The Brides of Rollrock Island (7 page)

“It’s
not
from a stranger, though,” said Bee. “It’s some old man we know; we just don’t know which.”

“I think
I
know which,” said Tatty archly. “Creepy Arthur Baitman that snuffles about up at Wholeman’s.” As the others crowed and fell about, she nodded to me. “I think he thinks he has a chance with you, Missk.”

“I hate the way you smutch and smirch everything!” I shouted. “It’s only flowers. It might be from anyone’s mad old granny, taking pity on me for having to live with
you
, you nasty nest of
snakes
!”

They all fell back from my noise, it was so unusual.

But Tatty looked on my passion coldly. “Oh, it’s not that they
like
you, Missk—don’t flatter yourself. They’re only
afraid
of you, that you’ll bring the seals again.”

Mam shouted then, at Tatty and at me, but I could not hear her for the clanging of Tatty’s words in my head. Whatever power I possessed, Tatty’s face—all their faces—told me that it would
never win me friends. My family would pretend it was nothing, or but a nuisance; the rest of the town would only ever shy from it or make the sign against it, and a few of the older folk leave these gifts—and secretly, so that I should never know who tried to appease me, and never bring any of my magics upon the town, out of consideration for those unknown givers.

“I’m going to
school
!” I turned away from shouting Mam and pushed through my sisters. Billy tried to stand and stop me, but I booted him hard in the shin. He howled and stepped aside; because Mam was there, he could not boot me back. I flung myself out the door. I knew I was ridiculous, my fat bottom flouncing away from them up the street. But I was always ridiculous, wasn’t I? That was my place among the Prouts, to be always the smallest and most foolish, to have their attention only as far as they could milk me for laughter, and otherwise to count for nothing at all.

I sat sorting shells on the edge of the seafront road; several other girls, and a littler boy or two, still staggered about down on the beach, collecting. It was a clear summer evening except in the west, where the sun, in a festive fit before it went to bed, sprayed pinks and reds about among a few streaks of cloud.

A clutch of men walked by, gathered from the seafront houses to go up to Wholeman’s together. From being entirely busy with my shells, I looked up to find all their eyes on me.

“Clear enough where that one’s great-pa dipped his wick.” Whoever had said it, deep in the group, lowered his head so that his cap brim hid his face.

“Prouts,” said another, to my face. He would never have spoken or looked so confidently on his own, but with five men behind him, he could say what he liked to any girl.

“Yes.” Another took courage. “Prouts were at it, bad as Cawdrons and Strangl’olds.” They were all blush-colored head to toe with the sunset, and their eyes glittered. “Not that
my
great-folk stayed about to watch.”

“Nor mine.”

“Nor mine, neither.”

I bit my lips in, turned to the sunset. I wished I were the sun up there, bloodying up the sky, with such small matters as men’s ill will and a girl’s embarrassment never approaching my vast-burning mind.
Prouts
. The disgust in that voice.
Prouts were at it
. I remembered, too, Gert’s awed tone:
Our greatest shame
. That was the key, wasn’t it, to the shadings of meaning of things said around me down the years at the school, in the town, glances passed and laughs stifled, hundreds of instances that I had not understood before?
Prouts were at it, Cawdrons, Strangleholds
. It was clear to me, suddenly, coldly, why Mam was always angry. All of Potshead was divided up like this; there were those who had had doings with the seal-women, and those who had not, and Mam had been born among the latter, and had married into the former. Perhaps she had not cared at the time, but she cared now, oh yes. It was written in every word she bit out, every impatient movement she made.

I turned from the sunset, which was fading from its greatest glory. The men were legging each other up to the higher path so that they could cut up Totting Lane. They were quite a way from me, clambering shadows, laughing; they had forgotten me.

Prouts
. The shells I had collected were faded dry on the paving
stones before me. Why had I brought them all up? Why had I thought them so wonderful that I must collect and sort them and take them home? I waited until I could no longer hear the men’s voices over the slap and swish of wavelets down on the gravelly shore, and slowly I scraped all the shells chink-chiming together, and pushed the dull-colored herd to the edge and then over; they tinkled to the stones and shells below, and instantly vanished among the others.

There came a long dark winter, and Rollrock lost many of its older folk. Among them went whichever men or women had been leaving the gifts for me, or arranging for them to be left. Which was it? Nothing came for me through those dark short days, so it could have been any of seven old men or women. Some of those had been kindly to me as they were to all children, and some’s faces had changed to watchfulness when they saw me, and others had been shut away as Nanny Prout had shut herself away, so that I hardly knew what they looked like.

