable, from surprise and something else, to take another step. Some of the moon shadows in the sea revealed themselves to be swimmers, and as they gained the shallows I saw that they were seals, several now plunging forward out of the waves. A long string of their followers led out beyond the surf, north around Forward Head towards Crescent Corner.

She sang, the witch, indistinctly against the wave-noise; I held myself back bodily from walking closer to hear the words. Her feet squeezed darkness into the shining sand. The ripples ran back to the sea, ran back and made splashy ruffles against the chests of the three leading seals, which forged towards Misskaella like dogs to their master. She put out her hand and moved her fingers as if scattering seed for birds. The seals came up around her; beside them, above them, she was neither so enormous nor so strange as she had seemed before.

I tried to step backward, preparatory to fleeing, for what if she should set those beasts at me somehow? But her song, whatever it was, held me, its sense unfathomable, its play both horrid and beauteous, unlike any tune I had heard before. Another pair of seals coasted up on a wave, and then began their caterpillar-rippling on the firmer ground; all my skin came alive and rushed about on my trapped body, but Misskaella tottered among the beasts quite unafraid, her feet and calves shining wet, the hems of her rags dragging in the water and dripping moonlight upon it.

Matter-of-factly, she chose a seal, one that lay between her and the water. She tucked her stick under her arm. She pressed her hands together and bent from the waist as if begging, as if praying, as if bowing reverently. She sang, she sang, and the song was no less senseless than before; it was like tethered kelp on the tide, its ribbons reaching and reaching, never obtaining what they reached for. The chosen seal rolled onto its back — I felt that roll as if I were seal myself, though I stood slender and fearful here on the sand. An invisible knife pierced the flesh under the beast’s chin and pulled a dark line down its body. I cried out, my voice feeble, quite without magical force, as the seal opened bloodlessly, parting like giant lips. But instead of teeth appearing and a tongue, the skin convulsed, and from its darkness and its glistening a girl sat up. Misskaella put out a claw to her, and the girl laid her long white hand in it, and allowed herself to be lifted from the shrinking seal-flesh. She was as white as bone, as narrow as a sapling tree; her hair tumbled black from where it had been pressed in a mass to the back of her head. It fell and spread, darkness and gloss together like the sea-waves, like the sea-rinsed seals.

I took several steps forward, then stopped myself. I was a-hum with Misskaella’s song, mazed with the light off the girl, the sight of the shape of her, swaying so tall beside the hunched fat witch. Out of her coat and onto the silvered ground she stepped, guided by Misskaella. She stood among the seals, afraid neither of them nor of the crone before her, and seeming not to feel the cold. Her coat, no more than thick cloth now, shrivelled and curled on itself beside her shapely feet.

The sea fell silent, as it sometimes does. Out from the creak and slither of the seal-bodies came Misskaella’s voice, low and crafty. ‘Dominic Mallett?’

With halting steps I approached the two upright people, one shadow, one shining, among the prone wet seals. Kitty Flaming, I told myself desperately, my wife-to-be. Kitty. But the words were nothing against Misskaella’s singing; Kitty was nothing, a frail flag blown to tatters by a magical wind. Her face blurred and faded in my memory, while the seal-girl’s grew clearer and clearer in the moonlight, serene, dark eyed, full lipped, a pale oval, her night-black hair moving around it, breathing of warm sea. She watched me soberly, fearless, unsmiling; she could no more look away than I could. No one, no woman or man, had ever regarded me so steadily, so trustingly. Kitty herself never looked at me this way; always her own next purposes and plans moved somewhere in her eyes and readied words behind her lips. This girl only waited, her whole being, her whole future, fixed on me.

I felt as if I had been doused in cold fresh water from the sweetest spring. It had washed away the anxious, busymaking man I was before, whom Kitty had been satisfied with; now I felt worthy to face this purer creature, unsullied yet, uninjured by the world. She put me at peace in a glance, and I went to her eyes, to her mouth as a swimmer lost in the night ocean makes for the only light he sees. The rest of her I all but ignored — the fine breasts, the narrow hips, the shadowy cleft of her, the lean legs leading to the sand-swirled half-buried feet, her black fall-and-fall of hair shifting around her like a frayed silk cloak. All those things I registered, but they were for later. Misskaella grinned, off to the side, the old crow, she sang and laughed at me, gloated over my plight. She too I ignored, falling into the dark eyes’ attention, longing to press my lips to those full, slightly open and uncertain ones — but restraining myself, until we should be alone together, unobserved by witch or weather.

‘What is your name?’ I asked the seal-girl.

She answered with the sea, with her comrades’ huffing and whining.

‘What
is
her name, Dominic Mallett?’ said the witch. ‘It’s for you to give her one, to use here on the land. What would you like her to answer to?’

I listened in my heart for the right name. I put out my hand, and her warm palm met it; her warm fingers intertwined with my cold ones. ‘Dominic Mallett,’ she said, just as Fametta had, but more curiously, experimenting with the first words to come from her new throat, to pass across her new tongue.

‘Her name is Neme,’ I said, because I wanted to see her tongue move on an N, her lips on an M, again.

‘Neme?’ rasped Misskaella from the glare off the moonlit sea. ‘There, then, her name is Neme.’ And I took the girl’s other hand, and we stood spelled together on the sand, the seals moving about us like monstrous dark maggots, helpless, harmless, huge.