“But — but Stephen … there was no choice.”
“No choice,” he thundered. Suddenly he clutched his chest and turned a ghastly color. He staggered toward her as if he were about to strike her. He raised one hand. At the same moment his eyes rolled back into his head and he fell to the floor.
Marjorie Snow stood over him, rooted to the spot. She held her hands over her mouth not quite believing what she was seeing. How had it come to this? What if someone had heard Stephen? Perhaps the maid, who was cleaning in the next room, heard him accuse her of the murder? She felt a cold fear engulf her. She looked down at him. His tongue protruded from his mouth as if he still wanted to speak. But he wouldn’t. No, he couldn’t, and slowly the words stirred in her brain. My husband is dying … my husband knows … but I am safe.
A new world seemed to open up for Marjorie Snow, widow of an obscure Episcopalian minister. There was a certain comfort in obscurity — particularly when one was a murderer. It wasn’t exactly murder, though, she told herself. Anyhow, she would have the annuity. She could move someplace, perhaps abroad. She could begin again. She looked down at Stephen. His face had pulled into a horrid grimace. Now, how did one go about announcing a death? No, not announce. She’d better go and summon the maid, say that the reverend suddenly just collapsed.
Heart attack, she supposed as she looked down at her husband. His hand was still on his chest just as it had been when he fell, as if trying to grip a heart in revolt. His other arm was limp on the floor. Perhaps she should move it so it would appear as if both his hands were trying to quell this pulmonary rebel. She bent down and delicately lifted the arm and then arranged the hand so it rested atop the other hand. “There!” she whispered softly. It was the same soft sigh that her mother would often emit when removing a perfect pie from the oven.
PHINEAS HEANSSLER sat scrunched over on the floor of the sail loft, simply staring. He felt paralyzed. He had never been in a situation like this, a situation that he could not fix. If a boat he had built had one of those annoying slow leaks, he could always track it down. If a sail was not cut right, he could recut it. If a rudder was ill balanced in its fittings, he could rebalance it. But this — this sentence of death by hanging — was unfixable. He felt he was drowning in grief and frustration.
Beside him was the newspaper that he had flung down with the dreadful headline and the picture of Lucy being led from the courthouse. Her chin was held high as she looked straight ahead. It was almost as if she were daring the photographers, as if she were saying, “Look at me!” Phin thought about the life-changing revelation May had made when she admitted that the sisters were “not quite human” and braced for his disgust.
But as he looked at Lucy he felt only pride. Not quite human. She was the most human creature he had ever encountered. How did one measure humanity anyway?
“Not quite human” was how May had put it when she came to the boatyard that terrible day when Lucy had been arrested. He could not remember what he had said in response. He was almost dizzy, for the experience of May Plum standing before him was so disorienting. How had he never noticed the close resemblance between Lucy and May? May, of course, lived out on Egg Rock with her father, the lighthouse keeper, Gar Plum, and his strange wife, Hepzibah. Beyond the natural isolation of living offshore they were a very reclusive family. So there were not many occasions when Phin’s and May’s paths would have crossed. They were not identical twins. The May who stood before him that day was more like a slightly blurred image of Lucy, and just as he was trying to absorb this, May had said that there was in fact a third sister named Hannah, who worked as a servant at Gladrock. This was news to him.
“And none of you are — are … quite human?” he had asked. May had nodded silently. “But what do you mean?”
“We are mer.” He remembered pressing his lips together trying to repeat the sound as if he were back in the first grade learning to read and trying to decode a word in his primer. “Mer people,” she said. “We are from the sea.”
“B-but what does that mean? You are here now. You live on Egg Rock, not in the sea.” He looked completely puzzled. Phin was not accustomed to being puzzled. He spent all day solving equations for his yacht designs — how to calculate wind shear and hull speed; displacement and waterline formulas. But there were no equations applicable to the extraordinary disclosure that May had calmly announced.
“At night we swim.”
“But lots of people swim.”
