Black Pearls (4 page)

Mortified and bone weary, she was far too exhausted to laugh at her mistake. Instead, daunted and tired beyond measure, she sat down by the vanished door and wept. With no room for pride, she sobbed so long and hard that Rampion, who had never before seen Tabby cry, was moved to tears herself. "Please, Mother," she called from the window. "Please do not despair. We will solve this riddle by and by." And it was not long at all before she did.

Tabby wiped her eyes and stared in astonishment when her clever girl showed how she could twist her long hair into a braid and wrap it around the open jaw of one of the gargoyles. When she had let the braid down as far as it would go, she urged her mother to use it as a rope and climb up. Indeed, once Tabby had obeyed her daughter's instructions and rolled Old Chauncey's cart beneath the window, then clambered on top, she found she could easily grab the lovely, sunny ladder that tumbled down to her and hoist herself home. "'Tis very like flying," she said, pleased and smiling, when she had reached the top.

***

On the evening of May's full moon—the Milk Moon, the villagers called it—Tabby rushed back to the tower. As she had each day for a month, she called for Rampion to let down her hair. All morning she had nursed her excitement, like something warm nestled against her heart. In a matter of hours, she had told herself as she emptied the villagers' chamber pots and scrubbed their floors, the hunger for flight would come. Rampion must already be feeling the heat in her blood, the stirrings of a woman born to flight.

At first when she called up and heard nothing but the wind whistling through the empty windows, Tabby was not alarmed. "Rampion!" she cried, her hands cupped round her mouth in case the girl was reading or dozing by the fire. "Rampion, let down your hair!" A crow in a tree behind the tower answered, but no yellow braid dropped down to her.

She spent an hour calling and crying, then another seated in a miserable heap beside the walled-up door. As she sat, she remembered how bravely and gaily Rampion had accepted her long imprisonment, and how quickly she had devised the scheme of using her braid to help her mother scale the tower wall. How resourceful and quick she was, this child Tabby had watched grow from a babe in her lap! And how slow and stupid Tabby had been! Why had she not seen it before? She was not the first to have climbed that golden ladder. Rampion must have helped her friend into the tower each day the door was locked and Tabby had the key. How she must have laughed at her mother's loose and easy love! And now she was gone. Dancing somewhere or laughing with a crowd of friends. Making fun of the simple household hours that were all Tabby ever hoped to know of joy.

Soon she was tearing at the stones with bloody hands, ripping them from the mortar until she'd made a small hole through which she could push open the door. She raced upstairs then and found what she had known she would—an empty room with Rampion's gowns all gone, her trinkets carried off, except for a basket of blackberries placed neatly on the table, and the lovely necklace, which must have come undone and now lay broken, its bright jewels scattered across the floor.

For three days Tabby waited, the hearth untended, sunset and sunrise finding her still beside the window. Sometimes she leaned out to stroke the head of the gargoyle whose gaping mouth had held Rampion's hair. "If witches cry, perhaps monsters can, too," she told the crusty stone. "When she returns, though, we must not tell her how we have wept."

For another week she lived on hope and the few provisions they had stored in the tower. Surely the gift of the berries meant that Rampion cared, that she was coming back. Surely the years of love, and of squabbling, yes, like a hen and her chick, before the two of them settled beside each other, could not have ended.

Finally, though, driven by hunger, Tabby took to the woods to gather wild fruit and to trace her daughter's steps. Each day she wandered a bit further, fanning out and out from the tower, searching for a small boot print, a dropped handkerchief, a whisper of what she had lost.

Two moons filled, then faded before she heard the tale from gypsies camped in a clearing deep in the woods. It was the story of a witch's child, and the woman who told it to Tabby, juggling two babes on her lap by the fire, had heard it from a groom whose mistress claimed to have learned it from a troubadour who had gotten the tale firsthand from a jester in a palace leagues away.

It seemed an evil witch had won the child from her terrified father and kept her prisoner in a tower. But one day Rapunzel—yes, the woman was certain that was her name—had escaped and run off with a handsome prince. She was a sweet young thing, Rapunzel was, with long flaxen curls, and wasn't it a blessing she had tricked that scheming witch?

