“Ah.” Oliver’s expression relaxed, the hardness leaving it. “Of course. I see it now. You’ve been led astray by girlish na?veté.”
If that was how he wanted to see me, it would be folly to argue. “She said Irene might be here,” I said, doing my best to look abashed. “You remember me telling you about how she disappeared? Irene is my friend; I had to help her.”
“There were things you didn’t know about Irene,” Oliver said regretfully. “You can’t imagine my dismay the other night, when she proved to be a hybrid.”
I pasted a look of shock on my face. “A hybrid?”
“Yes.” Oliver nodded. “Between your association with her and Dr. Whyborne, Mr. Ayers thinks you’re in league with the forces of darkness. Those who would bring about the end of the world.”
Could Oliver have simply misunderstood? Had he been the one led astray, fooled by the lies of the Fideles? I widened my eyes in what I hoped was a genuine look of horror. “Dr. Whyborne? Oh no, you must be wrong. I told you before, he’s a gentleman.”
“A mask of flesh over…well, I won’t trouble you further.” Oliver leaned forward. “Maggie…there are things I have to tell you. I’d thought to keep them from you, because the truth is terrible. The sort of thing no woman should be burdened with. But seeing as you’ve already been drawn into the web, used and taken advantage of by these villains, I fear I have no choice.”
Dread pooled in my limbs, but I fought not to let it show. “Then tell me.”
He took one of my hands. I forced myself to let it remain in his grasp, when all I wanted was to snatch it back.
“You thought Irene was your friend,” he said, looking into my eyes. “And the female ketoi as well, it seems. But what you don’t know is the Bedlam didn’t simply founder in a storm. Everyone on board, including Captain Parkhurst and my father, were murdered by the ketoi.”
*
All the blood seemed to drain from my extremities. Surely I had to have misunderstood. “Wh-what?”
Oliver released my hand and sat back in the chair. He looked tired, suddenly, as if reaching the end of a long struggle. “I don’t know if you recall, but one of the few remnants of the Bedlam found was the cork-lined trunk my father owned. It contained his diary, a few odds and ends…and a strangely carved rock.”
A summoning stone? I kept my face as neutral as I could.
“I didn’t know what it meant at first,” he went on. “Of course, I read the diary at once. He spoke of the trip across country, from New Bedford to San Francisco, and of his first look at the Bedlam.”
I nodded. As the number of whales decreased in the Atlantic, the company had begun to send its senior captains and crew to the more plentiful waters of the western arctic. It had been their first expedition to that portion of the globe.
We’d remained behind in New Bedford, along with Mrs. Young and Oliver. Papa and Mr. Young hadn’t wanted to uproot us from the homes and neighborhood we’d lived in for so long.
In the end, it hadn’t mattered. We’d lost it all anyway.
And now Oliver said it was due to the ketoi.
“After the launch,” Oliver went on, “Father merely recorded the ordinary thoughts of a man at sea. Minor infractions on the parts of the sailors, the weather conditions, how the Bering Sea differed from Hudson Bay. I kept reading, though, because it…it helped me feel closer to him.”
His mouth tightened with emotion. An unexpected twinge of jealousy ran through me. If only Papa’s log and diary had been recovered as well. At least Oliver had something of his father’s to keep, whereas we had nothing.
“I don’t understand,” I said, by way of prompting him.
Oliver seemed to come back to himself. “Forgive me. It was hard to read—it both comforted me and made my grief keener. As I said, at first the entries were ordinary. Then, one day, the men dropped nets to catch a bit of fish for their dinner. And when they pulled one of the nets in, they found tangled in it a creature such as they had never seen.”
I sat up straighter. “A ketoi?”
He nodded. “It hissed and snarled at them. Started to bite through the nets with those awful teeth.” He shuddered. “One of the men, Martinez, shouted they had to put it back in the water. Let it go.”
I had an awful feeling I knew where this was going. “But they didn’t.”
“Of course not.” Oliver looked at me as though I’d be mad to think otherwise. “For one thing, it wore a small fortune in gold and jewels, even if it wore nothing else. And for another, they’d just captured a creature, a human like creature, of the sort no one had ever seen. P.T. Barnum made a fortune exhibiting the mummified body of a monkey sewn onto a fish. How much more would a real mermaid be worth?”
Oh God.
Bile stung the back of my throat, and my head throbbed in time to my heartbeat. “They killed her.”