Chapter Forty-Three

A Circle of Light

I got back to find Maggie coughing worse than ever. She pressed a cloth to her mouth and it came away spotted with blood. She was gasping for air. I got her in the chair, brought her a blanket, and made her some coffee.

“Is there someone who can make you better?” I said. “Does that hospital have healers? Will Jack help you when I’m gone?”

“Never you mind,” said Maggie. “And stop fussing over me like an old mother hen.”

But I made her a can of soup, and I did her chores, and I watched her until she went to sleep.

Now I was lying on Tommy’s bed. The lamp made a small circle of light in the dark. I opened the book.

I wished I could skim through like Nellie, but I had to work for every word. It was old people telling true stories about selkies and seals. There were gruesome tales about hunting. Humans battered seals bloody on land and speared them at sea. They slashed off the fur to make coats and purses. One man said his purse was magic because it came from a selkie’s pelt. There were stories of drowning men saved by seals, and selkies seen dancing beneath the full Moon—

And then there it was. Sometimes the child . . .

My heart pounded and the page went spinning. I had to stop and take a deep breath until the words settled into place.

An old woman was talking about a fisherman in her village who’d married a selkie, with dark eyes, white skin, and a voice like music. They had a son.

“Sometimes the child of a selkie and a man is born in sealskin,” the old woman said. “Such a child soon slips into the sea and swims away. Other times the child’s like his da, and never changes into a seal at all. But once in a rare while they come late to the changing. This lad grew up looking like every other child in the village. Then one day, on the verge of manhood, he ran to his da crying, ‘What’s gone wrong with my hands?’ Between his fingers were half-moons of skin, like the webbing between a seal’s claws. The fisherman’s heart was like to break. That morning he had a wife and a fine son. But come evening, he watched two seals swim away, and they never came home again.”

On the verge of manhood—the boy was older than me when his pelt came! I turned the page.

“It was just as well they left. Why, you ask? If you’re wishing to know what happens with those born half-selkie, you’ve only to look at ‘The Tale of Westwood Pier.’ And then you’ll never ask again.”

That was the end of her story. There was nothing about how he turned. For a moment I felt disappointed. But then I realized another clue was right in front of me. You’ve only to look at ‘The Tale of Westwood Pier.’ I read the rest of the book word for word, but the tale wasn’t there.

Westwood Pier.

It started to rain, a steady pattering on the roof. I stared out the window at the dim light of morning. In my mind it became a fire’s glowing embers, and there sat the walrus, the unlit pipe in his hand, saying, “‘Westwood Pier’? But no, that wouldn’t do for children.”

I turned off the lamp and slipped the book under my pillow. I knew exactly what I had to do.