Break Wide the Sea

Chapter 1

Girls on the shore must guard their hearts

For the men tend to die catching whales.

Yet nothing we do for all our arts

Will keep them from their sails.

—ABBONISH NURSERY RHYME, RECORDED IN KIRKRELL IN THIRD MONTH, SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-THREE YEARS FC

The box from the dressmaker arrives just in time.

After our housekeeper carries it to my room, I kneel and sort through the contents, careful not to let my fingernails—long, sharp, reddish-black—snag the expensive fabrics.

Gloves, two dozen new pairs in linen and leather, velvet and silk, of various muted colors. A gray silk pair, I think, for tonight.

I’m tugging them gingerly on, a set of movements perfected by years of practice, when a bright voice from the doorway makes me jump.

“Is that a new dress?” Lydia asks.

Glancing over my shoulder, I see my younger sister teetering in the doorway, craning to get a glimpse inside the box.

Heart in my throat, I lean over it to block her view of my hands as I finish pulling the gloves on.

“No,” I say, letting the lid fall shut and sitting on its edge to face her. “Just some new petticoats.”

She knows that I always wear gloves, but not why. And I don’t want her to see the new shipment and ask again. I have enough lies to keep straight tonight.

“Oh,” Lydia says, disappointed. She’s ready for the shareholders’ meeting in a dress the pale yellow of corn silk, her hair drawn up and her cheeks pink with excitement, or maybe rouge. “You’re wearing that old thing?”

I look down, chagrined. I’m wearing a dress from a few years ago—dark blue velvet, the color of the ocean late in the evening on certain summer nights, when the sky has faded to twilight.

It falls almost to the floor, skimming my body, with long sleeves and a high neck.

I chose it carefully, hoping to make the shareholders see me as more than an incompetent child, as someone to be reckoned with.

“This isn’t a walk on the promenade, Lydia. It’s a business meeting.”

Double-checking that the gloves haven’t snagged, I move to my bedside vanity to fix the last few buttons at my nape, the tricky ones.

Maker knows I’ve had enough practice at this over the years, but with Lydia watching it’s harder.

“Our appearances are only important insofar as they inspire the shareholders to have confidence in us,” I tell her reflection in the mirror.

Although I fear that inspiring confidence in the shareholders will be an impossible task. Lately nothing I do seems to impress them. Perhaps short of magically transforming into my dead father, nothing ever will.

“Did you get Kit to bed?” I ask. In the mirror, I see Lydia drift into the room, despite how often I’ve told her to stay out unless invited.

“Yes, though I suspect he’ll be up for a while.” She pauses to examine the contents of my open wardrobe. “I told him he could read for half an hour since we’re making him miss the party, so I give it two hours before he’s asleep.”

“It’s not a party,” I say, pointlessly, because she’s not listening. She’s radiant, as always, but I can read the nervousness in her pale, set face, how she glances in the mirror and tugs at one lock of carefully curled hair.

Should teach her how to hide that, I think, soon, before—

“This is pretty.” She reaches for the seashell on top of my writing desk, a peach-and-white conch shell nested in a black silk handkerchief.

I whirl around, almost tearing one of the buttons from my dress in my haste to fling a hand out and block her path. “Don’t touch that!”

She steps back, raising her palms in a conciliatory gesture. “All right, I won’t.” Her brown eyes are wide, alarmed.

I take a deep breath and step back, aware that I moved too quickly.

“I’m sorry.” I opt for a partial truth in hopes that she’ll buy it.

“I’m just nervous for tonight. The shell is from August and I suppose—I suppose I’m rather protective of it.

” As I speak, I wrap the shell in the handkerchief—the spines sharp even through two layers of silk—and place it carefully in the top drawer of my dresser.

When I look back up, my little sister is watching me, quiet, considering. “If you say so,” she says eventually. “Do you want me to do up your buttons in the back?”

“Please.” I turn around so my back is to her and move my dark blonde braid over the front of my shoulder, eyes down so as not to meet my own gaze in the mirror. Lydia comes up behind me, lifting her hands. I will myself to be calm, to act like I have nothing to hide.

