The Book of Speculation: A Novel

Her mother began to pray.

Yelena watched him die. Through slender alder trees she’d seen the woman’s luminous skin and laughing eyes, had seen her father reach toward the woman to embrace her. His hand, once so warm and strong, was thin and wasted. His dark bearded face disappeared into the woman’s soot black hair. Yelena had called to him but her voice did not carry. She shook her mother, but her mother stayed rooted, praying. By the time Yelena reached the banks, her father had long since been dragged beneath the water.

Once Stepan was drowned, her mother moved quick and sharp as a switch, piling their possessions into a wagon and moving them to a distant village on the edge of a still black lake. Yelena had cried, not wanting to leave her father, knowing that he was in the stream. Her mother slapped the backs of Yelena’s hands. “If we stay, waiting for your father, she will take away any man we love. Would you have her drown your brothers?” her mother had asked. Yelena considered; what was a lost brother or two if it brought her father back? “When she kills them their deaths will be on your head,” her mother warned. Then Yelena understood. No river would be safe again, but other waters would not hold her father’s face. When her mother died she left her homeland, crossed countries and an ocean to leave the woman in the river and her father behind. In this safe land she bore her daughter and baptized her quickly to anchor her soul. Now, a lifetime later, a woman from a new water was tempting the boy who had become her son.

She waited for the Rusalka by the tub where the woman slept by night and drowned herself by day. Madame Ryzhkova saw Evangeline, flushed and breathless, and feared that she’d already stolen life and youth from Amos.

Evangeline froze at the sight of Madame Ryzhkova. The woman stood in the downpour, her clothing soaked, her face consumed by fury. They had been discovered.

“Madame, you must return to your wagon. You’ll catch your death.” She moved to put her arms around Ryzhkova’s shoulders.

“Do not touch me. You touch my Amos, you charm him and make him lie to me. I have seen what you do, your kind. You are a murderer, a soul thief—Rusalka.” Ryzhkova fought the urge to shout, to scream, but years of reading fates taught her that words were most powerful when spoken gravely. “You will go. You will leave this place and my boy. You will take no more from me.”

“Madame, I think you do not know your boy so well.” Evangeline walked past Ryzhkova and began untying the tub’s canvas. She glanced back at the old woman. “Nor me.” If her stomach heaved she forced it down. If her hands quaked, she squeezed them. “Go back to your bed, Madame. It would be a shame if you took ill. Amos would be heartbroken. I was when my grandmother died.”

Evangeline did not allow her eyes to water until she’d pulled the canvas down, and then only when she held herself, knees to chest, to muffle the sound. Whether it was fear or anger, she could not say.

Unhindered by her wet skirts, Ryzhkova flew across the muddy ground to Peabody’s wagon. When she threw open the door Peabody was bent over his ledger, carefully sketching the detail of a tentlike structure. The expanse of his stomach spilled over the small desk and obscured the writing at the bottom of the page. Startled by the unexpected arrival, his hand jumped, causing his plumed quill to scratch an ugly line through his sketch.

“Blast.”

“The girl must go.” Ryzhkova’s voice cracked.

“What is this?” Peabody turned the three-legged stool he called his ciphering chair. He regarded Madame Ryzhkova with a raised eyebrow.

She shook with violence. “Mermaid, you call her. Evangeline. She is warping my boy, my Amos. She makes him lie to me.” She smacked her palm firmly on Peabody’s desk, further smudging the sketch.

“Evangeline?” Peabody twisted the end of his beard to a thoughtful point, then wound it around his thumb. “I agree she has our Amos in a knot. Love, Madame, is nothing to worry oneself with overmuch. With time it will right itself.” He murmured something about the course of young love and returned to his ruined page. “Good for the profits, Madame. I see no harm at all. If you don’t mind, I’ve correspondence I wish to read.”

Ryzhkova’s eyes narrowed in such a way that Peabody’s levity died. “Stupid, stupid man. You love the boy, yes? You think of Amos like your son, like your Zachary?” Her voice rose. “She will kill him. Then what will you have? Money? No. You will have a dead son. And the girl? She will vanish into the river. No Amos, no mermaid—nothing.”

“Madame.”

“We must go away from the rivers. Away from water. You will turn her out and burn her things.” Her hands bunched in her skirts.