Black Pearls (14 page)

But the garden was empty, save for the blood-red roses and the new buds that had sprouted to take the place of the blooms the queen had cut. As I started back to the palace, I met one of my mother's serving maids coming back from market. Wearing a rough brown cloak over her head and scrambling up the rock-studded path from town, the girl was in such a hurry, she nearly ran into me.

There was something in her furtive, headlong rush that made me certain of her mission. Though my mother feigned indifference, I knew she must be eager to confirm the executions. There seemed little doubt she had sent a servant to witness the gruesome spectacle. Suddenly, all my own guilt and anguish over the event seemed focused on this innocent messenger, and I stepped into the middle of the path to block her way. I could not bear to let her run to my mother with her bloody news; as if I could prevent the deed by barring its report, I grabbed the poor creature by the shoulders and ordered her to stop.

When the cloak fell away to reveal Cinderella's spun-glass hair, I backed away, astonished. "I saw it all," she told me, a broad, ingenuous grin lighting her face. "I even got a lock of Lucinda's hair!" Triumphant, she held up a curlicue of fine dark locks. I turned my head away as if it might burn my eyes.

"You should have seen the people!" she went on, her eyes shining. "They were all pushing and shoving behind me, but I stayed right up front. That is how I managed to get this lock. I walked up and pulled it off her before anyone could stop me."

I had not seen my bride so animated since the night of the ball. She had forgotten all her lessons in refinement and was aglow with her old unbridled eagerness. "Their bodies did not twitch at all afterward, but you should have seen their eyes roll. I looked right at them, and I swear those three horrible heads knew just who I was!"

She was panting with excitement, as if she could not part with the details fast enough. "There really was not very much blood, you know. Stepmother bled the most, but that is because she fought the ax man hardest. You would not believe how she wriggled and cried out. Why, she was down on her knees before they even put her neck on the block. 'Fetch my stepdaughter,' she cried. 'Send for the princess! Tell her what they are doing to us!'"

Pausing for breath, she undid the cloak from her neck and stood, proud and radiant, in a pale yellow gown. "How I wanted to speak up and tell her I was there! I wanted her to look straight at me when the ax fell!"

My head was spinning, and a poisonous, bitter taste filled my mouth. I closed my eyes on her brightness, but her happy voice found me still. "Of course, a princess cannot afford to be seen in the streets like that. So I kept my peace and pulled this old cloak tight around me." She paused again, a touch of indignation softening her relish. "I only wish they had let me take a lock of Stepmother's hair, too. If the executioner had known who I was, he would never have dared push me away."

***

That night it was I who took to my bed. Pleading illness, I bid my wife good night at the door to our chamber and went to sleep again in my father's old rooms at the end of the hall. I was hardly guilty of deception, since the minute I lay down I was swept by trembling and nausea. I closed my eyes and, sweating mightily, let the waves of sickness wash over me. Their rhythm was somehow reassuring: the pain and then the brief reprieve, the quiet, hopeless space into which I could fit one or two breaths, succeeded by the harsh, grinding pain. Absorbed in this pattern, surrendering to its awful symmetry, I fell at last into a dreamless sleep.

It was next day I met Lynette, a dairy maid in the palace stables. Of course, I had seen her before, plump and charming and careless. She laughed too loud, slapped her thighs, and was forever picking straw from her hair. It was not hard to guess how it had gotten there. All the stable boys and several of the kitchen crew found endless excuses to tarry in the milking barn.

I could not blame them. As my own days grew emptier and my nights more hounded by guilt, I began to spend hours at a time lulled by her guileless chatter and her generous impulses. "If you like the milk of cows," Lynette took to telling me, winking naughtily and cupping her mountainous breasts, "you shall find much sweeter here."

Day after day, I was drawn back to her like the rest. The queen and my princess never missed me, so there was nothing to prevent my trips to the barn. Besides, there was something cleansing about the sweet breath of the cows and the steady rhythm of the buckets filling as Lynette milked. At first she took no special notice of my presence, but soon she must have sensed my need, my desperate case. She sent the others away and saved all her jokes and sly teasing for me.

