Falling In (8 page)

Grete took a few more steps, then reached down again to pull up another plant. “Snakeroot. You dry the roots, then pound them into a powder. It’ll cure an earache or a toothache in no time, but if too much is taken, it’ll make you ill.”

And so the lessons continued for the rest of the morning. Isabelle liked the names of the plants—bugwort, richweed, squawroot, dog rose—but quickly scrambled the various uses and doses and preparations. Did you dry pennyroyal or boil it? Prescribe drops of feverfew or brews? She didn’t
much care, and after a while stopped paying attention.

“Are you hearing anything I’m saying, Isabelle?” Grete demanded after giving a lengthy lecture on something called a whig plant.

“My brain is full,” Isabelle told her. “It’s too stuffed to take in one more fact.”

Grete sighed. “You too, Hen?”

But Hen shook her head. “I think it’s fascinating, miss.”

“Well, I suppose it’s time for lunch, by the look of the sky,” Grete said, picking up her basket, now full of roots and stems and leaves and berries. “Hen, this afternoon we can work in the kitchen. I’ll show you how to go about drying the roots and leaves, and how to boil syrups. Isabelle—” Grete stared at Isabelle quizzically, as though she couldn’t think of one single thing for Isabelle to do. “Perhaps—perhaps this afternoon you should rest. There’ll be work you can help with later.”

Isabelle almost protested that she could help too, that her ankle was fine—she’d been on it all
morning, hadn’t she?—and then decided against it. She could see herself on the front porch reading a book, rocking back and forth, maybe eating something chocolate. Did Grete have chocolate?

“There are some small cakes, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Grete said, and Isabelle took a step back. Yes, that was what she’d been thinking. But how could Grete know?

Grete had to shake Isabelle awake when she finally had work for her to do later that afternoon. Isabelle wiped a bit of drool from the corner of her mouth and rubbed her eyes. She’d been reading one of Grete’s books. To her surprise, when she’d stood in front of the bookshelves and began pulling books, she found they were all handwritten, each one in the same slippery blue cursive, the kind that looked pretty but turned out to be hard to decipher. So Grete was an author, Isabelle had thought, and grabbed several books at random to take with her to the porch.

The story she’d been reading was about a girl who wandered along a wooded path
and made friends with all sorts of things—bluebirds, squirrels, butterflies, trees. Everything she met had a secret to tell. After a while, carrying all the different secrets made her sleepy, and just as the girl lay down beneath a butterfly bush to take a nap, Isabelle had felt her eyes grow heavy too.

Grete picked up the book from Isabelle’s lap. “Do you know it’s impossible to finish this book? I fell asleep three or four times while writing it, and I’ve never been able to read through it since the moment I jotted the last period.”

“Is it magic?” Isabelle asked, suddenly feeling more awake. “Maybe the book casts a spell on the person reading it.”

Grete looked away for a moment. “Couldn’t say.” Waving Isabelle toward the kitchen, she ordered, “Come along inside. Hen and I’ve been hard at work, and now here’s the part where you can help.”

In the kitchen, Grete pointed to a wide array of pots and jars on the counter. “As you can see, we have syrups and tinctures and powders and leaves.
Hen and I have boiled and chopped and sorted and pounded, and now it is time to package things up and put them on the porch. Tonight, while we’re asleep, the folks will come, and in the morning there’ll be the fun of seeing what’s been left. The last of the fall’s apples and potatoes? A few jars of honey? A paper packet of sugar? If there’s sugar and honey, I’ll make Isabelle more sweets.”

“So they pay you for your medicine?” Hen asked, running a damp rag across the kitchen table.

“Meager pay it is, too, most of it, but it’s what folks can pay with, and money won’t help me out here in the woods, will it?”

“How do you know they need the medicine?”

Grete picked up a tangled strand of twine from the counter and began working at the knots. “Notes, mostly. Some send their little ones with a message— ‘the baby has a fever’ and the like. If they have questions, they get word to me. They send an older boy or someone full grown to pick up their packages at night, so as not to get on the wrong side of the village apothecary or the priest. A woman in the
woods is always suspicious to them that are in charge.”

“I ain’t met an apothecary worth his salt yet,” Hen said, washing her hands at the sink. “Ours is always giving Mam potions that don’t help a lick. You can do more with a cool cloth and a bit of vinegar than the apothecary can do with his whole store of roots and powders.”

“Perhaps you’ll apprentice to a healer when you’re older,” Grete suggested. “I’d say you have the gift for it.”

Hen reddened, then seemed suddenly fascinated with a speck on her shoe. “Be nice to have a gift for something,” she said after a moment. “But they don’t let girls apprentice, now, do they?”

Grete harrumphed. “A bunch of fools, the lot who came up with that system. You lose half the world’s brainpower that way.”

“It is the way it is, I guess,” Hen replied with a shrug. She picked up a small sack of something and handed it to Isabelle. “This here’s boneset, for them what’s got the fever. I’ll show you what Grete’s
taught me so far about measuring and pouring out. Nothing hard about it in the least.”

To her surprise, Isabelle found she enjoyed scooping powders onto squares of brown paper and folding the paper into neat triangles. She liked using a dropper to drip liquids into tiny blue bottles, and found it satisfying to pour the red and purple syrups into jars. She enjoyed it even though Grete hovered over her, counting out drops as they dripped and making her remeasure her scoops.

