“The folk in these parts live by fishing,” he said. “A youngster learns how to net a catch, or fillet a cod, before he’s half grown. But there was one lad who had no wish to follow that calling. All he would do, day in and day out, was sit on the rocks by the headland playing his whistle. Dances, airs, strange tunes of his own making. His father despaired of him. His mother said he’d be the shame of them, that he couldn’t turn his hand to a good day’s work in the boats. But Toby, for that was his name, just stared out to sea, and played his tunes, and in time folk came to listen with awe, for his music echoed the joys and longings of their own hearts.”

I sat stunned. I had not believed buttoned-up Hugh of Harrowfield had such words in him.

“The lad became a young man. Sometimes they’d ask him to play at a wedding, and he’d come reluctantly, and go as soon as he could. And then came the strange part of the story. Strange, but true, they say, for a man who was mending nets saw it with his own eyes. There was Toby, at dusk on a summer’s day, alone on the dark rocks with the notes of the whistle hanging in the air around him. And there beside him, suddenly, was a lovely young woman with skin pale as moonlight and long dark hair like tangled weed that flowed down to conceal her nakedness; and liquid eyes with a look of the wide ocean in them. She came up out of the water, and for a moment the man thought he saw the flash of a silvery tail, the shimmer of scales in the last rays of the setting sun; but when he looked again, she was sitting demurely on the rocks, listening entranced to the music, and she seemed a woman like any other, save that she was more comely, and wilder, than any lass from those parts.”

Red bent down, a strand of seaweed held carefully in his large hands. He laid it on the mermaid’s neck.

“Toby took her back home with him, and his mother, frowning, found her a gown to cover herself, and his father was torn between admiration and foreboding when Toby declared that he would wed her the very next day. But his grandmother said, you’ll not keep her long. It’s always the same with the sea folk. You think they’re yours, and then one day they hear the call of the waves, and they’re gone.

“The two of them moved away from the sea, all the way to Elvington, where Toby eked out a living playing at fairs and gatherings. The sea woman kept his house neat and slept in his bed, and in time she bore him two small daughters with dark fronded hair and faraway eyes. And folk hesitated to walk by their cottage at dusk, for sometimes you’d hear the sound of the whistle, lilting high, and other times you’d hear the voice of the wife keening a lament that made your hair stand on end, there was such longing in it.