Song of the Sea Maid by Rebecca Mascull Page A

gasps.
    ‘What a piece of work!’ says my tutor and we cannot help but dissolve into laughter as we watch them sport with the watermen and fly through the water with graceful celerity, upstream. We and others follow them for a time, but then it seems they tire and turn about, heading downstream away from London and, we hope, to the open sea.
    ‘Where do you think they are going?’ I ask.
    ‘To the Channel. They are not usually of fresh water. I have known of them in Scotland, Ireland too. But rare here, very rare. Peradventure they were lost.’
    ‘I hope they find their way.’
    As I watch their lithe forms fleet away from us, an erstwhile feeling surfaces in the pit of my stomach – an old associate of mine I did not know I was still acquainted with, not now I have my home, my benefactor and my new life. It is the yearning for travel, for discovery, to follow those creatures of the sea, to leave this soiled city behind and see new places. Perhaps my early life on the streets, my years following in an institution, without an object to call my own – excepting my brother’s note – is it any wonder I have a nomadic soul? Yet so does the Applebees’ son, still away with the army, not seen for years, and he had a stable loving home and escaped it for the rough comforts of a red coat. Maybe it is born inside us, this yearning to be footsore, and in others resides the overwhelming need for a bolt-hole. But now that I have a home, I cannot take it for granted. I do not wish it gone, only to wait for me while I go on my adventures and then come back to it, like a patient wife. I wish to see the world yet not as those with riches do, the Grand Tour of young gentlemen who are ferried from antiquity to supper and back again. It is another kind of travel I want, to move through it incognito as those porpoises – be a part of it, invisible within it – not as a young lady with all the restraints that creates. Not even as a man; but as a creature, at one with nature, at one with the air and the sea. But there is no woman I have heard of who ever achieved that.
    I settle in to my new abode and form an uneasy truce with Susan as regards my dress; she has found me stays without bones that they call jumps, usually worn by pregnant ladies and, now, female philosophers. And I will not wear the silly aprons, nor lappets that hang and get in the way or a bulky pad over my behind that impedes movement. I have one weakness only and that is for a blue-green lustring gown that I wear often, as its hue matches my mind’s image of the ocean I have never seen. I do make some effort to look smart and allow my new lady’s maid – Jane – to dress my hair neatly each day. She does coo and fuss about me, saying how my complexion is far too dark and not pale enough to be fashionable and how I must apply powder to whiten my face, which I steadfastly refuse. She also eulogises on how long and black my tresses are, and dark hair is favoured presently and if only I would allow her to dress it properly, in the new style – oh, what a fine head of hair it is! – and suchlike. But each day, I insist she pin it up beneath a neat cap, away from my face and away from experiments, and be done with it.
    I spend much of my time that first summer in Mr Woods’s garden. He has a small plot at the back and hires a gardener, Mr Dawes, and an apprentice, Paul, to keep it tidy. Planted in the earth and in pots and boxes are a variety of trees, plants and flowers that can stand the coal-smoke of the city , including in one corner a Judas tree and in another a London plane tree – most commonly seen on the streets, yet here is one of our very own; with its peeling bark that renews itself every few years, it resists the damaging effects of the sooty air that would suffocate weaker specimens. Flowers that thrive despite the bad air here include a range of lovely roses, as well as lilac, hollyand honeysuckle . I quiz our gardener almost daily about the