Black Pearls (2 page)

The girl did not look after him, only studied Tabby solemnly, then climbed onto her lap and fell asleep. Tabby had wanted to run after the man, to find out where he lived, to ask the countless questions that suddenly occurred to her. She needed clothes for the child, and shoes, and toys. She wondered if Rampion had ever been sick or whether there were foods she must not have. But the weight of that small creature kept her pinned to her chair, fearful of talking or moving lest the moment dissolve like a bubble in a stream.

Rampion. A strange name, but a good one, Tabby thought. Some girls were called Rose, after all, and some Violet or Pansy or Blossom. Wasn't it better to bear the name of a sturdy little plant, a green that flowered in the summer and gave food the rest of the year? As she listened to the shallow, even breaths of the babe in her lap, she closed her eyes and tried to feel her way through the years that lay ahead. Tabby was not blessed, as some in the coven were, with the gift of second sight, so the image she saw was more yearning than certainty, but it was a comfort nonetheless—a girl fair enough to be a princess, with a slender, graceful form and a laugh that tumbled like falls down a mossy bank.

She did not know how long they sat, the little one curled against her with her left thumb in her mouth, Tabby rigid with bliss, counting the small heartbeats that drummed against her own chest. But when Rampion finally stirred, her father was long gone and it was too late to ask him anything at all. They must make do, the two of them, with just each other.

And make do, they did. Though she could speak only baby nonsense, Tabby's new daughter (daughter! the word was too sweet to say aloud) made her wants clear. And each one was given her, nearly as soon as she pointed or cried or smiled at it.

Tabby hugged and fed and petted and played. She sang and clapped and laughed and jigged. She made dolls from old bed sheets and crowns from dried periwinkle and sweet William. By spring, the girl had spoken her first words, and by late summer, she was chattering like a magpie, telling her rag dolls secrets or begging her mother for treats. Though Tabby fell into bed each night panting with exhaustion, she lay sleepless for hours, tense and hopeful, her love like a hunger that could only be fed by Rampion's waking and wanting more.

She let the garden go to seed. All except the vegetables and herbs she grew to feed the child. There were not enough hours in the day to waste on primroses. Tabby was tending something far more precious now—something that responded to her care by growing more beautiful with every season. There were times, often when she sat stitching, that she looked up to find the girl playing in a stripe of sunlight spread across the floor. She would stop then, losing a stitch she would have to pick up later, and stare at the fearful loveliness of her daughter. And when, feeling doting eyes on her, Rampion looked up as well, she would likely run and put her arms around Tabby's neck, settle in her lap, and set to unpinning her own bright curls. "Mother! Mother!" she would beg. "Brush my hair."

Then Tabby would stroke Rampion's shining locks with a brush she had bought at market, a fine one made of willow wood and boar's bristles. The soft lapping of the brush, the hair falling pale as light across her daughter's shoulders, it worked the same miracle every time—the soaring inside her chest, her heart straining up and up. Her body never left the chair, but her mind and spirit flew away to the sweet future when her lovely child would grow to womanhood, when Tabby would take her by the hand to the sacred grove. When she would teach her what she knew of splendor, of endless joy.

Because she cherished this vision, the two of them flying together, Tabby's garden died before her meetings with the coven stopped. But it was not long after the peonies withered, their wilted heads drooping on broken stalks, that Tabby began to find reasons to miss the gatherings with her sisters in the woods. What had been her greatest joy was now cheating her of one far greater. Each time she left her daughter, she suffered dreadfully, imagining an endless variety of accidents and illnesses that might strike while Rampion was alone. What if the girl were to wake feeling thirsty, for instance? Were to push a stool against the wall to reach the cupboard overhead? And what if the stool tipped and sent her sprawling? Or say she managed to lift the latch and wander outside while Tabby was away? There were snakes in the old garden wall; Tabby had seen them several times at dusk, slithering out of sight before she could find their nest. The night she remembered this, Tabby tortured herself with a vision of Rampion being bitten, falling to the ground, then crying for her mother, calling and calling until she had no breath left but lay still and cold.

