Lucy

  “I know you meant no offense. Nor did I.” He bent his head toward her slightly and she caught a whiff of hair oil. “As I was saying” — his voice resonated with a forced cheeriness — “the Forbes yacht will be even grander than the Van Wyck one.”

  Lucy was dying to say, “Yes, I spent quite a bit of time in the master bedroom,” but wisely held her tongue. She began to make her excuses to leave, and was slightly alarmed when the duke insisted on escorting her from the table.

  “These island people,” Percy continued as they stood on the veranda of the Abenaki Club, “are quite clever, you know.”

  “You sound surprised, Percy.” It was the first time she had used his Christian name, and she saw his eyes dance with delight.

  “Well, you know, they aren’t …” He seemed to search for a word.

  “Aren’t what?” Lucy looked at him closely. Her chin jutted forward a bit. “Or are they just average?”

  Percy Wilgrew scratched at the side of his head as if this required a great deal of thought. “They don’t have the advantages that some of us do. Our kind.”

  “I’m not sure I take your meaning?” she said softly. She was feeling quite unsettled with this talk.

  “You know.”

  “I assure you, sir, I am not your kind, not in the least.”

  “I am not just talking about titles, Miss Snow. Yes, I am a duke with a title, which is a custom in England and not here. But of course it is,” he laughed, “easily remedied. Such is the case with Matilda Forbes and the Earl of Lyford. She will soon be a countess.” Lucy could not believe what she was hearing. He was actually dangling titles in front of her like a sideshow barker at a carnival. “I believe that your mother’s dear cousin Priscilla Bancroft has visited Lyford Hall. As I understand it, Lyford Hall bears some resemblance to White Oaks, where you were practically raised.”

  Practically raised? My mother’s cousin? What had her mother been saying?

  “Aunt Prissy?” Lucy said vaguely.

  “Yes, I believe that’s the nickname your mother called her by. She is your godmother, correct?”

  “Yes,” Lucy answered numbly, but she had fastened her eyes on her mother, who was engaged in an animated discussion with Muffy Forbes’s father. What yarns was her mother spinning? she wondered.

  “I really must be on my way.” Lucy turned to walk away. She was about to run.

  “Please don’t go.”

  “I’m quite late already.”

  He reached out to grab her hand and caught the cuff of her dress. There was a rip and the sleeve tore halfway off.

  “Oh, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to.” He was still holding the cuff. Lucy looked at her bare arm for several seconds. This was the same arm that had pulled her so powerfully through the water. She looked into the duke’s eyes.

  “Sir, make no mistake. I assure you once again, I am not your kind.”

  PERCY WAITED in the shadows of the carriage house of the Abenaki Club, which afforded him a perfect view of the drive.

  Why has she turned left, away from town? What possible bridesmaid’s errand could take her that way? Percy Wilgrew thought. He would get to the bottom of this. By hook or by crook he was determined to get to the bottom of it. He had to. He had no choice. Every week, a cable arrived from his mother outlining the dire straits that had befallen Ashleigh Manor, the ancestral home that had been in their family since granted by Henry VII to Michael Percy in 1487.

  The road out of the village of Bar Harbor was a winding one and, thankfully, lined with thick stands of trees. It was easy for him to follow Lucy undetected. He watched as she cut across the field. On the far side were the burnt-out ruins of the Grantmore Hotel. She seemed to be running now. He would have to walk quickly to keep pace.

  Five minutes later, he reached the ruins, but Lucy seemed to have disappeared. Then he spied a path that led into the woods behind the hotel.

  Percy Wilgrew heard them before he saw them. Heard the pronounced breathing, the rustle of leaves and twigs breaking. He closed his eyes and leaned against a tree. So this is her bridesmaid’s errand! He crept closer, careful not to make a sound himself. He first caught sight of her hair, loose around her shoulders. Someone was embracing her passionately. Who was it? He waited. Patience was one of the duke’s virtues. But soon the fellow got up and brushed himself off. He turned and would have looked directly into Percy Wilgrew’s eyes if it had not been for the thick trunk of the ancient oak. But Percy had seen him. That boatyard boy! He could hardly believe it. She spurns me, spurns a title for that? Percy felt a rage flare within him. He would not be made a fool of. Never!

