The Folk Keeper

“There is no one here.” I paused, smelling recently turned earth, rotting wood, and mildew. “You disturbed the baby’s grave!”

A taste like spoiled apples rose in my throat, and the details of that scene froze themselves in memory. Me, looking down, seeing an ivy-covered mound, my worn boots, Sir Edward’s black rosettes. It was a quarter past one.

“No one but you will notice,” he said. “No one comes here much, and I’ve covered the raw earth with leaves and ivy.”

Something was terribly wrong, but perhaps something was also terribly right. “Finian is not really ill, is he?”

“He’s well enough to be looking for you in Firth Landing, making sure you haven’t stolen aboard the Mainland ferry. I told him you’d crept away from the Cellar. He didn’t even stop to look for you there, just went searching. And as you were to be found nowhere on the estate, what would he conclude but that you’d run away?”

“I didn’t run away!”

Sir Edward shrugged. “Finian seemed to think he might even be responsible. Half the serving staff is scattered about Cliffsend, looking for you. The Manor won’t be this empty again until the Harvest Fair, when everyone down to the scullery maid takes a three-day holiday.”

“Liar! I never left the Cellar.”

“I must make you understand.” He pressed at my shoulder, I sank to my knees. His candle shone on the tiny gravestone.

Unnamed from the darkness came.

Unnamed to the darkness returned.

Born and died: Midsummer Eve.

I saw what I’d not before realized. “My birthday!”

A terrible darkness poured itself into my mind; my muscles gathered of themselves to leap away, but Sir Edward snatched me from the air as though I were a sparrow and tossed me onto the grave.

“Damn!” He pressed his finger to my collar-bone, pinning me in place. “My candle has gone out. No screaming, or I shall have to stop you, like this.”

He squeezed my throat, trapping the old air inside. I struggled beneath his hand. Everyone thinks breathing in is so important; no one thinks about breathing out.

Sir Edward relaxed his grip. “You’ll not try again, will you?”

I shook my head, whispered, “What do you want?”

“I want to know what Finian knows. He sees too much, that boy; he’s made more trouble for me than I care to admit.”

“What Finian knows?” I repeated stupidly.

“Does he know who your mother is?”

“My mother?”

“Ah!” said Sir Edward, and laughed. He turned my head on its pillow of dirt. Directly ahead lay the Lady Rona’s weathered headstone.

Another frozen moment: a dimpled moon, an ivory cheek, the smell of fresh-turned rot. Twenty-seven minutes past one.

My mother. I might have denied it, but etched into my memory was the inscription on the gravestone. Midsummer Eve. A holiday never celebrated on the Mainland, one I’d never connected with my birthday.

“But the baby died at birth,” I whispered at last.

“So you didn’t know!” said Sir Edward, and his fingers relaxed on my throat. “Then perhaps Finian hasn’t worked out the real story for himself. I only have just today. Hartley tricked me into believing the baby died, just as he always tricked me. Tell me this: Did Finian know about the Lady Rona, know she was a Sealmaiden? Which means, of course, that you are, too.”

Bolts of lightning might have struck my temples. I was dizzy, my thoughts buzzing uselessly, beads on a vibrating string. “I’m no Sealmaiden!” The mere sound of it is soft and tender. Not like me.

“It’s the old story,” said Sir Edward. “Your father out for a moonlight sail. Your mother dancing on the Seal Rock. He fell in love with her, stole her Sealskin, insisted she marry him, live on land. What could she do? Without her Sealskin she couldn’t return to the sea. Perhaps you can guess at the rest. Misery, jealousy, madness, and death.”

“What makes you think I’m her daughter?”

“You gave yourself away by calling up that storm.”

“Calling up the storm?” But already I realized what I had done. The sea cared nothing for my pact. It cared only for my blood. Three drops of Sealfolk blood to call up a storm.

To think that I had almost killed Finian! Really, I might have, with my casual vengeance. Finian. I wanted to say his name again and again, place him firmly on the earth, where he was usually solid enough. Finian! said my mind, but I forced myself to attend to Sir Edward.

“I’m a careful man,” he said. “I knew you must be of the Sealfolk, but I couldn’t be sure you were Rona’s daughter until I opened the grave. There are no little bones in that coffin. The story of your death was just that, a story Hartley gave out.”

“I refuse to be his daughter!” Not that hateful man with the dead metal eyes.

“You refuse him just as he refused you. He was entranced by your mother, but you were not an attractive baby, and he must have come a little to his senses. A Merton can’t have one of the Sealfolk as his heir. It would be so like him to give out that you’d died, but instead have you sent away where he could keep track of you from afar.”

“Knowing about me, his baby, all those years?” I hated Lord Merton more than ever. “Having the Matrons inform him when I was moved from Home to Home?” I’d fooled him once, though. He hadn’t known I’d become Corin. He’d known Corinna was sent to the Rhysbridge Home, but no one had known to tell him she’d turned into a boy.

“How he loved to control people,” said Sir Edward. “I could never escape it. Now he’d dangle the Manor in front of my nose. You shall inherit it, he’d say. Now he’d say he rather thought he’d get married again. My bride shall take the estate, and her son after her. Perhaps he fetched you back to Cliffsend because he could not bear to lose control of you, even when he was dead.”

“But he couldn’t bear to let me inherit, either?”

Sir Edward shook his head. “Although as between you and Finian, there’s little to choose.”

Oh, I understood him then. The estate was Sir Edward’s blood, his life, but as Lord Merton’s daughter, I stood in his way. So did Lady Alicia and Finian.

“I mean to marry Alicia,” said Sir Edward. “She will have me, I am almost sure, if that son of hers doesn’t stick his nose where it’s not wanted. And then I shall be master of Marblehaugh Park by marriage, not by blood. Wouldn’t Hartley be surprised!”

He seized the front of my shirt and pulled me to my feet. What a long walk that was, Sir Edward’s fingers wrapped round the back of my neck, steering me past the vacant eyes of the chapel Saints to the wall circling the shaft into the Caverns.

“You mean to put me in there!”

“We shall get through the Feast of the Keeper very well,” said Sir Edward. “I have every expectation of a good harvest with the Folk quiet and content from their sacrifice.”

“Me, as sacrifice!” But I couldn’t be afraid of that, when first I had to be afraid of dying as I fell into the Caverns. “You won’t have a live sacrifice.”

“Listen: There’s a stream beneath.” Sir Edward held up his finger. From deep underground came the sound of running water magnified by a cavernous space. “Others have survived the fall through the Graveyard Shaft, so will you.” He turned me by the shoulders so my back was pressed into the stone, my face full in the moonlight.

“But the Folk won’t touch me. I have the power of The Last Word.”

Sir Edward shook his head. “It all comes together for me, now that I know you’re no boy. How did you manage so well all these months as Folk Keeper without that power?”