But the fever broke, and the delirium shrank back like a tide on the ebb, and did not return. Jenny lay blinking at her familiar ceiling, with the familiar quilt under her fingers, and when she turned her head on the pillow, she saw her mother sitting there, watching her. She asked what day it was. Her mother hesitated, and then said, “You have been sick for seventeen days.” She could see her daughter counting, and saw the relief on her face when she counted past her wedding day and knew that it was past; and that told her mother what she wanted to know, and she too was relieved. But then the full reality of the conversation broke upon her, and she burst into tears and ran out of her daughter’s bedroom and into her own, where she woke up her husband to tell him the news, for they had taken it in turns never to leave Jenny’s bedside for the last seventeen days. And the news was better for him than seventeen nights of good sleep would have been.
The youngest maid servant was in the upstairs hall when Jenny’s mother rushed across it, and heard her mistress crying, and for a dizzy, awful moment half-guessed the worst. But she couldn’t bear the thought of being the messenger of such ill tidings, so she tiptoed closer till she could hear the joy in her mistress’ voice as she spoke to the master, and then fled downstairs herself to spread the glorious news to the rest of the household.
Jenny recovered only slowly. It was another week before she set foot outside her bedroom, yet another week before she ventured out of the house, and then only as far as the kitchen garden. The day after she had taken her first steps out of doors, her mother told her that Robert had been asking for her. He had come several times when she was ill, the first time the very day after she had come home wet and delirious, and he had been most anxious to speak to her. Her mother and father had been polite to him, but they were sorely preoccupied with Jenny’s health, and thought nothing at the time of the peculiarity of his manner, for they had no attention to spare. But her mother had seen the relief on her daughter’s face when she heard that seventeen days had passed during her illness. And so now she told Jenny only the brief fact of Robert’s continuing attendance, without saying that he had become more insistent, in this last week, since she had admitted that Jenny was recovering. Without saying that when people asked about a new wedding date, she had been noncommittal in a way that let people guess there would be no new wedding date. She would have put off speaking of Robert at all, and spared her daughter’s convalescence a little longer, but that she feared he would find her one day when she was alone, without her parents to intercede, mediate—send him away for good. What she wanted was that Jenny be well and strong and happy again. So, briskly, even perfunctorily, she told her daughter that Robert wished to see her.
Jenny went still in a way that was not just the natural lethargy of the invalid, and the cat in her lap woke up from its boneless sleep and gathered itself together again into four discrete legs and a tail, and looked up into her face. “I would prefer to avoid him,” she said, and that was all.
It was a month before Jenny could ride again, and she still tired easily; so it was two months, and high summer, by the time she felt able to make a journey of more than half an hour from her parents’ gate. She did not tell her parents where she was going; and she took Gruoch with her.
She rode to the bridge at the head of the harbour between the two towns.
She had told her parents little of what had happened. She had let them think she had somehow gotten lost and wandered near the sea-shore before she realised what she had done, and been drenched that way; she let them think that what she had said in her fever dreams of angry, vindictive sea-men and tender, weeping sea-women were only the result of her belated recollection of the curse, her own terror of what might have happened to her if she had not turned her mare away from the harbour in time.
She had not told them that even after her fever left her, she had gone on dreaming of a land beneath the sea, where the water was the air, but silvery and swirly, and the people walked on the sea-bottom with a curious, graceful, rippling stride, and there were horses with long slender legs and foamy manes and tails like little girls always wanted their ponies to have; and there were great grey-green hunting hounds not unlike her own dear Gruoch; and even the biggest trees had flexible trunks, and bowed and turned in the heavy air with slow elegance, trailing their frondy leaves, and that the fish nested in them like birds.
She rode back to the bridge, but she halted a few steps from it, suddenly unsure of herself. The sea-king had let her go, despite his promise to drown every land-person who touched the bridge or set boat in the water or dock-post next to the harbour shore, for as long as his people’s memory should last; and perhaps to thank him was the worst thing she could do. The thanks of a land-person might be the last thing he wanted, the thanks of a land-person he despised himself for sparing.
At the same time she remembered how his face had looked when he mentioned his son and his wife, and she remembered that when he set her on her horse, he had used his strength cautiously when he might have been harsh with her. But she feared that she remembered these things for the wrong reasons. Perhaps her desire to thank him was only an excuse to see him again, to see the person who lived in the land she dreamed of. And she felt ashamed of herself.
But as she stood hesitating on the bank, looking at the stones of the bridge but not daring to set foot upon them, the water below the bridge boiled up as it had done once before. This time the sun was sliding down the sky but nowhere near setting, and the long rays of afternoon set the wave on fire, and rainbows fell from every drop of water.
The wave did not wet her nor her horse nor her hound this time, and when it drained away again, a different sea-man stood on the bridge. He looked very much like the sea-man she had seen before, but not so much that she did not recognise the one from the other; this one was younger and plainer and had no bitterness in him.
She said before she could stop herself: “You are the sea-king’s son.” She said it as he was saying: “You must be Jenny.”
“Yes,” they said, again simultaneously, and both smiled; and each saw how the other’s rather ordinary face lit up with gentleness and humour and intelligence.
“I wished to say thank you,” said the sea-prince, and Jenny looked at him blankly, feeling that they were still speaking simultaneously, although she had said nothing more aloud.
He smiled again at her puzzled look. “I was born after my father’s curse was laid on this harbour, and I grew up knowing that my father was weighed down by some sorrow that grew heavier each year; but I did not know what it was, for neither my father nor my mother nor any of the court would tell me. My parents would not because they would not, and their people would not because my parents forbade them, and they loved my parents enough to obey, no matter how much I teased them. But my father told me the story at last, just these few short weeks ago, with the breaking of the curse when he let you go free. . . . And I have not been able to put the thought of you out of my mind since, and so I determined to meet you if I could.