  The Duke of Crompton was not only a patient man but a careful one. He planned. He strategized. He continued to watch, perfectly still. Lucy’s shawl lay on the ground. The sleeves of her dress fell off her shoulders to expose a shocking expanse of skin. She raised her bare arms to twist up her hair. He was hypnotized by the slow languorous movement of her arms as she wound her hair. It was horrible and yet he could not tear his eyes from her. She was dangerous. She needed to be destroyed.

  Percy wasn’t sure how much time passed before Lucy pressed her lips against the shipbuilder’s one final time and led him away, smiling. When he was sure they had left, Percy walked over to the patch of moss where Lucy and Phineas had lain entwined and spied something glistening on top of the moss. A pink pearl button. He bent over and picked it up. Folding his hand around it tightly, he smiled into the shadows of the forest. This will be easy, he thought. Now he had all he needed.

  IT WAS AS MAY and Hannah had told her. She felt it as soon as they swam out of the current — an inexorable pull stronger than the stream that had sped them to the shoals. Like iron filings toward a magnet she was aware of every fiber of her body and mind driving toward this place that was unknown and yet so peculiarly familiar.

  They had left for the shoals at dawn. Each of the sisters had made excuses to be gone for the day. Lucy had once again invoked her bridesmaid’s duties, though she had told Muffy it was something to do with Phineas. Hannah had worked two extra days and therefore arranged for a day off. May had the easiest time of all. She merely told her father that Hugh was coming up and they planned to hike Mount Abenaki, which they often did. Her father, Gar, wished her a good day and said not to worry about the lighthouse chores. He’d be fine on his own.

  Hannah and May had never been to the wreck during the daytime, and today was particularly sunny. They usually saw the hulk of the sunken ship through the reflected light of the moon. But now the shadowy depths were latticed with sunlight and hovering amidst the shafts like a golden angel, a sea angel. Lucy saw a face so like her own, so like her sisters that she stopped swimming for a moment and held still in the water. Then she slipped slowly through the shafts of light toward the figurehead that extended from the bow of the ship.

  “Mum,” she whispered in the watery language. Reaching out with her arms, she embraced the slender wooden neck. If only you were flesh, she thought. And not hard wood. What had it been like to be held by her, cradled in her arms?

  She was not sure how long she had been holding her, but she felt stirrings in the water as her sisters approached.

  She turned to May and Hannah. “How does one cry underwater?”

  “Look,” Hannah said softly. “Look at the figurehead’s chin — the small dimple is the same as ours.” Hannah touched Lucy’s chin as Lucy looked up at the face of her mother.

  “Do we know her name?” Lucy asked.

  Hannah and May shook their heads.

  “How do you think she came to be on this ship? Were we born here?”

  The girls shook their heads again. “These questions,” May began, “seem almost impossible to answer. We have pondered all of them. It is all so mysterious. We can only half guess at the answers. We know the name of the captain. Captain Walter Lawrence.”

  “Do you believe he could have been our father?” Lucy asked.

  “Maybe,” Hannah said.
br />   “Was he mer?”

  May shrugged. “It’s really hard to know much for sure,” she said.

  “But the mystery in a way begins with this ship. The Resolute. We’ll show you through her,” Hannah said. “We’re always looking for clues. Something to tell us more about our mother and the captain.”

  They swam through a rent in the vast hull.

  “This is the captain’s quarters,” May said as they swam close to an upturned navigation desk.

  “It’s where we found the scallop shell comb, the shell like May’s. She said I could have it since she already had one. Maybe we can find another one for you.”