"I've heard of such a girl," Tabby told the woman, something inside her crumbling, blowing away like dust. "But her name was Rampion."

"Rampion," the gypsy repeated, her accent heavy, slow. "That is how you say it here, yes?" She held her fingers up to show what she meant. "A small plant for salads, is it not?"

Tabby nodded, desolate.

"In our country, we call it rapunzel." But the gypsy had ab ready forgotten her story. She begged now to trade a beaded belt for the vest Tabby wore. Behind her, her husband proffered a leg of venison to sweeten the deal, but it was all Tabby could do to bid them farewell and stumble back to the tower. There she lit a fire and threw the girl's necklace into the flames. Then she unclasped a tiny locket from around her neck and took out the strand of yellow hair curled inside. That, too, went into the flames, where it flared, lit up the hearth, and was gone. For a while, as the jewels on the necklace cracked and blackened on the grate, Tabby thought she heard Rampion calling her. "Mother! Mother!" the voice in her head cried until she felt she might go mad. But then, as the gems split apart and finally turned to ash, the voice was quiet at last.

For three days, she slept, dreamless, on her pallet until the light woke her. The moon was full again and calling. Veils of filmy white covered everything in the room, the wind rustled like a woman's gown, and a wood dove mistook the brightness for morning and began to sing. Tabby rose from her bed and pushed the heavy chest from the door. She stared at the indigo woods below her, then turned her gaze to the sky. A fat newborn, the moon drew her to the edge of the doorway, filled her with the old longing.

She leaned out to the night, and the wind nuzzled her bare toes, slipped sly fingers up her gown. She remembered her sisters' warnings. "You have caught the way of human love," Maeve had said. And Tabby had laughed when they told her she would forget how to fly.

Tonight, though, it was not flight she was after. She still knew how to catch an updraft, how to surrender to a current, arms wide. But what Tabby wanted most, what she craved as she stood in the light of her last full moon, was to walk, not fly, from this door. To leave behind the loneliness that made her days rattle like chains and stole the taste from everything she ate. To drop like a stone and put a stop to the waiting, the mad dream of the girl racing up the tower steps and into her arms. Wasn't such an end better than trying to begin again when a garden was no longer enough? When the sweet, empty face of a flower or the warmth of the sun was nothing beside the rush of air, the final fall?

When the rats ate Herr Bergman's footstool, Father decided to call on the mayor. It was the same day they ate my crutch, but I was the only one who cared about that. The footstool meant money, after all; it was nearly finished and had been left on a workbench near my bed. I had leaned my crutch against the same bench, where it would be within easy reach. Easy reach of the rats, it turned out!

By the time I woke that morning, the footstool had only two legs left and the crutch looked as though a band of beaver had taken a fancy to it. The carved pad on top had been nibbled to a stub, and the rest was nearly four hands shorter than it had been the day before. When I leaned my weight on it, the whole shaft split down the middle and sent me sprawling.

I am not sure which made Father angriest—the sight of me, far too old to be sobbing on the floor in a pile of splinters, or the unpaid hours and new wood it would require to rebuild the stool. I know only that he was red-faced and trembling when he leaned down and yanked me to my feet.

"What will it take?" he yelled, bracing me against him and clamping his huge arm around my waist. "Do those monsters need to eat the trim off his wife's jacket before our fool of a mayor decides to hire the piper?"

I thought of the mayor's wife, a thin woman who walked as if she were standing on her toes inside those fur-lined boots of hers. And then I thought of the egrets I had carved on the top of my crutch, each one carefully polished with mineral spirits until its wings shone.

"A crutch is one thing," Father told me, as if he had heard the words I'd only thought. He steered me toward the workbench, where four small chests waited for finishing. "You can make another in a few hours, if you don't insist on decorating it like an emperor's walking stick." He made a snorting sound, the whinny of a large, steaming horse, then looked forlornly at the mess on the floor.

"This stool was nearly ready." He kicked the legs that remained on the halbchewed base. "The old man will not pay us twice for one stool." He handed me a mallet, unrolled an apron of chisels across the bench, then grabbed his cap and jacket from the pegs by the door. "I will call on the mayor after I fetch the birch," he told me, his tone as stern as if I were the one who had chewed the stool to shreds. "Find what you can for supper, boy. I'll not be back till that lout and his council have come to their senses."

