Adrift: A Little Mermaid Retelling

3: Agnes

Spring planting proceeded, each sunrise spilling its light over the field hands as they paced the straight-plowed furrows. I watched them of a morning from my window as I waited for my tutor, more often now than I had before. In the distance, I hoped to spy the boy I fancied my first real friend. Although I hardly ever went down to the fields myself, I could see him sometimes, following the stooped figure of his father.

If I had fancied I'd made a friend of him, though, I was mistaken. I had felt that we, being so close in age, could be playmates. But those were the foolish assumptions of a child in a childless land.

Young Daniel neglected to attend my lesson the day following his arrival. I thought him likely to be tired and yet abed, worn out from his long travels. But when the second and third day of lessons passed by with no sign of him, my curiosity mounted. I had, after all, done my very best to be exceedingly polite and well-behaved at our first meeting—something that did not come very naturally to me.

"Where is Daniel?" I asked one day as I sat down to my harp.

"Who, miss?" Master Leisher asked, thumbing through a few pages of sheet music.

"Daniel. The boy who came yesterday with his father to work in the field."

My tutor was an adventurous scholar, to be sure. After all, he had come with his books and his music to the New World. But his wild spirit extended no further than that—certainly not to the point that he could take the thought of a farm hand's boy at lessons in the manor house seriously.

"Ah, Miss Agnes," he said with an incredulous laugh. "Dear thing that you are. A field boy, sharing lessons with a lady! The very thought."

I was confused. "But why? Where does he take his lessons, then?"

"I'm sure I don't know—if he has any at all," he said. Master Leisher gestured at my harp.

I placed my hands on my harp strings, cupped in the proper posture. "But surely he must have them," I persisted. "You said yourself, Master, that 'a robust knowledge of history and literature are essential to good citizenship.'"

"Miss Agnes," Master Leisher said, unimpressed by my parroting of one of his dearest philosophies, "all a common body like that boy must do to be a good citizen is to work hard and obey his betters. It is for you and others of your station to make the true contribution to society."

As far as I was concerned, taking part in the monstrous thing Master Leisher called Society—always so, his inflection giving a kind of golden significance to the word—was not very interesting at all. It seemed a thing best kept in the home country—that is, far away.

Although I cannot remember clearly, I'm certain I told my tutor my opinion on the matter. It was the sort of thing I would have said. Still, I went away from that lesson with the knowledge that Daniel and I could not be bored together by lessons about endless lines of dead men, blotchy regions on maps, and what seemed even to me, a child, to be an irresponsible number of wars.

On the rare occasion that I glimpsed Daniel in the yard, feeding the chickens or sweeping the walk, he averted his eyes and deferentially called me "Miss Allore," more formal still than the house servants, who called me "Miss Agnes" instead.

I was beginning to grasp that there was a difference between Daniel and me, just as there was a difference between Father and his field hands. Disappointed that I did not have the friend I had hoped for in him, I reconciled myself to not thinking about the matter at all. Instead, I tried to focus on other things, especially my sole passion: my music.

It was common in those days for girls to receive an education in some of the arts, although few in the New World were afforded such a luxury. I, though, had Master Leisher. Under his watchful eye, I held an instrument from the moment I was able.

And I had such a talent, ever since that first day! It was the one thing I had in common with my mother, who had such an ethereal singing voice it would break a man's heart just to hear it. Even as a girl I knew that her voice, more still than her beauty, was the reason every man who looked upon her fell in love.

As I grew a little older and it became apparent to everyone—most painfully, to me—that my mother had given me life but no beauty of my own, it was my accomplishment for music on which I think my father pinned his hopes to secure a good marriage for me.

I had no such aspirations. When I sang and when I played, I thought of nothing else but the song. It is my opinion that music should be handled without motive, without reservation. It must be taken as it comes, dressed or undressed, kind or cruel, and felt—experienced—for the few moments it is there. Music is conceived, brought into the world and left to die with its last chords straining in the air; it is a moment, a breath, and we should make of it nothing more.

With music I was nothing but an astonished midwife, and it was not in me to labor at my passion with any purpose but to make something beautiful.