Edith Jessie Thompson

They’re sitting around the flaking Formica table, a cup of tea a-piece, and the radio is playing “How Long Has This Been Going On” again.

Too long. It’s been going on too long.

Outside, the trains come rattling. At night, in bed with Percy, she’d lain awake and listened to the trains and wanted to take one, just hop on, and go anywhere away from him. Percy used to get on the ferry and go off to Paris, and leave her all on her lonesome. She’d always wanted so much more than Percy gave her, off to Paris to buy fabric and buttons but he never brought her anything back. Maybe if he’d bought her presents, all of the things she wanted, it would never have come to what it came to. Poor old Edith would have been his poor old wife forever. Poor old girl.

A train thunders past and shakes the café. It’s the train to London, but it never bothers stopping here. Edith imagines getting onto that train and going all the way to London, Buckingham Palace and tea at the Ritz. The tea in here is weak and watery, and the radio’s always playing the same song. She hates that bloody song.

When she sleeps, she dreams about grand old London town.

Across the table from her, the Greek woman hawks and spits straight on the floor. No class at all, these bloody foreigners. Her Freddy used to tell her stories about foreign places that he’d sailed to when he was in the merchant navy. She’d always wanted to go with him, off on an adventure. The Greek looks likes someone’s granny, with her grey curls and the rings on her fingers, but sometimes, when she looks real close, Edith can see flames reflected in Granny Christofi’s eyes. Gives her the bloody heebie-jeebies too. Granny smiles, but there’s never anything warm in her eyes but fire.

Bloody foreigners. Edith used to see them everywhere when she went to the pictures with Freddie, always while Percy was away. They used to sneak out to the pictures, giggling like school kids, and then back to Freddie’s car or, if she was feeling naughty, back to her bed, Percy’s bed, and let him touch her there. If she committed a crime, maybe it was that. That she let Freddie touch her in Percy’s bed and she liked it, she really did. Never did no wrong, but that. Never did no wrong, and since when was wanting something better a crime? Since when? Freddy was so handsome. He had such gentle hands.

The other two women speak English, but they huddle their heads together and whisper to each other, like witches. Edith always worries that they’re speaking about her, ripping her to pieces and then looking up at her with their razor-sharp eyes. Bitches, just judging her for listening to her heart like all the bitches on her street who’d been there when the bobbies came to get her. They huddle together over their blanket-wrapped bundles, and, every so often, Edith catches a glimpse of blueish lips and tufty hair. Never cries though, not even when one slaps the other’s hands away and bends down to tuck the bundle away in her bag under the table. She sits back up and the other one just leans against her, smiling up at the ceiling. Edith doesn’t know their names, but she wakes up in the dark with their elbows in her ribs and their hair in her mouth, tumbled together in the dark, all of them left there, and forgotten. In the prison, the man told her that death was a release. In the cell, he’d promised that he’d look after her, afterwards. Oh, God, why did Freddie do it? She never wanted him to do it. Where’s that man who said that he’d look after her now? Where’s he gone? Where have any of them gone?

Just like a man to let her down.

Maybe she let herself down. Maybe a well bought up girl would never have written those letters, 60 letters, and all of them S.W.A.L.K. She never did half of the things she said she did. It was like a fairytale, somehow, or one of those dirty books with the flimsy paper covers that she hid from Percy in the space between the bed and the wall. All silk skirts and no knickers. She never did half of those things…She just wished she could, wished she could have ground up a light bulb and fed it to Percy a little at a time in his grey porridge that he ate first thing in the grey morning already in his grey suit. She hated him, and she wishes that just once she’d had the guts to do what she wrote in her letters, to do something desperate and wind up with his blood on her hands.

Only not really. Just in her head. Just in her letters. Just to make herself feel better when the bastard was away.

Percy hadn’t liked finding out about Freddy, showed it with his fists, too, but, still she never meant for Freddy to do it. She never meant for that to happen. She never wanted it to. Just because she liked to imagine Percy bleeding from the mouth doesn’t mean that she ever wanted to lie there screaming while he bled all over the pavement. Now, sitting at the table with them, these horrible women, she doesn’t remember what she wanted, really, but she knows that it wasn’t that. Nothing here shines enough for her to check, but her cheekbone feels pulpy and sore, like rotting fruit. Like a fruit that’s rotting must feel.

She’d been able to see her face in the table that the bobbies sat her at, and asked her the same questions over and over again. Things about Freddy and Percy. They had her letters. They wanted to know why she’d written the things she did, and why she’d asked Freddy to do the things he’d done. Over and over, the same questions and, over and over, the same answer.

She never wanted him to do it.

Granny Christofi looks up from her tea. Her old face is slack and sad. Edith never wants to look like that, but maybe she won’t. She was only thirty years old, and Freddy always said that she was so pretty. Never going to look like that dried out bitch.

It’s difficult to tell what season it is, here. Outside the window, the sky is always grey and the trains don’t seem to follow any particular pattern. It could be a mild December or a wet June, but she remembers that through the bars she could see Christmas lights and tinsel in somebody else’s window. She spent her last Christmas not eating, not sleeping. She’d scraped at the mortar in the little cell with her fingernails. She’d thought about carving their names into the wall. FREDDY AND EDITH FOREVER in a heart.

She never did, though. She just sat there and cried. A face at the bars had told her that she was the first woman to have a noose around her neck since ‘07. It didn’t make her proud, not at all. She didn’t know how to stop crying.

Something splashes into her tea-cup. Could be a tear, could be the ceiling leaking again.