I knew there was endless work ahead. But still I felt slyly grateful, glad that, for once, I was not the "lout" father blamed for our troubles. Ever since I was four and old enough to hold an awl, father had complained of my work. For nearly eleven years, I had been boxed about the ears and scolded for carving too slowly or polishing too fine. Now, whether or not the members of Hameln's council saw the error of their ways, Father clearly meant to set them straight. Which meant, in turn, that I would spend a whole day without being told that Frau Weedmeir was too blind to notice the finish on her strongbox. Or that unless the young Springmans had turned into royalty overnight, they did not require garlands on their settle.

As the bells of St. Nicolai rang the hour and Father started down the road, it occurred to me that he had misplaced the blame for our woes. It was, after all, that musical rat-chaser, not the council, who was the cause of the infestation. For the piper, it seemed, was entirely too good at his job. Three other towns had already hired him, and now all the vermin he'd sent packing had found their way to Hameln! The slithering rodents were everywhere: in cupboards, where they jumped out if you opened the door; in grain bins, where cooks found their droppings mixed with the chaff; and often as not, in nurseries, where they waited until dark to crawl into the cradles and set the babes howling with their nasty bites.

By the time the bells of St. Bonifatius had begun chiming, too, I was already at work. Not on the jewelry chests Father would expect finished by his return, but on a fresh crutch. Until now I had needed a new one only when I grew too tall for the old. To own the truth, I had been proud each time that happened, though Father said the only difference between a crippled child and a crippled man was that the man ate more.

Like stragglers trying to catch up, the bells in the church by the river always rang late, so now as those in our cathedral were finishing their song, the latecomers had just begun theirs. Carving as I listened, I was astonished to find my hands deciding on a new design before the rest of me had any inkling what they were about.

I had chosen a small piece of cherry with a sharp, uneven grain that would make it useless in Father's eyes. But it would do for the armrest of my crutch, and as I worked my carving tool along the grain, I created a jagged range of mountains, like the Weserbergland beyond our town. The sky behind the range I left as smooth and empty as a beggar's plate. Yet by the time both bells had fallen silent, I knew what to carve there: just above the mountains I shaped the egrets from my old crutch. Instead of standing on their long legs in a stream, though, these birds soared toward heaven, their wings beating wedge-shaped Vs into the sky. With such wide, beautiful wings, I thought, who needed legs?

When I was born, Mother hid my twisted leg until after the christening. Which is why I was baptized Emmett, a fine old name that means "hard-working and strong." I have proved to be one but not the other, and although Mother used to say "Better a strong heart than a strong back," Father never agreed. The first thing I remember is learning, much later than most wee ones, to crawl. And the second thing I remember is Father's face as he watched me drag my lame leg after me. Even now, when I catch him looking at me, I know what he sees—a worthless scrap, a waste piece like the blemished poplar he uses where no one will notice, on the bottoms of drawers, the undersides of tables, the tops of chests he will paint over.

While Mother was ill, Father tried to please her by praising my work or—and this always made her smile like a girl at Christmas—saying he thought my bad leg was beginning to straighten and flesh out. But my leg was getting no better than she was. And after she died, one day past Michaelmas last year, he no longer took the trouble to hide his impatience with me. And I no longer had her tender kiss on my head when she bade me good night. Or the sound of her laughter if I added a silly new verse to the songs we used to sing.

Our earliest "concerts" featured a single song, "
Backe, backe, Kuchen,
" "Bake, Bake a Cake." She used to sing that one to me when I was little, as she shaped our griddlecakes by the hearth. "
To bake a cake you need five things, I'm told.
" Her voice was light as the bells of the river church, coming to me from above as I sat in the shadow of her skirts. "
Eggs, butter, salt, milk, and cornmeal to make it gold.
" Grinning up at her, I sang a different cake for us, one made with worms, toads, mud, and pee to make it gold! When I added my extra ingredients, Mother always reared back her head and laughed. Then she would bend down and scoop me into her arms. "Let us keep that recipe our secret, young man," she would say, pinching both my legs till the one I could feel tingled. "I think your father would rather I use cornmeal, after all."