The House at Mermaid's Cove(24)

I couldn’t think of anything to say about the life they’d left behind that wouldn’t sound trite. Instead I asked Danielle what the other children were doing while she and Louis were milking.

“They’re helping in the kitchen,” she replied. “They’re making pastry with Molly from the village, but they’ll probably end up eating most of it before it’s even been cooked.” She grinned as she stood up to let me sit on the milking stool, revealing a gap in her top set of teeth.

“I used to love raw pastry when I was your age,” I said, reaching for the slippery udders. “Here goes—let’s hope I get it right this time.”

It took a while to master what Danielle had tried to teach me. I managed to squirt milk into my eye, which had us both in fits of giggles. I finally got the hang of it—but it was past midday by the time all the milking was done.

At the end of the afternoon Merle and the children walked with me as far as the church in the woods. Danielle and the others played on a rope swing attached to one of the yew trees while Merle and I went inside.

The scent of beeswax and incense made my stomach flip over. If I’d entered the place with my eyes closed, I’d have known instantly what kind of building I was in. It was the smell of churches the world over—so familiar but, now, strangely troubling. As my eyes adjusted to the shadowy interior, an image leapt into my mind—of Judas kissing Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was that what I was? A traitor?

“Shall I put the lights on?” Merle’s voice was a whisper.

“If you want to,” I whispered back. “I don’t mind it like this, though.” I caught the glimmer of stained glass in a wall of rough granite. It cast jewel colors onto a worn tombstone set in the floor. Somehow, I felt safer in the dark. Perhaps I thought that with the lights on, Merle would see the guilt written on my face.

“Would you like a candle?” She stepped away from me, to a metal stand to the right of the nave.

“Yes, please.”

I shielded the flame with my hand, following Merle as she carried hers. The flickering light illuminated ancient pews with birds and animals carved into them. We passed a lectern in the shape of a pelican—an echo of the symbol on the Trewella family coat of arms. A huge Bible rested on the bird’s outstretched wings. The pelican’s graceful neck was curved, its beak embedded in its breast. The light was too dim to make out the drops of blood trickling down its carved feathers to the two baby birds in the nest below.

We placed our candles in a tray of sand beneath a marble bas-relief of the Last Supper. I wondered who Merle’s was for. Her husband, I supposed. Mine was for me. A way of saying what I would have said to the Mother Superior, if I’d had the courage to go back to Dublin and face her: that I hadn’t lost my faith—but I couldn’t go on as I was.

As we turned to leave, a shaft of sunshine lit up the choir stalls in front of the altar. They looked even older than the pews. The dark wood was pitted with centuries of wear.

“I suppose you’ve heard the story about the mermaid,” Merle said.

“What story?”

She led me over to where the sunlight pooled on the smooth stone floor. “Can you see that?” She ran her fingers over the carved end of one of the choir stalls, tracing the outline of something I couldn’t quite make out. “It’s a mermaid. There’s the tail. And the hair.”

Suddenly I saw it. A bare-breasted, fish-tailed woman with hair hanging to her waist. She held a mirror in one hand and a comb in the other. Her nose and mouth had almost disappeared, as if generations of admirers had kissed her image. But her eyes were intact, big and round, as if they flashed a warning.

“People in the village say that long ago, a beautiful woman appeared in the church. No one knew who she was. She wore silk dresses and fur capes, and her voice was sweeter than anything they’d ever heard. She took a shine to a man in the choir—the best singer in the parish—and one day he followed her home from church.” Merle glanced at me, arching her eyebrows.

“Neither of them was ever seen again,” she went on, “until one Sunday a ship anchored in the cove. According to the legend, a mermaid appeared and asked the sailors to raise the anchor, as one of its flukes was resting on the door of her home, and her children were trapped inside. They weighed anchor and sailed away as fast as they could, because a mermaid was a bad omen. But when they described what they’d seen, people said the mermaid was the same woman who’d lured the man away—and that the children must be his.”

“So, the cove is named after the myth?”

Merle nodded.

“What a strange story.” I leaned forward to touch the carving. The surface of the wood was waxy from years of polish. “I mean, you can believe the bit about a rich woman visiting the place and luring a man away, but sailors seeing a mermaid . . . where did that idea come from?”

“Goodness knows. We have mermaid stories on Guernsey. People used to say that if a man followed a mermaid into the sea, she’d take him down to the depths of the ocean and eat him up.”

“That’s gruesome,” I said.

She nodded. “My grandfather knew a man who said he saw six mermaids playing on a beach when he was walking along the cliffs. They were probably seal pups, but he swore they were sirènes.”

She’d used the French word for mermaid. I asked her if people on Guernsey spoke French as their first language.