Mermaid of Penperro Read online

  She had eventually fallen asleep, her mind more on pleasure than on the rightness or wrongness of what she had let Tom do—and what further things she wished he might try. She had woken to a vanishing dream of being pierced by his manhood, pinned to the bed with the force of it, her body contracting in the mysterious release it had craved all the night. She was just conscious enough to realize that her body had reacted as if the dream were real, and she felt the final weak contraction of her sex around a member that was not there.

  Now, sitting under a church with spiders and a rat-eating cat, she had plenty of time to sit and contemplate, and to repent. Or, if not to repent, at least to try to regain a grip on her common sense. She again ran through the reasons she should not be letting Tom within two feet of her person, but her heart and her body kept finding excuses that suited her desires.

  She had already broken the spirit of her wedding vows; she’d broken them even as she made them, for she had made no attempt to love Bugg. What was one more sin stacked upon the rest? She was wicked, and she wasn’t particularly sorry about it. She wasn’t certain, though, that she could stand the names she would call herself if she did go to bed with Tom Trewella, for bed was certainly where things were headed. She had no illusions about that.

  And what did she think of Tom, that he would engage in such a dalliance with a married woman?

  She wanted to be able to say that he was dishonorable and that on those grounds alone she should restrain herself. She wanted to say that he was obviously a lust-crazed beast, with no care for anything but satisfying those animal drives of which Mama had warned her. She would be a hypocrite to say so, though; and besides, she did not believe it was half so true of him as it was of herself. At least to Tom her husband was nothing but a name, someone from her past and only tangentially a part of her future. She was the one who knew that an old man—however foul and bad-tempered—had given her a home for two years and had tried to be her husband.

  She was going to have to decide which path to take: chaste married woman or wanton adulteress.

  She listened to the sounds of footsteps overhead, and the murmur of voices. The noises settled down, and she assumed the morning prayer was about to begin.

  “‘O send out thy light and thy truth, that they may lead me, and bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy dwelling,’” the Reverend Mr. Jobson said, his voice loud and clear. It was, she thought, an appropriate choice of scripture for today. It almost sounded as if he were calling to the mermaid. She shrugged off her blanket and rose, walking with bent knees and hunched back to the small door. There was a bucket there full of seawater, and she paused to put the final touches to her appearance. She was wearing the same green dress, black spencer, and veiled hat that Foweather had seen her in before.

  “The Lord be with you,” the vicar said above. It was her cue to move. The Lord’s Prayer would be coming next, and while everyone knelt in prayer, heads bowed, she would make her entrance.

  She blew out the lantern and opened the door to the morning light. The tabby streaked past her, something dark and furry in its jaws.

  Her attention was focusing on the part she was about to play, her heart beating rapidly in her breast. It was a touch of stage fright, but even as it made her stomach light with butterflies it also made her feel vibrantly alive.

  She came out from under the church and made her way around to the front, one last thought surfacing on her choice of paths to the future: returning to Bugg was not one of them.

  Head bowed, Tom opened his eyes and cast a surreptitious glance at Foweather kneeling beside him. The man had his eyes closed and was red-faced and sweating. His breath came raggedly, his body betraying the faintest of quivers. Nearly everyone in the church was in a similar state.

  Matt had worked his usual storytelling wonder, bursting into the Fishing Moon yesterday with his tale of having met the mermaid on the beach, combing her hair and singing in as lovely a voice as any angel could have envied. And she had not swum away! He’d been stunned!

  Matt had gone on to recount how he had entreated the mermaid to come to church and seek the grace of God. She had understood English, and after much persuasion on his part agreed to attend the Sunday service.

  By now everyone but the Preventive crew knew in their minds that the mermaid was not real, but in their hearts they hoped she was. Even those who had clung more closely to reality were infected by their vicar’s excitement, and plied him with ale as they had plied Foweather on many occasions, asking him to repeat the story.

