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When at last the queen is finished – when the noises of her meal cease – I force myself upwards from where I’ve huddled on the floor, hunched over Ena, rocking her until she subsides to hiccups and a troubled sleep. Then I lie the child on the ground, gently, and approach the lip of the well.
I look at the red, red water, at how it splashes over the silver tail, obscures the bed of shed scales beneath the sea-queen – how many months’ accumulation? At least five. How often did my mother do this… reaping? I can never know. I walk around the well, around its great circumference, and come to a metal lever. With only the smallest hesitation, I push it, and it takes all my strength, but eventually I hear a grinding (no one’s kept this oiled since Isolde went away), then a gushing. Then the lever swings itself back into position and I look into the well again. The water is refilling, but the bed of scales is gone, washed into the chutes that will take it to the mines for one last harvest. I can feel the creature watching me, but I still don’t meet her eyes; once was enough.
‘He,’ I say, ‘had O’Malley blood. I don’t know what you can or cannot understand of me, but I promise you this: I will set you free. But that was the last of us you will have and in return you will be held captive no more.’ I swallow. ‘I’m sorry for what was done to you. I can never make it up, but I can offer your freedom. I will never return to Hob’s Hallow. I will not return to the sea and nor will any child of mine. I will set you free, and you will leave the lake, and swim to your home, for all the waters in the world are joined.’ I say this last like a prayer.
I risk a glance, and see she is considering me.
‘Promise me you will go, and cause no harm to anyone here.’
A beat, a long pause, then she nods. A sharp simple motion.
‘I will need help to free you, but I will be back, I swear. It will take me some time.’ A feathery, finny eyebrow is lifted. A lack of belief, certainly. I touch the bell-shaped pendant at my throat; crafted, no doubt, from one of her scales. ‘I can only promise. I am… not like my kind.’
Not entirely… but there are three dead men who might say different.
I turn around and I can see the door, now, quite clearly, and open, open wide! How could I have missed it? Fear. Fear. Fear, renders everyone blind. I gather Ena up and she makes a kittenish noise but does not wake; I retrieve Aidan’s lantern. On uncertain legs, I cross the stone floor, and realise that the torches can be removed from their place in the walls, so I take one to light our way back up, up, up where the air does not smell so much like the dead things of the deep.
* * *
From the bottom of the blanket box I pull out my duffel bag, and from I take the tattered bridle with its silver fittings. I dragged Ena’s cradle from her room and put it in mine, for the moment at least, and she sleeps there, quiet as a mouse. I pull out the book of tales, too, the one that Isolde started and I look more closely at the coat-of-arms on the front. I trace the bas-relief of the embossing, of the silver foil, the cunning way the lines join and flow; seeing it in a way I never could the old version with all its detail rubbed away.
It takes a while but eventually I see them differently and I realise that I’ve never seen it properly: at last a new picture emerges as if there are two layers to the art.
The uppermost, the most obvious, is the Janus-head, double-tailed mermaid of my childhood. The other, however, is entirely different: two figures, back to back. The one on the left, a woman in profile, with flowing hair, draped over the shoulder of a harp, and the upward curve of the soundboard looking like a section of a split tail. On the right, the mer-queen, her head close to the woman’s, also in profile so they might be taken for two-faced, her tail arching up on the same angle as the soundboard, but both of them joined at their spines, never able to move away from each other.
I sit on the floor and stare. I stare for a long time – so long that perhaps I sleep – and when I finally rouse the sky outside is greying with light. I leave Ena sleeping and go outside, the bridle jingling in my fingers. I run to the edge of the lake, stop carefully, then with only the slightest hesitation, I kneel.
I hold the bridle over the surface, watch how its reflection becomes clearer and clearer as I lower it. My hand shakes – I will never lose my fear of this for as long as I live – then with a sharp intake of breath, plunge the bridle beneath the waters. It is so cold. I feel the tremor once more, the lightning hit of the liquid on my skin, think how salty it is, and wonder again how Isolde made this
