‘Oh no – no. You only brought me what I asked for.’
‘I should never have brought it here.’
‘I should have proceeded differently when I discovered it. Oh, sir, do you think she will die of it? She is so awful still.’
But the doctor who comes just before dawn, and takes her faint pulse, and inspects her broken nails and bloodied knuckles, only raises an eyebrow. ‘A nervous complaint,’ he pronounces tersely. ‘The night wandering – the rages – the lack of care for her own person. One sees it often enough in girls her age, although what they have to weigh so heavy on their minds I am sure I cannot guess.’
‘What can be done for her?’ Angelica sniffs.
‘I shall give her a draught to help her sleep. But you must train her better. It is evident she has been indulged; you are making a rod for your own back if you do not take her into hand. Strong passions are troublesome in a girl, but intolerable in a woman: check her now, Mrs Hancock, before she gains a reputation.’
‘We shall do no such thing,’ Angelica storms, and the doctor meets her husband’s eye with pity as he departs.
With Sukie at last sleeping, Angelica folds her arms. ‘We must put an end to this,’ she says. ‘Immediately. Come with me.’
They lay another blanket over Sukie, and take the precaution of locking her door before descending to the hall and through the servants’ door to the back of the house, where hangs the row of leather fire buckets. ‘Fetch some down,’ says Angelica, who is too short to reach them herself. ‘Quick, quick. I am meant to be your helpmeet, not you mine.’ Together they bear two buckets each out onto the lawn. The sky has taken on a greenish dawn tinge, fading into cobalt and bright white, and then the most blushing orange of a ripe apricot. Down the hill, the mist sits on the river. In the garden of their house, morning is flourishing: daisies unclench before the sun and bees hum amongst the overgrown roses. ‘A strange wedding gift you gave me,’ she muses as they reach the folly. ‘A real creature too sorrowful to display. A thing that tells us what we really want is out of reach. Give me your key.’
‘What are you about?’ he asks, looking askance at her, but he puts his buckets down and takes the key from his chain.
The staircase descending is swept and newly mortared, fine and regular so as to trip nobody up. And down within, the vaults are musty no more, but fragrant, and scrubbed, and camphor-smelling from the rugs laid on each brick floor. There have been many sconces fitted to the walls, and Angelica parades around, lighting the candles in each one.
‘You see?’ she says. ‘As if there were need for a mermaid in this place. It would only distract.’
She darts into the last room, lined with chairs. The vat, in the centre of the room where it was left, is large and ugly, soot-blackened and – he sees now – much dented. Its canvas cover is lashed on with a rope that is unravelling back into flax, and Angelica wrenches it off at once.
‘What are you doing?’ he demands, and now a sense of real panic seizes him.
‘I do not want this. I cannot bear this. To be content as best we can must be enough for us.’ She fetches one of the elegant little chairs that line the walls, drags it to the vat, and scrambles up on it. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘it will be easier than you think. For she is not a solid creature.’ She plunges her arm into the vat and makes a fist. He thinks he will faint. She remains there for a moment, her eyes fixed intently upon his. ‘See? See?’ and then brings out her empty hand, dripping. She swoops again, seizing at nothing. ‘I believe we can take her apart in buckets, as if it were only water we were moving.’
Outside, the dawn chorus stirs and crescendos.
Angelica climbs up to fill her buckets, and each one seems to her to let out a little ‘oh’, an echo of water on metal. ‘Take these,’ she says.
He stands immobile. ‘No, no. I cannot.’ My mermaid. All I worked for … ‘Our party,’ he protests.
‘Never mind that. This thing must go.’ She hauls the buckets aloft, and drips hit the brick floor with soft little cracks. He steps forward, takes them from her. ‘Take them over there –’ she points to the pool – ‘we are going to give this beast its freedom.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘I want it gone away from my family.’ She has a sibyl-ish look about her, her hair awry and her white shawl draped over her shoulder. ‘We have detained it too long. If it is angry, it is because of our ill-treatment of it. What trapped creature does not strike out? Now, here. Help me.’
‘Oh,’ the buckets drip as Mr Hancock carries them, dizzy with fear, to the rock-lined edge of the pool. And, ‘Oh,’ they sigh as he empties them, two by two, whole buckets of sorrow pouring into the dark water.
He thinks he sees her there, in the well’s queer phosphorescence; she dances like stars and then plunges downward. Far beneath the surface, she swings in netty lengths, rediscovering her atomised self. Then he goes back to switch his empty buckets for full ones. Standing by her chair, he reaches only Angelica’s bosom. She stoops to kiss him. ‘You see? This is the right thing to do.’
He goes back and forth more times than he cares to count, and his arms ache and his feet become chilled. His wife’s lips are the only warm thing in the cavern, and he returns to them with each visit to the vat.
Presently, Angelica finds she has emptied so much that she can no longer reach the surface of the water still contained within it. She is not afraid. ‘Nothing for it,’ she says, and hitching her wrap up above her knees, she climbs in. The water comes up to her shins, and is not as cold as she had expected; it is at least not the gripping cold she felt the night she swam around Mrs Chappell’s fountain. She crouches down to fill a bucket. The water swirls about her, almost loving, and she feels its soft sorrow tickle her skin as if a great many little fish nibbled her.
‘Take care,’ says her husband.
‘Oh, we are all right.’ She crouches to stir the water again, the way children squat on the foreshore and study the drifting grains of sand. ‘We are all right, are we not?’ she croons to the water where the mermaid was. Then she passes up a bucket. ‘These are the last two,’ she says. ‘One for you and one for me.’
He helps her scramble from the empty vat; her wrap is wet and clings to her calves and thighs: even her hair is wet, and clings to her shoulders. She seizes it and twists it like a rope; dropples fall to the floor and she laughs.
‘Are you ready?’ he asks, and she follows him to the pool, each leaning a little to accommodate the weight of their bucket. He realises that he is tired; his bones drag as if they have been turned to stone, but this priestish moving of the water is nearly at an end. Even the vaulted cells of the grotto seem a little brighter than when the transportation began. Angelica draws close to his side as he empties his bucket into the pool, with a swirl and a gulp. Then she steps forward herself, her pail raised above her head. With her hair loose and her white wrap clinging, she might be fourteen years old and dancing as an acolyte of Venus once again. She balances the bucket on her shoulder, tips it gently, and pours it out in a long unbroken stream, so that at the end the water closes in a perfect ‘O’, and one single drop leaps up into the air.
‘And so it is done,’ she says.
First I sink,
Then I trickle,
Then I rush.
I am here; and here; and here. I touch this surface and also that.
I mingle, I quiver with a thousand new voices, and all these voices my own. I am a great tumble of motion which torrents all in unison.
And learning and knowing are the same, and I am a mite, and we are all the space allowed to us.
And if I am made of grief, well! Here is joy, and if I am made of fury, here is peace.