By Martin Pearson

A few months ago, as you may remember, I wrote of the death of Seth Washpool (related in the tale ‘The Next to Die’).
Seth was a quiet and unassuming man, but that did not prevent Philomena Bucket, the barmaid at The Squid and Teapot, admitting that she frequently called him by the wrong name, mixing him up with the larger-than-life blacksmith, foundry owner and father of seven sons, Seth Washwell, a man whom he resembled in no shape or form.
As far as anyone was aware, Seth Washpool had led a very chaste and uneventful life, but the truth is somewhat different.

Seth had been raised in the Pallid Rock Orphanage, and from an early age wanted nothing more than to be out of it. As far as he was concerned, the years could not pass quickly enough. He regarded the older children with envy, knowing that they would soon be free to live as they chose upon the island.
Throughout his early life his burning ambition had been to become that most revered of figures, a Night-Soil Man. In order to do this he would have to first become an apprentice, but, on the very eve of his leaving the orphanage for the bunkhouse at The House at Poo Corner, his plans changed completely. Like many a young man before and since, the direction of Seth’s life altered when Cupid chose to let fly an arrow in his direction.

There is a tradition in the orphanage that children of unknown parentage are given the surnames of notable islanders. As no one knew who Seth’s parents were, he had been awarded the name Washpool after the legendary Cosimo Washpool, the shipwrecked showman who established a fun fair on The Common. By the time Seth was born, the fun fair was long gone, but its memory, and that of the man who founded it, lived on in tales and legends.
In a similar way, Annabel Selsley, who had been left in a basket on the steps of the orphanage, was named after the brave and pious Sister Mary Selsley. Sister Mary was the nun who had risked life and limb to bring to Hopeless the baby who would one day become the most famous of all Night-Soil Men, Randall Middlestreet.

In the manner of children everywhere, the orphans of Hopeless tend to play happily together for the first nine or ten years of life, until they begin to notice some apparently irreconcilable differences in the interests of the sexes. After a few years of voluntary segregation comes adolescence and all that it conveys, and suddenly some of those previously irreconcilable interests appear to be trivial in the extreme.
This is exactly what happened to Annabel and Seth; they had lived beneath the same roof for fifteen years before they really acknowledged the existence of each other, and then they fell hopelessly in love.

For a year after leaving the orphanage the pair lived  happily together, making a home in an abandoned cottage in Tragedy Creek. They lived simply, even by Hopeless standards, but loved each other deeply, and that seemed to be enough.
Seth would often recite part of a half-remembered poem to Annabel. He had no idea who had written it, but the words seemed to sum up their relationship perfectly.
This is as much as Seth knew of the poem:

‘It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee –
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.’

It was certainly for the best that he only knew a brief portion of the poem, for neither would have been happy had they been aware of the denouement.

On Annabel’s sixteenth birthday the pair went down to the beach, as they usually did, to search for any useful bits of  flotsam or jetsam that may have been washed up on the tide.
Today there was the usual fare, consisting of bits of rope, driftwood, shells and discarded bottles. Disappointingly, there was nothing of any great value to be had and they made to leave. It was then that they heard a plaintive barking, where group of harbour seals were gathered, just a dozen or so yards from the shore. Seth smiled at the sight, then his smile faded to a look of horror as he watched Annabel wade into the ocean, discarding her clothes as she went.
 “Annabel, come back,” he shouted, pulling off his jacket . “You’ll drown.”
 Annabel turned, seemingly unfazed by the icy water lashing at her naked body. She pointed to the seals and called to him, but her voice was lost on the wind.
Although Seth made a valiant attempt to rescue his love, he was forced back time and time again by  the angry, incoming tide.
 “Annabel!” he cried helplessly, as he watched her disappear beneath the waves.
While he hoped that she would somehow manage to fight her way back to him, in his heart he knew that it was unlikely. If she did not freeze to death or drown, she would doubtless be taken by one of the monsters that lurked around the rocky shores of Hopeless, Maine.
 “Annabel, what madness possessed you to do this?” he sobbed.
 Then something caught his gaze. Emerging from the spot where the girl had disappeared was a young seal. For a few seconds she let her large, dark eyes rest upon Seth, before bobbing through the water towards the small group of seals patiently waiting for her.
It was then that he understood.
There had always been stories told on the island of the seal-people, the selkies, but he had never been inclined to believe in them. It was clear now that Annabel’s people had called her, and the lure of the sea was stronger than her love for Seth.
 “Goodbye, Annabel,” he murmured. “I will always love you. Come back to me one day, if you can.”
 But, despite his going down to the shore every day for the remainder of his life, Seth never saw Annabel again.

Seth was buried in the cold, stony ground of the churchyard. Afterwards, his friends bade him goodbye and retired to The Squid and Teapot to celebrate his life.
No one noticed the woman and her grown-up son who came from the shadows to lay sea-shells upon his grave. Nor did they see them leave, making their way over the rocks before slipping quietly beneath the waves of the dark Atlantic Ocean.

Author’s note:
For anyone not familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘Annabel Lee’, here it is in its entirety:

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,
 In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
 By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
 Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
 In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
 Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
  In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above
 Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Edgar Allan Poe.