  “If not I know where we can dive for one. Same place I found mine. A ledge down deep near Matinicus Rock.”

  But Lucy was not paying attention. She had found something else. The small cubbyholes above the bed.

  “There’s a chambered nautilus in one of those. He hates being disturbed,” Hannah said.

  “But what’s this?” Lucy asked, drawing out a rock fragment.

  “Oh, that! We almost forgot,” Hannah answered.

  “It’s lovely,” Lucy said as she held the fragment up to a ray of sunlight and studied the feathery design.

  “We think it’s a keepsake of our mother’s,” May said.

  “So why didn’t you take it with you? I mean, if it is our mother’s keepsake, wouldn’t you want it? And couldn’t it be a clue?”

  May and Hannah looked at each other, genuinely puzzled. “I think perhaps we were waiting for you,” May said slowly. “We can take it back to the cave now.”

  “Its design looks like a broken flower — a lily,” Lucy said, quietly tracing it with her fingertip. “It must be a fossil. I’ve seen them in the natural history museum in New York, just like this.”

  “Really?” May said. “You’ve seen true fossils?”

  “I’d love to go to a museum,” Hannah added. “Never been to one myself.”

  “Me, neither,” May said.

  “But you know,” Lucy continued, looking at it more closely, “it’s not just that it looks like a lily. There is a flow to it. It could almost be a picture of a current. The marks look like water streaming.”

  Something stirred in Lucy’s memory, a recent memory. “It reminds me of something else as well.”

  “What?” Hannah asked.

  “Something I’ve seen or heard or read about.”

  “Or dreamed about?” Hannah said.

  “Maybe. But I just can’t remember it right now.”

  “It’ll come to you,” May said. “But we’d best be swimming back now.”

  As Lucy swam, she thought of the sea-polished face of the figurehead, her mother. There were dim traces of the colors that had been — the rosiness of her plump lips, a thin veil of green in her eyes hinted at a deeper green scrubbed by the sea, and the shadow of what once had been the brilliant red of her hair. It took very little imagination to see what had been there nearly eighteen years before. Lucy grasped the rock fragment tightly in her fist and began wondering not so much about the color of her mother’s eyes or her face but her voice. It was then that the memory came back. Echoes of another voice — that of Dr. Forsythe, whom she had listened to on that spring morning in the Museum of Natural History.

  “A man in a sealskin boat, enshrouded in his sealskin parka. A seal man, they began to call these people who came across the sea with not a mortal wound, a trace of violence, but who had died in the icy embrace of the winter sea when blown from their course…. The selkie legends, the mythological shape-shifting creatures, seal folk, who are said to be seals in the sea but humans upon the land.”

  “A kind of mermaid?”

  “Lucy are you talking to yourself?” May had swum up beside her.

  “Selkies!” Lucy said. “But we’re not seals.”

  “Whatever are you talking about?” Hannah asked. “Have you remembered something? The rock — you know what it reminded you of?”

  “Yes, in a sense. It’s all coming together for me. And it’s not a dream!”

  “No?” May asked.

  “No, it’s as you say. The Laws of Salt,” Lucy replied.

  ACROSS THE SEA on Barra Head, the scripture of the Laws of Salt began to stir in another’s veins. Avalonia went to the notch in the cave wall where she kept her half of the rock. She peered at the fragment and began to weep as a flood of joy mingled with profound sorrow swirled through her, spinning like the waters of the Gyre of Corry.

  They have found one another. She closed her eyes tight and thought of that day so many years ago when she and her sister, Laurentia, had each found the halves of the rock.

  Then their mother had told them the story as she set the two rock fragments on the beach and fitted them together. “They call these sea lilies and sometimes feather stars. They are very ancient, from the time before time.”