“Why aren’t you watching Hen?” Isabelle asked. Grete’s breath on the back of her neck as she shadowed Isabelle’s every move was beginning to annoy her. “Hen might make a mistake, you never know.”

“Hen won’t make a mistake. Hen’s careful.”

Hen looked up from the table, where she was grinding leaves into a powder, her eyes wide, as though surprised to hear such a thing said about her.

“If Hen’s careful, then what am I?” Isabelle asked.

Grete laughed. “You, Isabelle, are a dreamer. You
always have to keep an eye on the dreamers. My husband was one, now, wasn’t he?”

Isabelle turned around and looked at her. “Your husband? You’re married?”

“Was. I’m a widow, going on fifty years now,” Grete said. “One marriage was enough for me.”

“I won’t ever get married,” said Hen. “Don’t want to get weighed down with babies.”

“A baby’s not a bad thing,” Grete said. “You might find you want one later.”

“Maybe.” Hen sounded doubtful. “But Mam’s got five little ones other than me, and it’s brought me no end of troubles. I’m supposed to take care of ’em, being the oldest, but I’m always losing this one or that one, or getting the brush caught in the other one’s hair. Seems I can make a baby cry faster than any girl in the village.”

“You’ve got other talents,” Grete told her. “How about you, Isabelle?” Grete once again peered over Isabelle’s shoulder as Isabelle poured syrup into a jar. “Do you want a man and a baby someday?”

Isabelle shrugged. “I can’t imagine liking someone enough to marry him.”

“Do you know no nice boys?”

Isabelle pondered this for the briefest of moments. “No,” she said, shaking her head. She didn’t mention that up until Hen, she hadn’t known many nice girls, either.

Grete patted Isabelle on the back. “One will come along. You’ve had hard times, to be sure, but things will get easier for you. You’ll see.”

Isabelle wondered if Grete could tell she’d had hard times just by looking at her. She supposed it was possible. But her deep-down feeling? Grete could see inside of people, into their hearts and minds.

In fact, Isabelle felt that surely Grete was magic.

But what kind of magic did Grete possess?

Ah, a question that deserved an answer if ever one did.

I know, I know. What about the witch? Will Isabelle find the witch? Is she still looking for the witch? Or has Isabelle’s search come to an end? But if it has, then what? Do we leave Isabelle and Hen happily ever after in the woods with Grete, picking berries? Do they grow up there, tending to Grete in her old age, taking over her “business” when she passes into the Great Unknown?

That could be a good story, don’t you think? Lacking in excitement, admittedly. Perhaps more the thing your grandmother would read with her First Monday of the Month book group. Remember that time you had to go with her? How the hostess’s house smelled like a hundred cats lived there, but it
turned out she didn’t have any cats at all, just one shivering Chihuahua? The book they discussed that night was something like
A Rosebush for Rosemary
, and you vowed that even when you were old as the ancient hills, you wouldn’t read books like that. No, only adventure books for you.

So, should you stop reading this book? I mean, you thought you were getting a witch, and so far all you’ve gotten is two girls and an old woman herb doctor. I don’t blame you for wanting your money back. You saved your receipt, right? Let’s march right back to the bookstore and demand—

Wait a minute.

I thought I saw something.

Yes, I’m pretty sure I saw something over—over—over—

There.

It’s a piece of paper falling out of a book.

I wonder what it says.

A few days later, when Isabelle was on the porch reading, a piece of paper slipped out of the book and fell to the floor.

It was a folded sheet of thick drawing paper, yellowing around the edges, crumbling at the corners. Isabelle leaned down and picked it up. Read:
For Isabelle
. She carefully unfolded it to reveal a nighttime picture drawn in blue-black ink—stars along the top, a full moon, a clearing in the woods, a patch of grass lit by the moon’s pale light. The trees that stood around the clearing had a friendly look to Isabelle, as though they were glad it was finally spring. Something was strung between the two trees in the foreground—
was it a blanket? No, Isabelle thought, a hammock.

A hammock. And in the hammock—Isabelle didn’t even have to look. She did look, though, and so she saw the baby, round and glowing, so small. She could tell the baby wasn’t at all scared to be outside in the middle of the night. She could tell just by looking—just by feeling the feelings the picture made her feel as she looked at it.

But as she sat gazing at the picture, another feeling gathered at the edges of the paper where her fingers grasped it. Fear. The trees had felt it first. The trees had heard the children coming through the woods. They’d heard the whispering voices, the hands reaching down to the ground to scoop up rocks and stones. The trees knew who was coming—

—and they knew what the children would do next.

Isabelle was still sitting in the chair, the book still on her lap, when Grete came out from the kitchen to the porch. Did Grete look different to Isabelle now? Isabelle squinted her eyes, opened them wide, tilted her head left, then right, as she watched Grete walk out to the front yard to check on a patch of silverweed she was cultivating by the woodpile. Does someone’s face look meaner when you’ve discovered their darkest secret? Sadder? The lines around their eyes and the corners of their mouth deeper now, more full of grief, rage, terror, horror?

Even at a distance, Grete looked like Grete, older than Isabelle’s mother, younger than the old ladies she saw riding to the store on the bus, their
hands folded carefully atop their purses. Her eyes still looked kind, the skin of her cheeks still looked downy and soft. She didn’t appear the least bit like a—well, Isabelle could barely bring herself to think it.

Isabelle looked up to the tops of the trees. She looked for the bones of children dangling from the branches, but saw none. She felt foolish.