The Bell at Sealey Head

Two

Gwyneth Blair heard the bell as the last, dying ember of light guttered into the cloud bank over the sea, and put down her pen.

She looked over the cobbled street, her father’s warehouses, and the bobbing masts in the harbor from the highest room in the house, just below the peaked roof, where the sharply slanting walls made the place unfit for anything but brooms or a writer. She had wedged a tiny writing table under the single window, a rickety affair from the schoolroom, whose surface her older brother had riddled with a penknife when he was bored. An ugly cushion, covered with lime ribbons and liver-colored velvet, that she had purloined from the parlor protected her from the split in the scullery stool she had rescued from the trashman’s wagon. There was just room enough in the angle between the table legs and the roof for a small tin chest into which she dropped the pages of unfinished stories. When they were completed, various things happened to them. Some she read to the twins; others she took to the bookseller, Mr. Trent, for comment. Most were consigned to the dark under her bed, to be considered when she was in a better mood. A few she took down to the garden and burned.

It grew dark quickly in the tiny room after the sun went down. She dried her pen, capped her ink, dropped a half-covered page into the chest. She sat a moment longer, following the ebb tide out of the harbor, through the rocky channel where a fishing boat foundered, invariably, once a year, and out to the restless deeps, already growing shadowy with dusk.

The bell had haunted her as long as she could remember.

It was the first thing she had written about, years earlier, the most exciting, the most dreadful piece of writing she had ever done. That had gone under her bed and never come out. Since then, her written explanations of the mystery of the bell had grown more sophisticated, more complex. Most still ended up under the bed. Some she showed to Mr. Trent, who held the common local belief about the phenomenon but enjoyed what he called her excursions into the imagination.

The makeshift latch on the peaked door rattled up and down. Gwyneth, who had heard no footsteps on the steep, narrow stairs, moved quickly, dodging the ceiling as she stood from long practice, and opened the door.

The baby of the family grinned at her toothily. She was not yet three, a plump, golden-haired, violet-eyed armful. Of all of the siblings, she most resembled their mother, who had died a few months after her birth. No wonder Gwyneth had heard no steps; Dulcie had done away with her shoes again, and who knew where this time?

“Tantie says come down.”

“I’m coming. Where, you miserable child, have you hidden your shoes?”

“Guess.”

“Indeed.” Gwyneth hoisted Dulcie up into her arms. “Do you think our father has nothing better to do than send his ships out to exotic lands to bring you back new shoes?”

“The bird is here for tea,” Dulcie said complacently, knocking Gwyneth’s spectacles askew with her dimpled elbow. “And Dary.”

Gwyneth stifled a sigh, as well as a few thoughts unwise to express around the chatterbox Dulcie. “How wonderful,” she said flatly. “How extremely pleasant for all of us to be favored by the magnificent presence of the bird.”

She started carefully down the stairs, keeping an eye out for stray shoes. She, too, had inherited their mother’s curly gold hair, but her eyes were practically colorless, gray as a fogbank with no storm in sight, and she had somehow grown nearly as tall as their father. That this did not discourage Raven Sproule, the bird, from seeking her out over his cup of tea never ceased to amaze her.

What ails the man? she wondered, putting Dulcie down to walk at the bottom of the stairs. I’m a merchant’s daughter who wears spectacles and spends a good deal of her life in an attic. Has his father run through the family fortune already?

She remembered to plant a smile on her face as she opened the parlor door.

Their mother, who had rarely used the dark, windowless room, had furnished it with her least favored items, hence the lime-and-liver cushion. Curiosities their father had gleaned from his ships wound up there: lamps made of seashells, animal-skin carpets complete with eyes and teeth, a huge round brass table, a folding screen painted with a snake coiling among jungle plants and flicking its tongue toward a squawking fledgling in its nest, an entire collection, in various sizes and styles, of ships in bottles. The more interesting oddments had been pilfered by the twins: the strange drums and rattles, the deeply bellowing conch shells, the peculiar games with polished stones for counters, the curtain made of strands of beads and minute stuffed hummingbirds. What was left was uncomfortable, ugly, or too bizarre even for the twins.

