CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In my dreams, I go to the sea again.
I was naked there but I wasn’t ashamed, not in the way the humans have taught me to be. Gaia, the water whispered, and I could hear its voice again. Gaia, come home.
I saw my sisters. My grandmother too, a shadow bleeding black around one eye as she sank beneath the surface, like she had forgotten how to float.
And I saw the Sea King. He was further out than the others, Zale by his side, an army of mer-men behind them. They were armed with spears, slain Rusalkas spiked upon them, their swollen eyes shot through with veins of scarlet. We are coming for you, my father said. I promise fire and fury the likes of which the human world has never seen. And I shall kill that man if he has dared to place one finger on the daughter of the Sea King.
No, I said and in the dream I could speak again. My voice was clear, strong. I had forgotten how good it sounded and I cannot believe how easily I allowed myself to be silenced. You cannot harm Oliver.
She loves him, Father, Cosima cried.
Love? my father said. Do you know what I do to little mermaids who fall in love with humans? A baby herring scurried away from the shoal and my father didn’t break eye contact with me as he thrust the trident deep into the fish’s back. Be careful, my father said as he cracked its wriggling head off. And I watched it die.
I woke then, trying to call out. I clutched my throat, forgetting that I had lost my voice, that I will never be able to say my mother’s name ever again. I folded my knees into my body, pressing them against my heartbeat. I was sure I could hear it faltering inside my chest.
Something shifts after that night by the sea. Oliver becomes comfortable in my company again; he stops hiding from me. And as hope, oh that treacherous hope, rises in me again, I realize that I need to work harder if I am going to win his love in time.
I begin to smile at all of Oliver’s jokes, whether I understand them or not. I laugh with bright eyes, the way I see ladies at dinner do.
I wait by his door in the morning, holding a glass of fresh juice for him. “Thanks, doll,” he says, as if he can’t quite decide if I am a sister or a servant. Too pretty to be ignored, too silent to be enjoyed. Thus, I must become indispensable.
“Grace,” he says in surprise when he opens his bedroom door one morning and finds me waiting for him. I nod at the stairs. Will we go to breakfast together? I walk with him to the orangery, where Eleanor is detailing the seating plan for that night’s dinner. “No,” Oliver says when he sees the chart in her hands. “Grace is to be by my side.”
“But—”
“Mother, if you want me to attend this thing, then Grace will be sitting next to me. If not, I can easily find other ways to occupy my time. What will it be?”
Eleanor nods, but I see her jaw clench in a way I know means she is furious. She has always watched me, but I have begun to watch her in my turn. What do you know about my mother, Eleanor Carlisle? What do you know of a woman with hair as red as mine?
Oliver has allowed me to re-join his afternoon excursions, insisting that I accompany “the boys” to their parties. This time I don’t get tired, no matter how late they finish up.
“Does she always have to be here? She can’t stop staring at you, it’s creepy,” I overhear Rupert complaining as he and Oliver saddle their horses in the stables. “Besides, I thought this was a girl-free zone.”
“You never minded when Vi joined us,” Oliver says. “Anyway, Grace is different,” he continues when Rupert doesn’t respond. “She’s not like other girls.”
I know enough of this world to realize that this is a compliment, but it doesn’t appease my fears. Other girls might be high maintenance and demanding, insisting that their needs are as valid as Oliver’s are and should be treated as such, but the other girls can run and walk and dance for hours. Other girls can laugh. Other girls can talk; tell Oliver all that he needs to hear. I have to be better than the other girls if I am going to live.
Sleep is still elusive. Each night, the water calls me, promising me respite from these clamouring doubts. And each night, Oli and I find each other again on the beach.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he says, then starts talking immediately, as if he has been holding his breath all day. All his life, maybe.
