The Mermaid Collector (5 page)

There was no logic to it. She’d never been close to drowning, never been tossed roughly into a wave and coughed and sputtered her way to the surface the way her sisters had. For one growing up on the Maine coast, not taking to the water was almost as blasphemous as loathing blueberries or fearing snow. Which was all the more
reason why her acceptance of thirty-year-old sailor Linus Harris’s marriage proposal had shocked everyone, especially her older sisters, Rachel and Pearl.

The truth was it had shocked Lydia a bit too, but that was how enormous her love was for him. She’d sooner live with her watery nightmares than live without him. And so she’d left her sisters in Kittery and followed Linus to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he had secured work on a new fleet of fishing trawlers. He found them a sunny room in a boardinghouse near the wharf, though he promised to have them in a house of their own within the year, both of them certain she’d be pregnant with their first child by then. But after three years, none of their plans had come to fruition. Though Linus loved the work—as Lydia could plainly see each time her handsome husband returned through the door, stinking of salt, his face and hair burned by wind and sun—she couldn’t conceive a child, and even worse, the nightmares she’d endured in their first year of marriage had not only persisted but strengthened in their terror: vivid, drawn-out visions of losing her husband to the blackness of the sea, dreams so dreadful that there was nothing Linus could say to erase them in those dark and terrifying moments after Lydia had woken, crying out, startled like an infant, and bursting into tears at once.

So when Linus returned home on a mild March afternoon with news of a keeper’s post at a lighthouse in a small town in Maine called Cradle Harbor, Lydia nearly wept with relief.

“I take this to mean I should apply for the position?” Linus had teased, still holding Lydia after she’d buried herself in his arms in her joy.

She looked up at him, her wet eyes pooling with apprehension. “You wouldn’t hate me?” she said, even as Linus carefully dried the streams of her tears with his thumbs.

“How could I ever hate you?” he asked.

“You love the water,” she said.

“But I love you more.”

And so it was settled. Rachel and Pearl, so happy to know their baby sister would be closer to them once again, made the long trip to Bridgeport days after learning the news, under the guise of helping Lydia to pack, though all the women knew it was a pale excuse since the young couple had been living in nothing but a single room and could fit the entirety of their worldly possessions into a handful of hatboxes.

“Linus says we’ll have a house there,” Lydia reported, settling herself between her sisters on the love seat, then rising soon afterward for more tea, too excited to stay still for long.

“As well you should,” said Rachel, the eldest of the three sisters. “Now you can finally have those beautiful babies we’ve all been waiting for.”

“Oh, you and your
babies
, Rachel.” Lydia’s sister Pearl had been blessed with milkweed blond curls that had not darkened even the slightest bit through the years, even as Lydia had watched her own pale hair turn an indecisive
shade of brown at age thirteen. “Not every woman believes it’s her calling to bear children, you know.”

“We all know you certainly don’t believe it,” Rachel said.

“So be it.” Pearl gave a mischievous smile over her teacup. “Maybe I just fancy my waist and my sleep far too much.”

“You say that now,” warned Rachel. “Just wait until Simon slips that ring on your finger and you find yourself awake at night, coming up with names for your children.”

“First of all, dear sister,” Pearl clarified, reaching for one of the iced tea cakes she and Rachel had brought, “Simon Wiggs will not be putting
anything
on my finger, least of all a ring, and if I should find myself in the unfortunate state of marriage someday, I suspect the only thing I will be lying awake over will be to think of ways to untangle myself from the situation.”

Rachel just rolled her eyes. “You’re incorrigible.”

“That’s what Simon said,” replied Pearl, winking at Lydia.

Lydia laughed loudly, grateful more than anything to have the subject of motherhood turned away from her. Too embarrassed to admit their lack of success, she’d merely told her sisters that she and Linus had wished to wait for a more suitable living arrangement in which to bring their baby into the world.

When their giggles had subsided, Rachel said, “As thrilled as we are, I still think you’re very brave, Lydie-loo.
It will be hard, hard work, this new job. This new life.”

