Page 91 of Dawnlands

“Oh! Can we see?” Mia asked.

The two grooms shrugged and turned the horses down a little track, following the gray smoke which lay between the trees like mist. The horses snorted as they came into a clearing and the sound alerted the charcoal burners who turned to see two big horses, and the two girls on pillion saddles behind their grooms.

“Good day,” an old woman said as she straightened up from a mound of dry turves and earth and came to the horses’ heads. Her lined face was deeply blackened with soot, her clothes and her hair dusted with dark powder. “Good day to you. Are you lost?”

“No,” Gabrielle said. “We’re riding home, to the Priory, when we smelled the smoke. Are you burning wood for charcoal?”

“Aye, that’s what we’re doing, and we have a license from themanor, and all. Are you the new landlords? Sisters to the new lord. Mr. Peachey, isn’t it?”

“We’re his cousins,” Mia said. “Can we see?”

The old woman laughed. “Not much to see here.”

Mia tapped the groom on the shoulder, and he got down from the saddle and turned and lifted her down, and then helped Gabrielle to the ground. The grooms stood, holding the horses as the girls went closer to the pyre.

“Hot work,” Gabrielle remarked, looking at the woman and her family, who carried on working as if the visitors were of little interest to them. They all had blackened hands and faces from the soot, and their clothes would never be clean.

“Hot and dirty,” the woman said. “And ill paid. But it keeps us fed. That, and brush gathering, and nutting, and mushroom picking, and berry picking. We have a license for the rights.”

“I thought it was free,” Mia said. “Aren’t berries free?”

“Nothing is free.”

“And you live here?” Gabrielle asked, looking doubtfully at the little hovels built from branches and the leather sheets.

“In summer it’s easier to keep the fires in. But in winter we live in a house at the edge of the woods and come out to the fires. Would you like a glass of small ale?”

Gabrielle was sure that they should not stay, but Mia said: “Yes, please,” and in a moment they were served with earthenware cups of small ale.

“I can tell fortunes,” the woman offered quietly. “Or I can tell stories for a penny?”

“I think we should…” Gabrielle began.

Mia reached into the pocket of her jacket and produced a penny. “Tell me a story. D’you know one of long ago? About the monks in the Priory?”

“Ah, a long-ago story,” the woman said. She took her seat on a fireside log, and the girls sat beside her and looked at the smoke escaping in wisps.

“There was a mermaid here once,” the woman said. “Came out of the sea.”

The girls nodded; daughters of Venice, they had heard many storiesof mermaids and strange creatures from the deep sea; there was no reason to disbelieve mermaids on an island named for seals.

“Came out of the sea on Midsummer Eve, years ago, looking for a lover. Came out of the sea where it laps up against the churchyard wall. St. Wilfrid’s Church, you know it?”

“Yes,” Mia said. “Just across the field from the Priory.”

“The mermaid was longing for love, she was lonely in the sea, she wanted a man to love her, one that could hold her and take her, not some cold fish-man. She wanted to be loved so much that she grew feet where her tail should be, and she came out of her world and she walked—oh! Her feet were that sore! She hobbled through the lich-gate to the churchyard and she took a seat on the stone bench in the porch. Still there now. You’ve seen it?”

The two girls nodded.

“She knew that if she waited there and faced the moon and turned her head to look over her shoulder at midnight, she would see her lover coming to her, with no shadow behind him.”

Both girls were completely silent, listening.

“The bell in the tower struck twelve notes, she counted them, it was midnight. She came out of the porch and faced the moon. She turned her head to look over her shoulder, away from the moon, and there she saw him.”

“Who was he?” Mia whispered.

“To her, he was the man she had dreamed of all her life under the water longing for a man. But—he was not a dream but a man in real life, a priest from the Priory, and he’d never seen a woman before, so he didn’t know from her gray eyes, and the streaming golden hair all wet on her shoulders, and the shimmer of her gown like scales, that she was no real woman but a mermaid, one of the faerie folk, that no man should touch. He didn’t know that he shouldn’t even look at her. Not even for a moment. He fell in love with her like that!”