“Not like us.” She seemed to glow when she said these three simple words. And then she began to explain how their bodies changed. How their legs and feet merged into long shimmering tails. How they could swim vast distances.
“Nantucket Shoals in one night from here?” Phin muttered to himself, then looked up at her. “How fast?”
“Faster than the Prouty,” she replied. The Elizabeth M. Prouty was the coastal steamer that plied the waters from Boston to Bar Harbor and points beyond.
“That can’t be. The Prouty goes eighteen, nineteen knots.”
“We can do forty with the current against us.”
His jaw dropped. He was trying to fit the image of the girl standing before him, wearing a simple muslin dress that looked as if it had been patched a hundred times and a faded shawl, with what she had just said. Her boots were scuffed. He could see a seam had opened on her left one where the heel met the leather. He was trying to imagine her with the powerful tail she had described, slashing through a boisterous sea. And this same mysterious transformation happened to Lucy as well, and their sister, Hannah. She was talking about swimming a hundred and seventy miles to Nantucket Shoals as if it were a walk in the park. Then she was saying something else.
“Lucy won’t die from a hangman’s noose.”
“What do you mean?” Phin asked.
“She’ll die from not swimming,” May said emphatically.
“I — I — I don’t understand.” He shook his head and May had to look away. The anguish in his face was terrible.
“It’s hard to explain, but the older we get the more difficult it is on our bodies if we stay away from the sea. I am beginning to feel it now myself. There is going to be a time when Lucy and I and Hannah have to decide between land and sea.”
“Or else what?” He leaned forward, trying his best to put together what she was saying.
“We’ll drown if we try to go back when it is too late.”
“B-b-but,” he stammered, and took a deep breath, then started again. “You could live on land. I mean, couldn’t you?” He seemed to be begging her.
“Yes, but we must never again be tempted by the sea. So it would be like a living death for us.” For some, she had almost said. How could she explain Hannah’s fiancé, Stannish Whitman Wheeler, who had thrived on land, grown rich from being the most sought-after portrait painter on two continents? But Phineas knew nothing really of Wheeler beyond his being a fancy society painter who sometimes came to Bar Harbor.
It had been nearly a month ago that May had told him all this. Now he heard a creak on the stairs. Before he looked up he knew who it was. May. She stood before him again and put a light hand on his shoulder. It was all in her eyes. She did not need to speak a word. The worst had happened. He closed his own eyes tight. “No time for tears,” May said. “We’ve got to get her out!”
He swallowed and clamped his eyes shut tighter. The gears of his mind seemed to whir. The granite blocks of the jail might be three feet thick. Dynamite? Possibly. Laying a charge? Perhaps. Now was not the time to panic. Now was the time to act. To calculate. This was a problem to be solved. The fact that Lucy was mer was not a problem. It was who she was. Her nature. Her essence. Her prime. Yes, that was it! She was as immutable as a prime number. But the prison was different.
The shadows cast by the light passing through the barred window at this time of day made it seem as if the very air were imprisoned. Phineas sat on a small stool. In the corner, Otis Greenlaw, the constable, sat watching
them carefully, trying to hear their whispered conversation. Touching between prisoners and visitors was forbidden. Phineas’s eyes wandered from Lucy’s hands, which grasped the bars. The masonry work was solid. Beautifully dressed stone. Each granite block was immense and must have weighed hundreds of pounds. One tiny window high near the ceiling let in a sliver of light and it, too, was barred. A cannon couldn’t blast through this, he thought. He found it easier to look at the rock than at Lucy. Looking at the rock was like trying to solve a problem, a mathamatical equation like computing what the possible hull speed might be with a given waterline on a sailing vessel. But these were rocks. And so in a sense was Lucy. Her face was unperturbed, almost placid, as if she had accepted her fate. This — her utter placidity — killed him.