When she was a little girl, her Mum told her the story about the wise men who came to see the baby Jesus when he was still lying in his crib, padded out with sweet-smelling straw. Edith never really went to the country, but she images that the straw must have smelled sweet, under his little head and his little bum and his little kicking feet. When her mother set up the crib scene in the parlour, she always arranged those wise men just so, standing around that baby like points around a star. It wasn’t until later that Edith found out that they didn’t get there until later. Epiphany, they called it. Twelfth night, and that was when all the decorations came down. The miracle was already over, done for another year.

It was around Epiphany that she’d started screaming and she couldn’t stop. Oh, Freddy, why’d you have to do that bloody awful thing? Why’d you have to do that to poor Percy? She knew what she’d written, but Percy’s only crime had been being a bad husband, and it’s never bad husbands who bleed, only bad wives. She was such a bad wife.

No, don’t! she’d said. No, don’t!

He had. Why had he, though? Because of her. Because he loved her too much not to.

Every so often, she’d hear someone screaming in the dark, and it would be a while before she’d realise that it was still her, still screaming, still carrying on.

Still there at the table with those other women, she can barely summon up a whimper for what happened to her, and what she did.

The night before they came her for her, she prayed, or, at least, she dreamed that she did. She’d prayed that, somehow, there’d be a miracle, and she’d go back to her mum’s house, and be quiet, and rest. She’d have liked to have slept without waking herself up crying. She’d have liked to close her eyes without nightmares. If anybody could have given her that, maybe it was worth praying for.

In the morning, the Doctor came, with his cold hands, and he stuck her with a needle. Everything was slow and sleepy after that. She couldn’t scream as much. It was like everything was happening to her underwater.

The rope rubbed like Percy’s hands around her neck.

When she was a little girl, she found a dead frog at the bottom of her mum’s garden, where her dad grew runner beans. She put it under a stone and left it there, and, the next time she went back, months later, there was nothing left but tiny white bones. In her cupped hands, under the table, she’s holding something so small, so sad she doesn’t have words for it. It’s been with her since the prison. It’s been with her since the rope. A little knot of cells and clots and her and Freddy and all of their love, and all of their sorrow too. What they made. What she lost. She closes her eyes and imagines the little frog resting between her two hands. The sum of so few tiny bones.

“Come,” says Granny Christofi. “Koimaomai. Now.”

She puts her hand on Edith’s arm. Edith wants to beg her not to touch her, but she never listens so, this time, she doesn’t tell her.

“Come on, dearie,” say the others, their coats already done up under their chins. “Baby’s got his bonnet on. Time to go home.”

Once, it was her and Freddy, when Percy was away but now, where they go, they go together. Back home. Back to their hole in the ground. She doesn’t know how they came to be tumbled together in the dark. In the end, nobody loved her enough to come and get her, not even her sister, not even Avis. She wonders where they buried Percy. She wonders where Freddy’s lying.

The stone is grey. The others go on down first and leave Edith on her own with her secret clasped between her hands. Sleep on, beloved, says the stone. Sleep on. At least she’s never alone in the dark. She’s warm and cradled between them and she can lie down in the wet earth with her thumb almost to her mouth and be quiet a while, and rest.

The Little Mermaid

She watches them running with her unmoving eyes and she whispers don’t drown, babies, don’t drown. If their plastic soled shoes were to slip on the stones then she’d watch them drown and sing for them, without sound, as their little souls rushed up to heaven. She has no soul of her own, and never did. Her people were as sea-foam. Souls or not, she aches to hold them in her metal arms, to press them against her unbreakable heart. They call her Lille Havfrue, but her people had no names for themselves. They were loved. It was enough. They live much shorter lives, these babies with their souls that show like candle flames in their eyes. Hot blooded, their hearts go racing, and they burn up and use themselves so quickly. She could have passed three or four of their lifetimes watching the in-out of sky fire against the tops of the waves and how terrifying had it been to know that there was another sky, far above theirs? How terrifying. How wonderful. Now, she can neither raise her eyes or lower the, now, but she can see the point, far away, so far, where there’s nothing to tell between her sea and their sky.

When she was born, they sung her name through all of the cathedrals. In the deep blue cold, bells held no sound, so they rang out their hearts instead. The sound they made was all of their joy at this newly discovered treasure. Their new princess. Her.

But none of it mattered to her. Her status was her pain. The clam shells that clung to her tail to show that she was the daughter of a king pinched. She would have traded them, if she could. She would have been common, because at least the common girls could swim upwards whenever they liked, skim the surface and feel the sunlight on the tops of their heads. All of their lives, she and her sisters had dreamed of the surface.

It is the nature of cold blooded things to yearn towards the sun.

By day, now, she catches the sun, keeps the warmth stored in her smooth brown skin, but no deeper. It lingers, a little, after dark, when the babies come with their edged tools. It takes metal to beat metal and, even then, the teeth barely scratch the surface of her neck, on the first bite.

It had been the fire, in the end, which tempted her. All of her life, it had fascinated her; she planted red flowers in a circle in her father’s garden, but she could have resisted if it had only been a question of the sun. The fire in the sky, though. In flashes, it mirrored something which she felt within herself, and for which she had no name. She was so tempted, and so young; sixteen years is barely a drop in three hundred. She had wanted it badly enough to disobey her father. She had wanted it badly enough to break every rule in the world.

What was it that the witch had said to her, all of those years ago? The sound of the saw makes it harder to recall.

Oh. Yes.

Desire is pain. Desire is pain, and she had wanted so.