“People said my father went crazy,” he says, “but he was just under immense pressure. My mother never gave him any peace.” He cracks his knuckles, one by one. “Always nagging him – how to dress, who to talk to. Look at these figures, these accounts. That bloody company. And now she’s doing the same to me, Grace. I don’t want anything to do with it – to obsess over numbers and forecasts and profits. I don’t know why she can’t just run the whole thing like she wants.” Because she can’t. They do not trust Eleanor because she is a woman. If I can see this, after so short a time, then why can’t Oli? But if this is the way it has always been, who am I to challenge it? And how could I? If I cannot speak, I suddenly realize, then I can change nothing.
“I just wish,” Oliver says, interrupting my thoughts, “that things would go back to the way they used to be, way back when. Before Dad’s accident.” I raise my brows into a question. “There was an accident,” he explains, his face so stark that it is hard to look upon. “Dad’s boat was wrecked; he was found thrown on a beach. It was a miracle, they said, that he was alive at all – but he was never the same after that. He wouldn’t take me out in the boat any more. He would go to the beach alone – back to the place where he was found, swimming out to sea and going further and further each time.” Oliver presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “And then he stopped,” Oliver says. “He took to his room, and I wasn’t allowed in there so I would sit outside. That’s all I can remember from then, the locked door and the smell of fresh paint from inside. I was only little at the time, I didn’t know what was going on. We should have kept him at home,” he mutters to himself. “I told her, Dad would have preferred to be at home but…” He sniffs back tears again, and I pretend that I haven’t noticed. “I would never have survived if it hadn’t been for George and Rupert,” he says. “And Viola.” Viola, Viola.
Another night, he tells me more about her. It’s a good thing, I tell myself, even though it hurts to hear him speak of her in such an intimate fashion. But it means he trusts me. “We were kids when we first met,” he says, lying on the ground. The sky seems so close tonight, as if you could fill your mouth with stars if you so desired. “Five, maybe six. It was around the time my father died, anyway. I needed to have some fun, you know?” He looks pleadingly at me, as if asking for my absolution. “And Viola was fun. She was always first to climb a tree, no matter how tall, or to take a dare to dive off the cliff edge, or to sneak out of the house when she had been punished. She was fearless. She was my best friend.”
Fury seethes in me, like scraps of smouldering coal. Did Viola give up her family for him? Her voice? Did she change her body in order to please him? Why must it always come back to Viola Gupta?
“Thank you,” Oliver says at the end of these conversations. “You are such a good listener. I can’t talk to anyone else about this.”
He trusts me, I tell myself. He confides in me. Daisy tells me what his valet says; that his nightmares have stopped, that he no longer calls out for Viola in his sleep. That has to be significant. It has to mean something.
And yet, he still does not kiss me.
We are by the sea again. Oliver staring at the water as he talks. I have never known anyone to talk so much. Black night stroking black sky, softly. No moon to show us the way.
“Here,” Oliver says, holding a seashell to my ear. A queen conch, I want to tell him when I see the peach and opal husk. Lobatus gigas. Unusual to find it in these waters.
“Listen,” he says, and I find the sound of home captured in its skull. “Can you hear that?” He takes it away, pressing it against his own ear and it is all I can do not to wrench it from his hands. “My father showed me that,” he says, throwing the seashell away from him, on to the sand. “Before he went mad.”
I listen to Oliver breathing, in and out. I want to hold him like a seashell and listen to his heart. Listen to his home. “And he did go mad, Grace,” Oliver says. “We used to find him here, in the middle of the night. Knee-deep in the water, screaming at the sea. Come back, he kept shouting. Come back.” Oliver allows the silence to blanket us both. Who was his father shouting for? Who had left him?
If I had my voice, what would I say to him now? Would Oliver even want to listen? Or does he just see me as a wishing well, a cavern that he can throw his words into, waiting till they hit the bottom?
“I miss him so much,” he says. “I miss all of them.” He stands, head thrown back to the sky. I used to look up, I want to tell him. I looked up because I thought it would be better here.
“But,” he says, and he holds out a hand to pull me up, before turning for the house, “perhaps it is finally time to let them go.”