Aunt Phoebe considered the room an educational gift to the inhabitants of Sealey Head, a sort of museum, and opened it to guests as often as she could. She sometimes wore the thin shawls with their bright, glinting threads while she poured tea, though the pinks and oranges rarely matched her habitual somber shades. She had come to live with her brother and care for his children after his wife died. It was, Gwyneth had thought at the time, like continually tripping over, or having to avoid, some cumbersome foreign object her father had brought home and constantly shifted into inconvenient places. But they gradually learned to live around her, for, despite her stodginess, she had a good heart.

“There you are,” she purred in her deep voice, as Gwyneth entered. Raven Sproule, trying to smile with his mouth full, was having his customary effect on Phoebe. Daria was there, too, his younger sister, all flutterings and lace, doing that thing with her gooseberry eyes. Her long lashes went winking and blinking up and down a few times at Gwyneth; she complained of weak vision, even to total strangers, as she peered confidingly at them.

“Gwyneth!” she exclaimed, as though the gloom had cast some doubt upon the matter.

“Daria. How lovely,” Gwyneth exclaimed back, trying to remember exactly when the Sproules had somehow become a fixture around the tea table. “And Raven. What a surprise. How are you?”

“Much better now,” he said meaningfully, having worked his bite into a less obtrusive position. Like his sister, he was fair and stocky, with a beak like a jungle bird and practically no chin. It was an odd combination, she thought. But what would he care what anybody thought? His father was Sir Weldon Sproule; his family had lived at Sproule Manor for two hundred years, and owned most of the pastures and small farms in the protected river valley east of Sealey Head. Raven was heir to the lot. Except for Aislinn House, which had begun crumbling while Sproule Manor was only a wish in an ambitious farmer’s heart, nothing in Sealey Head was more stately than Raven’s pedigree.

“Now,” he added, in case Gwyneth hadn’t quite understood him, “that you’re here. Your aunt said you must have been upstairs writing your stories for the children.”

“Bad, bad for the complexion.” Daria waggled a finger chidingly, then bit into a tart with the other hand. Her eyes widened again; she looked reproachfully at Aunt Phoebe, who had pulled Dulcie onto her knee and was being charmed by her. Rhubarb, Gwyneth guessed. She plucked the tart from Daria’s fingers before Daria dropped it into the umbrella stand made from some unfortunate pachyderm’s foot.

“Never mind that. Have a seed cake instead.”

“What are your stories about?” Raven asked. “I hope there are horses in them.”

“Or pirates,” Daria added with enthusiasm. “Great, hairy pirates with gold in their ears who are tamed and civilized by love. I read one like that just last week.”

“Oh, novels,” Raven said restively, glancing under the lid of an oddly hairy wooden box. “I can’t bear to read novels. Why sit still in a chair reading about somebody else’s life when you could be living your own?”

“Good question,” Gwyneth said, licking jam off her finger. Her aunt swiveled an eye at her; she lowered her hand hastily. “I think—”

“I mean, I’d rather ride,” Raven went on, encouraged. “Or you could sit around a good fire with your companions and talk. Why do something so solitary?”

“How else could I meet a pirate?” Daria demanded.

“Why would you want to? I’m sure they never bathe, and they wouldn’t know what to do with a cup of tea. Pour rum into the teapot and drink through the spout, no doubt.”

“Not my pirates,” Daria said firmly. “Mine would be the well-brought up, sensitive types, who were driven to the sea through no fault of their own, and welcome any chance to escape from their debauchery.”

“Bauchery,” Dulcie echoed happily from her aunt’s knee, and Phoebe’s spine straightened abruptly against the wicker.

“However did we get on such a subject?” she wondered to Gwyneth, as though her niece was the one who had invited pirates into their tea party.

“Not a clue,” Gwyneth murmured, and groped for a subject. “How are your horses?” she asked Raven, and he was off into knees and hocks and hoof infections. Daria put her hand to her mouth, yawned delicately, and shifted closer to Gwyneth, while Raven, beamed at by both Phoebe and Dulcie, wandered toward the warmth.

“We came to ask you to ride with us tomorrow,” Daria said softly. “We must pay a visit to Aislinn House. My mother is sending Lady Eglantyne some novels to read in bed, and an herbal pillow. She finds them very comforting when she can’t sleep.” She lowered her voice even further. “Dr. Grantham says Lady Eglantyne may not live much longer. She’s old and very frail.”

