Page 1 of A Magic Deep & Drowning

Part One

Land

Chapter One

The whale’s great eye stared back at Clara, black and glassy as the depths of the ocean. If she had cared to reach out and place her hand above it, she would have found that the eye was bigger than her palm, but she did not care to. Scars and unhealed wounds crisscrossed the slate-colored flesh, speaking to encounters with whalers, the last of which must have been fatal and driven it to the shore.

“Bad omen for a whale to beach,” her maid, Helma, said coming up behind her, stirring Clara from her thoughts. “’Tisn’t a good augur for the future.” The older woman crossed herself.

Clara tore her gaze away from the dead whale. “You say that when there are more than three magpies on a branch,” she countered lightly. “You say that when the wind is in the east. Not everything is a bad omen.” All the same, her heart twisted at the sight of the once great sea creature rendered prostrate on the land.

With a grunt, Helma turned away, muttering to herself. “Three magpies on a branch means a funeral, everyone knows that.”

Clara shrugged and breathed in a great breath of fresh, salty air. How good it felt to be out of the confines of the estate and on something of an adventure. Endless blue skies stretched above her, the steady lap of the sea making her feelsmall, yet whole. The beach teemed with people, all drawn by the spectacle of so great a beast washed ashore. Some of the bolder among them clambered up on its back, as if it were a conquered dragon from the days of yore, or a mountain to be claimed in the name of the Dutch Republic. They were as sharp-eyed and curious as the gulls wheeling above, all keen for some pickings from the creature, whether it was a piece of rubbery flesh to take home, or simply the story of having seen it. A little distance away from the activity, near the dunes, a painter had set up an easel and was taking his brush to canvas. Of course, Clara was no better than any of them, coming for her own selfish reasons.

A man in a broad-brimmed hat and rumpled coat saw her raising her handkerchief to her mouth and grinned. “Aye, ripe as a fishmonger’s wife, isn’t it? Was alive when it washed ashore, my brother came down to see it and said that it was weak, gasping for breath. The next day it was dead.” He took off his cap and scratched at his greasy hair. “Just think of it,” he said. “The air being like water is for us. Drowning in air.”

Clara wasn’t certain how whales breathed exactly, but it sounded true enough. “That’s awful!” The whale’s upside-down mouth gaped back at her like a slashed canvas. She shuddered. “The poor creature.”

The man shrugged. “Don’t be sorry on its account. Be sorry for the whalers who lost all their capital chasing it about, only to lose it. Had they finished the job on the water they would have been the ones enjoying the spoils.” He grinned. “As it is now, us folks on land can make a pretty piece of coin from the oil.” He waved his bucket at her, and she recoiled as its purpose became clear.

Wandering away, he whistled and swung the bucket. It had seemed like such a lark when Clara had heard that a whale had beached, but now seeing how wretched it was she wished she had not begged to make the journey by carriage with Helma.Men were cutting strips of its blubber with their knives, one even boasting that he’d have the eye. Another said that it was not the eye that was valuable, but its sex organ. “Grind it up into a powder, that’s what the Chinese do. Say it has the powers to make a man as virile as a bull, and gets a woman with child in the blink of an eye.” There was a ripple of derisive laughter at this, but more than a few of the men casually made their way to the other end, knives in hand with nervous excitement.

Clouds were gathering on the horizon, slowly rolling in toward the shore. As Clara watched the men with distaste, her neck prickled as if someone were scrutinizing her with the same level of interest with which she was watching the whale and its carrion pickers. Had her mother and father learned that she had absconded for the afternoon? Had they come to bring her back home? She looked about, but aside from the painter on the dune, there was no one that could be watching her from afar. She shivered.

“Come, Helma. I want to go home,” Clara said, turning abruptly. She had lied to her parents, telling them that Helma was taking her to church, and ever loyal, Helma had played along. Now as the hairs on the back of her neck lifted, she wished she hadn’t.

Helma’s shoulders sagged in relief. “Finally, a bit of sense from you,” she said. “It looks like rain and I promised your father we wouldn’t be but a couple of hours.”

“In that case, the whale surely was an omen,” she told her maid, “because we’ve already been three hours from home and Papa will not be pleased.”

Helma crossed herself again, muttering a prayer, or perhaps it was something a little more vulgar—Clara was never certain which. The cross was only one such superstition in the old woman’s arsenal; Clara often caught her tossing salt over her shoulder, touching a piece of wood with her righthand, or fumbling in her pocket for any number of questionable amulets.