“Look at me, Phineas,” Lucy whispered. Was she that ugly? Had she changed that much? She knew the texture of her skin was different. Every morning she swept up the strange little teardrop-shaped crystals that she had shed during the night. Hannah and May had told her they, too, had begun to shed these before they had crossed over and discovered their true natures. It stopped as soon as they began to swim regularly. They had not said it, but Lucy knew it was a kind of withering away of her mer soul.
Nevertheless, the fug of the land seemed concentrated in this jail cell. The air was heavy and thick. The small bowl of water they gave her to wash in was grimy, and she felt encrusted with the accretions of land, land and what was called society or civilization. She had the sudden realization that one did not have to be incarcerated to feel oppressed. She never before saw clearly how unnatural and constricted the land life was. Her physical existence might cease on the end of a rope, but she had now begun another kind of dying, a shriveling up of her spiritual essence.
This was the first time Phin and Lucy had seen each other to speak. He had come to the trial every day. But they had not been permitted to talk. And now that they could talk, even though it was through the bars, he was not looking at her. She figured that May had told him about being mer, and she wondered if that was it. Did he find her repugnant in some way? She looked down at her hands and his wrapped around the cold metal bars. She could see one small sparkly crystal stuck to the metal. She looked up. His eyes were scanning the walls, the ceiling. It suddenly struck her. It was the same way in which his eyes moved over a drawing of a yacht or a scale model, or the yacht itself when he was calculating wind loads per square foot of canvas or hull speed or any of the variables that went into designing a boat. He wants to break me out!
But this is not a yacht, she wanted to scream. It’s a jail. The walls are granite. The bars are iron. The windows are so small — hardly big enough for a baby to crawl through, let alone a full-grown girl.
“Look at me, Phin. Listen to me.” She slid her fingers through the bars and grasped his hand. He turned to her. A soft light suffused his eyes. She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it. “I know what you’re thinking. It isn’t possible.” She glanced toward the constable. The little piggy eyes peering out colorless from his bloated red face seemed to be drooping. He was almost asleep. He had not seen Lucy kiss Phin’s hand. He sat in a chair too small for his large bottom. He did not say a word. But his eyes were shut now and no longer staring at them as if to say, “Don’t even think of it!” A snore issued forth.
At first, Otis Greenlaw had found it exciting to have the murderer, “the poisoner,” as he called her, in his jail. It had been over thirty years since the last criminal, or rather the last real felon who was hanged, had occupied the cell. That had been in the time of his father. He had read up on it. It had been one Silas Bentham accused and found guilty of cutting his wife’s throat. Terrible, brutal crime. He noticed that they had referred to his father, Otis Senior, not as the guard of the tiny prison but as “constable.” Hence he had started insisting that any reporters address him as constable and refer to him as Constable Greenlaw in any newspaper reports. But the excitement soon wore off. Lucy Snow was not the monster that Silas Bentham must have been. She was just a quiet, mousey little thing. It had all become rather boring. When he told his wife this, she replied, “Don’t let her fool you, Ott. Still waters run deep. Poison, witch’s brews, and such.” She gave him a dark look that made a tingle chase down his spine. They’d hanged them down in Salem and now here. His wife was right. There was a darkness in this girl. He’d guessed that was her fellow. Poor soul. What had she done to him? He looked sick with love. Bewitched, most likely. Sooner they strung this gal up the better.
There was a rumor, however, that someone might beat Lucy Snow to the gallows. One Edna Barlow, who had murdered her own child and was a suspect in the death of another. She was now in a jail in Millinocket, but they did not have a gallows up there. So she was to be sent to Thomaston to hang. Constable Greenlaw would be ready. He’d already cleaned out the cell in the other corridor. Didn’t want to put the woman in the one next to Lucy Snow. Two murderers side by side — not a good idea!
The wife had nearly strung Otis up when she found out he had taken their grandson in to see the murderess. But it hadn’t seemed to affect the lad. As a matter of fact, he got a school report out of it and earned himself an A+. First A+ in their family and now he was talking about becoming a journalist. Imagine that — little tyke like Joey, eight years old and already talking about being a journalist.