She had no words for what she saw, for “ship”, “sails”, “mariner”, “prince”. The words had come later, but the words had not mattered. She had not needed any words for him. There he was. It was that simple. “Ikon” was another word that she learned later. Her people had never had a need for gods, but there he was anyway, as an image of her faith.

Faith is nothing but the desire for an end to pain.

Up on the great, whale-like thing that rode upon the waves, and not below them, she watched him, up there, against the sky, which they had filled with flowers of fire, all for love of him. She couldn’t look away. It was as though she had realised, suddenly, that there were two suns in the sky. He was that alien, and beautiful. He was that bright, with the sparks falling all around him and dying away to nothing.

Later, she could not say how long she had watched him for; it could have been five minutes or an hour before the storm blew in, and stopped the singing. The wind howled, and the rain fell. The sky-fire burned, brighter than the flowers had been, and more deadly. The storm had been so terrible, but she had not feared it. She was a cold-blooded creature with water already in her lungs. There was nothing about her that could draw fire. The babies on the ship had shouted and run, pulling on ropes, furling the ship tight in against itself. They couldn’t have known. They were so focused on the danger that they could see that they never imagined that there was danger that they couldn’t. For her part, she had never thought of those rocks as hidden. For her part, they had been in plain sight all along. The noise was like nothing she had ever heard, the ship grinding and dying upon the rocks. The water had dampened the sound, her whole life.

So few of those babies ever learned to swim.

In the churning, shouting mess which came afterwards, she searched for him. The water was cold, stole his glow and made it more difficult to tell which one he was. The babies screamed and fought, pushed and clawed at each other, and at the surface of the sea. What she knew was that the sea would take them, in the end. What she knew was that the sea would love them all, equally. Not for him, though. Not for him to be eaten by sharks and bottom-feeders, sink to the bottom as bones and, in time, become sand. In the water, his hair had become darker, not the bright gold that she had seen before, under the sun, but he was still finer than the others, no hair on his face, no marks on his hands. She took him limp into her arms. Though the land was not visible, she knew which direction to swim in. She knew the sea like the back of her hand, and she knew, instinctively, where it came to an end in fingers of sand.

She took him there. With him lying in her arms, his wet head against her breast, it was easy to think of herself as held.

On the sand, she lay with him. His skin was cool and moist to the touch. His heart had slowed to within an inch of its life, a slow thump-thump that echoes hers. He mirrored her, so how could she held but love him? She lay with him until she was gasping for air.

Don’t drown, baby. Don’t drown.

Before she left him, she bent, awkward and out of her element, to press a pale blue kiss to his cheek. It was all that she had to leave for him. The storm had swept away everything above the water, even the red flowers in her hair. It had swept everything except her, and, because of her, him.

He wasn’t dead when she left him. She was as sure as she could be. She was only young. He wasn’t dead.

The babies work hard, but it’s slow going. Her skin is thicker, now, and it holds on to the cold. In the winter, it can get cold, so cold by the water. Her and her sisters used to swim below the shadows of floating ice. She almost wishes that the babies would succeed, and separate her head cleanly from her shoulders. Maybe then there’d be a new one, maybe not, but, either way, it might take a long time remember everything she’s ever known, so it would be a while before she remembered how to hurt. Every movement of the baby’s saw sends a vibration through her right through her, so, she pretends that she’s humming, and she remembers what it felt like to make her last concious sound.

Please, she’d said. Please, and I’ll do anything. That was her first mistake. There should always have been something that she wouldn’t have done for him. There should always have been a limit. She was so very young. She hadn’t yet learned the value of silence. She didn’t yet know the danger of words. When she was younger, she’d had no word for “witch”. That came later. Back then, when all of this was happening, she’d seen her life only in terms of rules and suffering. Her and her sisters had whispered about a creature who lived a way away, in a cave before the drop-off, before the deep, dark water. She should have known not to go there. She had spent her seventeen years fearful of the vapour trails left by slowly circling sharks. She’d been told not to go there before.

She went anyway.

Desire is pain, remember. It is difficult to think clearly when you are in so much pain. Now, she feels no pain, only quiver and quake as the baby leans his whole weight onto the saw. The rasping vibrations make it difficult to concentrate, and all that she can think is witch witch witch witch witch.

But she hadn’t known that word, then. She’d gone there with her pleases and her promises, and the woman was there with her hands that moved like ghosts in the dark. Please, she said. Please and I’ll do anything. And it wasn’t until the witch smiled that she saw that every one of her teeth were small and sharp and white.

It never occurred to her to wonder what she was doing, not for a second, not even when the witch had told her about the price of love, and the cost of getting what you want.

Love made her stupid. The pain of wanting him made it hard to think. It must have, for her to go through what she did for him. The witch broke every bone in her tail. She would have screamed, but the witch had already taken her voice. She gave up her voice so that the witch would break every bone in her tail and give her legs. She couldn’t scream. Her voice was in a glass jar on the shelf.

The baby’s saw makes a deep cut in her throat, and she, she who hasn’t spoken in a hundred years, imagines her voice leaking out to him.

Be careful what you wish for, baby. Be careful what you do for love.

She doesn’t remember much of what came straight afterwards. She could feel her heartbeat in her ankles, and the tips of her new toes. The Witch conjured up a storm to blow her to the beach, but she nearly drowned, just struggling to the surface. The sea had no love for her. She had left the sea behind for a man, and the sea wouldn’t easily forgive her.

I’m sorry, she mouthed, but the water got into her mouth and tried to choke her.

No love, no love.