The carriage which had borne them the nearly ten miles from her home in the fens was waiting obligingly just past the dunes, where the road was still hard-packed dirt. Helma climbed heavily in, Clara behind her. With a lingering sense of unease, Clara glanced one last time over her shoulder at the whale, the people gathered around it like carnivorous ants, and the stormy horizon beyond.

The carriage jostled and bumped over the pitted dirt roads the entire way back home, throwing Clara’s stomach into turmoil. If she were a little silver fish, she could have slid as quick as you please through the smooth water of the canal. Even with her head between her knees, the landscape that they passed was imprinted on her mind: fields, flat and mellow green, stretched out to an endless horizon, broken only by the occasional poplar tree. This was the sky’s domain, and it sat expansive and benevolent atop a world as flat as parchment.

Though Clara might make light of her father’s displeasure, she did not relish the prospect of explaining herself to him when they got back, nor learning of what he wanted to speak to her about that night. It wasn’t that Clara was frightened of him, not exactly. Clara’s mother, Katrina, might oversee the running of the household with a backbone made of iron, but even she deferred to her husband. Theodor van Wieren bent nature to his will, imparting the same rigid hierarchy to which those within his household adhered, to the plants and animals of the estate. The breeze was made to kindly beg permission before rustling through the carefully pruned branches of his beloved apple trees. Frogs dared not jump from the lily pads in the canal, lest they disrupt the glassy surface with their vulgar ripples. But a beached whale was hardly something which her father could control, and so Clara had all but leapt at thechance to go and see a thing simply for the sake of seeing it where it ought not to have been.

By the time they arrived back at the sprawling stone house, Helma was complaining of a stiff back and the sun was casting mellow shadows in the poplar trees. Not quite ready to resign herself to an evening of needlepoint and stern lectures from her father, Clara begged off going inside. “Tell Papa that we are back and that I’m going for a turnabout in the garden.”

Helma gave her a long look, but she was rubbing at her stiff back and Clara knew she would not deny her. “Oh, alright, only don’t get your new slippers any dirtier than they already got at the beach. And make sure you’re back in before dark or your mother will have my head.”

First Clara’s wet nurse, then her nursemaid, and now her companion, Helma had been a constant presence in Clara’s life, almost like a second mother. And one overbearing mother was quite enough for her. The woman never seemed to age either, and Clara guessed that she could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy years old.

“You worry too much, Helma.” But seeing Helma’s tight lips and tired eyes, Clara softened and promised that she would be back in soon. Clara was careful to keep to the manicured paths that traversed the grounds, only daring to stray when she was well out of sight of the small castle.

So long as it didn’t rain, most days Clara and Helma would go walking along the gravel paths that cut the great lawn into precise concentric circles and intersecting triangles. Her father had hired a mathematician to plot it out, and the man had claimed that it was the most mathematically pleasing design to both the eye and the mind. She would walk with hands clasped demurely at her waist so long as she was in view of the house, but as soon as she rounded the first rose bushes, she would let out a sigh of relief and run ahead of Helma. Behind her, Clara would hear Helma giving up with a great sigh, thenyelling out her evergreen warning of “Mind your shoes, and stay away from the water!” Then Helma would sit down heavily on one of the stone benches that lined the walkway where she would catch her breath and wait until Clara had expended her energy.

But there were only so many times one could take the same walk with one’s maid for company. There were only so many gravel paths and concentric circles that one could trod before one became inured to the charm of a garden, no matter how well plotted out it was. When she had exhausted the paths, Clara would dart a glance quickly over her shoulder, and then skirt over to the canal.

The placid canal shimmered, a tight little copse of trees forming a shady grove around it. A school of silver fish darted by, sending a shiver of remembrance down Clara’s spine.

Placing a polished shell she had found on the beach at the edge of the canal, Clara bowed her head. “Fenna,” she murmured to the water. It was a superstition, taught to her by Helma as a way to remember and honor the dead. Clara didn’t need shells or tokens to remember her long-lost friend though; she had the nightmares, and the sounds.

Clara was breathing deeply, savoring the green canopy and lazy water of the canal when she caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She froze, her neck prickling again as it had on the beach. “Is someone there?” she called. The only response was the burgeoning sigh of the breeze through the branches above. Then:drip drip drip.She did not wait for the third sound. Picking up her skirts, Clara hurried back inside, mindless of the mud.

Chapter Two

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