Black Pearls (11 page)

"Whatever you did, child, is less than some and more than others. It's done and forgotten." There was weariness in his voice, and a dim gratitude. "The witch was starving you, but you have come home with food." At last he raised his eyes to hers. "You have come home with that slow smile of your ma's."

He reached for his daughter's hand. "We will tell the neighbors you have both returned." Gretel heard the surrender, the tired truce behind his words. "I have been without family for too long. I shall not lose you to sheriff's men, to a tribunal and the noose."

So her father shaped a new story, with a happy ending, repeating it again and again—to neighbors and peddlers and travelers; to brides and housewives who began afresh, now that the drought was passed, to pay for Gretel's handiwork and lace.
Once upon a time,
it seemed,
there were two children, a boy and a girl.
Father told of the witch, the gingerbread, and the oven. He told of the fire and the way the witch had planned to fatten the boy. He described with pride how his children had tricked her, how they had come home to him, hand in hand. "Of course, you know the way of young men," he always added at the end. "No sooner does Hansel come home than he takes a fancy to a comely lass from Wainridge. He is off courting, but my girl is home to stay."

Each time her father told the lie, Gretel felt as if he had branded her. The mark of Cain burned on her forehead, turning her awkward and ashamed in front of others. She had tried to save her brother, but only she and her angel had seen it. And perhaps God. What wouldn't she give to trade her heavenly father's trust for her earthly one's!

But she knew her da was right. She would never leave him now. Where was there to go? Where could she hide from the memory of Hansel racing into the fire? From the foolish, useless wish that she had said enough, done enough, been enough to save him?

So she stayed. Her father needed her, after all. Her table linens and scarves helped put food on their table. And if he blamed her for her brother's death, he never said so outright. Only sometimes she caught a look on his face, a shadow when she looked up from her sewing and found his eyes on her. It wasn't like the hate she had seen on Hansel's; she could never have lived with that. It was more like pity. Though pity for her or himself, she could not have said.

It did not matter. She had her angel. She could endure the cold stream where she took their buckets each morning. And the endless succession of days, like heavy, rough-scaled logs across her back—she could survive that, too. She could bear the mark Da's stories set on her forehead, because every night, in her dreams, it was kissed away. She worried sometimes, as she waited by the hearth for sleep to come, that it might not happen, that the angel might fail her. But it never did. Night after night, even after her father had died and Gretel was an old woman who lived by herself, the sweet moment always returned.

Once she had drifted past thought, Gretel found herself again in the woods. Again she stood by the small house trimmed with delights. But this time she walked without fear to the open door and the figure that waited there. Sweeter than a lemon drop, softer than caramel was the kiss Gretel's angel placed on her forehead. And when she was once more folded into the milk-white arms, Gretel felt no mark, no shame, only a tide of joy that rushed to fill her head, her heart, her whole body. Like a flood of music bursting from a small bird's chest, love forced itself through her bones and skin and erupted in a single perfect flower.
Mother,
she said as she held the angel fast.
Mother,
she sighed as she rested her head on the creamy shoulder.
Mother,
as the two of them turned their backs on the world and walked together until dawn.

Even a young prince can be jaded. I had endured countless receptions and balls, had watched an endless parade of aristocratic beauties present themselves for my approval—and for secret embraces in shadowed chambers or damp-walled gardens (giggling, rustling skirts, and then the sun too bright on a painted cheek). But this lost, thin-waisted nymphet was different. My mother noticed it first.

"Did you see that girl?" The queen stood beside me at the top of the stairs and studied the ballroom below us. "The one with Sir Lewis." Only a second before she had dismissed the gaggle of dancers, turned her back on the view from the balcony, and snapped open a perfumed fan pulled from her sleeve. Now, though, her eyes narrowed with interest, and she leaned over the railing. Like colorful gems spilled from a purse, men and women in velvet and satin moved across the marble tiles, each couple following the pattern of the pair in front of them.

"Look! She's charmed the old fool into a gavotte. It's a wonder he can hoist that monstrous frame out of bed in the morning, much less drag it about to a jig."

I glanced idly at the ragged chain of dancers beneath me. It was hard to miss chubby Lewis—bobbing up and down to his own private music while the others kept proper time—but once I had spotted the old fellow, I could not take my eyes from his partner. It was not the blue dress or the crystal slippers that shed rainbows as she twirled. It was not the lace gloves or the tiny jeweled bows that winked from her train. It was the way she carried herself—or, more accurately, the way she didn't. Instead of posing, dolblike, she floated, spinning and turning like a leaf, from hand to hand.

The queen, still focused on the great hall spread below us, must have noticed my interest. "I am glad," she told me, without taking her eyes from the pageant of the dance, "you are not like some, mongrels led here and there, driven only by their base appetites." I barely listened, already dizzied by the whirling fairy below me. "Perhaps your refusal to wed has been well advised, my son. Perhaps it will secure you now a bride of a different sort."

After I had kissed my mother's cheek and worked my way to the bottom of the stairs, the fairy dancer was my reward. As glowing and impartial as the sun, she took my arm for the next carole with the same smile she gave poor Lewis in farewell. She seemed, in fact, to have no idea who I was.

"You make the old dances seem new," I told her. "How has grace and beauty like yours stayed hidden from our court?" Something in her countenance unmanned me. The blaze of sconces twinkled behind her, and my flattery seemed empty and foolish.

"I have never been to court," she told me, training curious,
unblinking eyes on mine. "Or danced like this, or met anyone like you."