When Tabby finally told them she could no longer come to the woods, the others had been sad but not surprised. "You have caught the way of human love," her friend Maeve warned her. "'Tis not a bad way, but it clouds the heart and will make you weak. The Great Mother will ne'er abandon you, but 'tis you that will draw away from her. Further and further, until you have forgotten how to fly."

Tabby had laughed, knowing she would always remember the upward thrust, the whirling through moonlit air. "'Twill not be for long," she reminded them all. "Only until my daughter"—she said it out loud now, proudly—"comes of age. We will return to these woods after her first blood. The two of us."

Maeve and the others had nodded, but it was clear they did not believe her. "Paths are never straight," Sheba said, pointing the same finger at Tabby she had once used to show her the stars in the sky. "Turnings and choices leave tangles behind."

Tabby's old teacher drew her close. "You are not likely to find your way back to us." She kissed the younger woman, but it was a sad kiss, one that Tabby felt for a long time on her cheek, like a print, a seal of farewell.

After that night, she did not meet with the others again. Though she sometimes felt the urge to fly alone, to shoot like a lance through the dark, she stayed true to her changed life and her new responsibilities. These last were so consuming that they kept her from self-pity. Rampion was soon old enough for lessons. Tabby could not teach her to embroider or play the spinet like the daughter of the village mayor, but she had her own skills to pass on. The kitchen garden was still intact, and if Tabby had not raised the stone wall until it met the bottom branches of her cherry tree, their neighbors might have seen the two of them gathering herbs each morning, might have stopped to listen to Rampion's cheerful recitation: "Burdock for skin and blood; goldenseal for what ails; yarrow for strength, and..." Sometimes she would break off, forgetting the name of a plant. "What is this one, Mother? It has an awful stink! I hope 'twill vanish in the stew!"

"'Tis tansy, love," Tabby told her, smiling at the way the girl's lips and nose had nearly met in the center of her darling face. "The root for fevers and flies, the leaves for puddings and cakes."

"Then let us leave the root in the ground," Rampion had decided. "'Twill grow more leaves that way, and you know how I love pudding!"

There were cooking lessons, too. And darning. And the smattering of Latin Tabby had learned from the coven. It was mostly words that went with flying spells, not the church Latin the other children in town knew. Her sisters' church, after all, had been the wild woods, and their prayers had focused on thanksgiving, not penance, on the Great Mother, not the Holy Father. So it was little wonder that, at last, Rampion came to be regarded with the same suspicion and fear her mother was.

It did not happen all at once. There were only whispers at first, some nervous laughter when Tabby and her daughter appeared in public. But if Rampion chanced to stretch her tiny arm toward a stranger and utter a Latin phrase she had learned, some mistook it for an incantation. And once when they had gone to a fair in Bridley and Rampion tried to join a group of children watching a Punch and Judy show, the other children's mothers, one by one, had pulled their sons and daughters away from the stage. But in those early years, while Rampion was still a child, the two managed to brush shoulders with the rest of the village, and no great harm was done on either side. In fact, Tabby began to enjoy taking the girl with her to market, loved the way Rampion's cheeks reddened with the fresh air, the way people stared at her loveliness. Sometimes the tradesmen and shoppers even made timid overtures, handing the child sweets and trinkets or stroking her hair and asking if fairies had spun it. It made the final blow all the more cruel, then, that it came on market day.

It happened when Rampion was eleven years old, when her beauty had already begun to stop people in their tracks, to make them gossip and whisper things that sat like stones in Tabby's chest: Was such a face normal? Were Christ's children meant to be so alluring? Did her sweet shape dissolve at night, turn into the scab-infested leer and hairy chest of devil's spawn?

Perhaps if the hurt had traveled no further than her own anxious love, Tabby would not have run away, would not have packed up her daughter and taken to the forest like a gypsy. But one day when Rampion joined two girls playing at hoops in the market square, a group of older boys surrounded her. Tabby was bargaining with the apple woman when the boys' song made her turn:

Witch's Child, you cannot cry
when I pinch you low or high.
Fie! Fie! Four fingers round my thumb!
You must not walk where good folk come.

