Page 3 of A Magic Deep & Drowning

Interstitial

The widde juvven are the souls of women who were wronged by their men in life, and now seek their revenge upon the guileless living. They make their wretched homes in the wet, forgotten places, such as peat bogs, swamps, and even grave mounds. It is said that because of their broken hearts and searching for their absent lovers, that they have become skilled in finding lost things.

Beware the columns of mist that arise from these places and move in groups of three, for certainly it is the widde juvven, and woe to the soul who finds themselves alone on a dark road with mist hovering behind them. But if you are clever and brave, you might strike a bargain, and the widde juvven will use their skills of detection to help you find that which you have lost.

Chapter Three

The day after learning of her impending marriage, Clara flung herself out of bed at the first light of dawn. She had hardly slept, shapeless nightmares haunting the little sleep she’d had, the sounds of Fenna’s running footsteps and the quietly sinister dripping of water. Would the nightmares stop once she was married and living in her husband’s house? There were a hundred reasons the wedding couldn’t come soon enough.

“If I’m going to run my own household, I’ll need to understand how the kitchen works and what goes into managing it,” she announced to her parents as they broke their fast. “I need to know if ingredients are going to waste, and what the cook is preparing.”

Her mother frowned at her from across the table. “There is no agreement yet, and you haven’t even met the man,” she said. “Baking bread is the last thing you ought to be thinking about. Dedicate yourself to your spinet lessons, and that tangle of thread you call embroidery. A man wants a wife who has mastered such feminine skills, not a scullery maid covered in flour.”

Her father tilted his head in consideration. “Nay, Katrina. Our daughter is right. We have coddled her in that she has not had to worry about such household minutiae. Any city woman of means would share equally in the running of ahousehold. Clara ought to learn how to bake bread, as well as how to oversee a kitchen and plan meals.”

“So you would have her toiling with sleeves rolled up like a fishmonger’s wife? Besides, do you think that Mr. Edema does not have his own cook already?”

“Naturally the man does not pluck his own fowl nor bake his own bread,” her father retorted coolly.

Pressing her lips into a tight line, her mother resumed spearing the herring on her plate with a silver fork. Despite the small victory, Clara felt a pang of sympathy for her mother; she knew all too well what it was like to be corrected by her father.

Clara picked at her own food. She had lived here her whole life, and never once had she considered what went into running the kitchen, other than to occasionally badger their cook, Inka, for a piece of fresh-baked ginger cake. A day spent in the kitchen was a far cry from a carriage ride to the shore to see a beached whale, but it might be diverting in its own way.

In the end Clara was granted her request, much to Helma’s dismay. “But you’ll have a cook in your new household!” her maid protested, echoing her mother’s sentiments. Perhaps she was still unsure about her role in Clara’s future, and was worried that allowing her young mistress to bake bread was the beginning of a slippery slope that would lead to the redundancy of Helma’s own position. “Any man as respectable as Mr. Edema would never ask his wife to bake him a loaf of bread with her own hands.”

Clara was busy changing into one of her old dresses. She had always been tall for a girl—or so her mother was always lamenting—but over the last year she had grown as fast as a spring onion, leaving most of her hems hovering awkwardly about her ankles. Now she had a surplus of dresses fit only for chores and housework.

“That’s not the point,” Clara explained with thin patience. “I have to know how it’s made so that I can supervise.” She envisioned herself as perpetually busy in her role as wife and housekeeper, involved with every aspect of the household. She would oversee every domestic task from bread making to upholstery choices for the furniture to commissioning family portraits. She would be busy. She would be fulfilled. She would be in control.

The lumpy dough stared accusingly back at Clara. It didn’t look like Inka’s, all smooth and pillowy, rising cheerfully like the sun and peeking over the rim of the bowl. Lumps bubbled up from her soupy mess, and when Clara tried to punch down the air, her hand came away trailing sticky globs. She wiped her hands on her apron, leaving smears of watery flour. Her mother had been right; Clara did not make a picture of domestic bliss in the kitchen, but rather one of a sticky failure. Hendrik Edema would not be impressed. What if, on seeing Clara’s lack of household skills, he sent her back to her parents? What if there were a string of men after him, each deeming her to be unworthy? She could not fail in this.

