The Folk Keeper (10 page)

You cannot be surprised underwater in the ways you are on land. You cannot gasp; you cannot stagger back. You observe calmly as your hair — well, I can only say that my hair opened a door into another dimension. It caught at the shape of a new world. Gone were all the hard edges, the corners, the troubling shifts of light and dark.

I saw a fish flicker behind me. I didn’t see it with my eyes; rather, it sent a wave-image of itself, which I captured with my hair. I saw a ripple in the current, so tiny it might have been an echo of itself, shivering through liquid jade.

I made my own ripples, which bounced off the landscape and traveled back to me, explorers returning with maps of new territories. There were maps of scuttling crabs, maps of boulders, half as high as me. But where was the map of white canvas, which unlike the rest of the landscape, needed to breathe? I cast myself here — nothing. There — nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

There! A wave-picture describing not only Finian’s shape, but also his composition. Mostly liquid, save for a pocket watch in his waistcoat, and in his jacket pocket the lacy outline of a key.

My hands were caught by old habits, still reaching ahead, grasping at handfuls of water, not believing my hair alone could guide me through the dark. They groped along invisible walls, utterly useless until they closed first on a rough sleeve, then on a head of hair. It took only one strong push off the seafloor.

Thank the Saints for water, dense almost as a large and heavy man, helping Finian to the surface.

I swear I’ve never breathed before. Air exploded into my lungs, into depths never before used. And as though I were hearing music, my hair rose, making an echo space above my scalp, filling with bubbles of air. I was marvelously buoyant. I was foam on the sea, wafting Finian to shore. I was a bubble, holding up the world.

My heart jumped from its deep-sea calm. I was re-inhabiting my land-body, or maybe it was re-inhabiting me. My ears opened of themselves to an assault of voices, jarring after that great silence. The babble screeched to a crescendo, now sorting itself into words.

”Corin! Corin!” Everyone calling my name, and then Sir Edward’s voice above the rest. “Over here, lad!”

We’d drifted north and surfaced at the beach. The tide was flowing, water lapped almost at the edge. Long arms reached down, a hand heavy with rings grasped Finian and reeled him up. Another hand reached for me, but I sank below the surface, not yet ready to return to the world of laughter and tears and smoldering peat. The rock face was alive with tiny delicate branches. I’d known the barnacles only as hard conical shells, but underwater they reached with feathery legs to sweep the sea.

“Corin! Corin!” The voices came to me underwater. I closed my ears — extraordinary, I can truly close my ears. The voices vanished. But what if there were news of Finian? I rose to the surface.

“Your hand, Corin!” My buoyant sea-body slipped away as Sir Edward helped me onto the beach. There I stood, water streaming off me in all directions. How light it was already, the sky the color of goldenrods, the sea all gilded swells and shadowed troughs.

“Your lips aren’t even blue,” said Sir Edward. “Here, wrap this around you, anyway.”

I draped the jacket over my head like a hood, and around my shoulders and chest. Wet hair, plastered to my scalp, might look very unlike a wig. And the growing Corinna, in a wet tunic, even less like a Folk Keeper. It was Sir Andrew’s jacket; Sir Edward had not wanted to give up his own.

“Lady Alicia won’t like it that you let Finian fall off the cliff,” I said.

“She won’t,” said Sir Edward. “I shall have to admit to her that we quarreled, and that when he shoved me I was childish enough to shove him back, and so it went.”

“You quarreled about his costume?”

He shrugged. “It all seems so unimportant now.”

“What if he dies?”

“You’re a cool little thing, aren’t you.
What if he dies,
you ask, calm as can be.” He pointed down the beach to a broad backside bent over a long body. “The problem was not that Finian can’t swim, but that he hit his head. Mrs. Bains is doing what she can.”

I did not feel like a cool little thing. There was a terrible emptiness in my stomach, and I kept thinking of all the things I’d never said to Finian. Did he know I treasured the amber beads? Did he know I even laughed at his jokes, deep inside? I could not imagine how it must be for Lady Alicia, who leaned against the cliff. A scrap of gold satin lay on the crumbled rock, a piece of morning sky come to earth. She is very brave. I will never know what a mother feels when she waits to learn if her son lives or dies.

