Told on the water
Three of the merkind keep the stories of this coast between them. One writes down only what can be proved, one repeats what Cornwall has always said, and one makes things up and admits it.
Maren writes down only what can be checked: cargoes, crossings, the marks sailors steer by.
Fowey sits on a deep natural harbour, which is why ships far bigger than fishing boats have always been able to come in on the tide and lie safely in the river.
The hills behind St Austell hold some of the world's best china clay, and Fowey has long been the port it leaves from. The jetties upriver load ships that carry it abroad — it is a working cargo port, not only a pretty one.
The river is crossed at Bodinnick by a car ferry and at Polruan by a passenger ferry. Both are ordinary daily transport for the people who live on the other side, and both are far older than the engines now pushing them.
The red-and-white tower on Gribbin Head was built in the 1800s as a daymark: an unlit navigation mark, raised because this stretch of coast was mistaken in poor light for the safer entrance further east.
Cornish coves once lived on pilchards. A huer watched from the cliff for the dark stain of a shoal and shouted the boats out — the cry is remembered as 'hevva' — and the whole village turned out to help land and salt the catch.
Daphne du Maurier lived across the water at Bodinnick and later inland at Menabilly, and wrote books that the coast around Fowey is folded into.
Cordelia deals in stories Cornwall has told for centuries. She does not claim they happened. She claims they are still told, which is a different thing.
The story says a mermaid came up to the church at Zennor to hear a man sing, and took him back down with her. A bench end carved with a mermaid is still there, and it is old — older than the story anyone can date.
A magistrate said to have been called back from the dead to give evidence, and set impossible tasks for ever after: emptying Dozmary Pool with a limpet shell with a hole in it, spinning rope from sand at Gwenvor. When the wind howls, the old line is that it is Tregeagle.
Fishermen are said to have left a fish on the sand for the Bucca, the spirit of the sea, so that the next catch would come. It is the kind of bargain people make with weather they cannot argue with.
Villages lost to the sea are remembered all round this coast, and the telling is nearly always the same: on a quiet night you can hear the church bells ringing under the water.
Tamsyn invents, cheerfully. Everything here belongs to Foye, our imagined harbour town — none of it happened, and that is the point of it.
Foye's watchman kept a lantern burning from dusk to dawn so ships could find the harbour mouth. The town slept better knowing someone was awake, and nobody ever saw him eat.
When the pilchards came into Foye's cove the water turned bright enough to read by, and the lookout could see the shoal a mile off. The fish are long gone; the name stayed.
The Penruan ferryman rows across when he sees someone waiting, and whistles when he is ready to come back. The goat fare has not been asked for in some years.
The first map of Foye was drawn at Trevenna Hall, on a table that is still up there — because it was built in the room and will not come out of it.