Luckily Mrs. Barnum rescued her by taking up the conversation again.
“Mr. Lyman told me you are from Maine. Where are you staying while you visit New York?”
Amelia stared at her blankly. “Staying?”
She felt the first grip of panic then. Stay. Of course. She needed a room to sleep in, a boardinghouse or some such thing. That was what humans did. She knew this very well but had not thought of the necessity of arrangements.
She had not thought of anything (she could now admit this when faced with all the things she’d done wrong) except escaping her cottage and her rocks by the sea and the emptiness of her life there. It wasn’t even that the place had been haunted by Jack. At least a ghost would have filled up the blank space.
Amelia had run from nothing, run with the same impulsiveness that had her chasing that ship so long ago. There was no plan other than a vague idea of taking up the offer Mr. Lyman presented. Of course she should have had some place to stay. She could hardly return to the harbor night after night.
Mrs. Barnum gazed at Amelia in expectation.
“I’m staying with friends,” Amelia said.
Mrs. Barnum’s expression told Amelia she didn’t believe this story in the slightest but was too polite to say so. The older child huffed loudly.
“This is all very boring. When are you going to ask her about being a mermaid?”
Charity Barnum’s eyes widened. “Caroline! You know better than to speak in such a way. Apologize to Mrs. Douglas.”
Caroline’s chin jutted mutinously from her small face.
Mrs. Barnum turned to Amelia. “I’m terribly sorry. We’re having some difficulty finding a nanny at the moment—you know how hard it is to find good help—and she’s accustomed to staying with me all day. I’m afraid that like many mothers I am a little more indulgent than I should be.”
A blush rose in Mrs. Barnum’s cheeks as she spoke, and her eyes darted around the room. Amelia followed her gaze, took in the sparse furnishings, and realized they hadn’t the funds to pay for a nanny. Why this should be a source of embarrassment Amelia did not know—she and Jack had much less than this woman—but she was aware of the human custom that said discussing money was distasteful.
She’d never thought so much about the differences between herself and humans. Jack had never made her feel as strange as fifteen minutes in this woman’s parlor had done.
Charity Barnum watched her anxiously, waiting for Amelia’s polite reassurance that she was not offended by Caroline’s behavior. Again, Amelia knew that it did not matter so much if she was actually offended or not, just that she told her hostess it was fine.
Before she had an opportunity to say a word, the child spoke again.
“Mrs. Douglas? How can you be a mermaid if you’re a missus?” Her tone said that such things were not possible, and obviously this woman was a fake, because mermaids couldn’t be something so mundane as a “missus.”
“Because a fisherman trapped me in his net when I was swimming in the ocean,” Amelia said, speaking directly to the girl.
All the scorn disappeared from Caroline’s face. She approached Amelia with wide eyes, caught in the net of the mermaid’s story. “And when he caught you he kept you, and that’s how you became a missus?”
Amelia shook her head. “No, Jack would never do such a thing, for wild things should be free and I was very wild.”
Wild and young, Amelia thought. She didn’t look any older, but she was, and it was hard to think of that young and hopeful girl, the one who had walked so confidently into Jack’s cottage and expected him to love her.
“And so he let you go?” Caroline asked.
“Yes,” Amelia said.
“But you fell in love with him anyway,” the little girl said, and took Amelia’s cold hand.
“His eyes were so lonely,” Amelia said, and her voice sounded like it came from someplace far away, not inside her body.
Caroline squeezed her hand. “And his loneliness made you sad.”
“And made me realize I was lonely, too,” Amelia said.
“So you fell in love and you were never lonely anymore.”
Amelia’s face was wet then, though she didn’t know when she’d started crying.
Caroline climbed into her lap and put her little arms around Amelia’s neck and rested her head against the mermaid’s heart.
“And then he died, didn’t he?” the little girl whispered. “And now you’re alone again.”
Amelia couldn’t speak. Her voice had gone away, back to a place where Jack was pressing his face against hers, back to the time when she could breathe him in.
Caroline leaned back to look into Amelia’s eyes. “Don’t worry. You can be our mermaid and live with us and you’ll never be lonely again.”
“Caroline,” Charity said, but soft and full of weeping.
CHAPTER 4
Levi stood outside the door, his back pressed against the wall. In his hands he held a tray with a dish of beef broth, rapidly cooling, and a small hunk of bread. He’d waylaid the cook on her way to the parlor and convinced her to give over the tray.
He’d wanted an excuse to see her, though Charity treated him like a member of the family and would not have objected if he joined them without any specific reason. But his heart thrummed in anticipation as he took the tray from the cook; he didn’t think the mermaid would be able to hear it beating for her, but he couldn’t be sure.
The sight of her in the museum had seemed an impossible thing: the illusory manifestation of his deepest heart’s desire rather than an actual happening. Until she was there, he hadn’t realized just how much he’d longed to see her. He had convinced himself that the visit to the woman on the rocks was nothing more than a minor adventure. If he dreamed every night of flashing fins and grey eyes rising from the water then at least those shadows were banished by the time he stood at his shaving mirror every morning.
Even if he’d accustomed himself to the idea that she was really in New York, he couldn’t understand why. Why, after she’d sent him away without a backward glance? Could she have changed her mind about Barnum’s proposal?
Could she have come to see you? a very small voice in the back of his mind asked.
Of course not, the sensible part of him replied.
But that little voice murmured behind his ear all the same as he lifted her fainting body and felt how thin she was, so thin. At the same time there was something strong and powerful under her skin and she smelled of the sea, of salt and storms and the merciless wind and monsters that rose from the dark.
He knew then, without any other proof, that she was a mermaid, a real mermaid, and far from wanting her in Barnum’s tank, he wanted her to return to the ocean or to her cottage on the rocks or just go anywhere but there, for Barnum would take all of her magic and twist it out of her until the enchantment was gone, and Levi was afraid for her, so afraid.
He didn’t know where to take her then. He couldn’t run through the streets of New York bearing a strange woman until he reached the harbor. What would he do when he got there—toss her into the water and leave? Would the ocean heal her?
A doctor, too, was out of the question. What might happen if the doctor examined her? Was her secret written somewhere on her body, waiting to be discovered? Levi saw that she had legs instead of a fin, of course, but knew nothing of how a change might be triggered. If a well-meaning assistant laid a cold compress across her forehead, would the mere presence of water make her change? What did he know of mermaids?