Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [90]
“Lenia.”
She looked up into Margrethe’s face. Behind her, Agnes was holding her baby. Everyone else, other than a couple of servants, had left.
“It is a girl,” Agnes said, turning to Lenia and Margrethe.
Lenia looked from her baby to Margrethe and back again.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Margrethe said. “I don’t know how it is possible, but it is. I know it is.” Her eyes were full of tears. She was disheveled after what must have been hours of hovering over the birth table, but she was still every bit a princess in her purple gown, her long black hair piled elegantly on her head, a line of jewels running across it. “I am so sorry, for everything. I had no idea it was you. I’m sorry for everything that’s happened.”
Lenia nodded. She was too exhausted to think.
She reached up, mouthed “my baby,” hungry to touch her, and Margrethe smiled and turned to Agnes, who was washing the child in a small bath the servants had brought in.
Moments later, Margrethe was placing the child in Lenia’s arms.
It was so tiny, the size of a lobster.
The baby stared up at Lenia with bright blue eyes.
“She is watching you,” Margrethe said. “How strange.”
Lenia stared down, terrified she would hurt the child, so light and tiny she was barely there at all.
She checked her daughter over, looking for a fin or a tail. The baby’s skin was red and soft, and she had a thatch of white hair on her head, above her perfect, tiny face. She looked up at Lenia, out into the world, and she opened her rosebud mouth and let out a sharp cry.
“Your baby is perfect,” Agnes said, walking over. “You are very lucky.” She smiled, and it struck Lenia, right then, for certain: She knows.
But her baby was demanding her attention, twisting in her arms. The ferocity of the love that came over her then astonished Lenia. It eclipsed anything else she had ever felt. My child, she thought. Her human child, who could never survive under the water.
I am sorry I will not be able to care for you …
“Look at her!” Margrethe said.
The baby continued to stare up at Lenia, her skin glowing and sparkling, and then she kicked her tiny, perfect legs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Princess
MARGRETHE SAT AT LENIA’S SIDE, WATCHING HER hold her child. Both of them were sleeping now, the same perfect curving pout on each of their faces. The baby’s shock of hair was the color of the moon. A wet nurse waited quietly on a chair on the other side of Lenia, careful not to meet the eyes of the foreign princess who had inexplicably spent hours attending the birth of her rival’s child.
The room was dark but for a torch burning next to the mother and child.
Margrethe reached out and stroked the child’s soft forehead, ran her fingers across her long white lashes. She watched the baby’s glittering skin next to Lenia’s clear paleness, which seemed so out of place and strange now.
Margrethe had known that there was something familiar about the girl. Her pale hair, her blue eyes, her otherworldly beauty. But never had it occurred to her that the girl might actually be the mermaid until the day she’d seen her leaving Christopher’s room, her hair loose, the color of the moon, the faintest glow on her features. It might have been an illusion, the shimmer Margrethe thought she saw on her skin, but she had seen it. Before then she had not imagined that such a thing was even possible. How could it be? How had the mermaid been able to leave the water and come to the earth? It made no sense that the world could work that way. But then later, when she saw the second mermaid watching her from the water, all her doubts had evaporated.
“Why would you do this?” Margrethe whispered.
She knew that everyone would be looking for her, that she needed to prepare for the arrival of her father from the North, and the wedding that would follow. But all of that seemed less important now. Nothing in her life had been as beautiful as that instant when she looked down and saw the mermaid emerge from the sea.
She would give anything, she thought, to return to that moment.
There was a knock