The result of this was that Levi found himself holding his suitcase outside a tavern, sadly whiskeyless and unable to even find a patch of straw for the night, much less a feather bed.
He cursed Barnum’s scheming (under his breath, for there were sharp-eared ladies going about their afternoon shopping and his father would have boxed his ears if he’d heard him say such things before the fairer sex) and vowed that if he had to sleep on the sidewalk that night, he would never so much as carry a letter to the post for Barnum again.
Despite the complete lack of helpfulness from the towns- people, Levi wasn’t ready to go back to Barnum and explain why he’d returned to New York empty-handed. He knew the woman lived on the coast, not in the town, so all he had to do was make his way toward the sound of the crashing sea. Surely she would be easy enough to find then. How many seaside cottages could there be in this wretched state?
Several hours later, Levi admitted that first, there were quite a few seaside homes in this wretched state (an almost incomprehensible number, to his mind—who on earth wanted the sea encroaching on them all day and night?) and second, the coastline was longer than it appeared on a map.
As nightfall approached, he wandered, weary and foot-sore, along a kind of track in the snow (why was there still snow in April? It wasn’t natural) that ran along next to the enormous boulders that seemed to block off huge portions of the coast. At least they blocked off huge portions of the coast to sane persons—those who did not think it right, proper, or fun to clamber over rocks in order to reach the churning green ocean below. Levi did not like the ocean, and what he’d seen of it on this trip had done little to increase its appeal.
He had to admit that he was more than ready to give up this search. Nearly every home he’d encountered had been peopled by a flinty-eyed fisherman or his wife who, naturally, had no idea which of their neighbors might be a mermaid.
The best thing to do would be to hire a wagon to take him to the nearest town that was not filled with hostiles and give it up as a bad business. Perhaps he could convince Barnum that the dried-up monkey mummy of Kimball’s would do just as well.
He dropped his case in the snow on the track beside him. In addition to everything else, there was more snow up here than Levi had ever seen in his life, and he’d been trudging through it for hours. The sun was going down, he was nowhere near civilization, and he’d had enough.
And then he saw her.
She stood on the cliff staring out to sea, her unbelievably long witch-hair not blowing in the wind from the ocean but seeming to embrace it, to twine around the very air and move with it in an impossible dance. The cold did not appear to disturb her, for she wore only a rough wool dress and boots and no coat or even a shawl to cover her shoulders. She was young, much younger than any of her neighbors near or far, and even from this distance—perhaps a quarter mile—Levi could tell her skin would gleam like a pearl in candlelight.
He saw then the rough little cottage tucked onto the rocks behind her and the slight curve beneath it that would lead to a cove beneath.
This was the woman. He was sure of it.
As he picked up his case and hurried toward the still figure, he hoped that at the very least the woman would be hospitable, for if he didn’t get out of the cold, he felt certain his toes would freeze together.
His feet crunched in the snow, and he must have sounded like a lumbering bear to her, but she did not turn or indicate that she heard him at all until he called out.
“Hello!” he said.
He stopped when he was a few feet from her, not wanting to startle her. Her back was very straight, and the wind carried her scent to him, the salt of the sea mixed with the oil he could see gleaming in the coils of her hair.
She turned then, but very slowly, almost as if she were under a spell and wanted to stay there. Her eyes were closed, the lashes thick and dark against her white skin.
Then the lids rose, and he thought, Of course she’s a mermaid. What else would she be?
Those eyes were not of the shore, he thought. They were as grey as the storm that boiled below them, the constant swirl and crash that was the sea. But more than that, they were alien. The expression in them was not of a fellow human but of one who was apart from humanity and looked at him as something strange and curious.
He felt himself shrinking beneath that gaze and wondered suddenly if this was how Joice Heth had felt—the discomfort of being dissected by a look, the desire to shrivel up and disappear under eyes that wouldn’t stop watching.
“Yes?” the woman said.
Levi shook away the fancy that struck him. Of course she wasn’t a mermaid. Her gaze wasn’t any more or less forthright than the rest of the folk around here. He just hadn’t seen grey eyes very often, and certainly not ones just that shade of storm-tossed ocean.
“I was hoping you could help me,” Levi began, then stopped. Now that he was here, what was he to say to this woman?
“Yes?” she asked again. Her tone was disinterested. It said it wasn’t any matter to her if they stood upon the rocks in the cold wind forever.
Her witchy hair blew all around her face now that her back was to the wind. Levi was sure that if he approached her, the tendrils would grab him and pull him into the water and he would drown.
She was making him fanciful, and Levi knew better than to be fanciful. But there was something about her, something strange and compelling, and he understood why rumors flew so thick about her.
He understood, too, in the part of him that was Barnum’s spiritual kin, that those eyes and that hair and that so-direct look would draw crowds into the museum like no other.
She might not really be a mermaid, but by God, Levi and Barnum could sell her as one.
Could I trouble you for a cup of tea?”
That was what the man asked, in that way people did when they thought it would be no trouble at all. Amelia had tea, of course, but she didn’t know that she particularly wanted to share it with a stranger. And this stranger stared at her with too-avid eyes, eyes that told her he’d heard the rumors about her and come to see if they were true.
It had been a decade, give or take a few years, since Jack’s death. For a long time afterward, Amelia found she was unable to change, to even approach the sea. It had become something hateful to her—the mistress who’d stolen her husband away.
Amelia had stood upon the rocks and cursed it and wished all of her grief and anger on the vast unfeeling waves. She wished for a sudden shifting of the earth so that all the water would drain away from her sight, or that a vast fireball would descend from the sky and scorch all of the ocean into a desert.
In short she wished for ridiculous, impossible things but none more ridiculous or impossible as when she bent over in heartbreak and wept long tears over the rocks and promised anything, anything, anything at all if only the ocean would return her love to her.
And though she cursed and wept and pleaded and bargained, the ocean never listened or acknowledged the troubles of one small land-or-sea dweller. The ocean has a rhythm, but it has no heart.
After a long time had passed, Amelia stopped looking for his boat or wishing the great ocean would be destroyed because of the whim of her broken heart. Somewhere far away lived her family and her people, and perhaps she might like to return to them someday, and she would not be able to if the ocean was gone forever.