The Selkie Bride (14 page)

And in my sleep I hear the tide Creeping beneath my window wide
.

—Alasdair Alpin MacGregor

“I wasn’t expecting a…supersexual being,” I said sometime later, laying a hand against Lachlan’s chest and again marveling at the feel of his skin. Dawn was beginning to light up the horizon, a pencil of red burning its way through the clouds.

“Yer likewise unexpected. I’ve made nae plans fer this event.”

I could see the fact unnerved him a bit, though Lachlan’s hands remained gentle and soothing as he stroked my breasts with a damp cloth. I said, “Sometimes things just happen.” And for once that was a good thing.

“Aye. But they do nae happen tae me. At least, they havena happened fer a verra long while.”

“Don’t distress yourself. Nothing has fundamentally changed. I shan’t be dragging you to the altar.” The comment about changes felt as though it might be a lie, but I wanted to reassure him—and myself. I
needed a while to assess what I felt. I did not regret our union, but I needed some reflection on the change it had brought over me. I had never thought to want a forever again, because I had not known how perfect one might be.

“Yer sae young tae have sae little faith. Gird yer soul wi’ steel, but it willnae stop fate an she wants ye.” Lachlan’s voice was soft, almost as though he were speaking to himself. I was too tired to engage in the conversation, anyway, and decided to ignore it in favor of sleep.

“My head hurts. Like I drank too much whisky,” I said, closing my eyes and letting myself be soothed by Lachlan’s touch. “I must have gotten too much sun.”

He nodded. “The clamber-skull is tae be expected. Fer we were greatly intoxicated wi’ each other. That wasnae expected either. The madness hasnae come upon me in centuries of yer time, and I was careless and selfish.” He took a breath and rose up on one elbow. “Megan, lass, I suspect that last night we conceived a bairn.”

“What?” I smiled a little. I knew what
bairn
meant, but I was certain he couldn’t intend the word that way.

“A bairn. A babe.”

My eyes opened. I felt as if he had slapped me or thrown a carafe of water at my face. “No,” I said flatly, sitting up and pulling the blankets tight across my breasts as I retreated to the edge of the bed. “We did not. I am…not able. Duncan and I couldn’t…And anyway, you’re a selkie. We can’t have a child.”

Lachlan’s gaze was compassionate, but he did not
take back his words. “I assure ye that we can hae a child. Ye didnae conceive wi’ your husband because yer body knew him for a mortal enemy. And ye have conceived wi me because yer body knows…” He stopped, his expression something very close to stunned.

“Knows what?” I demanded, my voice high and uneven. My peace was fleeing and I felt cold creeping in.

“Knows I am nae enemy of yers.”

I opened my mouth to argue further, but he put a finger to my lips. Then he leaned over and laved behind my ear. I could feel the now-familiar dizziness that came whenever Lachlan drugged me.

“Why did you do that?”

“Sleep. We shall speak on it later. For now, best ye forget what I’ve told thee. We’ve a while yet afore it shall matter greatly and arrangement maun be made.” Lachlan began humming in two-part harmony. It was lovely and alien.

As insane as it sounds, I did put the alarming subject out of mind. I didn’t even scold him for drugging me without permission; I just slid back down on the pillow, listened to the lullaby and went promptly to sleep. When I awoke much later, it was to find Herman on my chest, peering at me intently. I looked about for Lachlan, but he was gone, and I vaguely recalled showing him out after dawn and barring the door behind him.

In spite of my claim to need time for reflection, I did very little of it that day. The joy of my illicit union I hugged to myself all morning, sharing my happiness only with the cat, who was staying quite close to me
as I prepared porridge—without salt but with extra currants and honey because I had a strong craving for something sweet.

In spite of the porridge, the craving for sweets grew as the morning progressed, and I decided to walk to the shop and see if perhaps Mistress MacLaren had some kind of candy. When I opened the front door, however, it was to find the world beyond in the clutches of a gale. Unlike the previous storms, this one was strangely silent. The wind did not howl, though the rain was a torrent. I frowned, contemplating the twenty minutes of flood and sleet I’d have to endure if I went into the village. In addition to icy rain, the wind beyond the house was slinging sand with particular vehemence.

“What do you think, Herman?”

The cat stared at me for a long moment, no doubt wondering if he had heard me correctly, then turned his back. He is a great fisherman and loves the outdoors, but not obsessive about any fish breakfast that meant getting wet from whiskers to tail.

“I think you’re right,” I said, closing the door. Herman and I would share an egg for lunch. I also ate all my dried apples and the rest of the jam.

In an effort to distract myself from my growing craving, I began to read voraciously. Once upon a time I would have been burned at the stake for possessing the contents of Fergus Culbin’s library, and a part of me had to wonder if I weren’t endangering my soul with it. Certainly my reading did nothing for my peace of mind.

I found a poem in one of the books, “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry.” It made me shudder with horror, a reaction that seemed extreme when I thought about it later. The poem is sad, of course, but I told myself that it had nothing to do with me and Lachlan. Still, it stuck in my head and would not go away.

