"she was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow" (page 57)
-- Cassandra Austen on her sister Jane
Through the Wood Beyond the World, beyond the Western Wild, passing under the murder of crows, climbing over the dolmen, clambering down the chalk cliffs, one can come to where the meer-maids bathe and sing.
And Wilhelmina Wang, a princess of Chang’an, and Emil Hering, a pension-keeper, had come to it.
Darkness is falling, the night draweth nigh. It is the prince of Kopenhagen’s wedding night.
From the evening the little meer-maid had washed up on the white marble steps of the palace, and the prince had asked her who she was, but she could not answer, to now, the cruel stone knife in hand, her sisters’ entreaties in her ear, her fate before her.
The silvery moon rises from behind the clouds and from the now empty Stone Table Wilhelmina and Emil could see the prince’s wedding ship in the distance. The meer-maids had gone, for all was in chaos under the sea, as the anticipation built over the return or the demise of their little meer-maid.
Wilhelmina was fearful of the meer-maids, having almost been drowned. She was glad they were gone, and the fate of the little meer-maid had nothing to do with her. But Emil, there was a pain in his eyes, and an aloofness that said he was not fully hers.
He turned to her and said, “I will save the little meer-maid. And then I will return to you.”
“What was she to him? When he was clearly not much to her?” Wilhelmina ached to say it, but bit her tongue, because she intuited it would not help her. There was a pride in Emil’s face that she dared not disturb, mixed with a desperate vulnerability. Most of the time Emil looked the shy, curious boy who could not afford to go to university at Greifswald that he was, but sometimes a kingly glamour comes over his otherwise delicately featured face, and his back rises straight as the chalk cliffs of Rügen, and Wilhelmina wonders what she has gotten herself into.
“I could not love thee, dear, so much, lov’d I not Honour more.” Emil didn’t have the words, so he reached for the lines from the cavalier poet Lovelace, to say what was in his heart.
Wilhelmina recognized the lines. “But you’re not going to war!” she had the urge to say, loudly and emphatically, but she didn’t.
He didn’t beseech her, except with his eyes, before diving off the Stone Table, into the cold Baltic waters he knew so well.
“Was she once a true love of his? An unrequited one, surely, but the unrequited ones are the ones that don’t let go for a lifetime.” The thoughts were a profusion inside her mind, as she had nothing else to do but cling and wait on the cold, spray dashed rock, looking out for meer-maids, on this cloudy night.