“Thank you, Daisy,” Eleanor replies. She is dressed in the violet dress she wore to dinner. (Spindly candles in silver candelabras, flowers blooming through the centre of the table, but no Oliver… “Busy, I’m afraid,” Eleanor had told the guests and they waited until the president of a neighbouring country engaged her in conversation before they started to gossip. “I mean, really,” they whispered, “how can Eleanor Carlisle be trusted to run an entire company if she can’t get her own son to attend a dinner party? The market is so volatile right now, did you see that latest report from…” These people have no uneasiness about speaking this way in front of me, of course. No one is wary of a girl who is mute.)
“You may leave,” Eleanor tells Daisy now. “I would like to speak to Grace before bedtime.”
Daisy doesn’t move, standing by my bed as if she is my guard; like the armed escort that flanks my father on the rare occasion he leaves the palace.
“Daisy,” Eleanor says. She sounds like Oliver, the same imperious tone, barely masked irritation at not being instantly obeyed. “I asked you to leave so that I can speak to Grace in private.”
“Yes, Mrs Carlisle.” Daisy backs out of the room, widening her eyes at me in warning behind Eleanor’s back. What is she trying to tell me?
“So,” Eleanor says when we are alone. “May I?” She gestures at the bed and I nod in acquiescence. It’s oddly intimate when she settles beside me. We only ever sit at opposite sides of the breakfast table but when we are this close, I can smell her perfume, floral with a hint of something woody, can make out the criss-cross of fine lines around her eyes and mouth.
“I see you, you know,” she says. “Night after night. I see you going down to the water. What is it about the sea that fascinates you so?” I shrug, the very picture of guilelessness, for how can I tell her that I need the sea? I need a respite from all the noise and the clamour of this world. She catches hold of my elbow. “You really are astonishing to look at,” she says, but there is no emotion in her tone. She doesn’t say it the way others have said it, as if beauty is something I should be celebrated for, as if my face is all I need to be deemed worthy of love and respect. She doesn’t say it like Oliver does either, like he’s blaming me for making him feel something he does not want to feel.
“I have heard tell of another woman with eyes so blue and hair so red,” she says, twisting her wedding ring around her finger. “One whose beauty could rival your own. It’s quite some time ago since I first heard of her, I never actually saw her. Not in real life, anyway.” She laughs, a dry humourless sound, like the cracking of a whip, and I feel very cold. Is she talking about…? “But her face, oh, her face haunts my dreams.” She peers closely at me. “And sometimes I cannot tell the difference between her face and that of your own. Isn’t that peculiar, Grace?”
I shrug again, surreptitiously wiping my sweating palms on the bedcover.
“I’ve seen the way you look at my son,” she says. “There’s no need to be embarrassed.” She reaches out to take my hand in hers, and grips it too tightly, rubbing at my knuckles as if she wants to wear the flesh away. “Oli is a handsome boy, and charming when he chooses to be. But I don’t want you getting hurt, Grace. You don’t want to know what it’s like loving a man who is in love with another woman. It can send you…” She laughs in that strange way again. “Well, it can send you quite mad.” I stare at Eleanor’s hand, the heavy jewelled rings on her fingers. All paid for by Eleanor, with Eleanor’s money. Everything in the house belongs to her.
“Oliver’s girlfriend died,” she says. “Did you know that?” Viola, with her blunt haircut and those long legs. The way Oliver looked at her: he has never looked at me like that. “Oliver and Viola were childhood sweethearts,” Eleanor continues. “The Guptas are an important family in this county, and Viola was much sought after, beautiful as she was.” She was beautiful, Viola. I wish I had her brown skin and her brash laugh. I wish I had her voice. I wish I had any voice at all. “Oli and Viola would have been married within a few years, and we were all delighted. A very suitable match; it’s not like Oliver Carlisle could marry any old stranger he picked up on the street. Or the beach, as it were.” I bite my lip to stop its tremor. “But I do not tell you this to hurt you. I tell you this for your own good. My son is grieving, more deeply than you could ever understand.” And what do you know of me? I want to ask her. What could you ever know of the sorrow that I have endured? “Oliver does not see you in that way,” she says. “Not now, not ever. It’s important for you to retain a little dignity. That is all I came here to say.”
Eleanor stands in a rustle of silk, placing a hand to my forehead as if she’s blessing me, like Cosima did on the night before I left the palace. Maybe they were both secretly cursing me.
Then she’s gone. I take a huge gulp of air, as if I had forgotten to inhale for the duration of her visit, and I pick up the hand mirror on my bedside locker. The face in the glass; the eyes so blue, the hair so red. And I see the woman who haunts my dreams. I see my mother. Was Eleanor talking about— The sea, I think. I need the sea.
I throw the covers away from me, dragging myself out of bed and tiptoeing down the stairs on these broken toes. Each step is white-heat, acid in a gaping wound, licking the edges with a caustic tongue. The front door thrown open. The marble steps. And then the sea, oh, the sea.
It is calling me, but it doesn’t speak to me, it doesn’t call me daughter any more. Its voice is as lost to me as my own and I’m not sure which hurts more. I soak my feet in its waters, the pounding solace, throw my head back to show the night sky the gaping hole where my tongue used to be. I wish I was able to talk to someone, that I had someone to hold my hand and tell me that they cared about me. I realize at that moment I am lonely, and I have been so for as long as I can remember. I realize that a part of me broke the night my mother left, that night of my first birthday. And I am not sure if I know how to put myself back together again.
My father told us that she abandoned us that day, that she chose to indulge her selfish obsession rather than stay close to home with her children. She was dead, he said, she was captured by the humans. He said that he would have saved her if doing so hadn’t meant endangering the entire kingdom. (But I think we should remember, girls, that maybe she didn’t deserve to be saved, he would say, waiting for us to nod in agreement. He needed proof that we loved him the most.) And yet the Captain said a mermaid had never been captured in all his time at sea. He would have heard tell, surely, it would have been the talk of the county.
I promised myself I would discover the truth about my mother’s fate but I have been so consumed by Oliver, by my determination to make him love me, that I forgot about Muireann of the Green Sea. And for what? Oliver makes me feel something that I do not understand, something that I cannot name. But… but he does not love me, his mother says – and he never will. He loves a girl called Viola, and she is dead. What am I doing here?
I look at the star-smeared sky – only two weeks to full moon, two weeks, and how am I supposed to make this man love me if he’s never here to see me, to witness my beauty? I thought I knew despair when I was under the sea. I thought I knew true loneliness. As a tear trickles down my cheek, falling salt on my lips, I realize that I was wrong.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Daisy’s draught wears off quickly now, pain eating through its relief with jagged teeth, licking its lips and looking for more flesh to devour.
“Please let me get you help,” Daisy begs one evening. The bleeding had gone on and on after she removed the bandages, and I must have fainted with the weakness, regaining consciousness to find Daisy’s stricken face staring down at me. “This has gone too far. I’m afraid for you,” she admits, and I am ashamed for what I am putting her through. “Let me just get the doctor. Mrs Carlisle never has to know,” she says.