In the beginning, these meetings were merely a way to fill idle hours, but now the scamp affords me pleasures as rich as any I fancied at that long-ago ball. My dairy maid is no princess, nor does she wish to be. But she lifts her skirts and wraps her dimpled thighs around me with a will. And I tarry longer and longer with her in the loft. As each afternoon fades into dusk, I rise reluctantly from our bed of hay. I push her from me, laughing. "Stop, Lady Lynette," I protest, bidding her cover herself and cease our play. "If I am any happier it must show upon my face. And for the sweet Lord's sake, help me brush this straw from my clothes."

Though in truth there is no need to hide, to proffer proof of my fidelity to Cinderella. She requires no troth, no lust, no love. She asks merely for the same tired recitation each night. As we lie in our silken bed, three times the size of the loft that I prefer, it is only the story she begs for, the same words over and over. And because it frees me in so many ways, I am not loath to tell the tale again. "The palace was bedecked with torches," I begin, "and young women from across the kingdom had come to the ball to meet their prince."

"And then?" she asks, her voice hoarse with longing.

"And then," I tell her, "a lovely stranger stepped out of a silver coach and into the prince's heart. She was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen, more dazzling than a fairy queen."

Cinderella listens and nods, prompting me if I forget any part of the tired tale. She sighs and smiles, even as her eyes close and the story sends her off to sleep.

Now that witches are rarer than fish wings, most people don't know the first thing about magic. And the first thing about magic is that it hurts. When my aunt sent for the crone who lived at the edge of town, she meant only to scare me. So far as we villagers could tell, that foolish hag had never done more harm than give our night watchman a potion that made him mad for the weaver's widow. The object of his affections weighed at least twice as much as the poor man himself, yet their match was no stranger than many made without benefit of incantations or philters.

The marriage my aunt intended for me, I assure you, was far more ill advised and much more laughable. Yet she would have me wed Lord Brevington, a man forty years my elder. And she would have me curtsy sweetly before him, speak my little Latin, and play the harp. I, of course, would have none of it, and that is when the witch was sent for.

"You have humiliated me for the last time, my girl," Aunt Hazel scolded. "Nor will I permit you to demean the honest proposal of our dear guest." She nodded at this, toward Lord Brevington, who seemed less demeaned than sleepy. He sat over the remains of Aunt's tea and scones, his head sinking lower and lower on his hollow chest.

But I sat with the harp beside me unplucked, reluctant to play the song she had bade me sing for His Lordship. It was "The Turtle Dove's Lament," a ballad that had found favor first with the court and then with all the unwed ladies in our town. The tale of a young woman abandoned by her love, it told of her standing above the sea on a towering cliff. She searched for her lost sweetheart's ship, clasped her pale hands across her breast, and leapt into the waves. The chorus, repeated three times, began with the words "
Your wild love has won me, now claim your prize.
"

I could not, you see, sing that refrain to the grizzled gentleman on our settle. I dared not, for fear I would burst into laughter as I played. Indeed, one look at the poor old soul, his withered legs crossed under orange garters, had nearly undone me. "May I not play Your Lordship a sprightlier tune?" I asked. "'Derry Down, Derry Down,' say?"

My ardent suitor, who seemed to be snoozing, made no reply. So I begged my aunt instead. "Oh, please, Auntie Dearest, let me choose a song less passionate, more in keeping with the—er, age and state of our visitor."

I could not keep from smiling as I pointed at the napping noble, and my aunt was in a rage straightway. She scolded me so loudly, I was certain Lord Brevington would wake, but I need not have worried. It turned out that the good man had gone to a deeper sleep than the two of us guessed, for when we tried to rouse him, we found that he was dead.

"Now see what you have done!" As if it were I who had caused the old man's soul to leave his body, Aunt Hazel grew angrier still. "All our prospects, all our high hopes—dashed by a willful girl's stubbornness." She paced our small parlor like a trapped animal, sighing and calling on my dead mother to witness her daughter's perfidy. At last, she summoned Lord Brevington's footman from the kitchen. And then she called the witch.

