Black Pearls (9 page)

But she reached neither the amber panes nor the sugarplums. Her angel, with a sorrowful countenance and Mama's long dark curls, suddenly barred the way. It shook its head and stamped its bare feet, then put out one hand and pointed a flaming fingertip at the girl's chest. Though she'd never resented her angel before, Gretel was confused now, even angry. As she woke to Hansel's shaking, she remembered the widespread wings and behind them the figure in the window, the bushes full of candy.

"Listen," her brother commanded, putting a rough hand over her mouth. "Only listen."

It was a bird's song, and if Gretel was surprised that Hansel even took notice of such a thing, she was more surprised by the song itself. The music wasn't human, though it sounded like someone singing under water, the words almost clear, nearly understood. She had no words, either, for the feelings the music stirred in her as she listened, though she recognized the pictures that danced in her head. The images she saw as the bird sang came straight from the dream she had just left: there was the house again, small and bright, and the figure in the window, waiting for her. And something else, something she couldn't see but was more real than all the rest. It was a mouthwatering smell, a smell that promised food she had never tasted, an unknown pleasure that drew her on like the ants she'd seen break ranks and swarm, madly, passionately, across a drop of honey.

Hansel must have been filled with the same images, the same scent. For together, without speaking, brother and sister rose and left the hollow of the tree. Side by side, they followed the bird's song to a nearby alder. The moment they reached the tree, though, the bird flew off and called to them from deeper in the forest. All morning they followed it, and as they walked, Gretel told her dream. With each detail she recalled, Hansel nodded, grinned. "Yes!" he said when she described the soft pink roof and the meringue that dripped from the eaves. "Exactly!" He even clapped his hands and slapped his knees when she told how the almond paste was carved into a door knocker and window boxes. "That's just how it is!" he told her.

When at last they came to a clearing and saw the house, Gretel stood frozen, remembering the way the angel had blocked her way. But Hansel raced for the dream. "Come on, girl!" he called, without looking back. "We are saved!"

The small swift—they could see it clearly now that it was out of the trees—that had led them here settled on the roof of the littie cottage. It preened its feathers and was suddenly silent, as if to announce that its job was done, that there was no longer need for singing.

Hansel had already removed the marzipan door knocker and stuffed it into his mouth. Ravenous, he finished that and two sugarplums before he turned and scolded his sister. "Foolish thing!" he said. "Why do you stand there? Your angel sent you a dream of this good fortune." He laughed with unaccustomed abandon, and pointed to the bird on the roof. "And her heavenly messenger has led us here."

But Gretel had not told him how the angel's finger still burned her chest. How she had actually checked under her shift to see if the skin was reddened there. It had not been, of course, and perhaps Hansel was right. Perhaps the angel had only meant that they should not take more than they needed, that they must repay the owner of the house for what they ate.

"We must knock," she told her brother. "We must offer to work for our food."

Hansel laughed again. "I have eaten the door knock, Gretel," he said, smiling like a naughty child, looking younger, lighter, and happier than she had ever seen him. "If we cannot knock, we shall sing for our supper, eh?" He came to her then and took her hand, wrapped his arm around her waist, and pulled her into a clumsy dance. Round and round he whirled her, singing the old song their father used to sing, until at last, giddy with his attention, she joined in:

"
Oranges and lemons,
" say the bells of St. Clements.
"
You owe me five farthings,
" say the bells of St. Martin.

For an instant, as they spun past the front window, Gretel thought she spied a shadowy figure staring out at them. She clasped one hand to her mouth, but as Hansel twirled them nearer, she saw that the window's glass was made of boiled sugar, cloudy and mottled as still water in a pond. Over its surface, bobbing and weaving like falling leaves, were only their own silhouettes, their own dancing selves.

"
When will you pay me?" say
the bells of Old Bailey.
"
When I grow rich,
" say the bells of Shoreditch.
"
When will that be?
" say the bells of Stepney.
"
I do not know,
" says the great Bell of Bow.

But she could not mistake the voice that stopped their dance. That was real, as rasping and ugly as the swift's had been beautiful. "Nibble, nibble, little mouse." Hansel let go his sister's hand when he heard it. "Who is nibbling on my house?"