  When Foweather himself heard of the encounter he had nearly fainted. Tom hadn’t been there to see it himself, but by all accounts the man had gone white as a fish’s belly, and about as clammy.

  There were so many men and women filling the church that it would be unlikely Foweather or his crew would notice that certain men were missing—men who were, at this very moment, waiting with wagons to receive the cargo of two boats that would be landing in Trennant Cove. It was the best landing place along the coast, second only to the harbor itself. If they were going to be brazen, Tom reckoned, they might as well be brazen as all hell. They would have gone for Penperro’s harbor itself if the tides had been right.

  Under the combined voices of the parishioners reciting the Lord’s Prayer it was impossible to hear whether or not Konstanze had entered. He pricked his ears, straining to detect the sound of the door either opening or closing, but could tell nothing.

  At the end of the prayer all stood, and as eyes came open an indrawn breath moved across the crowd in a wave, starting off to the right. One by one all heads turned to the alcove of the mermaid bench, and there stood Konstanze, veiled and motionless.

  Whispers rustled through the congregation. “Her gown is damp. The hem, look at the hem!”

  “There’s a trail of water!”

  “And seaweed by the door!”

  “I swear I saw a fin where her foot should have been.”

  Foweather grabbed Tom’s wrist, clenching it tight. “It is she. She has come!”

  Matt loudly cleared his throat, continuing with the service. When it was time to sit Konstanze did so on the bench, to another collective breath of amazement. It was several minutes before even a few heads turned their attention from Konstanze back to the vicar.

  “What should I do?” Foweather whispered frantically.

  “Sit still. Don’t look at her,” Tom whispered back, speaking from the side of his mouth as he kept his face turned rigidly forward.

  Foweather immediately turned to stare again at Konstanze, and Tom gripped the man’s knee. “Control yourself! Do not let her know that you want her!”

  “I cannot believe this,” Foweather said under his breath.

  Tom flicked him a wary glance, but Foweather’s face was suffused with awe, not suspicion. Tom tried to pay some modicum of attention to the service, failing miserably. Although he did not look at her, all his senses felt focused upon Konstanze, and upon the reactions of those in the church. He and Foweather were seated in the center of a pew toward the front, the people on either side of them there to serve as obstacles should Foweather make a sudden dash for the “mermaid.”

  Matt began the administration of holy communion, and Tom allowed himself a silent groan. The high church mass always took so damn long. He could go through the required responses by rote, but with his attention elsewhere he found himself lagging behind the congregation by half a syllable.

  And then it was time to sing the first hymn. Matt had chosen Psalm Twenty-nine, what should have been an evening prayer. He had apparently been unable to resist its mentions of the Lord ruling the sea, and the comparison in a later verse to young unicorns. Unicorns weren’t mermaids, but fantastical creatures were the order of the day.

  The organist gave the opening note, and the congregation and choir opened voice to sing. With the first sung notes, a purer, higher tone sang out from the mermaid’s alcove. Konstanze was singing an octave above even the highest of females pr
esent. Voices faltered and died as the parishioners tried to hear the mermaid singing.

  Tom saw Matt direct the choir to keep going, and with renewed energy they continued the hymn, the congregation halfheartedly following, no one wanting to risk drowning out the mermaid.

  They needn’t have worried. Not only could she sing like a creature from another world—which was what she sounded like, her voice floating so strangely high above what the hymn called for—but she could project that voice with a strength that set his skull to vibrating. It was such a strikingly eerie and beautiful sound she made that it was two more verses before he realized that she was not singing the words of the psalm, but rather only the vowel sounds of those words.

  She was clever; he had to give her that. His only instruction to her had been to try to imitate a mermaid on her first visit to church. She had found the perfect way to sound like a soulless creature, vainly pretending to be human. Although the mermaid could understand English, apparently she was not so skilled that she could read the words in the hymnal.