I was not afraid of Dame Meredith; I had grown up used to the sight of her bent form hobbling through the crowd at market, the sound of her nanny goat's bell when it wandered, as it often did, into our yard. So, after our noble visitor had been dispatched to his castle and Dame Meredith had arranged her musty skirts across the same settle from which Lord Brevington had taken leave of the world only moments before, I felt no alarm. Even when Aunt Hazel demanded an enchantment of the highest order, one that would ensure I learned my place, I never dreamt homespun magic could prove any more potent than the scolding I had just endured.

It required only a pinch of time, a trifling minute, to change my life. As soon as the dame had raised her arm and begun her chant, I felt the stiffness invade my limbs. "
Ye shall not rule the roost, ye shall not call the tune.
" As she recited the words, the old woman spread her knobby fingers like a cap across my head. "
But shall serve your master with nary a boon.
"

It happened so quickly that even as I smiled at such nonsense, my legs went numb and I closed my eyes against a sharp pain that filled my chest. "
With a lively will, though it be not your own, ye shall do my bidding and make no moan.
" No sooner had the pain stopped than my aunt screamed and I opened my eyes. I found that, indeed, my chest had been ripped open and that a shining bone erupted from between my breasts. I suppose it is a testament to the crone's witchery that I now felt no discomfort. I was dismayed only that my dress was ruined and my flesh turned the color of the coins my aunt had fished from Lord Brevington's doublet as he lay beyond the cares of earth.

Stranger, or should I say more horrible still, I saw that from the golden mote which pierced my chest, in a formation I knew only too well from hours and hours of practice, hung twenty harp strings. And where were these strings fastened? Why, all along my body, which, as I have said, had turned to burnished gold. I wanted to scream just as my aunt had when I saw, at the place where each string pierced my shining flesh, tiny blood drops lined like buttons up and down my chest and belly and thighs. But I could no more scream than speak or make the slightest movement to free myself from the spell that held me fast.

"What have you done, you foul fiend?" Aunt Hazel was crying now, beating the old woman about her venerable head. "Bring her back this instant, bring her back!" When her tormentor stopped to wipe her eyes, the hag rushed for the front door, but Aunt yanked her by the apron strings and forced her to stand before me.

Dame Meredith, squirming like a pig in my aunt's grasp, seemed as surprised as anyone at her handiwork. "'Tis only a minding spell," she protested, staring at my strings, my golden limbs. "'Twill make dogs obey and keep horses from leaping the fence."

"My niece is no dog, beldame." Despite my peril, I was moved by Aunt's tears and would have comforted her if I could. "You have pierced her through and turned her still as stone."

"I meant no harm, mistress." Meredith reached out to touch me, then pulled her hand back as if she had felt fire. "No harm at all, I swear."

"Undo your spell, witch," Aunt Hazel commanded. "And be quick."

"I cannot." The fear in the dame's eyes made it all too clear she spoke the truth. "I do not know how." She explained to Aunt that no one had ever asked her to reverse the spell; every one preferred dogs that minded and horses that stayed where they were put.

But Aunt Hazel would not rest till the witch had tried to un-spell me. And tried. And tried. Finally, exhausted and hopeless, the old woman threw her apron over her head and wept as if her heart would break. "'Tis no use, my lady," she sobbed. "The child will not wake. She lives only to obey."

"Obey?" My aunt, nearly as tired as the witch, gathered the strength to shake our neighbor by the shoulders. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"Whatever you last wanted her to do, madam," Meredith told her, "is what she will do forever."

"I wanted her to play." Aunt Hazel looked at me now, her voice as small as a child's. "I wanted her to play a song."

"Then you have only to ask it," the witch told her, drying her eyes and making for the door. "Perhaps it is not so bad, after all." She sniffled as she lifted the latch, ducked her head at me. "You need not feed her, from the looks of it, and 'tis certain that way ward child has learned to obey."

Aunt Hazel, I suppose, had neither the strength nor the will to chase after the old woman. For she sat where she was, long after the hag had left, staring vacantly at the fire and only sometimes at me. "It was just one song," she said at last. "Not so much to ask." She shook her head and tears collected in the ridges under her eyes. "Not so much to give."