"Surely I am not so different from other men." I laughed, more confident now. This was a game I had played before, over and over until I knew the script by heart, all the blushes, every whispered lie.

"Perhaps not," she replied. "But except for my father and the kind gentleman who danced with me just now, you are the only man I have ever spoken to." She cocked her head like a pretty sparrow and studied me while we spun. "You are so tall and fair, you quite take my breath away!"

She should have colored and curtsied; she should have lowered her gaze from mine. But her eyes, wide and greedy, devoured my face, and she laughed like a man, her head held back, her mouth unhidden by her hands.

I searched the weary catalogue of women I had known. Not one of them had looked like this, had danced like this, had stirred to life an open rush of affection I thought had died years before.

I learned the games early, you see. My first memory is of the endless carpet, the long trail along which my nurse led me to the tall, lovely woman who sat with her maids and laughed like music, "Mother, look what I have made for you," I cried, dropping my chain of dandelions in her lap, trying to scramble after them.

But the laughter stopped and the beautiful woman frowned. "Now look what the child has done! There is dirt all over my dress. Hannah! Hannah, come get him, quick."

As I spun around the floor with this sweet stranger, the years fell away and it seemed a child, trembling with adoration, had laid a chain of flowers in my lap. I stared at the girl in my arms and wondered if love was this simple.

"You cannot be a prince!" She laughed when I told her who I was. Her honeyed hair shook free from the combs that held it, and her hands, as if forgotten, rested in mine. "You are much too young and you do not scare me at all. Why, if you were not so important, we should be real friends!"

I forgot the lessons my mother and all the powdered ladies of the court had taught me. I neglected to bow and lie in wait, to flatter and pretend. "We are already friends," I told her. When the music started up again, I whirled us into a shadowy alcove, away from prying eyes. "Now tell me your name, sweet friend."

She stopped dancing and pulled me to a cluster of pillars at the edge of the hall. There she leaned against the sugared stone and whispered to me as if she were at confession. "I am afraid I no longer have a name of my own. After my father died, my step-mother called me nothing but Cinderella." She seemed as small and frightened as a bird I dared not flush. "I have not led an easy life."

"Your mother must have been very beautiful." It was an old formula, but I said it with new sincerity. She clung to the pillar, though, as if I had set a snare for her.

"I suppose she must," she said without affectation. "My father always said she was. But I cannot remember her face." And when she turned back to me at last, her eyes were filled with a strange and cloudy hunger I dreamed suddenly of feeding.

"When I was little and had no one to run to if I fell and hurt myself, no one to share the games I played alone among the mops and kettles, I used to try to picture her. I cried and yearned and prayed, but I could never see her eyes, her hair, not so much as the tips of her fingers."

She studied her own small hands in silence, then raised a face to which the light had rushed back. "So I have made up my own mother." She grinned like a clever child. "She is a fairy godmother, more radiant and powerful than anyone on earth. I cannot hold or kiss her, but she protects me with her spells."

She spoke as if she were still in a nursery. I laughed now, enchanted, and bent to kiss her. When she turned away once more, I was not angry but patient and tender. "And why not have kisses as well as spells?" I asked. "Surely a woman's dreams embrace more than elves and fairies?"

She did not leave the shelter of the pillar, only looked at me from its shadow. "Perhaps they do," she told me. "I used to see my godmother as clearly as I see you. She came to me in the daytime, real as the corn, bright as dawn on a stream. Now she visits only after dark, when there is no light to see how she wears her hair or the color of her dress." She squeezed my hand tightly, and her voice rose, colored with hope. "But last night was different. She came to me, really and truly. She promised me you."

Though her face and manner held me in thrall, I could make little sense of her childish words. I took them for flattery and fell into the easy habit of flirtation. "Promises," I told her, bowing gallantly, "must not be broken." With that, I took her arm and whirled her deeper into the alcove we'd found under the arch of the marble stairs. We danced on, just the two of us, plotting like runaways, smuggling in morsels from the banquet table. We formed our own tiny kingdom there, like the make-believe land I used to inhabit when my mother and father fought.

Before he died, the king had vanquished thousands of enemy troops but never won a single confrontation with his queen. As my mother's voice rose higher, spiraling toward outrage and anguish, the servants would shake their heads and Father would retreat to his chambers, apologizing, begging forgiveness all the way down the hall.

While these battles royal raged, I would hide under these very same stairs, my hands against my ears. If I closed my eyes, I could travel far away from the yelling and from the dark, intricate oaths issuing from my father's rooms. But of course, such respites never last. Neither did my time with the fairy dancer, Cinderella.

Too soon, I saw her grow restless, watched her count from our sanctuary the guests who had begun to drift in laughing clusters toward the door. Then, high in the castle tower, above the gods and goddesses painted on the ceiling, a bell began to ring midnight. Stricken, Cinderella looked up the marble stairs toward the guards at the door. "I must go!" She grabbed her train, darted back into the sea of silk and satin from which I had plucked her, and disappeared.

"Wait!" Midnight tolled again, and my mother, determined but unhurried, moved toward me down the stairs. "You did not tell me your family's name!" I saw a small figure gliding like a skater across the field of gold and marble, then gave chase. "How will I know where to find you?"

Too late, I pushed my way through the crowd, brushed past my mother, and reached the door. I raged at the watchmen who had let her climb into the silver coach that clattered out the gate as the last stroke of midnight hammered against the sky.

One of the watchmen, a burly fellow big enough to break me in two if I had not been his prince, hung his head, ashamed, while the other two pointed to a lost star that lay glittering in the moonlight on the bottom step.