A Study in Drowning(13)
Just then, all of it seemed preferable to staying in Hiraeth. But she could do nothing about it until the sun rose.
She opened her trunk and changed into her nightgown, cringing at the feel of the icy stone floor against her bare feet. She opened up her other pill bottle and swallowed her sleeping pill without water, feeling too demoralized to even try the taps. She lit the candle on the bedside table, and extinguished the oil lamps.
Effy was about to crawl under the velvet duvet when a terrible fear plucked at her. She thought again of the creature in the road. It had not been a deer, but it had been nothing human, either; she knew that much. And it had not been imagined. She’d taken her pink pill. Wetherell had seen it, too. Even the doctor, with his medical tomes and his glass bottles, could not have explained it.
Anything could come bursting in, anything. Effy snatched up the candle and walked toward the door, her breath coming in short, cold spurts.
There was no lock, but the door was extraordinarily heavy and bolstered with metal. Iron. Effy ran her finger over the brace, and no rust flaked away under her touch. Everything else in the cottage was ancient, but the iron was new.
As Effy returned, haltingly, to the four-poster, a phrase floated up in her mind. I waited for the Fairy King in our marriage bed, but he didn’t know I was wearing a girdle of iron. Angharad’s words were so familiar, they were like the voice of an old friend. Few things could truly guard against the Fair Folk, but iron was one of them.
Effy knelt over her trunk and took out her copy of Angharad, flipping to the page where she’d underlined that passage in black pen. This was Myrddin protecting her, giving her a sign. Keeping her safe.
She tucked the book under the pillows and pulled the duvet up to her chin. The dark was heavy and still. It was utterly silent, save for the faint sound of water dripping. Wherever the water was, it sounded close.
She was sure she would never be able to fall asleep in this clammy, dense silence, but the sleeping pill did its work. Effy slipped quietly under, the memory of Angharad’s words something close to a lullaby.
Four
We must discuss, then, the relationship between women and water. When men fall into the sea, they drown. When women meet the water, they transform. It becomes vital to ask: is this a metamorphosis, or a homecoming?
From A Meditation on Water and Femininity in the Works of Emrys Myrddin by Dr. Cedric Gosse, 211 AD
Effy woke the next morning to the sound of iron rasping against stone. The side of her face was wet and strands of damp hair stuck to her forehead. She wiped it dry with the edge of the green duvet. When she looked up, she saw a bit of the ceiling was soaked through—the sound she’d heard last night but couldn’t locate. The nasty, stale water must have been dripping on her for hours while she slept.
She was just sitting up in bed, gagging, when light cleaved through the open door. Her whole body tensed, half expecting to see wet black hair, a yellow curve of bone. But it was just a boy standing on the threshold, his dark brown hair wind tossed and untidy, though not remotely wet.
Decidedly not the Fairy King, but an intruder nonetheless.
“Hey!” She gasped, yanking the covers up to her throat. “What are you doing here?”
He didn’t even have the decency to look scandalized. He just backed up halfway out of the doorway, turning away from her with his hand still on the knob, and said, “Wetherell sent me to make sure you were up.”
Already Wetherell appeared to have very little confidence in her. Effy swallowed, still holding the duvet to her chin, squinting at the boy, who stared determinedly outside. He wore thin-framed round glasses, slightly misted by the dewy morning air.
“Well?” Effy demanded, scowling. “I’m not going to change with you in here.”
That, at last, appeared to offend him. His face turned pink, and without another word, he stepped outside and shut the door after him, more firmly than seemed necessary.
Still glowering, Effy got up and pawed through her trunk. Even her clothes felt somehow damp. She put on a pair of woolen trousers, a black turtleneck, and the thickest socks she owned. She tied her hair back with its ribbon. There was no mirror in the guesthouse, so she would have to hope her face wasn’t too puffy and her eyes weren’t too red. So far, she was zero for two on first impressions.
She shrugged on her coat and pushed through the door. The boy—university age, surely not much older than she—was leaning against the side of the cottage, a small leather-bound notebook in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. He had a face that seemed both soft and angular at once, his glasses perched on a narrow, delicate nose.
If Effy had been in a more charitable mood, she would have called him handsome.
When he saw her, he put his cigarettes back into his pocket. He was still flushing a little bit, and resolutely made no eye contact. “Let’s go.”
Effy nodded, but his rudeness turned her stomach sour. The morning light, even through the trees, was bright enough to make her head throb behind her temples. Ungenerously, she shot back, “You aren’t even going to ask my name?”
“I know your name. You haven’t asked mine.”
He was wearing a blue coat, flapping open at the front, that seemed, to her, too thin for the weather, and a white button-down shirt under it. His boots showed some scuffing. All of it made Effy think he’d been at Hiraeth for some time now. But he was not a Southerner; she could tell. His complexion was not quite pale enough, and he picked his way through the forest with a hedging delicacy that bordered on distaste.