The Sea House: A Novel (4 page)

It would have taken such a lot of effort to do that. And why leave the child under our house when there was a whole island out there where a child could be tucked away in a quiet grave?

*   *   *

The old-fashioned cursive handwriting and dense theology made Alexander Ferguson’s book of sermons hard going. Each sermon was transcribed into a wall of impenetrable Gaelic. I realised with a pang that Mum would have been able to read all that. I could only remember tiny snatches of her Gaelic. I remembered
‘mo ghaol’,
‘dear one’, and a few other words she used to say when she was angry – words that she told me not to repeat – but that was it.

I was pleased to discover the occasional journal entry in English: nature observations; notes on Alexander’s daily life. Here the writing was looser, snippets of comments and reflections where you could almost hear Alexander’s voice. I flicked through the book to see if I could find more, the thin breath of the paper fanning my wrist. I realised that a couple of the pages were a loose insert. I carefully took them out.

The thicker piece of paper seemed to be a letter, copied out from
The Times
newspaper. Even in Ferguson’s time, the article would have been some fifty years old. I read on, blinked, then read it through again. A schoolmaster in Reay was reporting a sighting of a mermaid. I gave a half laugh, and turned the page over. On the back was a list of three further sightings with names and dates.

The second piece of paper was thin enough to act as tracing paper. Opening it out, I found some rather fine anatomical drawings. I turned the paper round, held it closer. The upper body of each one was human, but the lower part tapered to the bone structure of assorted sea mammals. It was as if someone had tried combining two skeletal systems to create the mythical form of a merman. I could see they didn’t really make sense at the join. I shook my head. Why on earth was Ferguson inventing mermaid skeletons?

When I showed the letter to Michael, he whistled. I called up Dougal on the phone.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, seemingly unfazed. ‘There were a lot of mermaid sightings in the old days. Not so much now, of course, now that we know better. But you know, don’t you, that there is the grave of a mermaid, down in Benbecula, in Father Mac’s parish?’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘But it can’t have been a real mermaid. What on earth did they see to make them think that? Dougal, what do you think it was that the schoolmaster in Reay actually saw?’

‘That, we may never know. But evidently our Reverend Ferguson was asking the same questions.’

I put the phone down feeling a bit shaken. I’d always accepted that Mum’s tales of sea people were some kind of old fairy story – nice, but nothing significant. But now I was beginning to wonder. Suddenly, I felt a lot less smug about being able to explain the baby skeleton. Frowning, I went back to Alexander’s notebook and began to read through the journal entries with close attention.

CHAPTER 3

Alexander Ferguson, 1860

As soon as I heard the news from my servant girl, I hurried to Benbecula, but with the tides being difficult and the journey through the Uist isles long, I arrived too late. The wake was already finishing, the crofters almost all dispersed to their homes, and the minister refused my request to have the coffin dug up and opened, so that I might make an examination of the body. I thus made a further arduous journey, returning across the estuary to enlist the help of the harbour sheriff in Lochmaddy but he refused to go above the minister, and made it quite clear that he looked upon my request to disinter the mermaid – if such she be – with great suspicion.

The hour was growing late, and on the islands darkness is complete unless there is a moon, so I found lodgings at the harbour inn. While my dinner was being prepared, I took the opportunity to walk out and enquire among the fishermen if there were any among them who had seen the mermaid while she was still alive, or had had occasion to see her body before it was buried. By their frowns and puzzled faces they implied that my poor Gaelic was causing them great difficulty in understanding my questions, but as they turned away, I saw some of the men cross themselves. They understood me perfectly well. As soon as they decently could, each one of them turned his back and resumed stacking his ropes and creels. The water in the harbour beyond them was unusually still, a great sheet of red glass in the setting sun and I noted that there was a second black inn and customs house perfectly inverted in the water. Eventually, the silence grew long and I had no choice but to return to the inn’s bare little dining room and wait for my supper.

I found the landlady, however, a devoted gossip, and kindly disposed to help me improve my Gaelic. During the course of my dinner she settled herself at the far end of the table. ‘It was the MacKinnons who found the poor lady, lying dead on the shore. And I heard that Eilidh MacKinnon touched her with her own hand, just as I am touching this plate now.’