  The sweep of the feather star design, however, looked exactly like the course of the Avalaur current for which the two girls, Avalonia and Laurentia, had been named. Sailors were careful to give it a wide berth, for there were tales of how it lured the unwary into its deathly vortex. For mer folk, the Avalaur current did not spell death but life, a renewal with a mystical link to the secret threads of their origin and their destiny. And thus the Laws of Salt began to stream through their veins as salt through the ocean.

  “Now you see,” said their mother as she held up the two rock fragments, “how special it is that these two pieces of the rock were found here by you two sisters.”

  “What does it mean, Mum?” Laurentia asked.

  “It means that through life you shall always be linked, but even in death you shall never be completely separated.”

  Now all these years later, Avalonia clasped the rock in her hand. It was a clasp that seemed to stretch across the vastness of the ocean that separated her from her three nieces — Laurentia’s daughters. When will they come? When will they come? She took down the clàrsach and, plucking the strings, began to sing.

  Come home, come home to Barra Head

  I’ll show you the Gyre of Corry

  Come home, come home, sisters three

  I long to stroke your heads.

  At this moment, as the girls swam into the cave, each one felt a sonorous thrum rising within her. It was as if a note had been struck and an ancient music began to flood through their beings. They looked at one another, their eyes bright with anticipation.

  It was Lucy who spoke first. “I think our next long swim must be a very long one.”

  “Why do you say that?” May asked.

  “Because we must swim across the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “But where to?” Hannah asked, her eyes widening.

  “To the Hebrides, I think. For that is where our mother came from. It was what I was trying to remember when I first saw this rock.” She held out her hand and traced the sinuous curves of the sea lily.

  “And now you remember?” Hannah asked.

  “Yes.” So Lucy began to tell her sisters the story she had heard at the Museum of Natural History.

  And when she had finished, May was the first to speak. “And though we are not seals but mer, we are all creatures of both land and sea, and over there, some of our kin wait for us?”

  “Yes, I do believe it is so,” Lucy spoke quietly.

  “I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND IT.” Marjorie Snow was reading the note that had just been delivered. “Elena Hazlitt asked us both two weeks ago if we were free for the opera. And now she writes that she has made a horrendous mistake and their box is full. Stephen, do you understand?”

  “Perhaps, my dear, it was one of the more racy operas, and she felt it wasn’t appropriate for a clergyman to be seen in attendance.”

  “True,” Marjorie replied. “What’s the one about those scandalous artists in Paris?”

  “La Bohème?” Lucy offered.

  “That’s the one!” Her mother put one finger to her temple and tapped it. It was almost as if she we
re trying to cram one more thought into her somewhat overcrowded brain.

  Lucy often thought of her mother’s mind as a small tenement building, the kind one saw on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side where she often accompanied her father, for he had a favorite cobbler there, Jacob Hurwitz. Lucy was fascinated by all the little shadowy corridors and the bombardment of cooking odors that seeped out from every door. Children ran willy-nilly all over the place. Doors constantly slamming, babies screaming, people arguing. It was an incoherent little universe, chaotic and impenetrable, and she gasped in disbelief when she saw two men wrestling with a steamer trunk as another family newly arrived with half a dozen children trailed behind. She could not imagine how another human being could be stuffed into the building. This was the picture that came to mind as she saw her mother insistently tapping the side of her head.

  “Yes, La Bohème. All those seedy artists living together without benefit of clergy, no doubt. But the main character, the girl — she died, right?”

  “Yes, Mimi the seamstress. She died,” Lucy said.

  “So there,” Marjorie said.

  “What do you mean, ‘so there’?” Lucy asked.

  “So she died. She was punished. So it is not a completely immoral opera.”

  Lucy simply did not know how to respond. She had had too much on her mind since the swim to the wreck of the Resolute. She and her sisters were determined to make the much longer swim, across the Atlantic to the Outer Hebrides, which was almost a three-thousand-mile journey. Not one of the three sisters knew what kind of excuse they could come up with to cover such a long absence. And then there was the question that none dared to speak. Would it be a mere visit or would they be gone forever?