Or, at least, my father had done so while the selkies still survived as a race. He had, all unwittingly, unleashed the machinery of their doom upon them. The seaweed gathering device so disrupted the cycles of their lives and breeding, that the race began to die out. This fatal process accelerated at a geometric progression, the lifespan of those already born being shortened as well, perhaps through a collective grief. No rancour had ever entered into the relationship with my father; even now, only forgiveness existed in the heart of the Brown Leather Man, the last of his people. Their gentle wisdom had seen that such an outcome had never been intended.
The Brown Leather Man, however, had determined that there was yet some hope. The seaweed beds of the coast of Groughay, unmolested for so long a time, had re-established themselves to their original extent. Even more heartening was his discovery that a number of selkie embryos, in a spore-like state, had survived the process of converting the seaweed to fertilizer. In one spot where the fertilizer had been used, the fens around the village of Dampford, the embryos had matured, come of age, and even managed to mate with the inbred and somewhat devolved natives of that sorry region. The Brown Leather Man was not the first to discover this: Lord Bendray himself had made his decision to buy up the district and establish his residence there, prompted by his recognition of the Dampford villagers for what they were – a cross between humans and the selkies he had been aware of from his youth on the island of Groughay. Being remarkably dull-witted, the cross-bred Dampford villagers were easily victimised by another of Lord Bendray's moneymaking schemes, in which the village girls – their unlovely visages matched by corresponding alterations to their anatomies (I did not press him for elaboration on the subject) were lured into Mollie Maud's service in London to satisfy the jaded passions of her wealthy and bored clientele. So successful had this trade been – as trades dealing in the seemingly endless lusts of men usually are – that eventually a whole subculture of Dampford villagers, male and female, had been established in London, forming the amorphous borough of Wetwick that I had stumbled upon. To increase these innocents' isolation and thus reduce the chance of their escaping from Lord Bendray's and Mollie Maud's domination, Lord Bendray had created a mock religion for them, centred upon the fictional Saint Monkfish. To avoid detection, the Church of Saint Monkfish has no set place of worship, but rather floats from place to place in the city. The denizens of Wetwick – for so their supposed benefactors Lord Bendray, had named them – are summoned to services by a bell that Lord Bendray had especially cast for the purpose, with a note pitched too high for ordinary humans to hear; the selkie crossbreeds, with their seaborne origins, have a range of hearing different from that of ordinary human beings. The elderly of the tribe (as with humans long in tooth), having lost the highest-pitched portion of their hearing, have dogs trained to listen for the striking of their church bell and to guide them to the location of the services. Just such a "bell-dog" was the eponymous Abel, sleeping below-deck in my cabin. The dogs served another, even more sinister purpose: they were useful for various cabbies catering to depraved tastes, in order to deliver their passengers to the district where their pleasures could be catered to by the wretched employees of Mollie Maud. The coiner Fexton, as a convert to the worship of Saint Monkfish, had need of such an animal as well. Lord Bendray, with his thorough scientific mind, had even created an alternative economy for the Wetwick residents; its coinage, with the portrait of the mythical Saint Monkfish upon it, also served as an identifying emblem for those humans who had been initiated into the secrets of the borough's clandestine existence.
However, even as dull-witted as the Wetwick crossbreeds were, they had come to suspect that things were not as their patron Lord Bendray had told them. In addition to creating their own religion for them, he had blasphemously told them that the Christianity practised by the ordinary population surrounding them, was a faith all the sacraments of which dealt with fishing, a practice that the piscine Wetwick denizens would naturally view with horror. The bedecking of the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe in London with fishing tackle and copies of Izaak Walton was a scheme concocted by Lord Bendray to confirm in the minds of his deluded parishioners the belief in the basic hostility of the human race towards them.
All this, the Brown Leather Man had learned from his own investigations. Some call in his blood had motivated his leaving his sea home by Groughay, and finding these lost cousins of his tribe. Thus, he had found how cruelly they had been exploited to service the lusts and greed of land-bound man. Another reason prompted this pilgrimage: he had wished to determine what knowledge of the potentially dangerous principles of sympathetic vibrations taught to Dower's father still remained in the possession of the land-dwellers. This had been the reason for his visit to my shop, bearing one of my father's Regulators that had been left by him on the island of Groughay. In his haste caused by the broken watch-spring tearing his leather "skin", the Brown Leather Man had mistakenly given me the Saint Monkfish crown, collected by him on a visit to the borough of Wetwick.
His overriding goal, however, was the re-establishment of his own race. Having discovered the fate of the spores that had been carried in the seaweed fertilizer, he first had gone to London in hopes of obtaining ova to be quickened with his own seed; these he had hoped to carry back to the ancestral seaweed beds near Groughay, and thus breed back to the original line. His normally forgiving nature had been outraged by the servile and deluded state of the Wetwick denizens; he had tracked down the coin forger Fexton in order to determine precisely who was behind the cruel deception. Fexton, the Brown Leather Man had discovered, by reason of the general deterioration of his reason, had come to believe that the religion concocted by his employer Lord Bendray was in fact true; he had joined in the observances of the blasphemy that his criminal talents had helped sustain. While the Brown Leather Man had been speaking to Fexton, members of the Godly Army – ever vigilant against blasphemy, they had learned of the Saint Monkfish religion through their spying on Lord Bendray – broke into the room and attacked them. In the ensuing scuffle, Fexton was killed and the Brown Leather Man received a wound that triggered a state of reduced respiration and heartbeat, a normal process in his amphibian race. I was taken to be one of their fellow blasphemers when the two soldiers of the Godly Army returned to Fexton's rooms and discovered me there. Fortunately, being dumped into the chill waters of the Thames revived the Brown Leather Man, and he had overturned the boat, then bore me to the safety of the riverbank.
Our paths parted then, only to be entwined again in the village of Dampford. His efforts to obtain the necessary ova from the female Wetwick crossbreeds had been a failure, so he had gone to their native village. There – just prior to witnessing the contretemps into which I had managed to land myself, and extricating me from it – he had met with more success.
The first glimmer of dawn was tracing the sea's horizon by this time; the hours of the night had flown while I listened near-mesmerised by the strange account. Little time was left before this mysterious yet familiar figure would have to return to the ocean to avoid detection by my captors. He grasped my arm as he spoke: "Dower you must take from me something. And safely hide it." He reached behind himself, then handed me an object, a cylinder of brass glinting in the faint light. As I turned it about in my grasp, I saw that a section of thick glass was set into it; clear water sloshed inside, slightly clouded by a heavier milky liquid.