I was suddenly seized in a plush embrace. “Bless the boy!” cried Mrs. Bains. She was still wearing her house-keeper slippers. “He asked for you, Master Finian did. Asked for you then laughed a bit — you know the way he has — and said, ‘Tell Samson not to cut his hair!’”

Finian would live! Oh, the relief of it — my stomach filled up and my mind emptied out. I could wonder for the first time how Mrs. Bains had managed the cliff path; I could almost laugh at the thought that she’d need a winch to help her up again.

The Valet and his scornful cousins appeared, rather out of breath, with eiderdown quilts and a bottle of amber liquid. I glanced Finian’s way, then wished I hadn’t. His wet hair was dark and dead-looking on the rock. I’d rather remember him from last night, when the firelight shone through his hair, shooting it with red lights.

The footmen exchanged looks of dismay when Mrs. Bains said it was time to carry Finian up the cliff.

“Up with you, too, Master Corin!” Mrs. Bains’s heavy hand was on my shoulder. “Come get warm, Saints love you.”

My feet were sure and light up the cliff path. It was as though I had just then memorized the cliff, learned by heart its craggy tapestry. Where did clumsy Corinna go?

I look into the bedchamber mirror, which now reflects the twilight sky. Is this the old clumsy me, or the new surefooted one?

I must tend the Folk. I missed my chance to gather Saint-John’s-Wort at Midsummer dawn. How shall I control the Folk during the Feast of the Keeper?

My Folk Bag leans against the dressing table, looking rather full. Of course, it is the peat. I told Sir Andrew I will never marry, and that is the truth. But I may as well break it open, just to amuse myself.

I am back, staring into the twilight mirror. It is all silliness, and wouldn’t Finian laugh if he knew that the strands that bind my peat are dark red.

Clumsy Corinna is back. How can it be that my body did what I asked of it for only one night? I miss the skipping freedom of that Midsummer girl. Who can explain it: How did she come? Where did she go? I’ve been looking for her.

I dropped off the edge of the beach today, into water to my waist. After a few rocky steps, I slipped and came up spluttering. Where was that new dimension, the sudden electrical opening of the world?

Finian has been weak and ill. Mrs. Bains delights in trapping him under trays of broths and gruels and iced jellies. She wanted me to take to bed, too. “All that time in the nasty sea, and you such a little thing!”

“I am never chilled,” I tell her, and close my ears against her entreaties. Closing my ears — I revel in it. It is a new power.

If anything, I am rather too warm. I am always flushed these days of summer, my skin surging to rose in the midday sun. No, it is heat, not cold, that affects me most. The Folk are unnaturally quiet, resting up, perhaps, for the Feast of the Keeper, now fewer than two weeks away. I have no charms now; I missed my chance to gather Saint-John’s-Wort.

The easy days are gone.

I almost welcome Taffy’s companionship. He’s curled beside me on the cliff top, but I do not go so far as to pat him when he asks. His fur is sticky and old, worn down to the skin. He does not insist, however, and I tell him that at least his manners are good. His tail thuds on the rock.

The Folk continue quiet. They have consumed:

One barrel of herring

One dozen lobsters, with most of the

shell.

Mrs. Bains was not pleased. She was hoping to have one of those lobsters for herself. Today Finian has consumed:

A dram of ginger wine

Bread with milk and honey

A bowl of egg pudding.

He is pale and spends much of the day in his room, but I’ve coaxed him to come sailing with me tomorrow.

The Feast of the Keeper is the day after that, and then I shall be obliged to return to the old way of spending hour upon hour in the Cellar.

I will not allow Taffy to join me. He is old and fragile, and any sputter of anger from the Folk might kill him. I shall be alone again, just me and the Folk.

And another worry, too. I am growing. What will Mrs. Bains think when I tell her I need new and different clothes, tight waistcoats and loose frock coats? Sometimes I grow weary of it all, the pretense, the worry about the Folk. Finian once asked what would be so bad about becoming a gentleman. What if I revealed everything and became — what? A lady, I suppose. Do ladies sail? Would they take away my amber beads?

