His blood throbs. His heart is pinned to his chest, its spasm surely audible. He holds his breath and takes another step backwards, but there is something under his foot – a dead leaf or a bird’s decayed wing – that betrays him with a crunch.
She stiffens, then darts, her shawl and her nightgown and her hair flying behind her as if her movements leave a pale residue on the air. She is running down the lawn but is still some distance away; she cannot see him from his vantage point. ‘Where are you?’ she cries, moved suddenly to anger, and surges immediately towards the summer house, her lantern swinging high. ‘I will have no more of this!’
Although she is very close she cannot quite discern where he hides, and he is able to look at her for a good long time as she stops before him, her hair standing out as if it were electrified, and her feet spread and her face furious. The dawn light makes her unfamiliar; there are dark blooms in her eye sockets and under the shadow of her hair; her skin is luminous here, greyed there. She is panting hard; he hears her swallow with exertion or fear, he cannot tell.
‘Here I am,’ he says quietly.
‘What are you about?’ she demands. ‘What are you thinking? Creeping round at all hours, never here when I seek you, and what secrets you are keeping I cannot begin to think. If you mean to drive me to madness, it is very skilfully done.’ She waves her hand with such energy the lantern goes out; she drops it to the ground with no further thought. ‘Enough! I demand your behaviour changes, or I will quit you. Do not imagine I will not. I do not need you, sir!’
‘Come away,’ he says, hurrying forward. He takes her wrist. ‘Come indoors. We shall talk about it. Whatever you wish to say, I shall listen to you.’
She is craning to look past him. ‘What have you down there?’
‘Nothing.’ He pushes her onward.
‘Not nothing. I ought to know my outbuildings; I am mistress of them, am I not? And yet I never wondered why you kept the key to that one. What is it?’
‘Come away. Do not raise your voice; you will wake all the household.’
She pushes him away. ‘And what if I do? I have nothing to hide from them.’ She lunges into the stairway and almost loses her footing; he hears the shale scrabbling down and then she – still not three steps in – says, ‘Oh.’
‘Be careful,’ he says. ‘The stairs are very steep; the light is not good.’
He takes up the lantern from the grass and reignites it with shaking hands. Then he approaches behind her, holding it aloft to light her way.
She is poised on the steps. She touches one mussel shell, then another. She traces their bull’s-eye circles. ‘What is this?’
‘Go inside,’ he says. And she advances slowly, he following behind, and her hair in the cold breeze washes back upon his hand. She descends and descends, and in the chamber exclaims.
Something has happened there in that earth-enclosed chamber. The sorrow pours from the vat as if it were steam or smoke; it is invisible but it churns in the air, and fills the lungs; there is the simultaneous sensation of being so full of grief as to choke with it, and yet an emptiness, a dreadful lonely howling void.
She seizes his hand convulsively. ‘Be with me! I cannot bear it!’ and turns to him, fearful. ‘What is this?’
‘I do not know,’ he says. ‘It came from the sea.’
‘It is a trick,’ she says, not too far gone to remember her suspicions. But then she turns this way and that to look at the lions, the peacocks, the fans and arches all picked out in so many thousand shells, and how the lantern light flickers over them so they seem to creep. The shine of the pool in the furthest chamber sends reflections of its ripples scurrying over the walls: in the dark, everything moves.
She thinks a great hand has seized her. The feeling is – she cannot say – longing, or grief; that thing which is called by sailors Nostalgia, whose sufferers sicken for their home and fade away still weeping for it. And if they have no home to go to, it hardly signifies: the pain is just as deep and sweet. Her footsteps are loud and cold on the flagged floor; she tips her head up and her sigh resonates off the vaulted ceiling and comes back to her own ears a hundred times. It rolls also around the belly of the great copper vat, which crouches black and unadorned.
‘Is it in there?’
‘Look,’ he says.
He keeps a three-legged stool nearby for his nightly communions with the creature, but Angelica rejects all assistance. She hooks her fingers over the rim of the vat and hoists herself upward with all her strength. She can only remain for a short moment, before her slippers give up their grip on the copper and her arms tremble too violently to hold her. She turns to him, her fright compelling her as ever to anger.
‘Water?’ she spits.
‘No, no.’ He spreads his hands. The moment has come. ‘That is your mermaid.’
Her poor face expresses a thousand feelings and none. She shakes her head and knots her fingers. ‘I have thought for some time,’ she says, ‘that one of us is becoming insane. And I feel more confidently now which of us it is.’ But she looks about herself. She does not believe it.
‘Please. Look again. Your mermaid came. It is real.’
She twists her face. ‘Real as Mrs Chappell’s; real as a dead ape ever was. I am finished here, sir.’
He reaches out to her. ‘You cannot pretend this creature has had no effect on you. Let me help you up, and you will see what I see.’ He steps towards her with his arms outstretched, not a gesture she has known for some time, and this is why she acquiesces. Holding his shoulder to steady herself, she scrambles onto the stool. Her slippers are thin and precarious; she wobbles but she is up. She leans over the vat and frowns.
‘I see nothing,’ she whispers.
‘I swear.’
And she is quiet. She leans forward as still as a figurehead, hair ruffled by the breeze that has played through those chambers for who knows how long, and was born nobody knows where. Her eyes are dark and downcast; her fingers dig into his shoulder, and he feels the tremble of her arm as she holds her weight steady.
‘What do you see?’ he asks.
‘I see her.’
‘And?’
‘When I was a little child,’ she whispers, ‘I lived by the sea. On stormy days, I would to go to the wall at the edge of the harbour and look at it. I sat very still, as I am now, and I would stay there for hours.’ The wind outside picks up and comes hissing down the hill, stirring the grass with its invisible fingers, and sweeping down into the grotto. Her arms break out in gooseflesh. ‘It was so buoyant,’ she says, ‘energetic and terrible. I was so afraid of it that sometimes all I wanted was to leap into it.’
As the first streak of dawn nudges the horizon, he nods. ‘Yes. You do see it.’
She does not alter her position, but her whole body trembles, for it is a cold night to be abroad in only a shawl and a cotton wrap. ‘What are we to do with it?’ she whispers.
NINETEEN
By the time the sun has come up, and they have quit the mermaid’s lair for the house beyond, Angelica’s doubts are all flown away. ‘I will have it rule us not one minute longer,’ she declares to her husband. They have not slept, but sat together at first simply wondering, and she asking many questions, and he shaking his head and sighing, I cannot say. I do not know, while she becomes increasingly giddy in her relief. ‘For this is the cause of our misfortune,’ she says, ‘and where the cause of a trouble is plain there can be found a way to set it right.’
‘I cannot find it,’ he says tragically.