The Mermaid's Child (18 page)

“I suppose you take me for a fool?”

I looked up. I was going to have to say something, or at least try to. Something uncomplicated, to start with. I took another sip of beer.

“No,” I said, a faint and draughty sound.

The old man frowned.

“You think I'm just some credulous old pedant with his head buried in his books—”

Again, I had to settle for just saying “No,” though by this stage I wasn't so sure what I was denying. But the word came out a little clearer this time. A smile began to pull at the corners of my lips.

“Who sent you? Hamelius, was it? De Outremeuse?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Nobody sent me.” The words were coming back. My smile broadened. But the old man wasn't listening, he wasn't looking at me. His eyes had glazed over. I lifted my cup, took another gulp of beer. It seemed to be helping.

“It isn't too much to ask, is it? A little privacy? No one looking over my shoulder. No one sneaking in at night and rifling through my manuscripts. A little professional courtesy?”

“I don't want to seem ungrateful,” I said, each word coming easier than the one before, “After you saving my life and all; I can tell you're quite worked up about something, but to be honest with you, I don't have a clue what you're talking about.”

“What?”

“I mean—” I swigged some more beer. “I mean, what the hell is going on? There's no crew, you've spread no canvas, you're going nowhere. You're just drifting. In the middle of the ocean.”

He reached out to the platter and picked up a lump of cheese. He pulled it in two between his dusty fingertips, replaced one half.

“I do not consider it drifting,” he said, putting the cheese down, picking it up again. “And I am not, as you put it, ‘going nowhere.' I am closer than I've ever been. It's all coming together—that was the problem, you see—they knew it, they saw what I was about to achieve and—that's why I had to get rid of them.”

Them? Did he mean his crew? Had he killed them? Was I drifting in the middle of the ocean with a murderer? Suddenly, my regaining the ability to speak did not seem so important. How would he have done it? Poison? I dropped my crust back onto the table. He was still eating, though.

“You're a scholar, then, I take it?” he said through a mouthful.

“What?”

“A scholar. You must have studied.”

“No. I'm a sailor.”

“You would say that.”

“Yes, I would, because it's true.”

I looked down at the almost empty beer-cup, realized I must already be half drunk, and tried to call my thoughts together. I remembered the soft cold feel of a slate against my palm, the smooth glide as I guided my hand round the loops and dips of the alphabet, the smell of chalkdust. “I know my numbers one-to-ten,” I said, putting down the cup, my fingers instinctively counting out the numbers as I spoke. “And I can write my name, I can read a little, but that's all.”

“Of course you'd say that. If anything, it's evidence against you, saying that.”

I looked down at my hands, palms up and fingers curled from counting. There were calluses on my palms, yellowed hardnesses on the pads and along the fingers' edges. I turned them over, looked at the sundarkened skin, the scars that laced and pocked their backs. I blinked, held my hands out towards him.

“Look,” I said. “These aren't scholar's hands.”

He took them between his cold dry fingers, held them for a moment palm up, then turned them over. The lines on his face shifted and looked uncomfortable for a moment, like hair
combed the wrong way. He let go of my hands and looked up at me. “It's not
proof
of anything,” he said. “Evidence, perhaps, but not proof.” A pause. The water-purifier gave off a hiss: he stood up and moved across to fiddle with it. Then he turned back to me. “If you weren't sent here to spy on me how did you end up here? You say you're a sailor but where's your ship? There's no sign of wreckage, no corpses, no other survivors, not even a spar for you to cling to: just you, drowning all by yourself in the middle of the ocean. Just where I'd happen to be passing. I find it very hard to believe it could just be coincidence.”

“You weren't passing. You were drifting.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “I know a spy when I see one.”

I narrowed my eyes back at him.

“If I'm a spy and you know a spy when you see one, then why did you pick me up?”

There was a long pause. He pursed his lips. When he spoke again, if it hadn't been for the beer, and for the unfamiliar words, I would have realized that what he was telling me was not quite the truth.

