The House at Mermaid's Cove
Lindsay Jayne Ashford
Chapter 1
Cornwall, England: April 1943
I thought the sea would take me, but it spat me out as the sky was turning pink. I drifted in like flotsam, washed up in a sandy hollow among weed-strewn rocks. I lay there, numb with cold, broken shells prickling my cheeks. Why could I feel my face but not the gashes on my feet?
I must have been slipping into unconsciousness when the banshee wail of a gull pierced the fog inside my head. As I gulped for breath, a gush of water stung my nose and tongue. It tasted like Dublin Bay oysters. How strange, when my life was hanging by a thread, to remember something I hadn’t eaten for a dozen years.
It was a dog that found me. If it hadn’t been for him, I might have lain for hours in that hidden place, until the tide came creeping in to pull me back to where I’d come from. He’d been rooting about in the trees above the cove and gone tearing off when he scented something more interesting on the beach. Not me. A rotting gannet, I found out later.
I heard the barking over the lapping of the waves and the cries of the seabirds. Then I caught the sound of someone singing. A man’s voice, deep and clear. The words were in Latin. For a moment I thought I really had died. It was the sort of thing I’d always imagined angels singing. But then the dog came bounding over, snuffling in my ear and pawing the bare skin of my shoulder.
The singing stopped. I felt the thud of feet on the sand as the man ran to see what his animal had found. A pitiful, shameful sight I must have been—naked but for the chemise, which had ripped when the waves carried me through the spiked ribs of the metal barrier at the mouth of the cove.
I heard him catch his breath as he dropped down beside me. I felt the heat of his hand on my head, his fingers raking cropped hair wet and slick with salt, like the fur of a seal. Then he must have spotted what was stitched into the neck of the chemise, because he said it aloud.
Nine-three-seven.
That was the first clue to where I was: my number, spoken in English. His hand traced one of the threadlike scars that crisscrossed my back. Then his fingers were on my wrist, feeling for a pulse.
“Can you hear me?” He turned my head sideways. He scraped sand from around my nose. The smarting sensation brought a muffled whimper from somewhere inside me. Then I felt the weight of his body pressing down on my back. Seawater gushed from my mouth. I spluttered, retched. The dog barked at me. I could smell his breath, rancid with dead meat.
“Be quiet, Brock!” He grasped my shoulders. “Can you sit up?” He turned me over so that I was half sitting, half lying, on the sand. Through a blur of salt water, I saw that the chemise had ridden indecently up my thighs. The shock of that brought the wrong language to my lips.
“Ne me regardez pas!” My hands went to the frayed hem of the fabric, tugging uselessly.
“You’re French?”
As my vision cleared, I saw flecks of amber and gold in his irises. Black lashes and eyebrows. A face not much older than mine. “Not French. Irish,” I croaked back. The sea had burned my throat.
He tilted his head, an intense look in his eyes as if he were trying to see through mine to catch a glimpse of what lay inside.
I tried to stand up. But when the soles of my feet met the sand, I crumpled.
“You’re bleeding!” He took a large white handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around my right foot. As I watched him, I realized that blood was oozing from my left ankle, too. When he saw it, he pulled off his sweater and unbuttoned his shirt, which he bound around my other leg. I caught the scent of his skin as he bent over me. It made me think of the men I’d seen sunbathing on the deck of the ship as we’d headed up the coast of Africa and into the Mediterranean. I watched his hands, mesmerized, wondering if any of those men were still alive.
“You need a doctor.” He wrapped his sweater around my shoulders like a shawl. Then he lifted me as if I weighed no more than his dog. One of his hands was under my thigh. Somewhere in my fogged brain a voice cried out. But I hadn’t the strength to make him put me down.
He carried me across the beach to a low building sheltered by the trees that fringed the cove. The morning sun lit up walls of pale gray stone with sky-blue painted shutters over the windows. I wondered where I was. My throat stung too much to ask. He held me with one arm as he dug in his pocket for a bunch of keys.
It was as dark as night inside. There was a faint smell of fish and woodsmoke. He set me down on a pile of something that rustled as I settled into it. When he struck a match to light a kerosene lamp, I saw rods propped against the wall in front of me and nets hanging from the rafters. I was sitting on a great heap of sailcloth, my injured feet resting on a coil of rope. The dog was beside me, making a bed for himself in the crook of my arm. I hugged him to me like a furry hot-water bottle.
“I’m going to light a fire—get you warmed up a bit.” He was crouching in front of a potbellied iron stove, tossing in kindling and logs from a willow basket. “Can you get out of that wet undershirt? I’ll fetch you a blanket.”
I glanced across at him as he went back to the stove, afraid that he would turn around and see even more than he’d already seen. But he was pouring water from a big metal canister into a kettle, which he set on top of the stove. It was hard to wriggle out of the chemise. The sea had molded it to my body like a second skin. He kept his back to me until I’d covered myself up.