No, if I cannot be a Sir Edward, running the estate and doing as I like, I’d best remain a Folk Keeper.

Only one day later, and the world is running in reverse, right to left, against the tide of expectation. I am in the Cellar where I belong, in the cold and the damp and the dark.

How different from the clear Cliffsend light earlier today. Even the rocks were shining when I scrambled down the cliff, too intent on reaching the pier to see what I should have seen from above.
The Lady Rona
was gone, already out to sea, heading for the Seal Rock. Periwinkle water stretched between boat and shore; the
Windcuffer
and I were left behind.

The round, whole world as I’d known it cracked in my hands and leaked through my fingers. “Come back!” But it was too late. Finian was soon nothing more than a sail against the round bowl of the horizon.

I wanted to pluck the plug from that basin and watch him drain into the center of the world. And with that fancy came a mounting pressure inside, like an egg left cooking too long. Off I’d go,
Pop!
Bits of shell striking everyone.

I seized a stone and ran to the end of the pier.
Smash!
In it would go, into the
Windcuffer,
through those mahogany floorboards Finian loved so well.

I raised it over my head. The stone trembled in my grasp, but my fingers wouldn’t release it. I had grown soft all these weeks away from my Cellar.

Very gently, I laid it on the pier, sat down beside it. I spoke aloud to the sea, my words skipping like smooth stones over an underwater storm. “I propose a pact. Grow angry, as I am. Toss Finian around a bit. I haven’t the strength to frighten him, but you have.”

It was a childish game, urging the sea to take my revenge for me. “In return, I vow to worship you all the days of my life.”

Someone was coming up behind; I pressed my lips together. “Why didn’t Finian take the
Windcuffer?
” It was Sir Edward. “He always sails the
Windcuffer.
”

“Not always, it would seem.” I had also wondered why, but what was it to him? “Might I borrow a knife?” I said. Then, at his look of surprise, “Or your brooch? Yes, the cameo. I’ll only be a moment.”

It was just like Sir Edward to have a good, sharp clasp to his brooch. I jabbed the pin into my fingertip, where it leaked blood, but nothing of my rage. One, two, three, I shook the red drops into the sea and whispered, “To our pact, strong as blood!”

“Whatever are you doing?” said Sir Edward. But before I could tell him it was none of his affair, his voice changed and he pointed to the sea. “Look!” His hand still bore the livid crescent of my teeth from Midsummer.

Quick as mercury, the sea’s periwinkle face turned dark and rough. The waves arched with anger, like a cat, running with the wind at their backs. Against the darkening horizon, the air grew yellow; the solitary boat rocked in long combers.

The pier was not large enough for my feelings. It was a child’s game, my pact with the sea. Surely it hadn’t raised a storm? I brushed past Sir Edward. “Did he have an amber bead?” I said aloud. I had not one, but two. I paced the beach, watching the waves swell, the foam gather along their backs and streak in the direction of the wind.

I had to walk, I had to move, but Sir Edward stood curiously still, just watching. Monarch butterflies lay motionless at my feet. Against the shore, waves threw chunks of rock from their yawning bellies.

The coming storm was a tangle of sounds: Taffy whining from the cliffs, the wind keening across the waves, the sudden silence of birds. The air turned to pea soup; I could no longer see the white speck of Finian’s boat.

“It was just a game,” I cried to the sea. “I take it back!” But the rain came anyway, great hard drops that stung my face and pounded fragile butterfly wings.

Throughout it all, Sir Edward stood motionless on the pier, just watching, black satin drenched by cold rain. He said not a word of warning or encouragement as I pushed past him for the second time and almost fell into the
Windcuffer,
cursing the random, erratic winds. The
Windcuffer
shot away from the pier, rearing back to leap the waves, pitching so hard into troughs it seemed she must tear a hole in the fabric of the sea.

The waves snatched the amber bead from my palm. “For smooth sailing!” I screamed, but the sea had forgotten the rules, or else it was too late. My fingertip wept blood. Salt wind stung my eyes, a lone gull flew past.