II.

Uncle Dan truly was the best man in the world. His being a brave seaman was the least of it. There must have been times in which supporting his brothers' children, his partner's widow and for a while his unmarried sister bore down on him, and yet Emily had never heard him complain. That he'd taken Mrs. Gummidge in, whom scarcely anyone in Yarmouth liked due to her endless nagging and grating self pity, and never was other than courteous or kind to her, was, Emily suspected, less out of duty to his dead partner, whose widow she was, and more out of awareness that for a widow without money, relations or friends, there was nothing but the workhouse, but it was the way he always treated her as an honored companion instead of a burden, and ensured everyone else in his household treated her the same way, that made it heroic.

And yet there were people to whom Uncle Dan was not kind, and whom he outright condemned. "There are good women, and they're as angels," he said to Emily after Martha's shame became public in Yarmouth. "And then there's them bad women. That girl is now one of them, more's the pity, but don't you let her near you again, Em'ly. She's not fit."

"A bad woman," Mrs. Gummidge had told Emily years earlier, since Uncle Dan had left those kind of explanations to her when Emily, after starting to bleed, required them, "a bad woman is one who is unchaste."

"But what does it mean, Mrs. Gummidge?"

After much hemming and hawing, Mrs. Gummidge had provided the necessary details. "But don't you worry your pretty little head, Em'ly", she'd added. "Don't you talk to anyone but your uncle and cousin and stay with them and me, and do as you're told, and the angels will look over you."

Aunt Clara having been in service meant she had a slightly different idea of what a good and a bad woman was and more practical suggestions. "The worst woman I've known", she'd declared, "she was chaste, but cruel as a bird who'll peck out your eyes, that Jane Murdstone was. There are worse things a woman can be than free with her favours. Now I was lucky," she had said to Emily, "because the old Mr. Copperfield, he was good as gold, and Mr. Murdstone had the devil inside but not in that way. But I've seen households where it's different, and when there's a Master putting his hands on you there isn't much a girl can do. So don't you go into service, Emily, you stay here in Yarmouth. None of them shop owners will put a hand on you if they've got Dan and Ham to answer to, that's for certain."

But Aunt Clara, while ready to shelter Martha for a night, would not have provided her with more than that, either. "What's done cannot be undone," she'd sighed, when Emily, wanting to help Martha, had confided in her. "Best she leaves, goes to where not a soul knows her, poor thing."

So Emily was in no doubt whatsoever as to the fate which awaited her the moment she agreed to do more than smile at a man like James Steerforth, who was so utterly unlike anyone she'd ever known that he might as well have been a prince out of her childhood stories. Not that she considered him one. Or if he was a prince, he was one of the mer people, a selkie to beguile and steal away.

When he asked her what she thought of him, she told him this, and it turned out he did not know of the selkie, or at least pretended not to, so she gave him a story as well as a truth. "Ah, so you're a storyteller like our mutual friend," he said, amused, when she had ended. "I might have known. You are a lot alike, Miss Emily."

She thought of how, even as a child seeking shells on the beach with him, she'd been aware there was a difference between young Mas'r Davy and herself; every word out of his mouth had pronounced him other, a gentleman, and in fact Aunt Clara had been careful not to let him imitate their way of speaking, as if it would taint him once he returned with her to where she was in service.

"We're not," she replied. "Sir. For if we were, I'd be a lady, and you would not talk with me the way you do."

At this point, it wasn't that he had said anything improper, or that could not have been heard by her entire family. But that was because they heard it differently than Emily did, and they did not see what she saw, looking at James Steerforth.

"No," Steerforth said, his crooked smile fading, "no, that's not true. I talk with him the very same way, for that's my manner."

Which could be the truth for all she knew, for she hadn't seen Steerforth talk to any ladies, and there was no reason, was there, to believe that she ever would.

"Well, that marks you a true mer man then," Emily answered. "They don't make a difference between princes and beggars, and they come to fishermen and their wives most of all."

Some years ago, after Emily had begun to bleed but before her body had finished reshaping itself, and was tricking her at every turn, she and Martha had each shed their seven tears into the sea that were supposed to call a selkie lover. They'd heard the story from the herring girls who came from Scotland to Greater Yarmouth each season, and it had caught their fancy. It was still more done as child's play than as anything else, and yet they had waited a good while, until deciding to laugh about it and leave.

"Will he not marry you?" she'd asked Martha about the man who'd brought Martha to public ruin, a man who had not come from the sea but was one of Yarmouth's own and a shop owner to boot, and Martha, worn out by crying into dry despair, had shook her head.

"He said no man would put a hat on he'd shat in."

