She felt a spurt of guilt—guilt for having sent him away without a second thought—followed quickly by panic. She’d been caught, caught here in this place, and now Levi Lyman would take her away to Barnum and they would put her in a cage. Everyone would come and see her and point and laugh and then men with knives would come and carve pieces from her flesh to study and she would never see the world or the ocean or her little cottage ever again . . .
Amelia yanked her wrists from his hands and tried to stand, tried to run, but she was as weak as the first time she’d stood upon the shore. The noise made her dizzy, and when she gasped, she breathed in death and all the blood in her body rushed into her face and then emptied and then there was blackness and a voice calling far away, “Mrs. Douglas? Mrs. Douglas?” Someone gathered her up, gentle as a bridegroom, and then all was dark and blessedly silent.
Amelia opened her eyes again to find herself the subject of some scrutiny. A dark-eyed little cherub with a head full of ringlets, perhaps eight or nine years old, stared at her with the fixed gaze of one determined to have answers.
The very instant Amelia met this stare, the girl said, “Is it true you’re a mermaid?”
“Yes,” Amelia said, without thinking. The child’s personality demanded the truth, and it hadn’t occurred to Amelia not to give it to her.
“I knew it,” she breathed.
Then the girl turned abruptly and ran from the room, shouting, “Mama! Mama! She is a real mermaid, I told you so!”
Amelia realized she was on a rough velvet sofa, covered in a heavy wool blanket that made her sweat. She pushed herself up to a sitting position—slowly, very slowly—and marveled at how weak she felt. Almost immediately she wished she’d stayed prone, for the room tilted sideways and she had to lean back with her eyes closed again.
Where was she now? The last thing she remembered was Levi Lyman staring at her in amazement. Was that little girl his child? He hadn’t mentioned a family; but then, Amelia reflected, they hadn’t exactly gotten to know each other at their last encounter. She’d been too busy being clever with herself.
Amelia heard a rustle of skirts and peeked from beneath half-open lids at this new intruder. A pretty woman, a little careworn but dressed in the fashion of the respectable middle class, had entered the room. She held a toddler in one arm, a little girl who pulled on her mother’s bun-tucked braids with fat fingers. The woman’s stomach bulged—evidence of yet another child on its way. The woman’s hand was pulled by the insistent curly-haired moppet. The girl pointed at Amelia.
“See, Mama, there she is,” the girl said. “Look at her eyes and you’ll see that she really is a mermaid. Uncle Levi told me she was, and she even said it was true.”
“All right, Caroline, that’s enough,” the woman said, her face flushing a little when she noticed Amelia was awake and watching them. “Go along now to your room while I see to this lady.”
“But I want to talk to the mermaid!” Caroline said. “I want to know how she changes into a fish and what her home is like under the sea and if she likes being a fish better than a girl or the other way around. If Helen can stay, I want to stay.”
Caroline’s mother glanced at Amelia, then at her daughter, and seemed to decide it was better to let the girl stay than have an argument before a stranger.
“Very well, but you must be quiet,” the woman said.
She came toward Amelia then, with the slow, awkward progress of every woman carrying a baby. She gave a small polite smile and said, “How are you feeling now? I’m Mrs. Barnum, but you may call me Charity if you like. My husband is the owner of the museum.”
Charity Barnum settled on a chair positioned near the corner of the sofa. Her older daughter curled on the floor with her head on her mother’s knee. The younger child wriggled in her mother’s arms, clearly dissatisfied with the lack of lap space available with her mother’s pregnant belly in the way.
“You gave Mr. Lyman quite a scare,” Mrs. Barnum continued when Amelia did not respond to her first question. “It was all I could do to keep him from carrying you off to the nearest doctor.”
Amelia heard the words but couldn’t make sense of them. From the moment Charity Barnum entered the room, Amelia was hypnotized by the roundness of her belly. Of course Amelia had seen pregnant women before—and babies and children, too—but always from a distance. She hadn’t any friends in the village and had never been so close to a human mother.
There were, again, pregnant females among her own people, but that was so long ago she could hardly remember them. Anyway, that was before Jack, before the years of quiet wanting and heartbreak, before she sealed that unfulfilled desire closed so it couldn’t hurt her.
Now this woman was before her, this sad-eyed woman who seemed drawn despite her plumpness, a woman with two children already expecting a third—a third!—and for the first time Amelia felt the green poison of jealousy in her veins. That one person should have so much and she nothing at all . . . it was almost too much to bear.
Amelia wondered, if she’d had a child—a chubby little doll like the small one now toddling around the room—would that have assuaged her grief after the sea took Jack? If some part of him lived on, would she have stood on those rocks day after day searching for him?
If she had not been there, waiting for him on a cliff by the sea, she certainly wouldn’t be here now, wondering if she should take a job as Mr. Barnum’s mermaid. There would have been no rumors about her, no accidental revelations of her real self to drunk fishermen.
Mrs. Barnum gave a little cough. Amelia realized she’d been staring and woolgathering and let the silence go on too long.
Oh, this was why she always had so much trouble around humans! There were endless rules to follow, and she didn’t know or care about most of them. It never bothered Jack if she took too long to respond to his question or if she was silent for many minutes. At home she’d never had to interact with anyone in a parlor, for she’d never been invited to tea or anything else. She knew how to be properly human just long enough to complete a transaction at the general store.
“I’m feeling much better now, thank you,” Amelia said. This, she was certain, was the correct thing to say even if she didn’t feel better at all. One of the rules she did know was that truth wasn’t particularly valued in polite company.
“I imagine you’re hungry,” Charity said, watching Amelia with an uncertain look on her face.
Amelia wondered if she’d not put enough conviction into her statement about feeling better. It didn’t seem as though Charity believed her.
“I’ve asked the cook to bring you some beef tea,” the other woman continued.
Amelia stopped herself from wrinkling her nose at the mention of “beef tea,” but only just. She didn’t know what it was except that it didn’t sound very appetizing. What she really wanted was some regular tea with lots of sugar in it, but she didn’t know how to ask for it.
Amelia vaguely remembered some restriction on making such a request when you were a guest, and Charity Barnum had seemed so pleased to offer the “beef tea.” Amelia didn’t want to hurt her hostess’s feelings; Mrs. Barnum had the look of someone whose feelings were trampled upon with regularity.
The mermaid cast about for something to say, as one was supposed to do. Her interactions in the village had been limited primarily to the purchasing of goods and conversations about the weather. She didn’t even know the state of the weather from this room as there were no windows.