The constable now jerked himself out of his light doze. They were speaking in low voices. He could hardly hear them. He leaned forward a bit and caught a few words.
“So it doesn’t bother you, Phin?”
Bother him that she is convicted of murder and about to die? the constable wondered.
“No, why should it?” It should, Constable Greenlaw wanted to shout. What’s she done to you? Cast some spell?
Lucy dropped her voice even lower. He could not hear them now at all. Lucy’s voice was hoarse. “I’m not sure how we could make it work. I mean, being married and all, even if I were free.”
“Your mother somehow made it work,” Phin replied. May had told him the story of the shipwreck Resolute. “She married a sailor, the captain of a ship in Her Majesty’s service. I am not a captain but a shipwright. I live on the sea. You could still swim.”
Lucy drew her hands back through the bars and pressed them against her eyes. She had imagined such a life, but now there was no possibility. What sense did it make to talk about something that could never happen?
“Time’s up!” They heard the chair creak as Constable Greenlaw rose. “Come along now, young fella.”
Phin reached in and ran his long fingers through her hair. She raised her hand and touched his cheek.
“ ’Nuff of that now! No hanky-panky. Not on my watch,” the constable barked, and grabbed him roughly by the elbow. Phin wrenched his arm free and looked back over his shoulder. Tears were streaming down his face. Lucy touched her cheek where his hand had been moments before and then her hair. Was this truly their last touch? Could two touches endure for the short time that remained of her life? Could she carry them into an eternity?
IT WAS A RELIEF to Hannah that Stannish had been called to New York on portrait business. That had been a week ago, the day after the wedding. There had been no time really to discuss Lucy’s terrible fate. The few words they had exchanged had been perfunctory.
“My darling, I know how difficult this must be for you. I am so sorry.” He had picked up her hand and pressed it to his lips. But there were words left unspoken that she could read in his eyes. Stannish clearly found it reassuring that there was one less girl who so closely resembled his betrothed. He had nearly been apoplectic that day last summer when he had inadvertently bumped into May. “Well, at least she lives offshore in a lighthouse,” he’d sniffed. Lucy bore a much stronger likeness to May than to Hannah, and now that he had insisted on her dyeing her hair there was even less of a resemblance. He had made her promise not to swim. “You’ll be cured by spring. I give you my word.”
Cured — what a strange wo
rd that was! What was she being cured of — her true nature? Stannish called it an addiction. But how could it be? This was her essence, her inherent character. She was part mer. God had made her this way. Stannish had told her she would get used to being away from the water. That the sloughing off of her crystalline scales from her tail would stop. He had even given her an ointment that eased the irritation.
She broke her promise to Stannish two nights after he left for New York. It was the first time she had swum in almost six weeks. From the moment she entered the water, she began to feel herself again, and even the dark hair dye seemed to wash away more with each swim. Something deep inside her was knitting back together again. Something was healing…. If he loved her as deeply as he said he did, was it not this that he loved? That essence that made her Hannah? She was haunted by Ettie’s words on the steps of the church. They popped around in her head now like annoying flies — oily, superficial, varnish. That last one being the worst. Had she in fact fallen in love with someone who was all surface and no essence? But he was a great artist. The most celebrated painter in Boston, New York, London, Paris. His talent sprang from something deep inside of him. Something that she was in awe of. A person could not be an artist of the magnitude of Stannish Whitman Wheeler and have no essence. His art was a mystery to her, but it made him who he was. And she honored that, loved him for it, revered it, and would change nothing about him. Why could he not feel the same way about her? She touched her head. Her hair felt more supple, softer as the dye had faded with her nightly swims.
There was an isolated spot in Boston Harbor, the Fort Point Channel, with no shipping traffic. A derelict tug bobbed off a pier, which if no one tended would most likely sink to the muddy bottom within another two years. It was a perfect place to stash her clothes and then slip into the water — she and the water rats. But the rats paid her no heed.