I heard a mither calm her bairn, and as she rocked, and as she sang, she dwelledt sae hard upon the verse that the heart within her rang.

“O, cradle row, and cradle gae, and sleep well, my bairn within; I ken not wha thy father is, nor yet the sea he dwells within.”

It happened aen a certain day When this mither fell asleep, That in came her silkie lover And set him down at her bare feet,

And up then spake a gray silkie when he woke her frae her sleep, “I’ll tell ye noo where thy lover is: he’s sittin’ close on thy bed feet.”

“O, love, come tell to me thy name, Tell me where does thy homeland be?” “My home is great Sule Skerry, And I earn my livin’ aen the sea.
For I am a man upon the land; but I am a silkie on the sea, and when I’m far frae ev’ry strand, my home is in Sule Skerry.”

“Alas, this is a woeful fate! This doom ye’ve laid aen me, That a man should come out of the sea And tae have a bairn wi’ me!”

“Now foster well my wee young bairn, For a twelve-month and a day, and when that twelve-month’s fairly gone, I’ll come and pay thy nurse’s fee.”

And soon the weary twelve-month gone, he came tae pay the nurse’s fee; he had a coffer fu’ o’ Spanish gold, and another fu’ o’ the silver money.

When he had taken of the silver and gold And he had put it upon her knee, He said “Gi’e tae me my little son, And take thee up thy nurse’s fee.

“But how shall I my young son ken when thou ha’ taken him frae me?” “The one who wears the chains o’ gold, among a’ the seals shall be he.

And now thou will marry a hunter good, and a great hunter I’m sure he’ll be;
and the first shot that e’er he takes will kill both my young son and me.

And he shall come home wi’ a gift, chains of gold that he has won. And ye shall ken by these chains That he has killed yer lover and yer son.”

Humans did kill selkies, as immortalized in this poem. Perhaps with cause, if the song was right. But there were other legends too, and those said humans also used selkies by hiding their skins and forcing them to use magic to call fish and calm the sea.

Then a stray thought: Where did Lachlan hide his skin when he visited me? I prayed it was somewhere safe from both finmen and humans.

The poem continued to run through my head as I ransacked the kitchen, looking for something sweet. One verse especially bothered me, and it chanted itself over and over like a bully’s taunt:

“And now thou will marry a hunter good, and a great hunter I’m sure he’ll be; and the first shot that e’er he takes will kill both my young son and me.”

“My young son and me…” I said out loud.

It was only then that my last conversation with Lachlan came back to me. At first I assured myself it was only a dream, an unpleasant imagining of the type I’d had before, but the more the memory coalesced, the more certain I became that the conversation had
been real. I had spent the morning tunneling along, as happy and as blind as any mole in the dark earth, but now I had popped out into the light and was forced to see what I had forgotten.

“Oh, my sainted aunt!” I said, sitting down hard on the kitchen stool. “Herman, could this be true?
Can
I be with child? And where has Lachlan gone?”

The cat looked at me sympathetically, but remained mute. I began to cry, unable to be happy, though I had been given my heart’s desire.

May the tempest never rest, Nor the seas with peace be blest Since they tore thee from my breast.

—“
The Maiden of Morven”

Many parts of that day remain a blur to me. I do recall going out after the rain and looking out at the clumps of dead grass that surrounded the cottage and feeling overwhelmingly sad. I wondered many strange things that morning I had not considered before. Watching the brown grass being flattened by the wind I wondered: Does it hurt, do you think—to grow old, wither and brown, then have the wind lay you low? The grass bursts from the ground each spring with joyous color; is it sorrowful at the end? Does it know that it is dying?

My thoughts grew more grim and fanciful as day turned to dark. The night wore on and Lachlan did not come. Feeling nervous, I paced the cottage and twice stopped to wind the mantel clock and my father’s pocket watch; it seemed very important that I remain aware of the time. Finally, the cold compelled
me to bed. My sleep was uneasy but there were no more tears.

The next morning, driven mad with the need for sweets and some companionship, I made the bike ride into the village in spite of the lingering rain and wind. It was there I heard that Bertie Stornmont, monger and sometimes rag-and-bone man possessed of no more than half his born wits, had chosen to end his rather unpleasant life the previous night by taking a long draught of some homemade kin of John Barleycorn and then following it up with another draught of lye. The latter had burned him badly about the mouth and, they said, the nose. But I recalled Lachlan’s description of how the finman would suck out his victim’s souls by latching his sharklike teeth onto the dying man’s nose, and wondered.

I was horrified enough at the news to draw Mistress MacLaren’s attention with a public display of gasping and swaying. She very kindly urged me to sit until I had regained my color, and I had no choice but to obey; my knees simply would not hold me up any longer. In that moment I wanted very badly to blurt out a warning to all those standing in the shop, but something held my tongue—probably fear of how these people would react. They were all to ready to believe in the Devil and his minions, and might turn their rage on Lachlan or me.

