False Mermaid

At the deserted village, they climbed down the rocky escarpment. Cormac glanced up at the craggy rocks, and at the steep bank that fell away above the beach. The enormous heap of pale stones had washed out of the boggy earth above them.

“Tell me what you saw that day,” he said to Nora.

“When we first arrived at the beach, I was standing here,” she said. “Elizabeth was on the rocks over there—” She pointed out a trio of flat stones at the north edge of the bay. “I was watching her, but something—a movement up there—distracted me. It was a pair of sea eagles. I’ve never seen two of them together like that. They were fighting over something.” She cast her eyes about for the exact spot. “Look, there’s one of them now—”

She set off climbing up the rocks, and Cormac followed. By the time they reached the top of the eroding bank, the eagle was long gone. But as they drew near, Cormac could see where the giant bird had been perched. The stony ground was covered in a blanket of peat that stretched to the edge of the escarpment. He crouched down for a closer look. The edge was unstable; one false move, and you might do a header right down onto the beach below—unless you had wings, of course. Two pairs of talons had made a series of gashes in the soft ground where the two birds had been wrestling. Cormac edged closer to the brink to push aside the drying edge of peat, and drew back in surprise.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

“I’ll let you see for yourself.” He grasped Nora’s hand as she leaned forward. What they were looking at was a human foot, mostly stripped of flesh, the toe delicately pointed seaward. Beside it, the toe of an old-fashioned shoe had begun to surface from under the peat.

“She’s here,” Cormac murmured. “She was right here under their noses all along.”

“What are you talking about?” Nora demanded.

He moved to where the woman’s head should be if this was a normal supine burial, and pulled out his pocketknife, cutting through the grass carpet and peeling it back to expose the wet peat underneath. As he dug with bare hands, he wondered: What would the face of a sea maid look like? Would she still have her beauty after years under the peat, like the cailín rua? His mind conjured the curious faces, the mournful eyes of the seals who surrounded him while he was out rowing. At last his fingers felt something—the roundness of a cranium vault. But as he worked to remove the peat, in the place where he expected to find a forehead, a brow ridge, a nose, there was nothing but a shallow depression and a fistful of splintered bones. Whoever this woman was, her face had been battered in, her identity effectively erased.

Nora knelt beside him. She said: “You know who she is, don’t you?”

“I haven’t had a chance to tell you about this place,” he said. “Remember the other night, when you sang ‘An Mhaighdean Mhara,’ and I asked why you chose that song? There’s a local connection. This is where she lived—”

“Who?”

“The woman from the song—Mary Heaney.”

Nora drew back. “It’s only a story, Cormac. It’s not real.”

“I don’t blame you for being skeptical. I was, too—” He climbed to his feet and reached for her hand. “Come with me.”

Inside the selkie cottage, he dug through the stones and shells under the cot until he found the high-button shoe. He handed it to Nora. “It’s been bothering me for days, ever since I first came here. Why would anyone leave home with only one shoe? Two shoes makes sense, or none—but one shoe doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Nora sat in one of the low chairs to examine the shoe. It was rimed with dust and white mildew, but the cutwork around the ankle was distinctive. This was unmistakably the mate of the one they’d just seen peeping from the turf.

Cormac sank into the opposite chair. “The woman they called Mary Heaney, the woman who lived in this house, was a foreigner. She showed up one day in 1889 on a small boat with a local fisherman, P. J. Heaney. The woman spoke no Irish, no English. But she stayed on and lived with Heaney as his wife, had two children by him. People began to believe she was a selkie, like the Mary Heaney in the song. She would sit alone on the headland; Roz had reports of her singing in a strange language. She has all this documented—Roz has—census records, interviews, newspaper reports. When Mary Heaney disappeared six years later, people said she had discovered the sealskin Heaney had stolen from her, and returned to the sea. Everyone bought into it—all her neighbors here at Port na Rón, the newspapers, even the police. Everyone wanted to believe the myth of the seal wife when it wasn’t what actually happened.”

“But that song is quite old, isn’t it? How could the person who lived here be Mary Heaney if the song has been around for hundreds of years?”