The mer didn’t seem to look at the boy, but kept her eyes on Aislin, and the girl saw there, or thought she did, something cold and clever, almost admiring, with a lick of contempt. Admiration, for the girl was smart enough to stay back; contempt, for the girl said nothing to keep her brother safely with her.
The creature’s arms were scaled, Aislin noticed that then, and their reach was long as it grasped Connor and drew him in. The nails were more than nails, they were claws and the thing had no care for keeping the boy calm; the talons dug in further and further, so fast Connor barely thought to scream for a moment. And then he did and when he did it seemed he’d never stop, and the walls that had rung so recently with a siren’s song, now echoed with Connor’s last noises.
Aislin, unfrozen so fast, dropped to her knees and scuttled to the tunnel, which was wetter as the tide began to come in, steeper than it had seemed going down. As she crawled, rivulets of water poured towards her as she left the strange light of the sea cave behind and wiggled in a panic towards the tiny speck of sunlight left above.
And that’s the finish of it. None of the tales in this book end with the words “happily ever after”.
‘Is it true, Grandmother?’
Aoife smiles and her face transforms, though I don’t know whether it’s for better or worse, but she’s more beautiful, younger, when she smiles, that I must say.
‘Is it true, Grandmother, the story? Are any of them?’
She shrugs, does Aoife. ‘You know there was an Aislin, once.’
I know where Aislin’s portrait is in the main gallery upstairs. Even in her middle years, she looks like me; the silver ship’s bell pendant hangs around her neck. Or we all look like her, I suppose. And she in turn looked like all those who went before, with their dark hair, darker eyes, and strangely luminous skin, as if the moon lives just a little within us. I know there’s no image of her brother Connor there and, though there’s a headstone for him set into the south wall of the chapel, I’m willing to bet there are no bones sleeping behind it. But Connor should have lived, and the baby…
There’s a painting of her, that younger sister, Róisín: she’s eighteen, wearing a nun’s habit. No one but an O’Malley knows that she should never have been named for she was meant to belong to the sea – it’s harder to lose something once you’ve called it, owned it – and her birth shouldn’t have been recorded because she had another purpose. I also know that there is no portrait of my own mother (I wonder if Aoife burned it) for Isolde had somehow offended her parents before her death; Maura and Malachi have both told me that I look like Isolde, but I wonder.
‘What of the maid, Grandmother? The scullion? She disappears from the tale.’
‘People disappear all the time; perhaps she went away with the fairies.’ Aoife grins more broadly, but her gaze is cold, her tone too. ‘Don’t be a child, Miren, you should be beyond such things, such stories.’
‘Then why do you keep the book, Grandmother?’ I ask and her hands, with their long fingers, the blue tracery of veins, convulse around the cover before she can stop herself.
‘Stories are history, whether they’re true or not,’ she says and there’s that beauty again, and I’m awed at how she once looked; no wonder neither Silas nor half the men in Breakwater could say no to her. There’s a hint there that beneath her skin she never was very kind. I know that; she raised me. I wonder, as I have always done, whether she was kinder to my mother when Isolde was small.
I do love my grandmother, not simply from duty, but Aoife O’Malley (proper O’Malley, the daughter of first cousins, married to a first cousin) has never been what you’d call kindly. Even as she’s grown older, there’s been no mellowing, and only the slightest slowing of her movements. She’s smart, is Aoife, but not very patient, so the times when she’s found me especially challenging, I’ve paid for it when her temper’s snapped.
‘What did you discuss with Aidan this afternoon?’ I ask at last.
She shrugs dismissively. ‘That we’ll go and visit him in a few days, when the will is read. Perhaps we’ll stay overnight rather than race against the dark to get back here. It will be nice, won’t it, to have a sojourn in town?’
Nice perhaps if you’ve any money to spend on amusements, on a fancy meal or a scandalous show. Perhaps she’s hoping Aidan will open the mouth of his purse out of pity. But Aoife’s never been a fool or one to believe in fairy promises.
‘Go to bed, Miren. It’s been a long day.’
In my bedroom with its almost-empty armoires, writing desk, duchess with an age-pocked mirror, canopied bed and tiny bathing corner, I undress. I take off the corset and examine the impressions the whalebone has made on my torso, I dip my fingers into the furrows in the flesh, then move them until they find the scar just above my right hip (there are other scars but I don’t touch them, don’t seek them out). Raised, still pinkish despite the years. A brand, really, though the finer details have been lost in the healing: a Janus-faced mermaid with two tails. The same figure that adorns the family crest, the same image left only as an embossed impression on the cover of our book of terrible tales since the silver foil is long gone.
And I dream, that night, about mothers who chose between their children, who decide