Because why should I be afraid? Her fingers are soft and warm and nimble, fixing the lace at the nape of my neck, where my skin is still smooth. Her smile in the mirror is sweet, placid. If she feels my pulse thudding under my skin, she says nothing.

There have been times, these past few years, when I’ve caught her looking at me strangely, or for too long.

Times when she asked if I was all right, and when I said I was, she held my gaze like she was trying to catch me out in a lie.

But those moments grew fewer and farther between, and now she never asks at all.

Our conversations center around frivolous things, everyday matters.

News from the docks, gossip from the neighbors.

I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve gotten better at lying—at hiding—or if she’s simply given up on hearing the truth from me.

My fingers itch in their gloves. I grip the corner of the vanity and try not to think about it.

“So how do we inspire the shareholders to have confidence in us?” Lydia asks as we make our way down the stairs, the sounds of the shareholder meeting getting louder and clearer as we go. Dozens of voices merge into a roaring tide, impossible to distinguish as individuals.

“August and I will be announcing the voyage of the Heralder to the north,” I reply. “We’ll be sending our best sailors on the expedition. That should win us some points.” I grip the banister as I descend, polished wood smooth under my gloves, trying to remind myself of the solid ground beneath me.

There’s the sound of wineglasses clinking together, the rich smell of a cooking meal mixing with the perfume of freshly cut flowers, and the string players we hired underpinning everything with a lilting, refined harmony.

That was one of the lessons Papa gave me.

Whenever people gather to discuss the affairs of the Fairfax Whaling Company, make it an event. Make them feel lucky to be there.

I pause at the last landing before we reach the first-floor entrance hall, suddenly gripped by a wave of dread at the thought of rounding the corner, of all those eyes on me for the whole interminable evening.

“Anyway, just be your charming self,” I tell Lydia, stalling.

“Leave the business talk to me and August. Maybe someone has a pretty daughter you can talk to.”

The curse is worse now than it’s ever been.

It’s getting harder and harder to hide. Maybe Lydia didn’t notice the new gloves upstairs; maybe she really just failed to see my too-fast movement when she reached for the shell.

But so many more people will be watching me tonight.

I’ll have to be careful. I run through the rules in my mind.

Don’t move too fast.

Don’t touch anyone.

Ignore the smell of blood. At least that shouldn’t be an issue here in my home—not like it is out in the streets, so many years of whaleblood and cows’ blood and even human blood ground into the mud between paving stones.

A mischievous grin had flitted across Lydia’s face at the mention of pretty daughters. But now it falls, her eyes growing serious. “What if someone asks about the Orcadas? Was it really a finfolk attack?”

My stomach sinks at the reminder. Last month, one of our ships sank in the Aegiran Ocean, hundreds of miles north of here. Though no part of me wanted to, August and I visited the hospital after the survivors returned—about half the crew—to hear their reports.

In a small room off the hospital wing, the wails and groans of the injured and dying floated through the cracks in the walls.

The sailors spoke of an unnatural storm that flared up on a clear day, and some of them claimed to have seen dark figures in rowboats at the edge of their vision, watching as the ship went down.

I found I could barely make eye contact as they told their stories.

Meeting their gazes, it was like I was out at sea again, in the cold and the terror and the whirling fog.

I don’t know how August was so composed, so at ease. I couldn’t escape the feeling that any of the sailors might see in my eyes how I was like them: cursed.

One sailor refused to drink water unless the nurses forced it down his throat, crying out instead for salt water to be brought.

Another spoke in a language no one recognized.

A third couldn’t speak at all, though at first the doctors had been able to find nothing physically amiss.

It wasn’t until after he died that we learned the truth, when I heard the physician’s report of what they’d cut from his lungs.

A still-living, still-growing bright-orange branch of coral.

I arranged for a sum to be paid out to the man’s widow, enough for her to maintain herself for at least a few years.

It wasn’t hush money; I knew she would keep her silence.

No one wants to admit that their loved one died of a finfolk curse.

It means they can’t be buried in the churchyard at the Seaman’s Bethel.

And when the cursed go on living, well—

“Annie?” Lydia’s hand finds my elbow, making me flinch. She’s moved a couple of steps down the stairs, looking back up at me as if to ask what’s wrong. “The Orcadas?”