“But what—” Gwyneth said incoherently, thinking of the huge, quiet, melancholy house, the few servants left in it, most of them as old as Lady Eglantyne.

“The doctor advised her to summon her heir from Landringham.” Daria gave Gwyneth the full force of her round, green stare. “It is immeasurably exciting.”

Gwyneth opened her mouth again, was distracted by Dulcie’s laughter. The sight of Raven on his hands and knees, his hair in his eyes like a pony’s, arms and legs pumping rhythmically up and down, rendered her speechless.

“Raven, whatever are you doing?” his sister cried.

“I’m being a perfect trotter.”

Dulcie crowed again; even Phoebe had begun to laugh. Gwyneth closed her mouth. No, she told herself adamantly. I can’t like him just because he makes the baby laugh.

“What a girl it is,” Daria sighed fondly. “Your tiny sister is already turning heads. So, tomorrow. Will you come with us?”

“Of course she will,” Aunt Phoebe said briskly, keeping one eye firmly on priorities, even in the midst of revelry, and that, the speechless Gwyneth thought, was that.

Later that evening, after Dulcie had been put to bed, she read the beginning of her new story to the twins.

“ ‘The Bell at Sealey Head.’ ”

“Not the bell again,” Crispin groaned, and Pandora clouted him lightly with her knuckles.

“Be quiet. Go on,” she encouraged her sister. “I’m sure it will be wonderful.”

They were both thirteen. A spiky age, Gwyneth remembered. Crispin was growing gawky, and Pandora moody, inclined to bursting into a temper or tears for no articulated reason. For the first time in his life, Crispin was taller than his twin, and already talking of following their older brother, Rufus, to sea. They had their father’s chestnut hair and their mother’s purple-blue eyes, a striking combination of wood-land colors that Gwyneth suspected would survive the season of gracelessness, the fits and starts of temperament, the readjustments of the bones, and bloom overnight into beauty.

“Thank you,” she said gravely.

They were in the spacious library, the most comfortable room in the house, with its thick layers of carpets, the broad, ample chairs and sofas, the wide fireplace, the potted palms behind which their father had screened himself to pore over some papers. Gwyneth sat on a peculiar hourglass-shaped leather seat with arched wooden legs that her father said was a yak saddle, or some such. The twins sprawled on the green velvet sofa, Pandora hugging an embroidered pillow in her arms in anticipation.

Gwyneth cleared her throat and began.

Suppose.

Suppose one day long ago the little fishing town of Sealey Head had come to very dire straits. Great storms all winter kept the boats in the harbor, and in the spring, the fish, driven southward down the coast, or far out to sea, forgot to come back to be caught and eaten. Suppose, in spring, the boats went out and came back with nothing, and the rain, having fallen with all its might all winter, had simply grown depleted in the clouds. It was renewing itself busily within the floating vapors above, but could not yet fall. So the seedlings in the fields of Sir Magnus Sproule’s magnificent farm were drooped and wilting.

Suppose the disasters did not end there.

Suppose the Inn at Sealey Head, exposed on its bluff facing the tumultuous waves, had begun, over the winter, to melt away. Its walls, battered by briny spindrift and rain, grew swollen and soft; its stones cracked under the lash of water and salt. Rooms leaked; travelers left in high dudgeon, complaining of water dripping into their beds as they slept. The stable roof fell in; all the feed moldered in the wet. To make matters much, much worse, a portion of the coast road just south of Sealey Head had been buried under boulders when the towering cliff it passed under collapsed in all the rain. The boulders had torn a portion of the road away, so there was nothing but a long, dangerous ravine from the top of the cliff to the great rocks in the sea below. Those traveling along the coast were advised to make a wide circle around Sealey Head. The town suffered from the lack of business, as did, very keenly, the innkeeper, Anscom Cauley, and his family. He was forced to let his stableman go, then his housekeeper, then, unfortunate man, his cook; Mrs. Cauley had to do all the work herself.

But that is not all.

