A Study in Drowning(9)
But oh, he had made it seem like he did. “You’re so pretty,” he had said, and had sounded almost breathless. “It’s agony to watch you come in here every week, with your green eyes and your golden hair. When you leave, all I can think about is when you’ll come back, and how I’ll survive seeing something so beautiful I can’t touch.”
He had held her face in his hands with as much tenderness as a museum curator would handle his artifacts. And Effy had felt her heart skip and flutter the same way it did when she read her favorite bits of Angharad, those permanently dog-eared pages.
“Is this all you need from me?” Master Corbenic slashed his pen across the page and thrust the parchment back to her, then huffed a lower, shorter laugh. “You know what I think, Effy. You’re a bright girl. You have potential, if you keep your head out of the clouds. But a first-year student, taking on a project of this scale? It’s beyond you. I can’t fathom why the Myrddin estate would put out a call for students in the first place. And—I assume you’ve never been south of Laleston before?”
Effy shook her head.
“Well. The Bottom Hundred is the sort of place that young girls escape from, not go running off to. It would be easier to just stay here in Caer-Isel and try to get your grades up. If you need tutoring in Master Parri’s class, I can help you.”
“No,” Effy said quickly, pocketing the parchment. “That’s all right.”
Master Corbenic stared at her inscrutably, the late-afternoon sunlight pooling on the face of his wristwatch. “You’re the sort of girl who likes to make life more difficult for herself. If you weren’t so pretty, you would have failed out already.”
*
Effy left Master Corbenic’s office with her eyes stinging, but she refused to cry. On her way back through the college lobby, she saw the class roster, her last name crossed out and replaced with whore.
After checking to make sure no one was coming, Effy tore the paper down, balled it up, and carried it out of the building. Her heart was pounding. The Bottom Hundred is the sort of place that young girls escape from, not go running off to. Perhaps she was running away. Perhaps she was making life more difficult for herself. But she couldn’t bear it, the rush of floodwater in her ears, the haze that fell over her eyes, the nightmares smothered only by the annihilating power of her sleeping pills. She wasn’t a Southerner, but she knew what it was like to drown.
She walked past the library and out onto the pier. She stood there, leaning over the railing, wind biting her cheeks, and then she threw the crumpled paper into the ice-choked waters of Lake Bala.
Three
What is a mermaid but a woman half-drowned,
What a selkie but an unwilling wife,
What a tale but a sea-net, snatching up both
From the gentle tumult of dark waves?
From “Elegy for a Siren,” collected in The Poetical Works of Emrys Myrddin, 196–208 AD
Effy tucked her copy of Angharad into her purse. Her trunk was packed full of trousers and her new turtleneck sweaters and warm woolen socks. Rhia went with her to the train station.
“Are you sure I can’t convince you not to do this?” Rhia asked.
Effy shook her head. Passengers milled past them in blurs of gray and tawny. Rhia was generous and open-minded and clever, and kind enough to never mention the rumors about Effy and Master Corbenic.
But she didn’t know about the pink pills, the ones Effy kept at her side always, in case the edges of things started to blur. She didn’t know about the Fairy King and had never read a single page of Angharad. She didn’t understand what Myrddin meant to Effy, and she didn’t understand what Effy was escaping from. Rhia was a Southerner—but she didn’t know what it was like to drown.
A woman in a blue cloche shoved by and stepped on Effy’s foot. “I’ll miss you. Tell Maisie she can have my room.”
“I will.” Rhia chewed her lip, then managed one of her incandescently bright smiles as the train sang like a teakettle behind them. “Be safe. Be smart. Be sweet.”
“All three? That’s a lot to ask.”
“I’ll settle for just two, then. Your pick,” Rhia said. She reached around Effy to embrace her, and for a moment, with her eyes shut and her face pressed into Rhia’s fluffy brown hair, Effy felt calmer than the windless sea.
“That’s far more reasonable,” Effy mumbled. They broke apart as a mother trailing two ornery-looking children shouldered past them. “Thank you.”
Rhia frowned. “What for?”
Effy didn’t reply. She didn’t really know. She was just grateful not to be standing on the platform alone.
The other passengers were breathing in clouds of white, belts and wallet chains jangling, high heels striking the tiled floor with a tinny sound. Effy dragged her trunk on board and watched from the window as the train pulled out of the station. She didn’t look away until Rhia, waving, vanished into the crowd.
She’d meant to work on the train; she’d even brought her sketchpad and pen in her purse. But as soon as the train started down the bridge that led south over Lake Bala, her mind filled with a vague yet obliterating dread. The blank white page of her sketchpad and the bright midmorning light glancing off the lake made her eyes water. The woman sitting next to her crossed and recrossed her legs over and over again, and the sound of silk hissing against leather was so distracting, Effy couldn’t think of anything else.