Isobel had always found the challenges of living alone in the cottage were hard to bare, but as she had conquered them one after another the sense of independence and achievement had made her feel justified in choosing to live her life in the way she wanted rather than relying on others to make decisions on her behalf. But now she was struggling once more with tasks that had been simple routine only days ago and were transformed into a whole new range of obstacles in her determination to retain her autonomy.
Moving about from one room to another was made possible on account of a formidable bath-chair which her father had made use of towards the end of his life. Now Isobel had come to rely upon the sturdy wicker and steel contraption rather than facing the undignified alternative of crawling around on the floor. This would have been made almost impossible anyway thanks to the way in which she found her skirts got in the way of any such movements and rode up alarmingly at the same time to reveal the tail that had replaced her legs.
There was no question of her altering her clothing to compensate for the changes to her anatomy; it simply would not have been right or proper to go about wearing less than was seemly for a respectable woman. It was bad enough that she could in effect not wear undergarments of any kind and so Isobel came to rely upon the heavy nature of her skirts in order to both preserve her dignity and conceal the true nature of her lower half at the same time.
She had taken to making her bed on a couch in the sitting room, the narrow stairs still being simply too much of a mountain for her to tackle at that point in time, and spent most of her waking hours not far from it as well. There was a broad window set into one wall of the room that looked out over the cliffs towards the sea and in the evening she would sit before it, taking in the view and missing desperately the walks that were denied to her now.
The largest problem she faced from one day to the next was keeping her mind occupied and not allowing the contemplation of what had happened to her become the obsession that it threatened to turn into given half a chance.
Isobel read, sewed and wrote in her journal as often and for as long as she could, but there was no way to keep her thoughts from being pulled inexorably back to the events that had lead up to her being transformed from a reclusive woman into an equally reclusive mermaid. And while her memories of the events were strange enough, there was no news forthcoming that offered a clue as to how the whole thing had come about in the first place. Through the efforts of Parson Beagle, she learned that there had been no reports of ships lost in the storm that night and no wreckage washed ashore either. Beagle himself had even ventured into the grotto via the tunnel that she had discovered and returned to inform her that there was simply no sign of a shipwreck whatsoever amongst the rocks or in the water.
For her own part she found that she was adjusting, however slowly to her new form and was somewhat concerned by the way in which the initial sense of panic gripping her had subsided once she was back in a familiar environment and no longer under the scrutiny of those that she did not trust. In truth she felt little different as Isobel Wortley with a fish's tail than she had as the same woman with a pair of legs, even though she realised that she was in the purest sense of the word no longer properly a woman and rather a mermaid.
Her mind seemed to be the part of her least altered by the transformation and save for the way in which she was coming to regard her tail as a part of her anatomy, Isobel was sure that she was very much herself. She had by no means changed into the kind of mooning and desperate creature she saw in the character that she read of as she guiltily revisited the tale of the Little Mermaid for the first time since childhood. The idea of making such a fool of herself for the sake of some inbred prince made as little sense to her now as it had back then and she tossed the book aside in favour of something more adult as she tried to educate herself on the subject of her new species each night.