Two more prominent and influential men in Sealey Head were also suffering from the harsh turn of Fortune. The shipping merchant, Mr. Blair, had lost three out of four of his ships in the terrible seas, and the fourth had been driven so far out of its charted path that no one knew where it had gone. Rumor sighted it far to the north, trapped in a perpetually frozen sea among the icebergs. Or in dry dock on an island in the tropics, whose people spoke no familiar language, so could not tell the sailors where they were in the world. Mr. Blair expended the last of his fortune to send a fifth ship out to search for the missing.

And all was equally unwell at Aislinn House. Lord Aislinn’s profligate ways had so depleted the family fortune that his daughter, Eloise, became his only hope. But a slender one at that: with no fortune, and a face like a vole, all small dull eyes and teeth, she had no prospects whatsoever. Not even the ambitious young Master Tibald Sproule, who had his eye on Aislinn House, would make an offer for her.

In such hideously difficult times, it seemed only a fortuitous stroke of luck would save the town. As luck would have it, it came, though not in any shape anyone could have expected.

Gwyneth stopped. The twins stared at her expectantly. Even their father had shifted a palm frond aside to gaze at her in wonder.

“Go on,” Crispin grunted.

“That’s all I have.”

“But the bell!” He bounced a little, impatiently, on the sofa. “You said it was about the bell.”

“I haven’t figured that part out yet. Not in this story. Nothing seems right.”

“I like all the catastrophes,” Pandora commented. “I hope there are more of them before you put everything aright.”

“I believe there will be. I haven’t yet made up my mind about which of its faces Luck will be wearing.” She laughed at their twin expressions, both of them astonished and annoyed at once. “I’m sorry. I was hoping you might have some suggestions for me.”

“I cannot imagine how you will rescue your poor characters,” Toland Blair told his daughter over the palm frond. “You’ve certainly made them wretched enough. I hope you’ll at least show mercy to your beleaguered merchant. But why the bell? Why do you keep going back to it?”

He was a big, weathered man with gray streaks in his hair and broad mustache. After his wife had died, he took to sea on his own merchant ships for long, wearying periods, returning briefly now and then to comment on his children’s heights and give them carved ivory animals, or wooden-soled sandals, or stranger things that Aunt Phoebe locked into a cupboard as soon as he had gone again. He was beginning to linger longer now on land; his seafaring eyes, wide and distant, were noticing again the wonders growing under his roof.

“It’s a mystery,” Gwyneth said simply.

He shook his papers straight on his desk and came out from behind the palms to poke at the fire.

“It’s nothing more than the ghostly echo of the bell on a ship that foundered off the headlands long ago. It tolled its last as it was dragged under the waves, just as the sun vanished into the sea. That’s what everyone says.”

“Do you believe that?”

He looked surprised. “I never thought about it.”

“I have.”

“I know you have.” He chuckled. “I’ve listened to your stories. The sea bell that the mermaid rings in vain every sunset to summon her long-dead lover. The bell tied around the neck of a gigantic hound let out only at sundown.”

Gwyneth flushed. “You heard that one?”

“That was my favorite,” Crispin said enthusiastically. “When it ate all the evil highwaymen.”

“I liked the bell on the path into fairyland,” Pandora said, “that signals the gate between worlds to open only at sunset.”

“Well,” Gwyneth sighed. “Nothing ever seems right to me.”

“Perhaps because the truth of the matter is that simple,” her father suggested. “That sad.”

She looked at him doubtfully. Aunt Phoebe opened the library door then, sent the twins up to bed. She came to stand next to her brother in a rare, contemplative moment. Both heads bent, her white hair in a bun, his gray and brown tied at his neck; they gazed silently together into the fire. Gwyneth swallowed a sudden, flaring ember of memory.

Then Phoebe raised her head, said briskly to him, “Gwyneth has been invited to go riding tomorrow with Raven Sproule and his sister to visit Lady Eglantyne.”

“Really.” Her father glanced at Gwyneth. His mustache twitched at the expression on her face.

“He seems quite interested in our Gwyneth.”

“Really,” he said again, still gazing at his daughter. She widened her eyes abruptly, crossed them. He looked away, clearing his throat noisily.

“Well,” he said only, “there is another tale in the making. Let’s see what she does with this one.”