Folded up small behind her teeth to keep it safe, the witch had written the definition of a soul. Her people had no souls, and, without one, her human body wouldn’t last for long. Her bones would collapse in on themselves. Her heart would run dry and empty. She was dry and empty without the sea. On the sand, she stood naked and watched the waves come and go. The witch had told her that a soul was where two people touched. The sea had been in her her whole life. She missed it so much.

On reflection, she should have known. There she was, chafed and sore, red raw with love. Inside, where all of her life the sea had been, there was a gaping sort of emptiness. The bones that had been broken to make her new legs ached in her cracks. The new wound between her legs throbbed like a beating heart. She was an agony of wanting. She struggled to stand. A mammal is born knowing how to stand beside its mother, but she had been born knowing how to swim without sinking, and how to breathe the air in water. She had never known her mother.

‘Metamorphosis’ is a word for how much it hurts to change.

She heard the shout before she saw him. She had still been staring out to see, unable to quite tear herself away. She had been rocking, mimicking the motion of the waves. Heel-toe, heel-toe, and every movement the agony of broken bone. Now, she ever moves, but what she learned then was this: when in fear of dying, a creature would crawl on bloody stumps and jagged bones to get to where it thinks it needs to be to save its life. She had see the prince and fallen forward, crawled towards him on her hands and knees like an animal. She did not know the word for ’shame’.

She baby is getting tired now. She can tell. In the periphery of her vision, she studies him. He’s not so different from her prince, with his flaxen hair and his blue eyes so pale that they are almost colourless. The ocean is only blue because, very long ago, it learned how to mimic the sky. All of these babies look the same to her anyway.

The cruellest part as that the prince could not remember drowning. He had no memory of her at all, but he thought that she was close to drowning and he had been told that he had been close to drowning once, too. He covered her new skin with a cloak, and, mistaking the agony in her eyes for something physical, he lifted her up into his arms. If she had known the pain that would follow, she’d have clawed his eyes out then and there. She was young and hopefully. She had no idea how much love can hurt, and she did not know that it is possible to die and yet go on living at the same time. She could not know how many people do that every single day of their lives.

When he asked her name, she could not tell him. The Prince was a learned man, and he named her after a spirit of the air and sea from a play that he had read, once. He was learned, which does not mean that he was not also foolish. He could not read the longing in her eyes, which was in plain sight all along.

There was a temple on the hill, he told her. The woman that he loved was there, and would provide aid. The woman that he loved, and who he was going to marry. The woman that he loved, and who he was going to marry, and who had saved him from a death which he could not remember. She had found him lying on the beach.

Until then, the Mermaid hadn’t known that a heart could break as surely as a bone. The sound echoed around the place behind her ribs where the babies kept their souls, so loudly that she was sure that he must have heard it. It was then that she knew that the witch had been right. He would never love her. He could never. She had been cold blooded, and he was hot. She would have frozen him to death and now he would burn her alive.

To be different is painful, sometimes too painful to be borne.

Behind them, the sea crashed against the rocks like the pounding of fists. When she was born, they sang her name through the cathedrals and now it was like the cathedrals were falling for want of her. In his arms, she cried piteously and he assumed that it was because she was grateful to be saved.

There is a reason that no creature on the face of the earth or under the sea is born with the knowledge of the day that they will die, but she knew. The Prince would share his soul with the temple girl, the one who had had the luck to stumble across his, already saved. The mermaid would have stayed longer, but she was a water-creature then and the sand had clogged her gills. He would marry the temple girl, and the mermaid would dissolve into foam on a wave and be seen no more by those who had always had the grave to love her. The witch had warned her, but it had never occurred to her that it might actually happen. She was young.

At least the girl at the temple had been beautiful. The mermaid had fainted clean away, to save herself the heartache of watching them look at each other.

That night, adrift in a strange white bed, wrapped in sheets as wide as a ships sails, she dreamed of her eldest sister. Her eldest sister was the most lovely of the sea kings daughters, with hair as long and curling as kelp strands, the pale gold blush of the first sun in winter. Her hair was gone, all gone. The new bare skin was delicately veined with blue, the sea under her skin. Unused to dreaming, the mermaid had reached out to touch her sister, but her sister had put up her hands.

The mermaid had asked her why she’d come, and, in the dream, her beautiful sister had smiled behind her raised hands. She told the mermaid how she missed her. They had all missed her so. The mermaid couldn’t help it; the tears rolled down her cheeks. She knew that she was seeing her beautiful sister for the last time. When she died, she would dissolve into seafoam, and she could wash against her sister’s skin forever, and never know her.

It hurts to imagining the things that you stand to lose.

In the dream, her sister held out something made in wood and metal, like the wreck of a ship. At the time, the mermaid hadn’t known the world for ‘knife’. The baby uses a ’saw’. His work is slow. She just wants it to be over, again.

It hurts to wait.

What she knows now is this: there is nothing you can do that cannot later be undone, but back then the knife had been bought with the long length of her sister’s hair. The witch drove a hard bargain, and it had taken a whole head of hair to buy a simple promise. Her sister had bent close to her and whispered to her what the witch had said; if she killed him with the knife, she could become a mermaid again. She could go back.

In the dream, her sister had kissed her, gently, her lips against hers. The mermaid had tasted salt. Tears are salty because the ocean was there first.

She woke up and the knife was beside her on the pillow. She lay and looked at it for a long time. She was afraid to touch it. It looked like an evil sort of thing.

It was an evil sort of thing. These are the things that people are drive to do for love, and loss of it. And all of this sacrifice for a man who had been in love with the wrong girl along. She couldn’t blame him. He was only a baby. But almost any creature on the face of the earth or under the water will fight to save itself from dying.