Though Rampion eventually forgot the teasing, Tabby relived the ugly scene for weeks on end. It was still buried like a barb in her heart the day she packed their belongings and set off toward an old tower she had found in the woods. "They shall ne'er treat you like that again," she told the girl. Just as she had at market, Rampion sobbed piteously. But this time it was Tabby, and not the village bullies, who made her weep. She held fast to her mother's skirts and did all she could to prevent her from stuffing the last of the cookware into two bulging saddlebags on the hob low-flanked mare they had borrowed from Old Chauncey.

"It does not matter," the girl insisted, pursuing her mother into the forest and stumbling along the nearly invisible path Tabby seemed to find without effort. "For my sake, Mother, let it be. I would rather get teased every day than leave our lovely garden."

But Tabby could not forget how the children had poked and prodded, trying to prove a witch cannot cry—"...
when I pinch you low or high.
" How each had wrapped one fist around his other thumb and pummeled Rampion with both hands joined. Even when the girl began to sob, they did not stop, and afterward her slender arms had been riddled with ugly scratches and bruises.

The tower did little to comfort Rampion, though the shock of it stopped her tears. Jutting from the undergrowth at a slight angle, it no longer belonged to a castle but stood by itself, a crumbling ruin pointing halfheartedly at the sky. Even Tabby was dispirited as they neared the place, wondering if it could ever be made habitable. She heard the need to please in her own voice, the desperate enthusiasm. "See, love, there's a window on high," she told her daughter. "You shall be mistress of all you survey."

The girl sniffed and looked up to where two stone gargoyles guarded the tower's single window. "Then I will be mistress of fearsome rocks and noisome weeds." She kicked aside a clump of mandrake that barred her way and tied their mule to a tree. Pulling an ax from a satchel on its back, she called over her shoulder, "Come along, Mother. It would seem we must work until last light to part our front door from these woods."

It was true. What once must have been a guard's entrance was all but swallowed up by thick, gnarled vines and brambles. After they had chopped away the brush and forced the small door open, they found a stairway that was sound enough to climb. They followed it to the top of the tower, a spacious, high-walled room brightened on one side by the window and on the other by a second, larger door. Years before, Tabby supposed, this entrance might have opened into the castle. But if anyone had been foolish enough to walk through it now, they would have found no footing, only dropped like a stone to the woods below.

That first day and many after, Tabby and the girl scrubbed and polished. They hauled bedding, benches, and trestles from the house they had left behind and dragged them up the winding stairs. For though they placed a few sconces and a braided rug in the hall on the ground floor, most of their belongings had to be carried to the topmost room, where the window and the old doorway let in a comforting, buttery light. They pushed a chest against the larger opening and hung thick curtains, turning it into a passable window. Through a chink that Tabby assumed had once served to rain arrows on soldiers below, they vented a hearth.

At last, even Rampion had to admit, they had fashioned an elegant aerie. Whereas the old cottage had made their possessions seem dingy and small, the high stone walls of the tower lent everything they owned a sort of spare majesty. "I shall be quite afraid to sing at baking here," Tabby told her daughter. "It seems more fit for curtsies and perfumed handkerchiefs, this grand place we have made!"

"On the contrary, Mother." Rampion, who had not smiled in days, laughed and put down her broom. "'Tis made for trills and long, sweet notes." She picked up her skirts, then whirled around the huge room, singing as she spun. The combination of her daughter's tender form and the wild gaiety in her voice made Tabby stop work, dizzy with love, to lean against her own broom.

***

All went well for a few months. Rampion spent hours watching the woods and the fields beyond from the tower window. And when she tired of looking at the land below them, she spent even more hours tramping through the forest outside their door. Tabby's fear of people made her trust the places where they were not. She never worried about her daughter, who came home from these walks with herbs and flowers and mushrooms; with baskets of acorns, blackberries, and the tiny, ripe fruits they christened "wood plums."

What the wild world did not provide, Tabby secured by hard work. If Rampion begged for a new gown, her mother would hire herself out as a servant in town until it was bought. If the girl wanted a book, a few more weeks of work and Tabby could place it in her lap. And if the book was opened to a picture of a beautiful dame in a necklace for which Rampion pined, sure enough, Tabbatha Nigran overcame her hatred of the village folk long enough to clean their houses and wash their filthy linens. As she worked, she dreamed only of the moment she could fasten those flashing gems around her daughter's neck.