“I should never have started on the
Nichomachean Ethics
. I knew it would only lead to trouble. How could I let you drown after that?”

I just looked at him.

“Wha'?”

He waved the question away.

“It's beside the point. The point is, you have yet to tell me why you are here.”

I sat back and considered this a moment, my mind grown flabby and unwilling with drink and fatigue. I remembered the slaves I had set free: I brought my hand up to my chin and touched its tenderness. I remembered the lash peeling
the skin from off my back, and before that, McMichaels at his desk, and the way the light was refracted by his cut glass inkwell. I remembered John Doyle; I could almost feel her teeth grazing my flesh, her hands on my body. I could almost smell her skin. I remembered, before that, Joe's lean body on mine and the smell of heath and heather. I remembered the rain falling on my face the night we left the village. I remembered the foul taste of drought in my mouth, the pain of Uncle George's belt across my back. My father had died, and I had tucked a blanket round his toes. The circus had left a circle on the green, where the grass caught the light at a different angle. I had heard a mermaid singing, had watched her in the moonlight as she painted her nails.

“I was looking for a mermaid,” I said.

He nodded.

“Then you're a fool,” he said. “They don't exist.”

I leaned forward.

“Yes they do. I've seen them.”

He looked at me. “And what's it worth, the word of a self-confessed semi-literate deckhand? I'm a scholar, and I am telling you, they don't exist. It's a myth.”

By now I was barely listening. I was boiling with hostility.

“My mother was a mermaid,” I said.

“I'll hazard a guess that you never knew her? Someone told you she was a mermaid?”

“My Da—”

“Well there you are then. It's a euphemism.” He leaned back, a fingertip placed on his upper lip. “Or maybe it's slang.”

“What's a euphemism? What are you saying? That he lied to me?”

“It's like a lie. He might have said your mother was a mermaid, but what he really meant was that she was a whore.”

It was then that I decided he was the enemy. I'd have nothing more to do with him.

And it was also then that the old man decided that I was not a threat. Now that he considered me a fool, he became suddenly loquacious.

He informed me that his name was Jebb, that his ship was called the
Spendlove
, and that I would be allowed to roam the vessel at will, so long as I stayed away from the library and did not distract him. If I should happen to stumble in upon him at his books, I was to be sure to observe the four cardinal rules of the place. He explained them slowly, as befitted my idiocy, counting them off one by one on his fingertips: Rule One: no talking; Rule Two: no food or drink; Rule Three: no inkpots, and Rule Four: no livestock. I nodded along as he spoke, but was barely listening. The fact was, I had no intention of disturbing him. I had no intention of going anywhere near his library. I was going to be far too busy.

There was a great deal of work to be done. If there hadn't been all the time in the world, and nothing else to do, I would have thought that it was hopeless. As it was, I decided not to think about it. I just started work on repairing the
Spendlove
.

If Jebb had enquired, and he didn't, why I was doing it, I would probably have said that it was some kind of reparation for his hospitality, for fishing me out of the water and accommodating me on board. It wouldn't have been entirely untrue: I was looking on it as a prophylactic against meeting the same fate as his crew. But when I think about it now, I realize that it was in part instinctive, a defence against the solitude in which I found myself. I needed something to console myself with. I needed to lose myself in something. And I knew, I
was reminded every time my hand raised itself to touch the pendant at my throat, that there was joy to be found in a job well done, and pleasure to be taken from the quiet and proper practice of a skill.

But even that was an effect, rather than a cause. I needed to repair her because I was going to sail her. I would get her shipshape, then I would turn her round and sail back the way I'd come. I was going to find that shoal of mermaids. I was going to find my mother.

The idea of sailing her singlehandedly was daunting, but it seemed so far off that it didn't seem worth worrying about. Even the simplest of tasks seemed to take so long. I just didn't have the vigour that I'd once possessed. It had worn me threadbare, my time at sea.

