She swam and swam. It was dark and the land slowly disappeared behind her, but still she swam. She swam, surfacing to look for his boat, always sure that when she came up, she would see his dear face looking sheepish and saying he’d lost track of the time.
Finally she broke the water and saw it—his boat, the one with her name carved in the side so she knew it was his. It sat still and empty, the ocean lapping against its sides, and no sign of Jack anywhere.
Amelia swam to the boat and heaved herself over the side, her fin trailing in the water, sure that he was only asleep in the bottom. But there was no Jack, or nets, or fish that he might have caught. There was only the empty boat, oars tucked neatly inside.
She cried out then and plunged back into the water and down to the deep. Mermaids can see through the dark of the ocean.
Amelia was sure, absolutely certain, that if only she looked far enough she would find he’d fallen in the water and was trying to swim back to the surface. She knew he was trying to swim back to her. He would never leave her. Not her Jack.
She would find him soon. Very soon. She was sure of it. He was just out of sight, but his hand was reaching up for her and she would find him and she would save him and they would go home, home where they belonged, home on the cliff by the sea where they could see the ocean they both loved.
But she didn’t find him, though she looked and looked. After a long time, she went back to the surface and found his boat again. She searched all over it for any clue, any sign of what might have happened to her Jack.
There was nothing, only the empty boat and the folded oars and no sign that Jack had ever been there at all.
Amelia knew then that the ocean had swallowed him, torn him away from her, and a great bitterness filled her heart. She hated the ocean, hated the vast and heartless expanse that had taken Jack from her.
She wanted only to be out of the water then, away from the lapping waves and the boat that had borne her love away from her and delivered him into the cruel depths.
Mermaids do not cry, but Amelia had spent too long as a human, and so as she swam back to shore the tears streamed over the scales on her face and mixed with the brine of the sea.
When she touched the sand of the cove, she put on her human dress again and climbed the stairs back to the empty cottage. There she sat by the cold ashes in the fire and wept bitter tears until she felt wrung dry.
Jack’s boat never came back to the cove, and some of the other fishermen noticed the empty pier, and they told their neighbors that they saw Jack’s strange wife standing on the rocks every day, staring out at the sea.
They assumed poor old Jack had been taken by the ocean, as was not uncommon, and some of them even spared a kind thought for his wife, who watched for him day after day. But mostly they wondered when she would give up and leave, for she was not from that part of the world, and now that Jack was gone they thought that she, too, would go.
But Amelia did not leave. She stayed there in the cottage on the rocks, year after year. The wood of the cottage became white from the wind and the salt spray, and Amelia’s dresses grew as thin as her face, but she would not leave.
And she did not grow any older.
The people of the village could not help themselves talking, for winters were long and brutal where they lived, and a mystery is good for many an endless night. They wondered what kept her there on those rocks, and where she might have come from, and if, perhaps, she might have come from the sea.
This idea was met with less derision than that of Amelia dancing in the moonlight with the devil. These were an oceangoing people, and everyone knew that mermaids swam the ocean. Everyone knew that a mermaid might fall in love with a human man.
And far from making the people frightened of her, this knowledge seemed to comfort them, for it meant that in her own way Amelia belonged to them. She, too, was part of the ocean that gave and took everything from them.
Because she was one of them, they would protect her, and when she came into the village (much less often now) their eyes and their voices were softer than before. She was their Amelia, their wonder, their mermaid.
But the rumors about this strange and unusual woman who never grew old, and who might be a mermaid, traveled from village to village and town to town, as they do, until they reached the ears of a man whose business was in the selling of the strange and unusual.
His name was P. T. Barnum, and he’d been looking for a mermaid.
Part II The Museum
CHAPTER 2
The mermaid was not, to Barnum’s way of thinking, anything like a mermaid ought to look at all. He’d expected something that looked a lot more like a woman, like those Italian paintings that showed them all bare-breasted and full-hipped with long flowing hair. Barnum knew quite a lot of God-fearing types who disapproved of those paintings. Disapproval, Barnum knew, meant controversy, and controversy sold tickets faster than the seven wonders of the world. Barnum didn’t mind controversy as long as he could sell tickets to see a real mermaid.
This thing that Moses had brought him did not resemble those paintings in the least.
“Levi,” Barnum said.
Two men stood around the table with Barnum. Both stared at the object that lay there—one with optimism on his face and the other with his brow creased in consternation.
“Yes, Taylor?” Levi said. Levi’s face was a study in careful neutrality except for that creased brow. He’d been a lawyer, Levi had, and he still had a lawyer’s face, a face that gave away nothing until he wanted it to.
Levi was one of the few folks allowed to call him Taylor. Nobody called Barnum “Phineas.” He’d been named after his grandfather and his grandfather was Phin, but Barnum was always Barnum to everyone except to his wife and to Levi and to his family back in Bethel.
“Does that look like a mermaid to you?” As he said this, Barnum gave the third man a narrow-eyed look. That man, Moses Kimball, shifted his weight and looked hopefully at Levi.
Levi didn’t think much of the mermaid. Barnum could tell, and he felt sure Moses was bound for disappointment from that quarter.
“Well, Taylor,” Levi said, “I’m a lawyer, not a naturalist, but I would say that thing is the body of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish.”
And that was precisely what it did look like. It was only about three feet long, with skinny arms and a dried-up face and pendulous breasts, and covered all over with grey-black skin that looked as though it might flake off any second. The bottom half did not resemble the coy shining tail of myth but rather definitely that of a fish. It did not seem even particularly well preserved.
Barnum nodded in satisfaction. He preferred to be correct, and he’d correctly assumed that the thing was not a mermaid and that Levi didn’t think much of it. “Not a mermaid, then.”
Levi shook his head. “I shouldn’t say so.”
Moses Kimball spoke up then, and his expression indicated he felt his reputation as a museum proprietor was at stake. He had a long bushy grey beard that moved up and down as he spoke.
“The fellow I bought it from, Eades, said his father exhibited it in England to great success.”
“That may be so,” Barnum said, meditating on the so-called mermaid. “That may be so, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s nothing more than a humbug.”