I didn't run there, like I'd last done — didn't even ride in the carriage he'd sent for me. I walked, and I took me own time about it, too, and I thought on just what I'd say, and what he'd do when I said it, and what I'd do then. And before I knew, I were standing on the steps of that fine house, with no butler waiting but Henry Lee himself, with both hands out to drag me inside. «Ben," he keeps saying, «ah, Ben, Ben, Ben.» Like Monkey Sucker again, saying Mr. Hazeltine, Mr. Hazeltine, over and over.
He looked old, Henry Lee did. Hair gone gray — face slumped in like he'd lost all his teeth at once — shoulders bent to break your heart, the way you'd think he'd been stooping in a Welsh coal mine all his life. And the blue eyes of him … I only seen such eyes one time before, on a donkey that knew it were dying, and just wanted it over with. All I could think to say were, «You shouldn't never have left the sea, Henry Lee — not never.» But I didn't say it.
He turned away and started up that grand long stair up to the second floor and the bedrooms, with his footsteps sounding like clods falling on a coffin. And I followed after, wishing the stair'd never end, but keep us climbing on and on for always, never getting where we had to go, and I wished I'd never left the sea neither.
I smelled it while we was still on the stair. It ain't a bad smell, considering: it's cold and clean, like the wind off Newfoundland or when you're just entering the Kattegat, bound for Copenhagen. Aye … aye, you could say it's a fishy smell, too, if you care to, which I don't. I'd smelled it before that day, and I've smelled it since, but I don't never smell it without thinking about her, Senora Julia Caterina Five–names Lee, Missus Henry Lee. Without seeing her there in the big bed.
He'd drawn every curtain, so you had to stand blind and blinking for a few minutes, till your eyes got used to the dark. She were lying under a down quilt — me wedding gift to the bride, Hindoo lady up in Ponda sewed it for me — but just as we came in she shrugged it off, and you could see her bare as a babby to the waist. Henry Lee, he rushes forward to pull the quilt back up, but she turns her head to look up at him, and he stops where he stands. She makes a queer little sound — hear it outside your window at night, you'd think it were a cat wanting in.
«She can talk still," says Henry Lee, desperate–like, turning to me. «She was talking this morning.» I stare into Julia Caterina's pretty brown eyes — huge now, and steady going all greeny–black — and I want to tell Henry Lee, oh, she'll talk all right, no fear. Mermaids chatter, believe me — talk both your lugs off, they will, you give them the chance. Mermaids gets lonely.
«She drank so little," Henry Lee keeps saying. «She didn't really like any wine, French or Portuguese, or … ours. She only drank it to be polite, when we had guests. Because it was our business, after all. She understood about business.» I look down at the quilt where it's covering her lower parts, and I look back at Henry Lee, and he shakes his head. «No, not yet," he whispers. No tail yet, is what he meant — she's still got legs —but he couldn't say it, no more than me. Julia Caterina reaches up for him, and he sits by her on the bed and kisses both her hands. I can just see the half–circle outlines beginning just below her boobies, very faint against the pale skin. Scales…
«How long?» Henry Lee asks, looking down into her face, like he's asking her, not me.
«You'd know better than me," I tells him straight. «I only seen one poor sailor, maybe cooked halfway. And no women.»
Henry Lee closes his eyes. «I never…» I can't hardly hear him. He says, «I never … only that one time on the river, in the dark. I never saw.»
«Aye, made sure of that didn't you?» I says. «You'll know next time.»
He does look at me then, and his mouth makes one silent word — don't. After a bit he gets so he can breathe out, «Aren't I being punished enough?»
«Not nearly," I says. But Julia Caterina makes that sound again, and all on a sudden I'm so rotten sorry for her and Henry Lee I can't barely speak words meself. Nowt to do but rest me hand on his shoulder, while he sits there by his wife, and her turning under his own hands. Time we leave that sea–smelling room, it's dark outside, same as in.
And I didn't stir out of that house for the next nineteen days. Seems longer to me betimes, remembering — shorter too, other times, short as loving a wall and a barmaid — but nineteen days it were, with all the curtains drawn, every servant long fled, bar Gopi, him who'd come for me. That one, he stayed right along, went on shopping and cooking and sweeping; and if the smell and the closed rooms and us whispering up and down the stair — aye, and the sounds Henry Lee made alone in the night — if it all ever frighted him, he never said. A good man.
Like I figured, she never lost speech. I'd hear them talking hours on end, her and Henry Lee — always in the Portygee, of course, so's I couldn't make out none of it, which was good. Weren't for me to know what Henry Lee was saying to his wife, and her changing into a mermaid along of him getting rich. He tried to tell me some of their talk, but I didn't want to hear it then, and I've forgot it all now — made bleeding sure of that. I already know enough as I shouldn't, ta ever so.
Nineteen days. Nineteen mornings rising with me head so full of that sea–smell — stronger every day — I couldn't hardly swallow nowt but maybe porridge, couldn't never drink nowt but water. Nineteen nights lying awake hour on hour in one of the servants' garrets — I put meself there, 'acos I don't dream in them little cubbies the way I do in big echoey rooms such as Henry Lee had for his guests. I don't like dreaming, to this day I don't, and I liked it less then. Never closed me eyes until I had to, in that dark house.
Seventeenth night … seventeenth night, I've just finally gotten to sleep when Henry Lee wakes me, shaking me like the house is afire. I come up fighting and cursing — can't help it, always been that way — and I welt him a rouser on the earhole, but he drags me out of the bed and bundles me down to their room with a blanket around me shoulders. I keep pulling away from him, 'acos I know what I'm going to see, but he won't let go. His blue eyes look like he's been crying blood.
He'd covered her with every damp towel and rag in the house, but she'd thrown them all off … and there it is, there, laying out on the sheets that Henry Lee changes with his own hands every day, and Gopi takes to the dhobi–wallah for washing. There it is.
Everything's gone. Legs, feet, belly, all of it, everything, gone as though there'd never been nothing below her waist but that tail, scales flickering and glittering like wet emeralds in the candlelight. Look at it one way, it's a wonderful thing, that tail. It's the longest part of a mermaid or a merrow, and even when it's not moving at all, like hers wasn't just then, I swear you can see it breathing by itself, if you stand still and look close. In and out, slow, only a little, but you can see. It's them and it's not them, and that's all I'm going to say.
Now and then she'd twitch it a bit, flip the finny end some — getting used to it, like, having a tail. Each time she did that, Henry Lee'd draw his breath sharp, but all he said to me as we stood by the bed, he said, «It's made her more beautiful, Ben, hasn't it?» And it had that. She'd always had a good face, Julia Caterina, but the change had shaped it over, same as it had shaped her body. There was a wildness mixed in with the old sweetness now — mermaids is animals, some ways — and it had turned her, whetted her, into summat didn't have no end to how beautiful it could be. I told you early on, they ain't all beautiful, but even the ugly ones … see now, people got ends, people got limits — mermaids don't. Mermaids got no limits, except the sea.
She said his name, and her voice were different too — higher, yes, but mainly clearer, like all the clouds had blown off it. If that voice called for you, even soft, you'd hear it a long way. Henry Lee picked her up in his arms and put his cheek against hers, and she held onto him, and that tail tried to hold him too, bumping hard against his legs. I thought to slip out of there unnoticed, me and me blanket, but then Henry Lee said, quiet–like, «We could … I suppose we could put her in the water tonight, couldn't we, Ben?»