Every step was agony. The soles of her feet felt full of broken glass. Splinters of it had found their way into the centre of her heart. She kept going. It was her life or his; him in the ground, or her on the crest of a wave forever. If she killed him, she could go back. She kept walking. She cried and she didn’t notice it. She had to get there. The knife was heavy, so heavy, in her hand. She carried it. She had to. She looked back, once, to make sure that she wasn’t leaving bloody footprints on the white marble.

The baby stands back and looks at his work. Her head is nowhere near coming off her shoulders. She can feel the night-wind off of the sea in the deep, ridged groove that the saw has left in her neck. He rubs his thumb against the raw edges and, with her unblinking eyes, she begs him not to leave her, to stay and finish the job. He leaves her. They always do. Sometimes, they kiss her, but then they always leave her on her own. She just wants one to stay. The sky and the sea are the same shade of black, but she can still make out the white caps on the waves. Her sisters. Her beautiful sisters. The grief is always with her.

The end, when it came, should have come quickly.

The knife had made no sound when it slipped into the water and sank. She had heard herself make a little sound, a whimper, but she must have imagined it. The witch had taken her voice, and, now, she would keep it. She had slipped the nightgown from her shoulders. She had not waited. She had not given herself time to go back; she couldn’t kill the prince, which left her with no choice. She jumped. She had no choice at all. The water was so cold it hurt her, and, when she hit the surface, she broke into a thousand pieces, and those pieces broke into a thousand more, and their pieces too. The water was so cold that it smashed her into vapour and blew her back the way that she’d come. Something had caught her. It was like being held in a loosely curled fist.

Not seafoam, little one. Not yet.

For a long time, she waited. She was not a creature of the land, or a creature of the sea. She was of the air. She was the soft south wind and the ice on the surface of the water. She came to understand. Not always, but, sometimes, a soul is earned, not given. She had died, rather than kill him and, if she could not wish the Prince and the temple girl happiness then, at least, she wished them peace. It wasn’t a soul, not quite, but it was a flicker of light to draw herself in around. It was enough until they built the statue in the harbour, right where she had stood and jumped. It was made of metal and stone, like one of the new ships washed up on a rock. The wind swept her back the way that she’d come, all of those years before. There was a moment of impact, and then she looked out through those unmoving eyes for the very first time. She never expected to be this heavy.

And now she never changes. The babies come and take their pictures and the sea changes from blue to green and grey and back again. An American girl-baby with long red hair and layers bundling her up against the winter cold clambers up onto the rock with her. For a moment, they are eye to eye, and then the baby tugs off a glove with her teeth so that she can rub her bare fingers against the cut that the saw left in her neck. Eye to eye, the mermaid remembers that tomorrow is the shortest day. Somebody takes a photograph and the baby kisses her forehead before she jumps down off the rock and goes on her way. With her unmoving eyes, the mermaid watches her go.

And don’t drown, baby. Don’t drown.

Isolde (part 1)

There was a face frozen in the ice, a young boy or girl. She couldn’t tell. In Ireland, where she was from, they still told stories about a girl washing bloody shirts, a glimpse of your own death. She hadn’t seen any skinny girls, their knuckles blue from trying to get the stains out of skirts, but she stood and stared at the face in the ice for a long time, the little distorted features, tried to make out if her own fate was spelt out there. She couldn’t tell. It had been a long ride to bring her there, tall on her white horse, the hedges pale with frost, the heavy fur trimmed edge of her cloak dropping almost to the ground. There had been no sound, the world dampened by the snow, a strange funeral hush and she had turned her face into the shadows of her hood and thought of him, conjured him bent low over the neck of his horse and riding hard. When she had heard that they were coming for her, her husband’s men, she’d run through the secret doors to him without her shoes on. He’d caught her in the doorway, and she’d pushed a plan against his parted lips. Ride quickly, she’d told him. Do this thing and that. Do not fail me if you love me. Do not fail. It had been so simple, at the time.

She sealed it with a crumpled kiss.

“Isolde?”

She started; she’d been staring at the face in the ice. The child had fallen, obviously…fallen with nobody to catch her (she’d decided that the long hair straggling recalled a little girl with hair in braids come undone in the icy cold). She could fall here too, yet. She shook herself. Nobody was going to die here. Nobody ever died for loss of love or honour. Dying and the end of living are not quite the same thing in the end.

“Isolde,” said the voice, more insistent this time.

“Yes, yes…I’m coming,” she said, with a royal wave of her hand, shading her eyes to look for him as she stepped down onto the frozen river, into her own future. Or something.

He had come in a ship with dark sails and ended her life, to begin with. She had been almost too old to be married, too beautiful for most men, too carefully guarded a prize and then the Knight had come to claim her for his King. Nobody had asked her what she thought. Bought and sold, she’d stood and watched as the blood flowed on the green, green grass of her home. She had wondered if it would rain, as she watched the clouds scudding across the flat, white sky, as she watched the knight from across the water leaning on his sword on his knee in the mud, head bent. She had prayed for rain then. Let the rain come in hard from the sea and drown him. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t have eyes for anything but the wide, hopeless width of the pale sky. Morholt was dead. She had wanted the knight dead as well.

But it hadn’t happened.