And where was Lachlan? Why had he been gone so long when he knew I must have questions? Did he know what had happened in the village? Was Bertie’s death part of the reason for his absence? Surely there was some excellent cause for his nonappearance. He
could never have simply impregnated me and then disappeared without a word. Could he?

I swallowed hard, twice. Heartache doesn’t go down so easily when tears are welling up. Rejection and abandonment: These were my second skin, and I hated the familiar sight of them. I made myself a promise that I’d don that hair shirt only when all other possibilities were proven wrong; I didn’t want to believe that once again I had been used, judged and found lacking. I had grown fearful as the day and night progressed—and with perfectly good reason, given our murderous enemy!—but it was time to decide if I trusted Lachlan and his judgment. Did I believe he was the kind of person who would abandon a pregnant lover, especially when the finman was still at large and looking for the heart buried under her floorboards?

Even as I asked the question, my gut rejected the possibility. Lachlan might have left his family once they were grown, but he would not abandon me—not when I was carrying his child and the finman was still running free. Perhaps neither of us was searching for a spouse and a life of togetherness, but we were not irresponsible and heartless. So, his absence had to mean something else.

Unfortunately, the list of something-elses was unpleasant. I found myself contemplating the idea that Lachlan could be in trouble. He could even be dead. That thought had me ducking my head and breathing slowly, again staving off a faint that made Mrs. Mac-Laren unbend so far as to pat my shoulder.

Lachlan was not dead! I ordered myself to quit being
morbid. I had quite enough troubles without borrowing from remote possibilities; he had disappeared before this without there being any sinister reason. What I needed to be thinking about was the finman and his actions in the village. The Minotaur of Greek mythology had obligingly stayed in his maze and out of human sight, but our monster was out of his lair. Herman and I would have to contend. There was no other choice.

Perhaps I could briefly put off taking action, but what would I do if Lachlan were delayed for many days and the finman returned while I was alone? Could I kill the creature on my own, a beast who’d had his heart removed but still managed to walk about and kill with impunity? I did not currently have the knowledge to do so. Gaining that knowledge seemed the first order of business, and having the beginning of a plan stiffened my spine and put strength back in my knees.

When I was able, I left the store with all the dried fruit and withered apples Mistress MacLaren had in stock. I stowed these in the basket of my bicycle, not sure how long they would hold back the cravings that roared in my belly. Perhaps I should have been more fearful of my standing in the human community, considering the circumstances. After all, a sudden pregnancy would be very hard to explain, and the judgment upon immoral women, even widows, could be very harsh indeed here. I might be shunned. Yet, this did not trouble me as much as it should have; at that moment, my mind was more consumed with the idea Lachlan could be in trouble (this in spite of my gut’s
fierce insistence that nothing had harmed him) or that there might be something wrong with the baby inside me—a child that could be little more than a thought in size but was already a reality to me in every other way.

Rather than returning to the cottage, which was feeling less a fortress of safety than a prison of unhappy thoughts, I went instead to the beach made visible with the tide at ebb, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lachlan. Instead I found a seal’s carcass on the shore and had a moment of terror. But while it was not Lachlan, the poor beast had been attacked by sharks: I knew those bites now. Had the creature encountered the finman coming ashore to murder Bertie Stornmont?

Rising from the body, I noticed the low-tide beach was covered with silent seals huddled against the cliffs, as far from the water as topography would allow. Their eerie silence, so like Herman’s on the night the finman first appeared, had the small hairs at the back of my neck rising in alarm. A frantic spin to look for danger revealed nothing, but I did not feel calm or safe. The water was too close.

I approached the seals slowly. Speaking in a voice only loud enough to rise above the wind, I said, “If any of you know Lachlan, please ask him to come back to me. I need him.”

Part of me felt very silly doing this, but I did it anyway. Maybe they were just seals, but how else was I to get a message to a seal man?

The seals’ heads all turned in my direction and exhaled in unison, their breath a mist that shut out the
rest of the world. The earth and air shifted, and my orientation twisted and blurred as if through the lens of a spyglass focused upon something near, then something afar. Though previously inaudible, around my legs the marron grass whispered its dying secrets as it passed under the scythe of the besieging wind, not to rise again until spring. Or perhaps never. No matter what the calendar said, in an instant winter had overtaken fall, and the decades of darkness put off by its burial had caught up with the village in a matter of days. Like Dorian Gray’s doomed portrait, age and decrepitude were racing in upon it. The evil beneath the village was seeping out, ensnaring everything it touched, and I could see this with my mind if not my actual eyes.

In this vision, as I watched, icy crystals of hoarfrost—what Grandmother had called
cranreuch
—bubbled out of the ground and decorated the terrified seals, sealing up their noses and mouths. It also grasped my feet and legs, raced up my body and then closed in over my head, nearly shutting out the morning light. I felt cold in a way I had never experienced, and knew it for a winter of the soul and not just the frosty season that chilled the flesh. Unable to stop a small sob of terror, I nonetheless used every bit of will within me and pushed the vision away. My frozen limbs were clumsy as I ran for my bicycle, but I forced myself to go on and not look back, just in case it wasn’t all a waking dream but actually the end of the world.