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The woman snapped her fingers. “The moment that he saw her, though he didn’t know what he was seeing. He fell in love with someone who wasn’t even there! He fell in love with a beautiful woman when before him was a mermaid who could not be satisfied with the sea, standing on her bleeding feet. And she fell in love with him likethat”—again she snapped her fingers—“thinking that here was a handsome man, a man who would give her a baby and a family and would stay with her forever, and love her forever, and never fail her. She thought he would take her away from the sea and cure the coldness in her heart. She didn’t know he was a priest, and his love and his faith and his heart were already promised to God and couldn’t be claimed by any woman—and never ever by a mermaid.”
The girls could not drag their eyes from her old lined face.
“They lay together and he gave her a child, and then they parted—she to the sea and he to the Priory—but they knew that they would be together again, that they had a love, an unbreakable love.
“One night, before her time, it was the night of a full moon, a harvest moon, and a flood tide, she came to find him. She came into the harbor on the crest of the high water, but the current swept her right past the Priory, right past St. Wilfrid’s Church. The tide went so fast that she couldn’t swim against it and it washed her right through the sluice gates into the millpond, and then, as the tide turned and the water ebbed, the great water gates swung shut and captured her, in the pond, swimming round and round, with her hair streaming behind her in the weedy water and her pale face shining in the moonlight, crying for her lover to come and save her.”
“Did he?” Gabrielle asked, her voice a whisper. “Did he save her?”
“The miller came and saw a mermaid in his pond and crossed himself and blessed himself and sent at once for his landlord. His landlord came—that would be one of the Peachey family—and he brought his priest, not knowing what he would find. And the Peachey lord ordered that the mermaid be netted and drawn out of the water, and as she came out, all naked and shimmering with scales, her feet started to grow, and she stood up before them, like a beautiful woman. They dropped the net in their fright, and she saw her lover the priest, and he saw her, and he knew that he must speak for her, and say she was a mortal woman and his wife. And she knew that she must speak for him and claim him from the church and the world of men.”
The girls were rapt, even the charcoal burner family sat on their haunches and listened to the old story, their eyes on the little wisps ofsmoke escaping from the turves banked around the fire. The grooms stood by the horses, half listening as the woman paused.
“But she didn’t speak for him,” she said with a sigh. “She didn’t want to shame him by claiming him before all the people who knew of him as a priest. She didn’t want to betray him and she was ashamed of herself, a mermaid with sore feet. She stood before them, naked with her hair streaming down her white back, with her poor feet bleeding onto the stones of the tide mill yard, and she looked at him with her great gray eyes…”
“And did he…?”
“He said nothing. He didn’t claim her. He couldn’t be the man that she needed; that he thought he was. He stood silent, though he knew her, and knew she was with his child, and he loved her. Truly, he loved her… But not enough.”
Gabrielle blinked tears from her eyes: “Oh… not enough.”
“What happened next?” Mia whispered.
“They said that she must be proven to be mermaid or woman. The tide was on the ebb, and some said just throw her back in the harbor and let her swim away. But others said they must save her if she was a woman, and return her to the sea if she was a mermaid, and others just wanted a show—like people do sometimes.”
“They did a trial by water?”
“They did. They took her arms and her poor little feet and they tied her flat on one of the blades of the waterwheel so that it would turn and take her underwater and bring her up again. They thought that if she drowned, then she was a woman who had sinned, and God was taking her to Himself; but if she came out alive, then she was a mermaid, and nothing to do with God nor man. So they laid her on the mill wheel blade and all the while the man who loved her watched them do it, and said not one word.
“They opened the sluice gate so the water poured into the millrace, they took the brake off, the mill wheel turned and she went over the top and down into the pouring water of the millrace, underneath the water as the wheel turned, and then she came up again, out of the other side. Three times they put her deep under the water and three times the millwheel turned and brought her up again, and when they brought her out the last time she was white and blue and her little bleeding feet were still.”
“She was drowned?”
“Of course she was drowned, and the priest her lover lifted her off the blade of the mill wheel and walked with her in his arms down the road to the wadeway and walked deep into the ebbing waters of Broad Rife till everyone thought he would be swept away with her. Then he let her go. And her body with the streaming golden hair turned over and over and sank into the dark waters. And she was never seen again.”
BRISTOL JAIL, AUTUMN 1685
Ned, arriving in Bristol, the greatest provincial slave-trading city in England, found that not one magistrate in the city was prepared to review a transportation. No magistrate wanted to overturn a sentence handed down by the newly appointed Lord Chancellor, and none of the magistrates—all wealthy on slavery—were worried about a wrongful transportation.
“What about the habeas corpus?” Ned demanded of one clerk. “I demand that this Ned Ferryman be brought into court.”
“He’s already been in court and sentenced,” the clerk reasoned. “He’s a prisoner, he’s got no rights.”
“You’ve got the wrong man!”
“Who is he then?” the clerk was momentarily interested.
“A servant, an Indian from the Americas. Arrested in error.”
“Should have said so at the trial.”
“You know they were hanged if they pleaded not guilty.”
The clerk shrugged. “You say, he’s an Indian?”
“Yes—a Praying Indian. A Christian. From New England.”
“Then he’s not an Englishman—habeas corpus don’t apply. An Indian’s got no rights: no more than a woman or a child or an idiot. Only his owner could demand sight of him, and his owner would be punished for his crime. Are you his owner?”