Later, he’d stood on the deck on his ship with dark sails while, in white, she waited to kiss her mother goodbye, to bid honour to her father. She wore white for Morholt, the Champion but her uncle too, and squeezed her fist around the shard of iron that they’d taken from his ragged heart; a splinter from the Knight’s sword. It tore her palm and stained her dress, the splinter from the sword that had broken poor Morholt’s loyal heart. Behind her, on his ship, he was waiting for her, leaning on his arms on the rail, his shirt stained green from rolling in the grass with Morholt’s dead weight on top of him. He stood in the sun and she could imagine the smell of him, sweat and leather and his darkly curling hair, grass stains and blood. When she imagined him touching her by accident, his fingers brushing her arm to steady her as she climbed aboard the ship, her stomach heaved uneasily. She was pure, a princess of Ireland in her white gown. They had called her the Fair and she’d waited years for a husband who wasn’t afraid of her. They said that she could heal the sick. They said that she was worth her weight in iron, which is heavier and more use than gold. She’d been sold like so much meat to this curly haired knight who was younger than her. The price he’d paid for her had been blood and violence, which told her all that she needed to know about men, if she hadn’t known already from watching her father and his brothers. She risked a glance back at him. He smiled and winked at her, still leaning on his arms. She turned back to her mother and held out her hands.

She didn’t look at him again.

If her life had ended with Morholt and the sight of the knight standing on the sunny deck, then Hell was the space below the decks, in the dark, where the world pitched and rocked and Brangwain, sweetheart, her childhood friend who she’d grown up with and bought with her when she left, cried and whimpered about the country that they were never going to see again. With Brangwain’s cheek against her thigh, Brangwain’s tears soaking through her white skirts and her fingers combing through Brangwain’s long, pale hair (so like her own), Isolde had closed her eyes and thought of a new world. Around them the ship had creaked and shuddered as though possessed, and Isolde’s entire life narrowed to planks and pitch and the rocking, rolling motion of the sea, to the curls of Brangwain’s hair around her fingers and the bind of white linen across her breasts.

“Shhhh,” she murmured, smoothing her friend’s hot, wet cheeks. She kept herself occupied by imagining each part of her body as separate and then turning them against him, one by one. When she was done, she hummed Irish lullabies and started on Brangwain’s body. She turned each part of them against him. She hardened both of their hearts and told herself that maybe she could learn to love a King but she could never even look at the Knight who killed her without leaving a mark. She entertained fantasies of killing him while he slept. Her Uncles had taught her some things, but her mother had taught her more. She wouldn’t miss her mark, she was sure of it. After Brangwain fell asleep, she kilted up her skirts around her knees and followed the corridor down into the spiralling heart of the tiny ship, hiding from the shouts of the crew men on the deck above. He hadn’t even closed the door of his cabin all of the way.

Through the crack in the door, she watched him shrug out his clothes. She watched as his shoulders tensed as he dragged his shirt up over his head. Underneath the green, he was brown and white. Scars. Too many scars. For a moment, the beauty of the lines across his back made something low in her belly contract for him, but she closed her eyes, pinched a breath out through her nose.

She was hardening her heart.

He’d left his sword lying on a pile of clothes, unsheathed; he’d been examining the notched blade, his sword ruined now, no grace. Isolde thought about the shard of steel in the pocket of her gown, the splinter that had broken Morholt’s heart (hers as well). The Knight lay in a wooden tub, steam rising, his head tipped back against the rim. He looked much younger with his hair slicked back. He looked like he’d barely lost his puppy fat, his face only recently gone lean and handsome. She thought of her youngest brother, lying with his cheek against her thigh, dreaming of bows and arrows. He looked almost fragile lying there, the water beading on his skin, catching against his scars. She picked up the sword and hefted it. He wasn’t a child. She’d seen him with blood on his hands. The sword was heavier than she thought it would be. She imagined being hit with it, propelled by the full weight of his body behind it. He didn’t look like much, but she imagined that it had hurt like hell.

There are different kinds of hell.

She realised that he was looking at her. Somewhere inside her, there was a trembling little girl screaming but Isolde, with her hard heart, lifted her chin to meet his gaze, leaning her weight downwards on the point of his sword.

“I could kill you,” she said. “I should kill you. You…I loved him.”

“I’ve got a name,” he said. She lifted the sword with both hands, walked towards him with it held out in front of her, trembling, until she was close enough to stand over him. With some effort, she guided the point of the sword to rest against his throat. He didn’t stop looking at her.

“I know your name. I know who you are. I loved him and you killed him.”

“I was challenged,” he said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“Is that all you do? Like a trained dog? Your master says kill so you go kill, and drag the bloody spoils back home? What does your wife say?”

“I haven’t got a wife.”

“That’s sad,” she said, pressing on the sword a little, so she could feel his breath bobbing against it. “If I killed you, right now, who’d remember you? Anybody?”

“The world remembers deeds, Isolde. I’ve done. I’ve done what was required of me. S’not me who’ll be forgotten…s’you and your ladies and your uncle who did nothing but wait.”

Her name. He’d said her name for the first time. She’d assumed that he didn’t care, but he’d looked at her and said it. She dropped the sword. It bounced with a terrible noise when it hit the side of the tub and fell against the floor. Her bare feet made no sound on the wooden boards.

He woke her, fumbling in the dark. She’d lay awake listening to him roaming on the deck, her arm around Brangwain’s waist, holding the other girl’s slim heat against her. In the sudden flare and then the dim spill of the light she saw him, blowing on his burnt fingers. She sat up, Brangwain snoring softly still.

“Isolde,” he said, with a quick nod of his head, turning away from her, back to the door, reading for his own bed.

“I would have killed you, kni-“

“My name’s Tristan.”

“I would have killed you, Tristan.”

He looked at her for a long time, too long, so long a time that it became uncomfortable, and then he nodded.