Hard? Lydia didn’t think so. And Linus hadn’t suggested that as he’d rattled off the list of his daily chores. Tending to the lamp and the fog bell, trimming the wick, washing the windows. Trekking up and down curved metal stairs, clock winding, checking the channel markers. It had seemed manageable enough. And he’d have help too, he’d told her. There was a neighbor just down the road from the lighthouse, a young man who’d assisted the last keeper.

Besides, Lydia thought as she poured her sisters more tea, there wasn’t much chance of a man drowning in a lighthouse, was there? It wasn’t as if a hand might reach up from the sea and pull him down from all the way up there.

“YOU’RE AWFUL YOUNG FOR A
keeper.”

Those were the very first words the man with the pointed chin said to Linus when they’d arrived at the Point three weeks later. Linus had smiled in his usual way, as if the man had been humoring him, when even Lydia could see the frosty tint of the old man’s eyes.

“Our last keeper was retired,” the man went on to say as he led them up the lawn to the keeper’s house. “But then it’s really a young man’s job. All the up-and-down. Not to mention the walk just to get there.”

Indeed, it was a long trip, Lydia thought, looking at the
path Linus had trudged through the hedges, the path she refused to follow, even as the old man had given her a wary look. This was as close as she planned to get to the lighthouse.

“It does seem far,” she said to Linus later that afternoon as they watched the men unpack their things. “I thought you said the towers were always close. For emergencies.”

“Some are,” Linus answered. “It all depends.”

On what?
Lydia had wanted to ask. What could possibly have possessed the builders of this place to stand their lighthouse so far from the house? Not that she minded the siting. Hardly. If it meant she and their babies could sleep farther away from that crashing surf, she would be grateful.

Indeed, the house itself was lovely—lovelier than she had expected. There were built-ins and crown molding. Outside there was already a garden. The previous keeper’s wife had started it, the pointed-chin man had said. She left tomato plants as high as sunflowers.

Lydia would see her plants twice as high in the fall. But it was only spring—
barely
spring, April, that quixotic month that enjoyed its tease. Just when the earth would finally begin to thaw and those tentative buds would poke their velvety heads through the softening soil, a nor’easter would blow through, blanketing a hopeful ground in two feet of snow for a week.

No, she would wait for May before she began to peel off the layers of their bedspreads, before she could throw
up the sashes and keep them open. For all she knew, the coming week might find her carrying a child and dizzy with all the enviable symptoms of pregnancy.

Yes, she’d find her way out here on this rugged fingertip of earth. She’d steer clear of the rocks and the surf. There was a good deal of both grass and trees. If she stood right on a calm day, she might never even know she was so close to the water.

Still, the man with the pointed chin stopped in the parlor doorway and took Linus aside to whisper, “You think she can handle it out here, do you?”

“Of course she can,” Linus answered, smiling at her. “My Lydie can handle anything.”

LINUS LIKED THE WORK MORE
than he expected; Lydia could see that at once, and it relieved her to no end. There was much to learn, which didn’t bother him. He’d always loved new things and loved a challenge. Even his entries in the log book revealed his enthusiasm for his work. While he was required to just record his daily routines, Linus exceeded expectation and filled his journal with remarkable details, weather reports, wildlife sightings, birds that had landed on the gallery railings or nested in the eaves of the oil house. Each night, while they enjoyed tea, he would recite the passages to her, the habit quickly becoming routine. Lydia craved the readings, grateful for their intimacy, happy to know all her husband did and saw when she
would look longingly down the walkway from their kitchen window, wondering what filled his hours away from her in a place she couldn’t bear to see for herself.

It took only a few weeks for the town of Cradle Harbor to grow fond of the good-looking young couple who’d come to care for the lighthouse. They were that sort of people, warm at the outset, equally sociable, blessed with good humor and good hearts. Linus quickly made friends who told him at once that he was too gregarious to be a keeper. Since he was often in town to get supplies, sometimes he’d stop to chat with men along the wharf.

Lydia too made friends, most of whose husbands were fishermen.

“You must be anxious to start a family, dear.”

