Witch from the Sea

She had come every night to look after me.

“Senara is very sick,” she said. “She wants me to be with her. She says she is better when I am there.”

“Go to her, my dear,” I said.

“Well, you are better today, Mother.”

“Yes, my love. Do not fret about me.”

“Jennet is giving Senara a dose of Herb Twopence. She says that will cure anything.”

“She will be better in the morning.”

She clung to me for a moment. “You are sure, Mother, that you are all right without me?”

“Of course, my darling. Good night. Go and look after Senara.”

I kissed her fondly and she went out.

I went on writing. I would finish right up to that moment when I had kissed her good night. Then I shall put the papers away and go to bed.

Part Two TAMSYN

THE UNKNOWN SAILOR’S GRAVE

CHRISTMAS IS NEVER A happy time for me. I can never forget that it was at Christmas that my mother died, and although it happened six years ago I remember it as vividly now as I did the first Christmas after.

I was ten years old at the time. It had been quite a merry Christmas day. We had done a miracle play, the mummers had been to the castle and we had danced, sung and played our musical instruments.

I often thought that if I had been with her on that night, it wouldn’t have happened. For several nights before I had slept in her bed; and then Senara had been ill and I had stayed with her.

I would often think of those nights when my mother had been so pleased to have me with her. I was very young then and children don’t always see things clearly. I had imagined that she clung to me and that it seemed so important that I should be there.

And the next morning she was dead.

Jennet found her. I often go over it all. How I had heard Jennet scream and come running to me and I couldn’t get a coherent sentence out of her. I went to my mother’s room and there she was lying in her bed. She looked unlike herself—so still and cold when I touched her cheek.

The strange thing was that there was nothing to indicate how she had died.

My father’s physician came and said that her heart had failed her. He could find no other reason why she should have died.

She had been ailing for some weeks, my father said, and he had been very anxious about her. We all confirmed that.

I felt sick with anger against myself. I had the notion that had I been with her this would never have happened. I had sensed in those days before her death that she was afraid. Then I wondered whether I had imagined it. At ten years old one is not very wise.

There was a great deal of whispering in the castle among the servants but whenever I appeared they stopped and said something quite banal so that I was well aware that they had changed the subject.

My grandmother arrived from Lyon Court. She was stunned. She looked so bewildered, just as I felt, and she took me in her arms and we cried together. “Not Linnet,” she kept saying. “She was too young. How could it have been?”

No one knew. People’s hearts sometimes failed them, said the physician. Their time had come. God had seen fit to take them and so they went.

My grandfather was away at sea; so were my uncles Carlos, Jacko and Penn. Edwina came though. She seemed so strained and frightened. She broke down and said that she ought to have done something, that she had seen it coming. She wouldn’t explain and we didn’t quite know what she meant and she was too distressed and hysterical to say more. But I felt drawn towards her, because she blamed herself in much the same way as I did, for I continued to feel that had I been with her it wouldn’t have happened.

There was a service in the old Norman chapel and she was buried in our burial grounds close by Ysella’s Tower. She was put next to the grave of the unknown man who had been washed ashore when there was a wreck at sea earlier that year. On the other side of the unknown man’s grave was my father’s first wife.

More than anyone—even Senara—I had loved my mother. This was the great tragedy of my life. I told my grandmother that I would never get over it.

She stroked my hair and said, “The pain will grow less for you, Tamsyn, even as it will for me, but it is hard for either of us to believe that yet.”

She said she would take me back to Lyon Court with her. It would be easier for me there, she said. I longed to go with her. I kept thinking of my mother and the last time I had seen her. I should never forget it. She was in her bedroom and when I came she was standing up and looked as though she had hidden something. But perhaps I imagined that.

I felt more and more uneasy about not being with her. I felt she needed me so. Perhaps I did not feel that at the time but imagined it afterwards.

There was Senara though, who had drunk too much mulled wine and was very ill. So I had stayed with her. If I had not I should have been with my mother.

Senara said I should not reproach myself. She had been so sick and naturally I stayed with her. My mother had not exactly been ill, or if she had no one had known it.