Too afraid to run, the children stood rooted to the spot. And again the crusty voice called to them from behind the very window where Gretel had dreamt shadows. "Perhaps 'tis the wind, heaven's child." The owner of the cottage laughed, but since the sound was closer to a growl, her paralyzed listeners were hardly reassured. "Only the wind, playful and mild."

When the door opened and a stooped crone with a halo of fine white hair appeared on the steps, Gretel and Hansel were both relieved. The old woman was a pathetic sight, after all, her thinning hair, her watery eyes, the stockings that fell in folds around her ankles. "Ay," she told them. "I was partly right, was I not? Two of heaven's children have found their way to my door."

"Good dame," Hansel began, using the same unctuous tone with which he addressed their stepmother when she was angry. "We only want..."

"I won't have it whispered about that I turned such innocents into the woods." She smiled at them, though her mouth moved too slowly, too largely, as if it was unaccustomed to such an expression. "Well, come, then," she urged them, opening her door wide. "Out of the cold now, and I shall try to make us a bit of supper."

Supper was a feast—pancakes cooked on top of a brick oven that gave off a pleasant heat even when the hearth fire had died. The old woman served them cakes with nuts and fruit, and sweet cream that tumbled like a bountiful river from her china pitcher. The children, not trusting this sudden plenty, spoke little and ate a great deal. Then, bloated and easily won over by the promise of breakfast next morning, they followed the woman to a small room, where two beds covered with fresh white linens glowed like twin stars. They sank into a dreamless sleep, and neither could remember ever waking so late as they did next day.

Regaining some courage, and with it her manners, Gretel begged for work that might repay their elderly hostess's kindness. She could not help but notice the layers of dust beneath the stick candy on the walls and under the rush rug on the floor. "I might tidy the place a bit," she told the old woman, timidly. "I am fair handy, as well, with needle and thread."

"Do not trouble yourself," the woman told her. "There be only one small thing I need."

"Name it," said Hansel, sounding as though he was ready to perform miracles.

"'Tis something you might manage, young master," their hostess said. "Come and have a look at the wobbling leg on this chair." She led him back to the bedroom in which they'd passed the night, but when Gretel tried to come along, the woman pointed back to the kitchen. "There be the broom," she told the girl.

After she had swept the hearth, Gretel went in search of her brother. She tried the bedroom door and found it locked. "The young master must stay abed from now on," the old woman told her when she asked. "I shall not have him running off the lovely fat I plan to put on him."

Perhaps because Gretel had become accustomed to her step-mother's high-handed scorn, she was slow to apprehend the extent of the horror into which she and Hansel had stumbled. It took days of begging for scraps from the crone's table; of hearing the woman, whose voice no longer pretended any charity toward her at all, scold Gretel for drinking too much water or moving too slowly; of watching the witch (for what else could she be?) kneel and mumble prayers in a strange tongue before an ab tar covered with a blood-red cloth. It took the knife-sharp thorns of the black, bloomless brambles that had grown up around the house since she and her brother sought refuge there. And it took, finally, a chain of dreamless nights. Not once, after she had fallen, exhausted, into the brief sleep the witch allowed her, was Gretel visited by her winged guardian. It was a sign, she realized later, she should have taken to heart.

Eventually, though, she could delude herself no longer about the witch's plans. Three, and sometimes four times each day, the old woman took a brass key from around her neck and opened the door behind which Hansel now slept and ate. She always brought a tray with her heaped with elegant food: cakes and loaves and sugar tarts; cream and strawberries; even whole capons turned golden red on the spit above the kitchen fire. When she called Gretel to come get the dishes piled beside the door, the girl often heard the witch ask Hansel to hold out his hand. Through the keyhole, she watched the old woman circle his wrist with her gnarled fingers, and frown. "Not yet ready, my morsel," she would say, as if he were a roasting hen instead of a boy. "Not quite done."