Whoever it was, they had abandoned me, and I felt it sorely, for now I began to grow, up out of childhood and into a time of life when all the town, all of Rollrock, took a greater interest, not just in me, but in all the other rising young women about me, and they set us against each other as you set chickens at a market, comparing their feathers’ gloss and the brightness of their eye, their temperament and general breeding. The boys they watched too, for signs of fecklessness, but boys’ bodies and looks mattered
less than did girls’, however much my sisters compared them one to another. The girls’ company had long had dull moments this way, but it was only as I grew toward marriageable age myself that I realized that if I did not join that marriage conversation, there was nothing else left for me to do. I could not go out on the boats like the men, or run away to Cordlin and find a living there—what skill did I have to sell? But I hardly dared turn my mind to the kind of marriage I might make, for from the one time my sisters had shrieked to each other about my possible prospects, and from Mam and Dad’s uncomfortable silence on the matter—let alone the looks and jests that actual boys and men felt free to loose at me, out on the public street—I knew that I had little enough to offer. “Perhaps if you looked more cheerful,” Mam would say hopelessly after a space of glumly regarding me. But I had seen my sisters going about smiling at nothing and tossing their hair. It was grotesque; I would have none of it. I was an unhappy pudding and I would not pretend otherwise. Why should I try to win the favor of one of those boys? If they had not grown up tormenting me, they had never stepped forward to prevent those who did. Even Bee’s anxiously listing the men who might be expected to take an interest in me—defective in brain or looks or manners, or aged beyond caring whether a wife had a fine face and figure—could not move me to attempt to improve myself, try different ways with my hair or affect an interest in the lives about me.

I could have done with a gift being left for me now and then, to single me out as favored when all the world seemed intent on pointing out what I lacked. I looked forward sometimes to loosening the band upon my shoulder at night, just to remind
myself of what I could see that others could not—but what consolation was that, to watch the essence of things in its dance-and-streaming, when I must always return to the flatter life and the silenter, where I was an object not of reverence or wonder but of scorn?

As I sat uncooperative, my brother and sisters turned from me and one by one took wing into
their
opportunities. Our Billy, first chance he got, upped and offed Rollrock. He sent us a gaudy card, of two flirtatious “Spanish flamenco dancers,” but the card was post-stamped from a port in France, not Spain. Out of that port, he said, he was working some “proper ships.” What kind of work he did not say, but it clearly was not fishing boats he talked of; he surely thought himself too fine for that work.

Mam was even angrier now—she could not look on those flamenco dancers without distaste, and so that they would not smirk at us she propped the card on the dresser shelf with Billy’s scrawled message outward. Dad you could not mention Billy to; he would bluster away from you, full of unspeakable rage. I never saw him weep a tear of it, but his eyes would redden and blotch should other men’s sons achieve things and please them. His mouth would pinch up and he would seek beyond the speaker’s shoulder for something unrelated to talk of.

I was glad to see Billy gone. He had changed from rambunctious, sneering boy to hulking, sulking young man; add a little drink and he would be spoiling for a fight, and if he could find no one to have it with he would bring himself home to snipe and ridicule us. And Mam at his side would take his part if any of us saw fit to answer him back. It was almost as if she had taken
pleasure in his nastiness, as if he dealt out for her all the pain and insult she had not the courage to loose on us herself.

My sisters went on and on about the great tragedy and loss of our brother, among themselves and with Mam, seeming to enjoy making her weep and then exhibiting their own kindness consoling her. They knew nothing to support their imaginings of what Billy might be up to, not a thing—none of us except Dad had ever been off the island, or knew anything about the bigger world. But that did not stop them having opinions and proclaiming them, or hissing along every bit of gossip they collected.

I thought our family would stay this way forever, my sisters ignoring me except to tell me to straighten my posture and close my mouth and
smile
, for goodness’ sake!, Mam lining up with them against me and Dad striding among us with his eyes high and his chin stuck out, and Billy gone.

But a man came, a
lawyer
—or a beginning lawyer, some kind of under-lawyer yet. He day-tripped out to Rollrock from Cordlin, and he spotted Ann Jelly of all of them, and the moment his eye fell on her, she became something more than our sister, to our astonishment. She burst open, like a green bud into color and petal ruffle, and she smiled and laughed as she never had particularly before. She charmed us all, not just Skinny-Face Hurtle with his laboring syllables and his stiff collar propping up his head.

He wooed her mostly by letter, but he did cross to the island once or twice, and he joined us for an awkward dinner one Sunday.

“Sit
still
, Misskaella!” said Mam, though I was no more unsettled than any around that table, barring Ann Jelly herself, serene in her blossomed state with her lawyer-to-be by her side.

“Misskaella, there’s an unusual name,” said Skinny-Face. “What does it mean?”

Everyone looked at me surprised.

Ann Jelly said in charming puzzlement, “She of the execrable posture?” and everyone laughed.

“The sour-faced one,” said Bee, and all had their mirth at that too.

Mam looked about at the swaying girls, at Dad, who was going about his food, and at Mister Hurtle, who looked upon me kindly as my face hotted up. “It’s a girl’s name for Michael,” she said clearly, in her voice-for-visitors. “She is named for the archangel.”

“I see,” said Mister Hurtle, and nodded approvingly.

“Aye, she
looks
like a Michael,” said Lorel, still laughing.

“Lorelei,” said Mam, as if to point up the girlishness of Lorel’s name, while I sat there slab-faced and mannish under my clunking mannish name, and the girls made a show of stifling their laughter around me.

When Ann Jelly and Mister Hurtle married, the wedding—
which must be modest
, said Dad,
for I don’t want all the others expecting extravagance
—was on Rollrock. And wasn’t Bee vexed that it was not her own! And wasn’t Ann Jelly delighted! Triumphant, she was, in the spring wind at the church door, and the apple-blossom petals blowing around them like snow, and Skinny-Face’s smile creaking on his face. His parents, fat on Cordlin butter and cakes, beamed and mouthed “quaint” and “charming” and “countrified” and “fresh air,” and held themselves just a little apart from us, a little above us, under the trees in the garth during the wedding feast.