“Do you want to come and sit with me, Isolde? Have something to drink? It might help you sleep.”

She’d clambered out from beside Brangwain, gathering unbleached linen around her thighs. Later, people would talk of love potions and powder heavy wine. Later, they’d whisper of witchcraft and foul play, trickery and deception, some kind of Irish spell. What Isolde knew was this: when his lips touched hers, she tasted his breath. What she knew was that, when he held out his hand to her, she took it, and one side of her skirt touched the bone of her ankle. They knew each other’s names. She let him bring her out onto the deck. She shivered and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pulled back against his solid heat. She let him because it felt better than being alone. It wasn’t anything to be proud of, later. It was just something that had happened. It wasn’t as if she’d planned it that way, lain in the bed beside Brangwain and plotted. She liked to think that she understood a little about men; how some pushed and some pulled and some drifted. He was drifting. She saw it in his face. She didn’t love him, she couldn’t, but she did feel sorry for him, like a blue edge to the heat of her anger. She hated him, but she could no longer hate him out of existence. It was a stutter, when she took his face in her hands. It was a stammer, when she kissed him. He tried to whisper to her but he couldn’t find the words. She rubbed her fingers against his lips. White was for mourning, not purity. Pure something. Want. Need. She wanted him to help her. She needed him to know her. He was the last person who’d seen her, before she changed entirely. She pressed her body tight against his and hoped to leave an impression. She had wanted to hate him, but something else had come instead.

She woke up in pieces, her hands first (one threaded through his curling hair, one smoothing the flat heat of his belly). Her nose then, which brought her the warm, close smell of him, spice and sweat and old blood, soaked into his skin like beer in barrel wood. He smelt like the monks she’d met, Christians, those old men with their incense and their fool’s prayers. His bones were arranged around her like a blessing. His body, notched with scars, reminded her of his sword. She’d wanted to kill him the night before but now she stretched carefully, not wanting to wake him. It would be morning soon anyway, and Kernow would come looming out of the mist, and she’d rise and braid her hair with herbs and water and make herself ready for her husband.

Lonely without him, she kissed his forehead. He opened his eyes. She rubbed his lips with her fingers, don’t speak, not yet, don’t ruin it. He lay silently and watched her as she bent naked over her chest and rummaged for a gown that wasn’t mourning white. In the pitching, rolling light, the indigo linen looked closer to black, closer to the colour of his eyes than hers. He lay on his back on the pallet, one arm pillowed behind his head and watched as she sat taken, soft curves and muffled lines, and combed her fingers through her nearly waist length hair.

“So now you’ll go and be a wife?” he said. “Somebody else’s wife.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose so.”

“You could stay. We could…go. This is my ship. We could go anywhere.”

Anywhere there was water, anyway. The sea had always seemed so terrifyingly big from the beach, mirroring the sky. She shook her head without looking at him.

“No, Tristan. Not now.”

“I wish…”

He was so young, wasn’t he?

“If wishes were horses, lover, I’d be the Queen of Ireland, and I’d never have met you, and I’d have a hundred thousand horses.”

She turned her back on him to step into her gown, and didn’t look at him after that.

Mark was handsome though she wondered how much of that was a kind light in his eyes, the nice line of his mouth. Flowers in her hair and shared wine from a golden cup. Brangwain’s hand on her arm when she thought that might fall and she was a wife. Married. She’d almost wanted it to rain, wanted the sky flat and grey and featureless, imagined Tintagel washing away into the sea in a deluge, but it hadn’t and it didn’t and the sun shone all day and the ladies danced and she sat at her husband’s right hand. Her husband.

And all day, Tristan there, not smiling, in the corner of her eye.

Later, in the dim light, always in the dim light, Isolde unbraided Brangwain’s long hair, the comb bone as she separated layers over her maid’s finely trembling shoulders. The could have been sisters, the two girls; known each other for so long that they’d started to look alike, tall and slim with long hair and the bind of white linen across their breasts. They had called her the Fair, Isolde, the Princess of Ireland and there she was, a wife, a ruin and Brangwain was her only hope. In a fire, she’d have kicked a hole in anything to let the smoke out, to let her out. Brangwain was a hole which she smashed with her fist in the sky that was orange and red with setting sun, in the fact that she would soon be expected in her husband’s bed, but not until full dark.

A sunset wouldn’t save her. Not only a sunset.

She stood back and studied Brangwain who stood against the window, her hair and and loose and long, her hands beautiful but trembling. Against the light, she was so much dark space, the shape of her, rather than her actual details. Isolde took her face in her hands and kissed her.

“Will it hurt?” said Brangwain, and Isolde smoothed her hair with the sides of her fingers, remembering Tristan in the pitching, rolling dark and Morholt before him, pain and a little blood, her heard folded away small and offered with an open mouth and taken so gently. Hearts had layers like onions, like carefully packed chests. In the warm light of the setting sun, thinking about hearts and giving and taking, Isolde pressed a kiss to the corner of Brangwain’s mouth, trembling lips to trembling lips.

“A little,” she said, “But not too much.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Go to his bed,” said Isolde, managing a smile. “He’ll show you the way. It’s natural. It’ll be alright.”

Later still, years later, after the ice, in the face of fire, she thought that it was that, sending Brangwain into Mark’s bed in her stead, was probably the first thing that she did that condemned her to burn. Or to dream of burning, and black sails, but she managed to put that out of her mind when she went to him where he was waiting, open arms and the look in his eyes. She was another man’s wife, the wife of his Uncle, the wife of a King but she came to him barefooted like a peasant, like a lover, her long hair brushed out on her shoulders (her body was a mirror). When he bent his head to kiss her, she thought of Brangwain putting out the candle before Mark could turn around and look into her face.