It wasn't long before the witch, knowing Gretel would not leave her brother and that if she did there was no way out of the impenetrable thicket she'd contrived, began to treat the girl worse than ever. She fed her scraps, left her to sleep without a blanket, and at last grew as careless and talkative as if Gretel were a cat or dog, a pet that fended for itself but kept her company. "Ay," she grumbled one morning, stirring Hansel's porridge, "it has been a chain of long, lean days between meals. If I could eat such slop"—she stabbed at the pot with her spoon, then spat on the floor Gretel had swept only minutes before—"things would be different. But the blood thirst cannot be sated with your paltry human fare." She unhooked the cauldron from the hearth and set it to cool by the window. "'Tis a hunger to reckon with, a torture that feels close to madness when I must wait so long."

Gretel said nothing, knew the woman expected no reply. "But ah, when I feel that boy's flesh filling out, fat with life as he is of late, 'tis worth the pangs, the nights of waiting with my whole body crying out for him and my teeth rattling in my jaws."

Gretel knew, because the witch had told her, that if all went well, she would prepare her soulless feast soon. It was this fearful prospect that made the girl take a foolish risk and slip into Hansel's room the next time the old woman failed to lock the door. (The hungrier the crone got, the more forgetful she seemed. Once she even neglected to put on her shoes and clothes and spent the day naked, her wizened shins and third teat leaving Gretel torn miserably between laughter and tears.)

The room in which they'd spent that first night was much the same as Gretel remembered, except for the books and toys strewn everywhere. But in the midst of games and penny whistles, surrounded by whittled soldiers and chocolate candies, sat a boy she hardly recognized.

Hansel looked first at his sister's hands. "You have no tray," he said, his own hands describing a small, despairing arc in his lap. "I thought she might have sent you in her stead." Then he noticed her expression. "Why, girl, what is wrong? You look as though you see a haunt."

But it was no ghost Gretel stared at in disbelief. Her brother had far too much flesh on him to be a messenger from the other world. In fact, he was one of the stoutest people she had ever seen. In a few short months he had ballooned to twice his former size and lay propped on his pillows like a miniature pasha.

"You ... you look ... well fed." In fact, nothing that grew or walked or swam, nothing that Gretel could imagine, was meant to be so large. In a shameful moment, she even wondered how it was the witch could think her prize was not ready for the oven. "You must not eat any more, Brother." Hansel turned his cold, disapproving look on her, but she raced on, "Each bite you take puts you in greater danger. I hardly know how to tell you. The witch, she plans to—"

"Witch?" He looked even darker. "Mother is no witch. Though I suppose if she does not fancy you, she may seem so."

"'Mother'?" Gretel said the word aloud, and somehow speaking it herself was less horrible than hearing it on her brother's tongue. "'Mother'?"

"She has asked me to call her that, and so I shall if it pleases her." He leaned back, otiose, languid, and picked up a chocolate drop. He considered the candy, his expression almost fond, then popped it in his mouth.

"But how can you think she means you well?" Gretel was amazed that her brother had no idea what the crone was about. "We must run, Brother. We must leave here at once." She reached for one of his plump hands, but he pushed her away.

"Leave here?" Hansel sat up now, turning over a twig wagon filled with stone marbles. "Why should we leave someone who treats us with more kindness than our own parents?" He picked up a chapbook and opened it. "Why, she has even taught me to read." He lowered his head over the small volume. "This word is
raven.
See where it flies out of the pie?"

The more Hansel was content to sit and read, of course, the fatter he would grow. Gretel watched him pick up several more books, pointing proudly to pictures and to the single words that described them. "Even our own mother, girl, never taught us such wonders."

Gretel was fairly dancing with impatience. She had to convince Hansel of the danger they faced. And she had to do it before the old hag missed her. "You must understand. You must listen," she told him. "She feeds on human flesh."

"Ay." Hansel grinned ludicrously. "And this be a grand fellow I am eating, too." He pulled a gingerbread man from a chain of cookies strung beneath his window. Hugely, raucously, he chomped off its feet first, then its head.

"She means to eat you, too." There. Gretel had said it at last. She heard her own terrible words in the long silence that followed, that flowed like a thick current between them.