"But in the story you just told me it was the fisherman who kept a selkie wife, and stole her from the sea, not the other way around", Steerforth said. "Are the stories different if the selkie is a man? Now that I would consider slander. Since you've designed the tile of mer man for me, I do declare we men are just as much in need of getting caught as we are of doing the catching."

The laughter had returned to his voice, and yet he had a way of making her think he wasn't laughing at her but with her.

"None of the selkies, men or women, ever stay," Emily said. "When will you return to Oxford, Sir?"

For David Copperfield on the night of her engagement had told them Steerforth was at the university there, "getting bored in the highest tradition", Steerforth had added, and Emily, who had never owned more than two books in her life, one of them her late parents' bible, yet had used every chance to read the novels provided by the circulating library, had not understood how anyone living among freely available books, which a gentleman at a university surely did, would ever be bored.

"If I'm a mer man, then yours is the fishing net which caught me," he replied. "So that is for you to decide."

And there it was, the twist that turned a jest into courting, though courting, between the likes of him and the likes of her, could never be more than a jest. Unless she had read him true, the night she met him and saw destruction beckoning.

She thought she had.

She also thought he did not yet know, and that was good, for she didn't know for sure, either, did not know whether she would have the strength. Uncle Dan would forgive her anything, anything but this, and so if she followed this path, no matter what happened, she would not see his dear face again, nor Ham's, or Mrs. Gummidge's, or Aunt Clara's. At least they would not grieve for her the way they would if she had died, as she had planned.

Steerforth remained at Yarmouth under the pretense of wanting to learn how to sail, and he bought an old boat to be changed into a yacht for him, employing Uncle Dan and Ham and a great many others, and so the town thought well of him, for it had been a hard year for fishing. That he had the money to do this, and the leisure, made them consider him lazy if he'd been one of their own, but princely, as he was not. It was not all pretense, either; he did learn how to sail, and took much satisfaction from it.

As a child, Emily had always feared the sea would claim Uncle Dan and Ham, as it had her father. Yet she did not fear for James Steerforth, nor any longer for herself. The sea would not take them, not now at any rate. It knew that returning them safely on land would cause the greater damage.

At first it seemed that Steerforth only wished to play at courtship, as he was playing at being a seafaring man. Emily, who had play-acted for much of her childhood, recognized this, but it wasn't what she wanted now. You could not play at falling, then, mid air, declare that you would rather have remained on the ground. You either fell, or you never put a foot wrong to begin with. He might think it was kinder to court her in secret, and then be done with her in secret, so that they both could return to who they had been before, with no one but them the wiser. But that was because he truly was a selkie, shedding skin and turning himself into someone else as easily as he breathed. He had not understood she'd told him that first story as a warning, too. The fisherman kept the selkie woman's seal skin, and she could not return to who she had been.

When Emily told him she'd come with him if he took her away, that was when Steerforth understood, she saw it in his eyes. Not a secret; not something to be left behind, as the yacht which he'd given her name would be. She did not believe it would be much for him that her family and friends would curse him, for if he had felt any true regard for them, he would never have remained in Yarmouth. No, but he did care what his friend thought of him, that she knew.

"Why do you call him 'Daisy'?" Emily had asked, for it was this, not, as she had first assumed, the old childish form of "Davy" that Steerforth called the first boy she'd ever kissed, and who'd kissed her, when kissing had been nothing more than make believe given touch.

"Because he's that innocent," Steerforth had replied, "and must remain so, or the world will be a poorer place."

For all that he had teased her about feeling jealous of his ownership of David Copperfield's heart when she'd first met him, he'd spoken truth as well, she'd realized this by now. That look of glowing admiration, of adoration, even, which David had given him whenever Emily had seen them in each other's company would no longer be Steerforth's to claim. For gentleman or not, David truly loved her family, this Emily did not doubt, and he would not consider any man who broke their hearts a hero, or a friend. He'd despise such a man.

Steerforth stretched out an arm and brushed his fingers against her cheek then. Despite his recent sailing, they were still lacking in all that was rough; these were the hands of someone who had others work for him for all his life. And yet there was nothing soft about this touch, or the way he looked at her, recognizing in her what she'd seen in him from the start: a beckoning towards the maelstrom.

„Would you be happy, if I left and you never saw me again?"

„I would be dead within the week," she said, which was true, though not quite in the way he took it, as one more tribute to the power he had to make people love him. She did not know whether to call what she felt for him love, though it was strong and powerful. But she was more certain now than ever that she did not want to be Ham's wife, that she couldn't, wouldn't bear it, and that she wanted to have this man, who was beautiful in ways a man should not be and alien to all she'd been taught to trust. The thought of Ham's hands on her, come the wedding day, that thought now made her sick, while Steerforth's casual touch just now made her tremble, and not in fear.

„Well then," he said. „You shall live, and we will leave together. And let hell follow."