I slept between somewhat damp and musty sheets that night but I slept most contentedly. The landlady had given me directions to find the aforementioned persons, and my feelings may well be imagined as I lay in the dark and anticipated speaking with the very people who had seen and even touched this as yet scientifically unrecorded creature.

I was awake with the first light and composed a letter to the Dean of Science at the university in Edinburgh, requesting him to order an exhumation. I assured him that there were eyewitnesses who could attest to the existence of this half-fish, half-human specimen, and though I could not lay claim to complete certainty in the matter, it was my belief that the creature might hold the key to some previously undiscovered branch of the evolutionary chain.

This was an opportunity such as may not come twice in a man’s life, I assured him, and I urged the Dean to kindly dispatch his reply with every haste.

I left the letter with the landlady, along with an entire shilling to deliver it to the mail boat, and rode out towards the sea the happiest man in Scotland.

Of course, at that time I was not to know that the Dean’s reply would be most discouraging. He refused to order the raising of the mermaid’s coffin and wrote that I was too ready to give credence to ‘the fanciful tales of fairies and legends held by the aboriginal peoples of the Western Islands in their state of ignorance’. He suggested, now that my health was improving, I should consider making arrangements to return to a parish nearer to Edinburgh, where I could study once more alongside men of science and reason, and so continue perhaps with my classification of molluscs and crustaceans from the coast of Fife.

By late afternoon I had arrived back at the western seaboard of Benbecula. After enquiring at some of the black houses – which a visitor may easily mistake for a pile of stones, since they are surely some of the least civilised habitations in Europe – I was able to locate the whereabouts of the women mentioned by the landlady. I rode out to Traigh Mhor and left my horse grazing while I walked across a vast plain of wet sand that mirrored the wide brightness of the sky, to where two black figures were stooping to fill their buckets with periwinkles.

Once they understood my request, the women were very anxious to share their story. They asked for no coin. They appeared to be simple women of good character, deeply affected by the encounter. The details were as follows.

On the morning of June the sixteenth, 1860, Kate MacKinnon, and her mother, Eilidh MacKinnon, were gathering periwinkles and other seaware from the shores of the island of Benbecula on the Atlantic seaboard, when they were astonished to see a woman, visible only from the waist up, gliding along a little way out to sea, her lower portion hidden under the water. She swam in closer, whereupon a huge tail could be seen wavering beneath the sea’s surface. The creature remained with them a good hour, travelling up and down the shore as the women worked. Since the creature had a cheerful face and called out to them in a kindly voice, they called back to her, although they were unable to understand her language. They were sorry to see her swim away and not return.

The following morning, after a great storm, the two women returned to their work on the shore and were grieved indeed to discover the mermaid lying dead on the white sands. She was of small, adult size, her face clearly a human face, and with long black hair. The skin of her naked body, however, was unlike that of any man or woman living, being smooth and
‘sleekit’
as the skin of a seal. She did not have legs, but in their place, a tail covered in a thin, loose skin. One of the women told me that she had touched the tail, which felt as smooth as a fish, but without any fish-like scales.

*   *   *

I made my way back to Harris by boat and horseback, feeling increasingly feverish and cold, and once again fell prey to doubts: how could it be that I, a man of science and education, was willing to entertain a belief in mermaids? And yet, I remonstrated with myself, are we not, as scientists, called to consider the evidence? Could it not be possible that these persistent rumours and sightings were reports of some undiscovered link in the transmutation of species, the type of link that had been recently predicted by Mr Darwin? Might there be, visiting these very shores, a creature as fantastical as any newly uncovered, ancient fossil – but which was not yet extinct?

I returned to the manse very late, the house a black shape against the dark sky. I was glad to see a lamp still lit in the hallway. After so many hours of mental speculation beneath the host of white coals in the night sky, it seemed to me that I had taken fever less from the cold than from attempting to encompass the whole of Creation within my own small brain. Dizzy and aching, I fell rather than alighted from my horse and was heartily glad to see the maid come out carrying a lantern.

