Descent

1 - "Come and see"

"The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising, the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution."
-Daily News, Perth, Western Australia, 1909

September 10th, 1859
Rosshaven, Ontario

Clara woke to the sound of horses screaming.

The rain had drummed against the glass all night, lulling her into a restless sleep despite the emptiness in her stomach. She had been dreaming about horses and kept expecting the braying she heard to fade away with the dream, but it didn't. Sitting in bed, heart thumping from the stress of the nightmare, she realized the sound of the screaming horses was too loud, that the horses must be outside the barn, and that something was bothering them terribly.

Possibly just the storm, she thought. The soothing rain sounds that had lulled her to sleep had escalated into a torrent driven by booming thunder. She sat up in bed, cradling her knees, and waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. When father had tossed her in here he had denied her any candles, so she sat and stared and willed the inky indigo blanket over the room to settle enough for her to see.

Her room lit up with lighting and shook with near immediate thunder. The horses screamed. They were definitely outside the barn. Had Father saddled them? He'd be mad to try and take them out on a night like tonight, with the rain coming down in great white waves and no moon or to guide him. She winced; even though she'd only thought it, she felt guilty for thinking Father was mad.

They'd had a row at the dinner table. Not unusual at all this past year, with Clara having passed some invisible line which meant she was no longer allowed to mulch the stables or feed the horses or gather eggs, but was instead expected to work with her mother in the kitchen, learn to sew and clean, and read quietly in the study while Father and Charles went fishing at the pond. She knew it had something to do with her bleeding but Father refused to talk to her about it and Mother refused to talk at all anymore.

The house had grown completely silent since the Red Night over a week ago, when the sky lit up with an amber fire for hours and Father had come home from work with bandages around his hands and head and shut himself in the basement. He'd taken no meals for days and come up only for water, locking the door behind him. Clara and Charles had listened at the door. They heard sawing and hammering, and the sounds a man makes when he digs, at all hours of the day or night. When Father had finally emerged from the basement yesterday, seemingly for good, he was clean and dressed and neatly shaved. He sat at the table as though nothing was amiss at all, and the family had happily ignored the strange goings on until this very evening, when Clara had damned herself by doing the one thing a daughter is never to do: question her father.

Her face still burned where he'd hit her, his rough worker's hands splitting the skin on her cheek like wet paper. Charles had cried out briefly, but a stern look from Father, delivered by a snap of the head towards the young boy, silenced him. Mother sat at the table and quietly spooned her thin broth through the whole thing, while Father dragged Clara screaming by the hair out of the dining room and up the stairs, then tossed her into her bedroom, her shoulder crashing into her dresser as she fell.

Thinking back on the violence made her whole body ache. She had a bump where she'd struck the dresser that warred with the burning in her scalp where he'd held her hair. Her bum and knees had scraped their way across the carpets and her tailbone throbbed from the impacts on each stair. 

Sore as she was, she felt good for standing up to Father like that. Since they had come to this town--though she hesitated to call it that, as it was only four houses, a school, and an auction house--Father had grown meaner, thinner, and more solemn with every day. For a few weeks, she had expected her mother to fight for them, but it seemed as Father's rage had increased, hers had dminished, and now Mother did nothing more than cook, clean, knit, and sleep. Clara had barely heard her mother speak in the last month, and when she did it was so quiet as to be non-existent.