  Matt launched into his sermon shortly afterward, and Tom and the others settled down to endure. Most knew that it would be a long sermon today: a very, very long sermon. The longer the better, as far as the smugglers in Trennant Cove were concerned.

  Trapped in the church with nothing to do but sit and wait, with no distraction save Matt’s sermon and Foweather’s nervous shivering, Tom found his mind sneaking off to realms he had been trying to avoid: namely, the realms of Konstanze. Not Konstanze the mermaid sitting so prim and straight-backed in the alcove, but Konstanze on the ground behind the church, her thighs open to his searching hand, her breath catching with desire as he stroked her. That was the Konstanze he didn’t want to think about.

  It was as if she had become his own personal siren, luring him to his doom. What had he been thinking, to go so far with her?

  He hadn’t been thinking. That was the problem. He had been left alone with her for five minutes, and all she had to do was lean close enough for him to catch her scent and he lost all control.

  Had she known that would happen? Did she want him to ravish her? He couldn’t be certain of anything with her anymore. He never would have guessed she would swim with her breasts uncovered, and never would have suspected that she so avidly read that licentious novel—even if she did claim to have difficulty understanding it.

  Which brought him back to further puzzlement. She was married, and yet something about her was awkwardly innocent and naive. When he had slipped his finger inside her he had felt no evidence of a hymen, but then again he had never had personal contact with such a structure, and wouldn’t know what it felt like to begin with. The entire situation with her would have been so much easier if she had never consummated her marriage.

  What was he thinking? If she were still a virgin, and if her marriage were annulled, then she would be even more the forbidden fruit than she was now. If she were free and virgin, he could have her only if he married her. He would not want to do that, would he?

  Would he?

  His attraction to her was not purely physical. He liked talking with her, and despite the qualms it caused him he admired her adventurous spirit. She had a lively sense of humor, a practicality with which he could sympathize, and a quick, curious mind. She had courage and perseverance, too. He didn’t know how well he himself would have done if asked to put on a performance like the one she was putting on at this very moment, in front of a crowd of strangers and an overexcited Preventive man.

  All in all, she was everything he could have asked for. Her independence might give him worries that she would run off if she tired of him, but other than that he thought he could be very happy with her as a wife. He’d simply have to be certain to keep her happy, as well, so as not to lose her.

  But what was the use of thinking of that? Konstanze had said that her first time with her husband had hurt, so surely she couldn’t still be virgin, which meant that the entire train of thought was a pointless exercise in could-have-beens. However he felt about her, she could not become Mrs. Trewella.

  He was beginning to build a respectable loathing for the unknown Bugg. He would, he thought sourly, be willing to lay money that Bugg was one of those men who had sex in the dark, all but fully clothed, giving no thought to the pleasure of the woman. Likely he had succeeded only in fulfilling his husbandly duties a handful of times with Konstanze, giving her no chance to learn anything of lovemaking.

  He grimaced. He didn’t like to think of some wrinkled, liver-spotted old goat having his hands on Konstanze, or her having to lie still and frightened while the old bag of bones shoved his way inside her. It made him want to soak her in a tub of soapy water, to wash away the contamination of her husband’s touch.

  And then… and then he would show her what it was supposed to be like between a man and a woman. He drifted off into an exceedingly pleasant daydream about exactly how he would do that. Matt’s interminable sermon and Foweather’s stink of nervous sweat faded considerately into the background.

  Good Lord, would this service never end? Konstanze suppressed the urge to roll her shoulders and shake out the stiffness in her limbs. If it hadn’t been for the standing and kneeling periodically required, not to mention the hymns, she would have fallen asleep in her alcove, ogling crowd of Penperro folk or no.

  She was looking forward to this all being finished. Her skirt was still a little damp from the dousing she had given it, and her feet were cold. She was wearing an old pair of stockings to which Hilde had sewn a small set of fins, fanning out to the sides of her feet so as not to interfere overmuch with her walking. Her fins and stockings had been doused with seawater as well, making for that nice little trail she had left on the black-and-yellow tile floor.

  Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, she silently urged. She was half-starved, on top of the rest. It was a pity she hadn’t been able to accept communion. At least it might have taken the edge off her hunger.

  Wicked girl, she chided herself. Oh, she was terrible. Cornwall was having the most deleterious effect upon her morals.

  She tried to cheer herself with a thought of how much money she’d be making from this appearance. It should be enough to keep Hilde in sausages all through the winter. And money aside, she was glad that she had been able to attend the service. Although they stared at her, she liked to think that the folk of Penperro recognized her as a fellow conspirator, someone who was helping their cause. Although she could not talk to anyone, at least she had the pleasure of seeing new faces.

  This was the first chance she’d had to get much of a look at Foweather, as well; it had been only glimpses from a distance she had had before. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, but he lacked a sense of presence. In a crowd one’s eyes would skim over him, drawn instead to someone like Tom, who fairly vibrated with energy and a working mind.

  She squinted through her veil at him. She could see only a small portion of his face, but even from that wedge of expression he appeared to be about as numb as she was.

  The vicar began reciting the Gloria in excelsis, the congregation all rising to their feet. Thank God, the end is near! Hurrah!

  At the end of the Gloria in excelsis everyone knelt once again for the final blessing. It was her cue to leave.

  Toes pointed outward because of her small fins, she held her skirt and stepped silently in her stocking feet down the side aisle and headed toward the back.

  “Do not leave!” came a shout from near the front of the church.

  She turned her head and gaped at Foweather, standing up when he should have been kneeling along with the rest.

  “My darling! Do not go!” he cried, and then he climbed up onto his pew and ran along the seat toward the center aisle, bypassing the other parishioners who were just now reacting to his outburst. She saw Tom lunge for Foweather and grab his coat, and then the cloth slipped through his fingers as Foweather leaped off the end of the pew.

  Konstanze cursed in the frantic silence of her
mind and ran for the door, her fins flopping on the tiles as she made her mad duck-waddle dash, in a race now with the demented Preventive sitter. Men and women murmured and shouted, rising, turning to watch, but no one thinking to try to stop Foweather.

  She was almost there, the door was within reach— and then Foweather scooped her up into his arms.

  “Marry me, my darling! Marry me! We’ll call the banns this very morning,” he said, and with clumsy jerks pulled the hat from her head, the hat pins yanking out her loose chignon. Her mahogany hair spilled down over his arm.

  Over Foweather’s shoulder she saw Tom stumbling free of his pew, then coming down the aisle toward them. Foweather pursed his lips and half-closed his eyes, lowering his fleshy lips down toward her.

  She did the only thing she could think of: she let out a shriek of a power and pitch to shatter crystal.

  Foweather’s eyes popped open, and Tom reached them, grabbing Foweather’s shoulder. Foweather half turned, and stepped on the long frond of seaweed Konstanze had left by the door. She felt his foot slide as he lost his balance, and her shriek rose an octave as they went down together.

  Foweather took the brunt of it, but still her head slammed against the floor. She was scrambling off the man and crawling for the door even before the pain had a chance to make it to her brain. A woman near the back, possessed of more sense than the others, rushed forward and opened the door for her, reaching down to give her a hand up. She gave the woman a nod of thanks as she found her feet and escaped.

  Behind her, she heard Foweather shouting against the backdrop of Tom and others, pleading to be allowed to go to his bride. By the time she was halfway down the side of the church the roar of voices was spilling out the windows.

  “She’s escaping!” she heard shouted from a window. She ran around the far corner of the church and dived into her hiding place, slamming the little door shut behind her and turning the key in the lock.

  She put her fingers up to the throbbing spot on the back of her head, feeling the stickiness of blood over the lump that was already beginning to rise. She took her fingers away, tested the tackiness between her fingers, then rinsed them in the bucket of seawater.