I was gratified to see that she had waited up for my arrival though it was not many hours till morning. In spite of an inauspicious start, my faith in her was beginning to pay off, evidenced by her daily progress towards civilisation and thoughtfulness.

I also noted with a sigh, as she helped me unbutton my wet greatcoat – my fingers too numb and cold to achieve this small task myself – that many were the days when I would wish to see the evidence of such progress in myself.

As I pulled off my boots and left them to steam in front of the fire, I was forced to admit that there were personal reasons for my determination to discover any truth behind such rumours of sea people. For when I was a child, my dearest grandmother taught me not only her native Gaelic but also the stories braided into that tongue. My mother expressly forbade such superstition, but many were the evenings when the old lady held me spellbound with the old tales while the Aberdeen mists came in round the house and the ships’ horns boomed down in the harbour. She insisted my own black hair was dark and
sleekit
because all Selkie children are born covered with such hair, though, she said, it falls away quickly from the rest of the body.

As I grew older, I dismissed my grandmother’s stories as the innocent ramblings of the uneducated. But now, living in the islands, where the stories of the sea people seemed to be but yesterday’s news, I felt compelled to follow through with my enquiries – only trusting that in seeking out the truth of the matter, I would not thus destroy my own reputation, or indeed, my own peace of mind.

CHAPTER 4

Moira, 1860

The first day I came to the house of Reverend Ferguson, he looked down at my bare feet and said, ‘We must get you some boots, Moira, my dear.’

So he sent off to Glasgow and they came in a brown paper parcel, and they fitted me well longways, but they never did fit me for width. So he wrote off again to the shop that sent them, asking if they had any wider boots, but they replied that it was my feet that was wrong, not their boots, since feet didn’t ought to have been so wide in a woman.

The Reverend stuffed them with wet paper to make the leather stretch a little, but even so they were still sore to my feet. When not serving at the table, I pulled loose those laces and always kicked them off whenever I went out on the grass.

I knew I had good feet. Where I come from, forty miles away from here out in the Atlantic, everyone had good strong feet. My father, he had powerful big ankles, standing steady on the cliff face as he tucked the gannets under his belt like a fat skirt. Uisdean and me, we used to lie on the turf, put our heads in the wind and peer over the clifftop and watch the sea boiling a thousand feet away below us – almost as far away as the sky above. And there, down on the crags, my father, standing steady as he eased the bamboo pole along, slipped the noose over the guga’s neck. A tug on the rope to Finlay to say he was climbing up, and we watched him as he made his careful, easy way, back up the cliff face.

When they cleared us off the island, my father said we would not go to Canada with the others. So the factor of Lord Marstone promised us a home, on his own big island. ‘John,’ he told my father, ‘I have long valued you as a tenant. I will make sure that your new home will be far more suitable than this place. You will have a shop you can walk to.’

So we had a village shop ten miles away, and no road, and no money to buy bread and tea. He put us away on the Minch side of his big island, where the sour soil poisoned the crops and rotted the potatoes in the little bits of bog between the rocks. And we soon found out that our improvements in circumstances was a hovel that had killed all those who lived in it before us. There never was such a badly built, cobbled together pile of stones, more tumbling down than standing.

The coughing disease was in the walls. That’s why it was empty. I watched them all die, my dear ones. I got tired of the long walk across the island to where the soil is soft enough to bury a coffin. The factor came and burned the house down when he thought we was all gone. He did not see me watching him from up on the cairn as he fired the roof.

After, the world forgot I was ever there. There was talk of a witch haunting the marshes up on Bleaval, of ghostly fires set on the bog waters. Though I was then but a girl of sixteen, I was fast, you see, at snapping a rabbit’s neck and could lay a fire in a hollow to cook it quick as you like. I was glad they didn’t come near, glad they was afeared of me, because I was getting strong, and I had my reasons for getting stronger. When I had all my strength, then I would find that place where that landlord lived, and while he lay quiet in his bed, I would slit his throat, to pay me for the family he stole, to pay me for myself. For it sometimes seems to me that I must have died and live on only in the empty houses of our village.