“It came up in the spring one day last month,” he said. “It died when the noon sun struck it, and I took it out. I’m afraid the other fish nibbled it a bit,” he said apologetically, “but you can still see.”
Lying in the center of the cloth was a small dried fish, much like those darting about in the spring, save that this one was pure white. It was also blind. On either side of the blunt head, there was a small swelling where an eye should have been, but that was all.
“Do you think it is a ghost fish?” the priest inquired. “I thought of it when you mentioned spirits. Still, I can’t think what sort of sin a fish might have committed, so as to be doomed to roam about like that—eyeless, I mean. I mean”—he closed one eye again in his favorite expression—“one doesn’t think of fish as having souls, and yet, if they don’t, how can they become ghosts?”
“I shouldn’t think they do, myself,” I assured him. I peered more closely at the fish, which Stern was examining with the rapt joy of the born naturalist. The skin was very thin, and so transparent that the shadows of the internal organs and the knobbly line of the vertebrae were clearly visible, yet it did have scales, tiny and translucent, though dulled by dryness.
“It is a blind cave fish,” Stern said, reverently stroking the tiny blunt head. “I have seen one only once before, in a pool deep inside a cave, at a place called Abandawe. And that one escaped before I could examine it closely. My dear fellow—” He turned to the priest, eyes shining with excitement. “Might I have it?”
“Of course, of course.” The priest fluttered his fingers in offhand generosity. “No use to me. Too small to eat, you know, even if Mamacita would think of cooking it, which she wouldn’t.” He glanced around the patio, kicking absently at a passing hen. “Where is Mamacita?”
“Here, cabrón, where else?” I hadn’t seen her come out of the house, but there she was, a dusty, sunbrowned little figure stooping to fill another bucket from the spring.
A faintly musty, unpleasant smell reached my nostrils, and they twitched uneasily. The priest must have noticed, for he said, “Oh, you mustn’t mind, it’s only poor Arabella.”
“Arabella?”
“Yes, in here.” The priest held aside a ragged curtain of burlap that screened off a corner of the patio, and I glanced behind it.
A ledge jutted out of the stone wall at waist-height. On it were ranged a long row of sheep’s skulls, pure white and polished.
“I can’t bear to part with them, you see.” Father Fogden gently stroked the heavy curve of a skull. “This was Beatriz—so sweet and gentle. She died in lambing, poor thing.” He indicated two much smaller skulls nearby, shaped and polished like the rest.
“Arabella is a—a sheep, too?” I asked. The smell was much stronger here, and I thought I really didn’t want to know where it was coming from at all.
“A member of my flock, yes, certainly.” The priest turned his oddly bright blue eyes on me, looking quite fierce. “She was murdered! Poor Arabella, such a gentle, trusting soul. How they can have had the wickedness to betray such innocence for the sake of carnal lusts!”
“Oh, dear,” I said, rather inadequately. “I’m terribly sorry to hear that. Ah—who murdered her?”
“The sailors, the wicked heathen! Killed her on the beach and roasted her poor body over a gridiron, just like St. Lawrence the Martyr.”
“Heavens,” I said.
The priest sighed, and his spindly beard appeared to droop with mourning.
“Yes, I must not forget the hope of Heaven. For if Our Lord observes the fall of every sparrow, He can scarcely have failed to observe Arabella. She must have weighed near on ninety pounds, at least, such a good grazer as she was, poor child.”
“Ah,” I said, trying to infuse the remark with a suitable sympathy and horror. It then occurred to me what the priest had said.
“Sailors?” I asked. “When did you say this—this sad occurrence took place?” It couldn’t be the Porpoise, I thought. Surely, Captain Leonard would not have thought me so important that he had risked bringing his ship in so close to the island, in order to pursue me? But my hands grew damp at the thought, and I wiped them unobtrusively on my robe.
“This morning,” Father Fogden replied, setting back the lamb’s skull he had picked up to fondle. “But,” he added, his manner brightening a bit, “I must say they’re making wonderful progress with her. It usually takes more than a week, and already you can quite see…”
He opened the cupboard again, revealing a large lump, covered with several layers of damp burlap. The smell was markedly stronger now, and a number of small brown beetles scuttled away from the light.
“Are those members of the Dermestidae you have there, Fogden?” Lawrence Stern, having tenderly committed the corpse of his cave fish to a jar of alcoholic spirits, had come to join us. He peered over my shoulder, sunburned features creased in interest.
Inside the cupboard, the white maggot larvae of dermestid beetles were hard at work, polishing the skull of Arabella the sheep. They had made a good start on the eyes. The manioc shifted heavily in my stomach.
“Is that what they are? I suppose so; dear voracious little fellows.” The priest swayed alarmingly, catching himself on the edge of the cupboard. As he did so, he finally noticed the old woman, standing glaring at him, a bucket in either hand.
“Oh, I had quite forgotten! You will be needing a change of clothing, will you not, Mrs. Fraser?”
I looked down at myself. The dress and shift I was wearing were ripped in so many places that they were barely decent, and so soaked and sodden with water and swamp-mud that I was scarcely tolerable, even in such undemanding company as that of Father Fogden and Lawrence Stern.
Father Fogden turned to the graven image. “Have we not something this unfortunate lady might wear, Mamacita?” he asked in Spanish. He seemed to hesitate, swaying gently. “Perhaps, one of the dresses in—”
The woman bared her teeth at me. “They are much too small for such a cow,” she said, also in Spanish. “Give her your old robe, if you must.” She cast an eye of scorn on my tangled hair and mud-streaked face. “Come,” she said in English, turning her back on me. “You wash.”
She led me to a smaller patio at the back of the house, where she provided me with two buckets of cold, fresh water, a worn linen towel, and a small pot of soft soap, smelling strongly of lye. Adding a shabby gray robe with a rope belt, she bared her teeth at me again and left, remarking genially in Spanish, “Wash away the blood on your hands, Christ-killing whore.”
I shut the patio gate after her with a considerable feeling of relief, stripped off my sticky, filthy clothes with even more relief, and made my toilet as well as might be managed with cold water and no comb.
Clad decently, if oddly, in Father Fogden’s extra robe, I combed out my wet hair with my fingers, contemplating my peculiar host. I wasn’t sure whether the priest’s excursions into oddness were some form of dementia, or only the side effects of long-term alcoholism and cannabis intoxication, but he seemed a gentle, kindly soul, in spite of it. His servant—if that’s what she was—was another question altogether.