Page 17 of A Magic Deep & Drowning

The words stung Clara as hard as if her mother had slapped her across the face. Why was she still surprised by the depth of her mother’s cruelty?

Katrina stopped Atty, who was passing by, and snapped at her to fetch Theodor. “You are to be married to a good man in less than a month’s time,” she continued in icy tones. “Your father and I have been indulgent parents, and this is the thanks that you return to us.”

Clara cast her eyes down. It wasn’t that her mother spoke the truth—very much the opposite, for if they indulged her, it was in the way that a farmer indulged a cow by fattening it before the slaughter—but she felt the driving nail in her coffin that she was to be married in such a short time. Before it would have been enough to be mistress of her own household, the respected wife of a good, albeit it somewhat dull, man. But she had felt the winds of freedom beneath her newly feathered wings, and now she was being plucked and lamed.

“And you,” Katrina said, swinging her frigid gaze to Helma who was just coming in the door behind Clara. “I must be lax in my attentions indeed if I failed to see that the woman who nursed my own child, who cared for her and watched her throughout her girlhood, could now betray me in such a wretched fashion.” Her mother put a bony hand to her throat as if overcome by grief. But of course, her motherwas never overcome by any emotion, let alone one which she was so familiar with as anger. Somehow she was even able to squeeze a tear out of her dry eyes.

It had its intended effect. Helma looked as if Katrina had accused her of murder. “Oh, mistress, no! I never meant to betray—”

The tear vanished and Katrina held up her hand to silence Helma. “Pack your belongings and leave. You have until the end of the day. Inka will see that you receive your wages.”

Theodor strode in, wiping his handkerchief at his lips as if he had just been enjoying a glass of wine. He took one look at Helma’s tear-stained face and Clara’s downcast lashes and came to a stop. “What’s this?” he asked warily.

Without taking her eyes off Helma, Katrina answered, “Helma has been orchestrating rendezvouses between Clara and a young man. I am dismissing her from this house.”

“Oh, but mistress, you can’t! Please!” Clara watched as if far away as Helma sank to her knees, her hands clasped before Katrina in pleading supplication. Only hours ago she had cursed Helma as a ball and chain, but at the prospect of losing her, Clara realized just how alone she would be without her lifelong friend. Who would sit beside her as she muddled through her needlework? Who would comfort her after her mother struck her? Losing Maurits had been a blow, was she to lose the only other person in the world who cared a fig for her too?

Finally, Clara found her tongue just as her father was about to speak. “Don’t blame Helma. It was all my idea and she never wanted to go along with it. I told her we were going shopping. Mama, please, it is all my fault.”

“I agree—it is all your fault,” Katrina cut in. “You are a spiteful, wicked girl. Which is all the more reason you need a competent and godly chaperone to keep you out of trouble.Helma has proved herself to be incapable of this. As such, you will not leave this house again.”

“But I’m to be married in a month! You can’t think to keep me prisoner!” Then, glancing at Helma who was indignantly struggling up from her knees, added, “Besides, Helma will be coming with me when I marry.”

“What you do as mistress of your own house is your business,” her mother said with a sniff of conceit. “But bear this in mind, your new husband will expect complete obedience from you. I will not inform poor Mr. Edema of your conduct, as I want you out of this house and married. But nor will I protect you any more than you deserve—servants talk, gossip spreads, and it may reach him all the same.”

Coldness spread down Clara’s neck. “You would see me fail in my marriage?” she whispered.

Her mother scowled. “Of course not. I would see you humble and obedient. Neither of which you ever were while you lived here.”

Helma, who had been crying piteously to herself, looked up hopefully at this. “Mistress, please, I will watch her like a hawk. Like my own babe, she is. I nursed her from my own teat. Both her and—”

Whatever she was about to say was lost as color rose to Katrina’s gaunt cheeks. “Collect your things,” she hissed between gritted teeth. “Now!”

The last word reverberated off the tile floor and sucked the air right out of the hall. Even Theodor looked shaken.

But Helma didn’t move. She was biting her lower lip, looking at Clara as if battling with herself.

“Well? Do you want me to call Piet and have you thrown out with only the clothes on your back?”

Helma flinched at Katrina’s tone but otherwise ignored her words. “Clara,” Helma said, speaking quickly, “there’s something you ought to know. When you were a baby—”

Red in the face, teeth clenched to shattering, Katrina swept over and before Helma could utter another word, slapped her clean across the face.

Clara let out a yelp as if the blow had hit her. Helma took a stumbling step backward. “Get out! Get out!” Katrina shrieked, Theodor at her elbow, trying in vain to gain control of the situation. Helma stood there for a moment, dazed and tentatively touching her face, and then turned and fled upstairs to pack her belongings.

Spinning to face her mother, Clara fisted her hands into tight balls at her side. “How could you? Helma did nothing wrong!”

“How dare you speak to your mother in such a fashion,” her father interjected, all ice and disapproval.

They hated her. Clara could see it in her parents’ eyes, feel it in the bite of their words. The realization had been simmering for years, but it still left her cold. “Why?” she asked “Why do you always treat me thus? I may have been headstrong as a child, but I always was loving. Yet you treat me as if the very sight of me sickens you.”

Katrina’s color was slowly returning to her face, but she still stood there breathing hard through her nose, the lace collar of her dress rising and falling in great heaves. “How little you understand. Go to your bedchamber and meditate on just what it means to honor one’s parents.”

Upstairs it was quiet. Clara poked her head into Helma’s antechamber, but it was empty. The little trunk at the end of Helma’s bed was gone, and the cross that hung on the wall had been removed, leaving a t-shaped stain on the wall where the sun had shone around it for nearly twenty years.

Leaning against the door frame, Clara closed her eyes and let out a long sigh. Helma had once told her a story about a maiden, who when she touched things, turned them to gold.Clara seemed to have the opposite ability; everything she touched crumbled and turned to dirt. Besides Maurits, she didn’t have another soul who she considered a friend. And Helma had been so much more than just a nurse, a companion. She had been a constant in her life, a mother sometimes and a confidante. How she missed Fenna. Clara flung herself down on her bed, fully clothed on top of the counterpane, tears freely flowing.

And now she would have neither. It was better that they were all gone from her now, for she could no longer harm them with her rotten touch. She would dutifully go off to her new life with the kind and eager Hendrik, never to see Maurits again, or Helma. She made a little noise of self-reproach amidst her tears. Even now she could not help being selfish. She was only sorry because she had lost them, not because of her reckless behavior.

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