But I began to get things done. I took stock of the state of the rigging. Cautiously, dizzily, I climbed. Not nearly so high as on board the
Sally Ann
, but I lost my nerve nonetheless, and clung like a treemouse to the yard, eyes shut, swallowing back the sickness that was rising up my throat. I managed to cut the remaining shreds of canvas away, but came back down shaking, slowly, with no one there to guide my foot from stay to stay. I found spare sails, rolled up and stuffed under a table in the cuddy: some of the canvas had rotted into dark patches, holes: I cannibalized a spritsail and began repairing them.

The days confirmed that we were drifting south, carried only by the ocean's pull. The sun rose to port, sank starboard: by night the stars grew unfamiliar. With every passing day the air was growing colder, drier; the sea had taken on a jewelled, translucent blueness, like a summer evening. Leaning over the rails I sometimes saw dark, vast shapes moving beneath the surface of the water, heading south. Purposeful, going faster than the ship.

It was quiet. Always quiet. The slop of waves against the hull, the hiss of wind through the bare ropes, the creak of the undirected ship served only to reinforce the utter isolation in which I found myself. Leaning over the rail, I watched those dark leviathans moving through the water, heading ever south in their ceaseless, companionable procession. It was infuriating, the knowledge that every day was pulling me further away, was making it more difficult for me to get back to where I'd come from. I tried to drive myself harder, to work more quickly, but I kept making mistakes, making more work, hurting myself. My body was like a tired child: it could not be persuaded. I had to give in to it and let it rest.

Not that I could sleep, though. Not normal, eight-hour, night-filling sleep. Perhaps I had slept too long already, used up months' worth of my nightly allocation lying there on the reading desk while Jebb piled mounds of books around my sleeping form. As we drifted ever further south, the days seemed to stretch themselves, grow transparent at the edges. The hours of darkness dwindled to an eyeblink, to a twilight blueness.

I found boots, leggings and a sealskin coat in among the stores. Muffled from feet to chin, hood pulled tight against the cold, I watched my breath cloud the air, was distracted by grains of ice on my eyelashes. On the horizon there was whiteness, like mist on a river.

Buried in the shadowy corner beneath the gallery, hunched into the antipodean chill, Jebb emerged only to shelve or reshelve a volume, or to shamble over to the reading desk and pore over a page for hours, making notes in his scratchy, ugly handwriting. And he slept, still: in spite of the extended daylight he never seemed to have any trouble sleeping. A creature of habit, the hours could still be measured by his actions when
they could no longer be determined by the sun and stars. I knew that it was morning when he came up from his cabin, ate breakfast, squatted on the glorybox, and then went down into the library. I knew that it was evening when he emerged blinking and abstracted, ate dinner, and then promenaded round the deck, smoking his pipe. I knew that it was night-time again when he went back down to his cabin to read. He would yawn once, twice, and then his lamp would snuff out. A rhythmic rattle would start up: he would snore until the morning.

It wasn't that I was spying on him; at least, not in the sense that he'd imagined. It was just that I'd come to feel so lonely, so utterly bereft, that even though I'd told myself I would ignore him, I found myself shadowing him for the illusion of companionship it gave, for the ghost of structure and meaning it added to my day.

It was during one of his evening walks, though the sun was as high and the sky as pale as midday, that I watched him notice, for the first time, that there was something different about the ship. At first he moved as usual, head down, hands behind his back, watching, if indeed he saw anything at all, his own feet in their grey canvas slippers. Without probably having ever been conscious of the clutter of tackle and gear, he must have nonetheless become gradually aware that there was now nothing to trip over, nothing to snag at his feet as he took his walk. I watched him stop, glance around where he was standing, then lift his head to look beyond, at the rest of the deck, at the masts, rigging, sails. Then he turned back to look at me. I crossed over to him, wiping my hands on the seat of my trousers.

“You did all this?” he said.

“Yes.”

He looked round the ship again. “You're not altogether stupid after all.”

“Is that so?”

“At least,” he said thoughtfully, reassessing his statement, “you seem to be possessed of some kind of instinctive capacity, a practical cleverness that, while it is not without its uses, has almost certainly got nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence.”