Inka shook her head, biting back her criticism of her young mistress. “It’s not as firm as we’d like,” she said tactfully, “but hopefully the next loaf will be a success and rise.” It was an expensive endeavor to use so much flour in wasted experiments, and Clara knew that eventually she would have to produce an edible loaf, or even patient Inka would turn her out of the kitchen.

Clara fetched a new bowl. It was hard to be upset. Even if her bread wasn’t a success, there was something enjoyable in messing about the kitchen, and it made the days until she met Hendrik fly by faster. The more she thought about him, the more he grew in stature, the handsomer his features shaped themselves in her mind. It wasn’t that she expected him tobe young and dashing, rather those were simply the qualities which a gentleman who would save her from her parents and her stagnant life would undoubtedly possess. He would be taller than her father by a head, and be able to stare him down and force him to concede a point. Her husband would know just the right words and tone to use with her mother, rendering her speechless, but in such a polite and correct manner that Katrina would hardly be able to find fault with him for doing so.

Lost in her daydreams, Clara was just about to pour out another portion of flour and try again when the little maid Lysbeth came running in, red-faced and out of breath.

“Sorry to bother you, mistress,” she said with a hasty bob to Clara before turning to Inka, “but the chickens is got out! Atty and me was making ready to catch and pluck them and the big ones clean got out and escaped to the courtyard! One of the cats is making to pounce ’em and the old cock is running about and pecking anyone who so much as gets near!”

Inka threw her hands up over her head with an exasperated sigh. “Well if up isn’t down today, and down isn’t up. The fishmonger still hasn’t made his delivery and I’m supposed to somehow cook dinner out of thin air, and here you are telling me that what we did have has just run off. Well, don’t just stand there, child!” Without a backward glance at Clara, Inka ran out after the girl to the yard where the renegade chickens were making a bid for freedom.

After the last of their footsteps died away, the familiar silence of the house wrapped itself around the kitchen. That was always the way at Wierenslot; quiet to the point of suffocation. Clara pushed the bowl away from her and set to rubbing her hands clean of the sticky dough. The novelty of the experiment was losing its luster, and she wondered if there weren’t better uses for her time to prepare for matrimony. Perhaps she should focus on her embroidery after all, as her mother hadsuggested. Her last project was a tangle of threads and the tulips had come out looking like a pile of cow cud. Or perhaps the spinet was a more promising use of her time. At least with the spinet there was some noise, some life breathed into the walls of the dreary old house.

She was just scrubbing the last of the dough from between her fingers when a noise broke the silence. Inka was back. “Did you catch the runaway chickens then?” Clara asked without turning around.

“No chickens today, just the usual herrings and eels.”

Clara spun around at the deep voice. It wasn’t Inka. A little boat had pulled up outside the door that opened onto the canal, and a man was tying it up to the hook on the wall. Without looking at her, he bent down and hefted up two crates overflowing with limp silver fish.

Clara stared at his back, paralyzed. The man turned and made to pass off the crates, and when she didn’t step forward, he finally looked up. “Oh,” he said, mild surprise on his handsome, clean-shaven face. “You aren’t Inka.”

“I most certainly am not,” Clara retorted, drawing herself up. “And you aren’t the fishmonger’s boy. He always brings me an orange.”

The man raised his brows in mild amusement, the corner of his lips pulling up in a crooked smile. A corresponding wave of heat ran through Clara’s body. “Does your mistress know you’re hanging about the kitchen looking to pilfer sweets?”

Caught off guard, she was about to counter that she was her own mistress and could very well eat as many oranges as she liked, when her angry words died in her throat.

Aside from Fenna, Clara had never had playmates or friends growing up, and certainly none of the male variety. All the same, Clara knew what men looked like. There was Jan, the head of the stables, stocky and red-faced, with hands as big as cabbages. Fenna’s father, Piet the gardener, was likewise of astout build, his skin roughened by working the land. As for the men at church, they were so elaborately clad in silks and laces that it was difficult to think of them as anything other than a homogenous flock of black swans.

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