“Will he miss you?”

She shook her head.

“Brangwain went. One woman’s very similar to another in the dark, I suppose. To a man.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that, but she turned in his arms, her gown unravelling in his hands. She wanted to feel like a lover again, not a wife. Wives were women like her mother, who had been beautiful once but had faded, famed now only for her white hands, her light dim and almost gone, like a dead day in winter. Wives were iron, and women were supposed to flow like the wind. She rubbed her fingers against his lips (how easily things became habit).

“Don’t,” she said, unravelling.

Mark leant towards her, a cup of wine in his hand, the long table in the hall loaded with food.

“Tell me, my love,” he said, and she was distracted by a bead of wine the colour of blood clinging to his beard. “Who shall I leave to guard you when I go hunting?”

“Guard me? In my own home?”

“Too precious a jewel to be left in a wide open chest.” He laughed, and she remembered that she didn’t hate him, quite. “Who?”

She couldn’t help it; she looked to where Tristan was sitting beside the fireplace. He laughing loudly at something. He made a lot of noise, a lot of light, and drew the eye.

“Tristan,” she said. She had heard the whispers, of course she had: the Queen and the King’s nephew, Mark’s wife and his loyal servant, tristanandisolde, their names run together by suspicion. She’d heard them and Mark had surely heard them too but in scarlet, with her hair braided with gold, she felt like whispers, mere whispers, could never touch her. She was invincible. She was pushing against the sky.

“Tristan,” she said, again.

“Tristan,” Mark said, and nodded.

She wasn’t entirely sure when it had happened; when Mark had started ploughing Brangwain by candlelight, in daylight, in all lights, her hair dragged back so that he could see her face. It wasn’t her place to ask; her was her husband. Still, it meant that there were certain things that Brangwain knew because she’d been told, because sometimes Mark talked more easily when he was falling asleep. She didn’t blame Brangwain…it was as though she’d pushed her onto the path after turning her three times to confuse her. Isolde couldn’t blame her, that she’d found a way to Mark regardless. And they had been friends for so long.

“Isolde,” she hissed, and Isolde bent her head to listen. “It’s a trap. He’ll kill you.”

Isolde her felt a tilt come to her chin. She was a princess of Ireland, for the love of gods. She was no weak and mortal woman.

“I am not afraid of him, I…”

“He’ll kill Tristan too.”

She hadn’t run to him, then. She’d taken a deep breath, to feel linen tight across her breasts, the weight of the embroidery on her skirts. She hadn’t felt the sky any more, but she was still strong. She hadn’t seen him the whole night and, in the morning, she went to Mark, every inch his queen in her red and gold and told him that Tristan had displeased her, that he always displeased her, and that the cold wet moor could have him, and good luck with the fox or the stag or the sea. But she wasn’t immortal any more. And that was the difference wasn’t it? She could die now, one way or another, but hand or tongue. She could die, but she wouldn’t. She was a Queen of Kernow, and a princess of Ireland, and she was not afraid, but maybe she went to him less.

And still, the whispers came and, more and more, Mark was listening. And he had to do something, to appear still strong. It was vital, beyond important, to appear still strong.

“I have to test you, Isolde,” he said, his hands hurting the sides of her face where he held her. “I have to show everyone that you are my Queen,” he said, but what he meant was so many people can’t be wrong, can they?.

“Test me, then,” she said. “See if I’m lying.”

And there was a face frozen in the ice, a young boy or girl. She couldn’t tell. She bent down and brushed gloved fingers over the surface. A girl, she thought, a raggy whisper of braids in such a cold grave. She saw a glimpse of her own tomb and shuddered in her warm layers.

“Will you cross, Lady?” someone said, and it was all ceremony because she had to cross. Turning back now would be so big a folly. One of her husband’s men was holding out his hand to her.

“I will cross,” she said, stepping out alone.

Crossing the ice, her muscles cramped; her belly, her feet, the long muscles of her thighs which he had smoothed so expertly with his heavy soldier’s hands. She would not slip there though, not yet. She would not give any of her husband’s men a chance to catch her, or see her fall and tell Mark about it. She walked without lifting her feet, her hems stirring the snow on the ice, which creaked like a giant’s bones beneath her feet. The world was made out of giant’s bones. The world was a cage of ribs and the delicate parts of hands. Bear me, she told the river, silently. Bear me safely across. Around her, the pilgrims were also crossing and, ahead, the island and more bones, the bones of a saint, cracked femurs and a holy skull. She searched the corners of her vision for something, anything. His face in shadow. A hem stained green, dark hair against his brow and, when he passed her, the barest whisper of blood. Do this thing, and that. Do not fail me if you love me. Do not fail.

On the shore, carefully, she stumbled.

“The Lady!” she heard, going quicker than she’d meant to, and then his arms, familiar, a whirl softly to the cold, hard ground. Do not fail me if you love me, do not fail. A broken moment, a fluttering beat of her heart. She realised that she’d been doubting him. She shouldn’t have. He was a capable man. His arms were strong. Her husband’s men came running but he was already helping her to her feet, a pilgrim continuing on his way, stained green at the hem of his pilgrim’s brown. He took her heart with him, on his way on up the hill to see the Saint, as she turned to her husband’s men, feet shuffling, thinking against of that face in the ice. He took his heart with him. She could love him more, after that, in all the welter of wanting.

The snow was starting again.