“We’re still settling in,” Lydia had explained as politely as she could manage to the group of women in Annabeth Owen’s kitchen a few weeks after they’d arrived. “There’s no rush.” But as she’d looked around at their expectant faces, Lydia could see that there was. Had none of them struggled to conceive? Surely she wasn’t alone. Yet how would she know? To ask would have been unthinkable.

But that was to be in the past. Here Linus was relaxed. Certainly the post would have moments of danger, of anxiety. Just the other week a storm had lashed at the house and the tower with such intensity that Linus had spent the entire night in the lantern room, making sure the lamp stayed lit and watching the sea for ships in peril. And there was no question the work was constant and the hours
long. But the chores never seemed to exhaust him the way work had on the sloop.

“You must be going out of your mind down there,” said another woman whose name Lydia couldn’t remember, though she was fairly certain it began with
T
. “I couldn’t take it—I know that much.”

“It’ll be different when the babies come,” Annabeth said, smiling. “You’ll see. You’ll never know quiet again.”

It
would
be different, Lydia told herself, for the rest of the afternoon, and into the next week. And when her monthly came, as reliably and thickly as it had every month without fail since she was twelve, she told herself it was only a matter of time. She was only twenty-six. And besides, she still had so much to do. The garden she wished to expand. The rooms she wished to paper. The fruit she meant to can.

So she didn’t worry.

“THIS IS ANGUS KEENE,”
Linus announced one day in early June, coming into the kitchen with a dark-haired man. “He’s Miles’s brother. He’s the man I told you about. He’ll be helping me. Helping
us
, really.”

“Ma’am.” The man tipped his cap to Lydia and smiled shyly. He was young, she thought, glancing quickly at his sturdy frame and the soft brown curls that crept out under his brim.

That night at dinner, Lydia served fish chowder and corn cakes.

“I met an interesting man in town today,” Linus reported. “Eli Banks. He owns the cannery. A real character. You’d never know he was some big businessman. We got talking outside the post office. He asked me if I knew anything about sailboats.”

“And of course you said…”

Linus grinned. “Not a damn thing.”

Lydia smiled. “I’ll bet.”

“He’s looking to buy one. He knows nothing about sailing. He has one in mind and wonders if I’d come by and give it a look, tell him what I think.”

“Why? Is he going to buy it for you?”

“No,” said Linus, “but he did say he’d invite me aboard for its maiden voyage.”

“Sure he will.” Lydia gave Linus a playfully suspicious glance. “More like invite you so that you could be his captain.” Still, even as she said it, Lydia knew the suggestion of a day on a boat would have thrilled her husband. She knew how much Linus missed being out on the water.

“He seems young, doesn’t he?” she asked, taking the seat across from her husband.

“Banks?”

“No, Angus.”

“He’s twenty-four,” said Linus, then drew back in mock offense. “Are you saying I’m so
old
?”

“Hardly.” Lydia laughed. At thirty-four, her husband was still as fit and youthful as he had been the day they’d met. Still, Linus reached across the table to tickle his wife
for her teasing, getting in a good pinch to her side before she’d scooted out of reach, moving to the stove to refill his bowl.

“I still don’t see why you need him here.”

“An extra pair of hands is always wise,” Linus said, pulling a corn cake from the basket. “Especially once you’re with child. If you should need me, Angus can take over. He can man the lamp days at a time if necessary.”

“But what of his own family?”

“He isn’t married. He lives with Miles and Sarah down the hill. He has no ties to anyone here. He told me as much.”

Lydia considered the information, thinking it curious. Angus was a good-looking man; surely there was someone who interested him in the village.

Linus wore a suspicious look when she returned with his bowl, wagging his butter knife at her. “I know what you’re thinking, you know.”

“What?” Lydia asked him.

“Don’t you try to play matchmaker for that poor boy as you did with the Reynolds fellow. You leave him be.”

“I did not,” she defended, taking a corn cake and buttering it. “I merely suggested the Lewises’ daughter was also fond of music.”

“I need that young man here and paying attention,” said Linus. “Work up there requires caution, Lydie. You find someone for him to fall in love with, and he’ll become so stupid over her, he’ll slip off the gallery.”