She is rubbing her eyes. ‘A little. Only let me count up our takings.’ This gives him a little pang, since she is now intimately acquainted with his financial doings: if she reports back this aberration to her mother … but then her mother will hear of this, he accepts with a chill; perhaps she has already heard. He decides Sukie is far enough stepped into this business that it will do no harm for her to continue, and so he helps her carry their strongbox down to Mr Murray’s office. All day she has scribbled shillings and pence down in columns on a large leaf of paper; now she sets about matching the coin to the figures.
‘You will need a new ledger devoted to the mermaid,’ she says. ‘Daily takings and outgoings; and a separate book to account for every coin as you receive it. And you want a day-book, separate again, to record particular doings and correspondence, and a file to contain all that is written about it, and finally a large book to copy all the other books into.’
‘You have given this some thought,’ he says. He is impressed.
‘Common sense.’ She is stacking wobbly clipped farthings into towers and does not look up.
‘No, you are an accomplished girl. One day you will be a wife of rare talent.’
‘Like as not.’ Sukie’s secret ambition is to marry a gentleman in possession of a good trade but poor health, who will die very shortly after the children are born and leave her be. In such circumstances no body could blame her for entering into business herself, and thus thriving. ‘Here,’ she says, frowning, ‘I need you to count this again. I am distracted, I daresay; my total does not seem right.’
He scoops the coins towards him and begins again while she rises and paces the room, her palms in the small of her back. Rebbie’s borrowed stays pinch, and do not hold her in the way she is accustomed. The coins chink against one another, and his lips move silently. At last he sits back in his chair.
‘Well?’ she asks.
‘What did you come to?’ He looks a little stunned.
‘Thirty-eight pounds, four shillings and sixpence.’
‘Then you were correct. At least by my count, this is the sum we took today.’ She gives a little yelp, and he rises to embrace her. ‘Dear niece, all may yet be well! What a venture!’
She nearly skips for joy. ‘More than your sea-captain had supposed!’
‘If we go on this way, we shall be …’ Shall be what? He can hardly imagine. ‘No. Best see it as one remarkable day.’
‘So let us bow out while luck favours us.’ She yawns.
‘Ah, there is your good sense again.’
We fill their minds even when we are far away. They fancy they see us even when they do not. They tell one another stories about us.
The stories are of men who, walking on the shore, hear sweet voices far away, see a soft white back turned to them, and – heedless of looming clouds and creaking winds – forget their children’s hands and the click of their wives’ needles, all for the sake of the half-seen face behind a tumble of gale-tossed greenish hair. They cast themselves into the water, sometimes, their shirts gone to air about their bodies, or wade ungainly across the shallows, stumbling on weed-slick rocks, the gooseflesh standing out on their calves. And sometimes they never return.
Those that do, how can they explain themselves? What can they say? They felt largeness beyond words; they heard in the visitor’s lovely song something so unknowably perfect, pristine as mountain ice, that they would cast everything precious aside to hear more of it. These females from the other side of the world’s mirror pursue their own lust with impunity, never thinking to wait meekly to be approached, but complacent in their own beauty, calling out, I want you; I want you; come to me.
The stories are of brave men who turn their faces away, who remain resolute on the shore despite the ringing in their ears and the thunder of their hearts. And then what? The stories are of mermaids spurned who burn down churches, who strike men dumb, who see to it that your cradle will remain for ever empty. Petulant and cruel, these females, and vengeful.
The stories are of the bravest of men, who crept so softly down that the lady, communing with the wind and tides, or raising her silver arms to wring out her wet hair, never heard his approach until he seized her up. The stories are that mermaids once subdued make fine and modest wives, as loving mothers as any, except that they have a peculiar sense of humour, and often laugh aloud at ordinary things, like an old man hoarding his coins, or a pail of milk gone sour in a thunderstorm, as if there were something foolish to it all.
And then of course there is no leaving a sea-wife unattended. She is restive, and paces as if she still heard that dreadful calling from the water; she will go to the shore and stand there as the sea foam races about her new-minted ankles, her face sheened with tears. Unwatched, she will seek out the scrap of mackerel skin that fell from her when first she was dragged from the water. Given the means to return to the sea, she will unhesitatingly cast off the bonds of motherhood, forget her uxorial vows. She will vanish for ever in the turn of a wave as if it had all meant naught to her. For mermaids are the most unnatural of creatures, and their hearts are empty of love.
NINE
It goes on in this way for ten days. Mr Hancock neglects his office to loiter in the coffee-house, marvelling at the crowds of people he has drawn there. The first arrive not long after dawn, and they continue to stream through the doors even after St Edmund’s bells chime twelve; they would go all night if the door were not bolted against them. A group of Catholics come to pray about the creature and cast its demons out, but although they gibber on, the mermaid does not stir so much as a fin. Students arrive from Oxford already drunk, and liberate it from its glass bubble for a game of catch-as-catch-can. After that Mr Murray arms himself with a cosh. A man from the Royal Society comes to inspect the mermaid: he does not declare himself baffled, but his face speaks it plainly.
‘Ah!’ he cries in triumph after hours of increasingly frantic scrutiny. ‘There are stitches on it! And here, evidence of a wire frame.’
‘Well, how else were it to be preserved?’ asks Mr Murray in exasperation. ‘It is only mortal, after all – its body no less corruptible than any other low creature’s – we are fortunate it has been stuffed with such care as to preserve its original appearance. If it were a mere manikin it would require no such intervention: what greater testament could there be to its legitimacy than the fact that it has degraded, decomposed? You accepted the kongouro, did you not, and that was brought back a mere tanned hide.’
‘But that creature was witnessed alive,’ persists the man from the Royal Society.
‘And so was this, I daresay. There’s not a fishing town in England that has not been visited by merfolk at one time or another.’
‘Captain Cook saw the kongouro – a gentleman – his word is beyond question.’
‘Ah, a word’s a word. Any gentleman can tell a lie; any scoundrel can talk truth.’
‘An abundance of eyewitnesses!’ The gentleman’s argument falters; there is real terror in his eyes.
‘All of them on the same voyage,’ Mr Murray muses, ‘not an independent sighting amongst them.’
‘Well, how could there be, when no other man has ever gone there before?’
‘Convenient, that. Look, sir, it strikes me as contrary that you will accept the existence of a kongouro, which you never saw or heard of before, on such slim testimony, and yet how many tales have you heard of mermaids, and how many sailors report seeing them? In the annals –’ he waves his hand to indicate the sweep of history – ‘there is centuries’ worth of evidence to satisfactorily account for the existence of sea-maidens, and yet none at all for what creatures may creep upon the plains of an entire body of land that nobody visits and, need I really remind you, bears no name at all but Incognita.’
The expert hesitates.
‘Look at the thing!’ Murray exhorts him. ‘And consider whether such a beast could be invented.’ He pats him on the shoulder. ‘You know for yourself what is true, sir.’