On the high left bank of the Elbe, near where the painter Robert Sterl built his atelier and refugium, was another refugium: Saint Ursula’s. The nuns there had much to do with their sisters at the other Saint Ursula’s, which was on the Baltic coast.
Sister Aurelia at the Elbe Saint Ursula’s heard the soft tattoo drummed by little Friedrich against his mother’s back, even though the boy and Constantia von Cosel were five kilometers away up on the rock mountain.
Sister Augusta at the Baltic Saint Ursula’s deciphered Sister Aurelia’s epistle, that began as it usually did with “Grace and peace to you,” and she shook her head in perplexion, concern, and compassion. She had the meer-maids to worry over, and now this Constantia von Cosel and her boy.
When Wilhelmina Wang had played her zither on the deck of the Lord of the Seven Seas, she had awoken the denizens of the deep.
Sister Augusta was to meet the little meer-maid at the Mövenstone, that giant boulder the Möwes had hurled into the sea in legendary times. She hoped the teenager would show up. Sister Augusta was an old woman, and she recalled another girl of the sea she had tried to counsel once upon a time: Undine.
The meer-folk live for three hundred years, but as everyone knows, without souls. Unless they were to marry a Son of Adam or Daughter of Eve. Though it seemed to Sister Augusta, sacrilegious as the thought was, that possessing a soul didn’t seem to have much salutatory or even noticeable effect on one’s behavior.
Though Undine had wanted one. And that young Captain Hering had wanted very much to give it to her, and more. And Sister Augusta’s counsel fell on merry teenage ears. She remembered the beautiful Undine, seaweed in her hair, laughing song on her lips. All the happiness and hope, all the joy and great expectation of young love and marriage, even, especially when across a divide, one as deep as meer-folk and man, one as strange as sea and land, are no guarantee against the years of common living. Of the friction and misunderstanding, of the estrangement and restlessness, of the cooling of passions and waning of infatuation. And she was worried anew about the little meer-maid she was about to meet this evening at the Mövenstone, who did not even have mutual passion on her side, to start. Whose longing was unmet, whose pursuit only led, and could only lead, to rejection. Sister Augusta didn’t want the fifteen year old coral heart to break, as hers was broken so long ago.
The evening waves were crashing against the Mövenstone, and a flash of tail, a flip of fin, the glint of silver of the deep, and the little meer-maid kept her word. She was at the stone.
“Do not give up your voice, do not accept walking on a knife’s edge, to be near the prince. Do not make the bargain with the sea witch, to pursue a boy you do not really know. He may be beautiful at seventeen, but you are, too. Though you do not see it, others do. And if you could see the kindness, the steadfastness in them, you could have happiness ongoing.”
But the little meer-maid was in no mind to heed her words. As Sister Augusta knew she wouldn’t. She didn’t either, at her age, or even later. It is the fate of Daughters of Eve and Sons of Adam, to learn only from experience, not from words of warning.
“If you must, then at least take the stone-knife your sisters will offer you when all have gone wrong. The stone-knife they will trade their beautiful long hair for with the sea witch. The stone-knife Jadis sacrificed Aslan so long ago on the Stone Table with.”
But the little meer-maid shuddered at the impossibility, and disappeared under the wave with the heart-tugging arrogance of youth.