The House at Mermaid's Cove(13)

I used to wonder what Jesus would make of all the rules the convent imposed on those within its walls. There was nothing in the Gospels about not looking in mirrors, not making friends, or taking a vow of celibacy. I closed my eyes and turned over, pulling the sheet up over my head. What I wanted was to lead the kind of life he would approve of, without all the restrictions of the order. It was all well and good telling Jack that I was ready to leave the order. But could I really do it? Was I strong enough?

Unable to shut out the babble in my head, I got up and lit the lantern. Its yellow rays glimmered on the shiny black cover of the Bible Jack had brought me. It was on the upturned apple box I was using as a bedside table. It sat there, accusingly. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to open it. I limped over to the shelves under the window. An idea had come to me—something I had done as a girl of sixteen but hadn’t been permitted to do as a nun. I would start a journal. A record of this new life I was embarking on. The only source of paper in the boathouse was the blank pages of the tide tables. They were all out of date, so I didn’t think Jack would need them.

I took one of them from the shelf, flicking through to the back. There were a few lines of handwritten notes about a fishing trip, dated March 1938. His writing was very neat and meticulous compared to my own scrappy script. A few of the letters had a dramatic flourish. The capital S of the word sardine looked like a curled serpent about to strike, and the lowercase d had a tall, looped back. There was another word, Firefly, that was a forest of loops at the end. Was that the name of a boat? His boat?

Turning the page, I noticed something else. A name. Morwenna. Was this another boat? Or a woman? There was nothing to give any clue. Just a date in April 1938. Exactly five years ago. There was no more writing. Just blank pages after that.





Chapter 5

The next morning, I woke suddenly, gasping for breath, my heart beating fast. What my sleeping mind had conjured up was so vivid it took me several seconds to grasp where I was. In the dream I had been on a boat—not the Brabantia, but one of the small wooden craft, called pirogues, that were the main means of travel for the native people of the Congo. We were gliding along misty rivers banked by dense forests looped with lianas. The young black men who poled the boat along were singing a ballad with a strange repetitive rhythm. Then I heard cries coming from the forest. The screams of children. I tried to make the boatmen stop, but they wouldn’t listen. I scrambled up and tried to jump out. Then I was in the water. I was fighting the current, trying to get to the children.

I felt a hard, biting sensation in my chest. The faces of the children hovered in front of me. It was as if, wide awake, I could still hear them calling out to me. It took me a while to realize that the voices were real. There were people outside the boathouse—on the beach.

I struggled into my clothes. In my haste I forgot to use the crutch to help me up, only realizing when I reached the door that my right foot wasn’t hurting anymore. I slipped my legs into the Wellingtons and opened the door just a crack. The sunlight was dazzling. I shaded my eyes with my hands.

Four children were darting in and out of the waves. The eldest was a girl about nine or ten years old with blond braids streaming out behind her in the breeze. She and another girl were running away from two boys. The bigger boy was throwing water from a pail, and the smaller one was stumbling along in a gas mask, his arms outstretched and his fingers clawing the air as if he were pretending to be a monster.

There was a woman chasing after them, shouting at the boy with the pail. She had the same blond hair as the older girl, held up in a bun, which began to slip down her head as she picked up speed. As I watched, three of the children disappeared behind some rocks. The woman went after them. The smallest boy, left behind, started spinning round and round, until he toppled onto the sand. The gas mask must have banged against him as he fell because he let out a yell and clutched his head. His mother seemed not to have heard him. I could hear her giving the other children a piece of her mind behind the rocks. I wanted to run to the little boy and gather him up. But I dithered on the doorstep, afraid of interfering.

Soon the woman reappeared. “Oh, Ned! What have you done!” She scooped the child up. She undid his gas mask and tilted his head to examine it. “Let’s kiss it better!” She buried her face in his golden-brown curls. As she straightened up, she caught sight of me and waved. Hoisting him onto her hip, she came across the sand.

“Hello,” she said, holding out her free hand. “I’m Merle.” She pronounced the name the French way, not rhyming it with “pearl” the way English and Irish people would. But her accent wasn’t French. Her voice had a lilting quality, softer than Jack’s. “I’m from the house.” She nodded toward the trees above the beach. “Are you the cousin? From Ireland?” The way she said it was tentative, almost reverential. As if she were addressing someone terribly important.

“Yes, I . . . I’m Alice.” Her hand felt warm. I could feel grains of sand on her palm. Smile lines crinkled at the corners of her eyes, which were the same pale blue as the water behind her. The little boy gave a choking sob and wiped the back of his hand across his nose. “Is he all right?” I asked. “Would you like to bring him inside? Does he like honey? I could give him some—”

Before I could get the words out, the child wrestled himself free of his mother’s arms and went running past me, into the boathouse.