The Surface Breaks(43)

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.

Daisy has warned me about Eleanor, told me to be careful. “You can’t trust her, Grace,” she said one night after everyone else had gone to bed. “She asked me… she asked me to keep an eye on you. To report anything strange back to her. If she found out that I kept this from her…” Daisy blanched. “I need this job, Grace. My family depends on my wages to pay our mortgage.”

I don’t know what a mortgage is but I know that Daisy has been kinder to me than any other person above the surface, and still I give her trouble. I am like the kitchen’s cat, bringing in dead mice and laying them at the servants’ feet, expecting them to be grateful. Why must I always cause problems for the people I love?

“Grace?”

An insistent voice and a nudge to my ribs, and for a moment I expect to see my father looking at me, at his dreamy youngest daughter, with an expression between indulgence and irritation. But it is Eleanor awaiting my response, and it is not Sophia trying to keep me out of trouble, but George. He smiles gently at me, showing slightly uneven front teeth. Eleanor, he mouths.

“I said, you look tired, Grace. Are you sleeping well?” Eleanor says. She turns to Daisy, who is waiting tables tonight. “Daisy, has Grace been sleeping well?” Daisy doesn’t reply, dropping a salad spoon to the floor. “Daisy,” Eleanor says. “I asked you a question.”

“She has been sleeping fine, Mrs Carlisle.”

“She doesn’t look like she’s been sleeping fine,” Eleanor says. “But you wouldn’t lie to me, Daisy, would you?” All the guests titter politely at the thought, Daisy’s blushes betraying her discomfort.

There is an empty seat at Eleanor’s side. Oli has not come to dinner this evening; he and Rupert had “duties to attend to”, Eleanor informed us before dinner began. What duties could Oliver have at this time of night? Duties that involved Rupert, but not George?

I have been stuck here ever since, listening to the men talk to each other about politics and war over the heads of their female companions. I had not expected there to be so many similarities between this world and that of my father’s. War and money are still the domain of the men; serious, muttered conversations in private rooms, waving cigars, while the women are expected to adorn themselves with jewels, ensure they are pleasing to the eye. Men talk, women listen. All the women but one…